The ascendency of the Guises quite as much as the suppressive measures of the government against Calvinism served to bring this disaffection to a head. The issues, either way, cannot be separated. The practical aims of the Guises were large enough to create dismay without it being necessary to believe that as early as 1560 they aimed to secure the crown by deposing the house of Valois. It was unreasonable to suppose, though it proved to be so in the end, that the four sons of Henry II would all die heirless, and even in the event of that possibility, the house of Bourbon still remained to sustain the principle of primogeniture.
The Guises came from Lorraine, their father having been brother of the old duke of Lorraine; and through their mother they were related to the house of Bourbon. They were thus cousins-german of the king of Navarre and the prince of Condé and related to the King and the princes of the blood. Their income, counting their patrimony, church property, pensions and benefits received from the king, amounted to 600,000 francs (nearly $500,000 today), the cardinal of Lorraine alone having the disposal of half that sum. This wealth, united with the splendor of their house, their religious zeal, the popularity of the duke of Guise, and the concord which prevailed among them, put them ahead of all the nobles of the realm. The provincial governments and the principal offices were in their hands or those of their partisans.
The cardinal, who was the head of the house, was in the early prime of life. He was gifted with great insight which enabled him to see in a flash the intention of those who came in contact with him; he had an astonishing memory; a striking figure; an eloquence which he was not loath to display, especially in politics; he knew Greek, Latin, and Italian, speaking the last with a facility that astonished even Italians themselves; he was trained in theology; outwardly his life was very dignified and correct, but, like many churchmen of the time he was licentious. His chief fault was avarice, and for this he was execrated. His cupidity went to criminal limits, and coupled with it was a duplicity so great that he seemed almost never to tell the truth. He was quick to take offense, vindictive, envious. His death would have been as popular as that of Henry II.[73]
On the other hand, the duke of Guise was a man of war, famed as the recoverer of Calais and the captor of Metz. He was as popular as his brother was otherwise. But, like him, he was avaricious stealing even from his own soldiers.[74] According to their opponents the ambition of the Guises was not to be content with the throne of France merely. The throne of St. Peter and the crown of Naples were also believed to be goals of their ambition, the cardinal of Lorraine aspiring to the first and his brother, the duke, aspiring to the other in virtue of the relationship of the Guises to the house of Anjou, one-time occupants of the Neapolitan throne.[75] Even this programme was to be excelled. Their enterprises in Scotland in favor of Mary Stuart[76] are known to every student of English history; and after having vanquished Scotland many of the German princes feared that they might move their forces into Denmark in order to put the duke of Lorraine, their relative and the brother-in-law of the king of Denmark, into possession of the kingdom.[77]
“La tyrannie guisienne”[78] was a practical ascendency, not a mere fiction of their opponents. As uncles of Francis II, destined morally to be a minor always, owing to his weakness of will and mediocre ability, having in their hands the chief offices of state, the Guises proceeded to build up a system of government wholly their own, not only in central but in provincial affairs, to compass which the removal of the constable and the princes of the blood from the vicinity of the King was the first step. Then followed an attempt to acquire control of the provincial governments. Montmorency, the late constable, was deprived of the government of Languedoc;[79] the governments of Touraine and Orleans, in the very heart of France, were given to the duke of Montpensier and the prince de la Roche-sur-Yon. Trouble arose, though, in January, 1560, when the Guises excluded the prince of Condé from the government of Picardy and gave it to the marshal Brissac, although “the office had been faithfully administered by his predecessors.”[80]
The cardinal of Lorraine’s position with reference to the finances enabled him to provide the Guise faction with the resources necessary to back up its political intentions.[81] The onerous taxation of Francis I had been increased by Henry II, both the taille and the gabelle, the collection of which had caused a fierce outbreak at Bordeaux in the middle of the last reign; loans were resorted to, “not without great suspicion of their being applied to the King’s finances;” and the wages of the soldiers in garrisons and officers withheld.[82] This condition of things naturally drew the constable[83] and his partisans toward the prince of Condé, who vainly endeavored to persuade the king of Navarre, as first prince of the blood, and therefore the natural supporter of the crown instead of the Guises, to take a firm stand, Condé especially representing to him how great a humiliation it was to the crown that the administration of the kingdom should fall so completely into the hands of the “foreigners” of Lorraine; that, considering the weakness of the King, the fact that the provincial governorships and those of the frontier fortresses and the control of finances (which enabled the Guises to subject the judiciary to their devotion) were in their hands, foreboded ill to France.
Antoine of Bourbon listened to the complaints against the the Guises, but did little. At this time he was forty-two years of age. He was tall of stature, well-knit, robust; affable to everybody without affectation or display. His manners were open and frank, and his generosity was so great that he was always in debt. By the two merits of urbanity and generosity he made a superficial impression that did not last. In speech he was vain, and imprudent and inconstant in word and deed, not having the strength of will to adhere to a fixed purpose. He was suspected of indifference to religion and even of impiety at this time because he renounced the mass, though it was generally thought that this was with the purpose of making himself chief of the Huguenot party and not for religious zeal. The Protestants themselves called him a hypocrite.[84] Antoine would not make common cause with the constable partly from natural vacillation of character, partly because he believed that the constable had not supported his claims to the kingdom of Navarre, which he had been in hopes of recovering during the late negotiations at Cateau-Cambrésis.[85] With the conceit of a weak man in a prominent position, the king of Navarre entertained schemes of his own, which he proceeded to develop. His purpose was to play Spain and England against one another, in the hope that he either might persuade Philip II to restore the kingdom of Navarre to him by a firm advocacy of Catholicism in France, which, of course, prevented him from affiliating with the Huguenot party to which Condé and the Châtillons were attached; or, in the event of failure in this, to side with the Huguenots and enlist English support. Accordingly, shortly after his arrival at the court from Béarn, on August 23, 1559, Antoine sent a gentleman to Throckmorton, the English ambassador in France, desiring him to meet him “in cape” in the cloister of the Augustine Friars on that night. When they met, after a long declaration of his affection for Elizabeth, he said that he would write to her with his own hand, since he would trust no one except himself, for if either the Guises or the Spanish ambassador knew of it, “it would be dangerous to both and hinder their good enterprise.”[86]
In the interval, while waiting to hear from the English queen, Antoine of Bourbon, who had been coldly received at court, found that there was no room for a third party between those of the constable and the Guises.[87] At the same time the latter were made fully aware of his doings through the treachery of D’Escars, his chamberlain and special favorite,[88] and shrewdly schemed to rid themselves of his presence by sending him to Spain as escort for Elizabeth, the celebration of whose marriage (by proxy) to the King of Spain had come to such a fatal termination, and whose departure had been necessarily delayed by her father’s death.[89] In order to bait the hook the Guises represented to the beguiled king of Navarre that the opportunity was a most excellent one to urge his claims to his lost kingdom, and called in Chantonnay, the Spanish ambassador in France, to enforce this argument.[90]