Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    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