Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (20 page)

The new family seat augmented the existing foothold in the most fashionable quarter of the Right Bank. Just a few streets away was the vast fortress cum monastery of the Temple, originally built for the Knights Templar but now the headquarters of the Grand Prior and his knights of Malta. The Guise had long been a more significant presence on the Left Bank: all the major benefices they controlled owned property and often palaces, such as the Hôtel de Cluny, in this part of the city. The land-grab is partly explained by the convenience of having residences closer to court and of being able to receive the court more often on its peregrinations. But in a society where landowning was politics, its implications were immense and long-lasting. The Montmorency had long seen themselves as the power in this region and the purchase of Nanteuil made the Duke of Guise an uncomfortable neighbour of the Montmorency heartlands to the north of the city.

It is tempting to see the constable’s frenetic activity in the land market in the three years before his captivity as a response to this threat. Matters came to a head over the county of Dammartin, which was disputed between the heirs of Françoise d’Anjou. In 1554, Montmorency bought the rights of one of the claimants for 192,000 livres, a price that was over the odds for a property that had revenues of only 5,750 livres per annum. In the summer of 1559 the opposing claimant opened negotiations with the Guise, who coveted Dammartin because it was contiguous with Nanteuil, and they bought out the claim for a sum which the Cardinal of Lorraine estimated would exceed 200,000 livres when legal fees were taken into account.

From this moment, what had begun as a petty quarrel within the provincial gentry, became a battle royal between France’s two most powerful aristocratic houses. In sixteenth-century France, protracted lawsuits were often the product of feuds and the Dammartin case, which was not settled until 1572, was one skirmish among many in the greater struggle for power.

Despite Montmorency’s captivity, he and his family continued to hold the upper hand in the late 1550s because of their dominance of offices in the court and in the army, while the Guise had the edge of their rivals in the Church. Future promotions for the Guise were also unlikely because Montmorency intended to pass his own offices on to his sons. The policy of permitting a family to pass down offices through the generations like a piece of property was to prove extremely damaging to royal authority. To be fair to Henry II, he had not invented the practice. The post of Chamberlain in the Royal Household (
Grand Chambellan
) had long been considered a hereditary post of the dukes of Longueville, until the Guise had wrested control of it during their guardianship of the ‘little duke’.

Henry turned a practice into a policy. The Duke of Aumale was not only permitted to inherit his father’s governorship of Burgundy on his death in 1550, but also his father’s position as head of the royal hunt. But these positions did not fulfil the ambitions of the Guise to control the court and the army. The Duke of Guise’s appetite for the power he had fleetingly wielded as the Grand Master at Mary Stuart’s wedding had been whetted, and when he returned to the front for the campaigning season he felt that his achievements required more permanent recognition. Guise was heavily outnumbered by Philip II, whose superiority rested on the seemingly limitless resources of the New World silver mines. So Guise chose to remain on the defensive in Picardy and strike through the Ardennes. At Thionville, a heavily defended town situated on the Moselle and surrounded by bogs, which was invested on 3 June, the duke once more displayed the skill and bravery which made him the most celebrated general in Europe. He spent days and nights in the trenches, sleeping there if necessary, supervising the mines dug by the English miners he brought with him. It was highly dangerous work: on 20 June he was inspecting a gun emplacement with Piero Strozzi. While chatting away, he placed his hand on Strozzi’s shoulder who in the same instant collapsed, mortally wounded by a musket ball fired by a sniper. Despite the loss of his friend and the final bloody assault, in which 800 defenders gave their lives, Guise exercised his customary generosity towards the vanquished. He then pushed deeper into Burgundian territory until he was halted by news of another crushing French defeat at Gravelines in Picardy on 13 July. Once again the French interior was exposed and the duke had to conduct a forced march to Picardy. Twice within a year he had been required to repair a disastrous defeat. But even before the battle of Gravelines, the king, concerned about the dominance of the Guise faction, had already resolved to make peace.

* * * *

All empires eventually overreach themselves and self-destruct. The Franco-British empire had hardly been founded before cracks began to appear caused by unrelenting royal fiscal pressure and the disruption of trade. In Rouen, hub of the new empire, peasants in the surrounding region were fleeing their homes to escape the new impositions ordered in the wake of the constable’s defeat. It was at sea that the French could not compete. They were no match for the combined Anglo-Spanish navy. France itself was invaded in 1557 when a Spanish force landed in Brittany and the English sailed the Channel with impunity, burning the flagship of the French fleet at Cherbourg. At Gravelines terrible casualties had been inflicted by English ships which had come close to the shore and fired broadsides.

But it was religion that would end dreams of a Franco-British empire, and it was at the heart of this project that the Reformation rebellion would strike first. Protestantism had been harshly persecuted at the end of the reign of Francis I and it was a policy that his son had maintained during the first years of his reign. By the mid-1550s however heretic-hunting had slackened. In 1555—the year that Paul IV accelerated the prosecution of heretics in Italy and Mary Tudor began persecution in England—the Parlement of Paris, whose jurisdiction covered one third of the kingdom, executed no one for heresy. Elsewhere in France executions were sporadic. There were many reasons for this. Partly, it was an expression of the growing numbers, organization, and confidence of the Protestant movement in France. Growth was stunningly swift. Just four years after the first two churches were founded in 1555, seventy-two churches sent delegates to the first national synod. By 1562, there were upwards of 1,000 congregations, with a total membership in the region of 1.5 to 2 million people.

Suspects were now better able to resist arrest, the forces of law and order wary of causing a disturbance. But partly, too, there were many Erasmian Catholics, especially among the civic elites and the judiciary, who abhorred the practice of burning people for their beliefs and who blamed the failings of the Catholic Church for the schism.

Then in the summer of 1557 the court was stunned by an assassination attempt on Henry II. The culprit, Caboche, was a respectable chancery clerk and thus unlikely to have been a madman. Some witnesses claim that they heard him shout ‘King, I have been sent by God to kill you’. His two brothers, who were from Meaux, the longest-established centre of French Protestantism, had recently been tried for ‘atrocious insults, defamatory libels and blasphemy’ against the Catholic Church, and Caboche wanted his revenge. For at the heart of Calvin’s theology was a revolutionary radicalism. It did not just reject the structures, traditions, and rituals of the Catholic Church. Calvin reserved his bitterest bile for the Nicodemites, those hypocrites who secretly believed in the new religion but maintained a mask of outward conformity to the established Church. The true believer testified to the Truth. The psychology of Calvinism, rooted in biblical fundamentalism, gave a movement born in adversity immense strength and boldness. Persecution was a trial sent from God and martyrdom the ultimate test and expression of faith. Calvin stressed the need to obey the duly constituted authorities, but he found it difficult to control his followers from faraway Geneva. Protestants were both instruments of God’s will and behaved in accordance with demands of conscience.

God’s Commandments summoned them to disrupt blasphemous rituals, destroy profane relics, and tear down abominable images. The Old Testament in particular gave succour to the idea of divine vengeance that would strike down the wicked and impious. Assassination of the godless by religious fanatics, both Catholic and Protestant, was to be a particular feature of the French Wars of Religion, distinguishing it from the later religious conflicts in England and Germany.

In France, traditional politics, based on the struggle between rival factions, was about to be overturned by a new politics shaped by conflicting religious ideologies.

The assassination attempt on Henry failed and the culprit was hastily executed without a trial—at a moment of national crisis any division that gave succour to the enemy was to be hushed up. But the size of the Protestant Church in Paris and its growing audacity could not be ignored altogether. To many Catholics, the disaster at Saint-Quentin was evidence of divine disapproval at the spread of heresy in their midst. On 4 September, a Protestant service was held in a house in the rue Saint-Jacques. The house backed on to the Sorbonne and, although the meeting took place at night, it was difficult to keep the arrival of hundreds of people secret. Rumours of acts of debauchery and even child sacrifice roused the ire of local Catholics. Priests from the Sorbonne alerted the watch, the gentlemen in the congregation drew their swords and permitted many to get away, but 130 were arrested. Coming just three weeks after the battle of Saint-Quentin, there was strong pressure for exemplary punishment. Calvin wrote to the Duke of Württemberg to intercede on behalf of the prisoners and complained that all authority had been given to the cardinal, ‘who only asks to exterminate them all’. 9 There were reasons for this suspicion: that year the cardinal had been made an Inquisitor of the Faith in France. But there are good reasons for thinking that Calvin was wholly wrong about the Cardinal of Lorraine. The role of chief architect of repression had to be invented; conveniently it was one that avoided implicating the king directly. Later, when the first Protestant histories were written, the cardinal’s role became embroidered into their story of resistance to persecution and formed an essential part of the black legend of the Guise.

In fact the creation of the office of Inquisitor of the Faith is a red herring. Two other cardinals—Bourbon and Châtillon—were also entrusted with the position. But even if Lorraine had had the time and inclination to fulfill his duties, the idea of an Inquisition was a dead letter in a country where the secular law courts had little truck for such Roman and Spanish practices. But the failure of the Inquisition in France was not simply due to a lack of will and a desire to protect cherished liberties. There were Catholics who accused the Guise of openly favouring heretics, and not just in Scotland. The radical Catholic priest Claude Haton, who knew the Guise far better than Calvin, wrote in his diary that during the period of their ascendancy at court ‘they were renowned for belonging to the party of the heretics’. 10 And there is evidence to support this claim. Many magistrates turned a blind eye to Protestant assemblies. The arrest of those involved in the rue Saint-Jacques affair was the work of the lieutenant of the Paris Provost, Jacques Meusnier. Like many Parisian officers, Meusnier was a creature of the Montmorency and a bitter enemy of the Guise.

Before the Saint-Jacques affair, Meusnier had been charged with the pursuit of Françoise d’Amboise, Countess of Seninghem, whom the constable accused of abetting the escape of his prisoner of war, the Duke of Aerschot, who was worth a fat ransom. The countess was imprisoned, but as we have seen, although she was a Protestant, she was a kinswoman of the Guise and one of the dowager duchess’s closest companions. The Cardinal of Lorraine intervened on her behalf, launching a counter-suit against Meusnier, who was eventually stripped of his position and banished to the Ile de Ré for the subornation of witnesses.

To argue that the Guise were either ‘for’ or ‘against’ heresy during their ascendancy following the battle of Saint-Quentin is to overestimate the role played by religion in their thinking. In a time of war and crisis it was not a significant issue. When his sister, the abbess of Faremoutier, wrote to complain that their own lands in Saumur were so infected with heresy that it had become a second Geneva, the cardinal did nothing. Of the 173 letters of his that survive in this period only one mentioned the subject. He wrote to the Bishop of Verdun in June 1558 to advise caution in dealing with heretics: ‘you must look on it in the gentlest and most prudent way that you can, until we are out of the troubles and wars that occupy us, when we will have the means to deal with it carefully and more according to its merits’. 11 These were private sentiments. As leader of the Church in France the cardinal was expected to take a public stance against heresy. His public opinions were also shaped by the attitude of the king and his mistress who were both violently opposed to heresy and demanded exemplary punishment for those arrested. Henry talked of finishing off the ‘Lutheran scum’ for good, revealing his ignorance of some of the basic theological issues. The problem faced by the authorities in Paris was that many of those arrested in the rue Saint-Jacques were high-born; they did not fit the stereotype of heresy as the preserve of the seditious rabble. The criminal prosecution of the blue-blooded was a sensitive matter and always involved questions of politics. The case was taken away from the zealot Meusnier and handed over to the judges of the Parlement and they opted for a classic compromise, executing eight of the suspects between the end of September and the end of October, but only one of them was of high status. The victim was Damoiselle Philippe de Luns, a petty noblewoman from Périgord and widow without heirs. She had no one to intercede for her. All the others refused to recant, but were permitted to dissimulate or were better connected politically. The Dame de Rentigny heard Mass in prison and was released. After all, her husband was a zealous Catholic and ensign of the Duke of Guise’s gendarmes. She soon returned to the Paris Protestant Church. There was another reason for limiting the number of executions in Paris: