Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (33 page)

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For the first time since the early 1520s the Guise found they had minimal influence at the centre of power. Any sympathy for the widowed duchess was offset by the loathing everyone on the Privy Council had for the cardinal: ‘It is an infallible maxim that the queen hates the Cardinal of Lorraine as much as any man living.’ The papal nuncio added that ‘those that remained of their party were not loved for their personal merits but out of consideration for the duke they had lost’. 18 Only Cardinal Louis remained at court for any length of time.

From the spring of 1564 to the summer of 1565 during its tour of the war-ravaged kingdom—an attempt by Catherine to show the king to his people and to impose the Peace of Amboise on his divided subjects—his presence as an emissary was endured. Cardinal Charles had returned from Trent with his spirits raised; the sense of spiritual renewal is betrayed by the religious paintings and objects he brought back from Italy, including a Tintoretto and a Titian, to embellish Reims cathedral, and by the frequency with which his letters now contained passages of scripture. In constant fear for his life, he took to reciting Psalm 30 with its theme of deliverance: ‘Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing; thou hast loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness.’19 Before Trent, bishops had been regarded primarily as administrators of the temporalities. The cardinal now threw himself into the missionary role that Trent had set out for bishops. He summoned a provincial synod at Reims on the 25 November 1564 and urged the clergy to reform themselves before they reformed the Church.

Within three years he had established a seminary in Reims—the first of its kind in France. He became a leading patron of the new religious orders, arranging for Jesuits to preach at court and in his dioceses, and establishing a Capuchin community at Meudon—another first. Stung by Trent’s opposition, he and Louis ceased to be episcopal pluralists, although political and ecclesiastical control was maintained by resigning sees they once occupied to their clients. Tentative reforms in some of the many monasteries they controlled were also begun. He set the standard in pastoral care, serving dinner to the poor at Reims hospital during the Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas holidays.

The poet Remy Belleau described family life during the retreat from court in the mid-1560s. Belleau arrived at Joinville in 1563 to take charge of the crèche, and in particular the education of the 7-year-old son of René d’Elbeuf. Belleau was inspired by the charms of Joinville’s gardens to put on summer festivities of music, dancing, and poetry in the grounds of the new château. His pastoral
bergerie
, a mixture of prose and poetry first performed in 1565, centres on the upper château of Joinville, a household ruled meticulously by Antoinette de Bourbon. Belleau describes many works of art in detail which explore the prestige and misfortunes of the Guise family. The Guise fondness for music was also evoked in the tapestries depicting shepherds and shepherdesses dancing and singing. Three shepherdesses dressed as the three Fates sang in honour of the eldest son of the Duke of Lorraine, Henri Marquis du Pont, who was born in 1563. In Belleau’s poetry Joinville is represented as arcadia, but melancholia was not far away. At dawn every morning Antoinette de Bourbon awaited a troop of young girls in the gloomy old castle, she then processed across the main hall, to the gallery in which stood her open coffin and thence to the chapel. Awaiting her were her chaplains and six burning candles, four in front of a portrait of her husband at the foot of an immense cross and two in front of his tomb. The daily prayer she said for her husband for fourteen years, followed by the
Dulcissme Jesu
and the ringing of bells, was now joined by prayers for her murdered son, whose magnificent mausoleum placed beside his father was inscribed with the words
Laus Deo
, ‘To the Glory of God’. The mood at Joinville darkened further in 1566 with the death of René d’Elbeuf and his wife Louise de Rieux in Provence, where he had recently been installed as commander of the Mediterranean galley fleet. Belleau returned to Paris soon after. The shadow of death that hung over Joinville encouraged Henri, Duke of Guise and his younger brother, who were not welcome at court, to leave France and try their hand crusading against the Turks in Hungary in the summer of 1566.

Just as the family reached the nadir of its fortunes, the domestic and international situation suddenly turned in its favour. Catholics everywhere began to reassert themselves, providing the Guise with an opportunity to rally the cause and set out on the road to political rehabilitation. The religious provisions of the Peace of Amboise were so complex it would have proved devilishly difficult to enforce them even if there had been goodwill on both sides. Protestant noblemen took advantage of the rights it gave them to multiply the sites of worship on their property much to the annoyance of Catholics, who formed local defence leagues and associations to oppose its provisions. Every burial, prayer meeting, and procession was a potential flashpoint. And there was a subtle shift at court too where the atmosphere slowly became less welcoming to the Protestants. The moderates continued to dominate the Privy Council, but Catherine de Medici was raising new men; wholly dependent on her favour, their careers did not rely on the success of the toleration policy. Many were Italians with Catholic sentiments more Roman than Gallican.

And as the balance in her entourage shifted, so the interpretation of the articles of the peace by the Crown and its officials began to go against the Protestants. Nothing captures the change in mood better than the demeanour of Charles IX himself and more especially his younger brother, Henri, Duke of Anjou. Born in 1551, it is easy to see why Henri was Catherine’s favourite son: he had all the qualities to rule—true piety, charm, and intelligence—that his other siblings so palpably lacked. Henri could do no wrong in the eyes of his mother and she indulged his sometimes outrageous behaviour: in April he tempted the king into a game in which they mocked the Protestants in the presence of the whole court; it ended with them tearing up a book of Psalms and a Protestant catechism and showering each other with bits of paper. The Protestant leaders ground their teeth as they looked on. Anjou’s youthful irreverence, so in contrast to the dourness of his mother’s counsellors, was immensely attractive to young courtiers.

He quickly became the darling of the ultra-Catholics.

These changes alone would not have conspired to undermine peace had it not been for the revolutionary events that were taking place in the Low Countries. In the summer of 1566 Habsburg authority broke down and the spread of Protestant worship and iconoclastic fury seemed to presage a repeat of the Calvinist revolts in Scotland in 1559 and France in 1560. Philip II was not prepared to make the same mistakes the Guise had made. He possessed not only the means of repression—the most formidable army in Europe—but was prepared to unleash it with as much cruelty as it would take to stamp out heresy. On 29 November 1566, the Duke Alva, the former foe of François de Guise, now sixty and crippled by gout, was appointed captain-general of an army with a projected strength of 70,000 men. The attempt to re-establish Habsburg hegemony in the Low Countries by force was a Rubicon for Spanish imperialism: a threshold which, once crossed, would transform the political situation in northern Europe. French Protestants trembled at the prospect. They feared a wider conspiracy to suppress the Reformed faith and felt with some justification that the fate of their co-religionists in the Low Countries was tied to their own. There were strong kinship and cultural ties between the Confederate nobility in the Low Countries, which was French-speaking, and the nobility of north-eastern France. The House of Montmorency straddled both sides of the porous border, and the constable and his nephews were soon in secret discussions about mutual aid with the Confederates. The tension increased in the summer of 1567 as Alva’s army marched north close to the French border, through Savoy, Lorraine, and Luxembourg. The Huguenots’ loss of influence and fears that at any moment the Peace of Amboise would be revoked was confirmed in August 1567: after more than a year’s absence, Catherine summoned the Cardinal of Lorraine back to the Privy Council.

At the same moment several hundred miles to the north, events in Scotland took a dramatic turn, which would push the Guise irrevocably into the arms of the old Habsburg enemy. The stability of Mary Stuart’s regime was based ultimately on the pursuit of détente with England. Scots and English alike assumed that an unmarried Elizabeth had to name a successor, and Guise policy was to ensure it would be Mary. For a time the cardinal even foresaw the possibility of her conversion or marriage to a Protestant prince, such as Condé. She had not liked this. ‘Truly I am beholding to my uncle; so it be well with him he cares not what becomes of me.’20 Though he did not care for her choice, her cousin, Lord Darnley, whom he termed an ‘agree-able nincompoop’, he reluctantly set about obtaining the appropriate papal dispensation. This disastrous marriage set in train events in which Scottish affairs would spiral out of Guise control once and for all. Darnley was vain, foolish, idle, and violent, and he had a habit of offending people. His murder in February 1567 was followed by Mary’s overthrow, imprisonment, and abdication. Within a year she had fled to England and perpetual captivity. Until then relations between the Cardinal of Lorraine and Philip II had remained cool.

Hostility ran deep—unusually for French princes in this period the Guise did not write letters grovelling for Spanish pensions. Spain was deeply hostile to the crypto-Lutheran proposals that Lorraine had carried with him to Trent. Following the assassination of François de Guise, the Emperor Ferdinand had required no prompting to write to the cardinal and offer his condolences and support. Philip II, in contrast, had to be reminded of his duty by Ambassador Chantonnay.

He eventually did so on the 9 June, just as the cardinal was shifting his position at Trent. But the main reason for their mutual suspicion is made clear from the letter’s opening flourish: ‘Don Phelippe, por la gracia de Dios Rey de Espana, de las Dos Sicilias, de Hierusalem’.

Friendship with Spain meant privileging matters of faith over lineage and would require the Guise to deny (at least temporarily) their Angevin heritage. Events in France, Scotland, and the Low Countries in 1567 clarified the relationship as the mutual dynastic and religious interests of Habsburg and Guise coalesced. From the beginning of 1568 the Cardinal of Lorraine would maintain a regular correspondence with Philip II and his advisors, whose warmth could not hide Guise subservience to Habsburg power and its pursuit of hegemony in northern Europe: ‘There is no family’, he wrote in November, ‘more devoted and dedicated to Your Majesty’s service than ours.’

The Huguenot answer to the defeat of the Confederates in the Low Countries and the return of the cardinal to the council was a desperate gamble. The attempt to seize the king and his mother at Meaux on 26 September was a watershed, altering for good the precarious balance of politics at the court. It was a disaster for the Protestants on two fronts. In the first place the king escaped and made for Paris.

Secondly, their repeated claims to be acting virtuously in defence of the common weal sounded hollow. A secondary objective had been to purge the Privy Council of their opponents. There is little doubting what would have befallen Charles had he fallen into their hands. He wrote with relief from Reims that ‘The Huguenots narrowly missed cutting [him] to pieces en route.’ He escaped on a swift Spanish mount, but had to abandon all his baggage and silver and gold plate to his pursuers. One of his servants was killed.21 Despite the death of the Constable of Montmorency at the battle of Saint-Denis in December, the second civil war resolved little. The six months of uneasy truce that followed the Peace of Longjumeau in May 1568 resolved even less.

The cardinal did not have a good war. He spent the winter of 1567 in Champagne organizing the eastern army, but when he was ordered by Charles IX to the frontier itself he was indignant, judging that at his age such a journey ‘would in no way be worthy of service to you’. 22 Catherine was trying to keep him out of the way while she negotiated.

In January 1568 he could not prevent German Protestant mercenaries from systematically destroying the family estates. Though he disliked the idea of peace and feared that it would put his life in danger, he also recognized how destructive the war was proving.

In the meantime, Philip II showed that there was an alternative, Spanish solution to the problem of heresy, entirely at odds with the French experiment. A special tribunal, the Council of Troubles, was established in September 1567; it eventually tried 12,000 people, 9,000 of whom, including the Confederate leader, William of Orange, were judged in absentia and had their property confiscated; more than 1,000 were executed, including two magnates—the counts of Egmont and Horne, who were kinsmen of the Montmorency. French Protestants could not remain on the sidelines and they took part in the disastrous campaign against Alva in the summer of 1568. In August Condé, Coligny, and Orange formed a united front and the black image of the Cardinal of Lorraine was at the heart of their propaganda campaign. When the Protestants took up arms again in September they blamed him for conspiring against the peace and plotting to kill them. In order to link events on the continent with those in England and draw Elizabeth I into the conflict, they claimed that following the imprisonment on Mary Stuart in May 1568 she was also the target of an elimination plot. Some historians have taken these claims at face value. But while fears of a Catholic conspiracy may have been genuine, it does not mean that such a conspiracy existed. Nicola Sutherland has even suggested that in the course of the summer of 1568 a plot to eliminate every leading Protestant in Europe was in the making, a forerunner to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

The image of the cardinal as the evil mastermind of a vast international Catholic plot was a figment of the Protestant imagination.