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

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