Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (29 page)

Catherine had found the blunder offensive too. She assured Tournon, who was by now in tears, that she and her son would live and die in the Catholic faith.

The morning after Beza’s speech Lorraine was elected as the unanimous choice of the bishops to reply—Beza’s horrible blasphemies must not be permitted to pass unchallenged. The commuters from Saint-Germain took their seats again on 16 September. As an orator he was Beza’s superior, choosing to fight the Protestants on their own ground—scripture—and eschewing the impenetrable scholastic terminology favoured by the doctors of the Sorbonne. The longest part of his one-and-a-half-hour speech consisted of an exposition of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. He regretted most that what had been given as a ‘bond of union and peace’ had become a bone of contention. By concentrating on the Real Presence he was able to show the substantial agreement between Greek Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran confessions and isolate the Calvinists. Reactions to the oration did not divide, as one might expect, the audience on confessional lines. His defence of orthodoxy naturally got him golden opinions from his Catholic hearers. But others noted the rapprochement with Lutheranism: Condé was impressed and so too Hubert Languet, representing the Elector of Saxony. Beza saw the danger and poured scorn on it: ‘Never in all my life’, he wrote to Calvin, ‘have I

heard a greater display of ineptitude and imbecility.’ What the Calvinists most feared was that the cardinal’s speech opened up the possibility of reaching an agreement with the Lutherans.

Lorraine’s commitment to the Colloquy’s continuation in the face of Catholics who wished to call a halt to the proceedings swelled the ranks of his enemies. In order to reduce tensions, the second part of the Colloquy between two teams of twelve theologians took place in private and would focus upon trying to find a compromise on the Lord’s Supper. Interest in Lutheranism was not restricted to Lorraine.

The court, in particular, was humming with talk of the Confession of Augsburg. The political axis on which it was based was the revival of the Guise-Bourbon friendship of old, which had been formally sealed by the public reconciliation of the Duke of Guise and Condé on 24 August. Antoine de Navarre’s suggestion that the invitations to the Colloquy be extended to the German Lutheran princes was warmly approved. They arrived too late, however, to save it from the disaster that was about to occur.

After more fruitless debate, on 24 September Lorraine tried to cut the Gordian knot by stating that the time had come for an agreement, failing which the conference could not continue. He produced the Confession of Augbsurg and demanded that Beza sign it as a condition of continuance. Historians of a Protestant bent accused Lorraine of a ploy to publicize the Calvinist-Lutheran schism, and to play one confession off against another. In actual fact, his sole purpose was to get Beza to admit the Real Presence without having to submit completely to Catholic terms. Calvin had warned his team about precisely this sort of eventuality and Beza was prepared. He responded by asking if Lorraine would volunteer to subscribe first. The atmosphere between Beza and Lorraine was becoming increasingly acrimonious.

Beza retorted, ‘since you yourself do not want to subscribe to the confession, it is unreasonable to ask that we subscribe to it’. 28

The cardinal has borne a large share of the onus for the failure of the Colloquy. Certainly, his ultimatum destroyed the last chances of maintaining a dialogue on the principle of persuasion. But to further argue that his injection of Lutheranism was a masterstroke of deceit is based on ignorance of what he was trying to achieve. Protestants viewed the compromise as a trick, as part of a wider conspiracy to divide and destroy them, a stratagem that led inevitably to the Massacre of Wassy. But all the evidence points in another direction. There was nothing conspiratorial about Lorraine’s desire to defeat heresy, and he was no Lutheran. What he sincerely believed was that the Lutheran position on the Real Presence was the first step in building a Gallican variant of Catholicism. At first he thought that the Calvinists might be persuaded; if only he could get the Calvinists to accept the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg he would eventually convert them to his position. He now realized that agreement with the ministers was impossible: ‘They don’t want to hear; but to be heard.’29 After Poissy he turned his back on them forever. But he had also cut his ties with the ultra-Catholics and, though it seemed to matter little at the time, he had no faith in the Council of Trent. For him the Gallican Middle Way remained the only option.

Turning his back on Geneva and Rome meant stepping up the dialogue with the Anglicans and Lutherans. In doing so he ran the risk of becoming dangerously isolated. Catherine was disappointed in him as he had promised her victory, and she now looked elsewhere for counsel. She was now considering a new and more controversial solution: toleration. He was caught between her and her Protestant allies on the one hand and the ultra-Catholics on the other. His liberalism had offended his own bishops and laymen like the Constable of Montmorency, who had, as long ago as 1532, denounced communion in both kinds. The cardinal’s relationship with the papal legate, Ferrara, broke down altogether and the two men (much to the glee of the Spanish ambassador) became ‘declared enemies’. Lainez, the General of the Jesuits, launched a furious attack on the Colloquy and on conferences of any kind with heretics. Ultra-Catholics agreed with the Calvinists that one could not compromise with Error, that the Truth could not be pared and pruned to fit political circumstance.

Time was running out for the cardinal’s compromise.

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Lorraine was morose and depressed in defeat. There is some evidence to suggest that the failure of the Colloquy placed great strains on the rest of the Guise family too, as hard-line counsellors opposed continuing the moderate policy. Some of these men went as far as to hatch a plot to seize the king’s younger brother and heir to the throne, Henri, though nothing came of it. As usual, internal divisions were kept behind closed doors. Though it was decided they could no longer remain at court, there was to be no change in policy. The Duke of Guise departed on good terms with Navarre and Catherine; his retreat from court was not a declaration of war but a realization that his influence was ebbing and that Catherine had no intention of enforcing the edict of July. He would, as he had done in May, await the inevitable recall. The barometer of his intentions as he departed on 19 October was his relationship not with the Triumvirate but the Protestant loyalists. The presence of the Protestant Duke of Longueville in his retinue, his rehabilitation, and return to the family fold suggests that Guise was still behind his brother’s compromise.

The situation the brothers found on their return home to Joinville was far worse than they expected. At Wassy, heresy had reached the gates of the Guise domain. Across France the Protestant Reformation gathered pace and strength: churches were seized, cleansed of their Popish trappings, and friars and priests threatened or run out of town.

In some southern towns, such as Montpellier, Catholic worship ceased altogether. In Gascony the cause of the Gospels was sharpened by grievances against landlords; guerrilla attacks on the nobility and the refusal to pay the tithe culminated in the savage murder of the Catholic Baron de Fumel by an army of 2,000 commoners, who stormed his château on 23 November 1561. All across the south-west, local Catholic leagues had sprung up to defend the Mass and churches against the iconoclastic tide. In Paris, the Catholic preachers accused the Crown openly of complicity, and sectarian violence reached a new pitch of intensity as winter approached. On 27 December Saint-Médard was once more the scene of serious rioting. Though he was concerned about events in Dauphiné where the situation was critical, Guise rebuffed Spanish requests to lead the Catholic faction at court.

He spent his time hunting and visiting friends—this was the first holiday he had had in many years. Amicable relations with Catherine were maintained via a weekly correspondence.

Meanwhile, the cardinal returned to his diocese, where he preached sermons whose Lutheran tone—an attempt to stem the tide of apostasy—were widely noted. Rumours of his admiration for the Book of Common Prayer even reached Scotland, where Scottish Catholics were roused to indignation over his flirtation with Anglicanism. A

direct correspondence was opened with Elizabeth I who now wished ‘to gratify the duke and the rest of the House of Guise’. 30 But it was their old friend, the Duke of Württemberg, who offered the best hope.

He agreed to meet them at Saverne, halfway between Joinville and Stuttgart. So sensitive was this meeting that Rome had to be deceived about its true intent. On the morning of the 16 February 1562 the cardinal preached on Justification by Faith, a message which went down well with the Lutherans among the audience of 200. In the afternoon, the two dukes met to discuss the political and religious situation in France. Württemberg’s record of this interview provides our best guide to Guise’s state of mind in the weeks before Wassy. He admitted that, as a soldier since his youth, he was ignorant of religious matters, but as he began to talk he revealed evangelical inclinations close to his brother: ‘I know that I cannot be saved by my good works, but only by the merits of Jesus Christ.’31 What Guise craved above all else was unity over the Eucharist, for without it ‘everything was false’.

Württemberg was certain that Guise was being frank and he pressed him hard on his responsibility for the execution of heretics, prophetically warning him to beware of spilling innocent blood. Guise’s conscience was so troubled by this conversation that he could not sleep that night.

The next day the cardinal preached against the cult of the saints and later Württemberg and his theologian, Brentius, sat down with four of the Guise brothers: the duke, the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Cardinal of Guise, and the Grand Prior. It was almost as if Lorraine was trying to convert his other three brothers. And it was now that he made the big leap: since there could be no hope from the Calvinists or the Council of Trent, he put his faith in changes both in the liturgy of the Mass and in the ecclesiastical hierarchy—if he had to wear a black robe instead of his red one, then so be it. He said that he approved entirely of the Confession of Augsburg. Then, on their word of honour and on their souls, the Guise promised not to persecute the partisans of the ‘new doctrine’. The meeting of Saverne was not a Guise deception to neutralize the German princes in preparation for the coming civil war, for there was no question of their conversion to Lutheranism.

Instead, they foresaw the eventual conversion of the Lutherans. The success of the policy depended entirely on their ability to show good faith. The new order would last only weeks; it was smothered in its infancy at Wassy. Guise had promised restraint and, even if we accept his protestations of provocation, he could not deliver. He had committed the worst evil a knight could do: he had broken his word of honour. It was something that later tormented him on his deathbed.

Wassy changed France forever but it did not change Guise policy.

News of the Edict of Toleration had come at the end of February—they had long opposed it and their opposition was inevitable. Yet it was not the ultra-Catholics who summoned them to Paris. Catherine would hardly have summoned them if she feared a plot. Lorraine had nothing to hide; he wrote to her without ‘flattery’ that toleration would ‘set up the Ministers of Antichrist...who are against God and the King’. 32 But he had not given up hope that she would still listen to the Guise solution; his brother would come with news of the meeting at Saverne. Antoine de Navarre, now the leader of the crypto-Lutherans at court, urged the duke to Paris to come to his aid. When Condé raised his standard in defence of the Edict of Toleration on 2 April 1562 France stood on the brink of civil war. Even so, desperate attempts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis continued. Catherine thought she had reached an agreement in the summer. The Guise, joined by the King of Navarre, maintained their search for doctrinal compromise and embassies to Germany continued for the rest of the year. Finally, in the summer, delayed by his appointment to head the financing of the royal cause, the cardinal produced a Gallican confession. So explosive were its contents that it was top secret and would later be systematically suppressed. It has only recently been discovered. 33 Lorraine proposed that the Mass be cleansed of its sacrificial elements and spoken in the vernacular, that communion be taken in both kinds, that idolatrous images be removed from churches, and that priests preach the Gospels daily. The proposals were broadly in the line with the Lutheran Confession and were the culmination of more than a year’s study of the Augsburg Confession and discussion with Lutheran theologians. But the summer peace talks stalled:

France was about to enter a thirty-six year civil war. The cardinal’s proposal for an inter-confessional colloquy between Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans was impractical. Wassy had been a huge propaganda coup for the Calvinists and the Guise were no longer trusted in England and Germany. The Cardinal’s compromise was in ruins; his struggle to include the Protestants in a General Council had failed. The only possible way left forward for a reformer like himself was to go to Trent and triumph over the Papal party.

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Plate 17 shows an enamel, a fashionable and expensive medium, by Léonard Limousin, which was commissioned to represent the Guise triumph over heresy. Art historians have conventionally viewed the composition as representing the historic mission of the House of Guise as the scourge of heretics. Antoinette de Bourbon, with a cross surmounted by a victory wreath in her right hand, raises the chalice and Host, symbols of Christ’s body and blood, for all to see, while her triumphal golden chariot, drawn by doves of peace, crushes the bodies of heretics, ancient and modern. To the left is her eldest son Duke François, guiding the chariot. In the centre stands her deceased husband Claude, with her fourth son, Louis, Cardinal of Guise. To the right is Cardinal Charles, bending down to offer his parents and brothers a copy of his reply to Beza at Poissy.