Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (8 page)

He referred to the event as an ‘accident’ caused by seditious elements which contrasted with his own aristocratic stoicism—he had displayed the ‘moderation and patience’ of a Pericles and the ‘magnanimity’ of a Scipio. Wassy’s Protestants begged to differ, but his behaviour after the massacre does not suggest the workings of a cunning mind; he certainly wished to prevent Protestant worship, but as he himself said ‘he despised cruelty and [preferred] to leave the sword and arms to the magistrate’. 33

* * * *

In an age of religious renewal and violence, Europeans need to look back afresh at their own history of sectarian hatred. Wassy was partly a French affair. But for Protestants and Catholics across sixteenth-century Europe the massacre was not an obscure incident in a far-off foreign town; rather it was a profoundly local event, the first salvo in the greater struggle between good and evil, a reminder of what would happen lest one dropped one’s guard at home. The printing presses rolled with news of Wassy not only in French, but also in German, Dutch, English, and Latin. Terrifying woodcuts took the message to the illiterate. Wassy became infamous, a byword for religious bigotry or the evils of sedition, depending on one’s confessional persuasion.

The town’s notoriety was such that its description was added to the later editions of Sebastian Münster’s
Cosmographie Universelle
, a guide to the great cities and major topographic features of Europe—a sort of cumbersome sixteenth-century forerunner to the Michelin Guide.

News of the massacre spread terror among Protestants. Throughout the kingdom congregations held hastily organized secret musters, drew up rolls of those able to bear arms, and hatched plots to seize control of towns. The opening chapter in a terrible story and the beginning of a civil war that would last thirty-six years, Wassy continues to reverberate across the centuries. A new word ‘massacre’ was added to the political lexicon, a sound to which, in recent years, we have become inured. Up until the 1550s, ‘massacre’ had meant the chopping block used by French butchers, their meat cleaver being termed a ‘massacreur’. 34 Within a year the ‘butcher of Wassy’ was himself dead. Prior to the events of 1 March 1562 there had been at least one attempt to assassinate him but, in the wake of the massacre, the Protestants had even greater cause for revenge. The duke’s murder heralded an end to an older form of politics based on knightly chivalric ideals and ushered in a new ideological age in which political assassination was construed as an instrument of divine will. In France, massacres and the assassinations were to become regular occurrences, the Guise fated to be both conspirators and the victims of conspiracy. In the new political age, their image as murderers or martyrs was shaped and manipulated by the opposing religious parties in order to mobilize public opinion across Europe. In order to understand how and why these upheavals occurred we must turn to the origins of the family and chart their rise to power.

The mythic dictum of
The Three Musketeers
is far from original; it was for generations the motto of the House of Lorraine. In 1477, François de Guise’s grandfather, René II, Duke of Lorraine, rode into battle against Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, behind the ‘banner of his ancestors’, which depicted an arm protruding from a cloud and clutching a sword over which was written
Une pour toutes
. 
François’s father, Claude, the second son of René II, who was born at Condé on the Moselle in 1496, changed the emphasis to express solidarity and steadfastness when he took his own motto:
Toutes pour une
.
Là et non plus
(‘All for one. Here and no further’). 1 The ideal of family unity is universal, and the reality of family tensions too.

Relations between family members in the past were no less passionate than today, the stuff of perennial squabbling and reconciliation. In the past the stakes were even higher because power and wealth was predicated on the possession of land, which was acquired principally by inheritance and marriage. Today’s complex families, with their high proportion of step-parents, half-sisters and brothers and multiple sets of in-laws, was much the same as the distant past, where it was high rates of mortality and re-marriage, not family breakdown, that complicated kin relations. Property sharpened the emotional bonds between family members, establishing a sense of dependence or independence, embittering the excluded, and shaping the ambitions of the clever and the cunning. Among the aristocracy the stakes were higher and sibling and generational rivalry had serious political implications: a contested inheritance could result in blood-letting. 
The genius of
King Lear
is timeless. But for contemporaries, its dissection of the rivalry, treachery, and murder that consumes a family made it no fable.

The Guise rise to power was initially predicated on royal service and the favour of the King of France. But their ability to profit from it in the long term, and to hold on to power once favour was withdrawn, was due to an extraordinary level of family solidarity. The Guise did not suffer from the rivalries and jealousies that tore other families apart—the road to political impotence. Individuals acted in the interests of the group; sons invariably deferred to their father, younger brothers to the eldest male. It was recognized that an individual’s status was furthered by working for the collective, meaning that women too had an important role to play in the formulation and implementation of policy. Cooperation was not achieved by the enforcement of patriarchal discipline alone, since this could never by itself ensure harmonious affective relationships. Rather, wealth and power was distributed in such a way as to ensure equilibrium between family members, so good provision was made for younger sons and daughters, who were expected to show deference and loyalty in return. Ecclesiastical property and patronage were crucial to the maintenance of this strategy. The Guise aspired and lived up to their motto, engendering a clan mentality, the nature of which was reinforced by their distinctive origins and status among the princely houses of France.

The Guise descended from the most ancient surviving House of the Franco-Imperial borderlands. During the sixteenth century, genealogists would fancifully trace that descent as far back as the Carolingians and the creation of the kingdom of Lotharingia, the territory that lay between the Meuse and the Rhine, in 855—the implication being that the pedigree of the House of Lorraine was greater than that of the ruling House of Valois, who had replaced the ruling Capetian dynasty as recently as 1328, when the innovation of the Salic law had conveniently prevented succession in the female line. However, in the struggle with the House of Lancaster over this legal technicality, which came to be known as the Hundred Years’ War, the dukes of Lorraine were faithful allies of the Valois. An early example was Raoul, Duke of Lorraine, who acquired in 1334, among other French possessions, the seigneury of Guise when he married the niece of King Philip IV; he was killed by the English at Crécy in 1346.

The true origins of the Guise were more recent. The lineage was the product of the dynastic convolutions of the Houses of Lorraine and Anjou in the fifteenth century. The extinction of the elder ducal line of Lorraine in 1428 triggered a conflict into which the great powers of Valois, Lancaster, and Burgundy were drawn: the duchy was recurrently the focus of Franco-Burgundian power politics right down to 1477. The succession war was a classic confrontation between the heir in the female line, Good King René of Anjou, Count of Provence and King of Naples and Sicily; and the heir in the junior male line, Antoine de Lorraine, Count of Vaudémont and sire of Joinville.

Despite crushing the Angevins at the battle of Bulgnéville in 1431, Vaudémont could not unseat René. Nonetheless, the very favourable terms which he secured for ending his challenge were the roots of the close association which developed between the two lineages. Particularly important was the marriage of Antoine’s eldest son Ferry and René’s daughter Yolande d’Anjou: it was through Yolande’s right that her son René II claimed the duchy on the death of Nicolas d’Anjou, the last surviving son of Good King René, in 1473.

René II’s title was not secure and he now had to confront the greatest power in the region, the Duke of Burgundy. It was only in 1477, after the great triumph of the Lorraine and their Swiss allies at the battle of Nancy, where the body of Charles the Bold, the last Duke of Burgundy, lay humiliatingly unclaimed for two days, that René enjoyed undisturbed possession of Lorraine. René owed much of his success to the support of King Louis XI, and because of this alliance he was unable or unwilling to secure recognition as heir to the duchy of Anjou and county of Provence when Good King René finally died in 1480. Nevertheless, Angevin claims to Provence and the kingdom of Naples and Sicily were never forgotten and were incorporated into his coats of arms. How far his pretensions depended on French support was demonstrated in 1485 when an attempt to remove the Aragonese, who had installed themselves in Naples, ended in dismal failure. In later life he became disillusioned by the unwillingness of Charles VIII and Louis XII to recognize his rights and he did not take part in the French descent into Italy in 1494–5. Nevertheless, the close relationship between the Houses of Valois and Lorraine was destined to continue once the House of Habsburg entered the region between France and the Empire as heirs to the lands of the dukes of Burgundy.

Before he died in 1508, René II drew up his will, dividing his lands among his surviving six sons. The eldest, Antoine, inherited the duchies of Bar and Lorraine. Two sons were sent to be brought up in France and take control of the patrimony held there: the second son, Claude, received the lion’s share, the youngest son François being limited to some smaller properties in Provence. Claude’s inheritance was a substantial one in its own right, consisting of the seigneuries of Mayenne, la Ferté Bernard, and Sableín Maine; the counties of Aumale and Harcourt and the barony of Elbeuf in Normandy; the barony of Boves and the county of Guise in Picardy; and the barony of Joinville and the seigneuries of Ancerville and Montiers-sûr-Saulx in Champagne and the Barrois. The use of ecclesiastical benefices to prevent the fragmentation of the patrimony, for which the Guise became renowned, was already a feature of dynastic policy. Although he was also raised at the French court, the third son, Jean, was a key to the consolidation of the duchy of Lorraine. In 1505, at the age of only 7, he was provided with the bishopric of Metz, one of the richest in Europe, to which was added, in 1517, the bishopric of Toul (a benefice initially earmarked for the youngest brother, Louis, before he renounced it in favour of a military career). Jean completed the hat-trick of Lorraine bishoprics when he acquired the see of Verdun in 1523.2

Claude was only 9 years old when he left home to fulfil his father’s plans. Arriving at the French court in March 1506, he was awarded letters of naturalization. He thus became a Frenchman, took a French title, Count of Guise, and established his residence in France at Joinville in easy reach of both Paris and the capital of Lorraine at Nancy.

But in becoming French he did not forget his ancestors. As a boy, his father had recounted tales of their exploits and how God had favoured their House because of its piety, especially the deeds of Godefroy, Duke of Lorraine and Count of Bouillon, on the First Crusade and his election as the first King of Jerusalem in 1099, ‘chosen above others...to take in hand the sacred sceptre of Judah’. 3 His father assured him that providence had marked out their house for special consideration. At the battle of Nancy, God had revealed his ‘assurance in his well-beloved children’ and his scorn for the ‘lack of piety’ displayed by their enemy, Charles of Burgundy.

A more lasting influence on his life was his mother, Philippa of Guelders, who had been born in Brabant in 1462. Claude was her favourite son, possibly because her eldest, Antoine, had been born before the death of her husband’s repudiated and barren first wife.

Although rumours that Antoine was a bastard caused some tension between the two eldest brothers, it did not lead to an open rift and in 1530 a transaction was signed, definitively leaving the French possessions to Claude and Lorraine and Bar to Antoine, ‘in order to uphold and nourish peace and fraternal love, and to flee and avoid all troubles, questions, debates and quarrels’. 4 For the next eleven years after the death of her husband, Philippa, with the assistance of Nicolas le Clerc, doctor of theology at the Sorbonne, took care of her children and their affairs, and then in 1519 she shocked them by announcing that she was retiring to the convent of Sainte-Claire at Pont-à-Mousson.

She became a byword for saintliness. Although, in consideration of her status, the Pope had dispensed her from the novitiate and life of austerity, she insisted on completing her year on probation as the humblest novice, sleeping in the common dormitory, going barefoot, and rigidly observing every fast. Despite her reclusion, she continued to play an important part in Claude’s life. Until her death in 1547, she continued to maintain her rights to the Angevin inheritance in Italy and signed herself ‘Queen of Sicily’. She received visits by her children and grandchildren, jogging consciences habituated to the frivolities of court. Philippa’s renunciation of the world had more immediate consequences for Claude. She renounced her dower and enabled him to take up residence in Joinville and, in an ostentatious show of favouritism, bequeathed all her moveable property to him alone.

Just before his mother entered the cloister, another woman, Antoinette de Bourbon, entered his life. She would play a dominating role in family affairs for the next sixty years, outliving her husband and all her sons. Unusually for an aristocratic match, love seems to have played a part in their union. It was in 1512 that Claude, as part of the suite of the heir to the throne of France, the Count of Angoulême, who was visiting his betrothed, the Duchess of Brittany in the Hôtel des Tournelles, first encountered Antoinette, daughter of Marie de Luxembourg, Countess of Saint-Pol and François, Count of Vendôme, the great-grandfather of King Henry IV. The two were able to talk alone, a rare occurrence for teenagers of the opposite sex in those days; and following this, Claude, aged only 16, asked Angoulême to procure 17-year-old Antoinette’s hand in marriage. The dowry was fixed at 40,000 livres and they married in June 1513 in the royal parish church of Saint-Paul in Paris beneath the stained glass which depicted Joan of Arc.