Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (31 page)

He himself had a dozen friends in the Catholic ranks, but ‘honour and conscience’ dictated that neither one side nor the other would show mercy. Untouched by religious division, the remarkable solidarity of his family meant that Guise faced the prospect of battle with less trepidation. Three of his younger brothers, Aumale, Elbeuf, and the Grand Prior were present in the Catholic ranks. Even the Duke of Nevers was here. After an initial flirtation with Condé, the Protestant loyalist was now in Guise’s unit, though we do not know if he joined his cousin in hearing Mass and taking communion on the eve of battle. 5

The Catholic position was a strong one, but to the Protestants it looked more tempting than it actually was because they could not see its right flank, obscured by trees and the houses of the village of Epinay. Guise himself could barely see from this position and had to stand in his stirrups. The Protestant first line attacked what they considered to be the main Catholic force at 11 am. The constable’s cavalry moved down from the hill to meet it and were hit by Coligny’s gendarmes in front and by the
reiters
in the side. A terrible swirling melee ensued, but the Catholics were outnumbered and routed—some did not stop until they reached Paris, where they spread news of a calamitous defeat, whereupon Catherine is reported to have observed, ‘In that case we shall have to learn to say our prayers in French.’ The constable, his horse killed from under him and missing two teeth from a pistol shot, was taken prisoner. The next phase of the battle was the most crucial. If the infantry in the centre could not hold, the Catholic army would be annihilated. The French legionnaires were easily dispersed but the Swiss, who lived up to their reputation as the best soldiers in Europe, repulsed charge after charge by the Protestant cavalry. When the Protestants sent their German landsknechts against them they not only held firm but at the push of pike forced their traditional enemy to take refuge in the village of Blainville. The price was heavy: the Swiss lost their colonel and about half their men. But they could not be broken.

Saint-André was impatient to attack, but he was in only nominal command of the Catholic right and could do nothing without the Duke of Guise’s assent. Guise’s judgement that they should bide their time, even though the left flank was crumbling, was to be the source of much criticism. Before his capture the constable had requested assistance. Guise, however, remained impassive. When the constable’s youngest son was killed, his brother, Damville, rode over to the duke to beg him to avenge his death. He was dismissed: ‘We will have revenge, but now is not the time.’ Guise was too good a general to be swayed by sentiment. He was waiting until the Protestant horse was thoroughly disordered and dispersed—many
reiters
had headed towards the Catholic baggage train in search of pillage. When he judged the moment right the attack was launched with the words ‘Allons, mes compagnons, la bataille est gagnée.’ Condé and Andelot rallied their men and swung round to meet the charge and the two lines of heavily armoured gendarmes crashed into each other with tremendous force. Condé, his horse wounded, was dismounted and taken prisoner. After taking a fresh horse, Guise then charged his old enemy Coligny, who had managed to scrape together 1,200 exhausted horsemen. Catholic losses were heavy: the Duke of Nevers, Marshal Saint-André, and the perpetrators of Wassy, Jacques and Gaston de la Brosse, Guise’s standard-bearer, were killed as the Protestants put up fierce resistance. With night approaching and his men exhausted after five hours on the field, Coligny finally signalled his horse to retire, leaving the battlefield to Guise and 8,000 corpses, two-thirds of them royalists.

The battle of Dreux was a disaster for all the major protagonists, except Guise. The Protestants had been defeated and Condé captured, but the royalist casualties were much heavier. The slaughter of so many gentlemen—the royalists lost more than 500—had swept aside any remaining chivalrous hesitations about the killing of other Frenchmen. Civil war had been normalized. Montmorency’s capture for the third time in a less than distinguished military career was a disaster for the Queen Mother too for it left her totally reliant on Guise. Just three days after the battle the duke was once more made lieutenant-general of the kingdom. Dreux confirmed what people already knew—the Duke of Guise was the greatest captain of his age. His treatment of Condé enhanced his reputation further. Ignoring the fact that Condé had once sponsored a plot to kill him, Guise courteously invited his first cousin to share his table and even his bed. 
His generosity was a sign that chivalry was not altogether dead. Even Protestants, like la Noue, exhorted ‘all those who make a profession of arms to study and imitate [him] in order to distance themselves from the cruelties and unworthy things which are often permitted to pass in these civil wars’. 6 But this was a war about salvation, not honour, and few were listening.

Of all the protagonists only Guise had anything to gain from the continuation of the war. While Montmorency and Condé now joined Catherine in calls for a negotiated settlement, Guise pressed home his advantage. On 5 February 1563 he invested the remnants of the Protestant army at Orléans. Coligny was able to slip out and head for the safety of Normandy, but the situation of the defenders was desperate. 
On 18 February, Guise announced its certain submission and ordered the assault for the following evening. He did not live to see it. 

The assassination was planned well. Poltrot de Méré, a 26-year-old petty gentleman insinuated himself into the duke’s household and discovered that for the duke to reach his lodgings from the siege trenches he had to cross a river by a small ferry, which could carry only two others. Pistols were useless at more than a few feet, but there were bushes in which to hide and he succeeded in shooting the duke in the back. At first, the doctors did not consider the wound life-threatening, as the bullets seemed to have passed through his body.

However, on 22 February, with the duke in the grip of fever, they performed an excruciating operation, making a cross-like incision in the wound and inserting their fingers to look for a foreign body; they found nothing except an abscess. They cleaned the wound as best they could and cauterized it with a red-hot silver iron. To no avail; four days later, on Ash Wednesday, at the age of 44 the duke died. Did Poltrot act alone? Under torture he unravelled a conspiracy and implicated Coligny. What is certain is that the assassin was burning with the desire to avenge his kinsmen killed at Amboise. Poltrot’s deposition was sent to the admiral, who admitted paying him 120 crowns to spy on Guise’s camp but he furiously denied that he suggested the murder. By removing the main stumbling block to peace, the duke’s murder was a godsend to Catherine. The day after Poltrot’s execution the Peace of Amboise, negotiated between Condé and Montmorency, brought the first civil war to an end. The belief that the duke’s murder would restore stability was illusory. His murder radically altered the political situation; having already broken from the Middle Party, the Guise henceforth severed their links altogether with their former allies. For the next decade politics would be dominated by their quest for blood revenge.

* * * *

As the contemporary historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou put it, the Duke of Guise ‘was, even by the admission of his enemies, the greatest man of his century’. 7 Tears were shed in the Catholic courts of Europe. 
In Holyrood palace they fell ‘lyke showers of rayne’. 8 As the duke drifted in and out of consciousness in the last week of his life the struggle over his legacy had already begun. His deeds passed into myth as they were recast by Catholic propaganda, which identified the duke as a martyr for the Catholic cause and his heirs as the champions of orthodoxy. The death of a prince was a public drama, in which themes of serenity, redemption and suffering were embroidered by poets, preachers, and pamphleteers to edify the masses. As he lay dying, listening to the Gospels, in imitation of Christ he forgave his murderer and requested that he be pardoned. He spoke of his desire for a ‘good Reformation of the Church’ and begged forgiveness for the events of Wassy, which had happened against his will.

Had his brother Charles, who received news of the death at Trent with Christian resignation, been present things would have been handled differently. The duke’s widow, Anne d’Este, and 12-year-old son, Henri, were inconsolable and craved vengeance. Anne intoned, ‘God, if fair you are, as you must be, avenge this.’9 It seems unlikely, however, given what we know of her crypto-Protestantism, that Anne was behind the orchestration of her husband’s last hours. For the hawks, Claude d’Aumale and Cardinal Louis, it was imperative that the rumours of unorthodoxy that had accompanied the death of Antoine de Navarre be avoided. As he lay dying, the duke reverted to a deeply traditional and conservative creed. His reassertion of Roman orthodoxy was significant because his deathbed words and deeds, reported by his confessor, the Bishop of Riez, were soon circulating in cheap print. Riez, confessor to Henry II and Catherine de Medici, was a convenient choice, but in other respects a rather unusual one. He was a deeply conservative polemicist opposed to the evangelical traditions of the Guise family and to the Colloquy of Poissy who had translated the works of the Polish Cardinal Hosius, Rome’s leading apologist and the main opponent of the Cardinal of Lorraine at Trent. Conservatives like Riez and Hosius acidly rejected even the most limited reforms—demands for communion under both kinds were described as ‘satanic’—and savaged the idea of any compromise with Lutherans; heretics were to be rebuked and not talked to. Others who were present at the deathbed accused the bishop of changing the emphasis of the duke’s last words and in particular of playing down his repentance for Wassy. According to Riez, the duke defended the Real Presence, in which Christ is ‘present in reality and in essence’. In his last hours he enjoyed listening to the epistle of Saint James, a controversial choice from the biblical canon, since it had been condemned by Luther as an ‘epistle of straw’ for its teaching that faith alone was not enough for salvation. The duke spurned food for he had celestial nourishment: ‘I was killed for my support of the Church and the quarrel of my God.’ Guise’s death was represented as an explicit rejection of his and his brother’s flirtation with Lutheranism.

How far the duke himself was consciously engaged in reshaping his image in a reactionary mould we are unaware. His brothers did not need to orchestrate the extraordinary scenes that attended the procession of his corpse to its final resting place at Joinville. The Parisian authorities in particular cited the duke’s protection of their city from heresy as their reason for mounting a special funeral procession: twice before to popular acclaim he had come to save them. The procession of the funeral cortege across France was unique for a sixteenth-century French prince; it was the occasion for a spontaneous response by Catholics to the death of a great military hero, a public display of gratitude and grief for a martyr who had sacrificed himself in order to protect them and their faith. He was their Hector and Achilles, their Machabee, their Gideon and Samson. The body lay in state for three days in camp so that the army and the local population could come and pay their respects. Once it had been embalmed it was placed in a coffin and moved downriver along the Loire to Blois in preparation for its arrival in Paris. On 8 March the judges of the Parlement of Paris and the municipal officers attended a service in Notre-Dame in which the cathedral was everywhere bedecked with the arms of the House of Lorraine. The bells of every parish church in the city sounded all day in his memory. In the early hours of the 18th the duke’s coffin arrived at the monastery of Chartreux on the outskirts of the city. The drama was heightened later that day by the extraordinary fate that was visited on Poltrot’s corpse: in front of the packed crowds outside the city hall he was tortured; while still alive each of his limbs was tied to a horse and pulled apart, his body was burned and his severed head mounted on a post.

On the day after Poltrot’s execution, all the city’s gates were shut except the porte Saint-Michel, through which the funeral cortege would pass on its way to Notre-Dame; here the duke’s heart was to be buried before he was carried to Joinville to lie beside his father. First came the twenty-two criers, calling on Parisians to pray for their hero; they rang bells and were dressed in mourning clothes, on the front of which were emblazoned the city arms and on the back those of the House of Lorraine. Representatives of the mendicant orders of Paris and the vicars and cunés of each parish, holding crosses aloft, followed them. Two hundred representatives of the best Parisian families carried torches emblazoned with their arms. But this was a martial as well as a solemn event. There was a silent file-past of 6,000 infantry with their drums silenced and their banners lowered. The twenty-four flags, behind which marched the city militia, were of ‘black taffeta, trailing on the ground and emblazoned on the right-hand side with the arms of the city and on the other side with the arms of the deceased seigneur de Guise’. 10 Nothing symbolized better the common cause of the House of the Guise and the city, whose population was overwhelmingly Catholic, than the union of their coats of arms.

There was yet no talk in the family of exploiting this association politically, nor could they have done so for the family was in turmoil:

the duke’s death was compounded a week later by the death of natural causes of the Grand Prior, who many considered to be the ablest of the younger siblings. The impact of these deaths can be measured by the reaction of the Cardinal Charles who, according to Montaigne, bore the news of both these deaths at Trent with exemplary fortitude. Yet when one of his menial servants happened to die a few days later ‘he let himself be carried away...he abandoned his resolute calm and gave himself to grief and sorrow...The truth is that he was already brimful of sadness, so the least extra burden broke down the barriers of endurance’. 11