Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (47 page)

Their first encounter after the revolution passed off as if nothing had happened. Guise, wearing a coat of mail under his clothes, accompanied by the Queen Mother, the Cardinal of Bourbon, the Archbishop of Lyon and 800 horse, arrived in Chartres on 1 August 1588 to make his submission. The town filled with people from the surrounding countryside who had come to applaud the duke for his role in saving them the previous year from ‘robbing German heretics’. He was greeted with cheers and shouts of ‘Long Live Guise!’1 After the duke had gone down on one knee, the king helped him up and kissed him twice. Only at dinner that evening did the latent tension became palpable. The king asked, laughing, to whom they should drink:

Guise: To whom you please, Sire, it is for your Majesty to propose.

Henry: My cousin, let us drink to our good friends the Huguenots.

Guise: Well said, Sire...

Henry: [adding quickly] And to our good barricaders of Paris. Let’s drink to them and not forget them!

The duke smiled through gritted teeth and retired angrily soon after.

The papal nuncio, Morosini, who had been largely responsible for the reconciliation was undecided: ‘I do not know if their hearts correspond to their embraces.’ Guise, too, in a letter to Mendoza on 6 August did not know whether the king was displaying ‘an extreme dissimulation’ or ‘a marvellous mutation of will, a new world as it were’; he would proceed with ‘the circumspection required for his security, for the greater the king’s caresses, the more he would have suspicion’. 2 But he dismissed warnings about his immediate safety for ‘the sole and true danger he would run could only exist in the king’s cabinet, where one is only admitted alone, and where the prince has every facility to have him attacked and killed by a dozen or twenty men posted for this purpose’. The duke was foretelling the manner of his own death.

* * * *

Guise’s murder had been discussed before the barricades and it was discussed again in the months following, but the final decision was taken only a few days before the execution. All the indications are that it was planned in a hurry. Before the final act of the drama there were many scenes that suggested an entirely different outcome. Both men were fully committed to the reconciliation, but for very different reasons.

Guise should have been overjoyed by his success on 12 May. After all, he was the Tribune of the People, effectively the king of Paris. The seizure of royal revenues was the most satisfying aspect of the take-over. Bankers beat a path to his door to offer him credit, solving his financial problems at a stroke. Crucially for his sense of self-esteem he was no longer reliant on Philip II. But the duke was also embarrassed by his success. He was furious when he heard of the king’s flight. He wanted to be the king’s chief counsellor, not king of Paris. In the wake of the Day of the Barricades the duke presented himself as the natural mediator between king and people. His official pronouncements denied any foreknowledge of the barricades, noted the small size of his retinue, and reminded his audience that the only time he left his palace was to intervene to rescue the royal forces. One piece of propaganda stated that the only weapon to be found in the Hôtel de Guise was a rusty old pike belonging to his father! As a prince, the duke had no wish to be portrayed as a revolutionary. He put the events down to a ‘miracle of God’.

The duke wanted to be close to the king for another reason: he was uncomfortable with his status as a client of Philip II. Guise was playing a double game. The Spanish wished above all for a complete rupture between Guise and Henry. As Mendoza wrote to Philip II, ‘I am employing all means possible to prevent the reconciliation of Guise and the King...It is necessary to maintain the civil war in Picardy even if it is against Guise’s interests.’3 In a meeting with Mendoza at the end of July the duke reassured him, telling him that ‘he regretted not have let the people off the leash during the tumult, in order to finish off what they had planned’. Despite Mendoza’s insistence, he refused to march on the king at Chartres and satisfied himself with securing the approaches to Paris. With the imminent arrival of the Armada in the Channel Philip’s overriding concern was a secure port. While Guise wished to work with Philip for the ruination of Elizabeth, his chief objective was to replace Epernon in the affections of the king. He acted in accordance with the interests of his own House and wished to avoid humiliation at the hands of any prince—Habsburg or Valois. He wanted to use his victory to wring concessions from the king, to get closer to him, not to widen the rupture. In March the king had already offered him ‘great kindnesses and charges worthy of his dignity’ if he ceased his intelligences with Spain and in Rome. With his position strengthened the duke was now prepared to do a deal.

This was not the advice of all members of his family. His sister Catherine, certainly, and possibly also his brother, Louis, counselled that he march on Chartres, seize the king and place him in a monastery. Signalling his intentions, Louis seized the city of Troyes. But Guise ignored them. On 15 July the king signed the Edict of Union, which confirmed the 1585 treaty with the League and renewed his commitment to the war on heresy. The League leaders were awarded more towns as surety and the king also agreed to adopt the decrees of the Council of Trent. Epernon was dismissed.

Much to the irritation of Mendoza, the king declared that henceforth he wished ‘to govern with his cousins of Guise’. 4 The duke was made lieutenant-general of the royal army. We know a great deal about the duke’s state of mind as he made his way to Chartres for the formal reconciliation. The Archbishop of Lyon had emerged as the chief voice of moderation on the duke’s council after the barricades and, in preparation for his return to court, composed a long memoir which outlined how his master should behave. It was from the archbishop that Guise learnt his Machiavelli. In order to maintain himself in power, the duke would need to control one of the great offices of state and win over suspicious royal courtiers. He would also have to work hard to obtain royal favour. The archbishop, who knew the king well, played on his psychology:

The king’s favour will be continued towards you and even grow day by day if you are able to maintain him between a state of love and fear, that is, if he always remains convinced as he is now that you have such power in his state that he has no power to rid himself of you and also that by your words and actions you let him know that you are far from wishing to abuse your power and that, on the contrary, you would employ it all in his service. 5 

Guise’s principal objective on returning to court was the office of Constable of France: in abeyance since 1567, it was the highest office in the land and, unlike the title of lieutenant-general, was held for life and could not be revoked. News of the disaster that befell the Armada in early August 1588 confirmed the position of those on the duke’s council who favoured cooling relations with the Habsburg and a return to court.

Henry III’s intentions are much less easy to discern. There has been much speculation, though it seems most likely that it was a question of wait and see. The duke’s behaviour at the Estates-General would be crucial. The decision to summon the assembly was forced upon Henry by the disastrous state of the finances—debts had risen from 101 million in 1576 to 133 million in 1588. Between a quarter and a third of all income was being spent on debt servicing and the Crown was finding it difficult to borrow. But there were political considerations too. The king had out-foxed the League once before, in 1576, by calling the Estates-General, and he now thought he could do so again. Summoning it would counter the propaganda which portrayed him a tyrant, the violator of privileges, and despoiler of the people.

The Estates-General would be forced to provide the means to fight the war on heresy, or it would expose itself to attacks from precisely those radical Catholics who were its greatest champions. Now that he had his hands on the reins of power, Guise had less interest in pursuing the reforming agenda of the League. He advised against the calling of the Estates-General, which had been at the heart of League manifesto since 1585. He must have been aware that his position would be a difficult one: he would have to maintain his supporters while, if he wished to obtain the office he coveted, demonstrating at the same time that he was the king’s good servant. Henry may have realized this too, and he ignored the advice of the newest member of the Privy Council.

As the election campaign got under way, Henry did something even more surprising. He dismissed every other member of the Council: 
Chancellor Cheverny; the superintendent of finances, Bellièvre; and the secretaries of state, Brulart, Villeroy, and Pinart were all relieved of their posts. They were replaced with new and relatively unknown men, who were characterized by their modest social status, but also by their probity—there was no question of them being bought by the Guise. It was the first time that such a wholesale change had been effected in the history of the monarchy. The failures of the past were blamed on the old ministers. As the Estates opened, Henry was announcing the beginning of a new era.

The Estates-General of 1588 was unlike any other before. It had more in common with the assembly of 1789 than the previous two assemblies of 1560 and 1576, which were still recognizably medieval representative institutions, summoned for the purpose of presenting grievances to the king, whose only obligation was to listen. The electoral campaign was a titanic struggle, the most divisive and intense ever fought. The king did his best to disrupt the League campaign and he intervened personally in a number of contests, in order to ensure his choice was returned. But the League was well organized and another novelty was the sight of the Guise, who left the court in order to help the campaign in the provinces. Though the king did better than expected among the clergy and the nobility, the results in the Third Estate were an overwhelming victory for the Catholic League. Many of the deputies from the Third Estate, who arrived at Blois for the opening session on 16 October, came not with the intention of presenting grievances in the traditional fashion but, inspired and justified by their intense Catholic faith, to establish a new constitutional arrangement between the king and his subjects.

Reading the
cahiers
drawn up by the Parisian delegates, dominated by the Sixteen, one is struck by their extreme originality. 6 Using a religious language that was at times apocalyptic, their demands opened into a sustained critique of the current monarchical state. A thorough-going reformation of men and of the kingdom was essential if heresy was to be defeated and God’s anger appeased. There were calls for placing the Estates-General on a regular constitutional footing. One provincial
cahier
suggested that it be summoned every six years. 
Others went further and called for a standing Council of State to ‘advise’ the king while the Estates were not sitting. Paris, as usual, went further, calling for it to be composed of twelve men—a number with biblical connotations—from each of the estates who would scrutinize the decisions of the royal council.

The inaugural session took place in the great hall of the château of Blois on 16 October. The king, with the two queens beside him on a dais and with Guise, who was dressed in white satin and a black velvet hat and holding the Grand Master’s baton, at his feet, denounced past abuses and spoke of the financial needs that would have to be met if heresy were to be defeated. He was an accomplished public speaker and the speech was well received. It was also an opportunity to put pressure on the duke. After making explicit reference to ‘some grandees of my kingdom [who] have made such leagues and associations’, Henry promised to forget the past; but he reminded his audience ‘that those of my subjects who do not leave them or get involved in them without my consent will be attainted and convicted of the crime of treason’.7 At these words the duke was seen to go pale. 
Afterwards Guise was chided by his brother Louis for ‘having only done things by half’. If they had followed his advice ‘they would never have been in the difficulty they were now’. 8 Epinac said they should tell the king to remove the offending words from the published version. The king agreed to do so, but he had laid down the gauntlet.

The king could play the duke along, but he found his supporters much less easy to manipulate. The leaguer delegates demanded that the king swear to uphold the Edict of Union and declare that it was a fundamental law of the kingdom. The king agreed to do so, but inserted a qualifying phrase which referred to ‘the authority, fidelity and obedience due to his majesty’. Once again, he was forced to back down. The offending words were replaced by ‘only by the advice of the Estates does the king intend to make this law fundamental in his kingdom’. The consequences of this capitulation were potentially enormous. By depriving a heretic of the succession, another fundamental law, the Salic law, which assured the succession to the eldest male of the eldest line, was imperilled. The leaguers were jubilant; the royalists were dismayed. Everyone, however, understood the constitutional implications: the Estates were staking a claim to share sovereignty with the king. The debates on the issue were very different from those of previous Estates; the language and ideas that were expressed prefiguring those of 1789. The delegates argued that the law was above the king and that he could not modify it without consent.