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stuart carroll

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stuart carroll

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stuart carroll

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"Purging the body politic of undue Guise influence"

The relationship between the duke and the king during the next three years was complex. Henry was far too clever to try to provoke or humiliate the Guise, but his desire to effect a fundamental transformation of the court and the kingdom would inevitably mean tackling vested interest groups. The king wanted to keep Guise at court so he could keep an eye on him, and to this end extended his generosity. Likewise, the traditional picture of Guise as a man driven by ambition, cynically manipulating the opposition to undermine the king does not hold. Only slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, would the duke find himself undermined and his pride damaged.

Henry III was fastidious and paid much attention to etiquette. He made significant changes to the structure of the court designed to break the Guise monopoly on high office. The Grand Master of the Household ‘the first and cheifest office and dignitie’, as the Englishman Richard Cooke described it, had been in the hands of the Guise since 1559, and Cooke saw the duke perform the role:

When the king maketh a great dynner with solempnitie & ceremonie, it is his charge to serve in person as stewarde and master of the house with a white staffe in his hande, & must go before the meate which is served at the King’s table . . . [he] hath by virtue of his office the greatest allowance and the greatest table in the Court, that is for fowre & twentie persons, and to his table doe come ordinarily many younge noble men & others makinge profession of armes. And this table is allwaies covered whilest the King dynethe.

A great privilege certainly. But Cooke was unaware that the control of the Grand Master over the court had been weakened in 1578 by the creation of a new official, the Grand Provost (grand prévot de l’hôtel), who was given responsibility for the policing of the court. It was entrusted to a mignon, François du Plessis, the father of Cardinal Richelieu. The same happened to the post of Grand Ecuyer. When this was in danger of falling into Guise hands, Henry diluted its authority over the royal stables by creating a new institution, the Petite Ecurie.

Purging the body politic of undue Guise influence was not just a question of bureaucratic organization; it was one of style. Those who did not share the king’s intellectual pursuits felt left out; his disdain for traditional aristocratic pastimes hit the Guise particularly hard. Charles d’Aumale was Master of the King’s Hunt, a post that, during the previous reign, had given his father control of 340 staff and a budget of 70,000 livres per annum, but Henry III rarely hunted and expenditure fell to 24,500 livres in 1584. Aumale was forced to sell land in order to make ends meet. Kings of France had traditionally lived their lives in public and been accessible to their subjects. Henry III followed the English model and took steps to restrict access thus ‘avoiding the confusion that continually takes place in his chambers, where everyone without distinction wishes to enter without the ushers being able to stop them’. He and the Guise were seen together much on public occasions, but real business was increasingly conducted in private. In 1581, the king, against the advice of his mother felt confident enough to establish a secret inner council. This was associated with the rise of two men from the pack of mignons, Jean-Louis de la Valette and Anne de Joyeuse, to positions of pre-eminence at court. They emerged as the principal ministers in the new cabinet. Henry set about turning these men, from the modest southern nobility, into great magnates, straining his relationship with the Guise to breaking point.

Guise had little to complain of publicly: he was regularly seen with the king; his pension and salaries were paid on time; he directly benefited from innovative and unpopular taxes. In the summer of 1581 he was awarded a gift of 200,000 livres, part of his cut from nine new fiscal edicts registered that summer, which enabled him to pay off many debts. But this was a sweetener to prepare him for his political exclusion. In September the viscounty of Joyeuse was raised to a duchy and negotiations opened with Mayenne to resign the office of Admiral of France. The king arranged Joyeuse’s marriage to the queen’s sister, Marguerite de Lorraine; and, once again, Guise could hardly complain, as Marguerite was his cousin. A deal was struck: Mayenne resigned the admiralty to Joyeuse for 360,000 livres, in return for which the marquisate of Elbeuf was created a duchy. Guise appeared for the marriage, where only the painting we have investigated records his displeasure at the extraordinary favour displayed to Joyeuse, who was given a gift of 1.2 million livres. The festivities, called ‘Magnificences’ lasted for two weeks, and stunned contemporaries with their sumptuousness. Even Pierre de l’Estoile, who was among the 50,000 spectators at one of the parades, was grudgingly impressed in his journal. And the king did not stop there. On New Year’s Day 1582, Joyeuse and Epernon were appointed as alternating First Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber: henceforth no one could leave or enter the king’s apartments without their consent. Resistance to the palace revolution coalesced around the figure of la Valette, who became Duke of Epernon in November 1581. His rise was even more remarkable than that of Joyeuse. During the 1580s he would accumulate something in the region of 3 million livres in salaries, pensions, and royal gifts, putting into perspective the crumbs with which Guise had to be content. While Joyeuse took care of the navy, Epernon was charged with reasserting royal control in the army; in July 1582 he became colonel-general of the infantry and was named commander of many important garrison towns, most notably Metz, from where he could keep an eye on the duchy of Lorraine.

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

[histoireettralala]

Young Henri de Guise

Born at Joinville on New Year's Eve, 1549, the life of Henri, third Duke of Guise, was forever scarred by one harrowing event. At the age of twelve he had been forced to watch his father die in agony. The letters he wrote as a 7 year-old to the father, who was away on campaign, reveal a precocious intelligence. Henri idolized his father. When his uncle suggested that he would make a good priest he wrote to his father: "I would rather be next to you breaking a lance or a sword on some brave Spaniard or Burgundian to show that I like much better to fence and joust than to be always shut up in an abbey dressed in a gown." His formal education was, however, brief. At the age of 7 he was sent to Navarre College with the two other Henris, who would one day be his rivals: Henri, the son of Antoine, King of Navarre, and Henri, Duke of Anjou. But it was barely a year before the Prince of Joinville, as he was styled, was summoned by his father to learn the profession of arms. He was soon joined by his younger brother, Charles (born in 1554), while his youngest brother Louis, born in 1555, was destined to inherit his uncle's ecclesiastical empire. Henri was not interested in letters and, in spite of the close attention of his uncle and his grandmother, his knowledge of matters theological was superficial: "I heard the beautiful sermons that my uncle gave at Reims but I promise you," he wrote to his father, "that I will not be about to recite them because they were so long I can only remember half of them." Like his father and grandfather, he was more interested in traditional aristocratic pursuits and his letters resound with the theme of horses, hunting, and war.

In an age when looks and demeanour were thought to herald majesty, the beauty of the House of Guise was renowned. It contrasted with the ugliness that afflicted most of their Habsburg, Valois and Bourbon contemporaries. And the portraits of the new duke support the contention of observers that Henri —as ‘beautiful as an angel’, according to the Venetian ambassador —surpassed even his cousin, Mary Stuart, in looks. He had the trademark pale visage and curly, strawberry blond hair. He was tall too and had a good physique shaped by the usual martial sports and tennis and, more unusually, swimming —he could, it was said, swim across a river in armour. He inherited both his father’s charm and common touch: his immense attractiveness to women and affability with commoners would later be major political assets. If Henri had an Achilles heel it was hubris. In his father, the inbred pride of the aristocrat had been tempered by reserve and modesty, which charmed even his enemies. Henri, in contrast, inherited some of his uncle’s arrogance. A story told by Marguerite de Valois about the young duke is instructive. Asked by her father, Henry II, which prince she preferred, Guise or the Marquis of Beaupréau, son of the Prince of la Roche-sur-Yon, she agreed that Guise was without doubt the better looking but she preferred the other because ‘every day the duke does something bad to someone and always wants to be master’. The story is probably apocryphal but it stood the test of time because it captured something essential.

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

[histoireettralala]

A reputation in tatters

Henry III’s divergence from the traditional model of French kingship made him a controversial figure in his own lifetime. He was an enigma to many of his subjects. Henry looked majestic: he was taller than average, comported himself with elegance and dignity; he was a good public speaker and, following the model set by Philip II, diligent and hard-working. He took the idea to heart that in order to reform the state Frenchmen would have to reform themselves. Who better to set an example than the king: for three years, beginning in January 1576, he instituted the practice of retiring after dinner to hear public lectures from the leading thinkers of the day on edifying subjects. But he did not always behave in the manner which was expected: he was notoriously free with his emotions in public and his sense of irony — he ennobled his court jester in 1584— was lost on many of his subjects. Without a child and dogged by ill-health his rule was precarious. He and the queen tried all sorts of quack fertility treatments. From the moment in March 1580 when Guise recommended a doctor from Dauphiné, the king would spend an increasing amount of time away from court taking thermal cures. The duke accompanied the king on the pilgrimages that he undertook to various shrines to assist the queen’s conception. In 1582 Henry, already noted for his piety and convinced that divine wrath was the cause of his afflictions, underwent some form of spiritual conversion that manifested itself in abstinence. Regular dietary austerities had already become a significant part of his life and he now vowed to sleep with no other woman than the queen. On 11 August the king took leave of the court, leaving his mother in charge to go on a three month retreat. His immersion in the burgeoning penitential movement was crowned by the establishment of the new Confraternity of the Annunciation of Our Lady, which held its first procession at the feast of the Annunciation 1583.

On Maundy Thursday, in pouring rain, the king, dressed in the grey serge cagoule of a simple brother, returned in procession from Notre Dame cathedral, imitating Christ’s Passion with ritual flagellation. Many were shocked at the indignity of the spectacle; others, were more inclined to satirize what they saw as hypocrisy. The following ditty was one among dozens of lampoons:

Having pillaged the kingdom France

And all his people ripped off,

Is it real penitence

To cover yourself with a dripping sack cloth?

The Cardinal of Guise, who carried the cross, and Mayenne, who was master of ceremonies, had more dignified roles. Their elder brother was not present: he mocked the king for ‘living like a monk and not a king’. And there was something in this: the king spurned the traditional aristocratic pastimes, like hunting, tennis, and riding. As a consequence jousts and tourneys at his court were rare. The king was aware of Guise’s scorn, turning it into a joke one day, as he leapt into his saddle, remarking afterwards to one of the duke’s men nearby ‘Does my cousin have monks like me in Champagne who mount their horses in one leap?’

Henry was widely admired but he was not popular. Recent historians have found much to applaud too, but their judgement relies too much on the assessment of the educated elite. The people were less impressed. They blamed Henry for permitting heresy and thus bringing down on them God’s wrath in the form of harvest failure and plague, which afflicted his reign and came on top of the economic dislocation caused by civil war. As early as 1578, Claude Haton overheard the townsfolk on Provins denouncing him as a tyrant and an atheist. And his reputation suffered further because one could not trust him; he said one thing and did another. He issued a grand edict in 1580 abolishing many recently created venal offices, which were hated as a form of stealth tax since the purchasers recouped their investments in gifts and bribes, only to invent all sorts of new ones to sell soon after. Even taverns were turned into venal offices, forcing their owners, who had to purchase them from the Crown, to pass the cost on to the poor customer! Haton thought Henry deceitful, about as trustworthy as a ‘Turk’ or a ‘cunning whore’. The perceived gap between the king’s publicly declared virtue and privately practised vice was fertile ground for satire. Moralists railed against Henry’s court as a den of immorality, profligacy, and corruption. They pointed the finger at the king’s favourites, his mignons, or ‘sweeties’, a word with homosexual undertones. There was no truth in the rumours: but the king did little to stop tongues wagging; his ostentatious shows of affection towards them scandalized the public. The king’s penchant for dancing, which he undoubtedly associated with dexterity and self-discipline, was a red rag to the priggish. The mignons were swaggering dandies, whose fashions marked them out from ordinary gentlemen and outraged the Parisian bourgeoisie, none more so than the misanthropic diarist Pierre de l’Estoile, who described:

their hair like whores in a brothel, curled and recurled by artifice, sticking up under their bonnets, and their ruffs of their fine linen shirts stiffened and elongated so that their heads above them looked like the head of Saint John the Baptist on a platter. The rest of their clothes were the same; their pastimes were gaming, blaspheming, jumping about, dancing and vaulting, quarrelling and whoring, to follow the King around everywhere and do everything to please him.

Anti-court feeling was strong among the middling sort and fuelled the righteous anger of the pious killjoys who made up the ranks of the Catholic League. Haton described how in 1581 the religious radicals in his parish refused to take part in public prayers for an heir, desiring Henry’s ‘death and the extermination of his entire lineage’. This was an extraordinary moment which shows that ordinary people, who surely had no acquaintance with the new Protestant literature justifying Tyrannicide, were imagining the king’s death in the early 1580s.

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

Thanks @microcosme11 for the gif!

[histoireettralala]

The Fall of Calais

Henri believed that an attack on Calais, the plan for which had been in long gestation, was the surest way to restore French honour. Guise was initially sceptical. In English hands since 1347, Calais was protected by a formidable system of outlying forts which had been modernized during the reign of Henry VIII. Moreover, the campaigning season was late and the Calais pale was dreadfully inhospitable terrain; its marshy and windswept flatlands presented a formidable challenge to supplying an army during the worst months of the year in a country that had recently suffered one of the greatest military disasters of the sixteenth century. Despite his misgivings, Guise had been presented with the opportunity of posing as the saviour of the country and he seized it with alacrity. The campaign exemplifies how the Guise brothers worked together as a team, or as "two heads in one hood", as a contemporary put it. Charles and François left nothing to chance. The final months of the year were dedicated to meticulous planning. An old-fashioned captain in the army, Blaise de Monluc, was astonished that a soldier like François should spend so much time on paper work: "The devil take all these writings for me, it seems he has a mind to save his secretaries labour." The logistical problems of supplying an army of 30-36000 men throughout the winter in country suffering from war fatigue cannot be underestimated. Cardinal Charles busied himself with feeding Mars, using expedients to screw cash from taxpayers and reluctant lenders. "I do not cease day and night," he replied to his brother's urgent demands, "to torment myself to advance your money and to pick all the purses I can find to help you." Squeezing them until their pips squeaked did nothing for his popularity among the common people.

Calais's dozen or so outlying forts amounted to a formidable obstacle. Above the town's main gate was the inscription: "Then shall the Frenchmen Calais win; when iron and lead like cork shall swim." Its main weakness was its old-fashioned castle, which had been overlooked by Henry VIII's engineers. The English were caught off-guard by an attack outside the campaigning season. The suddenness of the attack on 1 January allowed the French to capture a number of outlying forts and bring the town within cannon range. The French were thoroughly prepared for the terrain, to the point of having made pitch-covered mats to serve as artillery platforms on the marshes. They were helped by the cold weather which froze the shallower marshes, enabling their guns and equipment to cross the treacherous ground easily. After two days of bombardment from across the river Hames a breach was made in the castle walls. The river was fordable at low tide and the duke advanced, waist-deep in the water, at the head of several companies, while diversionary attacks elsewhere drew off the defenders. His troops took the castle with ease and put the garrison to the sword. He retired to camp, leaving his brothers, Aumale and Elbeuf, to hold the castle against two bloody English counter-attacks. On 8 January Lord Wentworth sued for terms. He and several English lords were held for ransom (though they were eventually released) and the rest of the garrison and all those inhabitants who wished to leave were given safe passage to the Flemish border. Guise captured a significant quantity of military supplies and commercial goods, which he shared among his captains [..]

The fall of Calais shocked Europe in its daring and its challenge to the traditional ways of war.

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