Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (44 page)

As they approached their destination, the exhausted riders, sporting the green livery of the Duke of Mayenne, could at last see the crenulated towers of the old château perched on top of a steep hill, which overlooked the town of Joinville and the new pleasure palace on the banks of the Marne. The stable lads and servants who rushed out to greet the duke as he entered the courtyard saw that he was in a foul mood; he had received some bad news, his plans had been thrown into confusion and he had made the two-day ride from Dijon for a showdown with his brother. Since the death of Antoinette de Bourbon, the family servants had not been used to such conferences and they busied with refreshments for the exhausted riders. But there was little time to waste on that 14 April 1585. The pressure was etched on the features of Henri de Guise too; at the age of 34 he was already prematurely grey.

The brothers followed by their counsellors entered the gallery of the old castle with its ornate columns, each decorated with a frieze and a cornice, and crossed the brightly coloured tile floor in order to take the stairs to the living quarters, which had been built by their grandmother. They entered a room which jutted out from the main building, but had little time to admire the magnificent views it afforded towards the east of twelve summits, separated by streams, fields, woods, villages, and neighbouring castles; the conference, which would last a day and a night, had been called to resolve a crisis. The room in which it was set later became known as ‘the cabinet of the League’. 1 Mayenne was furious at his brother having ‘too soon declared and taken up arms’ against the king when he entered the town of Châlons with troops three weeks previously. The correspondence of the League leadership at this time has until now lain unknown and unread in the British Library. These letters, written in code, make clear that the brothers and their allies had initially planned to raise their standard on 18 April, a significant date for such a ‘holy enterprise’, as it was the day before Good Friday. They also make it clear that conspiracy was unfamiliar territory for some. Guise’s cousin, the Duke of Mercoeur, was told to write in invisible ink on the back of the regular post, but he had to be reminded to make sure that his pen was clean of ink before he wrote! 2 Mayenne charged his brother with a monumental blunder. In revealing themselves before they were ready, they would allow the king to represent them as the aggressors and buy off the town governors they themselves had been dealing with. He wanted to know why his brother had abandoned the plan to pressure the king into war against Protestants by working covertly, ‘always to keep close without abandoning him...to maintain and conserve themselves in his good graces’, while at the same time placing their partisans in positions of power. Instead, Guise and his troops had entered Châlons, where they had been confronted by the royalist lieutenant of Champagne, Joachim de Dinteville. Dinteville lost no time in dispatching a messenger to the king with the words: ‘indubitably the die is cast and the Rubicon crossed’.

Guise explained to his brother that he had been forced by circumstance. In order to dispel claims of treason he had ordered his cousin, Elbeuf, to conduct the Cardinal of Bourbon to Péronne, birthplace of the Catholic League, to make a declaration. But the damage had already been done. A document purporting to be a speech that Guise had delivered to his troops outside Châlons was already being circulated. The contents were political dynamite. He, it was claimed, spoke of his ambition to cut the ‘mocking
mignons
’ down to size and referred brazenly to his claim on the throne, reminding his audience of Hugues Capet’s usurpation of the Carolingian line and attacking those who denied his descent from Charlemagne from trying to ‘stand in the way of the glory of our House’. The document was palpably false—Guise wished to be a kingmaker not a king—and had been put about by his Protestant enemies to blacken him in the eyes of moderate, law-abiding Catholics. 3 In contrast, the declaration made at Péronne was a model of constitutional legitimacy. No mention was made of the Guise. The Cardinal of Bourbon, as a prince of the blood, was indubitably leader of the association. The three obsessions of the Catholic League figured prominently: representative government, religious fundamentalism, and England. The adherents to the association called for renewal of contractual monarchy, one that was more receptive to the will of the people, who were, of course, overwhelmingly hostile to a Protestant succession: ‘The Estates-General, free and without management, should be held frequently and as the needs of the kingdom demand, with full liberty to make all complaints.’ The cardinal declared himself not just against heretics, but against the enemy within: those Catholics who, in serving their own political interests, were subverting religion and the state. France, the cardinal exhorted his audience, must not be permitted to follow the example of England, which in League propaganda had become shorthand for tyranny.

Mayenne’s frustration was understandable given that preparations had been under way for a year. Plans, which had initially involved a general muster of all League forces somewhere along the Loire Valley, now had to be hastily changed. Many of those they had been dealing with in secret now distanced themselves. They informed Mercoeur ‘that our passage to join you in order to help and succour you is closed and the most important towns, where our coup would to be carried out, are lost’. 4 The brothers departed having agreed more limited objectives, but the conference pointed up their differences, which, as we shall discover, would be accentuated as the political crisis deepened.

* * * *

The war of succession was not just a civil war; it was a great European war. As soon as his brother was dead, the king sent the Duke of Epernon to Henri de Navarre to persuade him to convert, but Navarre had no intention of abandoning his power base. In Magdeburg on 15 December 1584 a Protestant alliance was signed by Navarre, Elizabeth I, an assortment of German princes, and Swiss Cantons to uphold the rightful succession. The king tried to keep the Guise in Paris, but after Anjou’s funeral they made their excuses and left. In September the three brothers and Roncherolles, the Cardinal of Bourbon’s chief advisor, held a conference at Nancy hosted by the Duke of Lorraine, where the decision was taken to revive the Catholic League. They reconvened at Joinville on 31 December with their cousins, Elbeuf and Aumale, and two representatives from Philip II, Tassis and Moreo, to sign a treaty that pledged to support the Cardinal of Bourbon as the heir to the throne. As the first Catholic prince of the blood, he provided a fig leaf of legitimacy. 

In fact, it was a radical step. The cardinal was 62 and, by claiming to alter the rules, the Catholic princes had struck a blow against the sacred and providential nature of the succession. For the first time it was possible to imagine the election of the monarch, candidates being endorsed by the Estates-General. Philip II agreed to fund the League army to the tune of 600,000 crowns a year payable in advance. However, because Philip was heavily committed in the Netherlands, the Duke of Lorraine agreed to advance two-thirds of the sum. For both men this was an opportunity not to be missed. They had both married French princesses, daughters of Henry II, and had children by them. Duke Charles was better placed: he had several sons by Claude de France, the eldest of whom, Henri, Marquis of Pont à Mousson, had been born in 1563, while Philip had only one daughter with Elizabeth de France, the Infanta Isabella born in 1566. At the time of the conference in Nancy, a medal was struck representing the marquis being crowned by Minerva and Mars with words
Crescenti Crescunt Coelestia Dona
, referring to the celestial gifts that the marquis was to come into. Of course, the Salic law excluded succession through the female line, but then the laws of succession had just been torn up.

The cousins embraced each other and left for their regions, where they were to raise money and recruit adherents: Guise remained in Champagne; Mayenne returned to his governorship of Burgundy; Elbeuf and Aumale were to organize the rebellion in Normandy and Picardy respectively. Their cousin, the Cardinal of Vaudémont, accompanied by the Jesuits, Matthieu and Samier, was sent to Rome to get the blessing of Gregory XIII. Paris was a special case. Guise initially saw his popularity in the city as an opportunity to raise funds. And so, at the end of 1584, he summoned his Left Bank friends to the palace of the Archbishop of Reims, his brother’s Paris residence. The first Parisian branch of the Catholic League was made up of veterans of the English exile cause: Charles Hotman, Mary Stuart’s treasurer; Boucher, cureóf Saint-Benoît; Prévost, cureóf Saint-Séverin, and Matthieu Launay, the translator of Robert Persons.

They agreed to proceed by each recruiting two men among the legal and mercantile elite, who would in turn co-opt their friends. Like freemasonry, the Parisian League spread along networks of friends and colleagues: cells were rapidly established in all of the city’s numerous civic and royal organs of government—Guise’s friend President Neuilly took matters in hand among the excise men. The secret organization took the name of the Sixteen, in reference to the number of the city’s districts. Its early members were overwhelmingly educated men of the middling sort—lawyers formed the backbone of the organization—precisely the sort of people who were able to contribute to League coffers. As the Sixteen spread, it required an organization. Its ruling council of ten, headed by Hotman, divided the city into five sectors: three on the Right Bank, one on the Ile de la Cité, and one on the Left Bank. Council meetings took place in Hotman’s house in the rue Michel Lecomte, a stone’s throw from the Hôtel de Guise, in the Sorbonne, or in the professed house of the Jesuits, behind Saint-Paul’s in the Marais. Here Guise’s letters were read out or verbal instructions given by Roncherolles, the duke’s liaison in Paris. The Hôtel de Guise bustled with activity as the money and arms began to pile up. More beds had to be brought in to accommodate all the new people who came and went. The king had forbidden the sale of arms in the city, but the Sixteen’s tentacles also reached into the organization of the city’s provost and his archers. Nicolas Poulain, lieutenant of the provost, who joined the Sixteen on 2 January 1585, arranged for the transport of arms at night to the Hôtel de Guise. Delighted at the progress of the Sixteen, Guise ordered them to send emissaries to the provinces to establish cells in other towns. Hotman made the arrangements and earmarked 3,000 crowns for this purpose.

Henry III was aware of Guise plots, but not of their objectives. In the early months of 1585 he surrounded himself with a new guard, the
Quarante Cinq
, recruited from Epernon’s homeland of Gascony, traditionally the birthplace of France’s toughest soldiers. He tried to exploit differences between the brothers, tersely ordering Guise, who feigned ignorance, to stop his machinations, while being more emollient to Mayenne, writing to him of the ‘singular love’ that he had for him. And then the king had a stroke of luck. On 12 March a boat, loaded with 400 corselets and 1,200 arquebuses, was discovered on the Marne and brought back to Paris. An investigation was launched and orders for the arrest of Jean de la Rochette, an esquire of the Cardinal of Guise with close links to the Parisian legal world. Cardinal Vaudémont narrowly avoided being picked up as royalist units scoured the countryside looking for the suspect, who was finally arrested on 26 March. 
After his escape, Vaudémont wrote that ‘never had a man had such good fortune’, which was an understandable exaggeration since he had just returned from Rome with some news that would have stunned the whole of Europe and forced Henry III into a corner. According to Vaudémont, Gregory XIII had ‘taken away all scruples that he could have had and gave full and plenary indulgence to all those who employed themselves in such a holy and good work’. 5 

Guise’s decision to summon his forces to Châlons—which he had identified long before as his headquarters because of its excellent communications on the Marne—had been forced on him by la Rochette’s arrest. It was a decision made easier by the Pope’s blank cheque. 
Over the next few weeks, Guise slowly extended his control over much of Champagne, though the capital, Troyes, remained in royalist hands. The League confined itself at first to plundering tax receipts and taking towns, which could be used to bargain with the king—the Governor of Verdun was bought for 10,000 crowns. A concentration of forces was attempted at Montargis, south of Paris. The Duke of Elbeuf left his base at Bayeux in mid-May and joined with the Count of Brissac at Angers, but in a skirmish outside Beaugency they were forced back by royalists under Joyeuse.

It had become apparent that the king did not possess the resources to defeat the League, and Guise had no wish to give battle and damage his image as the king’s good servant. More seriously, the death of Gregory XIII and the election on 24 April of Sixtus V, a man known for his mistrust of Spain, removed papal approval for a
putsch
. Negotiations conducted under the auspices of Catherine de Medici had been under way for months before a peace was signed at Nemours on 7 July. At face value, the treaty was a royal capitulation. 
Henry rescinded the edicts in favour of Protestantism, promised to declare war on Navarre and accorded the Catholic princes towns for their security and bodyguards for their protection. During these years Henry’s mood fluctuated between melancholic fatalism and a desire to retreat from the world: he spent several days a year between 1584 and 1586, living as a monk, wearing the coarse black habit of a Minim and meditating alone in his cell in the Franciscan Oratory. 
But it would be wrong to accept the general opinion that Henry did little to secure the succession for his preferred candidate. He had out-manoeuvred the League once before and thought he knew how to deal with the Guise: he would play for time, buy off their supporters, foster division between brothers and cousins, and wait for the League to blunder and crack.

This time, however, things were different. Since 1582, Henri de Guise had ceased to trust the king. He knew him as a hypocrite and what is more he had worked out his tactics. He was better informed than his adversary. He had a spy, le Bois, in the Duke of Epernon’s household who slept in his master’s chamber. Guise told Mercoeur, during the negotiations with the Queen Mother, that ‘we are well advertised from all sides that their intention is to deceive us and we well believe it’. 6 Guise knew the rapprochement to be a fake, but he would make use of it to expand his power base and multiply the urban cells of the League. In private, he compared the king to Louis XI, the fifteenth-century king known as the universal spider for his treachery and double-dealing. 7 This reference is a clue that the duke was, like his mother, a student of history, and at the very least aware of the constitutional implications of contractual monarchy. In the resistance theories borrowed by the Catholic League from the Protestants, Louis XI was the archetypal tyrant, whose reign had witnessed the final overthrow of the sovereignty of the people, whose freedoms were enshrined in the ancient Frankish constitution.