Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (26 page)

Fiendish tiger! Poisonous snake! Sepulchre of abomination! Spectacle of wretchedness! How long will you abuse the youth of our king? Will you ever make an end of your unbridled ambition, your pretences and thefts?

The Antichrist is a shape-shifter. His power lies in his cunning: he does not announce himself with horns like the devil, but is more likely to appear in the form of a friend, cloaking himself in holiness and mingling falsehood with truth in order to tempt and trap the unwary.

The
Tigre
, François Hotman’s seven-page diatribe against Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, set new standards in European political discourse, outdoing even the splenetic John Knox. It stood out from the score of other pamphlets denouncing the Guise in the wake of the Conspiracy of Amboise. So explosive were its contents that anyone found in possession was liable to hanging. It represented the cardinal not only as a shape-shifting monster from hell, but also as a ‘villainous sodomite’ and ‘bugger’ (for the denizens of Gomorrah only celestial punishment will suffice). Hotman’s vitriol transformed the lexicon of European political discourse in other ways too. Drawing on Cicero, he justified tyrannicide and reminded the citizen of his duty to defend the Commonwealth against tyrants. Those who read this pamphlet had not heard this sort of political language before—Brantôme recalled that he was ‘gutted’ when he first read it.

Protestant hatred for the leader of the Catholic Church in France seems at first glance to be so obvious as to be barely worth investigation—that is until we recognize that the cardinal was similarly vilified by Catholics, and that his brother was never subjected to the same level of abuse. In fact, though the duke had more Protestant blood on his hands than his brother, his affability and modesty left his reputation intact. On the death of Francis II, the Venetian ambassador reported that ‘although the Duke of Guise is popular, and above all with the nobility, everybody so detests the Cardinal of Lorraine that, if the matter depended upon universal suffrage, not only would he have no part in the Government, but perhaps not in this world’. 1 The cardinal responded by asking Ronsard, the most fashionable poet of the day, to give his image a makeover:

The cardinal was an intellectual and statesman, whose humanist education inspired him with grand ideas for the reform of Church and State. Objections to him and his programme were partly based on personality. Intelligent and able, he was also a difficult man. He could be charming and suave but also haughty and irascible, and vindictive towards those that he considered had betrayed him. But there was another more serious charge made by contemporaries: he was, in the words of one Protestant, simply a ‘hypocrite’. 2 The ‘pretence’ that the
Tigre
refers to was a charge made more explicitly by Andelot at the time of his arrest on heresy charges in 1558:

I am very certain of my doctrine and you know better than you are letting on, Monsieur le Cardinal; I call upon your conscience as witness, whether you did not once favour this holy doctrine, but honours and ambition have since deflected you, indeed even to persecute the followers of Jesus Christ. 3

Protestants were not the only ones to charge Charles with being a Nicodemite. Catholic hardliners had their suspicions too. One of these was Paul IV; and the Pope who succeeded him, Pius IV, referred ironically to another aspect of his hypocrisy: ‘the Cardinal of Lorraine is a second pope with 300,000 livres of revenue who has taken the opportunity to remonstrate to the Council [of Trent] against the plurality of benefices’. 4 What people distrusted about Lorraine was the impression that his theological position might be flexible, his approach to matters of faith shaped by contingency. In fact, the cardinal’s theological position was largely consistent: thoroughgoing reform was needed within the Catholic Church in order to bring back the souls it had lost. His tactics, dictated by the double hostility to his position of both ultra-Catholic conservatives on the one hand and Calvinists on the other, would lead to charges of dissimulation and pretence. In order to understand the genesis of his compromise, the reasons for its failure and the tragic consequences of that failure we need to return to his childhood.

* * * *

In 1535, at the age of 10, Charles began his studies at Navarre College under the aegis of François le Picart. An inspiration for the early Jesuits, Picart was the leading preacher of his day and a celebrity—when he died in 1556 it was said that 20,000 people attended his funeral in Paris. He was also a leading opponent of heresy: in 1533 he was exiled from Paris after accusing the king’s sister of unorthodox opinions. But Picart was different from other conservative Sorbonne theologians, who thought it was simply enough to denounce heretics in lurid tones. The funeral sermon for Claude, the first Duke of Guise, in 1550, was an example of this old-fashioned approach, which contrasted the subject’s piety with:

The Lutherans, who believed in sexual freedom and hold all in common, are now expanding everywhere, just like the Goths, the Gepids, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, and other barbarians, in order to ruin Christendom. 5

Such firebrand rhetoric may have stirred the hearts of the uneducated listener, but the precocious Charles de Guise was different. Navarre College was the leading centre of humanism in Paris and Picart taught his pupil that the new learning was the best way to combat heresy. Picart was not afraid to read Protestant works in order to refute them with reference to the scriptures. The result, as the more conservative preachers pointed out, was more akin to debate than denunciation. He was also prepared to admit that the Protestants might have a point: in contrast to many of his colleagues he was prepared to denounce clerical abuses. In stark contrast to the wrathful and vengeful deity portrayed by other preachers, who warned that heresy was a sign of the coming of the end of the world, Picart had an optimistic message; his God was good, loving, compassionate, and merciful. Love would reconcile lost souls. God was so good he even wanted Martin Luther to be saved! 6 The important role he attached to scripture, to preaching, and to reform of the clergy had a profound influence on the young Charles. One of his first acts on becoming Archbishop of Reims was to found a university there.

He was deeply touched by humanism. But humanist learning was much more controversial in France—where it was accused of promoting paganism, relativism, and immorality—than it was in Italy. By the time he had succeeded his uncle as head of the Catholic Church in France, humanists were under attack from both Protestants and conservative Catholics alike. The godly on both sides were wary of learning they associated with impiety. In his youth the greatest opponent of Catholic Reform remained the Sorbonne. When François Rabelais’
Tiers Livre
was condemned in 1546 Charles rushed immediately to his defence and provided him with the living of Meudon. In gratitude Rabelais dedicated his next work, Le Sciomachie, to the young cardinal.

Charles’s other mentor at Navarre College was a considerably more radical figure than Picart. Ten years older than his pupil, Pierre Ramus was from a poor background. He achieved notoriety for his attacks on the outdated medieval syllabus taught at the Sorbonne. In 1544 he was banned from lecturing on Aristotle and Plato; his books were burned and he was condemned to a year in the galleys. Lorraine was present in the Parlement when the sentence was quashed in 1546, and as soon as he came to power in the palace revolution of 1547 he had the ban on Ramus’s lectures lifted. When Ramus was condemned once more in 1551, the cardinal again oversaw his defence and afterwards, in order to give him more freedom, procured him a professorship at the Collège Royal. Ramus was grateful, dedicating twenty works to his patron and in 1555 praised ‘the splendour of your very noble race, first issued from the Great Emperor Charlemagne, which has since bound together the crowns of
Austrasia
, Aragon, Sicily and Jerusalem’.

For his platonic salon, which emerged in the early 1550s, the cardinal created an idyll at Meudon on the fringes of Paris. It was arguably the most important non-royal commission of the French Renaissance and served as a museum to display the antiquities that the cardinal had brought from Rome. Busts were chosen and juxtaposed with care: Cicero and Demosthenes alluded to the cardinal’s own eloquence. Perseus, representing the Duke of Guise, is paired with Mercury, representing the cardinal at the capture of Calais; for it is Mercury who arms and counsels Perseus before his battle with the Medusa. The high moral tone imparted by the gallery dedicated to busts of Roman emperors was offset by the representation of Bacchus in the entry to the pavilion, reminding the visitor of the ancient proverb that ‘good wine makes for a good mind’, and reassuring Rabelais, whose
Tiers Livre
begins with a eulogy to the inspirational powers of wine.

The extensive gardens were laid out under the cardinal’s direction. The sculptor Jean le Roux built a grotto in 1556–7, which long remained a marvel to sightseers, on whom hidden fountains would playfully turn unsuspected sprays of cold water. Above the grotto were busts of Plato and Aristotle beneath which poets like Ronsard and thinkers like Ramus could escape from the thought-police operating on the Left Bank. Ramus’s increasingly heretical beliefs could not have escaped his patron. The salon was a broad church, an irenic academy, where free thinking was permitted, as long as public conformity to the Catholic Church was maintained. Ramus’s break with the cardinal came only at the end of 1561 with (the
sine qua non
for all Catholics) refusal to attend Mass. During the 1550s, however, it was the existence of the salon that gave the Protestants the impression that the cardinal was a fellow traveller. In reality, he was nothing of the sort. He enjoyed the latest taste in art—he had met Titian in 1547—and music, whether it was secular or religious in tone. He played the lute and Protestants later sneered at him for putting the lascivious and corrupting verses of Horace to music. Though he knew his scriptures, the letters he wrote are very different from those of his Protestant contemporaries. Scripture is largely absent. In contrast to the godly, he was an Epicurean, happy to discuss the latest court gossip, make jokes, and discuss matters of faith in earthy and simple language.

The liberal atmosphere of Meudon can be resurrected from the surviving rolls of the cardinal’s household. Many of his staff were gentlemen whose families are more usually associated with the Protestant cause. His closest advisor, referred to as his ‘great governor’, was Gabriel de la Vallée. A Catholic, la Vallée rarely left his master’s side and slept in the cardinal’s chambers for his security. His wife however was described as a woman ‘who mixes freely with the "Huguenotical", "Calvininian" and Lutheran’ religion. His step-daughters were raised as Protestants. One of them, Marie, has a significant role to play later in our story. For she was at the heart of the Protestant network in the Brie, a tightly knit group whose internal disagreements shed light on the conspiracy that sparked the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. 7 Among the prelates in the household there were some ultra-Catholics, but there were many more evangelicals such as the Guillart brothers, respectively bishops of Senlis and Chartres, who became notorious for their unorthodox views. In 1561 they were cited by the Roman Inquisition. The Bishop of Chartres’s indulgence towards heretics made him the target of fanatics. During the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre a Catholic mob went in search of him but, unable to find him, had to be satisfied with ransacking his palace.

What was discussed in the grotto of Meudon can be deduced from the writings of the two leading thinkers surrounding the cardinal, the chief theologian in his household, Claude d’Espence and his friend, the humanist Michel de l’Hôpital. Michel de l’Hôpital was born into the Guise orbit in 1506 as the son of the Duchess of Lorraine’s physician. He became a lawyer and entered the cardinal’s service in 1553, emerging as the Guise’s chief polemicist. He poured scorn on claims that they were foreigners, arguing that France extended to the Rhine and calling the Cardinal of Lorraine ‘the hope of the French race’. 8 It was he who first developed the concept that religion was being used as a cloak for sedition, and that a distinction needed to be made between faith and politics. D’Espence was five years younger and another product of Navarre College in the 1530s. In 1543 he was forced to retract some of the propositions made in his Lenten sermons and is said to have remarked of his conservative opponents that ‘to know anything of Greek made man suspected, to know anything of Hebrew almost made him a heretic’. He was widely admired and visited Geneva for an interview with Calvin in 1548.

The friendships that developed at Meudon were based on a shared admiration for Erasmus. There was a shared commitment to the evangelical attack on the cupidity and absenteeism of the clergy and to calls for returning the Church to its ancient purity; rejecting outright those innovations, such as purgatory, which had commercialized the road to salvation. As an alternative, the Meudon circle promoted a Christocentric piety that required the believer to imitate Christ.

Most were also hostile to the Protestants: d’Espence wrote a thesis attacking predestination and upholding the role of free will in grace. But, they argued, heresy could only be defeated by reform within the Church and by showing charity to those separated from it. It was these voices that the cardinal listened to as he decriminalized heresy in the spring of 1560.

These men considered themselves to be orthodox; none repudiated the miracle of the Mass. The most outspoken of them was Jean de Monluc, who had served as chief minister in Scotland in 1548 before being summoned by his patron to join the caucus of reform-minded progressives on the Privy Council. In the intervening years his evangelical experiment in his bishopric of Valence, which included offering the chalice to the laity, had proved highly controversial, not least with the Duke of Guise, governor of the province in which the see was located. Ultra-Catholics ascribed the rapid spread of the reform there and the breakdown of order to the temperance of mealy-mouthed moderates. Consequently, there were limits on what could be said in public. The household of the Duchess of Guise, another space in which heterodox ideas were welcomed, came under renewed scrutiny in 1554 when her Italian almoner, Boturnus, was accused of preaching heresy. Otherwise light was made of the duchess’s devotional shortcomings. It was only when the Duke of Guise visited Rome in 1557 and Paul IV fulminated that Boturnus ‘was one of the greatest and most wicked heretics in Christendom’ that the matter became politically sensitive. 9 Boturnus was dismissed and retired to Geneva.

With every new crisis, Protestant servants of the Guise were forced to make the difficult choice, either to quit their service or maintain a stricter outward conformity. The most serious defection occurred in the wake of the Conspiracy of Amboise when the master of the ducal household, François de Hangest, left after a decade of service. Until then, his well-known closeness to Calvin—Calvin himself was raised and educated with the Hangest family and his early career owed much to their patronage—had not hindered his career. Despite his departure, strenuous efforts were made to keep him in the fold with cash and gifts and the conferral of the Order of Saint Michel in September 1560. On the eve of his arrest, Condé had recourse to Hangest to intercede for him, knowing that his fellow Protestant was still ‘an especial servant’ of the Guise. 10

While the Protestants left, their moderate Catholic colleagues prospered. Despite the breakdown of order, civil war did not yet appear inevitable and there was genuine cause for optimism among those who favoured compromise. Following the Conspiracy of Amboise, the team of humanists and progressive Catholic theologians that the cardinal had groomed at Meudon was brought into the Privy Council with the intention of beginning a thoroughgoing reform of Church and State.

* * * *

In the early months of Francis II’s reign, the reforming impulse was initially felt only in the realm of finances. The cardinal had deeply disappointed his supporters among the Protestants by continuing the religious policies of the previous regime, limiting himself to scripture classes for the young king. The controversy caused by du Bourg’s execution and President Minard’s murder made the dangers of continuing this policy plain. Within days of these events, and in the wake of the election of Pius IV, the cardinal urged Philip II to join him in reviving the idea of a General Council of the Church, and, in a revealing glimpse of his arrogance, claimed that together ‘they could make the rest of Christianity go where they wanted’. 11 Even before the Conspiracy of Amboise, his mood had changed. At the end of February he complained bitterly about the abuses in the Church as the cause of the current unrest. During Lent, at the height of the Conspiracy, he joked ‘that those who chose to eat meat could do so’. 12 For the next two years he would wage a struggle for a free and general council that included the Protestants, opposing the ‘Popish’ Council of Trent, whose continuation he correctly foresaw would make the current schism in Christendom permanent.