Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (46 page)

Through his informant Henry knew that the Sixteen were afraid. 
After hearing Poulain report in the Louvre on Tuesday 26 April, Epernon urged that Guise should be tried and executed. But Henry considered the measures he had taken were sufficient. After all, the new papal nuncio, Morosini, unlike his predecessors, was hostile to the League and assured him of papal support. Henry was sufficiently confident to leave the city that very day with his favourite. On the morning of 29 April they parted. Henry left for a week-long retreat of penance and contemplation in the Hieronymite monastery at Vincennes. News that the Duke of Elbeuf was in the vicinity of the Rouen with a small army and threatened to provoke an insurrection forced the king to dispatch Epernon with a portion of the royal army. Henry would soon rue their absence.

* * * *

While the king was at Vincennes, purging himself and drinking ass’s milk, Guise, pressed by the Sixteen, made the momentous decision to come to Paris:

On his return to Paris, the king remained firm in his resolve to face down Guise, ordering units of horse to join the Swiss close to the city. 
He would view any attempt by the duke to come to Paris as a means ‘to play out this tragedy’ and he reiterated his prohibition on 5 May, making it clear that it would be considered an act of treason. On 8 May, Guise left Soissons at 9 pm with eight retainers and an emissary of the Sixteen and, after riding all night, entered Paris at midday the following day. Far from putting his personal device into action—
Ut Phoebus coelo, pax nubila terris discutit
(like Phoebus in the sky, peace disperses the clouds from the earth)—Guise’s presence could only serve to darken the clouds of conspiracy that were swirling around Paris. He knew that his defiance of the king was risky, and might even cost him his life. That is why he did not go to the Louvre but instead to the palace of Catherine de Medici; he knew that she was jealous of Epernon’s influence and guessed that she would shield him from the king’s anger. As he crossed the city, he was quickly recognized and there were shouts of ‘Long live Guise! Liberator of France, pillar of the Church, exterminator of heretics!’ Flowers were thrown from widows. One lady shouted ‘Good prince, now you are here, we are saved’, and tried to kiss him. By the time he reached his destination in the rue Saint-Honoré the press was great as the crowd tried to reach out and touch his cloak.

Catherine took the duke in her carriage to the Louvre, where the king, forewarned, assembled his guards. Guise’s murder was discussed, but the king may have been dissuaded by the fact that the duke had come to the city unaccompanied. There were the protestations of his beloved wife, the duke’s cousin, to take into account. 
Once more he decided to play the duke along and embraced him when he was ushered into the Queen’s chamber. 26 He accepted Guise’s lie that he had been asked to come to Paris by Catherine and that, as a man of honour, he only wished to have satisfaction for the injuries done to him by Epernon. Henry replied that he loved Epernon and he wished the duke to do the same: ‘He who loves the master should love his dog.’ ‘Provided that he does not bite’, replied the duke, using humour to defuse the tension. Over the next two days Catherine did her best to reconcile the two men. They put on a good show. The king demanded a restitution of the Picard towns. Guise said this could only be done as part of a reformation of the kingdom and recommended the programme which his chief counsellor Pierre d’Epinac, Archbishop of Lyon and ‘the
intellectus agens
of the League’, had drawn up, beginning with the summoning of the Estates-General. The king agreed to look at it. At dinner on the evening of the 10th the duke performed his function as Grand Master of France. But neither man was a dupe. After dinner, the king held a meeting with a few close counsellors, at which his mother was not present. They discussed the possibility of summoning the Swiss and French regiments into Paris in order to frighten Guise and force him to leave the city. It was a high-risk strategy. The city had traditionally enjoyed the privilege of guarding itself. In the meantime, orders to search the city’s taverns and arrest strangers were issued.

The royalists had to act because their position was deteriorating by the hour. Many of Guise’s retainers had been in the city for weeks and more were arriving daily. When the duke arrived at the Louvre for dinner he was accompanied by forty horsemen. The outbuildings, garden, and courtyard of the Hôtel de Guise had been turned into an encampment and could barely contain the numbers. The Venetian ambassador noted the extraordinary number of soldiers arriving, and more were anticipated. A large contingent was lodged in and around the residence of the Duchess of Montpensier. The first skirmishes took place on Wednesday 11 May as the governor, François d’O, conducted sweeps in search of Guisard captains who had been distributed throughout the city. When the duke went to the Louvre to complain, the king could no longer dissimulate: ‘as soon as he saw Monsieur de Guise arrive he turned to look away’. 27 Paris was on a state of high alert, and that evening the fateful decision to move troops into the city, in spite of its liberties, was taken. Despite periodic purges of the suspect officers, the royalists were unsure of the loyalty of the militia and so units were ordered into unfamiliar positions outside their neighbourhoods. Many captains refused. When Governor d’O did his rounds that night he found that many units had abandoned their posts. When he asked why he was told ominously that they had gone home to protect their families.

At 4 am a loyal alderman, Lugoly, opened Porte Saint-Honoré and in marched 4,000 Swiss and 2,000 French troops. They passed in silence to the cemetery of the Innocents, where they received their postings and, to the sound of fifes and drums, filed into the waking city. The plan seems to have been to bottle up the volatile Left Bank. 
Three ensigns of Swiss under Crillon crossed the Seine and occupied the market place on the Ile de la Cité. The two bridges that linked the island to the Left Bank were occupied by companies of French foot: 
one under de Gast crossed the Petit Pont and took up a position beneath the Petit Châtelet, a prison whose towers guarded the southern approach to the bridge; the other under Marivaux barred the Pont Saint-Michel. The rest remained on the Right Bank: six ensigns in the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville and a reserve at the cemetery of the Innocents.

It was an orderly takeover and the Parisian response was orderly too. From about 8 am people began to gather together and they began to build barricades. It was a defensive measure to protect their homes and property. In some parts of the Right Bank, such as the rue Saint-Honoré as far as the Innocents, there was little opposition and royalist control was quickly established. Resistance, as had been expected, was led by the University quarter and the Ile de la Cité. Royalist units which penetrated too far toward the university colleges on the Left Bank were forced back at the barricades though bloodshed was largely avoided and only one person was killed.

By 10 am a stalemate had developed as the sides confronted each other behind the makeshift barriers. The three militia colonels who had responsibility for the Left Bank and the Ile de la Cité were magistrates (two judges and a president of the Chamber of Accounts), and as such abhorred social unrest. They quickly took control of the situation and prevented violence. However, some of their junior officers were members of the Sixteen and several units unreliable. 
The loyalists knew that the best way to maintain order was to avoid bloodshed and they sent a delegation to the king, pleading with him to withdraw his troops. The rest of the morning was taken up with negotiations as each side sought to persuade the other to retire.

The duke was kept fully informed of these events. Three hours before the entry of the soldiers, he had been warned that the usual positions of the militia had been altered and that something was afoot. He arose early and went to hear seven o’clock Mass at the nearby Chapelle de Brac. Three hours later the purpose of the royal
putsch
was made clear: 
the king demanded that he leave Paris immediately. At the same time, the duke was being inundated with demands for assistance from across the city, and members of the Sixteen arrived at the Hôtel de Guise to offer their support. It was a momentous decision, but one that the duke took with remarkable coolness. Unlike the king, shut up in the Louvre, Guise came out of his palace to show himself to his supporters. At midday he was walking in the streets in the vicinity ‘full of gaiety and confidence’, chatting and mixing with soldiers and well-wishers. A plan of attack was quickly sketched out. He dispatched his captains into the city, most of them making for the hotspots on the Ile de la Cité and the Left Bank. The Count of Brissac was placed in overall command of the rebels there.

Brissac and his men passed the royalist guards on the bridges without difficulty. Why this should have been so is not difficult to ascertain. The position between the opposing forces had not changed since the morning. Negotiations were under way and there was, as yet, no reason for thinking that they would not succeed. Guise claimed to be acting as an honest broker between the two sides, and his lieutenants had no difficulty in persuading the royalists that their intentions were peaceable. As soon as he crossed to the Left Bank, however, Brissac’s demeanour changed. He began to incite the crowds and called a meeting in the house of a wealthy supporter of the Sixteen, Mathurin Pigneron. Situated in the Place Maubert, it was just a short walk to the royalist position underneath the Petit Châtelet.

The meeting, attended by a number of junior militia officers sympathetic to the Sixteen and former officers who had been purged for their role in previous acts of insurgency, began at around 1 pm. It was an educated group—many of those present were lawyers—with a shared history of dedication to radical Catholic politics. What they discussed we do not know. What we do know is that Brissac gave them a speech, and it must have been a rousing one. He pledged ‘that willingly he would give his life for them and for liberty, and for the Holy Roman and Apostolic faith’. The word that stands out here is ‘liberty’. The junior officers and legal officials who filed out of Pigneron’s at around 3 pm on 12 May 1588 took a pledge to die fighting not just in defence of Catholicism, but to oppose a king, who had consistently trampled on their rights and liberties and whose absolutist principles had now been fully exposed by the use of force against his own subjects.

The effect these men had on returning to their units was electric. 
The magistrates and commanding officers on the Left Bank were brushed aside as the insurgents gathered their student and bourgeois supporters together and charged the advanced royalist pickets in the rue Saint-Jacques who quickly beat a retreat towards the Petit Pont. Brissac’s mixed force of soldiers and bourgeois then assaulted the main position. Resistance quickly melted and he pushed on and seized the bridge and the Petit Châtelet. This defeat placed the royalists in the market place of the Ile de la Cité in peril, and they now found themselves under attack from the surrounding streets.

The victory galvanized the untrained bands of Parisians. An eyewitness in the rue de la Huchette, which ran parallel to the Seine, and was cut off by the royalist units on the bridges, recorded what happened next. The residents had dismantled their barricades and were in disarray, until two League soldiers emerged from the Angel tavern to rally them: ‘Scoundrels! Where are you fleeing to? Abandoning your barricades so that in no time your daughters will be raped in their homes and you’ll be slaughtered like pigs. Follow us! 
There are only half as many of them.’ At the end of the street, another of Guise’s lieutenants, François de Moy, began his attack on the Pont Saint-Michel. He too had animated the bourgeois with a rousing speech, ‘having loudly ranted against the king and against those who surrounded him, whom he called scoundrels, he proclaimed the orders he had been given with the command of the duke to carry them out’. The assault seems to have been coordinated with Brissac, since bells were rung to announce the advance. The royalists were subjected to a fusillade of stones and shot from the surrounding houses. Brissac continued his advance and pushed the Swiss back through the Ile de la Cité to the Pont Notre-Dame. The royalists, demoralized and trapped in the narrow streets, were in disarray and in no position to counterattack. Even so, the failure was one of leadership: there was no coherent command and little coordination between the royalist units. In order to save his beleaguered troops the king pleaded with Guise to intercede and stop further bloodshed. It was the message that Guise had been waiting for. He could now live up to his device and disperse the clouds of dissension. Dressed in a white satin doublet, cap in hand and without arms, he left his palace in the Marais accompanied by only two pages, who preceded him on foot carrying his sword and buckler. At five o’clock he entered the heart of the city, pacifying his supporters and arranging the peaceful departure of the royalists. As he toured the streets he had some difficulty in controlling the passions around him. L’Estoile overheard one Left Bank radical, fresh from the fighting, say that it was time to ‘go and barricade this bugger of a king in his Louvre’. 28 

Others had taken to disparaging him as Brother Henry, or Sire Henry. Everywhere the duke went he was greeted with shouts of ‘Long Live Guise!’ ‘My friends that’s enough’, he replied, ‘Shout long live the King!’ The duke’s role as an honest broker suggested that a deal might be done. On the following day, the king, terrified and trapped inside the Louvre, was considering his options when a letter, intercepted by a royalist agent, was brought to him. It removed all hesitation. Guise was summoning reinforcements to Paris and bragging of how ‘I defeated the Swiss, cut to pieces a part of the royal guard and keep the Louvre invested so closely that I 
will take good care of who is inside. This victory is so great that it will be remembered for ever.’29 That evening Henry fled the city.

* * * *

The Sixteen took control of the city, occupying the Bastille, the château of Vincennes and the Arsenal. The royalist mayor and two Aldermen were thrown into prison. A few days after the barricades, Guise demonstrated his reform credentials, presiding over two popular assemblies that purged the city council and called for the abolition of municipal venal office and the free biennial election of all city officials. The principle that public office should be awarded on merit and not for cash was re-established. This was the first step in the restoration of representative institutions and civic authority throughout France, which envisaged an enhanced role for the Estates-General. 
Free and regular elections would transform it from a forum for the presentation of grievances into an assembly which would guarantee religious uniformity and scrutinize the royal council.

Guise’s objectives, however, were different from his popular supporters. His intention had never been to overthrow the king of France, merely to obtain proper recognition of his worth and replace Epernon at the centre of power. Letting the genie of popular Catholic radicalism out of the bottle had proved remarkably easy; the test was whether Guise could control it for his own ends. All revolutions have their dark side, for the enemies of truth merit death, and it became quickly apparent that the Paris Sixteen were no exception. Years of anti-English propaganda boiled over into violence in the heady days after the fall of Paris. Mathurin Pigneron, whose reputation had been enhanced during the fighting, demanded that action be taken against the English ambassador. Located on the quai des Bernandins in the heart of Left Bank radicalism, the embassy was as potent a symbol of foreign intervention and heretical pollution as the US embassy in Teheran was in 1979. Guise placed a guard round the embassy and a diplomatic incident was avoided. But it was a powerful reminder of his tenuous hold on the people. Populist regimes must give their supporters what they want. No one had been executed for heresy since 1560. On Midsummer’s Eve the new city authorities burned a huge effigy called ‘heresy’ in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Five days later the Parlement of Paris sentenced two daughters of a solicitor to be strangled and their corpses burned. One of them was burned alive ‘by the fury of the mob, who cut the rope before she could be strangled and cast her into the fire’. 30 They had been in prison for eight months, during which time the authorities, including the king, had concentrated on persuading them to abjure. But the judges were now under intense scrutiny. Within days a number of bourgeois invaded the law courts and ‘without respect for his quality’ demanded that the First President of the Parlement execute another Huguenot who had been languishing in prison for a year.