Stuart Carroll - Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe

Early spring is a busy season in the vineyards of France. But on the morning of Saturday 28 February 1562, those toiling on the east-facing hills overlooking the chteau of Joinville who momentarily stopped pruning their vines and looked below were treated to an impressive sight. Two hundred heavily armed men were mounting up; their lord and master, Franois de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, ten days after celebrating his forty-third birthday had been summoned to court by the regent of France, Catherine de Medici, on an important matter of state. While at court a superficial state of peace prevailed, the provinces of France were descending into civil war as Protestants fought to defend their right to worship and Catholics to deny them.

As head of one of the greatest princely houses of Europe, he was a rare visitor to Joinville these days, but he was immediately recognizable among the throng: no more and no less than the tallest, thickest and most honorable oak among all the trees in the forest, as one contemporary put it. 1 And this was no exaggeration: the Guise were uniformly tall in an age when men were on average much shorter than they are today, and when much greater store was placed on physical prowess. Mary Stuart, the dukes niece, was 5 feet 11 inches tall and she shared with her uncle the distinctive blond hair, which made the Guise look so un-French like, and which added fuel to the court gossips, who whispered that the Guise were not true-born Frenchmen, but foreigners from the Germanic lands of Lorraine. The peasants were privileged to catch a glimpse of one of the most famous men alive. As the Venetian ambassador put it, he surpasses by his courage, not only all the most celebrated generals of his age, but also any that have come before. 2

To the peasants working among the vines, the sights and sounds of a princely retinue on the move was as amazing as it was unusual. An aristocratic retinue was a naked expression of power and, in dangerous times such as these, it had to be seen to bristle with menace. The most impressive men came from the squadron of the ducal gendarmerie company, which at full strength comprised 250 heavy cavalry. This was the elite of the French royal army, on campaign the men-at-arms being required to arm themselves with closed helm; a good cuirass; upper arm and forearm armour; thigh, haunch and knee pieces; and a fully armoured saddle in addition to a pistol and a good, strong lance. Their horses were required to be bardedthat is to have head and chest armour as well as flank protection. Each man had to maintain two great warhorses and one nag for his baggage.

Also catching the eyes of those accustomed only to everyday hues was the dazzling clash of colours. Red and yellow were the colours of the House of Lorraine. It was used for the dukes livery, on which was stitched the distinctive ducal badge , today known as the cross of Lorraine, but in those days more properly called the cross of Anjoua reminder that the Guise claimed descent from one of the greatest of medieval princely houses. Yellow was also the colour of the House of Bourbon, from whom the duke was descended through his mother.

But he was most likely dressed in his favourite colour, red, which was traditionally associated with martial prowess, and wearing a hat topped with red plumes, for he loved plumes. 3 The ears of those listening from the vineyards would also have been assailed by the strange and unfamiliar. Foreign sounds mingled with more familiar cadences among the shouts and commands of the officers, as the men prepared to move off. Most of the men-at-arms were local, from the Barrois, Chaumont, Eastern Champagne and the other borderlands where the kingdom of France met the duchy of Lorraine, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. But the following of a great prince was a polyglot entity that reflected his dynastic interests and that made flesh an identity that was not restricted by national boundaries. Along with his soldiers travelled the men who counselled him, dressed him, served at his table, cared for his horses, and checked his accounts.

Here were heard accents from Normandy and Picardy, where the duke was a significant landowner, but also from Italy, where all educated Frenchmen believed the centre of the world to be and where the duke had once campaigned; from Germany, whose people were prized for their warlike disposition and whose specialist muscle was called upon for particularly dirty and dangerous work; and from Scotland, to where Mary Stuart had six months previously been unhappily dispatched. Lackeys provided protection for their lord; they were often employed solely for their ability to intimidate and to project an image of invulnerability. Their swaggering braggadocio was announced by the outlandishness of their appearance: earrings, ruffs, codpieces, trend-setting haircuts, and artfully curled mustaches.

At their sides dangled the newly-fashionable long sword, which the English called the rapier but which they knew as a verdun, whose elaborate hand guards marked out their owners as men of fashion and distinction. But the rapier was not just for show: it announced that one was a man of honour and prepared to die fighting if necessary to uphold it.

The onlookers gaze could not have missed the ducal coat of arms, which was everywhere to be seen: on the surcoats of his men, on the carriage which carried his pregnant wife, Anne dEste, and, not least, on his battle standard, unfurled by the standard bearer of the gendarmes, which depicted three silver eaglets on a red band set on a yellow background. The eaglets were a reminder of his Houses imperial heritagethat they were vicars of the Holy Roman Empire in the territories that lay between the Rhine and the Moselle. Coats of arms symbolized the identity of the family and, with the badges, banners, and livery, they were totems representing the bonds of fellowship and mutual obligation which bound the princely host together. The quarters of the dukes coat of arms represented the seven other sovereign houses from which he claimed descent: Hungary, Naples, Jerusalem, Aragon, Guelders, Jlich, and Bar.

This was no idle symbolism but a statement of his claim for precedence among his fellow men and of his rights, which he was honour-bound to defend.

As prince of Joinville, Franois was aware that his ancestors occupied an especially privileged place in the annals of chivalry and, as a Christian knight, a history that he aspired to emulate. Originally built in the eleventh century on a wooded spur of a hill overlooking a bend on the left bank of the river Marne, it had seen the famous Jean de Joinville, companion in arms and chronicler of Saint Louis, ride forth to the crusades; it housed the relics brought back from Palestine and the shield of Geoffroy V de Joinville given to him by Richard the Lionheart; it had sheltered Jeanne dArc at the beginning of her mission; during the Hundred Years War it had been a French frontier outpost and partially burnt by the Burgundians. Despite its growth into a bustling market town of 3,000 people and the building of its Renaissance chteau surrounded by one of the most magnificent gardens in France, Joinville was still a frontier outpost; as recently as 1544 it had been burned and pillaged by the invading forces of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain. Guises loathing for the House of Habsburg was based on personal experience. It was hostility to the Habsburg which had brought the Guise and their neighbours, the Houses of Clves and la Marck, to the French court. These princely houses occupied a privileged position at the very apex of French society, although it was only in the seventeenth century that they were commonly referred to as princes trangers, which distinguished them juridically from indigenous French princes.

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Joinville faced east across the Marne. The countryside round about was hilly and wooded with vines on the lower slopes; but higher up the slopes, some of which rose to over 1,000 feet, the gradients were so steep that only grass clung to them. From here, as far as the eye could see, the land belonged to the duke. A land of water, woods and hills, it was neither well populated nor particularly productive, but it made for magnificent hunting, the dukes favourite pastime. Nine miles to the south-east of Joinville, at the limits of his lands, lay one of his many hunting lodges, hidden amidst the forests in the village of Doulaincourt. Just beyond, in the same direction, the onlooker could admire Reynel, the chteau of the dukes neighbour, Antoine de Clermont-Amboise, who at one time had been a frequent guest at Joinville. The duke found little to admire now that Antoine was a Protestant, a pestilence that everywhere crept closer and closer to his own lands. Turning to the north-east, seven miles from Joinville, was the dukes smaller chteau at Montiers-sr-Saulx, which lay within the Barrois, not part of the kingdom of France but belonging to the Duke of Lorraine. But the duke was not heading in this direction; he turned west towards Paris, where he had been summoned because of the crisis caused by the Edict of Toleration, which had been promulgated only six weeks before by Catherine de Medici. Although the Edict had only conceded the Protestants limited and temporary rights of public worship, its implications were revolutionary in a monarchy founded on the precepts of one king, one faith, one law. Not since the fall of the Roman Empire had a European state officially permitted the exercise of more than one Christian creed among its subjects; nowhere in sixteenth-century Europe, not even in heterogeneous Poland, did there exist similar legal protection for religious dissidents.