Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (35 page)

Paris was not only sixteenth-century Europe’s largest city; it was its first metropolis. To wander the warren of streets behind its medieval walls was to experience such a bustle, noise and stench that it was compared to an entire province. Everywhere the visitor was reminded of its extraordinary Catholic heritage: its 300,000 souls were crammed into nearly 300 streets, divided into 39 parishes and served by 104 churches and monasteries; its conservative and celebrated university was spread over 49 colleges on the city’s Left Bank.

As he left the Louvre at 11 am on Friday 22 August 1572, Gaspard de Coligny paid little attention to his surroundings. He had just attended a council meeting, chaired in the absence of the king and the Queen Mother by the Duke of Anjou, and as he walked along was absorbed in reading an important piece of business. He did not return the hostile looks of the locals. At 55 he was the kingdom’s most experienced politician and soldier and used to the menacing gazes of Catholics. The curious were kept at a distance by a dozen bodyguards. His serious expression, penetrating gaze and white beard lent him a gravity that was out of place amid the gaiety of a rejuvenated court. Even his enemies respected his courage and piety. He was often compared to his contemporary, François de Guise—France’s ‘two shining diamonds’. Better educated than the friend who became his bitterest enemy, he was a good Latinist and maintained a journal (since lost) for posterity. Like Guise, the admiral spread fear among his enemies. There was an uncompromising element in his character which suited him well to Calvinist discipline. In war he knew the value of cruelty and terror as a weapon. To the Protestants this made him a hero, and the leadership was in awe of him. That morning he was making the short walk to his lodgings in the rue de Béthisy. Soon after he turned into the rue des Poulies a single shot rang out from a hundred feet away. Protestants placed their trust in providence for good reason: at the very same moment the shot was fired Coligny stopped and turned suddenly, and the shot missed his vitals, fracturing his left forearm and taking off an index finger. His men immediately rushed to the house from where the shot had been fired and tried to force the door, but the assassin had planned well. The house had a rear door that opened onto the square in front of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois church, where a horse was awaiting him.

Coligny was not killed by the bullet; he would have lived. And yet within forty-eight hours he was murdered. Several days of anarchy followed in which between at least 2,000, and perhaps as many as 6,000, Protestants were butchered. Upwards of 600 houses were pillaged. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is the greatest imponderable of sixteenth-century history. The barbarity with which defenceless women and children were massacred has echoes of the horrors of the twentieth century—horrors that were literally unspeakable: such was the cruelty and terror of those August days that very few were ever able to set down in words what they had seen or experienced.

The task of the historian is made all the more difficult because the sources that survive, written amid the confusion or put together much later in an attempt to shift the blame, are even more than usually partial and suspect. Over the centuries a plethora of suspects and motives have been put forward. Older interpretations rested on Catherine’s reputation as a wicked Italian Queen schooled in the dark political arts of Machiavelli. Coligny’s assassination, it is claimed, had been planned years before and was the signal for a premeditated programme of extermination. Catherine, it is claimed, was driven insane by maternal jealousy. Coligny was increasingly powerful at court and threatened to supplant her in her son’s affections, and so she employed the Guise to eliminate the admiral. This conjecture relies more on xenophobia and misogyny than hard evidence. In fact, the evidence for Coligny’s preeminence is rather thin: in the year before his death he was at court for a total of only five weeks. In a major reinterpretation in 1973, Nicola Sutherland argued that an assassination was inconsistent with Catherine’s larger political aims. 1 Catherine had spent more than ten years trying to preserve the peace by balancing the Catholic and Protestant factions, and there is little reason to believe that she would suddenly abandon these consistently held policies and order the death of the Protestant leader, let alone a more general policy of extermination. If not Catherine, then who? Sutherland claimed to have uncovered an international Catholic conspiracy, involving Spain, the Papacy, and the Guise. The Spanish scenario is plausible. In the summer of 1572 Coligny was pressing for immediate intervention in the Low Countries.

Philip II of Spain and the Duke of Alva wished him dead. Once again, however, the evidence is flimsy. Spanish policy was tempered by
Realpolitik
, recognizing that the admiral was a force for division and therefore contributed to France’s present weakness. There are other suspects and motives: the Duke of Anjou, the Italians on the council, or a combination of the two—all have their accusers. Charles IX has recently been rehabilitated as an idealistic philosopher-king who, fearing that his dream of concord was about to be shattered, played a decisive role in planning Coligny’s murder. Fresh clues have been gleaned from the prosaic (rising grain prices) to the esoteric (the neo-platonic environment of the court). One benefit of recent research has been to uncouple the plot to kill Coligny from the general massacre that followed. Few historians would now argue that the plotters had a premeditated plan to murder thousands. In order to understand the Massacre we must first answer the riddle of Coligny’s death. Only then will we begin to uncover the link between aristocratic conspiracy and mob violence.

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Despite the recent research, much that surrounds the death of Coligny continues to remain the stuff of myth and legend. But the historian is no ordinary storyteller. Solving his murder is not substantially different from any other puzzle half a millennium old. The sources may be partial and the interpretations of the events will vary depending on which sources one places most trust in—but this is always the case in historical reconstruction. In fact, the historian of the Massacre is blessed with a great deal more evidence than is usual for the sixteenth century. We are not like the detective left bemused by the absence of a body, a suspect, and a motive. The most glaring omission in the investigation so far has been the absence of serious analysis of the principal suspects: the Guise family. Although most are now agreed that the Guise were responsible for the assassination of Coligny, the gaze of the historian continues to fall principally on Philip II, Catherine de Medici, or Charles IX: getting the Guise wrong means getting the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre wrong. Reconsidering the political events of the period 1570–2 from their perspective gives a very different impression of events at the centre than is usual. We shall find that there are as many myths about the background to the Massacre as there are about the events of 22–24 August itself. Not only will we find that we have a body and weapon; but that we have a motive and conspiracy to kill too.

The first myth about the months preceding the Massacre is that there was a united ultra-Catholic faction in France. Certainly, there were many Catholics, probably a majority, opposed to the Peace of Saint-Germain, and the Guise were their principal hope. But in Paris, while the people were happy to invent rousing songs in their honour, they were more reticent about showing armed support. Calls to support the family in its feud with the Montmorency had fallen on deaf ears. What made the Protestants such a formidable threat, despite their numerical inferiority, was their relative unity. Catholics, in contrast, were bitterly divided by personality and policy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the royal council itself. The overwhelming majority of councillors who signed the Peace of Saint-Germain shared the same ultra-Catholic sensibilities as the Guise and the same distaste for heresy. But what these councillors shared too was a dislike for the Guise. Peacemaking was self-interested, enabling its sponsors to consolidate their grip on power. A renewal of civil war would only rejuvenate the Guise. Since these councillors played a crucial role in the Massacre it is worth briefly sketching out who they were.

Ironically, the only councillor personally well disposed to the Guise was the one man who opposed them on ideological grounds. Jean de Morvilliers, Bishop of Orléans, was the last surviving member of the Cardinal of Lorraine’s evangelical circle still on the council. He was widely respected for his opinions and often presided over the council in the absence of the king. A key architect of the toleration policy, he had negotiated the Peace of Saint-Germain and wished to maintain it at all costs. Though his and Morvilliers’ paths had long since diverged, Lorraine still wrote warm and affectionate letters which recalled ‘the liberty of our ancient and firm friendship’. 2 The same could not be said of the other religious moderate on the council. The religious peace had allowed the Montmorency to reassert themselves.

Following the death of the constable in 1567, leadership of the family passed to his eldest son, the Marshal of France, François, who entered his fortieth year in 1570. François was utterly unlike his religiously conservative father; suspected of being a Nicodemite, he now emerged as the champion of the free Gallican Church, which would be the natural ally of Anglicans and Lutherans. A fierce opponent of the Guise, he was very close to his cousin Coligny. Coligny had no need to visit the court to make his influence felt: his cousin acted for him. Montmorency’s influence on the council was reinforced by the fact that his brother-in-law, Marshal Cossé, had control of the finances. François quickly emerged as the strong man of the peace party. Just like his father, he dealt with any signs of popular sedition with exemplary brutality. On 18 March 1571 the Protestant congregation in Rouen was attacked after some of them had failed to remove their hats as the Host passed them in the street. The fighting left forty dead. Montmorency’s role in condemning sixty-six suspects to death, levying swingeing fines, and removing others from office left Catholics bemused. One eyewitness thought he and his men ‘were of the colour of Calvinists’. 3 Even more controversial was his role in the Cross of Gastines Affair in Paris. This cross had been erected by Catholics to celebrate the execution of three Protestants during the recent civil war. Article 32 of the Edict of Saint-Germain demanded the suppression of all such reminders of sectarian hatred. Catholics were outraged and tried to prevent it being pulled down on 29 December 1571. In his capacity as city governor he quickly nipped sedition in the bud, immediately hanging one rioter; others were severely punished. With the Protestants under his protection Parisians turned their sights elsewhere. The fevered religious atmosphere was conducive to witch-hunting and there were several burnings in the city. In June 1572 there were anti-Italian riots caused by tax hikes.

The marshal and his substantial following in and around Paris were the only counterweights to the seething discontent.

Otherwise the council was dominated by Catherine de Medici’s protégeś. In the main they were Italians with ultra-Catholic inclinations but, in the short term, took a pragmatic view of the peace and shared Montmorency hostility to the Guise. At 33, Louis Gonzaga was the youngest and most intelligent of them and, as the highest born, their natural leader. Catherine had carefully managed his career since his arrival from Italy, bending the law in order to permit him to inherit the duchy of Nevers, the greatest landed fortune of the age, when the last male of the House of Clèves died, leaving three daughters. Louis was a new type of Catholic: a man of intense piety, he was an early promoter of the Counter-Reformation sensibility emanating from Italy. A serious leg wound received in 1568 effectively ended his military career, and his energies were directed into matters of state, in which he had pretensions to be something of a controversialist and thinker. He emerged as the chief mentor of the Duke of Anjou, shaping the heir to the throne’s intellectual and devotional interests and encouraged the young duke to distance himself from the Guise. It was Nevers who articulated the inchoate animosities of Catherine’s faction. In a memoir on the state of the realm written for Anjou in 1573 he argued that one of the principal causes of the weakness of the monarchy was the monopoly of royal offices that the Guise family had built up over the generations, such that they held ‘half of the principal honours, estates and emoluments’.4 Whereas the grandfather had been worth only 30,000 to 40,000 livres a year, his grandchildren were now worth 500,000 to 600,000 livres per year. They were over-mighty subjects. He disparaged Louis, Cardinal of Guise—with some justification—as lacking the capacity and intelligence for affairs of state, and did not believe Duke Henri was fit to sit on the Privy Council. This was all the more surprising because Henri de Guise was his brother-in-law. Nevers had married Henriette, the eldest of the three Clèves heiresses in 1566 and Guise married Catherine in October 1570. Temperamentally they were very different. Guise was primarily a soldier who displayed little interest in the finer matters of theology; he must have appeared shallow to the more mature and more cerebral Nevers. And their personality clash was exacerbated by their wives, who did not see eye to eye. There was an almighty squabble over the partition of the Clèves estate and the debts that had accrued. Henriette does not seem to have been a Protestant, while Catherine renounced her faith only shortly before marrying Guise.

The final actor in the drama was the king himself. Charles IX had recently emerged as a political figure in his own right and, though he despised heresy, invested much energy in the success of the peace. He was not without intelligence and could speak with passion, if not much art, on subjects as diverse as theology, poetry, architecture, and military strategy. Recent attempts to rehabilitate him as a philosopher-king, however, surely go too far—this is a more apt description of his more intelligent and able younger brother. Charles was happier outdoors. His frenetic dedication to hunting, even by the standards of the time, was obsessive. His fondness for metal-working—he had a forge installed in the Louvre—was even more unkingly. Though his tutor, Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, had proscribed the reading of Rabelais, Charles had an earthy sense of humour. Some of his jokes, though lacking in wit, were relatively harmless. When Guise’s only sister, Catherine, who at the age of 17 was already noted for her independent spirit, married the widower, Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Montpensier, then forty years her senior, Charles quipped that her blood ‘so fiery and vivacious would turn as cold as a fish’s on contact with the creeping coldness of the Duke of Montpensier’. 5 Other ‘jokes’ reveal the crassness behind the civilized veneer. Charles gloated that the scene after the consummation of his marriage to Elizabeth of Austria resembled a ‘German corset bloodied by a pistol shot'. 6 Charles may have been wedded to peace for the moment, but he had been raised in an environment in which political assassination was common currency. He was a man of his age and gave his blessing to political murder: on 10 December 1571 a group of assassins murdered Lignerolles, favourite of the Duke of Anjou, whose crime had been to intrigue against royal policy.