Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (40 page)

In August 1578 the duke bowed humiliatingly to the inevitable and sold the county of Nanteuil to a courtier for 362,000 livres. But this did not clear all the debts, nor did it pay Aumale’s dowry. In 1581 he sold the castle of Homburg and the fief of Saint-Avold in the Empire to the Duke of Lorraine for 288,000 livres, a huge return on an investment in properties that had been bought on the cheap from the Cardinal of Lorraine, during his tenure as Bishop of Metz. Though he was by no means solvent, the greatness of a prince was measured in the credit he was able to obtain. 
And there were plenty of rich Parisian merchants and bankers who continued to lend despite the risks. For some it was a long-term investment in the duke’s political fortunes, for others akin to a religious duty. Money was also crucial to the duke’s relationship with the Crown. He needed royal patronage to maintain himself; in order to do so he had to remain close to the king. The emergence of a radical Catholic opposition to royal policy provided both a challenge and an opportunity.

* * * *

At the accession of Henry III, Catholics had more hope for the future than at any time since the civil wars started. The mass conversions that had followed the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre seriously weakened Protestantism north of the Loire. As Duke of Anjou, the king had shown himself eager to spill blood in the quest for religious unity. The Guise shared these hopes. Excluded at the end of the previous reign, four of them were summoned by Henry to enter the new Privy Council. And then he joined their family. Unusually, it was not a political match. Quite simply he fell in love with their cousin, Louise, daughter of Nicolas de Lorraine-Vaudémont. They were married two days after he was crowned king by the Cardinal of Guise in February 1575. Such was the hope of the Catholics and the joy of the Guise that their dismay at the disastrous 1575 campaign and the Peace of Beaulieu which ended it in May 1576—the most generous to the Protestants so far—was all the greater. Henry III realized, like his mother before him, that the war was not only unwinnable, it was destroying monarchical authority: as provinces and their revenues fell under the control of aristocratic warlords, royal debts had risen to more than 100 million livres, ten times what it had been in 1559.

In order to secure the peace, Henry also made a number of major political and financial concessions to them and their Catholic ‘politique’ allies. He agreed to call the Estates-General, pay off their mercenaries, reinstate them to the offices they had held before the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and in surety of his good intentions cede control of several strategic towns to them. The king’s younger brother and heir, Alençon, who had allied himself with the heretics, was rewarded with the duchy of Anjou. To hard-line Catholics it was a humiliation. Opposition was immediate.

Opponents of the English Revolution had a horrible fascination for the Catholic League, viewing it as the most pernicious and significant development in modern history. To them it marked a revolutionary break with the past, ushering an era of religious fanatics who challenged the concept of divine-right monarchy. Sir William Dugdale considered that ‘The Holy League in France, is so exact a Pattern of ours in England, as we have just reason enough to conceive, that the Contrivers of...[our] Rebellion, did borrow the Plott from theme. 
All the main parts, and many of the Material Circumstances, being the same in both: Only the scene is changed and the Actors divers.’

The early Tories thought so too and, with reference to a flurry of books and plays on the subject compared their Whig opponents to the Duke of Guise. In one sense these reactionaries were right. The Catholic League was a radical break with the past because it went far beyond a call for the restoration of the Catholic Church. Drawing on the new science of history, its manifesto looked back with admiration to a mythic past, in which the first Frankish kings guaranteed the freedoms and liberties of the Three Estates. Its principles constituted a fundamental re-imagining of the state. The inviolability of royal Catholicity, not only ensured Henri de Navarre’s exclusion, but it paved the way for a monarchy elected by the Estates-General, acting in the name of the people. The basis for this constitutional shift was the idea, first put forward by the Protestants, that sovereignty was shared. After the seventeenth century, the League was ignored by historians because it did not fit easily with the either liberal or Marxist notions of revolution. But since the 1979 Iranian Revolution we have become reacquainted with the revolutionary potential of theocratic and democratic ideas combined. We now know that the English Revolution was not the first Bourgeois Revolution, but a variant of religious revolution, whose European antecedents can be found in France in 1576 and in Germany during the Peasants War of 1525.

In another sense, however, English reactionaries got the Catholic League wrong. The Duke of Guise was not a precursor of Cromwell; the League was not initially a vehicle for princely ambition. Its origins were local and particular and the duke, though sympathetic, had to maintain a discreet distance. Opposition to the Peace of Beaulieu was strongest in Picardy and Normandy, provinces where Protestantism, decimated by the 1572 Massacres, was now being reintroduced by royal edict. In Normandy opposition centred on the reintroduction of Protestant worship to Rouen. Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, archbishop of the city, took the lead. A man previously known as a courtier rather than a churchman, he now disowned his Protestant nephews, Navarre and Condé, and made one of his rare visits to his diocese. Reviving a dormant practice, he and his noble supporters invoked their rights to sit in the Parlement of Rouen, where they attempted unsuccessfully to stop the registration of the peace edict. 
On 23 July he confronted the Protestant congregation as they arrived for worship; they fled in terror.

The League’s initial support came from the nobility. Men like François de Roncherolles, the Cardinal of Bourbon’s chief adviser. 
Roncherolles would soon get himself into trouble with Henry III for publicly demanding that the non-Catholic princes of the blood be stripped by the Estates-General of their right to succeed. This would have had the effect of bringing the cardinal’s Catholic nephew, the 10-year-old Count of Soissons, closer to the succession. Both men had a vested interest in the boy’s career: the cardinal being his guardian; Roncherolles his governor. 11 The cardinal also saw himself as a potential candidate. Once before, in 1563, he had petitioned the Pope to dispense him from holy orders and now at the age of 53 the possibility was discussed again.

In Picardy the League took on a more dangerous form. Here resistance coalesced spontaneously around Henri, Prince of Condé’s return as governor. The local gentry signed a manifesto at Péronne, a symbol of resistance to the peace since it had been assigned to Condé as surety, on 5 June. The signatories envisaged a network of secret associations, each with an elected head, pledged to defend both Catholicism and the ‘rights and liberties’ of Frenchmen, as had been enjoyed at the time of the first French king, Clovis. They sent agents to other towns in Picardy and made contact with fellow malcontents in Normandy. Henry III acted quickly and ordered the ringleaders to leave Péronne. He discovered that the Picards and Normans had joined together because ‘neither wishes to have [Protestant] preachers, nor to observe the edict of pacification...there being little reverence for his majesty and hatred for the Queen Mother’. 12 In September he ordered the League to dissolve. But surveillance of a secret organization was otherwise difficult. Networks of kinship and sociability lent the conspirators cohesion and were hard to penetrate. There were regular secret meetings that coordinated the movement across Picardy and Upper Normandy. Letters were written in cipher, some of which fell into royal hands; but the League in turn intercepted royal correspondence. 

The League’s organizational abilities were first put to the test in the electoral colleges that met to choose deputies to the Estates-General. This was the first time in French history that there was something approaching an electoral campaign. Traditionally, elections to the Estates were not contests; rather they were meetings which decided on a list of grievances and someone was delegated to carry them to the assembly. The League’s mixture of bigotry and constitutionalist rhetoric injected an ideological element into the process. Henry III intervened in a number of cases to overturn the result and impose a royalist candidate. Things did not go all his way: the League managed to overturn the royalist candidate for the Second Estate of the Caux in Normandy on a technicality. The elections resulted in a League caucus being present at the opening of the Estates at Blois in December. Most of its noble leadership were present there, including François de Roncherolles, who was returned for the Second Estate of Gisors, and who now emerged as its chief negotiator with the king.

The king suspected the Guise were behind the agitation and he was right to be alarmed. The League of Péronne had been signed in the house of Jacques d’Applaincourt, an old family servant, who had to resign as the Cardinal of Lorraine’s pantler in 1560 because of his conversion to Protestantism, before returning to the fold as ensign of the Duke of Aumale’s gendarmes. His services would soon be further rewarded with his appointment as Governor of the duchy of Guise.

This should not imply that the Guise were in day-to-day control of the organization. That would have been too dangerous. On 2 August the king made them swear an affidavit to uphold the peace, and they had no wish to break with him. Rather, it was hoped that the League would force a rethink in royal policy. While the duke dissimulated, his enemies tried to smoke him out. As the Estates-General opened he was accused of high treason. A memoir had apparently been discovered on an agent he had sent to Rome and published as
A Summary of the Guisian Ambassage to Rome
. Its contents and translation into English suggest it was the work of Protestants. It was a clever ruse and only at the end gives itself away as a piece of false propaganda, calling for the Pope to make Guise captain-general of the League, for the Duke of Anjou to be arrested, and for the king and Queen Mother to be confined to monasteries. The Guise had never made a secret of their descent from Charlemagne. But the Summary stated that this claim would be the pretext for the overthrow of the Valois, whose ancestry could only be traced to the usurper of the Carolingians, Hugues Capet (fl. 940–96). Henry III was reassured and accepted the falsity of the
Summary
. But the first doubts about the duke’s loyalty had been planted.

Having failed to stamp out the League, Henry adopted a ploy he would use again and again during his reign: unable to use force he would have to outsmart his opponents instead. On the eve of the Estates, Henry backtracked and announced that all his subjects should sign the League. In doing so, he significantly altered the original covenant, replacing subversive passages with new clauses that upheld the peace and Protestant worship and bolstered the royal authority. The League leadership responded by ignoring the alterations and continued to circulate the original text. However, they now faced a more stubborn opponent than the king. With some justification, taxpaying commoners viewed the king’s co-option of the League as a cynical manoeuvre to squeeze more money out of them. The First and Second Estates were the most vociferous in favour of a renewal of war; but they would not have to pay for it.

The revelations of the parlous state of royal finances made to them in January 1577 hardened the obduracy of the Third Estate to any more taxes. Even though they were sympathetic to the Catholic cause, most towns refused to sign the League outright, since ‘it was a novelty, the like of which had never been used in France nor heard speak of’. 13 At Troyes, the presence of Guise in person could not induce any of the Three Estates to sign. A further embarrassment followed. The election of the duke’s chief counsel, Pierre de Versoris, as spokesman for the Third Estate at the Estates-General was a major victory for the League. Unfortunately, Versoris, ‘a famous and celebrated’ Parisian lawyer, froze on the big occasion in front of the king and the assembly and gave a faltering performance. He, and by association his party, was made a laughing stock. The League’s failure at Blois was orchestrated by another lawyer, Jean Bodin, an enlightened royalist, opposed to another calamitous civil war, who had just published, to widespread acclaim, the S
ix Books of the Commonwealth
, where he argued that the king did not share power with the people. On the contrary, the sovereignty of the monarchy was absolute and undivided. For the king and the League the 1576 Estates were a failure, because they failed to vote fresh taxes. But they were significant in establishing some basic constitutional positions that would have immense implications for the future of the French monarchy, especially the incompatibility of representative government and religious tolerance. In the future, the choice would be between the League’s vision of limited, constitutional monarchy, whose representative institutions would guarantee a theocratic state based on the principle of catholicity, or Bodin’s vision of a monarchy, unfettered by custom and tradition, whose sovereignty was indivisible and thus strong enough to ensure peace and religious toleration.

As a result of Bodin’s manoeuvres, the 1577 campaign began without the resources and was inevitably indecisive. It did, however, result in a peace that was more acceptable to the Catholics and was the basis for a significant reduction in intercommunal religious tensions in the years that followed. Article 56 of the pacification edict disbanded and outlawed all leagues and associations. The Catholic League was pushed underground and Henri de Guise continued to feign ignorance of its existence. Wherever it resurfaced, however, in Champagne in 1579, or Normandy and Picardy in 1580, it was led by the duke’s lieutenants. It developed a clandestine regional command: 
the papal nuncio was sure that the Marquis of Elbeuf headed its organization in Normandy, Aumale in Picardy. In spite of this, the League was, as yet, little more than another faction of malcontent nobles, albeit possessed of a dangerous ideology. Henry III planned to make them an irrelevance: he was pressing ahead with an overhaul of government and administration; he remained on cordial terms with the Guise family; he was in the prime of his life and fully expected that the queen would soon produce an heir, quashing once and for all the prospect that Henri de Navarre, currently second in line to the throne, would succeed him as France’s first Protestant king.