Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (37 page)

He must not attach any credence to them.’17

The precise level of Charles IX’s involvement in the invasion is difficult to gauge. Twice in July 1571, he and his mother had met Louis of Nassau in secret. No doubt he dreamed of emulating his father and grandfather and of regaining the ancient French lands in Flanders and Artois that had been usurped by the Habsburgs. Charles wrote to Nassau on 27 April 1572 in support of the liberation of the Low Countries from Spanish ‘oppression’. ‘All my fancies are bound up’, he wrote a month later, ‘with opposing the grandeur of the Spaniards and I am determined to conduct myself as subtly as possible.’18 Zun˜iga, the Spanish ambassador, was well aware of Charles’s game and of his limited room for manoeuvre. In a letter of 1 June Philip II ordered him to play along: ‘as long as [France] does not lower its mask, we shall not lower ours, but give them to understand that we believe them’; and more explicit instructions were issued a month later: ‘it is necessary that they believe that we believe their external appearances’. 19 In this context, the attitude of England was crucial.

There was some misplaced hope that England could be persuaded to act as France’s proxy. But the failure of the English marriage and Elizabeth’s flat refusal—fearing French hegemony as much as Spanish—to sign anything more than a defensive alliance made Catherine, in particular, resistant to an adventurous foreign policy that threatened the fragile peace at home. The overwhelming majority of Frenchmen shared the Cardinal of Lorraine’s assessment that summer: ‘If France enters the war, all is ruined.’20

In the hot and humid summer of 1572, the Privy Council was dangerously divided on the matter of intervention. Coligny returned to the Council on 6 June. His familiarity with the king raised eyebrows and rumours spread about his influence on policy. His chief ally, Marshal Montmorency, was sent to England, where he arrived on 10th to ratify the Treaty of Blois. More than protocol was at stake:

a man of high status was required to impress upon Elizabeth and her ministers the benefits of an Anglo-French invasion. He was empowered by Catherine to make another marriage offer, this time in the shape of Charles IX’s youngest brother, the Duke of Alençon. Elizabeth made it clear that she found the idea of marrying a man twenty-two years her junior ridiculous and restated her desire to remain on friendly terms with Spain. Catherine refused to countenance taking risks without the English and her opposition to intervention was hardening. On his return Montmorency put a favourable gloss on his mission and convinced Charles, in a meeting on 20 July that, notwithstanding the Saint-Ghislain debacle, all was not lost and the prospect of the English marriage and an Anglo-French offensive still alive. The court then dispersed for three weeks: the king went to the Loire and the Queen Mother went to Châlons to visit her daughter Claude, Duchess of Lorraine. When the Privy Council reconvened in Paris on 6 August 1572 the tensions that had been simmering that summer exploded in two stormy meetings.

The various ambassadors found it difficult to glean what went on.

The ambassador of the Grand Duke of Tuscany reported that all was in ‘confusion’; Walsingham told Elizabeth that Paris was in a state of ‘suspense’. However, the basic positions are not difficult to ascertain from the memoranda which survive. Coligny put his case for war with an undercurrent of menace: ‘The war is not only just, it is necessary if we wish to avoid a more dangerous one in the future.’21 The ultra-Catholics objected to the king supporting a military adventure in favour of heretics and rebels. The Duke of Anjou was at their head, the Duke of Nevers his most eloquent mouthpiece. Nevers was not only opposed to war on grounds of conscience, but against all forms of covert operations too: to provoke Philip II was to run the risk of an invasion of the south from Philip’s bases in Italy and across the Pyrenees.

Since the spring he had argued that a pre-emptive strike on the Protestant leadership was necessary and justified. But it was not the ultras who swung the day. The key intervention came from the ageing Jean de Morvilliers, who had been summoned from semi-retirement.

Despite his antipathy to the ultras and his closeness to Montmorency, he came down firmly against war. ‘Truly’, he wrote, ‘it must be confessed that the conquest of the Low Countries would be the finest and the most suitable that the King could accomplish. I do not say it is impossible but I cannot imagine it being done.’22 What concerned Morvilliers was the failure of Elizabeth and the German Princes to commit themselves to an offensive alliance. Coligny lost the day.

Though open war was out of the question, the king did not cease to continue with covert encouragement for the rebels. Agents in England and Germany were secretly instructed to do everything they could to get Elizabeth and the German princes to break with Spain, thus creating the preconditions for an immediate French attack. But Coligny would wait no longer. French volunteers, not all of them Protestants, had already departed without encouragement. He was also driven by a sense of divine mission. In a letter to lord Burghley he saw himself as ‘God’s warrior’ about to go into battle against the ‘servants of Satan’. 23 Just as Guise had found himself cornered months previously, so Coligny was now trapped: honour required that he fulfil his pledge to the House of Orange; conscience that he follow the path of Truth; and the youthful entourage of Protestant captains gathering in Paris for the royal wedding were impatient for action. With or without royal dispensation, he resolved to go to the Netherlands. In a letter to Orange on 9 August he announced that he would bring 12,000 foot and 3,000 horse with him, and the following day he walked out of a council meeting without promising to desist.

The date of his departure was fixed for the 25 August.

Historians remain divided over whether the failed assassination on 22 August was carried out on Guise’s orders. He had a motive and there is evidence that links him with the assassin. But he vigorously denied involvement and the evidence pointing to him is circumstantial.

It is at this point, as myth and legend becomes entangled with fact, that the conspiracy theories take over. In the absence of evidence we are reduced to conjectures about motive. Was the duke the scapegoat for a wider conspiracy? Did Catherine, motivated by insane jealousy at her son’s newly won independence, want Coligny dead? The conceit is seductively Shakespearean. Despite recent attempts to restore her image, Catherine remains the prime suspect. Charles IX was in awe of Coligny, perhaps even a little frightened by his cold conviction, and had taken to referring to him as ‘father’. The date of the assassination—22 August—is surely significant in establishing a motive.

Those hostile to the Guise claim that they had been plotting for months to undermine the peace and stop the marriage. But if the Duke of Guise was the lone conspirator why did he wait until after Henri de Navarre’s and Marguerite’s marriage, which took place on the 18th, to do the killing? No: whoever wished Coligny dead also wished the marriage to go ahead. The assassination was not designed to end the peace; nor was it a pre-emptive strike in the next civil war. In fact, the opposite was imperative: that Coligny be stopped from beginning a foreign war and threatening internal peace. This can be shown by subsequent events: as Paris descended into chaos the king issued several orders from 24 to 28 August upholding the edict of pacification. There is a more fundamental objection to considering the failed assassination as a Guise plot. The duke had made his peace with Coligny. To break his word after only three months would have been a flagrant challenge to royal authority, for which ‘grave penalties’ had been threatened. Guise was young and inexperienced, but he was no fool. Most of his family were in Italy, leaving himself and his uncle, the Duke of Aumale, to face the inevitable judicial and political backlash.

The Spanish conspiracy theory is at its weakest here. The success of the revolt in the Netherlands meant they had little more to offer the Guise than moral support. If the Spanish were sending him money it was pitiful: the duke continued to be plagued by creditors and in September was forced to make his first sale of property (the barony of Cuverville for 18,000 livres) in order to keep them at bay. More crucial to the duke’s calculations were local circumstances, especially the attitude of Paris’s Catholic governor, Marshal Montmorency, who had already faced him down twice. Montmorency’s absence from the city in August is a conundrum; it has received scant attention, but was crucial to the chain of events. The marshal was still working for the English alliance early in the month but fell ill and retired to his estates at Chantilly to the north of Paris, and was unable to attend the royal wedding. But Guise could not have known that the marshal would not return to the city at any moment. The absence of a man with a large retinue, who had recent experience of and an aptitude for quelling Catholic sedition, remains a mystery. It was one of the reasons why events in the streets would get out of control so quickly.

If Guise was involved then it is most likely that he was in collusion with someone in authority; that he was given the nod to assassinate Coligny by one or more members of the royal council in the week that followed 10 August. In Guise’s mind, this was less murder than the justice he had been searching for a decade. And he was surely provided with assurances of a royal safeguard when the inevitable response, judicial or otherwise, from the Protestants and their Montmorency allies came. In such a scenario, Catherine’s involvement is likely. The Spanish ambassador certainly thought she was implicated.

Her motives were twofold: to maintain the peace and to remove a man she despised. She had never forgiven the Protestant leaders for their treachery at Meaux in 1567 and now she believed that Coligny was about to do the same again and start another civil war. Catherine was a woman who bore a grudge. In particular, she had long wished the death of the Count of Montgomméry, the unfortunate who had killed her husband in the fateful joust in June 1559. Although it was an accident, Montgomméry was a marked man. He was stripped of his post in the Scots Guard, banished from court, and went into exile where he converted to Protestantism. Finally, in 1574 she had him cornered in Lower Normandy and personally attended to his trial and execution in Paris. In a show of petty vindictiveness his descendants were degraded of their nobility. She was not alone on the council in wanting Coligny dead; but only she could have given Guise the guarantees he needed. Her faction in the Privy Council may have been in on the plot, but Guise would not have trusted the word of men he considered to be his social inferiors and whom he blamed for usurping his rightful position in government. The only other person he trusted was the Duke of Anjou. All the sources suggest that the duke would play a crucial role in the days that followed the assassination. Did the duke egg on his one-time boon companion, in the same way that he had once encouraged him to flirt with his sister? Intelligence and cultivated manners are not barriers to murder, and Henri, Duke of Anjou, was also an accomplished intriguer and dissimulator who placed great store in the powers of manipulation. Deeply pious he may have been, but murder and assassination did not trouble his conscience: he had used them before to remove his enemies and when he ascended the throne as Henry III he would use them again.

The assassination appealed to the plotters in the council because it was the perfect political murder. The Crown would get rid of one enemy and the blame would fall entirely on another. It could be represented to the world as a private affair—as the Massacre initially would be—that left the Guise dependent on royal grace.

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There is another intriguing possibility (one first put forward by Denis Crouzet in 1994) that the gunman was not part of a conspiracy at all; that he had a different motive for wanting Coligny dead, one that was rooted in parochial, not national or international, events. 24 Three documents, until now hidden in the archives, lend credence to this conjecture. The Guise family papers record that on 25 September 1573, a year and a day after Coligny’s death, Duke Henri promised to pay annually Charles de Louviers, lord of Maurevert, near Chaumes-en-Brie, who had been raised as a page in his father’s household, the sum of 2,000 livres until such time that the king provided him with an equivalent pension. 25 Another document in the Parisian notarial archives is a receipt signed by Guise and Maurevert on 23 May 1581, which attested the latter had received 2,000 livres on 22 August 1575, three years to the day after the attempted assassination took place. 26 By this date Maurevert was already in receipt of a smaller royal pension, amounting to 650 livres. Presumably, it was necessary to get the receipt notarized in the hope that the difference could be claimed from the royal treasury. Two thousand French pounds was a large sum of money—it was a much larger sum than the best-salaried ducal man received—and the fact that Maurevert was paid on the anniversary of the assassination is surely significant. Maurevert is the man that most contemporaries accused of pulling the trigger on 22 August, and his nickname
Tueur du Roi
(King’s Killer) takes on a more sinister tone now we know that Henri d’Anjou was happy to award him a pension when he became king.

When Coligny was finally killed on 24 August, a reliable commentator says that it was on the express orders of Anjou ‘to have the Admiral killed at whatever price it took’. 27 It is entirely proper to speculate that Anjou and Guise were involved in the initial plot and that Anjou agreed to fund the operation, and also that the intrigue cast a shadow over their future relations, which were to have such enormous repercussions for the kingdom. This leaves the question of why the Duke of Guise waited over a year to promise Maurevert his money. Surely an assassin carrying out such a dangerous mission would have expected something sooner, or at least something up front? After all, those who finally killed Coligny were gratified much sooner. This raises the possibility that Maurevert was not contracted to kill, but played the role of minion to Guise’s Henry II of England and Coligny’s Thomas Becket. One of the most considered accounts of the Massacre, that of the secret agent, Tomasso Sassetti, says that news of the shooting came to the Duke of Guise when he was playing tennis with the king, ‘who was very shaken and very angry with the arquebusier and his accomplices. And because the common talk was that Guise had had the shot fired out of his old enmity, His Majesty turning round to him...asked him if what was being said was true. 
[Guise] denied knowing anything.’ 28 The Venetian ambassador also thought that Guise was innocent; his reasoning being that the duke: