Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (39 page)

Children are often described witnessing their parents’ death. Thus the youngest daughter of Nicolas le Mercier was dipped ‘stark naked in the blood of her massacred father and mother, with horrible threats that, if ever she became a Huguenot, the same would happen to her'. 38 Amid the orgy of killing and looting there was a cruel logic in operation. Among the first non-noble victims were the rich Protestant merchants who had been attacked and intimidated at the time of the Cross of Gastines affair. Hundreds more were rounded up and marched to the ancient Pont aux Meuniers to be executed. Not a conventional sixteenth-century bridge with housing on it, it was in fact a series of water mills; the farthest upstream of the three bridges that connected the Right Bank to the Ile de la Cité, it provided a modicum of seclusion for the killers and meant that the corpses were transported by the Seine out of the city as rapidly as possible and did not become snagged on mill wheels. ‘It was necessary, they said, to send these fish to Rouen and other places inhabited by heretics.’39

Sometimes the violence parodied royal justice, as in the case of Coligny’s corpse, or mimicked the purificatory rites employed by the Catholic Church, such as the burning of a Protestant bookbinder. But elsewhere the motive was sheer vindictiveness. There were many tales of lawsuits and scores being settled at the point of sword or halberd.

The wife of Philippe le Doux, who was about to give birth to her twenty-first child, was stabbed in the abdomen and her half-born babe left to die in the gutter. Her killer was a neighbour and militia sergeant, Pierre Coullon, a less successful professional rival of her husband. After killing husband and wife, he and his accomplices stole 4,000 crowns. This horror mingled with grisly carnivalesque games.

Professor Ramus, the former friend of the Cardinal of Lorraine, was killed by the very students he taught; his corpse was flung out of an upper storey window on to the cobbles below, and then his entrails were spilled ‘and dragged around the corpse whipped by some students, who were instructed by their masters’. 40

At 3 pm the city aldermen arrived at the Louvre to tell the king that Paris was out of control. Charles ordered the violence to cease. But the genie had been let out of the bottle and the aldermen were unable to stop the violence. The official line was that the Crown was attempting to impose order and that the peace held. French embassies abroad were informed that the morning’s events ‘happened through a private quarrel long fostered between the two houses’. 41 This lie is further evidence pointing the finger at those who had a vested interest in portraying the Guise as scapegoats. The Massacre ruined their plans. Catherine and Anjou now argued that in order to restore the monarchy’s reputation the king would have to declare that he ordered the admiral’s death, and this is precisely what he did on the following day. There was a further reason for doing this beyond showing Europe that the king was still in control. To declare that the Massacre was the result of a private quarrel was to risk the continuation of the vendetta. Montmorency received news of Coligny’s murder at Chantilly on the evening of 26 August. He remained ‘undecided and cool as he could be’. If this was a private affair, he was bound by the laws of honour to march on the Hôtel de Guise. The king’s volte-face was of the utmost strategic significance: Montmorency awaited news from Paris, ‘hoping that the king would not admit to the murder of the deceased admiral, resolving in this case to pursue vengeance; but on news to the contrary, he resolved to submit himself to the will of the king’. 42 Even so, it was several days before order was fully restored.

Charles IX seems to have had some form of nervous breakdown. The confusion in royal policy and the conflicting messages that emanated from Paris contributed to the spread of the killing to the provinces in the following weeks. Thousands more were killed, but the fate of Protestants in the regions varied from one town to the next, and depended much on how local officials interpreted the often opaque signals emanating from the capital.

* * * *

In murder investigations today, reconstructing the movements and behaviour of a suspect in the hours after a crime is imperative. We too can add to the psychological profile of our suspects and gain more of an insight into their motives. The scenes of carnage and slaughter did not elicit sympathy, sober reflection, or remorse from any of the chief suspects. Memoirs written later attempted to shift the blame.

Charles could not resist riding out to Montfaucon to gawp at Coligny’s corpse, ‘a spectacle’ which ambassador Walsingham thought revealed ‘what good nature is in the King. It is much lamented to see his cruelty even by the Papists.’43 The only culprit to express regret was the Duke of Guise. Walsingham, no friend, exonerated him: ‘The duke of Guise is not so bloody, neither did he kill any man himself but saved divers.

He spake openly that, for the admiral’s death he was glad, for he knew him to be his enemy, but he thought for the rest that the King had put such to death as if it had pleased him might have done him very good service.’ On leaving the rue de Béthisy, the duke crossed to the Left Bank, in order to carry out his second mission. But the Protestants here had been alerted, forcing Guise to conduct a furious and fruitless pursuit of the fugitives to Montfort l’Amaury, twenty-five miles away. He returned, exhausted, on the afternoon of the 25th. Guise had no wish to be cast as a scapegoat or to have the justice of his cause undermined by association with the rabble. In some respects this comes as no surprise. His mother’s desire for Coligny’s death was not at odds with her continuing sympathy for other Protestants. One target on day one was Coligny’s chief counsellor, Arnaud de Cavaignes, who eluded his killers and made his way to Anne d’Este’s residence, the Hôtel de Nemours, situated on the rue de Pavée on the Left Bank. Here he was hidden for two days until royal guards arrested him and he was led off to the Conciergerie, where he was tortured and, after confessing to treason, executed. Happier were those who, like Jacques de Crussol, made their way to the Hôtel de Guise. A girl was among the group which stayed there for a week until the atmosphere outside had calmed down. When her parents learned that the Guise planned to have her and her siblings re-baptized in the Catholic Church, they hastily reclaimed their young. News of this unlikely safe house circulated among those in hiding, since members of the ducal household, either because they feared for their Protestant kinsmen or because they were acting under the direct orders of the duke, were sent out amid the chaos and carnage to lend what assistance they could. Pierre de Foissy, whose father and brothers ranked among the duke’s most trusted men, rescued Françoise de Languejoue.

Jean de Mergey took refuge in Saint Thomas’s church, from where he sent a note to the Baron of Cessac, the lieutenant of Guise’s gendarmes, since ‘he is my friend and would dare to do me a good turn’. 44 Cessac told him to sit tight. Another Guise man, a gruff Catholic ducal gendarme, Jean Pastoreau, Sieur de la Rochette, came to collect him.

He was a good choice because, whereas Cessac was a southerner, Pastoreau was well known in the city and was ‘a great enemy of those of the [Reformed] religion’. Pastoreau acted the part of a guard leading his prisoner and succeeded in getting Mergey across the Pont aux Meuniers and to safety. Compassion was not the prime motive for helping. Pierre de Foissy married the rich heiress he saved.

Antoine Huyart from Troyes accepted an offer of help from a neighbour, another Guise household man, Charles des Boves. Boves welcomed him ‘humanely enough’, but it was soon clear from the soldiers that were sent to guard him that ‘he would have to spit into the [money] pot, or otherwise it had been decided to finish him off like others of his ilk’. 45 Back in the Brie, too, men were taking advantage of the opportunities that the Massacre brought. Boves’s brother, François, also a Guise servant, snatched Marie de Luzé, Dame de Lumigny, who had been hiding out dressed as a peasant, and took her off to Lorraine under the pretext of protecting her. She was only released and fled to Geneva after agreeing to sign over all her property.

Let us now contrast the actions of the duke and his men with the other main suspects. Many Catholics believed that the Massacre was a miracle. In the Saint-Innocents cemetery at midday on the 24th, a hawthorn bush—the traditional symbol of virgin purity—which had been shrivelled for months, suddenly burst into flower. Parisians flocked to see this sign of God’s benediction, where women wailed and the sick were healed. The Saint Batholomew’s Day Massacre was, for many Catholics, a mystical experience, a moment akin to resurrection, in which they came closer to God. At least this is how the Duke of Nevers described his feelings a few weeks later. For him the Massacre was an act which revealed the workings of divine will, to which men had no choice but to submit. His unshakeable belief in divine providence made him, the Counter-Reformation warrior, remarkably similar in outlook to his Calvinist enemies. 46 Unlike the 218 unit that Guise had commanded which was only in the city briefly after the death of Coligny, the units commanded by Nevers and Anjou seemed to have played a major role in leading the popular violence.

Despite the general disorder, Anjou’s death squad was still carrying out killings in the city on the 25th.

The motive that Sassetti attributed to the main suspects after the Massacre was not faith but reason of state. What was the best way of stopping Coligny? How could the murder be done without ruining the Peace? Logically, the best solution for Catherine and her counsellors was to use the Guise and expect the backlash to fall on them. In allowing the private vendetta to run its course the monarchy would emerge as supreme arbiter. It was a classic example of divide and rule.

If, on the other hand, Maurevert acted without orders from above, he did not do so alone; he had accomplices among the senior ranks of the Guise household. These men had a motive. Their own experience of the civil war in the Brie had sharpened their animosity to the admiral.

They wished him dead as much as did the duke.

The history of the twentieth century has taught us that there are many levels of complicity in mass murder. We cannot completely absolve the aristocratic death squads from complicity in unleashing the popular religious violence. Some leaders, such as the dukes of Anjou and Nevers, had more blood on their hands than others. Both were extremely devout, representatives of the new militant Counter-Reformation piety. This was another reason why they despised the Duke of Guise. Like his father, Henri was rather more conventional:

he showed little interest in matters of dogma. The duke was very careful to contrast the justice of his private quarrel with the actions of the Catholic mob. For him, this was not a crusade or a mystical experience; it was justice. He went out of his way to rescue defenceless Protestants. After all, his honour as a knight was at stake. The duke was not party to the initial deliberations to eliminate Coligny in the week after 9 August. His involvement in the massacre was based on opportunism, not religious fanaticism. Even his men seemed to have been more concerned with the material rewards that the violence brought, rather than bloody revenge.

Many Protestants accepted the duke’s right to take revenge according to the laws of honour. They were also well aware of the steps he took to distance himself from the mob and his co-conspirators. He had no intention of being made a scapegoat. He was largely successful: it was the Crown which would be blamed and damaged by the events of August 1572. A plot which began as an attempt to ensure peace and stability ended up doing just the opposite. The Valois monarchy never again recovered its stature: Charles IX was revealed as a tyrant; Catherine de Medici and the Duke of Anjou as scheming hypocrites. The most widely read pamphlet about the Massacre, printed in Latin, Dutch, and German, as well as French, contrasts the regrets of the Duke of Guise to the bloody cunning of the royal family. It called for the overthrow of the Valois monarchy, who were mere descendants of the usurper Hugues Capet, and their replacement by the Guise. But the
Reveille Matin
was not a Catholic tract: it was Protestant—claiming to be published in Edinburgh it was dedicated to Elizabeth I. The Guise and the Protestants had both suffered at the hands of the monarchy: it was time to bury their differences in the common cause. If only, the author argued, the Guise would guarantee liberty of conscience, the Protestants would join them in overthrowing the Valois. This was fantasy in only one respect. In the years after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Duke of Guise would form a different alliance, which would overthrow one royal House and attempt to overthrow another.

The diarist Claude Haton observed the huge wedding party that crossed Champagne in September 1576. Like many Catholics, he was impressed, for though he considered most noblemen lazy and immoral, he was comforted that the Guise ‘were not yet infected by heresy or false religion’. 1 They were celebrating not one but three weddings. The marriage of Charles de Mayenne had been celebrated at Meudon on 6 August and the family were on their way to celebrate a double wedding at Joinville: the 21-year-old Charles, Duke of Aumale, to his first cousin, Marie, daughter of the Marquis of Elbeuf—tall and pretty she would one day become the king’s lover. 
The marriage of cousins was common, but first cousins less so, and the papal dispensation must have been expensive. The Duke of Guise also agreed to pay the dowry of 100,000 livres. Two days later, Aumale’s sister, Diane, married François de Luxembourg, Duke of Piney, a neighbour whose credentials were that he was ‘very rich, solvent and has a good house and furniture’. 2 

Many familiar faces had disappeared since the Massacre. Two years before, the Cardinal of Lorraine had died aged 49. His frail health had been unable to withstand the flamboyant devotions demanded by Henry III, who had recently succeeded his brother as king. On 8 December 1574, despite the advanced season, barefoot and carrying a black cross, the cardinal filed behind flagellants in white penitents’ hoods. He caught a chill and died on 26 December. 
His body was laid to rest in Reims cathedral and his heart placed next to the tomb of his sister, the Queen of Scotland in the convent of Saint-Pierre de Reims. His death came just over a year after the death of the previous Duke of Aumale, who had been mown down by a cannon ball at the siege of La Rochelle. Only Cardinal Louis remained from the second generation, but though exceedingly rich he was no leader. The Spanish ambassador, Diego de Zun˜iga, was more contemptuous: ‘he had neither taste nor the intelligence for anything at all’. 3 And Zun˜iga did not think much of the next generation either: 
‘the dukes of Guise and Mayenne and the [abbot] of Fécamp [soon to be cardinal] their brother, are not men of affairs’.

At the age of 25, court gossip had it that Henri de Guise would amount to little more than a gallant. It was an image sustained by his good looks. The Venetian ambassador described him as ‘the same age as the king [in fact he was a year older], but taller and better built; his figure majestic, sharp-eyed with curly blond hair, a blond wispy beard...no one knows how to resist him in fencing’. 4 Of the two other Henrys who would decide the fate of France, he was more like Henri de Navarre than Henry III. Before Navarre’s flight from the court and reconversion in 1576, the two men got on well; they hunted, diced, played tennis, and chased women together. To them religion was subordinate to politics: neither man was especially devout; there was something of the libertine about both. As soldiers, they believed that the existential and theological problems that preoccupied Henry III were better left to the clergy. Guise was more refined than Navarre—even his enemies acknowledged his courtesy. 
He spoke Italian and German, which was essential, as his retinue was as cosmopolitan as his father’s. He did not stand on ceremony with his social inferiors and his affability was buttressed by a sense of humour. When one of the Scots in his retinue began talking inappropriate and treasonous politics at a social event, demanding that the duke hurry and invade England, the ladies present, many of whom were Protestants, could only smile with polite embarrassment. The duke was able to rescue the situation: ‘Ladies, he is talking Scotch; you do not understand it.’5

Henri’s exaggerated sense of honour also added to his charisma. He took part in the new craze for duelling—a practice that should have been anathema to the truly pious, since it was banned by the Council of Trent. In December 1573 he fought with a mere esquire. One cannot imagine his father deigning to fight a social inferior. In other ways, too, Henri was beginning to emerge from his father’s shadow. 
Henry III ascended the throne with a martial reputation, but Guise was the only royalist commander to distinguish himself in the disastrous offensive launched against the Protestants in 1575. At Dormans on the Marne, he showed immense bravery in checking an invasion of German mercenaries. As he pursued the fleeing enemy, a German pistolier, whom the duke had struck twice with his sword, replied with two pistol shots, grazing Guise’s thigh and taking away part of his cheek and left ear. The wound was serious, but after six weeks of convalescence he was left with a scar to rival his father’s and a nickname to match—
le Balafré
(scar-face). Unlike his grandfather after Pavia, the duke did not consider it important to undertake a pilgrimage of thanksgiving. Instead, his grandmother Antoinette had to send a servant to make the journey on foot to Saint-Nicolas du Port in Lorraine. The duke preferred to make political capital, much to the disapproval of the English ambassador in Paris, as he ‘showed himself much in the place and around town to have the favour of the common people’. 6 Parisians clamoured for a popular hero and those sympathetic to him evoked the pain that tormented him and described the black velvet patch he wore, which rendered ‘grace to the deformity’. 7

That Henri was emerging as a man of substance and political skill is evident from the triple marriages which took place in 1576. With the passing of the older generation, which had been bound together by fraternal love and deference to the eldest, there was a danger that, as the new lineages established separate households, the ties that bind would weaken. Once again, the succession of the next generation was organized in such a way as to prevent squabbling and promote interdependence. The Duke of Guise’s leadership was based on an agreement with his brothers and cousins, by which deference to strict principles of precedence was reciprocated with a fair distribution of estates, emoluments, and Church patronage. This began a year before the three marriages with a partition between the two elder Guise brothers. Charles was four years younger than his brother and a more straightforward character, a bluff soldier whom the English ambassador found ‘not so full of treachery and dissimulation’. Like his brother, Charles showed little interest in the ascetic piety that was becoming fashionable at court. Unlike his brother he was a burly man, with hands ‘like shoulders of mutton’, the result of overindulgence that made him fat by the time he was 30. There was a dark side to him: in 1587 he stabbed to death a servant who displeased him.

Charles received Mayenne, recently raised from a marquisate to a duchy, in the partition. Henri got the rest, but had to agree to pay all the family debts (which were considerable) and his mother’s and grandmother’s dowers. In addition, Charles inherited the governorship of Burgundy when his uncle Claude d’Aumale died—it had been in their continuous possession since 1543 and the Crown was in no position to refuse. Charles married a rich heiress, Henriette de Savoie. 
Unusually, for a Guise it brought with it a significant inheritance in the south-west. Just as significant, the bride’s father, Honorat de Savoie, promised to hand over the office of Admiral of France to his son-in-law when he died. The king was unable to prevent him doing so in 1578, thereby permitting the Guise to control three of the great offices of the crown: Admiral of France, Grand Master of the Household, which Guise had inherited from his father, and the Master of the Royal Hunt (
Grand Veneur
) which Claude, Duke of Aumale, passed to his eldest son, Charles. Their grip on high office was tightened in 1583 with the marriage of Charles d’Elbeuf to the daughter of the ageing Master of the King’s Stables (
Grand Ecuyer
), who agreed to resign his post as part of the deal.

The cousins were brought up to behave like brothers, an arrangement sanctified by the marriage of Charles d’Aumale to Marie d’Elbeuf. Any reservations Charles had about marrying his first cousin were allayed by the substantial resources that the Church provided. His brother Claude (born in 1562) was first disqualified from the Aumale inheritance as a Knight of Malta and then compensated with a lucrative portfolio of monasteries by his uncles. Cardinals Charles and Louis had brought the second generation of the House to the pinnacle of its Church power and wealth; just as crucial was their ability to secure them for the next generation. Before his death, Cardinal Charles obtained Henry III’s formal acceptance of his nephew, Louis II, the youngest of the three Guise brothers born in 1555, as his heir. Four years later, on Louis I’s death, Louis II succeeded him as Cardinal of Guise.

Louis II’s ability to pick up six benefices through his own youthful exertions between 1574 and 1588 suggests that he was a skilled ecclesiastical empire builder in the mould of his uncles. He was helped by the Pope’s willingness to satisfy Guise ambition and Henry III’s inability to curb them. The Counter-Reformation made greater demands of the clergy, and of bishops in particular. In this respect, Louis II was a throwback to an older era: his mistress, Aymerie de Lescherenne, gave him four bastard sons. The cardinal’s education, at the hands of a conservative Benedictine scholar, was far removed from the humanist studies once championed by his uncle Charles.

The English ambassador thought him ‘as a Guise, not in show so cunning but given to vanities and disorders, but thought as crafty a head as [his brothers]’. 8 In other respects, however, he was a model Tridentine bishop. Canonical age requirements prohibited him from exercising the office of Archbishop of Reims until 1583. At the end of April that year he made his triumphal entry in Reims and sang his first Mass. He held a provincial synod in May that endorsed decrees of Trent. During the summer, his diocese became the epicentre of a vast number of penitential processions, in which pilgrims, dressed in white and singing hymns as they marched behind the Host, criss-crossed north-eastern France. Louis welcomed over 70,000 pilgrims into the city that summer. Thousands more made the journey to Notre Dame de Liesse, a pilgrimage of European significance, whose shrine to the Black Madonna was undergoing a revival thanks to the patronage of the Cardinal of Lorraine, who had bought the nearby château of Marchais and the land around Liesse in 1553. 
At the end of the century, Guise association with the shrine was confirmed by the gift of a magnificent black and white marble rood screen, on which was inscribed passages of scripture.

The 1583 processionals were a huge logistical operation and far from spontaneous. Many were led by their bishops and the cardinal, who led processions around the town, welcomed pilgrims at the cathedral with refreshments and small chapbooks of prayers that had been printed for the occasion. Louis was no innovator; he had been encouraged by the papal nuncio, Giovanni Battista Castelli, who arrived in France in 1581, to adopt the reform model introduced by Cardinal Borromeo in Milan. This was controversial to those who despised foreign, and especially Italian, innovations in devotion, but Louis was proud of his achievements and defended his reforming activities in a number of publications. The Marian Cult and the revival of shrines were particularly associated with the Jesuits: it is no coincidence that one hundred students from the English College in Reims took part in Louis’s triumphal entry and that his summer’s activities ended at the end of September with the mass-ordination of English missionary priests. Louis’s campaign needs to be understood in a wider context: support for the English mission was the barometer of radical Catholic activism in France, while the revival of shrines and the cult of Mary were the chief symbols and agents of the Counter-Reformation throughout Europe.

The Jesuits exercised an influence over the third generation in another area too. Charles d’Aumale was among the first intake of 400 enrolled in the Jesuit University founded by Charles III, Duke of Lorraine and the Cardinal of Lorraine in 1572 at Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine. The Duke of Lorraine was not himself a militant Counter-Reformation figure—the establishment of the university was an indication that he saw Catholic reconquest as a peaceful activity. He was on good terms with his Protestant neighbours, and tolerated Jews and those who kept their beliefs private, such as his chief minister, the Calvinist Count of Salm. The rigours of a Jesuit education turned out young men with a markedly different cast of mind. Charles d’Aumale, though not very able or intelligent, emerged from two years of study with a different world view from his cousins; he was more devout—he was the only member of the family to go on pilgrimage to Italy—and more uncompromising in his political and religious outlook. The Jesuits had taught him well. In contrast, his cousin turned brother-in-law, Charles, Marquis of Elbeuf, educated by the humanist Remy Belleau at Joinville, turned out to be the most libertine of the cousins: 
on friendly terms with several Protestants, he was not averse to employing heretics as servants. Friction must surely have existed between the cousins—Guise and Elbeuf did once come to blows at court—but was otherwise kept well hidden from public view. 
Continuity and harmony were assured by the severe presence of Antoinette de Bourbon, who continued to run family affairs from Joinville, where she was preoccupied by the upbringing of her great-grandchildren.

The festive mood that summer was threatened by the gathering financial storm. Guise had yet to liquidate the debts left to him by his father and uncle and this was aggravated by the agreements he made with his brothers and cousins. The amount of the indebtedness has been put at between 1 and 3 million livres, or between four and twelve times his annual income. The Venetian ambassador described his cousins as rich and the duke as a ‘poor prince’. He was being sued by his treasurer, Pierre Hotman, and he owed his tailor 30,000 livres. 
There was absolutely no question of cutbacks: honour required that a prince lived and acted in accordance with his station: at ninety-eight people, his household was smaller than his father’s and this was as far as he dared go without losing face. The parlous state of royal finances and his ambivalent relationship with Henry III ruled out help from that quarter. The 1575 campaign was financed out of his own pocket, borrowing 200,000 livres against the family silver. Antoinette, now well into her eighties, was left to sort the mess. In July 1577 she complained to her grandson that debt repayments were eating up so much of his income ‘that not a sou of revenue was to be had’. 9 
Her task was made worse by the death of Cardinal Louis I, whose affairs were found to be chaotic. The agent she dispatched to the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris found ‘everything in a bad state and was attempting to avoid complete ruin’. 10