Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (4 page)

25. Façade of the château of Eu.

26. Richard Verstegan, 
Briefve description of divers cruelties
.

27. Th
e assassination of Henri de Lorraine, Duke of Guise

To understand the Guise is to understand the profound transformations that shook sixteenth-century Europe. So it is mystifying that outside France they are all but forgotten. For in their day the Guise were held in awe throughout Europe. Admiring or appalled, none could ignore them. Enemies at one time or another of the great dynasties of Tudor, Habsburg, Valois, and Bourbon, the Guise were one of the most powerful princely houses of sixteenth-century Europe. With dreams of empire and aspirations to rule several kingdoms, they were the greatest non-royal house of their age. There may have been richer German princes and more cultured Italian dukes, but none had the astonishing range of dynastic interests which they possessed, ranging from Scotland to Sicily and from Ireland to Jerusalem. Their story requires retelling and it is fitting that the first comprehensive biography of the family for a century and half should fall to an Englishman, and not just because Elizabeth I considered for most of her reign that it was the Guise, and not Philip II, who was her foremost enemy.

Today, the main family members are largely remembered outside France as bit players in the drama of one of their brood, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. But Mary’s story cannot be told fully without reference to her kith and kin. Mary’s star certainly burned brightly for a brief while: she was Queen of France for eighteen months, and claimed the thrones of England and Ireland before setting sail for Scotland in 1561. Yet once there, events were soon out of her control and she spent the last nineteen years of her life in prison, a pawn in dynastic politics. She was not the sun around which her kinsfolk orbited. Mary’s importance to history lies less in the consequences of her deeds, but more in what she represented at the time and continues to represent, whether as woman, lover, or martyr. Her life has been romanticized and her historical significance overstated. Put simply, in the annals of the Guise family her existence values a few brief pages. There is no need for hyperbole when it comes to retelling the deeds of her uncles and cousins. They shaped the course of European history: rising to prominence around mid-century as the greatest enemies of the House of Habsburg before plunging France into bloody chaos, they refashioned the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent; plotted to invade England and remove Elizabeth I; and made and unmade the kings of France before ending the century as martyrs for the Catholic cause.

All this is true and makes for drama. The story is a good one, but it is also an important one. Their mark on history was not confined to military campaigns, artistic patronage, and diplomatic and court intrigue. The Reformation was not just a religious event; it led to a profound reordering of political thought and practice. The Guise embody the changes wrought by the sixteenth century. As popular movements were mobilized for and against the Reformation, the traditional dynastic politics of the middle ages were utterly transformed. Power was no longer the preserve of a tiny aristocratic elite. What shocked contemporaries about the Guise was that they represented something novel and pernicious. They incited and manipulated popular Catholic feeling and used the new medium of print to create a religious party with mass support. More than fifty years before the English Republic, the Guise led a religious and political revolution in France that overthrew the Valois monarchy.

The Guise story urgently needs retelling for another reason. In an age of religious fundamentalism, it is time to revisit the roots of Europe’s own religious violence. The word ‘massacre’ was first used in its modern context in sixteenth-century France. The French Wars of Religion are of wider significance not simply because France was the most populous state in Europe and because its Calvinist Church was for a decade Europe’s largest, or because the conflict sucked in all of Europe’s major powers. They were significant because ordinary Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe conceived events in France as part of a wider confessional struggle. France’s tribulations were a constant backdrop to domestic affairs and a terrible object lesson in what might happen at home if one’s guard was momentarily dropped. The image and actions of the Guise family were on public trial. At home, their appeal to Catholic populism was to make them more powerful than the King of France. In the eyes of the Catholic masses they were charismatic heroes, worshipped in song and woodcut, lauded in a new form of cheap political broadsheet. Protestants replied with their own scurrilous songs and satires. The Black Legend of the Guise was born.

The legend was most ubiquitous in England. Here, fascination with the Guise was intensified by Mary Queen of Scots’ execution. And it is no coincidence that the Guise were among the first contemporary figures to be portrayed on the English stage. Christopher Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris set a dark tone, dramatizing the family’s ‘treacherous violence’ (Act I, Scene IV), a Machiavellian pursuit of self-interest in the name of religion. First performed in 1593, barely a decade after the Guise had attempted to invade England and overthrow Elizabeth I, Marlowe gave voice to their vast ambition in the character of Henri, Duke of Guise. It is surely one of the most memorable soliloquies he ever wrote:

What glory is there in a common good

That hangs for every peasant to achieve?

That like I best that flies beyond my reach.

Set me to scale the high Pyramides,

And thereon set the diadem of France,

I’ll either rend it with my nails to naught

Or mount the top with my aspiring wings,

Although my downfall be the deepest hell.

More whimsically, in
Doctor Faustus
(first performed in 1588/9 or 1592/3), the duke’s uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, makes a brief appearance with the Pope, both entering the banquet hall only to have an invisible Faustus snatch away their dinners and, in a spectacular exit, scatter the banquet hall with fireworks. The stage popularity of the duke continued in the seventeenth century, making appearances in several plays and culminating in Dryden’s
The Duke of Guise
of 1682, which was so controversial that its first performance was delayed by several months and the playwright forced to defend it in a separate
Vindication
.

This interest would be a mere footnote to English history if it were not for another important, hitherto neglected, facet of the Guise. Historians of England are interested in French events in so far as they relate to English foreign policy; dynastic matters, such as the Anjou match; or the development of a distinctly English Protestant national identity. Popular understandings of French affairs rely on the endless production of works on Mary Stuart, or the extraordinary (in all senses of the word) performance of Fanny Ardant as Marie de Guise, regent of Scotland, in Shekhar Kapur’s film
Elizabeth
(1998). This is, however, preferable to the position in France, where the importance of British affairs to the development of a distinctive French Catholic identity in contradistinction to the heretical and perfidious English is all but ignored. Part of the
raison d'être
of this book therefore is to bring to a general readership some unjustly neglected aspects of Anglo-French relations during a crucial period—the projected Guise invasions of England, the major role played by the English Catholic refugees in Parisian politics, and the consequences for France of the Jesuit mission to England and Mary’s captivity and execution.

The Guise story is a remarkable one, but it has yet to be told fully in any language, principally because it has been distorted by historians, who have cast the Guise as heroes or villains, martyrs or murderers, according to sectarian prejudice. From Marlowe’s Massacre onwards they have made for stock historical villains; portrayed by their enemies as power-hungry Machiavellian conspirators, history has judged them harshly, accusing them of selling out France to foreigners, of pursuing their own interest to the detriment of the patrie, of being slavishly devoted to the cause of religious reaction. It is time to put the record straight.

Early spring is a busy season in the vineyards of France. But on the morning of Saturday 28 February 1562, those toiling on the east-facing hills overlooking the château of Joinville who momentarily stopped pruning their vines and looked below were treated to an impressive sight. Two hundred heavily armed men were mounting up; their lord and master, François de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, ten days after celebrating his forty-third birthday had been summoned to court by the regent of France, Catherine de Medici, on an important matter of state. While at court a superficial state of peace prevailed, the provinces of France were descending into civil war as Protestants fought to defend their right to worship and Catholics to deny them.

As head of one of the greatest princely houses of Europe, he was a rare visitor to Joinville these days, but he was immediately recognizable among the throng: ‘no more and no less than the tallest, thickest and most honorable oak among all the trees in the forest’, as one contemporary put it. 1 And this was no exaggeration: the Guise were uniformly tall in an age when men were on average much shorter than they are today, and when much greater store was placed on physical prowess. Mary Stuart, the duke’s niece, was 5 feet 11 inches tall and she shared with her uncle the distinctive blond hair, which made the Guise look so un-French like, and which added fuel to the court gossips, who whispered that the Guise were not true-born Frenchmen, but ‘foreigners’ from the ‘Germanic’ lands of Lorraine. The peasants were privileged to catch a glimpse of one of the most famous men alive. As the Venetian ambassador put it, ‘he surpasses by his courage, not only all the most celebrated generals of his age, but also any that have come before’. 2

 To the peasants working among the vines, the sights and sounds of a princely retinue on the move was as amazing as it was unusual. An aristocratic retinue was a naked expression of power and, in dangerous times such as these, it had to be seen to bristle with menace. The most impressive men came from the squadron of the ducal gendarmerie company, which at full strength comprised 250 heavy cavalry. 
This was the elite of the French royal army, on campaign the men-at-arms being required to arm themselves with closed helm; a good cuirass; upper arm and forearm armour; thigh, haunch and knee pieces; and a fully armoured saddle in addition to a pistol and a good, strong lance. Their horses were required to be barded—that is to have head and chest armour as well as flank protection. Each man had to maintain two great warhorses and one nag for his baggage.

Also catching the eyes of those accustomed only to everyday hues was the dazzling clash of colours. Red and yellow were the colours of the House of Lorraine. It was used for the duke’s livery, on which was stitched the distinctive ducal badge 
‡
, today known as the cross of Lorraine, but in those days more properly called the cross of Anjou—a reminder that the Guise claimed descent from one of the greatest of medieval princely houses. Yellow was also the colour of the House of Bourbon, from whom the duke was descended through his mother.