Deputies from Parliament went, according to custom, to offer their felicitations to the new king, and to ask him “to whom it was his pleasure that they should, thenceforward, apply for to learn his will and receive his commands.” Francis II. replied, “With the approbation of the queen my mother, I have chosen the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, my uncles, to have the direction of the state; the former will take charge of the department of war, the latter the administration of finance and justice.” Such had, in fact, been his choice, and it was no doubt with his mother’s approbation that he had made it. Equally attentive to observe the proprieties and to secure her own power, Catherine de’ Medici, when going out to drive with her son and her daughter-in-law Mary Stuart, on the very day of Henry II.‘s death, said to Mary, “Step in, madame; it is now your turn to go first.”
During the first days of mourning she kept herself in a room entirely hung with black; and there was no light beyond two wax-candles burning on an altar covered with black cloth. She had upon her head a black veil, which shrouded her entirely, and hid her face; and, when any one of the household went to speak to her, she replied in so agitated and so weak a tone of voice that it was impossible to catch her words, whatever attention might be paid to them. But her presence of mind and her energy, so far as the government was concerned, were by no means affected by it; he who had been the principal personage at the court under Henry II., the Constable de Montmorency, perfectly understood, at his first interview with the queen-mother, that he was dismissed, and all he asked of her was, that he might go and enjoy his repose in freedom at his residence of Chantilly, begging her at the same time to take under her protection the heirs of his house. Henry II.‘s favorite, Diana de Poitiers, was dismissed more harshly. “The king sent to tell Madame de Valentinois,” writes the Venetian ambassador, “that for her evil influence (mali officii) over the king his father she would deserve heavy chastisement; but, in his royal clemency, he did not wish to disquiet her any further; she must, nevertheless, restore to him all the jewels given her by the king his father.” “To bend Catherine de’ Medici, Diana was also obliged,” says De Thou, “to give up her beautiful house at Chenonceaux on the Cher, and she received in exchange the castle of Chaumont on the Loire.” The Guises obtained all the favors of the court at the same time that they were invested with all the powers of the state.
In order to give a good notion of Duke Francis of Guise and his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine, the two heads of the house, we will borrow the very words of those two men of their age who had the best means of seeing them close and judging them correctly, the French historian De Thou and the Venetian ambassador John Micheli. “The Cardinal of Lorraine,” says De Thou, “was of an impetuous and violent character; the Duke of Guise, on the contrary, was of a gentle and moderate disposition. But as ambition soon overleaps the confines of restraint and equity, he was carried away by the violent counsels of the cardinal, or else surrendered himself to them of his own accord, executing with admirable prudence and address the plans which were always chalked out by his brother.” The Venetian ambassador enters into more precise and full details. “The cardinal,” he says, “who is the leading man of the house, would be, by common consent, if it were not for the defects of which I shall speak, the greatest political power in this kingdom. He has not yet completed his thirty-seventh year; he is endowed with a marvellous intellect, which apprehends from half a word the meaning of those who converse with him; he has an astonishing memory, a fine and noble face, and a rare eloquence which shows itself freely on any subject, but especially in matters of politics. He is very well versed in letters: he knows Greek, Latin, and Italian. He is very strong in the sciences, chiefly in theology. The externals of his life are very proper and very suitable to his dignity, which could not be said of the other cardinals and prelates, whose habits are too scandalously irregular. But his great defect is shameful cupidity, which would employ, to attain its ends, even criminal means, and likewise great duplicity, whence comes his habit of scarcely ever saying that which is. There is worse behind. He is considered to be very ready to take offence, vindictive, envious, and far too slow in benefaction. He excited universal hatred by hurting all the world as long as it was in his power to. As for Mgr. de Guise, who is the eldest of the six brothers, he cannot be spoken of save as a man of war, a good officer. None in this realm has delivered more battles and confronted more dangers. Everybody lauds his courage, his vigilance, his steadiness in war, and his coolness, a quality wonderfully rare in a Frenchman. His peculiar defects are, first of all, stinginess towards soldiers; then he makes large promises, and even when he means to keep his promise he is infinitely slow about it.”
To the sketch of the Cardinal of Lorraine Brantome adds that he was, “as indeed he said, a coward by nature.” a strange defect in a Guise.
It was a great deal, towards securing the supremacy of a great family and its leading members, to thus possess the favor of the court and the functions of government; but the power of the Guises had a still higher origin and a still deeper foundation. “It was then,” said Michael de Castelnau, one of the most intelligent and most impartial amongst the chroniclers of the sixteenth century, “that schism and divisions in religious matters began to be mixed up with affairs of state. Well, all the clergy of France, and nearly all the noblesse and the people who belonged to the Roman religion, considered that the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise were, as it were, called of God to preserve the Catholic religion established in France for the last twelve hundred years. And it seemed to them not only an act of impiety to change or alter it in any way whatever, but also an impossibility to do so without ruin to the state. The late king, Henry, had made a decree in the month of June, 1559, being then at Ecouen, by which the judges were bound to sentence all Lutherans to death, and which was published and confirmed by all the Parliaments, without any limitation or modification whatever, and with a warning to the judges not to mitigate the penalty, as they had done for some years previously. Different judgments were pronounced upon the decree: those who took the most political and most zealous view of religion considered that it was necessary, as well to preserve and maintain the Catholic religion as to keep down the seditious, who, under the cloak of religion, were doing all they could to upset the political condition of the kingdom. Others, who cared nothing for religion, or for the state, or for order in the body politic, also thought the decree necessary, not at all for the purpose of exterminating the Protestants, —for they held that it would tend to multiply them,—but because it would offer a means of enriching themselves by the confiscations ensuing upon condemnation, and because the king would thus be able to pay off forty-two millions of livres which he owed, and have money in hand, and, besides that, satisfy those who were demanding recompense for the services they had rendered the crown, wherein many placed their hopes.” [Memoires de Michael de Castelnau, in the Petitot collection, Series I., t. xxxiii. pp. 24-27.]
The Guises were, in the sixteenth century, the representatives and the champions of these different cliques and interests, religious or political, sincere in their belief or shameless in their avidity, and all united under the flag of the Catholic church. And so, when they came into power, “there was nothing,” says a Protestant chronicler, “but fear and trembling at their name.” Their acts of government soon confirmed the fears as well as the hopes they had inspired. During the last six months of 1559 the edict issued by Henry II. from Ecouen was not only strictly enforced, but aggravated by fresh edicts; a special chamber was appointed and chosen amongst the Parliament of Paris, which was to have sole cognizance of crimes and offences against the Catholic religion. A proclamation of the new king, Francis II., ordained that houses in which assemblies of Reformers took place should be razed and demolished. It was death to the promoters of “unlawful assemblies for purposes of religion or for any other cause.” Another royal act provided that all persons, even relatives, who received amongst them any one condemned for heresy should seize him and bring him to justice, in default whereof they would suffer the same penalty as he. Individual condemnations and executions abounded after these general measures; between the 2d of August and the 31st of December, 1559, eighteen persons were burned alive for open heresy, or for having refused to communicate according to the rites of the Catholic church, or go to mass, or for having hawked about forbidden books. Finally, in December, the five councillors of the Parliament of Paris, whom, six months previously, Henry II. had ordered to be arrested and shut up in the Bastille, were dragged from prison and brought to trial. The chief of them, Anne Dubourg, nephew of Anthony Dubourg, Chancellor of France under Francis I., defended himself with pious and patriotic persistency, being determined to exhaust all points of law and all the chances of justice he could hope for without betraying his faith. Everything shows that he had nothing to hope for from his judges; one of them, the President Minard, as he was returning from the palace on the evening of December 12, 1559, was killed by a pistol-shot; the assassin could not be discovered; but the crime, naturally ascribed to some friend of Dubourg, served only to make certain and to hasten the death of the prisoner on trial. Dubourg was condemned on the 22d of December, and heard unmoved the reading of his sentence. “I forgive my judges,” said he; “they have judged according to their own lights, not according to the light that comes from on high. Put out your fires, ye senators; be converted, and live happily. Think without ceasing of God and on God.” After these words, which were taken down by the clerk of the court, “and which I have here copied,” says De Thou, Dubourg was taken on the 23d of December, in a tumbrel to the Place de Greve. As he mounted the ladder he was heard repeating several times, “Forsake me not, my God, for fear lest I forsake thee.” He was strangled before he was cast into the flames (De Thou, t. iii. pp. 399-402), the sole favor his friends could obtain for him.
But extreme severity on the part of the powers that be is effectual only when it falls upon a country or upon parties that are effete with age, or already vanquished and worn out by long struggles; when, on the contrary, it is brought to bear upon parties in the flush of youth, eager to proclaim and propagate themselves, so far from intimidating them, it animates them, and thrusts them into the arena into which they were of themselves quite eager to enter. As soon as the rule of the Catholic, in the persons and by the actions of the Guises, became sovereign and aggressive, the threatened Reformers put themselves into the attitude of defence. They too had got for themselves great leaders, some valiant and ardent, others prudent or even timid, but forced to declare themselves when the common cause was greatly imperilled. The house of Bourbon, issuing from St. Louis, had for its representatives in the sixteenth century Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre and husband of Jeanne d’Albret, and his brother Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Conde. The King of Navarre, weak and irresolute though brave enough, wavered between Catholicism and the Reformation, inclining rather in his heart to the cause of the Reformation, to which the queen his wife, who at first showed indifference, had before long become Passionately attached. His brother, the Prince of Conde, young, fiery, and often flighty and rash, put himself openly at the head of the Reformed party. The house of Bourbon held itself to be the rival perforce of the house of Lorraine. It had amongst the high noblesse of France two allies, more fitted than any others for fighting and for command, Admiral de Coligny and his brother, Francis d’Andelot, both of them nephews of the Constable Anne de Montmorency, both of them already experienced and famous warriors, and both of them devoted, heart and soul, to the cause of the Reformation. Thus, at the accession of Francis II., whilst the Catholic party, by means of the Guises, and with the support of the majority of the country, took in hand the government of France, the reforming party ranged themselves round the King of Navarre, the Prince of Conde, and Admiral de Coligny, and became, under their direction, though in a minority, a powerful opposition, able and ready, on the one hand, to narrowly watch and criticise the actions of those who were in power, and on the other to claim for their own people, not by any means freedom as a general principle in the constitution of the state, but free manifestation of their faith, and free exercise of their own form of worship.