Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (7 page)

An assault on Wassy is unlikely to have been the dinner-table conversation that night; the duke had other things on his mind. In his governorship of Dauphiné, a province close to Calvin’s Geneva and in even greater turmoil than Champagne, he was facing armed insurrection. That evening he dictated a letter to his lieutenant there, la Motte-Gondrin, the tenor of which tells us much about his state of mind: ‘I think that if there is large assembly [of Protestants]...it would be best to seize the pastor, and to immediately hang him, as the author of the seditions and conspiracies against you, and of the rebellions that they are making now against the edicts and commandments of the King...which will curb the madness of the rest.’18 This letter was intercepted by the Protestants who later published it as evidence of the duke’s pre-meditation at Wassy. In fact, it is nothing of the sort.

Dauphiné had been experiencing a vicious sectarian civil war for months: there had been attempted coups in several towns. La Motte-Gondrin’s opponent there, the Baron des Adrets, was the bloodiest of Protestant captains, whose veins even moderates said coursed with ‘black blood’. Des Adrets campaign was fuelled by personal factors: the Duke of Guise had forbidden him to fight a duel, his honour thereby besmirched. His revenge was on a grand scale. The duke’s present concern was therefore sedition and revolt; to him Protestants who worshipped openly in large gatherings were rebels and deserved to be treated as such, but he made it clear, in line with royal policy before the Edict of Toleration, that only pastors were to be made examples of. The duke’s fears were very real—within two months of writing this letter there was a Protestant coup in Valence; la Motte-Gondrin was killed and his body displayed from a window in the centre of the town.

What gripped the duke as he set off from Dommartin early on Sunday 1 March for Eclaron was not some abstract religious anxiety—the fear of God’s wrath lest he act—but the feeling that everywhere his authority was under threat. He was only too aware that the manor in which he had stayed the night was, under France’s infinitely complex feudal laws, held in vassalage from his neighbour, the Protestant Count of Brienne. How humiliating it was to do homage to a heretic! He had to cross Wassy, entering through the south and departing through the north gate, in order to reach Eclaron, but there was no need to stop in the town. However, the season demanded that he and his men hear Mass. Eclaron was too far away, so when the troop had done only three miles it stopped at the village of Brousseval, only a mile or so from Wassy, where he could have done his devotions. But he chose not to.

There were certainly those who counselled that the Protestants should be dealt with, but the duke was not initially among them: ‘I would not suffer my breakfast to be prepared at Wassy, so I ordered that it should be waiting for me at [Brousseval], expressly to prevent what would come to pass at Wassy...wishing to prevent one of my men from irritating or saying words to the townsfolk, and that neither one nor the other entered into religious disputes, which I had expressly forbidden mine to do’. 19 He quickly lost his appetite when, on arriving at Brousseval, he heard the ringing of bells from the direction of Wassy ‘at a time when one was not accustomed to hearing them’. 20 He loudly demanded what the ringing was for and a number of his men, as well as people in the street, replied that the Protestants were being summoned to their Sunday service. The bells had clearly upset him. Were the Protestants making use of Wassy’s church? While we would hardly consider bell-ringing an antisocial activity, the sound of bells was often a cause of friction in pre-industrial societies. The right to ring bells at particular times and during particular festivals was a right that was highly coveted. Even in the early nineteenth century there continued to be many disputes over ‘the power to decide when the bells were to be rung and when they were to remain silent during the rites of passage’. 21

Bell-ringing was an especially contentious issue in the sixteenth century—both Protestants and Catholics rang them to drown out the services of the other. Nuisance noise is still the greatest cause of neighbourly disputes today. For the duke, it was also a direct challenge to his rights of lordship, as protector of the patrimony of Mary Stuart. He decided to summon a council. When an important decision was to be taken, noblemen did nothing in haste. Guise’s men were expected to lay down their lives in his service and they expected to be consulted on matters of policy: a noble following had a collective identity and sense of responsibility and the man who acted alone could find himself isolated. Some counsellors did not share the duke’s caution. Two men in particular played a key role at this juncture. The master of his household, Jacques de la Montaigne, originally from distant Saintonge, had settled in the vicinity of Wassy ten years previously and was ‘a great enemy [of the Protestants and]...author and solicitor of the massacre’. 22 The ultra-pious Jacques de la Brosse, whose son was to play a big role in the events that were to follow, was also a key man in that fateful decision. A no-nonsense man of action, he had been present with the duke in all his major triumphs of the past fifteen years and had achieved recognition as the most experienced and respected captains of his day and ‘the most sweet and gracious man of war that one had ever known’. 23 The rise of these two outsiders was due to talent: the sentiments of kinship and neighbourliness that were providing the Protestants of Wassy a measure of protection from other ducal servants were entirely lacking. There were many others whose goal in entering Wassy had little to do with faith or thoughts of order, especially ‘the lackeys who rejoiced at this enterprise saying that there’d be pillage for them’. 24

The duke resolved to go and hear Mass at Wassy. It is here that his protestations of innocence ring hollow. He could have stayed at Brousseval but he was not welcome there, as the local lord of the manor was yet another convert to Protestantism, and he had encouraged many of the inhabitants of the village to go to the Protestant service at Wassy. 25 By opting to go and hear Mass sung at Wassy with his full retinue, the duke was fully aware of the dangers. But the risks were overridden by the knowledge that everywhere in this region his rights were being challenged. He felt betrayed. If he could not hear Mass at Wassy, his niece’s property, where else would soon be off limits? The duke was also aware that the Edict of Toleration provided for Protestant worship outside of towns, and the bell-ringing made it clear that Wassy’s Protestants were holding their services inside the town. He may have gone with the intention of arresting Minister Morel, a policy he had backed before the Edict of Toleration. When the duke passed through Wassy’s south gate he undoubtedly felt that he was doing his duty in upholding the law. Almost certainly lacking was any sense of the spirit in which those laws were enacted.

As the host entered the town at around 8 am, la Montaigne pointed out a Protestant rope-maker in the street who was interrogated before being released. The duke was apparently looking for the Protestant minister. 26 It is from here that Protestant sources become less reliable.

The duke is supposed to have launched a surprise attack on the barn where the Protestants were meeting, but if this were so it was not a particularly successful enterprise: out of a congregation of several hundred, the duke’s heavily armed retinue, most of them veteran soldiers and hired thugs, could only manage to kill a fraction of that number.

The duke did not head towards the barn, but instead made straight for the parish church of Wassy, where he intended to investigate the bell-ringing and do his devotions. A further irritation to the duke’s mood came from the location of the barn. More provocative than the ringing of bells to announce a public service within the town walls was the fact the meeting house lay not one hundred yards from the church along a street that ran to the south-eastern quarter of the town. This part of town fell within the jurisdiction of the imposing royal castle. In his attempts to justify the events that were to follow, the duke made no mention of the fact that Protestants were worshipping within the city walls and therefore acting illegally under the terms of the Edict of Toleration. 27 Rather, he made much of the fact that the barn belonged to him and that they were worshipping on his property. In those days the castle quarter was clearly separated from the rest of the town by a ditch. The Protestants claimed that they were in the castle compound, technically outside the town’s jurisdiction and therefore acting lawfully. But legal quibbles were not what provoked the duke’s anger. The castle and its environs had been entrusted to his protection by his niece and he was furious that one of his subordinates, the captain of the castle, Claude Tondeur, should permit such an outrage to occur. (The presence of one of the captain’s relatives among the Protestant congregation is further evidence of his complicity.)28

Most of the ducal host did not enter the church, alighting in the covered market opposite the western aisle, while others were posted in the cemetery, located between the church and the Protestant meeting house. The reinforcement gendarme squadron of fifty men, already fully armed, was in the Market Square and ready to move. Groups of soldiers milled about the streets. Barely one hundred yards away they could hear hundreds of Psalm-singing voices. Once inside the church the duke convened the town’s anti-Protestant faction, headed by the provost, the prior of Wassy, and the priest. To visit the Protestant meeting would not be without precedent: the Edict of Toleration stipulated that, while royal officials could not hinder Protestant worship, they had the right to oversee assemblies. The provost, opposed by powerful interests in the town, had been unable to stop the services and he must have been delighted finally to be able to press his case in person, persuading the duke to delay his departure for Eclaron. The meeting with the provost confirmed what the duke had already seen and heard that morning. At this point he became very agitated—something had to be done.

A later, moderate account probably has it about right when it says that the duke’s ‘design was not to do ill to any individual, but to dissipate by his presence these kinds of assemblies’. 29 There is no hint of a premeditated assault. He was determined to reprimand these rebels in person and he sent three men to announce his arrival: Gaston de la Brosse, son of Jacques and standard-bearer of the duke’s gendarmes, and two German pages. It was now that events got out of hand; the three envoys arrived at the barn door to find the minister inside delivering his sermon to 500 or so men, women, and children.30

What happened at the door we will never know, but it seems likely that they were not permitted to enter until the minister had finished and, when they raised their voices to object, were told to be quiet. They then tried to force an entry, but were repulsed. The unarmed Protestants at the door reached for anything that would scare them off—a stone or two were thrown. La Brosse had been humiliated by ‘mere peasants’ in front of his comrades. Noblemen recognized only one way to repair honour wounded in such a public fashion; his upbringing taught him to respond in only one way. He wanted their blood and now had support on all sides, as the duke’s men rushed towards the noise of the scuffle. The first Protestants were killed vainly defending the barn door: a poor wine-seller was asked if he was a ‘Huguenot’ and when he replied that he ‘believed in Jesus Christ’ was run through with several sword thrusts; two others were cut down as they tried to make a run for it. Confusion quickly spread through the town: muskets were let off; cries of ‘Kill! Kill! By God’s death kill these Huguenots’ were heard; the trumpets of the duke’s gendarmerie company summoned them to the attack; the provost ran over to the Swan tavern and told the duke’s lackeys to put down their drinks and run to their master’s aid. Chaos reigned in the narrow streets as the duke arrived at the scene, and in the press he was unable or unwilling to hold his men back as they forced their way into the barn to exact vengeance. In this enclosed space the slaughter was face-to-face with swords and daggers, such that the ‘posts and walls of the barn were splattered with blood’. 31

Amidst panic-stricken screams the congregation fled the slashing steel blades up the stairs and onto the barn roof, whose feeble covering, a curse during the winter months, now permitted them to clamber away and make their escape by jumping onto the town walls. Some were less lucky. Those who tried to make a run for it in the opposite direction were an easy target for the Cardinal of Guise’s arquebusiers, who were lined up behind the cemetery wall. Escapees on the roof were also quickly identified and began to be picked off by sharpshooters. Amid the carnage Léonard Morel continued to preach until bullets began to fly around his improvised pulpit. After ducking down and saying a prayer, he removed his cassock and tried to escape, but he was quickly wounded and, on being recognized by one of the duke’s gentlemen, taken prisoner.

The massacre lasted about one hour and led to the deaths of some fifty people, in addition to which up to 200 were wounded. But this was no indiscriminate killing that did not spare women or children, as would occur in other copycat massacres in the coming years: at most, five women and one child were killed at Wassy. The identity of the dead, and some of those lucky enough to escape, tells us much about the nature of Protestantism in the town and why it was proving so hard to root out. Among the toll of murdered vignerons, drapers, and weavers we find the rector of the town’s schools, the town procurator, and, among those who escaped, two aldermen and a notary. The Duke of Guise’s reaction to events also tells us much. In Protestant eyes the ‘butcher of Wassy’ had revealed his true self and in propaganda they made much of his cruel and vengeful nature after calm had been restored. His actions tell a different story. The duke was an angry man in the aftermath of this bloodletting. He had lost control of his men; the martial discipline on which his reputation rested had broken down. His wife, who had been reduced to tears by the spectacle, in particular needed comforting. The duke vented his frustration on a Catholic: Claude Tondeur, captain of the castle, was ‘fiercely reprimanded for having permitted the assembly and preaching there to take place’, arrested, and sent—along with the two Protestant aldermen and the minister—to Eclaron, where they were subjected to a severe rebuke before being released. He did not try to use the events of 1 March politically and play to the gallery of Catholic fanatics who saw the massacre as a manifestation of divine vengeance. Social hierarchy was a more important factor for him. During an interview with the English ambassador in the Hôtel de Guise in Paris on 23 March he complained of the ‘arrogance’ of vassals who dared to challenge his authority. 32