Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (14 page)

I have pacified the Kingdom of Scotland which I hold and possess with the same power and authority as I have in France, to which two kingdoms I have joined and united another, England, its kingship, its subjects, and its rights which, by a perpetual union, alliance and confederation, I can dispose of as my own in such a way that the said three kingdoms together can now be deemed a single monarchy. 6

This was wishful thinking on several counts: not least the fact that the putative Franco-British empire was as much a Guise as a Valois dynastic entity.

* * * *

The rapprochement with England was the work of Anne de Montmorency. In the spring of 1551 the two kings exchanged embassies; Henry II conferring on Edward VI the Order of Saint Michel and Edward reciprocated by sending the insignia of the Order of the Garter.

Montmorency hosted the English embassy at his own château at Châteaubriand. A treaty of friendship was signed and Henry’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, betrothed to the English king. Edward VI became godfather to Henry’s third son; the child, the future Henry III, being given the names Edouard-Alexandre. In recompense for his services, Montmorency’s barony was raised to a duchy in July—an unprecedented step for a man of non-princely birth and an innovation which led to muttering by those of greater pedigree. As Constable of France, Grand Master of the royal household, and Governor of Languedoc, he possessed unrivalled political power and access to the king. In the earliest days of the new reign, Henry had made great display of his favouritism by permitting Montmorency the honour of sharing his bed, a practice whose indignity shocked some Italian observers. The Guise were particularly put out that the king had been present while Montmorency was having a foot bath, a moment of intimacy they could never aspire to. But Henry did not just crave paternal guidance; he needed a maternal figure too. His mistress, Diane de Poitiers, was Montmorency’s only serious rival. Born in 1499, she was 46 years old when Henry became king. She took responsibility for the education of the royal children, including Mary Stuart, much to the vexation of their neglected mother, Catherine de Medici. Such was Diane’s hold over her lover that the imperial ambassador, a hostile witness whose code-name for Diane was
Silvius
, reported that policymaking was done as much in the bedroom as in the council chamber:

After having reported to her what had been negotiated all morning and since, either with ambassadors or others of importance, he sat beside her bosom with a guitar in his hands, on which he played, asking her whose opinion it was to be, the constable’s or the duke of Guise’s, and if
Silvius
was not watching, touching one or other of her nipples and looking at her attentively. 7

In the palace revolution that accompanied Henry’s accession to the throne, the old king’s favourites—some of whom were imprisoned—and his mistress, the duchess of Etampes, were stripped of their possessions and titles at the expense of Montmorency and Diane. Montmorency was not only reinstated to his offices, but he was given the arrears of his salary for the years he had been unpaid while in disgrace, a colossal sum amounting to 100,000 crowns. The constable was in a position to favour his own clan. His brother was made Governor of Paris and the Ile-de-France. He had a particular affection for the three Coligny brothers, the sons of his sister Louise. The eldest Odet, Cardinal de Châtillon, his most trusted counsellor, was provided with a number of new benefices, including the rich-picking of the bishopric of Beauvais. The second son, Gaspard, became colonel-general of the infantry.

Henry was equally generous to his lover: he gave her the Duchess of Etampes’s jewels, including a diamond valued at 50,000 crowns and a cash gift of a further 100,000 crowns. The same year he bestowed on her Chenonceau, perhaps the most graceful of all French Renaissance châteaux, and a year later she was given a title, that of the Duchess of Valentinois, to match her new surroundings and status. Diane had once been married to a great Norman lord, Louis de Brézé, who had died as long ago as 1531. She had no sons from this marriage for whom she could sponsor a career, but she did have two daughters—Françoise, born in 1518, and Louise born in 1521. Diane was astute and ambitious and she married both to naturalized foreign princes. In 1539 Françoise married Robert de la Marck, Duke of Bouillon, a neighbour of the Guise who, like them, had interests in the Holy Roman Empire. His mother-in-law took responsibility for his career: in 1547 he was made a Marshal of France and in 1552 he became Governor of Normandy, a province where she already exercised extensive influence and, since the death of her husband, was a major landowner. The Guise too did well out of the new regime.

The ageing Claude retained his governorship of Burgundy but now lived in semi-retirement at Joinville. However, his two eldest sons, François, who was confirmed as Governor of Dauphiné and whose county of Aumale was made a duchy in 1547, and Charles, who as Archbishop of Reims had the honour of crowning the new king, had long been companions of the dauphin and were now promoted to the Privy Council for the first time. From the start of their careers they were Diane’s protégés. For the previous two years Charles had dined frequently with Diane, where the conversation undoubtedly turned to the future shape of the government. The burgeoning relationship was cemented in July 1546 when Diane married her younger daughter, Louise, to the third Guise brother, Claude II. This was one of the key political unions of the decade and a magnificent opportunity for a younger son whose slice of the family fortune would otherwise have made for a relatively meagre living. Diane was generous in turn with the confiscations that the king bestowed on her. It was through her favour that the Guise acquired significant properties in Paris and the Ile-de-France, a departure from their traditional landholding base and crucial to men who were now expected to attend frequently to business at court. 

Diane also trafficked in the profits of the royal demesne. 
She gave her new son-in-law Rhuys and Sucinio in Brittany. Aumale was granted the rights to administer all lands for which there was no heir and which had escheated to the Crown. In order to support better his station when he became Duke of Guise in 1550, he was awarded the revenues and rights to appoint officials in Dourdan, Provins, and Saumur. In exchange, like a commodity in a business deal, Louise left her mother and went to live at Joinville with her mother-in-law.

Duke Claude’s death could easily have led to squabbling among his heirs. The complexity of inheritance laws ensured that lawyers hovered like vultures ready to feed off the carcass of any feuding family. In one respect the Guise enjoyed good fortune. Claude and Antoinette had only had one daughter (Louise) who did not take holy orders and thus required a dowry. She died within a year of marrying the great Flemish nobleman, Charles de Croÿ, Duke of Aerschot, in 1541. As a consequence there were no quarrelsome brothers-in-law for the Guise siblings to contend with. Control of Church patronage, already significant in the guise of Jean, Cardinal of Lorraine, was tightened with the accession of Henry II, ensuring that of the six surviving male children only four had to be provided for. Standards of ecclesiastical propriety had recovered a little since Jean had been made a bishop at the age of 3. The second son, Charles, had to wait until 1538, when he was 14, to succeed his uncle as Archbishop of Reims, which also bestowed on him the dignity of first peer of the realm. He became cardinal in 1547. The fourth son, Louis, three years his junior, was made bishop of Troyes in 1545 at the comparatively advanced age of 18. The fifth brother, also like his eldest brother called François, was from a young age chosen to be a knight of Saint John, which meant that he, too, took holy orders and would not marry. His career was also starred. Nominally, he should not have taken his vows until he was 21 in 1555, but six years before this he was already Grand Prior of France, the head of the Order of Saint John in northern France, which had its headquarters in the sprawling Temple complex in north-east Paris. In a letter to the Pope asking for dispensation due to his youth, his brother Charles evoked the crusading mission of the order and that of his own house, as ‘kings of Jerusalem and Sicily’. 8 Even before his nomination, François had gathered an impressive portfolio of estates and houses (called commanderies) owned by the knights: the commandery of Troyes alone brought him an income of 5,250 livres. As a teenager he was on the way to becoming a significant figure in his own right: a letter to his eldest sister, the queen of Scotland, written on the way to Rome on business, suggests a 15-year-old of unusual precocity. 9

This left only three sons to share the landed inheritance, which was divided on strict geographical lines. The eldest son, François, became the second Duke of Guise and, in addition, received the marquisate of Mayenne and all the territories in the Barrois, Champagne, and Provence. The lands in Normandy were divided between the remaining two sons. The third son Claude II, was given the newly created duchy of Aumale. The reasoning behind this is clear: on his marriage to her daughter Diane de Poitiers had favoured him with a significant portion of her Norman property, and he now became one of the great magnates in a province that was crucial to the functioning of the putative Franco-British empire. The sixth son, René, was still only 14-years-old and, although the barony of Elbeuf was set aside for him, he continued to live at Joinville under the wardship of his mother.

Ambitious younger sons were thus satisfied with good marriages, generous portions, or careers in the highest echelons of the Church. As they established their own households and dynasties, their part of the bargain consisted in deferring to their eldest brother in all public affairs, as if he were their father. A letter of 25 June 1552 from Antoinette to René, who had just arrived to join the royal army, indicates how this was inculcated in each child: ‘You should conduct yourself wisely and with the counsel of your brother [François]. Otherwise do not give me any cause to be displeased with you. Besides the news I get from others, write to me often. Love well your kindred and, as you are obliged, act the same towards your wife. ’10 A clan mentality was the result, a mindset that was enshrined in the ritual of everyday life in one particular ceremony, the
lever
. This ritual was usually associated with the rising and dressing of the king and was most developed by Louis XIV at Versailles, where the theatre of monarchy was most fully elaborated. For the Guise, it was a means for the younger brothers to demonstrate their respect and deference to their elder brothers, themes which are echoed in the formality of letters between the siblings. When the brothers were at court, the four younger brothers would rise earlier and then assist at Cardinal Charles’s
lever
, after which they would then visit François and attend on him. When they went to meet the king they thus appeared as a group.

There is one final and simpler reason that explains family unity. The concept of ‘All for One’ was not imposed by discipline alone. Having grown up in a strict but loving environment at Joinville, the Guise quite simply had a great deal of love and affection for one another.

Theirs was an upbringing utterly devoid of the tribulations of, say, the king himself. Family gatherings were as frequent as matters of state permitted. In 1549 Jacques de la Brosse informed the Queen of Scotland that the Duke and Duchess of Guise, their six sons, their daughters-in-law, and the little duke of Longueville were all gathered at Reims for Easter. The crèche that Antoinette and her daughters-in-law maintained at Joinville continued to grow throughout the 1540s and 1550s. In 1553, Louise de Rieux, Countess of Harcourt—the new wife of René, the last son to marry—moved here. Such a large and vibrant household was a strong attraction, and the whole family gathered there in the same year to celebrate Christmas.

* * * *

The two eldest brothers who ran family affairs on the disappearance of the first generation of the family in 1550 complemented each other perfectly, like Castor and Pollux as their admirers had it. The Renaissance idealized the harmony between war and letters, ‘these two great virtues, which your most illustrious House has in more abundance than all the other princely families of our time’. 11 François, though not uneducated—he could, for example, compose an epitaph in the style of the Ancients—was first and foremost a soldier. Whereas the king’s love for his chief minister was based on respect tinged with fear of disapproval, his love for Guise was that of the favourite and evinced in masculine camaraderie. Even by the standards of French kings, Henry stood out for his love of martial sports. Upon his accession the court began to give tournaments to an extent that had not been seen since the fourteenth century, and even more unusually he refused to allow deference to his royal status, with the consequence that he was often worsted in the joust. Guise was among the most prominent knights on display and was often to be seen fighting alongside his brother-in-arms, the constable’s nephew, Gaspard de Coligny, for they had ‘sworn friendship together’.12 

Guise’s prowess, courage, and bravery were already the stuff of legend. He was accustomed to go into battle with his visor raised. In an attack on Boulogne in 1545 he was wounded by an English lance thrust which entered above the right eye, toward the nose, and passed out on the other side between the ear and the back of the neck, with such force that the head of the lance was broken and remained embedded in his skull. Fortunately, Ambrose Paré, the greatest surgeon of his age, was on hand and with a pair of smith’s pincers he drew out the object. Even so the prognosis was not initially good, given the violence of the blow and the subsequent operation. His miraculous recovery was yet another manifestation of God’s special providence. Henceforth, François was nicknamed
le Balafré
, ‘scar-face’. He displayed the attributes of a true Christian knight in other respects. At the siege of Metz in 1552 he refused to deliver up a slave who belonged to the commander of the imperial light cavalry, Don Luis Davila, who had fled to the French lines on a Spanish horse. Guise returned the horse as a mark of courtesy but ‘could not return the slave since he became free in reaching the privileged soil of this glorious kingdom of France’. 13 He was not given to public displays of anger but showed moderation towards his enemies, even veering, as he got older, towards the sober and reserved in demeanour. The start of the battle of Renty was one of the few occasions on which he was recorded as losing his temper, striking the lieutenant of his gendarmes, Moy de Saint-Phal, on the helmet because he had broken ranks. After the battle, Moy demanded satisfaction for the offence but the duke was quick to repair their friendship, remarking in the king’s tent that it was better to hit a man for being too precipitous than too cowardly and thus the ‘blow carried more honour than disgrace’. 14 The duke loved camp life and esteemed soldiers even of the meanest sort, making a point of remembering their names and speaking to them familiarly. And he was tough when he needed to be: when a drunken German mercenary confronted him one day with a pistol, the duke instantly unsheathed his sword and with one stroke whipped the pistol from his hands, and placed the point of the blade against the German’s throat. News of this soon spread, much to the appreciation of the other mercenaries who respected such manly bravado.