Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (41 page)

* * * *

The picture illustrated in Plate 24, completed from sketches taken at the marriage of the Queen’s sister, Marguerite, to the Duke of Joyeuse, is one of the last depictions of Henri de Guise while he was alive. 
The six family members on the left are separated from the ball which whirls around them. They are, from the left, Mayenne, Henry III, Queen Louise, Catherine de Medici, Henri de Guise, and finally Cardinal Louis II, dressed not in his cardinal’s robes but in fashionable clothes of a fetching pink topped off with a ruff. The picture crackles with tension. Guise, looking at the seated lady, gestures towards the dancers with his hat. Catherine appears to be doing the same, but on closer inspection we see that she is looking towards her son, her hand blocking the duke’s advancement. The king, unusually for such a jolly occasion, rests a hand on his sword. Painted in 1582, the picture captures the moment when the strains in the relationship between the king and the duke could no longer be hidden. The reasons for the distance lay in the king’s ambitious programme to transform his unruly subjects and reassert royal authority. His determination to alter the structure and personnel of his court accentuated the personality clash.

Henry III’s divergence from the traditional model of French kingship made him a controversial figure in his own lifetime. He was an enigma to many of his subjects. Henry looked majestic: he was taller than average, comported himself with elegance and dignity; he was a good public speaker and, following the model set by Philip II, diligent and hard-working. He took the idea to heart that in order to reform the state Frenchmen would have to reform themselves. Who better to set an example than the king: for three years, beginning in January 1576, he instituted the practice of retiring after dinner to hear public lectures from the leading thinkers of the day on edifying subjects. But he did not always behave in the manner which was expected: he was notoriously free with his emotions in public and his sense of irony—he ennobled his court jester in 1584—was lost on many of his subjects.

Without a child and dogged by ill-health his rule was precarious. He and the queen tried all sorts of quack fertility treatments. From the moment in March 1580 when Guise recommended a doctor from Dauphiné, the king would spend an increasing amount of time away from court taking thermal cures. The duke accompanied the king on the pilgrimages that he undertook to various shrines to assist the queen’s conception. In 1582 Henry, already noted for his piety and convinced that divine wrath was the cause of his afflictions, underwent some form of spiritual conversion that manifested itself in abstinence. Regular dietary austerities had already become a significant part of his life and he now vowed to sleep with no other woman than the queen. On 11 August the king took leave of the court, leaving his mother in charge to go on a three month retreat. His immersion in the burgeoning penitential movement was crowned by the establishment of the new Confraternity of the Annunciation of Our Lady, which held its first procession at the feast of the Annunciation 1583.

On Maundy Thursday, in pouring rain, the king, dressed in the grey serge cagoule of a simple brother, returned in procession from Notre Dame cathedral, imitating Christ’s Passion with ritual flagellation. 
Many were shocked at the indignity of the spectacle; others, were more inclined to satirize what they saw as hypocrisy. The following ditty was one among dozens of lampoons:

Having pillaged the kingdom France 
And all his people ripped off, 
Is it real penitence 
To cover yourself with a dripping sack cloth?14

The Cardinal of Guise, who carried the cross, and Mayenne, who was master of ceremonies, had more dignified roles. Their elder brother was not present: he mocked the king for ‘living like a monk and not a king’. And there was something in this: the king spurned the traditional aristocratic pastimes, like hunting, tennis, and riding. As a consequence jousts and tourneys at his court were rare. The king was aware of Guise’s scorn, turning it into a joke one day, as he leapt into his saddle, remarking afterwards to one of the duke’s men nearby ‘Does my cousin have monks like me in Champagne who mount their horses in one leap?’15

Henry was widely admired but he was not popular. Recent historians have found much to applaud too, but their judgement relies too much on the assessment of the educated elite. The people were less impressed. They blamed Henry for permitting heresy and thus bringing down on them God’s wrath in the form of harvest failure and plague, which afflicted his reign and came on top of the economic dislocation caused by civil war. As early as 1578, Claude Haton overheard the townsfolk on Provins denouncing him as a tyrant and an atheist. And his reputation suffered further because one could not trust him; he said one thing and did another. He issued a grand edict in 1580 abolishing many recently created venal offices, which were hated as a form of stealth tax since the purchasers recouped their investments in gifts and bribes, only to invent all sorts of new ones to sell soon after. Even taverns were turned into venal offices, forcing their owners, who had to purchase them from the Crown, to pass the cost on to the poor customer! Haton thought Henry deceitful, about as trustworthy as a ‘Turk’ or a ‘cunning whore’. 16 The perceived gap between the king’s publicly declared virtue and privately practised vice was fertile ground for satire. Moralists railed against Henry’s court as a den of immorality, profligacy, and corruption. They pointed the finger at the king’s favourites, his mignons, or ‘sweeties’, a word with homosexual undertones. There was no truth in the rumours: but the king did little to stop tongues wagging; his ostentatious shows of affection towards them scandalized the public. The king’s penchant for dancing, which he undoubtedly associated with dexterity and self-discipline, was a red rag to the priggish. The
mignons
were swaggering dandies, whose fashions marked them out from ordinary gentlemen and outraged the Parisian bourgeoisie, none more so than the misanthropic diarist Pierre de l’Estoile, who described:

Anti-court feeling was strong among the middling sort and fuelled the righteous anger of the pious killjoys who made up the ranks of the Catholic League. Haton described how in 1581 the religious radicals in his parish refused to take part in public prayers for an heir, desiring Henry’s ‘death and the extermination of his entire lineage’. This was an extraordinary moment which shows that ordinary people, who surely had no acquaintance with the new Protestant literature justifying Tyrannicide, were imagining the king’s death in the early 1580s.

* * * *

Far from being effeminate, the court dandies were violent and dangerous men. They were adepts of the new craze for duelling, where challenges were issued for the slightest offence. Duelling became dangerously entangled with faction politics. The
mignons
were intent on safeguarding the honour of the king and that meant cutting his rivals down to size; at first they provoked and fought against the king’s brother, Anjou, but after he and his entourage quit court under the pressure in February 1578 they turned their attentions to the Guise.

On 27 April at 5 am in the Paris horse market, the three
mignons
Caylus, Maugiron, and Livarot faced three Guisards, Entraguet, Ribeŕac and Schomberg. It was fierce combat: Maugiron and Schomberg were killed outright and Ribeŕac died the next day in the Hôtel de Guise where he had taken refuge; Livarot was severely wounded. The king was distraught at the death of his beloved companions: ‘he kissed both of their dead bodies, had their locks cut off and took away and locked up their blond hair, took Caylus’s earrings which he himself had given him’. 18 He wanted to punish the ‘murderers’, but the duke pledged to stand by his men. On the 10 May the whole Guise family and the Duke of Lorraine left court. The cause of the duel related to gossip about the Duchess of Guise, the object of the affections of another mignon, Saint-Mégrin, who knew that the best way to dishonour a man was to turn him into a cuckold. On 23 July at 11 pm he was attacked by a gang of masked assailants in the rue Saint-Honoré led, witnesses claimed, by the Duke of Mayenne. He was the victim of a savage assault; his corpse was mutilated by twenty blows.

The king’s break, first with his brother and then with the Duke of Guise, had been sudden and violent. It was in order to revive a sense of obligation and brotherhood among his squabbling nobility that Henry III founded a new order of chivalry, the Order of the Holy Spirit, from which the Guise were excluded from the first promotion of new knights on 31 December 1578. But the king and the duke could ill afford to remain enemies for long. Henry III had no wish to add to the list of disgruntled princes, which included his brother and the King of Navarre. For his part, Guise needed royal favour to keep his creditors at bay. He had no wish to become yet another of the provincial warlords, who had benefited during the civil wars at the expense of royal power but, in the absence of favour, now eked out a precarious existence on plundered royal taxes and handouts from foreign princes. So the duke was happy, through the mediation of his mother, to return to court in March 1579; accompanied by 600 horse he would remain close to the king for the next three years. He entered the Order of the Holy Spirit in the second promotion of knights, re-entered the Privy Council and once more resumed the functions of the Grand Master of the King’s Household.

The relationship between the duke and the king during the next three years was complex. Henry was far too clever to try to provoke or humiliate the Guise, but his desire to effect a fundamental transformation of the court and the kingdom would inevitably mean tackling vested interest groups. The king wanted to keep Guise at court so he could keep an eye on him, and to this end extended his generosity. Likewise, the traditional picture of Guise as a man driven by ambition, cynically manipulating the opposition to undermine the king does not hold. Only slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, would the duke find himself undermined and his pride damaged.

Henry III was fastidious and paid much attention to etiquette. He made significant changes to the structure of the court designed to break the Guise monopoly on high office. The Grand Master of the Household ‘the first and cheifest office and dignitie’, as the Englishman Richard Cooke described it, had been in the hands of the Guise since 1559, and Cooke saw the duke perform the role:

When the king maketh a great dynner with solempnitie & ceremonie, it is his charge to serve in person as stewarde and master of the house with awhite staffe in his hande, & must go before the meate which is served at the King’s table...[he] hath by virtue of his office the greatest allowance and the greatest table in the Court, that is for fowre & twentie persons, and to his table doe come ordinarily many younge noble men & others makinge profession of armes. And this table is allwaies covered whilest the King dynethe. 19

A great privilege certainly. But Cooke was unaware that the control of the Grand Master over the court had been weakened in 1578 by the creation of a new official, the Grand Provost (
grand prévot de l’hôtel
), who was given responsibility for the policing of the court. It was entrusted to a mignon, François du Plessis, the father of Cardinal Richelieu. The same happened to the post of
Grand Ecuyer
. When this was in danger of falling into Guise hands, Henry diluted its authority over the royal stables by creating a new institution, the
Petite Ecurie
.

Purging the body politic of undue Guise influence was not just a question of bureaucratic organization; it was one of style. Those who did not share the king’s intellectual pursuits felt left out; his disdain for traditional aristocratic pastimes hit the Guise particularly hard. 
Charles d’Aumale was Master of the King’s Hunt, a post that, during the previous reign, had given his father control of 340 staff and a budget of 70,000 livres per annum, but Henry III rarely hunted and expenditure fell to 24,500 livres in 1584. Aumale was forced to sell land in order to make ends meet. Kings of France had traditionally lived their lives in public and been accessible to their subjects. Henry III followed the English model and took steps to restrict access thus ‘avoiding the confusion that continually takes place in his chambers, where everyone without distinction wishes to enter without the ushers being able to stop them’. He and the Guise were seen together much on public occasions, but real business was increasingly conducted in private. In 1581, the king, against the advice of his mother, felt confident enough to establish a secret inner council. This was associated with the rise of two men from the pack of mignons, Jean-Louis de la Valette and Anne de Joyeuse, to positions of pre-eminence at court. They emerged as the principal ministers in the new cabinet. 
Henry set about turning these men, from the modest southern nobility, into great magnates, straining his relationship with the Guise to breaking point.

Guise had little to complain of publicly: he was regularly seen with the king; his pension and salaries were paid on time; he directly benefited from innovative and unpopular taxes. In the summer of 1581 he was awarded a gift of 200,000 livres, part of his cut from nine new fiscal edicts registered that summer, which enabled him to pay off many debts. But this was a sweetener to prepare him for his political exclusion. In September the viscounty of Joyeuse was raised to a duchy and negotiations opened with Mayenne to resign the office of Admiral of France. The king arranged Joyeuse’s marriage to the queen’s sister, Marguerite de Lorraine; and, once again, Guise could hardly complain, as Marguerite was his cousin. A deal was struck: Mayenne resigned the admiralty to Joyeuse for 360,000 livres, in return for which the marquisate of Elbeuf was created a duchy.

Guise appeared for the marriage, where only the painting we have investigated records his displeasure at the extraordinary favour displayed to Joyeuse, who was given a gift of 1.2 million livres. The festivities, called ‘Magnificences’ lasted for two weeks, and stunned contemporaries with their sumptuousness. Even Pierre de l’Estoile, who was among the 50,000 spectators at one of the parades, was grudgingly impressed in his journal. And the king did not stop there. 
On New Year’s Day 1582, Joyeuse and Epernon were appointed as alternating First Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber: henceforth no one could leave or enter the king’s apartments without their consent.

Resistance to the palace revolution coalesced around the figure of la Valette, who became Duke of Epernon in November 1581. His rise was even more remarkable than that of Joyeuse. During the 1580s he would accumulate something in the region of 3 million livres in salaries, pensions, and royal gifts, putting into perspective the crumbs with which Guise had to be content. While Joyeuse took care of the navy, Epernon was charged with reasserting royal control in the army; in July 1582 he became colonel-general of the infantry and was named commander of many important garrison towns, most notably Metz, from where he could keep an eye on the duchy of Lorraine.

With the country at peace and royal authority restored to a level it had not seen since the beginning of the civil wars, the king should have been delighted. But he was a troubled man; wracked by bouts of depression he went through a spiritual crisis. Partly this was due to his lack of an heir. Partly it was to do with the Guise. Everything seemed fine until Easter 1582. There was a frisson of excitement in January when the King took a fancy to the Duchess of Aumale. At Lent, the king was accompanied by Guise on a pilgrimage to Chartres to intercede for a child. The atrocious mud and rain forced the king and the other princes to turn back ‘half-dead’. Only Guise, in a display as much of machismo as of piety, finished. For three years the king had humoured, managed, and skilfully out-manoeuvred the Duke of Guise, but now their relationship reached an impasse. 

Rumour had it that, in return for acquiescing to the promotion of his rivals, the duke was expecting to be made Constable of France, and he was now furious. As he wrote to his stepfather the Duke of Nemours: 
‘you cannot imagine the little pleasure that we have these days...you would not imagine how it irks me and if you were here you would find this company completely different from what it was formerly’. 20 
At a family gathering in April at his mother’s house in Paris, it was decided against following the court to Fontainebleau. Just before it departed a placard was pinned to Epernon’s apartments in the Louvre:

Braggard beware!
For always taking more than your share.
One morning you’ll wake to bad luck, 
For that day we’ll have you strung up. 21