Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (42 page)

As his melancholy subsided the king made amends. In October he admitted that he ‘lived too privately’ and that he needed to make time for conversation. He ordered more feasting and dances.

These bread-and-circus entertainments masked the king’s true feelings—he had finally been convinced that the Guise were planning to usurp the Navarre’s legal right to the succession and seize the crown for themselves. The claims were not new; they were preposterous and easily exposed as fabrications. But during 1582 an obscure and little-read Latin genealogical compendium, the
Stemmatum Lotharingiae
, came to the king’s attention. The claim that the Guise were directly descended from Charlemagne was uncontroversial; the legend had been put into print as early as 1510. In 1543 Edmond du Boullay had traced the dynasty back to Adam! The
Stemmatum
itself received the royal privilege. But here and there within its thousand pages its author, François de Rosières, Archdeacon of Toul, had inserted explosive allegations: he insinuated that Hugues Capet was a low-born usurper of the Carolingians, and that Provence and Anjou had been snatched from René II of Lorraine by extortion and false promises; he maintained that Elizabeth I was a bastard and that Philip II was the true heir to the kingdom of Navarre. Henry III was furious.

On 23 December Rosierès was arrested in Toul and interrogated. Who had put him up to writing a book which ‘condemns and dishonours Frenchmen'?22 Rosières’s reply that it was all his own work failed to appease the king and he was sent to the Bastille. On 26 April 1583 he appeared on his knees in front of the king, the council, the dukes of Guise and Mayenne, and begged pardon for having spread malicious lies detrimental to the kings of France and the House of Valois.

The enemies of the Guise capitalized on their misfortunes: wild accusations against the duke abounded—he was cleared of plotting to poison the king’s brother. And yet there is good reason for thinking that the Guise were as shocked and disturbed by the
Stemmatum
as the king. For Rosières was not working for them, but for Charles III, Duke of Lorraine. He was the duke’s genealogist and member of his Privy Council, and saved from execution at the duke’s intercession.

Charles III had two reasons for wanting the
Stemmatum
compiled. 
Partly, it was to refute a similar Protestant publication, which mocked the pretensions of the House of Lorraine to descend from Charlemagne, claiming instead that Hugues Capet, far from being the son of a butcher, was a true Carolingian and had saved France from German domination. The inference was clear: Henri de Navarre, the true heir, would save France, once again, from the ‘Germans’. But the
Stemmatum
went far beyond a refutation. That it did so was because it reflected the vanity of Duke Charles III and the talk that circulated freely at his court. For Charles III was a man with great plans. He took to styling himself Count of Provence: the uncertainty into which the Dutch Revolt and the French Wars of Religion had plunged Europe provided opportunities for ambitious men like him. He dreamed of extending his duchy towards the Rhine. The same year that the
Stemmatum
was published, he plotted, with Calvinist support, to seize the Lutheran city of Strasbourg.

The controversy was a serious blow to Guise. Although the king no longer trusted him, he needed to keep him nearby. Nobody, least of all the astute English ambassador, Cobham, was fooled: ‘The king dissembles exceedingly’. His flirtation with the Duchess of Aumale may also have been part of the ruse. The
mignons
took to poking fun at the cuckolded husband. Cobham described the tension between Guise and Epernon as a ‘heartburning’. In May 1583 the feud turned violent: there was a punch-up between the two retinues and Guise issued a challenge. Later that year a squabble during a tennis match was even more dangerous: ‘this will not be without blood, because the duke of Guise saith little, and then he commonly thinketh most’. 23

* * * *

Life at court had steadily become unbearable. All the more so since, when the king married into the House of Lorraine in 1575, Guise prospects had seemed so good. Precedence was a precise indicator of power and the other princes, sensing the political wind, had won rulings that pushed the Guise further down the ceremonial pecking order. This was humiliating for a family that had once posed as the defender of the princes against parvenus. Even those Catholic princes to whom they were related—the Orléans-Longueville, the Nevers, the Montpensier—increasingly spurned them. One consequence of this was that the family turned in on itself more than ever before. Outside hostility and the intermarriage of first cousins strengthened the clan mentality. The rupture with the king in 1582 made solidarity imperative. The duke remained at court for one reason: he too was dissembling, humouring, and playing the king along. He was secretly plotting to win a kingdom. He was planning the invasion of England.

We may hope that in time to come our England, which now through grievous torments lieth oppressed with the heavy burden of heresy, may, as it were, being called out of the ugly jaws of Satan and restored again to the bosom of the Catholic Church, make account of the receiving of their old and ancient religion at your hands.

William Gifford, considered the brightest prospect in the émigré community, had been teaching at Reims for less than a year when he wrote this eulogy to the Guise. The Giffords were an ancient and distinguished lineage with properties in Staffordshire and Gloucestershire, whose wider family circle contained many notable supporters of Mary Stuart, such as the Throckmortons. The Giffords encapsulated the dreams and dangers of exile. William’s elder brother, George, ‘the doublest knave that ever I knew’, according to ambassador Stafford, was a soldier who harboured fantasies of assassinating Elizabeth I. 
Their cousin, Gilbert, was already a difficult and truculent 17-year-old when he left England and went into exile; he challenged a fellow student to a duel and stirred up division in the English College in Rome. On returning to France, he was a reformed character and joined the secret conspiracies of the Marian party. His fellow plotters were unaware that he was, in fact, a double agent, who was known to his controllers in London as Francis Hartley.

As for William, the Cardinal of Guise was impressed and granted him a pension. William’s youthful optimism—he was no older than 25—captures the spirit of hope and expectancy that was surging through the ranks of English Catholic exiles at the beginning of 1583. 
Over a thousand exiles formed a militant and organized community centred on Reims, Paris, and Rouen. The move of the English College from Douai to Reims in 1578 had been a great success: by 1583 its size had quadrupled to over 200 students. The Cardinal of Guise facilitated the move and took a close interest in the institution, encouraging its mission, and ordaining many of the more than one hundred priests who made the return voyage across the Channel. It was a hazardous journey: 
seventeen priests had already been martyred since 1577. Those who returned to France were not disheartened however; they reported ‘signs of revolt’ everywhere, waves of conversions, and the readiness of people to rise up as soon as an army of liberation set foot on English soil. Once the exiles had looked to Spain as their saviour, now they saw the Duke of Guise as the man to lead them home. William proclaimed that ‘the immortal fame of that noble family of Guise...should be blown and spread in the Christian world forever’.1 

Elizabeth took the opposite view. She disapproved of Henry III’s policy of keeping them at court; he ‘should not favour her mortal enemy, to which she added some very foul words applied to Guise’, which Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, did not feel he could repeat to Philip II. 2 The Guise were up to something, and she knew more about it than Henry III or Philip II because with the influx of exiles had come double agents and spies. Mendoza complained to his master of how secretary Walsingham, an experienced observer of the Paris scene from his time there as ambassador, maintained ‘such a multitude of spies in France’. 3 One of these was planted in the Guise household itself. His reports give us an unparalleled glimpse of the world of the Guise family: we can eavesdrop on the duke’s jokes, participate in his
coucher
, the nightly ritual of his retiring to bed, or see the duke bite his lip in vexation as his invasion plans are postponed. This tale of spying and skulduggery has yet to be told in full partly because of the aversion of English historians for things continental; they refer to the invasion project as the ‘Throckmorton Plot’, as if Francis Throckmorton was something more than a parochial cog in a much bigger international mechanism. 4 In France, too, the English exiles evoke little interest, surprisingly so since the care of English refugees was an early opportunity for Paris radicals to demonstrate their solidarity with and commitment to the international Catholic cause. Exile propaganda was to be enormously important, not only in showing Frenchmen the terrifying fate that a Protestant succession would bring, but also in vilifying Henry III as the puppet of Elizabeth. 
What his ultra-Catholic critics wanted were less pilgrimages and processions and more action to help their British co-religionists.

* * * *

Guise interest in foreign affairs was stimulated by their deteriorating relationship with the king. In April 1578, in talks with the Spanish ambassador and letters to William Allen, the head of the English mission, the duke first spoke of his interest in the exile cause and of his concern for the plight of his cousins Mary Stuart and James VI. 
Guise found offers of Spanish assistance welcome as his reputation came under sustained attack from the mignons. Until then, the Spanish had been deterred by his inexperience and dilettante image. But the Duke of Anjou’s flight from court in February and the danger that he would raise a French army to assist the Dutch rebels made it imperative that the Spanish find allies in France. Philip II was not fussy: he approached Henri de Navarre and paid pensions to Protestant noblemen. Guise was identified by the Spanish ambassador as an ideal ally, both because of the political pressure he was under and his enormous debts. The talks had no immediate political consequences but prepared the ground for future cooperation. Guise entered the world of international espionage with the Spanish code-name ‘Hercules’, which was later changed to ‘Mucius’.

When he was finally forced to quit court in May the duke did not retire as usual to Joinville. Instead, he visited his wife’s properties in Normandy. But this was no summer holiday. His first visit to the seaside was to pledge to build a new family residence at Eu: plans were quickly completed and the foundations laid. Eu was not just a pleasure palace; it was the beginning of the revival of interest in a British empire; this time backed by the Habsburgs rather than the Valois. Its proximity to Dieppe made Eu quickly and easily accessible to England. In the next few years he would spend more time in Normandy than in Champagne, improving Eu’s anchorage so that it could receive vessels of up to 300 tons. One of the leading exiles, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, who became suffragan and vicar-general of the diocese of Rouen in 1579, encouraged his interest. At the beginning of 1582 he invited Ross and a number of senior Jesuits to Eu, where he announced the donation of £100 towards the establishment of a new school for the sons of English Catholics. The duke had recently built there a new college for the French Jesuits and it remained almost empty. When Father Robert Persons, whose escapades in England the previous year captivated his French audience, begged it from Claude Mathieu, the Jesuit Provincial readily lent it to him. The small school, which never had more than thirty pupils, was the direct predecessor of the present Stonyhurst College.

The duke’s conscience was untroubled by the English mission, which meant sending young and suggestible men into extreme danger. 
The Jesuits, in particular, adapted well to the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage, even though such activities were ostensibly forbidden by the Society. Guise chief agent, Hubert Samier, travelled disguised as a physician called la Rue, on his visits to Mary. Even on the continent he rarely wore his habit and travelled incognito, either as la Rue or Hieronymo Martelli. Guise was aware that he too was being watched and not just by the English. In 1579, Henry III appointed a new lieutenant in Champagne, Jean de Dinteville, with orders to keep an eye on the duke—it was another reason why he preferred to stay away from the province. Guise himself was compelled to adapt to the times: when he visited the Spanish ambassador he did so in disguise. 
He paid a bribe of 3,000 crowns to Stafford, the penurious English ambassador who replaced Cobham in the autumn of 1583, to look at diplomatic dispatches.

In January 1581 Guise was commissioned by Mary to form an association in her name. But it was Scottish domestic politics, as in 1560, that promised to transform Guise fortunes, this time for the better. The Earl of Morton’s Protestant and Anglophile regime was shaken by the return of the Catholic, Esmé Stuart, Duke of Lennox. 
There were high expectations of James VI’s return to the Catholic fold when Morton was hanged on 2 June and Lennox took control of power. Guise could barely contain his excitement. When he was not at court, he was in Normandy where he was a regular guest of the Bishop of Ross at the archiepiscopal palace of Gaillon, reputedly the most beautiful Renaissance palace in France. In December, an English spy followed him to a number of secret meetings with representatives of the Catholic League in Normandy; these included François de Roncherolles, who would soon be sent to Scotland as his plenipotentiary, the local vice-admiral, Jean de Moy, whose support in any overseas enterprise was crucial, and an old Guise acquaintance, Michel de Monchy, Archdeacon of Eu, who had taken responsibility for the care of the English exiles in Rouen. 

It was during this visit that the duke first encountered Persons, and another Jesuit, the Scotsman William Crichton. He entertained them at Eu, where he gave Crichton, who was about to depart to hold secret talks with the Earl of Lennox, final instructions. Persons had recently returned from England and told the duke about his narrow escape and the arrest of his fellow priest, Edmund Campion. Persons had since settled in Rouen, setting up a printing press and establishing himself as the chief propagandist for the English Catholic cause. Persons’s report that the conversion of the entire British Isles depended on Scotland chimed with Guise’s dynastic interests. Campion’s martyrdom (1 December 1581) not only gave licence to propagandists like Persons to put Elizabeth on trial, but it played into the hands of Henry III’s enemies and moved French hearts into active support for the exile cause. Until then, Henry and Guise had succeeded in disguising their mutual animosity. When the break finally came in the New Year, Guise would defy his king and plot Elizabeth’s downfall.

* * * *

The key decisions took place in April and May 1582 as relations with Epernon came to a head and the court left for Fontainebleau without the Guise. On 14 May, in the house of the papal nuncio, Castelli, Crichton made a report of his visit and relayed Lennox’s ambitious plans to restore Scotland to Catholicism with an invasion of 8,000 troops in September supported by a similar-sized local levy. This was preliminary to asserting the claims of James VI to the throne of England. Crichton read out a memoir, which denounced the machinations of the ‘Puritan’ faction under the earls of Leicester and Huntingdon to usurp the rightful Stuart succession. Beside the nuncio, sitting around the table were Guise; James Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, representing Mary; and Claude Matthieu, who, as well as Provincial, was also rector of the Professed Jesuits (the elite of the society distinguished by their personal oath of obedience to the Pope), whose house in the rue Saint-Antoine had, since its foundation in 1580, emerged as a leading centre of Catholic politics. After listening, Guise first made some modifications to the plan, before turning to the nuncio to ask him to inform the Pope that ‘he would insist in going in person on this enterprise with all his friends and kinsmen, and that as things stood as they were he did not doubt that the enterprise was feasible’. 5 

The meeting ended in agreement, but two weeks later the duke got cold feet. ‘He had a great desire to take part in person’, but was troubled that he would break the oath he had made to Henry III 
as a knight of the Order of the Holy Spirit not to employ himself in favour of a foreign prince. A meeting at Beaton’s house was hastily arranged and, in typical Jesuit fashion, Matthieu was able to free the duke’s troubled conscience. After all, his legitimacy would come from the Pope himself and, if necessary, an Italian commander would be placed nominally in charge, so as to avert domestic criticism. The next step was to raise the 400,000 crowns necessary, and the Spanish ambassador, Tassis, was duly contacted. Crichton was sent to Rome and Persons, disguised and under the pseudonym Richard Melino, was dispatched to Madrid to sell the enterprise. In July, Guise and Mayenne went to Normandy to begin preparations, discussing the logistics with their local contacts and procuring the necessary ships. 
Roncherolles was sent to Scotland in order to lay the groundwork for their arrival.

The enterprise suffered its first blow on 22 August with the seizure of James VI by Protestant lords in the Ruthven raid. Guise was not disheartened, as he still had great faith in Lennox. Worse news came from Rome, where the Pope was only prepared to offer 50,000 crowns, but especially from Madrid, where Philip II was distinctly cool. One of the most damaging accusations levelled at Guise was that he sold himself and later France to a foreign prince. This completely misunderstands the nature of sixteenth-century dynastic politics. The duke approached Philip as an equal and hoped that the Catholic cause would provide cover for Guise dynastic pretensions in the British Isles. But Philip had no intention of using Spanish money to install a Guise puppet regime in the British Isles. Above all, he wanted the Guise to remain in France for his nuisance value, distracting the attention of the English and French from the Netherlands, where the Duke of Anjou had arrived on 10 February with the blessing of Elizabeth and Henry III, who had been providing covert financial support for his brother for some time. Anjou, accompanied by an Anglo-French host, which included the Earl of Leicester, was sworn in as duke, count, or lord of the various Netherlands provinces.

In September, Philip sent a meagre 10,000 crowns to Guise to support his espionage activities. What Philip wanted above all was a counterweight to the Anglophilia of the French court, and so he placed the duke on a pension of 40,000 crowns. Philip instructed Tassis to tell Guise his priority should be the threat posed by the possibility of a Protestant succession in France, and that the duke was assured of his protection should he require it. Being a foreign pensioner was not unusual in sixteenth-century Europe and it was difficult to refuse Spanish silver: even Stafford had his hands in the honey pot. What distinguished Guise’s relationship with Philip was its scale. It was not yet a formal alliance, but the first steps had been made in a commitment that would inevitably grow as the Anglo-French entente strengthened. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the New Year, the arrival of Lennox in Paris, where he immediately fell ill, put invasion plans on hold.