Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (28 page)

He even went to Catherine to offer evidence that would incriminate them and bring them to justice. But Catherine needed the Guise, as they had once needed her: to check the pretensions of the King of Navarre, the first prince of the blood, to the regency. Catherine proved herself to be a shrewd and clever manipulator of men and, though she lacked a power base herself, deftly played off the Guise, the Montmorency, and the Bourbon against each other. Compromise was in the air too. Guise retained the office of Grand Master but rendered the keys to the royal apartments to the Queen Mother in February. The following month Navarre took Guise’s title of lieutenant-general of the kingdom, but crucially the royal seals remained in Catherine’s hands. Satisfied by his promotion, Navarre no longer had to play to the Calvinist gallery. While at court his ostentatious appearance at Mass and abstinence during fasts were noted. Calvinists noted disapprovingly that, away from his devout wife, the temptations of court life were too great and his behaviour was more befitting a libertine gallant than a member of the godly. As his support for the reformers waxed and waned, leadership of the Protestant movement devolved more and more on Coligny.

Another source of contention at court was more easily dealt with.

Hatred of the Cardinal of Lorraine was the one thing that both Catholics and Protestants could agree on. As the Venetian ambassador noted, this had less to do with his policies than his overbearing personality: ‘his desire was to appear that he was the person who knew everything and did everything’. In this atmosphere, he feared for his safety and retired to his diocese at Reims, where he would preach and set an example to others by administering to what he termed ‘his little flock’. His retirement allowed his brother greater freedom of movement. While the cardinal had little faith in Philip II’s commitment to reform of the Church, his brother’s thinking was more straightforward: since the family had so few friends it was time to cultivate the Habsburg enemy. Though Philip continued to mistrust the Guise and continued to place more faith in Montmorency, his ambassador, Chantonnay, in competition with Throckmorton, did his best to bring Catholics at court together and form a united front.

In the cardinal’s absence it was the Protestant party that gained the upper hand. Under Coligny’s protection Protestant preachers held Lenten sermons at court, testing the tacit acceptance of Protestant worship behind closed doors. Catherine continued the religious policy of the previous regime. But the law remained ambiguous and difficult to enforce, and the Protestants determined to test her resolve.

Coligny had the backing of Elizabeth I who assured the admiral that he could ‘boldly make record of her constancy and determination to advance the work of Almighty God by maintaining the truth of the Gospel’. 16 As the climax to the religious year approached, tensions reached breaking point. On Palm Sunday, Coligny opened the doors to his apartments, permitting anyone to hear the service, which was attended by Condé and 500 supporters. Chantonnay was scandalized. But it was the news that the Queen Mother and her young son had heard the sermon that brought matters to a head—Protestants hoped and Catholics feared that the king of France was about to convert.

The counterpart of Calvinist self-confidence was Catholic resignation. Defeatism and opportunism swept through the ruling elites.

Among the educated, in particular, there was little stomach for a fight and Protestantism was in fashion. But just when the elites seemed ready to give in to the Protestant tide, a vigorous and popular Catholic reaction occurred. Since their rulers seemed unable or unwilling to defend the cause, the people themselves would have to take responsibility. Violent riots—virtual pogroms—erupted in Provence, Angers, Pontoise, Le Mans, Toulouse, Lyon, and Beauvais in the spring and early summer of 1561. Clustered around the chief moments of the Church calendar, they targeted those who failed to take Easter communion or failed to pay due reverence to the elevation of the Holy Sacrament in processions. These incidents were not entirely spontaneous. Especially noteworthy was the role in the violence played by new confraternities that were springing up all over France.

They were very different organizations from the traditional boozy social clubs associated with the guilds. The new brotherhoods were characterized by their piety and by their devotion to the Holy Sacrament, an institutional rebuttal of the heretics’ denial of the Real Presence. Cutting across traditional trade and class boundaries, they called for a militant and united response to heresy. By publicly parading and venerating the sacred Host and proclaiming the miracle of the Mass, they would confront Protestants openly and directly.

The confreres were inspired and motivated by doom-mongering preachers whose sermons the people now flocked to hear. And Catholic printers showed that Protestantism was not the only religion of the book: in the years before 1562 there were as many as 70,000 copies of anti-Protestant sermons, libels, and tracts circulating in France. Dominican and Franciscan preachers did not confine their vitriol to heretics; they denounced the Erasmians as fellow travellers of heretics.

The Crown made desperate attempts to halt the cycle of sectarian violence. Insults, such as ‘Huguenot’ and ‘Papist’, were made a punishable offence. But it could do little to stem the torrent of abuse that streamed from the pulpit. The printed sermons of one of the most notorious preachers, Artus Desiré, reveal ‘the narrowness of his intellectual range and the lengths he was willing to go to achieve his violent ends’. 17 Desiré’s sermons were a call to arms in order to pre-empt God’s wrath: ‘when the [Holy Sacrament] is put down and Mass no longer said in the world, when the dissolute prevent the sacrifice, God will come to judgement and the world will come to an end’. And the preachers were not afraid to call their betters to account. Desiré was arrested in April on his way to Spain to exhort Philip II to intervene in France. As the Protestants at court gathered for Communion on Palm Sunday, a Paris preacher identified the enemy: ‘It is this [House] of Coligny that is against you and will ruin you.’18

Paris’s resolute ultra-Catholicism was in contrast to the liberal atmosphere at Fontainebleau. It was the Constable Montmorency who made the first break with the consensus at court. He and his wife were deeply conservative and he now had to choose between his faith and his beloved nephews. He told Coligny he wanted unity and could not tolerate a repeat of the Palm Sunday events. But it was not just the Protestants that led the constable to revolt. Jean de Monluc had become the Queen Mother’s favourite preacher at court, and the constable no longer wished to hear sermons that criticized the Church and denounced deeply cherished practices, such as the cult of images and the invocation of the saints. Easter Sunday, 6 April 1561, was a day of mounting drama. It began when the constable and the Duke of Guise heard that Monluc was to preach the Easter Sunday sermon.

The old enemies met and agreed not to attend. Next, Guise went to Catherine de Medici, who was out walking in the gardens, and told her that she must stop ‘drinking from two fountains’. The two former enemies followed by a host of other Catholic grandees then descended into the servants’ quarters to hear an obscure friar. Quite deliberately they shunned the intellectual and elitist
Moyenneurs
and joined the humble people. Cardinal Tournon stood godfather to the reconciliation, which Protestants denounced as the ‘Triumvirate’, a conspiracy against the state. Guise and Montmorency received Holy Communion from the cardinal’s own hands after exchanging the kiss of peace. Montmorency left court the next day followed by the duke twenty-four hours later—Catherine was left isolated. Since Guise now had new Catholic friends, he publicly repudiated some of his Protestant ones.

He summarily broke off the engagement of his daughter to the Duke of Longueville, citing the latter’s refusal to attend Mass and snapping that he would ‘rather marry his daughter to a poor gentleman than to the duke’.

After Easter, public order began to break down and the prospect of civil war loomed once more. Nowhere was the breakdown more in evidence than the capital. At the end of April, 2,000 Catholics in Paris attacked a Protestant meeting house on the outskirts of the city which was stoutly defended by its occupants and several of the assailants were killed. Catherine came under intense pressure from both sides.

On 11 May the Parlement of Paris issued a stern remonstrance against the policy of tacit toleration, arguing that the only way to stop sedition ‘was to cut the root, which is religious division’.

* * * *

In the summer of 1561, the moderate Flemish theologian, George Cassander wrote that there were three parties in France: ‘the Papists’ led by the Cardinal of Tournon, the Huguenots led by Coligny, and another party called the Third or Middle Party, which consisted of the Queen Mother, Chancellor l’Hôpital, Monluc, the King of Navarre, and the Cardinal of Lorraine. Historians invariably disagree with this. To them, the Guise, as chief architects of Catholic reaction, must belong to the ‘Papist’ party. But this was not so: in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of civil war in 1562, politics was in a state of flux and uncertainty. We should avoid the temptation to interpret the events of 1561 through the prism of later events. For there is good reason to believe that François, Duke of Guise, too, was behind his brother’s efforts to find a middle way in the summer and autumn of 1561. All too often the story of France’s troubles concentrates exclusively on the clash between two opposing religious parties to the detriment of those who were yet undecided, or caught in the middle. It would be the split in the Middle Party and the falling away of the middle ground that led France to fall into the abyss.

In the mounting chaos after Easter, Catherine once more turned to the Guise. As late as May, Cardinal Charles remained exiled from court because of the animosity towards him, and he was now joined by his brother. And yet only a month later the Guise were back at the centre of power and the English Ambassador Throckmorton was singing the Duke of Guise’s praises. The Triumvirate was forgotten: ‘The like hope there is by some good arguments [Guise] will become an earnest Protestant.’19 Had even the English ambassador, whose despatches had hitherto rarely arrived in London without containing some diatribe against the Guise brothers, been duped by François’s famous courtesy and affability? Protestant historians have always thought so: the Guise were laying smoke screens while they secretly directed the Triumvirate conspiracy. But there is not a shred of evidence that a cunning plot was being masterminded. Although the Protestants wished it otherwise, the Triumvirate remained only a loose agreement to drop old antagonisms during the current crisis. Throckmorton may have been naïve but he was no fool. In order to understand what was really going on in the summer of 1561 we need to lay aside confessional bias, and to consider what solutions to the crisis were on offer.

Initially, it was the fear of a breakdown of order in Paris that led to the duke’s recall. Catherine feared that the processing of the Host at Corpus Christi would lead to riots, and so just two days before the feast she hastily ordered the duke to come and maintain the peace. As he passed through the city dressed in his favourite crimson, he was welcomed as a saviour:

The queen not only noticed that the duke was popular and able to maintain order in a way that the commander of the army, Navarre, had been unable to do, she saw that the duke’s retinue of 400 men was twice as large as Navarre’s. But Guise did not consider exploiting his popularity with the Catholic mob for political ends. As a prince, the only constituency he wished to appeal to were his peers. The duke ignored appeals from Rome and Madrid and pledged his support to his brother and the Middle Party, joining his brother in a dialogue with Lutherans and ‘Anglicans’ (a term which was coined at this time in France to denote the Church of England, although its use in English is not recorded until 1635). Guise wrote of his hopes that a National Council would solve religious divisions and start a ‘good Reformation’. 20 Calvinists denounced his letters as a ploy to split the reform movement. True, the Elector Palatine was sceptical and the Landgrave of Hesse cautious. But the Duke of Württemberg was convinced, because Guise spoke with frankness. He had, he wrote, no intention of ‘embracing any religion, other than that which he had been brought up in’, but he then went on to condemn the ‘blindness and idolatry’ into which the Catholic Church had sunk; he looked back not to Catholic tradition but to the scriptures as the basis for concord.

Württemberg had greater reason than his fellow Lutherans to trust the duke. He was an old friend and had served under him in Italy. Having been raised at the French court, he was a product of the same evangelical milieu as Anne Boleyn and the Cardinal of Lorraine, whose interest in the Confession of Augsburg was in the French evangelical tradition of working with Lutherans. The conservative princes, German or French, shared more in common with each other than with the plebian ultra-Catholics and Calvinists confronting each other in the streets. Soon envoys were shuttling between Joinville and Stuttgart; Württemberg, cautioning his friend against coercion, sent him a copy of the Augsburg Confession.

Antoine de Navarre was also reading the Augsburg Confession. Historians, echoing Calvinist despair, have been unimpressed at his ‘vacillation’ and ‘weak will’. On the contrary, Navarre’s reverence for both the Mass and the cause of the Gospels is indicative of growing conviction. Lutherans’ reverence for a truncated version of the Mass seemed to offer the best hope of compromise; its conservative reformism the best antidote to the growing political disorder. Navarre’s reconciliation with the Guise was more than opportunism; it was built on a realization that they shared similar beliefs. Crucially, the Duke of Guise would be able to rely on Navarre’s support in the dark days after Wassy.

The renewed impetus behind the search for a
via media
was partly due to the decision made to return Mary Stuart to Scotland. Her faith was also inspired by Erasmus and she agreed with her uncle Charles on the need to make a deal with the Protestants, rebuffing a delegation of Scots Catholics. While she could not embrace Protestantism she promised to respect it, as long as she was free to have a private chapel. Following these successful negotiations she and her uncle returned to court on 10 June. The revival of Guise fortunes in Scotland would require the support of England and the family now moved to repair its relations with Elizabeth. As soon as the cardinal returned to court, he had an interview with Throckmorton at which the issue of Church reform was raised. When an ultra-Catholic pamphlet was published in Lyon denouncing Elizabeth I as a bastard and her mother, Anne Boleyn, as Jezebel, Throckmorton was grateful to the Guise for their attempts to suppress it and arrest the culprit. Throckmorton’s rapprochement with the Guise suggests that he had seen the memorandum, drawn up at the behest of the cardinal, principally with the Lutherans in mind. It outlined the major points of controversy that needed to be resolved, including the issue of the Real Presence.

Throckmorton reciprocated these overtures: he told his masters that all the French Catholics he met were for some sort of Reformation; all that each man desired was ‘to make his bargain as honourably and profitably as he can’, and of how they looked with envy across the Channel at the way order had been maintained. They feared the Calvinists because they were Levellers, who wished ‘to pluck down an old building which consists of good and bad stuff’.

With the Guise apparently leaning towards the Confession of Augsburg, Throckmorton sent off hurried appeals for a French or Latin translation of the English Prayer Book; he told William Cecil that an explanation of the English
via media
was urgent: ‘a modestie in the Apologie will commende it greatlye, and to avoyde as may be to irritate anye partie’. 21

What the Guise were offering was not toleration—an idea abhorrent to the vast majority of Europeans. The word toleration lacked the positive connotations it has today. In the sixteenth century it meant putting up with something one did not like. They could not countenance liberty of worship and wished above all to preserve the unity of the Church, the foundation of social order. Their proposal was to make a pragmatic distinction between public worship and private conscience. This was very different from the violent solution demanded by the preachers in the towns and the Spanish ambassador at court, a solution which the confraternities devoted to the Holy Sacrament were already fighting for. Lorraine’s proposal was a Gallican version of the
via media
that was being tried in England and that would later come to pass in the Dutch Republic. It reconciled social order with a limited degree of liberty of conscience.

While his brother kept the peace in Paris, Cardinal Charles made a triumphant return to the Privy Council. The enforced sabbatical spent in his diocese, devoted to preaching, pastoral care, and spiritual reading, was one of the happiest periods of his life, one in which he had felt a sense of freedom he had rarely known before. His depression of the previous winter had lifted and he returned to politics with renewed vigour and energy. He talked excitedly about the necessity of returning to the practices of the primitive Church as a preliminary step to healing division. The breakdown of order he argued was due to the fact that the law was ambiguous and each side interpreted it as it saw fit. What was required was both an ‘inviolable law’, which was clear to everyone and which would maintain peace in preparation for the summoning of a National Council of the Church, which Catherine had announced on June 12. The Calvinists too stepped up the pressure for an unambiguous law: the day before they had presented a request for liberty of worship. From 23 June to 17 July 150 grandees and magistrates debated the two proposals. The cardinal’s persuasive eloquence was much in evidence. He ‘listened to almost every hour [of the debates] and his interventions were accorded much attention and admiration, even from his enemies’. 22 The Duke of Guise was frank; if toleration was accorded ‘he would not keep his sword sheathed forever’. 23 But the Guise proposals were also heavily opposed, and not only by Protestants. Chancellor l’Hôpital, now convinced of the need to accommodate the Protestants, clashed with his former patrons and argued eloquently that attempts to outlaw Protestant worship were absurd and unworkable. Cardinal Tournon, whom Pius IV

referred to as the only good Catholic in France, opposed the summoning of a National Council, calling it ‘the greatest evil that had ever been pursued in France’. Senile and in fragile health, he lacked the charisma of his opponents and the Guise proposals were accepted by a majority of Catholics present. The resulting edict of July outlawed Protestant worship. At the same time, it ended corporal punishment for heresy and ‘prohibited all men to investigate what is going on in the house of his neighbour’. 24 ‘Unity with reform’: the pragmatists had triumphed over the dogmatists. Guise statecraft owed more to Elizabeth I than to Philip II.

It was now that Catherine dropped her bombshell. On 25 July, less than a week before the French clergy were due to meet at Poissy, where they had been detached from the other delegates of the Estates-General because Pontoise was too small, Catherine made it clear that the assembly was not to be one of prelates alone; ‘subjects’ who desired to be heard were welcome too. When it became known that safe conducts were to be issued to Protestants there was an outcry.

Pius IV demanded that heretics be met with ‘fire and sword’, and he despatched the Cardinal of Ferrara and Lainez, the General of the Jesuits, to France; their aim to oppose the Cardinal of Lorraine, whose eagerness to debate on the issue of the Real Presence was well known. Dialogue with the Protestants was all the more important since the Guise now had a Protestant kingdom to rule. Mary Stuart embodied their commitment to upholding the distinction between public conformity and private belief. Hope abounded that the Auld Alliance was being renewed and revived, as one of her supporters put it, ‘as it has been between their predecessors, by most ancient band and league, inviolably in all times past’. On the day that the National Council was announced she left Paris, accompanied by five of her uncles, heading for the cardinal’s great Benedictine abbey at Fécamp on the Channel coast. From here she set sail for Scotland.

She would never see her uncles or France again.

* * * *

Perched on a bluff which nestles in a loop in the Seine, the royal château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye has extensive views to Paris fourteen miles to the east. Three miles to the north, the river, which has come round a loop flung several miles to the east, is met and spanned at Poissy by one of the finest of French medieval bridges. Convalescing after an illness, the Cardinal of Lorraine arrived at the great Dominican convent there in a litter on 29 July. He was among forty-six bishops and archbishops, including six cardinals, who convened to debate a panoply of ecclesiastical matters, of which the meeting with the Protestants—the Colloquy of Poissy—was only a subsidiary event. Even so, more than half the complement of French bishops did not attend. For the Doctors of the Sorbonne, Chantonnay, the Pope, and perhaps a majority of the French bishops, the mere presence of the Huguenots was in itself an abominable scandal, but that they should be allowed to detail their heretical opinions in front of the young king was outrageous. The General of the Jesuits summed up the ultra-Catholic sentiments when he referred to the Calvinist delegation as consisting of ‘wolves, foxes, serpents, [and] assassins’.

The captain of the Genevan delegation was Calvin’s second-in-command, Théodore Beza. Six years older than Cardinal Charles, he shared the same humanist background—he was a fine Latin poet and professor of Greek—as well as the refinement, good looks, and aristocratic background of his enemy. Beza arrived at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 23 August, where he was assured that a formidable array of support awaited him: a crack team of a dozen Calvinist ministers and theologians provided theological expertise and sixteen laymen, most of them nobles, provided moral support. Catholics complained that the Protestant delegation was better received at court than ‘would have been the Pope’. 25

On the day after his arrival Beza was called into the chambers of the King of Navarre, where he found not only Antoine, but Catherine herself, Condé, and the cardinals of Bourbon and Lorraine. The meeting between Beza and Lorraine must rank as one of the most extraordinary of the Reformation age. There was a moment of tension as they confronted each other for the first time. Lorraine started icily: ‘Hitherto you have been known to me only through your books, which in your absence abroad have occasioned the greatest disturbances in France. Now that you are here in person, I trust you will show a spirit of peace and goodwill and lend us your aid in suppressing these disturbances.’26 Beza denied that he had written the
Tigre
and replied modestly that he was too unimportant a person to possess the wide influence with which the cardinal credited him; moreover he had always condemned violence. Lorraine then steered the conversation onto the terrain on which he wished to fight: the Real Presence.

Had not, he asked, Beza written that ‘Christ is no more in the Eucharist than in the mud’—words offensive to the queen and rest of the company present. Beza dismissed the notion as ‘absurd and full of blasphemy’ and went on to advance the Calvinist interpretation.

The cardinal then made an oblique reference to the Lutheran interpretation. At the first mention of Lutheranism Beza was on the alert.

Calvin had warned him that at all costs the cardinal must not be able to make capital out of Lutheran-Calvinist dissensions and drive a wedge into the reformed edifice. But this was not the cardinal’s principal intention: with a mixture of arrogance and
folie de grandeur
he believed that he could save the whole of Christendom if agreement on the Real Presence was found. ‘Do you confess then that we communicate truly and substantially the body and blood of Jesus Christ?’ The cardinal was taken aback when Beza answered in the affirmative that he did so ‘spiritually and by faith’. The cardinal did not pursue this important qualification but replied positively: ‘This also I do believe.’ On parting both men embraced and the cardinal in particular was heartened by the meeting. ‘You will find that I am not as black as they make me out to be.’

It was a distinguished company that on Tuesday 9 September 1561 made the short journey to the convent at Poissy. The twenty-two Huguenot ministers and lay deputies were ushered into the great refectory by the Duke of Guise, fulfilling the office of Grand Master.

They were placed behind a barrier erected at one end (Plate 16), where they were expected to stand throughout. Charles IX was already in place at the other end of the hall, surrounded by his mother, the princes of the blood, and other courtiers, among them the cardinal’s protégés Ramus and Ronsard. Chancellor l’Hôpital started the proceedings, addressing the bishops seated behind Lorraine, urging them to listen to the Huguenots with charity in the general interests of peace and harmony. Then Beza rose to deliver the first full-length oration of the Colloquy. It was important because it would set the tone for the course of the whole assembly. It was a polished and refined performance. Beza set out to woo the royal family, pledging himself to concord and sounding an ecumenical note. He avoided the complexities of the doctrine of predestination and accentuated, without exaggerating, the not inconsiderable common elements that united the two confessions. He then spelled out the orthodox Calvinist position on the Eucharist, stressing several times that the Calvinists believed in the Real Presence. It was at this point that he made an immense tactical blunder. He affirmed that the reformed doctrine did not render Christ absent from the Eucharist, but added that this was not a corporeal presence: ‘We say that His body is as far removed from the bread and wine as is heaven from earth.’27 This was too much for the prelates sitting opposite who had hitherto listened in polite silence. Cries of ‘Blasphemavit!’ were followed by murmuring and hissing as some of the prelates made as if to walk out. Even Coligny covered his face with his hands. Cardinal Tournon, trembling with wrath, stood up and asked how Catherine could permit ‘to hear these horrible blasphemies, in the presence of the King’. Beza tried to explain his analogy, noting that the glorified body of Christ can now only be in heaven and not elsewhere, but the damage had been done.