did well, at all events, not to defer it any longer, for he was soon
on the threshold of that world where faith ceases and belief begins.
He was engaged, although badly wounded, in inspecting the siege-works
in the front of the Chateau de Pouckes, that Flemish cradle of the
Pooks settled in England. It was on a June afternoon of the year 1453,
that Jacques, with a crowd of nobles half-encircling him, rode out, in
spite of the protest of his doctors (because, as he said, if he were to
remain doing nothing he should certainly die), in order that he might
have _something_ to do. There was a famous piece of artillery on the
Burgundian side, which was sorely troublesome to the stout little band
that was defending Pouckes. It was called the “Shepherdess,” but never
did shepherdess speak with so thundering-unlovely a voice, or fling her
favors about her with such dire destruction to those upon whom they
were showered. Jacques drew up behind the _manteau_ of this cannon, to
watch (like our gallant seamen at Sebastopol) the effects of the shot
discharged from it. At the same moment a stone projectile, discharged
from a culverin by the hand of a young artilleryman of Ghent, who was
known as the son of Henry the Blindman, struck Jacques on the forehead,
carrying away the upper part of his head, and stretched him dead upon
the field. A Carmelite brother rushed up to him to offer the succor and
consolation of religion, but it was too late. Jacques had sighed out
his last breath, and the friar decently folded the dead warrior’s arms
over his breast. A mournful troop carried the body back to the camp.
The hero of his day died in harness. He had virtues that fitted him
for a more refined, a more honest, in short, a more Christian, period.
These he exercised whenever he could find opportunity, but such
opportunity was rare. He lived at a period when, as M. de Sismondi has
remarked, “Knights thought of nothing but equalling the Rolands and
Olivers of the days of Charlemagne, by the destruction of the vile
canaille”--a sort of pastime which has been recently recommended in our
senate, although the days of chivalry be gone. The noble comrades of
Jacques, as M. Henne observes, acknowledged but one species of supreme
pleasure and glory, which consisted in making flow abundantly the
blood of villains--or, as they are now called, the lower orders. But
in truth the modern “villain” or the low-class man is not exclusively
to be found in the ranks which have had such names applied to them. As
Bosquier-Gavaudan used so joyously to sing, some thirty years ago, in
the _Ermite de St. Avelle_:--
“Les gens de bien
Sont souvent des gens de rien;
Et les gens de rien
Sont souvent des gens de bien!”
For a knight, Jacques was really a respectable man, and so disgusted
with his butcher-like occupation, that, just before his death, he had
resolved to surrender his estate to a younger brother, and, since fate
had made of him a licensed murderer, to henceforth murder none but
eastern infidels--to slay whom was held to be more of a virtue than a
sin. Let us add of him, that he was too honest to earn a reputation by
being compassionate to half-a-dozen helpless foes, after directing
his men to slaughter a score of the mutilated and defenceless enemy.
Jacques de Lelaing would sooner have sent his dagger up to the hilt in
his own heart, than have violated the safeguard of a flag of truce.
_Such_ days and such doings of chivalry are not those most agreeable to
Russian chivalry. Witness Odessa, where the pious governor directed the
fire on a flag of truce which he swore he could not see; and witness
the massacre of Hango, the assassins concerned in which exploit were
defended by their worthy superior De Berg.
Jacques de Lelaing, however, it must not be forgotten, fell in a
most unworthy cause--that of a despot armed against free people. His
excellent master swore to avenge him; and he kept his word. When
the Château de Pouckes was compelled to surrender, Philip the Good
ordered every one found alive in it to be hung from the walls. He made
exception only of a priest or two, one soldier afflicted with what was
called _leprosy_, but which has now another name in the catalogue of
avenging maladies, and a couple of boys. It was precisely one of these
lads who had, by his well-laid shot, slain “the good knight without
fear and without doubt;” but Philip was not aware of this till the lad
was far beyond his reach, and in safety at Ghent.
Those who may be curious to know the course taken by the war until it
was terminated by the treaty of Lille, are recommended to study the
Chronicles of De Lettenhooe, of Olivier de la Marche, of Chastellain,
and Du Clery. I had no intention, at setting out, to paint a
battle-piece, but simply to sketch a single figure. My task is done,
however imperfectly, and, as old chroniclers were wont to say, May
Heaven bless the gentle reader, and send pistoles and abounding grace
to the unworthy author.
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.