Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (30 page)

The central theme of the unity of two generations of the Guise in defence of the Real Presence is clear from the prominence accorded to Duke Claude, who had been dead for a decade at the time of composition—his spirit enduring as paterfamilias and moral compass of the family. Nevertheless, the enamel was for private viewing and there are clues to suggest that it may have meant different things to each member of the family, revealing the subtle tensions between them.

The presence of the Cardinal of Lorraine’s climbing ivy badge and his device,
Te Stante Virebo
, suggests that it was his commission, and that he ordered it the year between the end of the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561 and his departure for Trent in September 1562. A date coterminous with the Saverne interview is possible. A further clue to its date is the motley crew of heretics it depicts. There are several medieval sectaries, the Anabaptists, as well as Hus, Calvin, and Beza. But there is one notable absentee: Martin Luther. For the enamel defends not only the Real Presence but also the cardinal’s compromise with Lutherans. Some family members, Antoinette in particular, were no doubt uncomfortable with the policy, and the enamel thus provided a comforting idealization of family unity. It could be interpreted both as a statement of rapprochement and as a reaffirmation of the family’s commitment to the war on heresy. It is further proof that before he left for Trent, Lorraine believed that the true allies of the Gallican reformers were Lutherans rather than the Pope.

When he left Paris on 19 September 1562, at the head of more than sixty bishops and over a dozen doctors, there were widespread fears among the Italians and Spaniards that Trent’s conservative direction would be diluted by so many heterodox Frenchmen. And they were right to be alarmed. Not only did Lorraine travel with his putative Gallican confession, he was also ordered to address a long list of clerical abuses and explosive issues such as clerical marriage. Lorraine’s arrival at Trent provoked panic among the Pope and his entourage. This was the man who had talked to heretics! Some of the Pope’s counsellors urged him to punish him and in doing so ‘reduce this proud House [of Guise], the cause of so much evil’.34 He quickly emerged at Trent as the leader of the opposition to the Papal party.

Throughout November and December Lorraine took the fight to the dogmatists, arguing that the priority must be a reform of morals, which would bring heretics back into the fold, and not the establishment of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. He had not yet given up the hope that the Lutherans and Anglicans would be able to participate in the Council. The Spanish, in particular, poured scorn on his crypto-Lutheranism. The Council had reached an impasse; he could not even get the Spanish to agree on episcopal residence. By Christmas, exasperated by the sterility of the proceedings, he was desperate to return home to France, where the first civil war had reached a critical phase. In the New Year he denounced Rome as the source of all woe and he vainly explored the possibility of transferring the Council to Germany, farther from the influence of Rome and Madrid.

And then over the summer of 1563 relations with Pius IV thawed.

As he wrote to the Bishop of Rennes, the Pope’s letters were now ‘full of honest and gracious words, of demonstrations of friendship’. 35 He was summoned to Rome at the end of September for a personal audience and lodged in the pontifical palace in apartments adjoining the Pope’s. His gradual conversion to the Tridentine project was not due to Pius’s flattery and bribery—though the offer to make cardinals of Lorraine’s choosing was no doubt welcome. Lorraine put it down to the Pope’s ‘great desire to see a good reformation done’. The journey was made easier as a consequence of a genuine spiritual conversion. Had this been solely the result of his visit to Rome, sceptics would be right in claiming him to be perhaps the first person converted by a city that was a byword for corruption and vice—it usually had the opposite effect on visitors. In fact, his conversion had a long gestation: the journey from Gallican to Roman Catholicism was helped by his affinity for Italian culture. His long sojourn in Italy had put him in touch with the dynamism of the Catholic revival in southern Europe, introducing him to a spirituality that confronted him with the narrowness of the north European evangelical tradition and its fixation with scripture. He came into contact with once worldly prelates like Cardinal Farnese, who had undergone a similar conversion experience, recalling their meeting in Rome when ‘he was able to open his soul [to Farnese] better than in letters or other means’. 36 During his stay he would have observed the shoots of the Catholic revival in Rome too. As a music connoisseur he was surely intrigued by the novel ways in which the Oratory, founded by Filippo Neri in the 1550s, used the power of music to inspire devotion in the laity, a form which later became known as the oratorio. More importantly, his conversion was politically motivated; he was isolated and weak. One of the liberal French bishops captured Lorraine’s utter sense of isolation: ‘how the poor lord is treated by all sides. The Huguenots take him for their greatest enemy, and he will be no less odious to the Pope if he continues to speak of Reformation.’37 Reconciliation with Rome was the only way to escape his sense of isolation, to break the impasse and salvage something from the wreckage of his reform ideals. Abandoning the Gallican third way was a price worth paying for maintaining Catholic unity and achieving serious reform of the Church Universal.

His role in the making of the Council of Trent, which remained the basis for Catholic dogma until the middle of the nineteenth century, turned Lorraine from a model Gallican into defender of
Roman
Catholicism. It was a turning point in the story of the Guise family and in the history of France: his championing of
Roman
Catholicism placed him and his family on a collision course with the monarchy.

But the need to break out of the isolation into which he had led his family and forge new alliances was imperative; on 8 March 1563 he received the news that his brother had been shot and killed by a Huguenot assassin. The fortunes of the family had changed forever.

Shortly after daybreak on the 19 December 1562, scouts in the royalist army, which was drawn up in line of battle just south of the town of Dreux, between the villages of Nuisement and Le Lucate, reported hearing the drums of the Protestant army as it approached the village of Imberdais two miles to the south. A brief council was held by the three royalist commanders. They were men long used to campaigning together, though not always happily so. As Constable of France, Anne de Montmorency was the senior commander. Second-in-command was Marshal Saint-André, like his comrades, a former favourite of Henry II and a founding member of the Triumvirate. Also present was the Duke of Guise, though he had no formal rank beyond command of a 200-strong gendarmerie company and an equal number of gentlemen volunteers—an indication of his huge popularity among the nobility. Together the Triumvirs resolved to force the enemy to give battle and, leaving its baggage at Nuisement, the royal army advanced about three-quarters of a mile further south to a position between the villages of Epinay and Blainville.

The royalist battle line extended across a front of slightly more than a mile. The 20,000-strong army was particularly well provided with infantry, but had only 3,000 horse. In order to minimize its inferiority in this arm, a strong defensive position was adopted and the cavalry interspersed with the foot. The right flank, anchored on Epinay, was nominally under the command of Saint-André; it comprised first the Spanish infantry, then Guise with his gendarmes and volunteers, followed by a block of veteran French infantry, then came Saint-André himself with more heavy cavalry, a regiment of German landsknecht infantry and gendarmerie units under Guise’s brother, Aumale and the constable’s second son, Henri de Montmorency, Duke of Damville. The centre of the royalist position was occupied by the largest unit on the field, a phalanx of Swiss pikemen, whose reputation as crack troops was expected to inspire the regiments from Picardy and Brittany, which were designated by the grandiose title of legions, though in reality they were composed largely of half-trained peasants. Their flank was protected by the dragoons under Sansac and the rest of the gendarmerie stationed in front of the village of Blainville, which were commanded by Montmorency in person.

The Protestants, led by Coligny and Condé, had not sought a battle and had not expected the royalists, whom they knew to be deficient in cavalry, to offer it. They were on the retreat from a failed attack on Paris and were heading towards Normandy, where they intended to join with their English allies, under the command of the Earl of Warwick, and use English subsidies to pay their mutinous mercenaries, who made up more than half their 13,000-strong army. Despite their inferior numbers, the battlefield, which sloped gently down from the royalist position, suited cavalry and gave the Protestants the chance of making their considerable superiority in this arm count.

With only about a mile of open plain separating them from the royalist’s defensive line, it was still uncertain if the Protestants would commit themselves to a risky pitched battle. The Huguenot leaders hurriedly formed a line of battle in front of the village of Imberdais and immediately to the south of the hamlet of Maumasset.

It was drawn up in two lines, the first of which comprised most of their 4,500 cavalry, anchored on its left by two regiments of German pistoliers, or
reiters
, followed by Condé’s gendarme regiment, then two more gendarme regiments, one behind the other, a unit of light cavalry, then a regiment of gendarmes under Coligny and, protecting the right flank, two more regiments of
reiters
. The second line contained all the Protestant infantry—a large block of volunteer French infantry flanked on either side by two regiments of German landsknechts—and on the extreme right a reserve regiment of
reiters
.

The Protestants were more innovative than their opponents. In contrast to the dazzling confusion of colours that made up the royalist lines, the Protestants were distinguished by their white surcoats and sashes. Like their royal counterparts, the Huguenot infantry regiments were in rectangular blocks about ten deep, and the heavily armoured gendarmes in a single rank formation, ready for the shock charge with the lance. The
reiters
, however, were organized in massive columns sixteen ranks deep, a formation dictated by their tactic, the caracole—a demanding manoeuvre which called for each line in succession to discharge its pistols into the enemy before peeling away towards the rear in order to reload.

The journey to Dreux had begun eight months before. Catherine and her ministers knew that the Edict of Toleration would be controversial, and so most of its provisions were leavened with sweeteners for the Catholics, requiring Huguenots to restore all Church property, from buildings to relics, and forbidding them to build churches or hold assemblies inside the limits of any town. Even so, the opposition of the Parlement of Paris was inevitable—it only registered the edict under extreme duress and then immediately disclaimed it in a secret register.

But it was the volte-face of Antoine de Navarre which significantly tipped the scales in favour of a united opposition: he pleaded with the Duke of Guise to come to Paris and join him. Protestants denounced Navarre as ‘Julian the Apostate’ and accused him of accepting Spanish bribes. But opposition to the edict was not the work of fanatics. The prospect of toleration forced moderate Catholics to make a choice—the Middle Party was itself split down the middle. The moderates were not opposed to the edict on the grounds of bigotry; as one liberal judge put it prophetically, far from re-establishing unity in the body politic, toleration would create ‘two diverse commonwealths each opposed facing one another’, which would inevitably fight and destroy royal authority. 1 Another moderate Catholic, Etienne Pasquier, went even further and described the Edict as stillborn: ‘it was, so to speak an abortion suffered by France...[like a dead child] that will cause many tears in the entrails of the mother who produced it’. 2 Paris learned of the Massacre of Wassy within forty-eight hours. The pulpits and the Catholic press praised their Moses, their Jehu, who by spilling the blood of the infidels had consecrated his hands and avenged the Lord. The Protestants demanded justice and Catherine summoned the duke to her residence at Monceaux to answer for his actions.

Navarre promised to stand side-by-side with his ‘brother’. What would Guise do? On 12 March he arrived at his château of Nanteuil, only fifteen miles to the north-west of Monceaux, where he met his fellow Triumvirs, Saint-Andreánd Montmorency. In agreement with Navarre, they urged him to ignore Catherine and march on Paris. On 16 March the duke and three of his brothers, escorted by over 1,000 horse, entered the city through the Porte Saint-Denis to a rapturous reception from a welcoming committee of nobles, city officials, and bourgeois. The crowds that lined the street to view his entry shouted their joy—and their hatred of the Huguenots. The city council pledged him 20,000 men and 2 million crowns if he would assume the title of ‘defender of the faith’. On his journey through the city he met Condé, accompanied by 500 horsemen, returning from a service in the suburbs. He could afford to be courteous to his rival, the Protestant being so heavily outnumbered. In the words of the Protestant captain, la Noue, it was an elephant against a mouse. Violence seemed inevitable as Easter approached. A bloody riot took place on 20 March when a Catholic crowd attempted to disinter a corpse that had been buried according to the Reformed rites in the Cemetery of the Innocents. Palm Sunday processions two days later were the signal for clashes between the factions as they criss-crossed the city. One observer noted ‘that one heard so often the retort of firearms that it seemed that Paris was a frontier town’. 3 Eventually both sides were persuaded to remove their soldiers from the city in order to avoid further bloodshed. The Triumvirs headed to Fontainebleau and effectively placed Catherine and the king under house arrest. Condé rode to Orléans and raised his standard on 2 April. He and seventy-three others signed an association ‘to maintain the honour of God and to defend liberty and the kingdom’. 
It was the first of many such leagues which over the next thirty-six years would promise to defend the Commonwealth against tyranny. 

The Huguenots had been preparing for this eventuality since the previous summer and the rapidity with which they mobilized and struck with a largely volunteer army stunned the royalists. During the whirlwind months of April and May many of France’s principal towns fell. From the outset the fighting was characterized by its savagery, vindictiveness, and pogroms carried out by the majority Catholic population against their Protestant neighbours. In Toulouse, the one great provincial city the insurgents failed to take, days of bloody street-fighting between makeshift militias left 500 people dead. Thousands more Protestants were butchered after their defeat, many of them lynched by vengeful peasants as they sought refuge in the countryside. The Catholic captain and memoirist, Blaise de Monluc, brother of the Bishop of Valence, explained that desperate times required desperate measures: ‘I found it necessary, against my inclinations to use not only severity, but cruelty.’4 Protestants did not always limit themselves to iconoclasm and priest killing; their successes at Beaugency in the Loire and Mornas in Provence were followed by massacres of the defenders.

The Duke of Guise remained aloof from the destruction. Perhaps he had seen enough at Wassy. He took no part in the levelling of the two principal sites of reformed worship in Paris, which was personally overseen by the constable. Even though Guise was the best and most popular general in France, status dictated that the King of Navarre should command the royal army. In the autumn, during the siege of Rouen, talent and luck combined to propel him once more to the fore.

The failure of the English, who had entered the war with the hope of regaining Calais, to send more than 200 reinforcements condemned the beleaguered Protestant garrison. Catherine, whose return to power rested on her ability to arbitrate between the factions, had no interest in the outright victory of either side and pressed for a negotiated surrender. Meanwhile, during an inspection of the front-line trenches on 13 October, Antoine de Navarre was mortally wounded by a musket shot in the shoulder. Despite the attentions of the great surgeon Ambrose Paré, who had saved Guise’s life at Boulogne, there was no hope and he died, apparently according to Lutheran rites. A week after taking command Guise began an all-out assault; within five days the walls were breached and the city fell. He tried to save the Norman capital from the customary fate of a captured city by announcing a bonus to his troops, but they were not about to be bought off so cheaply and three days of looting, in which not even its churches were spared. 
The booty was sold off at bargain rates by the soldiers as far away as Paris, where the poor victims had to travel to repurchase their property.

As the Protestant and royalist armies faced each other two months later at Dreux, the savagery of the past months was momentarily forgotten. The Protestants reconnoitred the royalist position and considered it too strong to attack. For about two hours the two armies remained standing facing each other. Thirty thousand men were crowded into an area about a mile wide and half a mile deep; many were facing kinsmen and neighbours and, in the case of the Protestant loyalists serving in the royal army, their co-religionists. 
The constable was directly opposite his nephews. La Noue described his emotions during these moments: