Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (45 page)

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The first strains quickly began to appear as the campaign against the Protestants in the south got under way. Mayenne was given command of an army against Navarre, but it was poorly provided for and while he was occupied by fruitless sieges in the Dordogne, the king continued to conduct negotiations with the Protestants behind his back. 
Guise went to Paris to put pressure on the king. His entry on 15 February 1586 was carefully stage-managed. It took place almost a year to the day that the Earl of Derby and 200 English gentlemen had entered the city for the purpose of conferring the Order of the Garter on Henry III. Parisians had been excluded from these festivities for fear of violence. Public spectacles had been avoided and guards posted throughout the city, as even ‘the best sort murmur not a little to finde this Kinge so disposed to entertayne Amity with Heretikes’.

The Cardinal of Guise described the very different circumstances of their arrival on ‘Saturday and very few or no courtiers rode in front of us, but a great host of the nobility that I guess there to have been five of six hundred...We did not see the king that day, and on our way to the Hôtel de Guise along the few streets one has to travel I have never seen such acclamation by the people, for all the houses and streets were crammed with men.'8 The English ambassador reported, not without satisfaction, ‘the strangest reception of the Duke of Guise that I ever saw...Not one gentleman went to meet him...He saw the King upon Sunday morning, who when he was coming in, spake all the worst he could of him...tarried not a quarter of an hour with him, but went his ways, and never saw him since but in the masque, where he never said a word to him...All [Guise’s] people be marvellously out of countenance, and Madame de Montpensier [his sister], the virago of the League, crieth out extremely of this usage of him.’9

Despite this frosty start, Henry knew that, notwithstanding his popularity, the duke was short of funds and in a weak position. He thought he could charm him and use the war to his own advantage. He therefore agreed to step up the war effort, believing that a new round of taxes, especially the sale of more royal offices, would grind down the people and undermine support for the war. And he planned to channel the new funds to loyalist commanders and increase the defections from the League. Mayenne’s struggling army would now have to compete with new forces sent into Auvergne under Joyeuse and Epernon in Provence. The rise of the latter was relentless. With his elevation to the governorship of Provence and command of the Mediterranean galley fleet, he was in command of what were considered the ‘three keys’ of the realm, the other being the fortresses of Boulogne and Metz.

Lucinge, the ambassador of the Duke of Savoy, who met and closely observed Guise during his stay, noted the disaffection of his Parisian supporters. Guise ‘let himself be led by the nose...and enchanted by the practices of the king and his enemies...who played him along for weeks at a time with whoring and following all sorts of immoderate debauching’. 10 While this sort of behaviour may have scandalized the duke’s pious constituency, such displays of virility played to a different gallery, pointing up the king’s lack of manliness. The association of sexual and martial prowess was strong and it was an image that Henri de Navarre, too, cultivated with great success. Nevertheless, when Guise finally left Paris on 18 May his supporters were downcast. It seemed as though he had been outmanoeuvred once more. There was nothing he could do when Henry reopened negotiations with Navarre. 
He retuned to the eastern frontier. An invasion of German mercenaries paid for by English and Danish subsidies was expected at any moment and the duke was soon preoccupied besieging Jametz and Sedan, key fortresses on the Meuse, belonging to the Protestant Duke of Bouillon. 
His major concern was to keep his small army in the field in anticipation that the king would do a deal with the Protestants. He would not return to the city for another two years. As a result he would lose control of the Paris Sixteen.

During his absence the Sixteen became impatient. They did not wish to temporize with a king who did not keep his promises, and they wanted the
mignons
removed from power. They feared that a deal with Navarre and his English allies was about to be done and pamphlets, such as Louis d’Orléans ’
Advertissement des Catholiques Anglois
and the French translation of Robert Persons’s scandal sheet,
Leicester’s Commonwealth
, painted a hideous picture of life across the Channel under a heretical monarch. The opening sonnet of the
Advertissement
was so full of treason that l’Estoile considered it ‘enough to send the author to the gallows’. 11 The authorities undertook rigorous investigations in order to suppress it. In Paris, resistance to censorship and new taxes, especially the sell-off of 139 grades of royal office to purchasers who bought the rights to sell them on for a profit or pass them to their heirs, was led by the lawyers and related professions. In the summer the city’s solicitors went on strike. On 22 November the Sixteen had its first martyr when an attorney, François le Breton, was hanged for saying that the king ‘was one of the greatest hypocrites that ever there was’. His critique went far beyond matters of faith: he accused the king of putting justice up for sale and taxing the poor to feed the rich. As the Sixteen developed a social and political programme, so its armed wing grew. It could count on 1,500 butchers, 600 horse-traders and 500 ‘bad boys’ among the Seine’s boatmen and river workers.

The plan to seize the king was however born of desperation. The arrest of one of its founding members, the notary Lamorlière, increased fears of a royal crackdown. How to do it? The leadership had no experience of organizing a coup, let alone street-fighting. The arrival of the Duke of Mayenne in January 1587 calmed their anxieties. Mayenne had returned from the south furious at his treatment by the king and determined to avenge his humiliation. His army, ill-supplied and underfunded, had been decimated. Desertions were made worse in a depopulated countryside denuded by famine and plague. Mayenne took up residence in the palace of the abbot of Saint-Denis among the Left Bank militants, and it was here that preparations for the coup were finalized. The plan was to overwhelm the strong points of the city, eliminate a number of royalists, and seize the king. In order to disrupt the movement of royalist reinforcements, a new weapon was to be deployed, one that would become synonymous with Paris’s history of insurrection. For the first time, barricades—a word derived from the
barrique
, the barrels in which every household stored its comestibles—were to be built across the city’s narrow streets, presaging the great events of 1648, 1794, 1848, 1871, and 1968. The day of the barricades was set for 15 March. The Duke of Guise, who was absent, was not informed.

Among the plotters there was however discontent. One of the founding members of the Sixteen, Nicolas Poulain, lieutenant of the city’s provost, was aghast at what he considered to be social revolution, ‘using the lower orders to divest the king of his throne and put the House of Lorraine in his stead, having cut the throats of the rightful heirs’. 12 Thanks to Poulain’s tip-off, the plot was foiled and several of the ringleaders arrested. The Sixteen were seriously compromised, and if the king had acted decisively he might have been able to break the movement altogether. That he did not do so may have been due to over-confidence. After all, his strategy of wearing the Guise down seemed to be working. And he now had a double agent providing excellent information about the divisions among his enemies. Mayenne denied any complicity and distanced himself from the coup.

Poulain told the king that Guise was furious both with his brother and the Sixteen and that the latter, chastened by their failure, had begged the duke’s pardon and sent him a gold chain worth 500 crowns. But the king was prevented from a full-scale repression in the city for another reason: news of the execution of Mary Stuart arrived in Paris on 1 March, providing the Paris League with a martyr of a different order.

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In the weeks following the news of Mary’s execution hardly a parish church in the city was immune from the sound of Lenten preachers mourning the death of the dowager queen and screaming for revenge against those responsible for the cruelty. Even in a traditionally moderate parish like Saint-Eustache, the preacher, possibly Mary’s former confessor, René Benoist, a man averse to extremism, was forced to leave his pulpit and abandon his sermon altogether, so great was the emotion that ‘had won over the audience including himself’. 13 Interest in Mary’s plight had always been strong among French readers and her death filled the bookshops with editions relating to her and more broadly to the persecution of Catholics in England. In 1587, Catholic polemic accounted for 60 per cent of all the editions printed in France. Of these 416 items no less than 91 or 22 per cent were related to events in the British Isles. 14 Rumour had it that the king had been complicit in Mary’s execution, though no one dared to put such words into print until much later.

Guise was more sanguine. He did not travel to Paris for the memorial service, which took place in Notre-Dame on 13 March, nor join the clamour for revenge. He had momentarily turned his back on the city. Since the summer of 1586 he had been preoccupied with the international situation. His strategy was increasingly dictated by events out of his own control. He had become completely dependent on Philip II for funds and for political direction. Philip had no intention of elevating the Guise to a position of influence in England and during 1586 the Spanish had taken over control of attempts to save Mary. It was they who had directed the last daring plot to overthrow Elizabeth which forced the queen to sign Mary’s execution warrant.

Philip was increasingly preoccupied by the Armada and subsidies to Guise were overlooked or not paid at all. During the winter of 1586 Guise insisted that Philip honour his obligations, but the duke was no longer a priority. ‘Have patience’, Philip told him, ‘help will arrive. 
Don’t shout in protest until you are sure you have been refused...the cause of religion is on the threshold of its greatest triumph, but requires time, and prudence.’15 The duke had been reduced from the status of ally to that of client. In order to ensure the continued flow of subsidies, he agreed to provide the Armada with a deep-water port in France. But the spy Poulain got wind of the plot and on 17 
March 1587 an attempt by the Duke of Aumale to seize Boulogne was foiled. Aumale went into open revolt. He blockaded the town and took control of three smaller towns in Picardy; it was the beginning of a campaign to bring this strategic province, which bordered the Spanish Netherlands and the Channel, completely under League control. Henry was furious at this flagrant challenge to his authority. He ordered Aumale to disband his troops and pleaded with Mayenne and Guise to reason with their cousin. On 10 April, at an assembly of notables in Paris, the king defended the Bourbon succession and attacked those who defied his authority. The failure to take Boulogne was to have serious consequence for the Armada; but the affair was equally serious for the relations between the king and the Guise. The manner of the fighting reveals a shift in the attitude of the League leadership to the use of force. Aumale had the royalist captain of Boulogne murdered and placed a price of 4,000 crowns on his successor. During May he conspired to seize Abbeville and Amiens. Henry responded by appointing the loyal Duke of Nevers as governor and assembling troops at Beauvais. France was on the threshold of its first full-scale Catholic civil war.

These manoeuvres did not induce Aumale to withdraw and Henry was unable to confront the League in the field for the simple reason that he was no longer secure in Paris. With their men-folk preoccupied elsewhere and the leadership of the Sixteen cowed by the failure of the March 15 coup, leadership of the League in Paris devolved upon a woman, the duke’s 35-year-old sister, Catherine-Marie de Lorraine, dowager Duchess of Montpensier. Pierre de l’Estoile considered her to be ‘queen of Paris’; to Brantôme she was ‘a great lady of state’. A widow since 1582, her power in the city derived from the protection she provided for radical preachers. She had a violent dislike of the king and, in the wake of Mary Stuart’s execution, encouraged priests to preach openly against him. From her palace in the rue de Tournon in the faubourg Saint-Germain she continued to sponsor the English exiles’ cause. The king responded to protests by Stafford and in June several printers were arrested and books burned.

Catherine kept up the pressure by arranging for an exhibition of pictures of six pictures from a book, the
Briefve Description
, which had been executed by the engraver Richard Verstegan (Plate 26). The exhibition began on the Feast of John the Baptist (24 June) in the cemetery of Saint-Séverin. It was a natural choice because the church was close to the English embassy on the Left Bank and the curé, Jean Prévost, a founding member of the Sixteen. Cemeteries in the sixteenth century were recreational and gathering places, natural arenas for games, promenading, and shopping. The engravings were enhanced for the exhibition by being enlarged and painted. Copies of the book were distributed to visitors. The event caused a sensation:

Henry’s nickname for Catherine was the ‘hunchback’, and he ordered the dismantling of the exhibition at night ‘for if the hunchback suspects anything she will prevent it, since she likes to cause me great fear’. 17 But the weakness of the king’s position soon became apparent when he attempted to deal with her preacher friends. At the end of August a sermon was delivered in Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois church attacking the king in person and making the link between the lack of morality in France and high bread prices (the subject of recent riots) and venal office-holding. On 2 September, following rumours that the king intended to arrest a number of preachers, including Jean Prévost and Jean Boucher, the Sixteen gathered to protect the preachers. A riot ensued when the king’s men entered the parish of Saint-Séverin. Henry’s men were forced to withdraw and he to abandon any hope of arresting the preachers; they, emboldened by their defiance, refused to let up and there were incidences of them refusing communion to those they considered ‘politiques’. On 16 December the Sorbonne issued a judgment stating that it was permissible to depose princes who did not act correctly. Henry saw the hand of Boucher, rector of the Sorbonne, behind this and at the end of the month he summoned him and the others for a personal audience, warning them that if they did not cease to attack him he would not hesitate to send them to the galleys. Then in the New Year he summoned the duchess and told her he was aware that ‘she was making herself the Queen of Paris and of the monopolies, plots and seditions she was practising and how she was paying the wages of Boucher...

and other priests and preachers to continue their seditious and bloody preaching’. 18 She was unrepentant and bragged that the League had advanced more by the words of her preachers than by the arms of her brothers. He ordered her to leave Paris. But he could not compel her to go. To arrest a woman and a princess would have antagonized the people. Just three days after her dressing down, Catherine was seen carrying a pair of scissors in her belt, supposedly in preparation for tonsuring the king before putting him in a convent. She joked that it would be his third crowning, a play on the king’s device
Manet ultima coelo
. The third and last crown (after that of France and Poland, where Henry had briefly been elected king) is that of heaven.

Henry’s inability to silence the duchess and her preachers was due to the utter collapse of royal power in France at the end of 1587. 
Unable to confront Guise openly and force him to surrender the towns he had seized in Picardy, the king had planned for the Protestants to do the work for him. In months of painstaking negotiations, using his mother as an intermediary and making substantial concessions, he tried to persuade Navarre to convert. With the invasion of France by the Protestant powers now imminent the king had no choice but to confront it. Consisting of 20,000 crack Swiss infantry, 10,000 German pistoliers and 3,800 French, it was an enormous force. Guise was persuaded to meet the king at Meaux on 4 July to discuss the defence of France. It was a tense affair. Epernon came out to greet Guise and the two embraced, but Epernon and the
Quarante Cinq
later accompanied the king to vespers with weapons concealed beneath their doublets. The trouble for Henry was that he had tried to dupe Guise once too often. All the ambassadors knew what he was up to. As Stafford put it, he ‘was playing a mock holiday’ with the duke, believing that he could outmanoeuvre him as he had done before. For three days the king and the duke worked on a strategy and, though Henry stubbornly refused to make the duke lieutenant-general of the royal armies, he made him a number of promises about men and materiel. Guise left Meaux expecting reinforcements and money. Within weeks he was complaining that not one of the promises made to him had been kept: 
only six of the thirty-two gendarmie companies he had been allocated had appeared. Henry never intended to keep them. Guise would have to fend for himself in the face of overwhelming numbers. In the meantime, the king would keep the main royal army fresh, ostensibly to prevent the union of Protestant forces, and send another army under Joyeuse to keep Navarre penned in the southwest. Success here would bring Navarre to his senses and silence the preachers in Paris who accused the king of pusillanimity.

With no help from the king, Guise had recourse to his friends and family. The charisma of the Guise name also attracted noblemen and volunteers from all over France and 120,000 crowns was raised by his friends in Paris. The duke also expressed his gratitude to Mendoza: ‘I 
hold his Catholic Majesty as the common father of all Catholics and of me in particular.’19 The core of the army, which assembled at Nancy in Lorraine, consisted of 6,000 pikemen, 3,000 arquebusiers, 1,000 light cavalry raised by the Duke of Lorraine, 2,000 gendarmes under Guise, and 3,000 horse sent from Flanders by the Duke of Parma. By mid-September he had assembled a formidable force of 22,000 men. His first inclination, once the Protestant army crossed into the duchy of Lorraine, was to give battle. But he was unable to force them to fight and once they had passed through his territory, the Duke of Lorraine had no intention of hazarding his own troops. When the Protestants crossed the frontier on 18 September and camped close to Joinville, in the region of the Cardinal of Guise’s abbey of Saint-Urbain, Lorraine’s forces remained in the Barrois and he refused to enter the kingdom of France. In the meantime, Henry III did his best to deprive Guise of reinforcements, summoning ‘all his Catholic subjects’ to his army headquarters at Gien on the Loire, where he now commanded a force larger than Guise’s—some 20,000 men. Worse was to follow for Guise when the Protestant army was reinforced by 1,200 men under François de Coligny, son of the admiral.

A royal agent wrote with satisfaction of the duke’s ‘weakness’, as he was unable to stop the Protestant advance. Guise wrote desperate letters, ‘having been abandoned by all others’, to Philip II, which were full of bitterness at the ‘exquisite and convoluted devices’ Henry III 
was using to undermine him. Even after he was joined by detachments sent by his relatives, Aumale, Elbeuf, and Mayenne, his army had shrunk by mid-October to 6,000 foot and 1,800 horse. Guise could do little more than shadow and harry the much larger force. Meanwhile the Protestant army moved closer to the king at Gien, passing through northern Burgundy, pillaging and ravaging the countryside en route. Henry III blocked the passage across the Loire, but he had no intention of going over to the offensive. Bad news from the south increased his timidity. On 20 October Joyeuse had offered battle to Navarre at Coutras. The two armies were evenly matched in numbers: Navarre had about 4,000 to 5,000 foot and 1,200 to 1,500 horse, Joyeuse had the same number of foot and slightly more horse (1,500 to 1,800). However, the Protestant army was a veteran force, which was compounded by Joyeuse’s lack of experience. He made the fatal error of drawing his gendarmes in long line,
en haie
, in order that they could deploy their lances. The Protestant cavalry, armed with swords and pistols, were deployed in deep ranks, and to the sounds of their battle hymn, Psalm 118, ‘This is the day which the lord hath made, we will rejoice and be glad in it’, they smashed their way through, shattering the Catholics into fragments and rolling up the flanks. No quarter was given. It was a crushing victory: as many as 2,000 Catholics were killed, including hundreds of gentlemen loyal to the crown, and Joyeuse himself, whose death was a great personal loss to the king. Coutras was a significant battle. For the first time in the Wars of Religion the Protestants had won a victory in the field. For Henry III, who had invested so much in his devout image, the absence of divine approval was a serious reverse.

Fortunately for the king and for Guise, the main Protestant army could not decide on a strategy and there were divisions between the German mercenaries under the experienced Baron von Dohna and the French under the young Duke of Bouillon. With the season getting late and fatigued by their long marches, the Germans and Swiss now detached themselves from the rest of the army in order to replenish themselves on the rich farmland of the Beauce. This was the moment that Guise, who had been shadowing the Protestants since they had crossed the frontier, had been waiting for. Guise was lunching with his brother and cousins at Montargis on the 26 October when he heard that the Germans had arrived at Vimory, only one league distant. 
Despite Mayenne’s caution, the army was ready to march within the hour. Guise was counting on surprise and the darkness of a moonless night. His attack was eventually repulsed, but he inflicted heavy casualties and, more significantly, seriously dented the enemy’s morale. A month later Guise attacked them again, this time in broad daylight, at Auneau, between Chartres and Paris, destroying their baggage train, killing 2,000 and capturing 400 prisoners.

As Guise prepared to deliver the coup de grace, the king negotiated the withdrawal of the mercenaries. He gave them money and provided them with an escort for their protection. The duke was furious. 
He wrote to Mendoza on 16 December complaining ‘of the strange favours and overt connivance that Epernon shows to the enemy...It is strange that the forces of Catholics should serve heretics as recompense for all the ills they have done to France.’20 Henry’s attempt to undermine the duke’s victory was not lost on Parisians. Preachers attacked the king and proclaimed the duke as their saviour: ‘without the prowess and constancy of the Duke of Guise the Ark would have fallen into the hands of the Philistines, and heresy would have triumphed over religion’. 21 Flushed with the success of their hero, the Sixteen sent a delegation to Guise’s headquarters at Etampes, urging him to seize the king, but the campaign had not yet finished and the duke considered the moment unpropitious. Soon after the Sorbonne drew up its secret opinion that the government could be taken away from unsuitable kings, ‘as could responsibility from a suspect guardian’. 22 The king hurried back to Paris. The silencing of the preachers was to be the first step in the reassertion of royal authority. Henry demanded the towns in Picardy be returned: ‘I cannot endure my subjects seizing my towns, nor having intelligence with foreign princes.’23 He sent agents to reason with the Guise, but he had an army at his disposal, and was prepared to use it.

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Guise was furious at his treatment and retired to Nancy at the end of January for a conference with his kinsmen which lasted until the middle of February. They resolved to force the king to adhere to the treaty he had made with the League, to force him to continue the war, and pay their troops. Above all, they demanded the dismissal of Epernon. Instead, Henry invested his favourite with the governorship of Normandy and the admiralty of France, which had been vacated by Joyeuse’s death. It was an extraordinary and unparalleled concentration of power in the hands of one man and it caused Jean Boucher to pen one of the most scandalous pamphlets of the sixteenth century, the
Histoire tragique et memorable de Piers Gaverston
. Once again, the League made reference to English history to make its point, reminding readers that Gaveston, like Epernon, had risen from Gascon obscurity to become the favourite of Edward II. Gaveston’s terrible murder at the hands of the English aristocracy was warning to Epernon, who was also accused of homosexuality.

Both sides continued to negotiate, but trust had long since broken down. Guise had had enough of the king’s artifices, which he compared to ‘the temptations that the devil made to Our Lord on the mountain’. 24 Civil war loomed, as royalist troops moved into Picardy. 
At Nancy, Guise had formulated a plan for a series of coups d’état across the towns of northern France supported by armed insurgency. 
Plans were coordinated with Mendoza in Paris. The Armada was due to set sail in the spring and the duke was prepared to do the utmost to help Philip II take revenge on Elizabeth. A setback came when royalist reinforcements slipped into Boulogne, forcing Aumale to end his blockade. He turned his attentions to Abbeville, arriving there on 16 March, and stationed his troops in the suburbs in order to prevent a royalist garrison from entering. Henry ordered Aumale to leave the vicinity and reiterated that he must also surrender the other towns he was in control of or suffer the consequences. Guise’s reason for refusing to do so reveals him to have been a student of Machiavelli:

We must retain them and in this regard the most resolute will win. For if the towns perceive the least weakness their resolve will slacken and we shall lose all credit and authority. That which you hold from the king is only held through fear...for the majority of towns and provinces are looking at what we do in this affair, and what they fear most is that the king should go [to Picardy] in person...But if he does there lies our chance...I have troops ready...and before the king can reach Beauvais I will be at the Porte Saint-Antoine or the Porte Saint-Denis, and seeing Paris fall thus every town in France will do the same. 25

At the end of March, Guise ordered the Sixteen to appoint the officers of a clandestine militia. A week before Easter (10 April) Poulain informed the king, who summoned prominent members of the Sixteen and threatened them with summary execution unless they ceased their machinations. The Sixteen, afraid for their lives, now urged the duke to come to Paris and told him that they would soon have to act ‘whether the duke favours it or not, being extremely annoyed at his prevarication’. Guise continued to hope that Henry would be forced to leave the safety of Paris. Finally, on 15 April he sent instructions to the Sixteen to prepare an insurrection for the night of Quasimodo, Sunday 24 April. To this end he sent a number of veteran captains and promised to send more men to be housed in different parts of the city. In addition, he informed the Sixteen that he had secured the keys to the Porte Saint-Denis and that fifty horsemen would enter Paris, assassinate Epernon and seize the Louvre. The Sixteen were to erect their barricades and seize the strong points of the city. Poulain reported it to the king, who immediately took preventative measures, forbidding Guise to come to Paris and moving 4,000 Swiss troops closer to the city. In a frank letter to secretary of state, Villeroy, the king stated his readiness to use force against the insurgents: