Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe

"Carroll sees the Guises as big players, not just on the French scene, but elsewhere in Europe. When Henri II died in a tournament, Mary, Queen of Scots, whose mother was a Guise, was married to the new king, François II, and the Guises used this tie to dominate the Royal Council, even managing to shove the king’s mother Catherine de’ Medici to the sidelines. For a while, they were in the catbird seat and did their best to marginalize their rivals, the Houses of Bourbon and Montmorency. Although this effort came to a halt when François II died, they continued nevertheless to make very good use over several generations of the opportunities that fell their way to build a following. At the same time, Mary Queen of Scots’s claims on the English throne nourished their hopes that she would someday succeed to the English crown and, conceivably, would provide a way for them to influence religious and political developments in the British Isles. Carroll also stresses that the Guises never relinquished their hopes to recover the kingdoms of Naples and of Sicily, although this created an awkward situation while they were allied with Spain and Philip II. Yes. The Guises were a branch of the House of Lorraine, and had inherited the dynastic claims to those crowns from the House of Anjou, which had been dethroned centuries earlier by the Spanish royal House of Aragon. In addition, the House of Lorraine in earlier times had been rivals of sorts to the House of Burgundy. Their hope was that they could someday and somehow upend the heirs of the House of Burgundy in the Low Countries. Ironically, the dynastic heir to both the Burgundian and Aragonese dynasties was none other than Philip II of Spain, ruler of southern Italy and of the Low Countries, and on whom the Guises depended to subsidize their efforts in France. They couldn’t accept Spanish help in France if they were challenging Spain in southern Italy or the Low Countries, so they had to put these things on ice. It’s an interesting interplay of conflicting ambitions. On this last point, let me mention that in another one of his books, Carroll explored how the Guises used the patronage they exercised in their royal governorships of Normandy and Champagne to build networks of ties much lower down the social scale that were of great use to them in the civil wars. Of course, Henri was doing the same thing on his side, as were the Montmorencys as well in their respective governments. Carroll disabuses the reader of all notions that modern nationalism, or modern ideas of patriotism, or Marxist class conflict, are going to offer useful tools for understanding that remote period. The frames of reference of people back then included none of those things. Because a key duty of the king was to protect his subjects, and that included protecting them from divine wrath. Ordinary people believed that droughts, plagues, and failed harvests were the result of God punishing you for something—and maybe that something was a wrong belief. So if you were a heretic, you would bring down divine wrath and collective punishment on the community. The king’s job was to make sure that wrong beliefs didn’t take hold. So heresy was not just a sin: heresy was sedition, because it was getting in the way of the work of the crown. The other side of that (and you’ll find this if you look carefully at Carroll), was that if the prince himself established and embraced false beliefs and tried to impose them on the community, then he was leading his community astray. He was no longer the rightful prince, but a tyrant and not an instrument of God’s will, and was therefore removable. The Calvinists were the ones who first started thinking this way, after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, but then when Henri became king, the Guises made use of these arguments to rally Catholics to their banners, by turning the argument upside down: ‘You can’t have a Protestant king, it’s heresy. God will punish this country.’ Carroll shows that such ideas did not originate with the Guises, the Montmorencys, or the Bourbons—they simply made good use of them. In terms of sources, unfortunately, because the Guises died out in the late 17th century, their papers, records, and books were scattered or destroyed. They certainly don’t survive in any coherent way. A few papers and letters attributed to Cardinal Charles de Lorraine, of the first generation, did survive, and have been published. We’d like to see a lot of material from the early Guises, but we don’t have that. It doesn’t exist. Carroll has made use of everything that is available, and he’s done a very good job of showing, over three generations of the family, how they managed to make themselves players of the first rank in France and abroad. It’s an excellent collective biography that’s long overdue. They came around slowly but surely, partly because they were being driven bankrupt by decades of warfare. After it was clear that the crown was not within their grasp, their choices were exile or the bargaining table. The family itself was beginning to fracture between the Duke of Mayenne and the young Charles de Guise, son and heir of Henri de Guise, who had been assassinated at Blois in 1588. In fact, uncle and nephew were almost rivals at that point. For his part, Henri was able to buy them off one by one. ​Interestingly enough, Henri never quite cut all ties to the Guises. The Guise family were closely related to him by the standards of the time, and Henri used to say that, after his own Bourbon kinsmen, they were his closest family. In spite of the armed conflict between them, Henri made use of some of the women in both families to keep open lines of communication and to signal his willingness to reconcile. The Guises were smart enough to know when the game was done. In fact when Mayenne came to offer his allegiance, Henri made much of him and saw that Mayenne’s financial troubles were dealt with. Similarly, when young Charles de Guise made his submission, Henri astonished his entourage by addressing the young duke as “nephew” and saying some kind words about the duke’s assassinated father. It was vintage Henri! The Guises remained prominent at court into the reign of Louis XIV. One member of the family married a legitimized daughter of Henri’s, and the penultimate duke married Henri’s granddaughter. As this small sampling makes evident, the literature on this period is remarkably rich and deep and has benefitted not only from the burst of activity that attended the approach of Henri’s 400th anniversary year (1989) and continued thereafter, but also from the changing perspectives and focal points of historians in recent decades. I’d like to think that my book makes good use of the work of so many of those scholars in the field of early modern Europe and provides the reader with an introduction to a fascinating period of French history and to a key player. Henri IV earned an honored place in the national narrative of his country by, as I write in the preface, “winning his crown, pacifying his subjects, and governing not simply well, but memorably…”"