Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (36 page)

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Marriages were among the few occasions that the Guise were able to attend at court in the two years before the Massacre, otherwise they were not welcome. The Montpensier marriage in February 1570 had been under negotiation for a year and was crucial for rebuilding ties with the other princes, which had been lately under strain. Catherine de Guise was the only daughter of Anne d’Este and Duke François. As a descendant of French royalty through her mother, she commanded a huge dowry—200,000 livres—of which the Crown agreed to pay half. But the marriage was not a happy one, and with his brother-in-law soon in deep trouble for his pursuit of Princess Margot, Montpensier found it expedient to feign that he was ‘no longer a friend to the Guise’. Duke Henri’s hurriedly arranged marriage in October permitted him to return to court and he resumed the duties of the Grand Master of the Royal Household. On 25 March 1571 the Cardinal of Lorraine officiated at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and he and his nephews figured prominently in her triumphal entry in Paris. And then suddenly royal favour was removed. There was not, complained the Spanish ambassador, a ‘spoonful’ to be had. Power was passing once again to the old Montmorency enemy. Just a few weeks after the coronation, tensions exploded in the king’s chamber itself, and Guise and Méru, Marshal Montmorency’s younger brother, gave each other the lie. Once more, the duke, his brothers, and uncles had no alternative but to leave.

‘The Cardinal of Lorraine is no longer spoken of, except as if he was dead, nor any of the Guise, about whom nothing is known.’ The words of the Spanish ambassador hardly suggest that the retirement from court was the cue for the start of a conspiracy with Philip II and Alva.

The family gathering which took place in the summer of 1571 had a sinister purpose for some historians. In fact, it was to celebrate the birth of the duke and duchess’s first born, Charles, Prince of Joinville, on 20 August. Philip II still considered the Guise his chief ally and told his ambassador to help them; but they were of little use to him in disgrace. The amicable correspondence between the Cardinal of Lorraine and Philip II and Alva ceased. If there was a Guise-Habsburg plot to overturn the peace in France it was kept remarkably well hidden. Cardinal Charles accepted his fall stoically and busied himself with visitations of his diocese and the reform of the breviary. He lamented to the Duke of Ferrara that ‘the court had changed greatly since the time when he was raised there. Now they seek to discriminate against the old servants of the Crown, never telling the truth in an attempt to create division among the great and, if possible, break good alliances and friendships, in order to put everyone at odds with his peers.’7 Things got worse in September when Coligny reappeared at court. The warmth with which he was received could not have been in more contrast to the way in which the king treated the Cardinal of Guise, who remained near the court in his customary role as envoy; ‘hardly remembered by their majesties’ the king did not bother to summon him. 8 Coligny was rewarded with a gift of 100,000 livres and the revenues of the benefices of his recently deceased brother, the Cardinal of Châtillon. He was welcomed back to his seat on the Privy Council and permitted the quasi-princely honour of being surrounded by a retinue of fifty gentlemen everywhere he went.

With Coligny on board the council could now press ahead with its plans to heal the religious divide. Future stability would be achieved by two dynastic marriages and one reconciliation. In the first instance an anti-Spanish alliance with England would be concluded and sealed by the marriage of Elizabeth I and the Duke of Anjou. Secondly, negotiations for the marriage of Henri de Navarre and Marguerite de Valois were to be finalized. The final piece in the jigsaw would be the reconciliation of Guise and Coligny. These policies were strongly supported by the Montmorency. Catherine could count on her creatures to fall into line. Opposition came over matters of conscience. Anjou flatly refused to marry a heretic. The council was however united in its desire to see the end of the poisonous Guise-Montmorency feud. In October 1571 Guise was ordered to court to make his peace. He was to come only with his ordinary retinue.

Guise found himself cornered: to renounce his enmity while the Montmorency were in such a position of ascendancy would be yet another humiliation. His uncle urged caution, but at the age of 20 Henri was less inclined to accept fate. The cardinal’s letters are filled with world-weary resignation rather than Machiavellian scheming.

An experienced politician, he knew the values of patience and forbearance. He had made peace with Coligny once before, only for civil war to alter that within eighteen months. He assured Charles IX of his ‘entire obedience and fidelity’ and promised ‘charity towards his neighbour and the forgetting of past injuries. He placed in the hands of the king, who has the power of the sword, all the justice he could wish for and in the hands of God all his revenge.’9 His nephew had other ideas. He went to Paris to show his solidarity with the oppressed Catholics.

The city was in turmoil over the Cross of Gastines Affair, symbol of its resistance. Mounting anger at its impending removal was fuelled from the pulpits, and especially that of Simon Vigor, the king’s own stipendiary preacher. Vigor, whom the Protestants referred to as ‘the bellows of Satan’, pleaded with Governor Montmorency to leave the cross and delivered a fiery sermon on 4 November full of menace.

Vigor’s sermons were popular because of their simple and uncompromising language, insisting that the king annul ‘the damnable edict that allows [the Huguenots] freedom of conscience, and constrain [them] to return to the Catholic Church by depriving them of their properties and reinstituting the punishment of execution by burning’. 10 Montmorency maintained order with difficulty following the 20 December riots. He reported to the king ‘that in Paris there are a growing number of gentlemen friends of the lords of Guise, and they have rented rooms in various quarters, plotting nightly something between them...and that among the plans they have one will go and kill the admiral in his house’. 11 Since Coligny was in Burgundy this was highly unlikely. This was yet another trial of strength, as had occurred in 1565. Montmorency warned the Crown that in any confrontation he would be obliged to support his cousin. Coligny issued orders for his men to be ready to mobilize. The dukes of Guise and Aumale and the Marquis of Mayenne entered Paris on 14 January with a retinue of 500 men, about the same number that Montmorency commanded.

Their presence gave succour to the malcontents. Two houses on the Pont Notre-Dame, occupied by suspected Protestants, were the object of continual intimidation; their walls defaced with mud and filth. We do not know where the duke heard Mass on Ash Wednesday 1572. If he had gone to Notre-Dame he would have been subjected to an extraordinary political sermon by Vigor, denouncing the hypocrisy of the peace edict and challenging the Crown. Citing Saint Augustine, he argued that it was permitted to kill only at the king’s command, but that the moment the king gave his order, it was sinful not to obey it. To illustrate the point he said that ‘if the king ordered the Admiral [Coligny] killed, it would be wicked not to kill him’. 12 Had the Duke of Guise been present, or read the version that was hurriedly printed, he would have taken this as a sign to be patient. In any case, Guise’s motives in coming to Paris had less to do with religion than with the restoration of his damaged honour. There was more bluster about him than menace. In requesting leave from the king to fight Coligny in single combat, he was trying to put off the inevitable. Cardinal Charles would have none of this foolishness and left for Reims at the onset of Lent. In April the Marquis of Mayenne quit France altogether to go on crusade. If Guise was plotting to restart the civil war beginning with a strike on Coligny it is inconceivable that he would have permitted his brother, Mayenne, to depart with 200 family retainers, or that his cousins, the young Marquis of Elbeuf and the eldest son of the Duke of Aumale, should go to Rome in the train of their uncle, Cardinal Charles. Henri de Guise’s show of strength in the city had achieved his purpose; his challenge to Coligny had shown that he was not coming to the peace table defeated. On the 12 May 1572 he bowed to the inevitable and arrived at court to make his peace. Guise agreed to abide by the terms of the 1566 Moulins accords, at which the ‘king was overjoyed, and wishes that, under grave penalties, no more mention is made of things past’. 13 As a gentleman Guise was bound by his word of honour—that is until such time as the king said otherwise.

Things were going well for Catherine and she moved on to her next objective. Within a month she struck a deal with Jeanne d’Albret, Henri de Navarre’s mother, on the matter of the great Bourbon-Valois dynastic alliance. Navarre’s uncle, Cardinal Bourbon, would perform the service in the square in front of Notre-Dame, but without wearing a surplice. Navarre would escort his bride into the cathedral, retiring before Mass. The marriage contract, signed on 11 April, was followed a few days later by the signing of the Treaty of Blois, a defensive alliance between England and France. Catholics opposed on grounds of conscience could do little about either. It is commonly asserted that the Guise did everything they could to oppose royal policy. But things were not as simple as that. Immediately after the reconciliation with Coligny, Cardinal Charles left for Rome for the papal conclave to elect a successor to Pius V. Catherine charged him with obtaining the appropriate dispensation for her daughter’s marriage. Already in disgrace, the cardinal was under pressure to deliver. His predicament was made worse by Mayenne’s departure from France without royal dispensation. The depth to which stock in the Guise had plunged is revealed by the grovelling letters the cardinal wrote in order to placate the king’s displeasure. He himself was angry at his nephew’s folly and pleaded with the king to ‘have pity on a poor, hopeless and debauched boy’. 14 Mayenne was forced to seek the king’s pardon. Once in Rome, the cardinal had to appear, at the very least, not to be subverting royal policy. He swore on the damnation of his soul that he was doing all he could, but despite twisting arms and greasing palms, there was a stumbling block which even his powers of persuasion were unable to overcome. As he wrote to Catherine on 28 July, the issue was not one of consanguinity, but the ‘difficulty is in the religion of the King of Navarre and in his person. It is of public notoriety that he acts against the Catholics in his lands’. 15 The marriage, delayed by the death of Jeanne d’Albert and rescheduled for 18 August, would have to proceed without the cardinal or the dispensation. Just as the final touches to the peace and reconciliation project were being finalized, a political earthquake occurred in the Netherlands that would change the balance of power in northern Europe forever. The artfully constructed peace edifice began to crack and totter.

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The repression and exploitation of Alva’s regime had led to widespread revulsion in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. Protestant pirates, known as the Sea Beggars were a serious menace, but they had confined themselves to raids on the coast and attacks on Spanish shipping from their bases in La Rochelle, Emden, and the English Channel ports. When Elizabeth I, who was always cautious in her relations with Philip II, expelled 600 Beggars from England they seized the small, unimportant port of Brill. This time the Beggars stayed and held out:

the revolt of the Netherlands had begun. By early July the whole of north Holland, except Amsterdam, was in rebel hands. The States of Holland recognized William of Orange as ‘Protector’ of the Netherlands in flagrant defiance of Alva’s commission from Philip II. For Protestants everywhere the liberation of the Netherlands was the great cause of the age, and since the end of the third civil war in France the French Protestant leadership had tried to persuade Catherine and her ministers that intervention in the Netherlands was in the national interest, uniting Frenchmen against the old enemy.

William of Orange’s younger brother, Count Louis of Nassau, was the rebel’s chief envoy in France. He had fought valiantly with the Huguenots in the third civil war and Coligny had given his word that he could count on them during his hour of need. He also told Count Louis that he could persuade Charles IX to help. As soon as Brill had fallen, Nassau had rushed troops and supplies from Huguenotcontrolled La Rochelle. He then embarked on a bold plan in the southern Netherlands in support of his brother in the north. On 24 May he seized the town of Mons by stealth and garrisoned it with 1,500 men. At the same time another force of exiles and Huguenots under the command of François de la Noue crossed the frontier farther west and captured Valenciennes. Then they launched an audacious raid on Brussels to capture the Duke of Alva himself by surprise.

Alva was convinced of Charles IX’s complicity and that France would soon declare war. Fearing the French more than the Sea Beggars, he concentrated his efforts on Mons. Just before the Spanish managed to surround the city, Count Louis sent a messenger to beg Coligny to fulfil his promise and mount an invasion of the Netherlands in the name of Charles IX. The messenger, Genlis, was a cousin of Coligny as well as of the late Egmont and Hornes.

Arriving in Paris on 23 June he set out to persuade Coligny and King Charles to send immediate relief to Mons, arguing that it did not mean a total break with Spain. In this limited objective he was successful and he left Paris with 6,000 men on 12 July. According to the Spanish ambassador, Diego de Zun˜iga, Charles secretly gave him 60,000 livres. 16 Seven days later Genlis marched straight into a Spanish ambush at Saint-Ghislain about six miles south of Mons:

the French were wiped out, Genlis was taken prisoner, tortured, and strangled. Papers captured by the Spanish confirmed Alva’s suspicions that Charles IX was himself aware of the Orangist invasion. Charles protested his innocence but was aware he had been seriously compromised. On 12 August, just six days before his sister’s wedding, he wrote to his ambassador in Brussels: ‘The papers found on those captured with Genlis [show]...everything done by Genlis to have been committed with my consent...Nevertheless, [you will tell the Duke of Alva] these are lies invented to excite suspicion against me.