Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (49 page)

That night Henry anguished about what to with Cardinal Louis and the Archbishop of Lyon. In deference to their high ecclesiastical status, his initial inclination was to spare both. In the end, remembering the threats made by the cardinal, he spared only the archbishop. 
Even the
Quarante-Cinq
bauked at this sacrilegious task. Henry had to cajole Michel de Gast, one of his most faithful gentlemen. The deed was done on the morning of the 24 December by six soldiers, who were paid 200 livres each. Louis’s remains, too, were burned and his ashes scattered. The Guise brothers were dead. The Counter-Revolution had begun.

His dream of reclaiming the Anjou succession in ruins, Henri II, Duke of Guise, grandson of Henri I, turned away from the city of Naples on 7 April 1648 and rode north to safety. It was a desperate situation: he had only fifty men left; his esquire had abandoned him; his ensign had thrown away the ducal standard. He turned right off the Appian Way just before Capua and headed inland in order to cross the Volturno by ferry to Caiazzo. It was dangerous country. As he skirted to his left rose the wooded slopes of Mount Tifata, 620 metres high, and to his right the peak of San Leucio, whose castle dominated the region of Caserta with its magnificent views across the bay of Naples, loomed into view. As he made for the gap between the peaks, a squadron of Spanish cavalry, larger than his own, appeared from a wood with the intention of barring his route. The sounds of galloping horses from the rear announced the arrival of three more Spanish squadrons, cutting off his retreat.

There was no thought of surrender. The duke tossed off his cape and charged straight ahead, scattering the Spanish horse and, with his sword in his teeth and pistols in his hand, pushed passed thirty musketeers and made it to the other side of the ravine. After a couple of miles of hot pursuit, in which his lieutenant, the Baron de Mallet, was killed and the duke wounded in the shoulder, the troop halted and the remaining officers pleaded with the duke to change mounts and escape while he could. They were too few to hold the enemy for long and less than a mile from the ferry the duke’s horse was hit and he tumbled to the ground. He looked for an officer to whom he could present his sword: two captains stepped forward, but they respectfully refused it, accepting as proof of his honourable surrender two ribbons which the duke took from his hat, one of buff, the colour of his lover, Mademoiselle de Pons, the other green, the colour of the House of Anjou.

Henri II’s dashing escapade reminds us that during the seventeenth century the Guise did not go into rapid decline; rather they continued to be a great princely House whose dynastic interests remained European in scope and whose opposition to the Habsburgs remained undimmed. Henri restored the honour and glory of the family, which had been eclipsed in recent years. His father, Charles, had been forced to leave France in 1631 and died in exile in 1640. Henri had initially been destined for the Guise ecclesiastical empire, which had been rebuilt after the Wars of Religion, under his uncle Cardinal Louis III, who became the fourth Guise Archbishop of Reims in 1605. Already Abbot of Saint-Urbain, Montier-en-Der, Corbie, Ourscamp, Saint-Denis, he added six others, including Cluny, Fécamp, and Mont Saint-Michel during the minority of Louis XIII.

Unfortunately, Louis III was wholly unsuited for a career in the Church. He was a rake and his appalling handling of the benefices strained relations with his more pious brother. Even as an archbishop, he did not bother with consecration. He devoted most of his time to an ex-mistress of Henry IV, and he seems to have contracted some form of marriage to her. She bore him five children. Louis’s pre-Counter-Reformation attitudes caused a scandal and threatened the attempts by his brother to rebuild the family’s fortunes and to erase the taint of rebellion associated with it.1 His death in 1621 came as something of a relief. But the other branches of the family began to falter too: the Houses of Mayenne, Aumale, and Mercoeur were about to disappear for lack of male heirs. Charles’s plans to pass the ecclesiastical empire, worth around 400,000 livres, to his second son, Henri, foundered in the 1630s partly because he was a bitter personal enemy of Cardinal Richelieu but perhaps more importantly because, although he had been Archbishop of Reims since the age of 15, Henri showed no interest in a religious vocation and was intent on emulating the dissolute ways of his uncle. When his elder brother died in 1639 he resigned his benefices and the century-old Guise ecclesiastical empire had come to an end.

Henri’s desire to quit the Church was driven by his burning ambition to emulate his forebears. He revived the Guise-Coligny feud in 1643 when he fought and killed Maurice de Coligny, descendant of the admiral, in a duel. Next he revived the animosity with the Habsburgs. When Naples revolted against Spanish rule in 1647 he arrived with little money and few men, expecting that the cry of Anjou would still have meaning for Neapolitans a century after his great-grandfather had been forced out with a much larger army. Despite his ignominious failure and four years spent in Spanish captivity, he tried once again in 1654, this time backed by Cardinal Mazarin. The expedition was back in France within weeks. He spent the rest of his life at Louis XIV’s court, where he was occupied by debts and love affairs until his death in 1664. The seventeenth-century Guise were not of the calibre of their sixteenth-century forebears. Henri was a reckless romantic, whose grand gestures and personal bravery were paid for by sacrificing his family’s role in the Church, the bedrock of Guise fortunes. Behind the dashing façade, he was a libertine, utterly at odds with the soldierly demeanour of his grandfather and great-grandfather.

Though the Guise family survived and flourished after the Wars of Religion, the sense of clan feeling did not. Henri II’s exaggerated sense of his own honour was no substitution for the lack of solidarity with his cousins. The absence of cohesion or of any attempt to build a network of obligation among brothers and cousins made the various branches of the House of Lorraine a much less significant political force as the seventeenth century progressed. The origins of this change can be traced back further, to the years following the murders of Blois when the family had the opportunity to replace the Valois as the next royal dynasty. Henry III’s Counter-Revolution was an immense failure; rather than restoring royal authority it brought the monarchy crashing down. The reason for this was the genuinely popular outpouring of grief that greeted news of the assassinations. Emotions were whipped up further by preachers who turned the victims into Catholic martyrs and urged their congregations to resist the tyrant. ‘The people’, reported Pierre de l’Estoile, ‘never left a sermon without having fire in their heads’, and they turned their anger on the symbols of royal authority. On 29 December, St Thomas of Canterbury Day, the congregation of Saint-Gervais trampled the royal arms, which had adorned the door of the church, following a sermon by Dr Guincestre, one of the preachers maintained by the Duchess of Montpensier. The same preacher, during a sermon on 1 January, invited his congregation to take an oath that they would avenge the deaths of the brothers ‘with the last taste of their blood’. The next day a group destroyed sepulchres and marble figures that the king had erected for his dead
mignons
close to the great altar of the church of Saint-Paul.

These emotions are also indicative of the success of the propaganda campaign of the Catholic League in the years preceding the murders at Blois. News of the suffering of English Catholics had given St Thomas of Canterbury Day fresh significance for French Catholics. On the feast day, just six days after the murders, a Jesuit preacher in Rouen made the comparison between the murder of the Guise brothers and the murder of the Saint explicit. The impact that the sermon had on an emotionally charged audience was recounted by a refugee English nun:

When he came unto the pulpytt, all eyeis and mowthes gapying upon hym, the good man was in such a passyion that he seemyd lyke to burst and could scars bring ouyt hys words for weepyng, the passion of that tyme had so altered his voice. Hys matter was of blessyd St. Thomas, declaring to the people the cause of hys martirdome in behalfe of Chrystes churche, and of the quarrel betwixt hym and the kyng, and how hys braynes were stroke out upon the pavement before ye alter. Thys thing was so apt for hys purpose that the people could by and by apply ytt that the preacher had no soner named the slaughter of theyr two princes but thatt all fell out into weepyng, and the preacher ther sobyng allowed could saye no more. Butt after a preatty space, striving with himself to speake, he clapyyng of hys hands cryed aloude, o pover eglese gallicane, and so came downe, the people all so movyd as we never have seene nor shall see ye lyke.2

In Paris, requiem Masses were hurriedly organized and churches decked out in mourning. On 8 January, the Duke of Aumale was present at the service in Saint-Jean-en-Grève, the family’s Parisian place of worship, and a month later the same church, still covered in funeral hangings, hosted the baptism of Duke Henri’s posthumously born son. The city aldermen and militia were prominent in the cortege which conducted the boy from the Hôtel de Guise to the church. The first alderman of the city, Nicolas Roland, held the baby at the font, symbolizing Parisian solidarity with the Guise. Rumour had it that the child had been born with the mark of divine grace. Across France in the early months of 1589 carefully managed funeral processions and ceremonies were staged in memory of the duke and the cardinal. These were highly unconventional in that ordinary people became participants, rather than simply spectators in the ritual. Thousands of small children played a prominent role. They walked two by two and proceeded from church to church. They carried candles, recited public prayers, and sang Psalms and hymns. Despite the bitter cold, the majority of those who took part walked barefoot wearing only a shirt. Paris’s dark, narrow, and icy streets were illuminated on many evenings by thousands of candles and filled with the sounds of prayer.

At one such ceremony on 10 January, thousands of boys and girls wound their way up to the church and monastery of Sainte-Geneviève, at the entrance of which they ‘threw ther candles to their feet and walked over them as a sign that this accursed tyrant [Henry III] had been excommunicated’. The presses rolled with pamphlets extolling the innocence of the murdered victims and vilifying the king. A new feature of this propaganda was the widespread use of simple pictures designed to shock; they consisted of gruesome pictures of the Guise brothers, their bodies riddled with injuries or the alleged mistreatment of their corpses by a gleeful Henry III. 3

On 14 January 1589 a decree of the Sorbonne was registered in the Parlement deposing Henry III, and royal government was replaced by a Council composed of the Three Estates, as some deputies had envisaged at Blois. Mayenne was elected lieutenant-general and the Cardinal of Bourbon declared King Charles X. The murder of Henry III on 1 August 1589 by a Dominican monk was represented by the League as inspired by God; the murderer exulted as a new David killing the modern Goliath. Getting rid of Henry III failed to solve the essential contradiction of the League. Its democratic ideals were in conflict with the demands of wartime administration, which required not debate but bureaucratic management to feed insatiable Mars. The vacuum in resources was filled by Spanish silver. Increasingly Spanish troops were required to sustain the war effort. Despite his advantage on the battlefield, Henri de Navarre found himself unable to defeat the League militarily. Navarre’s ultimate victory was far from inevitable. If the League had found a serious Catholic alternative, the likely scenario would have been the division of the kingdom, along similar lines to the Low Countries, into two mutually hostile states: a Catholic north, supported by Spain and organized, not unlike the Dutch Republic, according to the principles of representative government, and the Bourbon south, where the king’s absolute authority guaranteed religious tolerance. The Cardinal of Bourbon died in captivity in 1590 but the wartime emergency ensured that it was only on 26 January 1593 that the Estates-General convened in the Louvre to elect a new monarch. The failure to find a consensus candidate was due to two factors: internal squabbling among the House of Lorraine and Spanish arrogance. Within the family, the Duke of Lorraine’s son, Henri, and Charles, Duke of Guise, who had recently escaped captivity, both had their supporters. But Mayenne, now head of the family in France, had no wish to cede power to a younger man and after a six day family conference at Reims at the end of April no agreement was reached.

In order to claim his reward for propping up the League, Philip II now brought pressure to bear: on 16 May his ambassador officially solicited the Estates to elect the Infanta Isabella. Since the laws of succession had already been changed, the abolition of the Salic law, which her candidature would require, was relatively non-contentious. At this juncture, Philip, who had a tendency to overestimate his power, overplayed his hand. Spanish bribes circulated freely but their cajoling was another matter; it even upset Mayenne. Had the Spanish agreed to marry the Infanta to a French prince, most likely Charles de Guise, a deal could have been struck; but instead the Spanish ambassador insisted that she marry a Habsburg, Archduke Ernest, brother of the emperor, Rudolf II. The Estates refused under any circumstances to countenance the crown going to a foreign king.

On 4 July the Spanish changed tack and agreed to the election of Guise and his marriage to the Infanta. The problem with the 22-year-old duke was that, although he had widespread support among the people of Paris, he was not taken seriously by his own relatives. Mayenne and the Duke of Lorraine were underwhelmed. Mayenne had tasted power and was not going to cede it to his young nephew without substantial guarantees. His demands were exorbitant and would have left him in effective control of the League kingdom, his nephew a mere puppet. Mayenne’s only interest was to perpetuate his own authority and he fell out with the dukes of Aumale and Elbeuf too. The women, once a force for solidarity, now stirred the pot of discord: the dowager Duchess of Montpensier referred to her nephew sarcastically as ‘the pretty king’; he reminded Mayenne’s wife ‘of a little boy who still needed a spanking’, and even his mother seemed to prefer the children from her second marriage, especially the Duke of Nemours, who referred to Charles de Guise as a ‘young fool who has his mother to help him get ahead’. 4 The clan mentality which had sustained and ruled the family since its foundation by the first duke, Claude, was at an end. As Henri de Navarre arrived at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis on the evening of 22 July with a huge retinue of nobles and counsellors, he was conscious of the divisions within the League. The date was carefully chosen, the drama masterfully orchestrated.