Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (24 page)

However ghastly and abhorrent the sight of people being burnt may appear to us, in the sixteenth century most of these burnings were hardly newsworthy. The lives of the socially inferior were worth much less than their betters. Literally so: the French criminal justice system continued to operate on the concept of blood-money, which was paid according to the status of the injured party; the lives of the labouring classes were valued in sous, the lives of aristocrats in tens of thousands of pounds. This is precisely why the trial of the five judges arrested in June caused so much consternation and public debate—its like had not been seen before. The Guise regime too was also being put on trial. In 1559 there was a new medium that hitherto had played little role in the old-fashioned game of court politics: public opinion, which was stirred by the unprecedented number of cheap pamphlets rolling off printing presses across Europe. Paris was gripped by the trial and divided between those who were horrified to see judges put on trial for holding opinions that did not appear unorthodox, and others who argued that the gangrene of heresy had penetrated so far into the body politic that only some drastic surgery could save it.

To their fellow judges the very idea of executing a member of their own body was repugnant. The interrogations were conducted in such a fashion as to give the accused every opportunity to get themselves off the hook. They revealed little about their true beliefs, confining themselves to adherence to the Bible and the Athanasian Creed. In the main, they supported the death penalty for those they called ‘sacramentarians’, who denied the real presence in the Mass, making a distinction between them and ‘Lutherans’, who retained elements of the Mass. Punishments were mild. The harshest, a fine and five years’ suspension, was reserved for the judge who had uniquely called for a national council of the Church and a suspension of persecution. There is no reason to believe that the Guise were disappointed at these verdicts. A senior judge, Christophe de Thou, who intervened on the accused men’s behalf, was the Guise’s chief client in the Parlement. ‘I can never adequately repay what I owe to your house’, he wrote to the Duke of Guise. 18

What was required from the judges was outward conformity. But one of the accused, Anne du Bourg, refused to play the game. Unlike his co-defendants this young judge (he was 37) not only admitted to attending Reformed services and buying their books, but taking their communion at a recent Easter service. Most shockingly of all he denied the miracle of the Mass. In early December there were desperate last-minute efforts to avoid the scandal of public execution by coming up with an ambiguously worded confession of faith that would satisfy both du Bourg and his moderate colleagues. During these delicate negotiations events took a dramatic turn. Protestants had not stood idly by during the trial: in October and again in early December there were attempts to rescue him from prison. On 12 December an ultra-Catholic judge, President Minard, was gunned down by masked assassins outside his home in the rue Vieille du Temple, not far from the Hôtel de Guise—it was almost as if they wished to scupper the compromise. The following day, before the final judgment had been made, du Bourg signed the compromise. But the pressure not to be another Nicodemite was immense. Six days later du Bourg formally repudiated it. Under such circumstances the Parlement had no alternative but to order his execution; he was garrotted and his corpse publicly burned on 23 December. French Protestantism gained its supreme martyr; the tyranny of the Guise regime had been laid bare.

The Cardinal of Lorraine wrote to the ambassador in Rome that it would act as a deterrent, and he probably also hoped that it would end calls from Rome and Madrid for more of the same. The du Bourg affair was a call to arms for French Protestants: resistance to tyrants was not only legitimate, it was necessary for the good of the commonwealth. Du Bourg’s trial was responsible for two more sinister developments, which were to have immense consequences for France over the next three decades. First, the use of assassination as a legitimate tool of resistance made its first appearance; its origins lay in Protestant psychology, which construed the individual as an instrument of divine vengeance. Second, during the last tense days of du Bourg’s ordeal, there was an outbreak of sectarian violence in Paris.

In the week leading up to Christmas there were clashes between Catholics and Protestants, who had taken to meeting in a house next door to the parish church of Saint-Médard. At least two Protestants were killed and on Christmas Day the priest saying Mass was stabbed and mortally wounded. 19 The parish was to become a byword for sectarian violence in the city. Du Bourg’s death was divisive and counterproductive. Opponents of the Guise were filled with a renewed sense of purpose and energy. A conspiracy was underway that would not only rock the regime on its foundations but would put the lives of the Guise brothers in mortal danger.

* * * *

During that Christmas and New Year, rumours of a conspiracy were circulating abroad, and they reached the ears of the Guise. Cardinal Charles was right to fear for his life. When one of his servants was murdered, a law banning the wearing of masks and long coats that might conceal pistols was issued. On the 12 February the court left the château of Marchenoir, where the Duke of Guise’s prospective son-in-law, Longueville, had entertained Francis II with a strenuous bout of hunting and games, to make the short journey to the royal residence at Amboise on the Loire. On route they were overtaken by the duke’s secretary, Millet, who had raced from Paris. With him he had a man called Pierre des Avenelles, a lawyer in the Parlement from a well-to-do and cultured family. Avenelles was apparently a sincere Protestant, whose Paris home was being used as a safe house. He said that the conversations he overheard there made him feel uneasy and afraid, although the gift of 10,000 livres he was soon to receive suggests other motives. He told of a conspiracy to seize the king while he was at Amboise and present him with a request demanding liberty of conscience. The cardinal and the duke were to be arrested in the name of the three Estates and killed at the first sign of resistance.

He named the leader as Jean du Barry, seigneur de la Renaudie—it was a name the Guise knew well.

The Conspiracy of Amboise was the culmination of events that were European in dimension. French Protestants were impressed at how rapidly popery had been overturned in the British Isles. They heard the call of John Knox ‘to take the sweard of just defence agains all that should persew us for the mater of religioun’. The initial rejoicing at the death of Henry II had given way to despair when it was clear that the new regime would continue his policies. Throughout France and among Protestant exiles in Geneva and Strasbourg there was vigorous debate about whether it was legitimate to resist an anointed king. Out of these debates was developed a theory of just resistance to ‘foreigners’ and tyrants’, as the Guise were called. It was a proposition that attracted disgruntled Catholics too. Its major failing was that it rested on the claim of the princes of the blood to rule as regents in the name of the king, and Francis II, idiot though he may have been, was three years past his thirteenth birthday, the legal age when French kings reached their majority. Antoine de Navarre was branded a ‘coward’ by the minister of the Paris Congregation when he refused to oppose the new regime. In Scotland the Calvinist rebellion was sanctified by its aristocratic leadership. Calvin was wary of proceeding without them in France, prophetically warning that ‘If a single drop of blood was spilt, the rivers of Europe would run with it.’20 But there were other less cautious voices who had read in their Bibles that ‘Who so sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed’ (Gen. 9: 6)—these men had no need of the princes.

Calvin was distant from the congregation in Paris, which was embattled and endangered.

Since the princes did not see fit to protect the ‘constitution’, the role devolved to the lesser nobility. La Renaudie had more personal reasons for involvement. He moved in the Guise orbit in the 1540s and it was probably through their favour that he escaped imprisonment for fraud and fled justice in 1546. La Renaudie converted to Calvinism during exile in Switzerland and saw the Conspiracy as an opportunity to defend the faith and recover his status in France.

Above all he craved vengeance: he blamed the Cardinal of Lorraine for the execution of his brother-in-law, a leading member of the reform movement at Metz. La Renaudie’s protectors had now become his persecutors. The men whom he inducted into his plot from September 1559 were inspired by more noble sentiments. The oath they swore was to ‘liberty’. They were drawn from the ranks of the well-connected provincial gentry and captains were appointed to lead bands recruited in every province of France. Most of their support derived from local Protestant churches: in Provence representatives of sixty congregations came together and pledged to raise a force of 2,000 men. And there was a vast pool of poverty-stricken soldiers willing to take the daily wage of eighteen sous for a cavalryman or ten sous for a foot soldier that la Renaudie was offering. On 1 February 1560 the plotters held a ‘parliament’ at Nantes in order to put the finishing touches to their plan. The Baron de Raunay offered his château two miles from Amboise as a rendezvous; other units were to seize towns and disrupt the movement of royalist reinforcements.

Were the plotters acting alone? The involvement of Elizabeth is unlikely, though the Guise suspected her. They feared an English descent into Gascony, a province where Protestantism was well entrenched and whose historic ties to England gave substance to their suspicions. Among those arrested in the wake of President Minard’s assassination were two Scots, Robert Stuart and the Earl of Arran’s younger brother, and a French Protestant who had emigrated to England only to return to France to escape the reign of Bloody Mary. Financial support from Germany and Switzerland is a possibility. More certain are the negotiations with Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé. The twelfth-born of his family, Condé was a 29-year-old political nonentity. He was even less well regarded by Henry II than his brothers; he had no military reputation and little money. According to the Venetian ambassador, ‘He was a man of a quick and unquiet temper, very different from his brother, who was of a most amiable and easy character.’21 There was little else to admire: he had to walk with his head held high in order to hide his stoop and had a voracious sexual appetite that relied as much on force as seduction for its fulfilment. His wife Eléonore de Roye, was made of steelier material; she was highly intelligent and made up for her husband’s absence of true piety. But this unlikely Protestant hero had one crucial qualification: he was a prince of the blood. Condé gave his blessing to the enterprise but he was careful to leave no trace of direct involvement and worked through his many servants who signed up. Even so, the Guise already had their suspicions: the 70,000 livres he had been promised went unpaid and he was passed over for the governorship of Picardy in January 1560.

The
putsch
was planned for mid-March. It was at this time that the word ‘Huguenot’ first entered widespread usage. A corruption of the word
Eidgenossen
, the members of the Swiss confederation, it had overtones of communalism and republicanism totally at odds with the traditions of the French monarchy. It became a popular term of abuse because ‘le roi Huguet’ was a ghost who visited the Loire Valley at night, a time when the Protestants held their secret services. As bands of conspirators, or liberators, depending on one’s point of view, moved to take up their positions around Amboise they had no idea they had been discovered and were walking into a trap. Many Huguenots agreed with Calvin that violence would only increase their suffering. Coligny for one had sunk his differences with the Guise—he had even stayed at the duke’s palace at Nanteuil in the autumn—and he was hastily summoned to Amboise on 21 February along with the rest of the aristocracy, including Condé. With each day that passed the tension mounted in expectation of an attack. The Cardinal of Lorraine took to wearing a mail coat. The Scots suspects were brought, in disguise, from Paris and tortured to see if they would reveal the precise date. Caches of weapons were discovered. Most of the insurgent units did not get within sight of the château before they were rounded up in the woods by heavily armed patrols. It was said they surrendered ‘like sheep’. A general pardon was issued on 8 March which contributed to the ease with which they laid down their arms. 

When thirty or so of the ringleaders were picked up at the château of Noizay on the morning of the 15th it looked as if the danger was over. But two days later, at dawn, the Guise brothers were woken by shouts from down below. Boatmen plying their trade on the Loire, swollen by winter rains, had spotted 200 heavy cavalry on the Blois road, sporting distinctive white sashes. White was the symbol of purity in the Christian faith: it was the first appearance of the colour adopted by the Protestants to symbolize their cause. The Prince de Condé could only watch from the battlements, as after a confused two-hour fight in the suburbs, his co-conspirators were forced to flee. 
In the aftermath, la Renaudie was hunted down in the woods and killed. His corpse was taken back to Amboise and hung from a gibbet just outside the château gates with a placard around it: ‘La Renaudie, also known as la Forest, author of the conspiracy, chief and leader of the rebels.’

The aftermath caused more controversy than the conspiracy. The captured papers and interrogations of the prisoners made for good propaganda: the rebels were represented as regicides. The Parlement of Paris conferred on the duke the title of
conservateur de la patrie
. But his actions did not meet with universal approval. What shocked contemporaries most was not so much the numbers of executions—these were wildly exaggerated—but the quality of these men and the summary fashion in which it was done. Dozens were hanged from the battlements for all to see, others were drowned in the Loire. There were about twenty beheadings, the spectacle of which was quickly turned into anti-Guise propaganda. Even the Duchess of Guise was appalled by the extent of the blood-letting. She pleaded for the life of the Baron de Castelnau, who had surrendered on condition that no harm would come to him. Though her husband’s conduct was usually governed by chivalrous convention, in this case he refused to budge and the baron was executed.