Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (6 page)

Had the Duke of Guise visited his neighbour at Ligny, as his mother did, he would have been as aware as any guest that the errors and traditions referred to belonged to his Catholic faith.

It seems likely that the Protestant cell in Wassy had initially attended services at Brienne, Trémilly and on other noble estates in the vicinity, but this still meant a long journey for a cloth worker on foot, and their growing number and confidence in the autumn of 1561 persuaded them to consider setting up their own church. The advice of Troyes was that such an undertaking was likely to antagonize the Guise, for not only was Wassy too close to their lands but the usufruct of the royal demesne at Wassy had recently been signed over to Mary Stuart as a part of her jointure as dowager queen of France. Her uncle had been charged with its administration. It was considered safer to maintain a secret conventicle serviced by Pastor Jean Gravelle from Troyes. However, numbers grew so rapidly that secrecy became a problem. Perhaps as many as 500 to 600 people, many of them curious Catholics, came to hear Gravelle’s sermons, and he was forced to move to the courtyard of the hospital, which lay just beyond the town walls, in order to accommodate them.

Wassy would not at first seem to have been a welcoming place for the Reformation. Indeed, the Duke of Guise had got wind of the public preaching and in early November sent some of his gendarmes to ‘snuff out this small church in its infancy’. 13 But reformed ideas incubated well in small towns which prided themselves on their civic independence, where everyone knew each other, where everyone had a relative or neighbour who was a member of the new church, where even those who remained attached to the old faith shared the general antipathy to the overfed monks of Montier-en-Der, who controlled Wassy’s parish church and its revenues and exercised jurisdiction over twenty-one parishes in the vicinity. The abbot of Montier was none other than the duke’s brother, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, head of the Catholic Church in France and the richest man in the kingdom.

Wassy was a microcosm of the complacency that beset the Catholic clergy everywhere: families among the local elite saw benefices principally as a cash cow and a means to social advancement and were only tangentially concerned with the welfare of the laity. Clerical pluralism was an issue at Wassy; the son of the provost, Claude le Sain, was not only cure of the town, a task made much more onerous in recent years by population growth, but also had control of the house of Augustinian hermits, situated among the forests outside the town. Provost le Sain played an important role in the events to come.

He was initially a supporter of aspects of the reform movement.

Protestants later accused him of ‘having revolted against the knowledge he had of the truth of the Gospels’. 14 Like many educated Catholics he desired a more scripturally based religion. But as a royal official he had no desire to challenge the status quo. This explains the particular hostility the Protestants reserved for him, and those they considered to be ‘Apostates’ or ‘Nicodemites’, that is those who hid their truth faith. Le Sain’s concerns were first expressed to Antoinette de Bourbon when the Protestants began to worship publicly. She urged him to do something, but he would do nothing without the authority of the provincial governor and expected the Guise to help him out of his predicament.

Guise’s threats were unsuccessful for another reason. The psychology of Protestantism thrived on adversity; a sense of persecution may even have been essential to its spread, since the righteous expect their faith to be tested by God. Protestants referred to themselves and interpreted events in biblical terms; they were the Israelites, threatened on all sides by the heathen, but sure in the knowledge that if they kept faith they would be saved, while the rest were surely damned. In the land of the king of Babylon, God’s chosen people would not be stopped from raising their temple in his honour: on 13 December, in defiance of the duke, Jean Gravelle travelled from Troyes to perform the first Protestant baptisms in the town.

On the advice of the Cardinal of Lorraine, the duke decided to adopt a more conciliatory approach and bring back his subjects and neighbours by force of argument. Four days after the baptismal rites, a delegation arrived headed by the Bishop of Châlons—Guise’s creature—Jérôme Bourgeois. He summoned the leading Protestants, each of whom was well known locally, and announced that the following day a monk would preach to them and return them to the fold. The meeting was tense, since the Protestants did not wish to listen to ‘false prophets’ and the bishop was perturbed by their insolence and suggestion that he should come and hear their pastor, but after two hours of negotiation they agreed to his demand. They saw it as an opportunity to vindicate themselves and spread the Word; that evening they met with pastor Gravelle to plan the bishop’s downfall.

When, the following morning, Bishop Jérôme entered the large barn that served as the Protestant meeting house, it was as far removed from the experience of entering his cathedral in Châlons as he could possibly have imagined. In the cathedral, the brightly painted and decorated walls, and the glorious clutter of reliquaries, stained glass, votive candles, tombs of local worthies, pictures of Saint Etienne, the cathedral’s patron, and images of the virgin assailed the eye of the beholder. Pews, rails, and screens carefully demarcated sacred space. In contrast, the barn contained only a makeshift pulpit and the gaping holes in the roof, though they would one day prove an unintentional godsend, left the congregation exposed to the elements.

With no pews to segregate the social classes, or men from women, the congregation mixed freely, giving credence to Catholic preachers’ claims that these meetings were akin to the witches’ coven, a breeding ground for social disorder and sexual licentiousness. And it was noisy. When the bishop arrived with his train, consisting of a fifteen-man retinue, the preacher, Provost le Sain, the royal procurator, and the prior of Wassy, it was already crammed full of expectant townsfolk. As they entered, the Protestants opened their Psalm books and began singing the hymn to the Commandments:

Thus spoke the Lord: I am your God, 
who brought you out of Egypt’s land. 
One God alone shall you revere 
and so fulfil my command (Kyrie eleison!). 15

Catholics were unaccustomed to such sounds. The laity did not normally sing during the liturgy and the strangeness of the Psalms offended many Catholics: in Troyes in April 1559 a goldsmith had been murdered for having the temerity to sing them in the streets. 16 
The congregation followed their hymn with a prayer, which was cut short by the bishop, who wished to have his arrival formally announced. But Pastor Gravelle had no regard for the usual niceties and showed no respect for the bishop’s dignity, cutting him short: ‘Monsieur, since I am in the chair first, I shall be the first to speak.’

Behind this veneer of politesse lurked an insult, it being more correct for a man of his low station to address a bishop with the dignified Monseigneur. Gravelle had seized the initiative and went on to state that they were permitted by law to practise their beliefs and none should prevent them from doing so. In fact, this was untrue: the royal council was at that moment debating the matter, but at this stage such assemblies were still forbidden in law. His argument, however, rested not on the letter of the law but on its interpretation: the provincial governor, who had the power to ‘interpret’ royal edicts as he saw fit, had recently permitted Protestant worship in Troyes. What he failed to mention was that the governor, the Duke of Nevers, was himself a Protestant.

Gravelle offered the bishop the right to reply, but again in such a manner as to cut the man down to size: ‘Speak not in your capacity as a bishop, but as a private individual, for we only recognize you as such.’ The event was already slipping from the bishop’s control and he was on the defensive. He found himself asking why they would not accept him as a bishop, which simply allowed the pastor to expound on the failings of the Catholic clergy. The pastor mocked him for failing to administer the sacraments and being unable to preach; and when the bishop said he did not need to preach and employed vicars to do so, he trumped his adversary with the precise passages of scripture in which bishops were conjoined to preach in person. Bishop Jérôme was then required to defend Episcopal authority and the concept of apostolic succession—things he had not dreamt of having to do and for which he was unprepared. He was, however, no fool and he tried a couple of jokes to mock and deflate his earnest opponent, a move which contrived only to make the pastor more serious: ‘saying that on several occasions he had exposed his life to danger in the name of Jesus Christ, and that...he was ready to seal with his own blood the doctrine that he preached to the poor people’. And he went on to denounce the riches of the Church and the poverty of the people: ‘You have taken trouble only to nourish your insatiable greed, and not those souls which were bought so dearly by the blood of the Eternal son of God.’ The pastor was now playing to the crowd, asking rhetorically which of the debaters was better suited to care for them. The bishop could not compete with this sort of populism so he now asked the minister to leave; the minister refused, saying that he would now preach the Gospel and that if the bishop wished to he could listen in peace, otherwise he should depart henceforth. Even Protestant sources describe the meeting as angry: the bishop could only conclude that ‘fury’ reigned among them; the provost had already left in fright.

They were pursued on leaving the barn by cries of ‘Wolf! Fox! Ass! Get back to school!’ The monk bravely went to preach in Wassy church, but, startled by the noise of the Protestants leaving their meeting, soon thought better of it, quitting the pulpit in such haste that he left one of his shoes behind.

Even if the Protestants exaggerated the extent of their victory there is no denying the impact that this drama had on the town. Many new converts were won over that day with the simple message that they should stay and listen to the sermon and afterwards ask any question they wished. This was a young movement responding to a laity hungry for news of the path to true salvation. The congregation grew rapidly. 
It was claimed that 900 people took communion at Christmas. 
Although some of them came from the surrounding region—Guise tenants among them (one of the deacons was a Joinville man)—there is no doubt that, as a proportion of the town’s population, Wassy compared well with other Protestant strongholds. In percentage terms the congregation was now stronger than the host church at Troyes. It was time to appoint a permanent minister: Jean Gravelle returned to Troyes and on 27 January Léonard Morel arrived from Geneva.

Bishop Jérôme hurried back to Joinville to lick his wounds. 
Antoinette de Bourbon ordered a report to be drawn up and sent to the king and, in the absence of her eldest son, she set to work to bring this insolent riff-raff to heel. She summoned Provost le Sain and the prior and ordered them to ensure that none of her ‘subjects’ took part in Protestant services, said anything derogatory about the Holy Roman Church, or failed to attend Mass. She wrote strongly worded letters to the principal townsfolk expressing her (and Mary Stuart’s) displeasure. In the meantime, a Lenten preacher, otherwise referred to as the ‘cockroach’ by Protestants, was dispatched to shore up the Catholic faithful.

* * * *

On 1 March 1562, fifty Protestants were massacred in Wassy. Thus began a conflict that shook Europe for thirty-six years. Historians once disdained the study of events as being the mere flotsam of history that floated on deeper, more impersonal seas. More recently, the ways in which an event can utterly transform and reshape history has been brought into sharp focus by 9/11. Wassy was one of the great transformative events of European history, ushering in the age of the Wars of Religion, which over the next century would engulf the whole of Europe, the legacy of which, until recently, we congratulated ourselves on having been confined to a corner of Ireland.

The Protestant accounts stress premeditation. But the evidence is flimsy. When the Duke of Guise left Joinville he did not make straight for the town; he was accompanied by his pregnant wife in a carriage, suggesting that this was not a whirlwind strike, and we know that his initial plan was to stop the night at Dommartin before heading north-east to another of his residences at Eclaron, stopping briefly at Wassy only to pick up a squadron of gendarmes who were accustomed to lodge in the town. Pro-Guise accounts, on the other hand, overplay the accidental and unplanned nature of events on 1 March. In order to interpret accounts which were written for propaganda purposes, I want to do something that historians largely try to avoid: speculate about the duke’s state of mind on that previous evening.

This was the season of Lent, a time of fasting and prayer, and in recent years a season in which a new breed of fiery preacher was gaining celebrity for their vitriolic denunciation of heresy, reminding their audience that God’s wrath would inevitably be brought down on Catholics unless they excised this pollution from the community.

There was one very important man who sat down with the duke to share his frugal meal that night who was open to such a message: the duke’s 77-year-old chief advisor, Jacques de la Brosse. Jacques had a particularly strong devotion to the Eucharist and an intense veneration of the Host and its sacred properties, the product of a Catholic revivalism in reaction to Protestant denials that the consecrated bread turned into the body of Christ. Jacques’s Eucharistic piety was unusual even among his fellow revivalists, for he called his daughter by a highly unusual name: Euchariste. No wonder he was chosen as the man to combat Protestantism in Scotland, spending three years there in total and finally returning to France in the summer of 1560.

But the Guise were not motivated by blind religious zeal or easily seduced by the counsel of fanatics. The duke was not a man given to excessive devotion; indeed he displayed an aristocratic
hauteur
for any passion that smacked of a loss of control. His brother Louis, Cardinal of Guise, was with him at Dommartin but he was more courtier than priest and more likely than the others to consider breaking the Lenten fast. Known as ‘the cardinal of the bottles’ in reference to his penchant for booze, he once admitted in a letter to his disapproving mother that a stomach ache had been caused by a surfeit of eating and hunting while at court. 17 The duke’s wife, Anne d’Este, was no fanatic either—she had been raised a Protestant and was known for her compassion.