Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

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.