Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (32 page)

The duke’s son, Henri, was confirmed in his father’s offices as Grand Master of the Household and as Governor of Champagne, but he was only twelve years old and leadership devolved to the third and fourth brothers, Claude, Duke of Aumale and Louis, Cardinal of Guise. Both men were hawkish and happy to connive in François’s staged ultra-Catholic exit. Though a competent soldier, Claude lacked charisma, and Louis, though rich, was best known for his playboy image. 
The family council that met at Joinville at the end of March 1563 was a bitter occasion, the stoicism demanded by Charles absent. Offers of support came from all over Catholic Europe. But words were cheap and resources otherwise lacking: the duke had left debts in the region of 200,000 crowns, much of it contracted in the defence of the faith.

Meanwhile, the constable told his fellow privy councillors that he ‘would support his nephews as if they were his own children and to that effect would employ all the power of his kinsmen, friends and servants’ against the Guise. 12 The dominance of the Montmorency on the council was painful enough and then Coligny rubbed salt into the wound: ‘This death is the greatest good which could have happened to this kingdom and to God’s Church, and particularly to me and my entire house.’13 His gloating made what became known as ‘a public feud’ inevitable. For the widow there was ‘only one solace; that is to make sure that his friends will remember one day at the right time to avenge her injury’. For their part, Protestants sang songs in praise of Poltrot, ‘the sweetest word in the French tongue’, and read pamphlets that referred to him as ‘the hand of God’. But the feud cut across religious lines: Coligny could rely on the support of his uncle and his uncle’s eldest son, François de Montmorency, who as Governor of Paris kept an eye open for signs of support for the Guise in the city.

The family council, in which the dowager duchess took a leading role, developed a dual strategy. 14 Public armed demonstrations pressured the Crown towards effective legal action against the admiral.

Meanwhile, in an effort to limit the protection the constable offered to his nephew, public opinion was bombarded with propaganda vilifying the Montmorency. They replied in kind, defending themselves as upholders of the monarchy and of the Peace of Amboise. The Guise launched a private suit against Coligny (26 April 1563) supported by demonstrations of force in the capital. The conflict soon centred on who would conduct the judicial investigation. Anne d’Este moved the king to tears when she made a dramatic personal appeal, prostrating herself before him after Mass in Meulan church on 26 September. The drama moved to Paris four days later when Anne, who was dressed in mourning, the Ferrarese ambassador, and Cardinal Louis gathered with their lawyers and 200 supporters outside the Sainte-Chapelle and, two by two, made the short walk to the law courts of the Parlement of Paris. They packed the chamber in closed session, and despite the objections of the attorney general, their menace ensured that the judges proceeded to name commissioners to begin the investigation. 
The Guise were followed everywhere by a large retinue and every session of the Parlement attracted excited crowds. But victory was short lived. Within weeks the king evoked the case to the royal council.

Tensions increased on 23 November when the admiral and his supporters arrived in the city in a magnificent show of force. The Venetian ambassador, estimating the numbers at 8–10,000 men, feared ‘that any little accident might unleash a great scandal’. While the factions roamed the streets, the Guise withdrew from the royal apartments in the Louvre to their own stronghold in the Marais.

Fearing the outbreak of civil war in the capital Catherine summoned the parties to the Louvre on 6 December to try to broker a peace settlement, but events on the streets upset the plans of the policy-makers. Soon after the abortive peace conference Condé’s chaplain was attacked by the members of the congregation of Saint-Germain de l’Auxerrois and saved only by the intervention of Huguenot soldiers. More seriously on 22 December a man attacked the priest of Saint-Séverin during Mass, wrestling him to the ground as he raised the Host. The royal family led the public reparation for this act eight days later, in a procession through the streets from the Sainte-Chapelle to Saint-Séverin on the Left Bank, in which the Venetian ambassador recorded the prominent role of the Guise.

Along the route the people complied enthusiastically with orders to cover their houses with hangings and mount lighted torches. Rumours of conspiracy fuelled the combustible atmosphere, and they were not without foundation: handbills posted around the city threatened the life of the Queen Mother and her chief councillors.

Public enmity between the parties and their supporters was displayed day in day out through taunts, challenges, and insults. Gangs of liveried lackeys roamed the streets looking for trouble. Gradually the Protestants and their Montmorency allies gained the upper hand.

Their demand that Catherine remove Guisards from key positions was backed up by force: on New Year’s Eve a captain of the royal guard was assassinated in cold blood. The Guise were unable to counter the ascendancy of their enemies on the regency council, causing the Spanish ambassador to despair that ‘the Guise and the Catholics act so meekly and [are so] defeatist, as if there was no remembrance of the death of M. de Guise nor of the Catholic Religion’. Finally, on 5 January 1564, the king issued a decree, suspending judgment on the murder for three years, during which time the parties agreed to desist from attacks on each other. When he returned from his thirteen-month sojourn at Trent, the welcome extended to the Cardinal of Lorraine at court was cold to the point of rudeness—he was even searched for concealed weapons. The Privy Council dismissed his demands for the implementation of the Tridentine decrees and, in a clear illustration of the tip in the balance of factions, the meeting ended in angry uproar.

Until then, Chancellor l’Hôpital had displayed deep affection for the cardinal, his former patron and godfather to his grandson, but their differences now spilled over into personal animosity. Faced with the chancellor’s contention that the Tridentine decrees were prejudicial to the independence of the Gallican Church, the cardinal shouted in exasperation that he did not know what religion the chancellor was of. The argument became so fierce that the Cardinal of Lorraine called l’Hôpital an ‘ingrate’, who was trying to harm the cardinal and his family despite all that he owed them. L’Hôpital replied that he remained grateful and would risk his life to repay his debts, but he declared that he would not do so at the expense of the honour and profit of the king. He would remain loyal to his office, to the Queen Mother, and to the policy of toleration of which he was the principal architect. He reminded the cardinal that it was the Guise who had trampled on the Edict of January in Wassy, a violation that had caused so many troubles in the kingdom. 15 Lent 1564 saw Guise fortunes reach their lowest ebb. Cardinal Charles was invited to open the season with a sermon to the royal family at Fontainebleau. The night before some Huguenots stole into the chapel and ‘did a great stinking shit on the seat of his ceremonial chair’. 16 This was one humiliation too many and the family quit court in haste.

A new strategy was called for. The cardinal spent the rest of the year building a wider, non-confessional, base of support by attracting their cousin Condé to their cause. The death of his wife in July 1564 had severed his kinship ties to the Montmorency and removed a godly influence from his life. The two men had a genial meeting at Soissons, where the cardinal offered him a Guise princess: Anne d’Este or Mary Stuart. The dowager Duchess of Guise, in particular, was keen to revive the old alliance with the House of Bourbon. Assured of Condé’s goodwill, the next move was to build on the popular support that the family had attracted in Paris, and challenge the traditional Montmorency power base there. To this end, the cardinal planned a sort of triumphal entry into the city with his nephew, Henri. Fearing for his life, the cardinal was accompanied by a retinue of fifty men, even when he sang Mass and preached in church. On the pretext that he had the royal consent, he ignored warnings from the governor, François de Montmorency, that arms were forbidden in the city. A

showdown was inevitable. It proved to be yet another humiliation.

The two retinues clashed in the rue Saint-Denis on 8 January 1565. At least two men were killed and the Guise men scattered: the cardinal and his nephew, pistols in each hand, were forced to take ignominious refuge in the house of a rope-maker. At nightfall they stole across the river to the safety of the Hôtel de Cluny on the Left Bank, where Aumale joined him. Their dishonour was compounded by their failure to rouse the Parisians. For the next two days the cardinal was trapped in his residence surrounded by hostile troops. The only Parisians who turned up came to poke fun: even among Catholics, anti-clerical feelings were strong. Both sides began to gather forces in the vicinity of the city which cut across confessional lines: Montmorency was supported by Coligny; the Guise by Condé.

Both sides took the fight to the public in an exchange of vicious libels. At stake was the claim to be the greater lineage. The Guise appealed to the other princes, and Condé in particular, to unite against the Montmorency, ‘for the princes should not easily permit that any of their rank be outraged by people of inferior condition’; they were no better than levellers who wished to overturn the traditional hierarchy. As for the Montmorency, to the traditional complaints about the Cardinal of Lorraine—he was accused of hypocrisy, buggery, and incest and of being the Antichrist—was joined a new strain of anti-Guise propaganda, which mocked their royal origins and pretensions to be the heirs to the Angevin empire. Rather, they were descended from the counts of Vaudémont—foreigners and simple gentlemen. They were the real parvenus, ruthlessly usurping the traditional role of the Montmorency as protectors of Paris.

In the provinces, too, the Guise tried to build an anti-Montmorency coalition, tapping into local Catholic discontent with the Peace of Amboise. They elicited terrifying oaths, such as the one sworn by the seigneur de Sansac: ‘I promise to use all my strength up to the last breath to expel from this kingdom or kill those who have made peace without punishing the murder, and to inflict a shameful death on those who shared in the homicide, and I swear also to use all my strength in exterminating those of the new religion.’ Guy de Daillon pledged ‘to avenge the death of the said duke up to the fourth generation of those who committed the said homicide or connived at it and of those who are yet defending the culprits’. Chilling though these documents are they proved to be of little practical value in the pursuit of Coligny; these men were offering moral rather than material support. Daillon’s promise to serve the Guise up to the fourth generation is a biblical convention (Exodus, 20: 5) that had no legal force. He would never support the Guise with arms and always remained a loyal servant of the Crown.

Neither was sympathy for the Guise translated into support on the streets of Paris. Over the next couple of years the family presented its interest as a public cause and tried to broaden its base of support, but the people remained aloof. During the Guise-Montmorency clash in Paris in 1565, attempts to rekindle memories of Parisian solidarity for the Guise backfired, allowing Protestant pamphlets to demonstrate the shallowness of Guise influence among the people. After quitting the city, Aumale toured neighbouring provinces hurriedly trying to form an association. A letter to his brother, the Marquis of Elbeuf, was intercepted and published by the Protestants. It not only publicized the names of his co-conspirators but revealed his disillusion with the Catholic populace: ‘I find it good that the said lords wish to take heed leaving aside the towns, all the more since there is no assurance to be had in the people, as I have lately seen once again. But with the nobility, for my part I am firmly resolved and prepared.’ This association also came to nothing. Support for the Guise in the provinces was fickle. Their weakness was vividly exposed on 12 January 1566 when the cardinal journeyed to Moulins and, employing all his powers of eloquence, in front of the royal council and princes implored them to open judicial proceedings against Coligny. He appealed to the princes to uphold his family’s honour ‘which is yours as well’. The Cardinal appealed to their sense of gratitude—for a decade or more, the Guise liked to fashion themselves as protectors of the princes against Montmorency preponderance. But this idea no longer had any credibility. The overwhelming majority of the princes voted against the motion. The Bourbon-Vendôme had first shown the way in 1560 and over the next decade or so, as Guise power at the centre waned, the other princes followed suit, aligning themselves with the Crown’s toleration policy, which offered the best hope for stability. With support for the Guise waning, the Crown was able to impose a settlement at Moulins. Coligny swore publicly that he was not responsible for the murder of François de Guise. He and the cardinal then exchanged a kiss of peace.

The cardinal had one more trick up his sleeve. He shifted the focus of his opposition, posing as the defender of the Catholics in the council. On 16 March he presented a petition from the judges of the Parlement of Dijon protesting against a royal amendment to the Peace of Amboise which allowed ministers of the Reformed religion to visit and console the dying and to instruct the young. This was an extension of the original peace which had allowed Protestant worship in only one designated town in each baillage or seneschalsy and Lorraine claimed that it was a covert means of proselytizing. The petition caused a stir in the council because it was apparent that the amendment had not been discussed in the council, but issued on the sole authority of the chancellor. L’Hôpital turned to the cardinal and remarked drily ‘Monsieur, you already came back to trouble us.’

The cardinal exploded: ‘You, who enjoy your position today, thanks to me, dare tell me that I came to trouble you.’17 Council members leapt up and the meeting was plunged into uproar. Order was only restored when the Queen Mother intervened. She ordered that the offending edict be burned, that the teaching of the Protestant catechism be strictly prohibited and that the chancellor be forbidden from sealing edicts without the consent of the royal council. Lorraine’s tactical victory was undermined by his arrogance, which alienated even those who agreed with his principles. He accused the chancellor of always wanting to be ‘cock of the dunghill’, and declared that he would attend no more councils in the chancellor’s presence. L’Hôpital retorted that they could manage quite well without him. A dangerous precedent was thus set: any recall of the cardinal to the council would be widely interpreted as heralding an alteration to the Peace.