Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (27 page)

After Amboise, Michel de l’Hôpital entered the Privy Council as chancellor along with the Bishop of Valence, who was dispatched to explain the new moderate line in Scotland. Bishops were ordered to return to their dioceses. Catherine de Medici has long been credited with the change of policy and personnel, but this not the case. The 41-year-old Queen Mother emerged from the Conspiracy as a more significant figure, but she had no political experience, no provincial power base and no faction behind her: the new men on the council were the cardinal’s protégés, not hers. Her religious position was always dominated by political considerations, which meant the security of her children. She had been crucial to the Guise regime from the beginning, supporting the policy of repression, but was just as happy to support the decriminalization of heresy if it improved the security situation. Fellow Italians found her shallow. ‘Religion did not enter her soul. Neither gratitude nor love seems to have prompted her prayers but rather a desire to placate His wrath.’13 Catherine had a vested interest in promoting as many factions as possible so that she could play the arbiter. To this end she arranged for the return of an old Guise enemy from Rome: the papal legate, Cardinal Tournon. A spokesman for the Pope and Philip II, he quickly emerged as the leader of the ultra-Catholic faction at court. She had no antipathy to Protestants, however, and heterodox beliefs were rampant in her household. Catherine was to emerge as a brilliant player of the dangerous game of faction politics. But her inability or unwillingness to grasp fully the subtle issues of dogma that divided Frenchmen was to have serious consequences for the kingdom. Typically, she preferred the dashing Duke François, for whom she had a ‘profound veneration, founded on his personal merit’, to the cardinal, who made her feel socially and intellectually inferior.

The cardinal’s Easter sermons that year, ‘of incomparable eloquence’ were a call to arms for the evangelical cause. On 22 March he announced to the Pope plans for a National Council of the Gallican Church, which would return the Church to its primitive beauty. It was his initiative. Others on the Privy Council still preferred to wait for a General Council, until which time, as Chancellor L’Hôpital explained in July, Frenchmen ‘would have to attempt to live in quietness’. Rome and Madrid were horrified at the prospect of some form of Gallican compromise, leading to the establishment of a local variant of Catholicism independent of Rome. Philip II sent an envoy to press for a return to persecution. Pius IV accused Lorraine of being a schismatic. The severity of their response was an indication of how carefully he would have to tread. The Calvinists were suspicious too.

As early as 1549 Calvin had denounced those he disparagingly called
Moyenneurs
, or ‘Mediators’, who thought they could find a third way between the confessions. Calvin and his followers had little interest in compromise: the Truth was revealed in scripture. They demanded liberty of worship. They were right not to trust the cardinal; he was still intent on their destruction, but this time his weapons would be compromise and reform. Rumours began to circulate that the cardinal favoured a princely style Gallican reformation and that he would take the title of Patriarch of France. Certainly, he was a keen student of the confessional situation in the Holy Roman Empire, where the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg had devolved the issue of religious allegiance to the imperial cities and the territorial princes. He made it clear that he wanted any future General Council to include the Lutherans, and preferred a German venue over Trent. But he also realized that the solution in the Empire, with its decentralized and heterogeneous political structure, could have no application in France if the monarchy was to be preserved. England was a more promising model: the Elizabethan
via media
was providing a measure of stability for a kingdom similarly plagued by religious division and dynastic weakness.

On the 21 August 1560, fifty-five grandees and men of letters met at Fontainebleau to discuss the current crisis. It was a stage-managed event, in which the evangelicals would triumph over their internal and external enemies. Proceedings started well when a caucus of
Moyenneur
prelates close to Lorraine denounced the abuses of the Church. In proposing the motion for Gallican reform, Jean de Monluc argued that it was a patriotic duty: as Paris burned it was absurd to look to the Tiber to douse its flames when there was plenty of water flowing in the Marne and the Seine. Cardinal Tournon was not amused. But, just as things were going according to plan, an unexpected and unwelcome intervention upset the proceedings. Admiral Coligny took the floor and proposed a different solution to the religious troubles: pacific coexistence between the two confessions. He presented a petition with 50,000 signatures calling for liberty of worship. There was a sharp intake of breath among the audience as he did so; it was the first time that the Protestants had dared to petition the king in such a fashion. Coligny had hijacked the conference and the Guise brothers were furious at his audacity. Old animosities were rekindled, for vital questions of etiquette, honour, and reputation were at stake. Coligny would not be forgiven. The agenda had called for the Guise to give an account of the kingdom’s affairs under their tutelage. Quite unexpectedly, they were now forced to confront the admiral on the issue of religious reform, a matter that they had intended to leave to the bishops. Their differing responses revealed for the first time the divisions within the Guise family itself. The duke straightforwardly told Coligny to keep his nose out of Church business; he for one:

would leave it to those who were more learned than him on matters of theology; though he was sure that all the councils in the world would not happen to divert him or make him change the ancient ways of his predecessors, principally regarding the Holy Sacrament. 14

The cardinal spoke for much longer and with more subtlety; he opposed the simple certainties represented by his brother and Coligny, both men, incidentally, who would be martyred for their beliefs. The cardinal conceded that the petitioners were obedient subjects. But in a famous quip he said he could oppose the 50,000 signatures gathered by Coligny with a million of his own. Liberty of worship was impossible because it would show ‘approval of their idolatry, and the king could not conceive of it without being perpetually damned’. Less well reported is what he said next:

He was of the opinion that [as regards] those who went to services without arms, who sang Psalms and who didn’t go to Mass, and other things they observed, since the penalties had served no good until now, the king must forbid that they should be troubled by judicial punishment. He being very upset that they had carried out heretofore such grievous punishments...That the bishops and other persons must labour to win them over and correct [abuses] according to the Bible.

This passage reveals Lorraine’s caution and moderation. Its contrition for the failed war on heresy and acknowledgement that, contrary to what he was telling Rome and Madrid, an Interim was in force, was followed, as the cardinal was increasingly moved to do, with a passage from the Gospels. ‘Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother’ (Matt. 18: 15). This was a call for dialogue. Within days preliminary talks to discuss the idea of a National Council were announced. To Philip II this was backsliding, and it redoubled his hatred for the Guise. Rome and Madrid vowed they would do everything to stop it happening. The Guise had to write reassuring letters and dispatch envoys to explain themselves.

Coligny emerged from the Fontainebleau conference as the most eloquent and most convincing leader of the French Protestant movement. But in the rich religious soup that was France in 1560 there was one ingredient that historians, often with a confessional axe to grind, have neglected—the ‘Protestant loyalists’. These were aristocrats who, while embracing the Reformed faith, despised the militancy of the urban congregations, whose popular reformation displayed worrying signs of Swiss-style communalism. The ‘Protestant loyalists’ had their private chapels and, with their deep sense of loyalty to the king, were hostile to the plots and conspiracies of the House of Bourbon.

They were on the whole better disposed to the Guise. Indeed many of them were kinsmen or neighbours of the Guise in Champagne. Some were, like them, princes in the Holy Roman Empire and impressed by the way in which divisions in Germany had been resolved by the 1555 Religious Peace. The loyalists shared many of the social attitudes of their elitist Catholic evangelical friends, despising the vulgar and ignorant devotional practices of the masses. And they would later see the Massacre of Wassy in class terms—as an affair between a lord and his subjects—and in the ensuing civil war side with the Crown against their co-religionists. Following the Fontainebleau conference, Cardinal Charles made a bold attempt to include this group in a
Moyenneur
or Middle Party.

He spent the summer of 1560 matchmaking, obtaining the appropriate papal dispensations and planning the most glittering social occasion of the year. In the first week of October all the French princes, bar the House of Bourbon-Vendôme, gathered at the Queen Mother’s château at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, to witness multiple exchanges of vows. An old Guise friend, the 44-year-old François de Clèves, Duke of Nevers, Governor of Champagne, was getting remarried. At the same time his 12-year-old daughter Catherine, married Antoine de Croÿ, Prince de Porcien. Catholic ritual was followed, which was ironic since many of those gathered with the Guise family for the festivities were Protestants. But whether they were Catholic or Protestant mattered little: the wedding guests were overwhelmingly
Moyenneurs
. The event reunited many of those who had sat at the top table at Mary Stuart’s wedding. We know that Catherine de Clèves was not yet a Protestant because, after the death of her mother, she had been raised at Joinville by the dowager Duchess of Guise. Her father and brothers oscillated between Rome and Geneva, but, as their loyalism during the civil wars would later attest, they backed the Cardinal of Lorraine’s search for a compromise. Porcien was more open about his faith and kept Protestants for company, but his mother Françoise d’Amboise, whose conversion in 1558 had not disrupted her close friendship with the Duchess of Guise, believed that outward conformity was a price worth paying for maintaining the friendship of her Catholic neighbours. Approval of these marriages came from the aristocratic Protestant women who were so numerous in the household of the Queen Mother. These courtly ladies disapproved of the dangerous and dissolute rabble-rouser, Condé. They were charmed by Lorraine’s suaveness and his talk of concord and dialogue.

The betrothals were the most exclusive of social occasions: the rarefied company was distinguished by their pedigree and their kinship ties to each other and their roots in the Champagne region. The snobbery of the princes extended to the Montmorency, whom they considered social upstarts. French Protestant princes, such as the Longueville, the la Marck, and the Clèves, had little taste for rebellion; they possessed lands in the Empire and looked with envy at the German princes who controlled religious matters. As well as organizing the weddings, the Cardinal of Lorraine had also been discussing and thinking about the Eucharist, the most divisive issue between Protestants and Catholics. He had found a creed whose conservative reformism and obeisance to social hierarchy appealed to aristocrats in particular. The cardinal was becoming intrigued by the possibilities of a French compromise based on the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg.

* * * *

Hoc est corpus meum.
Rarely in history has the interpretation of so few words led to so much death and destruction. The Eucharist had been divinely instituted as a bond and token of union; it had now become the chief source of discord and strife. What did Christ’s words at the Last Supper mean? Was the substance of the bread and wine converted into Christ’s body and blood during the miracle of the Mass, or was ‘this is my body’ to be taken figuratively? Calvin argued that Christ’s body was not ‘physically’ present in a gross sense. The Eucharist was spiritual sustenance in which Christ’s presence penetrated the marrow of the true believer. For Calvinists, the Catholic Mass was an abomination, more akin to a pagan sacrifice, with overtones of idolatry and superstition. But to Catholics the Mass was more than a rite: it symbolized the unity of the community; participation was a social obligation in which the power of the body of Christ, ‘one bread and one body’, united the disparate parts of society into a body social. The Mass did not just give spiritual sustenance; it was vital to social and political order. The Calvinist interpretation of the Eucharist threatened to break the body social apart.

For Catholics religious unity was also essential to personal and collective salvation; it was prized as a manifestation of the Spirit; division was the work of Satan. Erasmus, the greatest irenical figure of Renaissance Europe, argued for reform, reconciliation, and reunion within the Catholic tradition. And the French
Moyenneurs
’ proposals for reform in the Catholic Church—the suppression of exorcism at baptism, communion in both kinds, the abolition of private Masses and feast days and cults which lacked due reverence and solemnity, the singing of Psalms in the vernacular—were largely inspired by Erasmus. However, they wished to leave the Mass largely intact. Even these modest reforms were controversial and they were being overtaken by events, as Protestants at court and conservative Catholics in the country began to assert themselves in the early months of 1561.

An early indication of the growing controversy over the Mass came just before Francis II’s death when the English ambassador, Sir Nicolas Throckmorton, caused a scandal by refusing to stand during the Elevation of the Host. Protestants no longer had to show restraint.

Throckmorton became a considerable factor in the emergence of a Protestant party at court under Charles IX. Coligny could not hide his satisfaction as Catherine took over the regency ‘without using any dissimulation, praising and thanking God’ for the fall of the Guise. 15