Part 22

Such is the history of an individual; let us now trace the fortunes of a knightly house. The story of the Guises belongs entirely to chivalry and statesmanship.

THE FORTUNES OF A KNIGHTLY FAMILY.

“This deals with nobler knights and monarchs, Full of great fears, great hopes, great enterprises.” _Antony Brewer, “Lingua.”_

In the pleasant spring-time of the year 1506, a little boy, mounted on a mule, and accompanied by a serving man on foot, crossed over the frontier from Lorraine into France. The boy was a pretty child, some ten years old. He was soberly clad, but a merry heart beat under his gray jerkin; and his spirits were as light as the feather in his bonnet. The servant who walked at his side was a simple yet faithful follower of his house; but there was no more speculation in his face than there was in that of the mule. Nothing could have looked more harmless and innocent than the trio in question; and yet the whole--joyous child, plodding servitor, and the mule whose bells rang music as he trod--formed one of the most remarkable invasions of which the kingdom of France has ever been the victim.

The boy was the fifth child of René and Philippa de Gueldres, the ducal sovereigns of Lorraine. This duchy, a portion of the old kingdom of Lotharingia--in disputes for the possession of which the children of Charlemagne had shed rivers of blood--had maintained its independence, despite the repeated attempts of Germany and France to reduce it to subjection. At the opening of the sixteenth century, it had seen a legal succession of sovereign and independent masters during seven centuries. The reigning duke was René, the second of that name. He had acquired estates in France, and he had inherited the hatred of Lorraine to the Capetian race which had dethroned the heirs of Charlemagne. It was for this double reason that he unostentatiously sent into the kingdom of France one of his sons, a boy of fair promise. The mission of the yet unconscious child was to increase the territorial possessions of his family within the French dominions, and ultimately to rule both Church and State--if not from the throne, why then from behind it.

The merry boy proved himself in course of time to be no unfitting instrument for this especial purpose. He was brought up at the French court, studied chivalry, and practised passages of arms with French knights; was the first up at _réveillée_, the last at a feast, the most devout at mass, and the most winning in ladies’ bower. The princes of the blood loved him, and so did the princesses. The army hailed him with delight; and the church beheld in him and his brother, Cardinal John, two of those champions whom it records with gladness, and canonizes with alacrity.

Such was Claude of Lorraine, who won the heart and lands of Antoinette de Bourbon, and who received from Francis I. not only letters of naturalization, but the title of Duke of Guise. The locality so named is in Picardy. It had fallen to the house of Lorraine by marriage, and the dignity of Count which accompanied it was now changed for that of Duke. It was not long before Claude made the title famous. The sword of Guise was never from his grasp, and its point was unceasingly directed against the enemies of his new country. He shed his own blood, and spilled that of others, with a ferocious joy. Francis saw in him the warmest of his friends and the bravest of his soldiers. His bravery helped to the glory that was reaped at Marignan, at Fontarabia, and in Picardy. Against internal revolt or foreign invasion he was equally irresistible. _His_ sword drove back the Imperialists of Germany within their own frontier; and when on the night of Pavia the warriors of France sat weeping like girls amid the wide ruin around them, _his_ heart alone throbbed with hopeful impulses, and _his_ mind only was filled with bright visions of victories to come.

These came indeed, but they were sometimes triumphs that earned for him an immortality of infamy. The crest of his house was a double cross, and this device, though it was no emblem of the intensity of religion felt by these who bore it, _was_ significant of the double sanguinary zeal of the family--a zeal employed solely for selfish ends. The apostolic reformers of France were, at this period, in a position of some power. Their preachers were in the pulpit, and their people in the field. They heard the gospel leaning on their swords; and, the discourse done, they rushed bravely into battle to defend what they had heard.

Against these pious but strong-limbed confederates the wrath of Guise was something terrible. It did not, like that of Francis I.--who banqueted one day the unorthodox friends whom he burned the next--alternate with fits of mercy. It raged without intermission, and before it the Reformers of Alsatia were swept as before a blast in whose hot breath was death. He spared neither sex nor age; and he justified his bloody deeds by blasphemously asserting that he was guided to them by the light of a cross which blazed before him in the heavens. The church honored him with the name of “good and faithful servant;” but there are Christian hearths in Alsatia where he is still whisperingly spoken of as “the accursed butcher.”

When his own fingers began to hold less firmly the handle of his sword, he also began to look among his children for those who were most likely to carry out the mission of his house. His eye marked, approvingly, the bearing of his eldest son Francis, Count D’Aumale; and had no less satisfaction in the brothers of Francis, who, whether as soldiers or priests, were equally ready to further the interests of Lorraine, and call them those of Heaven. His daughter Mary he gave to James V. of Scotland; and the bride brought destruction for her dowry. Upon himself and his children, Francis I., and subsequently Henry II., looked at last with mingled admiration and dread. Honors and wealth were lavished upon them with a prodigal and even treasonable liberality. The generous king gave to the insatiate Guise the property of the people; and when these complained somewhat menacingly, Guise achieved some new exploit, the public roar of applause for which sanctioned a quiet enjoyment of his ill-gotten treasures.

For the purpose of such enjoyment he retired to his castle at Joinville. The residence was less a palace than a monastery. It was inhabited by sunless gloom and a deserted wife. The neglected garden was trimmed at the coming of the duke, but not for his sake nor for that of the faithful Antoinette. Before the eyes of that faithful wife he built a bower for a mistress who daily degraded with blows the hero of a hundred stricken fields. He deprecated the rough usage of the courtesan with tears and gold; and yet he had no better homage for the virtuous mother of his children, than a cold civility. His almost sudden death in 1550 was accounted for as being the effect of poison, administered at the suggestion of those to whom his growing greatness was offensive. The accusation was boldly graven on his monument; and it is probably true. No one however, profited by the crime.

The throne found in his children more dangerous supporters than he had ever been himself; and the people paid for their popular admiration with loss of life and liberty. The church, however, exulted; for Claude of Lorraine, first Duke of Guise, gave to it the legitimate son, Cardinal Charles, who devised the massacre of the day of St. Bartholomew; and the illegitimate son, the Abbé de Cluny, who, on that terrible day, made his dagger drink the blood of the Huguenots, till the wielder of it became as drunk with frenzy as he was wont to be with the fiery wine which was his peculiar and intense delight.

The first Duke of Guise only laid a foundation, upon which he left his heirs and successors to build at their discretion. He had, nevertheless, effected much. He had gained for his family considerable wealth; and if he had not also obtained a crown, he had acquired possession of rich crown-lands. The bestowing upon him of these earned popular execration for the king; the people, at the same time, confessed that the services of Guise were worthy of no meaner reward. When King Francis saw that he was blamed for bestowing what the recipient was deemed worthy of having granted to him, we can hardly wonder that Francis, while acknowledging the merits of the aspiring family, bade the members of his own to be on their guard against the designs of every child of the house of Lorraine.

But _he_ was no child who now succeeded to the honors of his father, the first duke. Francis of Guise, at his elevation to the ducal title, saw before him two obstacles to further greatness. One was a weak king, Henry II.; and the other, a powerful favorite, the Constable de Montmorency, from whose family, it was popularly said, had sprung the first Christian within the realm of France. Francis speedily disposed of the favorite, and almost as speedily raised himself to the vacant office, which he exercised so as to further his remote purposes. In the meantime the king was taught to believe that his crown and happiness were dependent on his Lorraine cousins, who, on their side, were not only aiming at the throne of France for one member of the house, but were aspiring to the tiara for a second; the crown of Naples for a third--to influence in Flanders and in Spain, and even to the diadem of Elizabeth of England, succession to which was recognised as existing in them, by Mary Stuart, in case of her own decease without direct heirs. It is said that the British Romanists looked forward with unctuous complacency to the period when the sceptre of this island should fall into the blood-stained grasp of a “Catholic Guise.”

It was not only the fortune of Francis to repair the ill luck encountered in the field by Montmorency, but to gain advantages in fight, such as France had not yet seen. The Emperor Charles V. had well-nigh got possession of beleaguered Metz, when Guise threw himself into the place, rescued it from the Emperor, and swept the Imperialists out of France. His fiery wrath cooled only in presence of the wounded, to whom he behaved with gentle and helping courtesy. His gigantic labors here brought on an attack of fever; and when he was compelled to seek rest in his house at Marchez, a host of priests and cardinals of his family gathered round his court, and excited him to laughter by rough games that suited but sorrily with their calling.

The second duke inherited his father’s hatred for “heretics.” The great Colligny had been his bosom friend; but when that renowned Reformer gave evidence of his new opinions upon religious subjects, then ensued, first a coldness, then fits of angry quarrelling, and at last a duel, in which, though neither combatant was even scratched, friendship was slain for ever. Duke Francis was prodigal like his father, but then his brother, Cardinal Charles, was minister of the finances: and the king and his mistress, Diana de Poictiers, cared not how the revenue was managed, so that money was forthcoming when necessity pressed. The consequence was, that the king’s exchequer was robbed to supply the extravagances of Guise. But then men began to associate with the name the idea of deliverance from oppression; and they did not count the cost. And yet victory did not invariably select for her throne the glittering helm of the aspiring duke. The pope had selected him as commander of the papal army acting against Naples, but intrigue paralyzed the arm which had never before been conquered, and the pontiff showered epigrams upon him instead of laurels.

In this momentary eclipse of the sun of his glory, the duke placed his own neck under the papal heel. He served in the pope’s chapel as an Acolyte, meekly bore the mantle of obese and sneering cardinals, and exhibited a humility which was not without success. When at a banquet given by a cardinal, Guise humbly sat down at the lower end of the table, he asked a French officer who was endeavoring to thrust in below him, “Why comest thou here, friend?” “That it might not be said,” answered the soldier, “that the representative of the King of France took the very lowest place at a priest’s table!”

From such reproaches Guise gladly fled, to buckle on his armor and drive back an invasion of France by the Hispano-Flemings on the north. The services he now rendered his country made the people almost forget the infamy of their king, who was wasting life in his capital, and the oppressive imposts of the financial cardinal, whom the sufferers punningly designated as Cardinal _La Ruine_. The ruin he achieved was forgiven in consideration of the glory accomplished by his brother, who had defeated and destroyed the armies which threatened the capital from the north; and who had effected much greater glory by suddenly falling on Calais with a force of ten to one, and tearing from the English the last of the conquests till then held by them in France. Old Lord Wentworth, the governor, plied his artillery with a roar that was heard on the English coast: but the roar was all in vain. There was a proverb among our neighbors, and applied by them to every individual of mediocre qualifications, that “he was not the sort of man to drive the English out of France.” That man was found in Guise; and the capital began naturally to contrast him with the heartless king, who sat at the feet of a concubine, and recked little of the national honor or disgrace. And yet, the medals struck to commemorate the recovery of Calais bear the names only of Henri and Diana. They omit all mention of the great liberator, Guise!

The faults of Henri, however, are not to be entirely attributed to himself. He had some feelings of compassion for the wretched but stout-hearted Huguenots, with whom, in the absence of Guise, he entered into treaties, which, Guise present, he was constrained to violate! In pursuit of the visions of dominion in France, and of the tiara at Rome, the ambitious house sought only to gain the suffrages of the church and the faithful. To win smiles from them, the public scaffolds were deluged with the blood of heretics; and all were deemed so who refused to doff their caps to the images of the virgin, raised in the highways at the suggestion of the duke and the cardinal. This terrific persecution begat remonstrance; but when remonstrance was treated as if it were rebellion, rebellion followed thereupon; as, perhaps, was hoped for; and the swords of the Guisards went flashing over every district in France, dealing death wherever dwelt the alleged enemies of God, who dared to commune with Him according to conscience, rather than according to Rome. Congregations, as at Vassi, were set upon and slaughtered in cold blood, without resistance. In the Huguenot “temple” of this last place was found a Bible. It was brought to the duke. This noble gentleman could spell no better than the great Duke of Marlborough; and Guise was, moreover, worse instructed in the faith which he professed. He looked into the Book of Life, unconscious of what he held, and with a wondering exclamation as to what it might be all about, he flung it aside, and turned to the further slaughter of those who believed therein.

In such action he saw his peculiar mission for the moment, but he was not allowed to pursue it unopposed. His intrigues and his cruelties made rebels even of the princes of the blood; and Condé took the field to revenge their wrongs, as well as those of the Reformers. The issue was tried on the bloody day at Dreux, when the setting sun went down on a Protestant army routed, and on Condé a captive; but sharing the bed, as was the custom of the time, of his proved victor Guise. Never did two more deadly enemies lie on the same couch, sleepless, and full of mutual suspicion. But the hatred of Condé was a loyal hatred; that of Guise was marked by treacherous malignity. The Protestant party, in presence of that hot fury, seemed to melt away like a snow-wraith in the sun. He and his Guisards were the terror of the so-called enemies of the Faith. Those whom he could not reach by the sword, he struck down by wielding against them the helpless hand of the king, who obeyed with the passiveness of a _Marionette_, and raised stakes, and fired the pile, and gave the victim thereto, simply because Guise would so have it.

The duke received one portion at least of his coveted reward. At every massacre of inoffensive Protestants, the Catholic pulpits resounded with biblical names, showered down upon him by the exulting preachers. When his banner had swept triumphantly over successive fields, whose after-crops were made rich by heretical blood, then did the church pronounce him to be a soldier divinely armed, who had at length “consecrated his hands, and avenged the quarrel of the Lord.”

Guise lived, it is true, at a period when nothing was held so cheap as life. Acts of cruelty were but too common in all factions. If he delivered whole towns to pillage and its attendant horrors, compared with which death were merciful, he would himself exhibit compassion, based on impulse or caprice. He was heroic, according to the thinking of his age, which considered heroism as being constituted solely of unflinching courage. In all other respects, the duke, great as he was, was as mean as the veriest knave who trailed a pike in his own bands. Scarcely a letter addressed to his officers reached them without having been previously read to their right worshipful master. There was scarcely a mansion in the kingdom, whose lord was a man of influence, but that at that table and the hearth there sat a guest who was the paid spy of Francis of Guise.

It is hardly necessary to add that his morality generally was on a par with the particular specimens we have given of it. Crowds of courtesans accompanied him to the camp, while he deliberately exposed his own wife, Anne of Este, the sister of Tasso’s Leonora, to the insulting homage of a worthless king. Emphatically may it be said that the truth was not in him. He gloried in mendacity. No other personage that I can call to mind ever equalled him in lying--except, perhaps, those very highly professing heroes who swagger in Greek tragedy. He procured, by a lie, the capital conviction of Condé. The latter escaped the penalty, and taxed the duke with his falsehood. Guise swore by his sword, his life, his honor, his very soul, that he was innocent of the charge. Condé looked on the ducal liar with a withering contempt, and turned from him with a sarcasm that should have pierced him like a sword. Pointed as it was, it could not find way through his corslet to his heart. He met it with a jest, and deemed the sin unregistered.

There was a watchful public, nevertheless, observing the progress made toward greatness by the chivalric duke, and his brother the cardinal. Henry II. had just received the mortal blow dealt him at a tournament by the lance of Montgomery. Francis II., his brother, the husband of Mary Stuart, and therewith nephew to Guise, succeeded to the uneasy throne and painful privileges of Henri. On the night of this monarch’s decease, two courtiers were traversing a gallery of the Louvre. “This night,” said one, “is the eve of the Festival of the Three Kings.” “How mean you by that?” asked the other with a smile. “I mean,” rejoined the first, “that to-morrow we shall have three monarchs in Paris--one of them, King of France; the others Kings _in_ France--from Lorraine.”

Under the latter two, Duke and Cardinal, was played out the second act of the great political drama of Lorraine. It was altogether a melo-drama, in which there was abundance of light and shadow. At times, we find the hero exhibiting exemplary candor; anon, he is the dark plotter, or the fierce and open slayer of his kind. There are stirring scenes of fights, wherein his adversaries draw their swords against him, at the instigation of a disgusted King, who no sooner saw Guise triumphant, than he devoted to death the survivors whom he had clandestinely urged into the fray.

The battles were fought, on one side, for liberty of conscience; on the other, for the sake of universal despotism. The bad side triumphed during a long season; and field after field saw waving over it the green banner of Lorraine. Catherine de Medicis, and her son Charles IX., accompanied the Duke in more than one struggle, after the short-lived reign of Francis II. had come to an end. They passed, side by side, through the breach at Rouen; but accident divided them at Orleans, where had assembled the gallant few who refused to despair for the Protestant cause.

Guise beleaguered the city, and was menacingly furious at its obstinacy in holding out. One evening he had ridden with his staff to gaze more nearly at the walls, from behind which defiance was flung at him. “You will never be able to get in,” remarked roughly a too presuming official. “Mark me!” roared the chafed Duke, “yon setting sun will know to-morrow how to get behind that rampart; and by Heaven, so will I!” He turned his horse, and galloped back alone to his quarters. He was encountered on his way by a Huguenot officer, Poltrot de la Mer, who brought him down by a pistol-shot. The eyes of the dying Duke, as he lay upon the ground, met for the last time the faint rays of that departing sun, with which he had sworn to be up and doing on the morrow. He died in his hut. His condition was one of extreme “comfortableness.” He had robbed the King’s exchequer to gratify his own passions;--and he thanked Heaven that he had been a faithful subject to his sovereign! He had been notoriously unfaithful to a noble and virtuous wife; and he impressed upon her with his faltering lips, the assurance that “generally speaking” his infidelity as a husband did not amount to much worth mentioning! He confessed to, and was shriven by his two brothers, Cardinals John and Charles. The former was a greater man than the Duke. The latter was known in his own times and all succeeding, as “the bottle cardinal,” a name of which he was only not ashamed, but his title to which he was ever ostentatiously desirous to vindicate and establish.

The first Duke had acquired possession of crown-lands; the second had at his disposal the public treasure; and the third hoped to add to the acquisitions of his family the much-coveted sceptre of the Kings of France.

Henri, surnamed _Le Balafré_, or “the scarred,” succeeded his father in the year 1560. During the greater portion of his subsequent life, his two principal objects were the destruction of Protestantism, and the possession of the King’s person. He therewith flattered the national vanity by declaring that the natural limits of France, on two sides, were the Rhine and the Danube--an extension of frontier which was never effected, except temporarily, in the latter days of Napoleon. But the declaration entailed a popularity on the Duke which was only increased by his victory at Jarnac, when the French Protestants not only suffered defeat, but lost their leader, the brave and unfortunate Condé. This gallant chief had surrendered, but he was basely murdered by a pistol-shot, and his dead body, flung across an ass, was paraded through the ranks of the victors, as a trophy. How far the Duke was an accomplice in the crime, is not determined. That such incidents were deemed lightly of by him, is sufficiently clear by his own proclamation in seven languages, wherein he accused Coligny as the instigator of the murder of the late Duke of Guise, and set a price upon that noble head, to be won by any assassin.