Aspiration, Representation and Memory

The Guise in Europe, 1506–1688

Jessica Munns, Penny Richards, Jonathan W. Spangler, Jessica Munns, Penny Richards, Jonathan W. Spangler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472419347
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317178026
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Exploiting the turbulence and strife of sixteenth-century France, the House of Guise arose from a provincial power base to establish themselves as dominant political players in France and indeed Europe, marrying within royal and princely circles and occupying the most important ecclesiastical and military positions. Propelled by ambitions derived from their position as cadets of a minor sovereign house, they represent a cadre of early modern elites who are difficult to categorise neatly: neither fully sovereign princes nor fully subject nobility. They might have spent most of their time in one state, France, but their interests were always 'trans-national'; contested spaces far from the major centres of monarchical power - from the Ardennes to the Italian peninsula - were frequent theatres of activity for semi-sovereign border families such as the Lorraine-Guise. This nexus of activity, and the interplay between princely status and representation, is the subject of this book. The essays in this collection approach Guise aims, ambitions and self-fashioning using this 'trans-national' dimension as context: their desire for increased royal (rather than merely princely) power and prestige, and the use of representation (visual and literary) in order to achieve it. Guise claims to thrones and territories from Jerusalem to Naples are explored, alongside the Guise 'dream of Italy', with in-depth studies of Henry of Lorraine, fifth Duke of Guise, and his attempts in the mid-seventeenth century to gain a throne in Naples. The combination of the violence and drama of their lives at the centres of European power and their adroit use of publicity ensured that versions of their strongly delineated images were appropriated by chroniclers, playwrights and artists, in which they sometimes featured as they would have wished, as heroes and heroines, frequently as villains, and ultimately as characters in the narratives of national heritage.

Chapter 1
The Guise and the Two Jerusalems: Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis and an Early Modern Family’s Medievalism

Robert S. Sturges

My intention in this analysis is to synthesise some scattered scholarly observations on the medievalism of the Guise family in the sixteenth century, in particular their concern with the First and Seventh Crusades, and with the crusading mentality more generally. To this end, I will also offer a reading of their ancestor the Sieur Jean de Joinville’s crusading memoir, La Vie de saint Louis, a text in which Claude de Lorraine and Antoinette de Bourbon had a demonstrable interest. As is well known, the Lorraine-Guise, like other princely families of the ancien régime, saw themselves not merely as noble, but as royal, and were deeply interested in demonstrating their links to several different royal titles. Their connection with the Crusades provided support for such claims, especially for the Lorraine claim to the – non-existent – kingdom of Jerusalem. In the Middle Ages and early modern eras, as today, Jerusalem was not merely a political entity, but a spiritual one at the same time. For the Guise, the Heavenly Jerusalem was just as real as the earthly one, and Duke Claude’s descendants eventually laid claim to it as well, through the imagistic association of Paris under Catholic League control with the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. The Guise thus arrogated to themselves the earthly and heavenly Jerusalems simultaneously, along with the political and spiritual authority that came with them, an authority that was ultimately deployed in the family’s conflict with King Henry III of France.

The Guise, the Crusading Mentality, and the Kingdoms of Jerusalem and Naples

It has not been unusual, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to think of the Crusades as a purely medieval phenomenon, confined to the period stretching from the First Crusade of 1099 to the Muslim re-conquest of the kingdom of Acre and the expulsion of the Europeans from Syria in 1291. From this point of view, the minor, late medieval crusades – in the Baltic, against the Albigensians, and so on – serve primarily to confirm that, in the words of the most influential historian of the Crusades, ‘[t]he Crusading spirit was dead’ by the mid-fifteenth century.¹ Indeed, further planned expeditions to reclaim Jerusalem never came to fruition.

But for Christians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and even beyond, though the kingdom of Jerusalem may have been lost in the thirteenth century, that loss was merely temporary; if no expedition there actually bore fruit, Jerusalem remained an important goal in the European mentality of the later medieval and early modern periods, and the concept of the crusade remained potent. In the words of Alphonse Dupront, although ‘[l]es expéditions de croisade, toujours dirigées, en fait ou en esprit, vers cette fin dernière, ne parviendront plus jusqu’à ces terres maintenant trop lointaines’,² it is equally true that the victory over the Muslim Turks at Lepanto in 1571 can be considered ‘l’événement-terme de la geste croisée’,³ and even that Lepanto itself ‘n’épuiserra pas … la puissance de croisade’, because the latter should properly be considered as a ‘mouvement plus total que celui de la défensive contre l’infidèle; peut-être même nécessité des profondeurs d’un poignant besoin collectif’.⁴ The crusading mentality has thus never entirely died out, as events in our own historical epoch may suggest, and it remained especially potent in the period of Guise ascendancy from the mid- to the later sixteenth century. A more recent historian of the Crusades takes this more liberal view of the crusading movement:

The last crusade may have been that of Sebastian of Portugal in 1578. The last crusading league was the Holy League from 1684 to 1699. The last crusaders may well have been found in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The last functioning brother knights of a Military Order running the last order-state were the Hospitallers on Malta until 1798.⁵

Indeed, members of the second and third generations of the Guise family were literally crusaders – not to the Holy Land, except imaginatively, but against the Turks.

Modern historians have regularly discerned this crusading mentality in the Guise family’s activities, both military and cultural, from Claude de Lorraine forward, as well as in the Catholic League and in the French Counter-Reformation more generally. Denis Crouzet, for example, suggests that ‘c’est le massacre d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants, dans un imaginaire de guerre sainte, de croisade retrouvée qui est l’indice d’une violence devenue l’instrument du salut de ceux qui demeurent fidèles à Rome’;⁶ elsewhere he writes of the Catholic League’s activities in Paris in terms of Dupront’s ‘rêve de croisade’, as ‘une croisade spirituelle’ or ‘intérieure’.⁷ Referring specifically to the Guise family, Jessica Munns and Penny Richards find that ‘[i]ls se considèrent comme des combattants catholiques menant contre les ‘hérétiques’ protestants une croisade …’.⁸ Stuart Carroll similarly writes of the family’s ‘crusade against heresy’.⁹ Historians’ fondness for this kind of language when discussing the Guise family and the Catholic League is hardly surprising: if the Wars of Religion are conceptualised, from the Counter-Reformation, Catholic League or Guise point of view, as God’s will, as a holy war against the infidel, one in which the opponents of orthodoxy are characterised as subhuman and in which extreme violence directed against them is justified by God, then the historical model of the Crusades can scarcely be avoided.¹⁰

Moreover, the historical connection between the Crusades and the activities of the Guise is not merely a linguistic one imposed by modern historians. Contemporary sixteenth-century evidence suggests that the Guise and their early modern observers also used the Crusades as an organising principle for understanding their behaviour and indeed their entire ethos. As suggested above, they were, to begin with, literal crusaders insofar as it was possible to be a literal crusader in the sixteenth century; not to reconquer Jerusalem, but against the Turks in eastern Europe. Carroll has recently demonstrated just how committed the Guise, especially the younger generation, were to the idea of crusading, whether for reasons of genuine religious devotion or of political ambition: Duke Claude’s fifth son François (not to be confused with Claude’s eldest son of the same name) became head of the Order of St John within France at the age of 15, in part because of ‘the crusading mission of the order and that of his own house, as “kings of Jerusalem and Sicily”’.¹¹ In the following generation, too, Henri, the third duke of Guise (not yet 18), and his even younger brother Charles, marquis of Mayenne, went to Hungary on crusade against the Turks in 1566 and were lauded as crusaders by Brantôme;¹² Mayenne returned to crusading in 1572.¹³

In addition to their literal crusading activities, the Guise from Duke Claude forward engaged in various cultural performances designed to enhance their status as a crusading family, and indeed their links to the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Naples (or Sicily). Jonathan Spangler points out that René II, duke of Lorraine, had in 1506 partitioned his property between his eldest son, Antoine, and his second Claude, thus creating the new Guise dynasty and, further, that a 1530 treaty between the brothers had defined the two branches’ different spheres: France for the Guise, non-France for the Lorraine.¹⁴ Nevertheless, Spangler also suggests that their identity as princes étrangers remained ‘a point of pride’ to the Guise,¹⁵ and the evidence suggests that the Guise continued to emphasise their family connection with Jerusalem, Naples and the Crusades. Spangler, indeed, has pointed out that what the Guise renounced in 1530 was property, not claims to potential sovereignty.¹⁶ Their family seat at Joinville was itself a constant reminder of their historical links with the sieur de Joinville, thirteenth-century companion of St Louis on the Seventh Crusade and author of the crusading chronicle La Vie de saint Louis.¹⁷ The Joinville family were Lorraine-Guise ancestors, and in 1444, Ferry de Lorraine, count of Vaudémont and of Guise and seigneur de Joinville (see Plate 1), married Yolande d’Anjou, daughter of René I, duke of Anjou. Among his other titles, René I claimed those of king of Naples and of Jerusalem, the latter title having descended to him, somewhat questionably, from St Louis’s brother Charles of Anjou, who had bought Maria of Antioch’s rejected claim to the throne after the high court of Outremer decided against her and in favour of Hugh of Cyprus in 1268.¹⁸ (René’s claim to the kingdom of Naples also descended from the same Charles of Anjou, who won it by conquest in 1266; but by the sixteenth century this title was equally suspect, as Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon had conquered it in turn in 1452.) The marriage of Ferry and Yolande, Duke Claude’s grandparents, was thus a particularly significant one for the Lorraine-Guise family, uniting them and their Joinville connections as it did with the alleged royal family of Jerusalem and of Naples.

The Lorraine claim to Jerusalem, however, went back even further than Charles of Anjou: they also claimed descent from the legendary Godfrey of Bouillon, hero of the First Crusade and first ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem after its conquest in 1099.¹⁹ This claim was laid out for them in 1549 in Les Antiquités de la Gaule Belgique by Wassembourg, a canon of Verdun; he traced the origins of the Lorraine and Guise families back to the Trojan War, but also, more importantly for our purposes, to Godfrey of Bouillon.²⁰ Indeed, Paolo Giovio had made the same suggestion even earlier, in 1540, claiming that Claude’s son ‘descend sans conteste de Godefroi de Bouillon, glorieux roi de Jérusalem’; he renewed this assertion in 1550, describing René’s descendan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Contributors
• Line of Descent, from Joinville to Naples
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Context of a Dream
• 1 The Guise and the Two Jerusalems: Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis and an Early Modern Family’s Medievalism
• 2 The Guise ‘Italianised’? The Role of Italian Merchants, Intermediaries and Experts in Ducal Consumption in the Sixteenth Century
• 3 Political Uses of Reputation and Celebrity in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Henri de Lorraine, Fifth Duke of Guise
• 4 ‘Magnificence Reigned’: Anthony Van Dyck’s Portrait of Henri II de Lorraine, Duke of Guise
• 5 Dreaming of the Crown: Political Discourses and Other Sources relating to the Duke of Guise in Naples (1647–48 and 1654)
• 6 Mother Knows Best: The Dowager Duchess of Guise, a Son’s Ambitions, and the Regencies of Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria
• 7 Parthenope’s Call: The Duke of Guise’s Return to Naples in 1654
• 8 Warriors of God: History, Heritage and the Reputation of the Guise
• 9 Channel Crossing: The Guise in British Drama
• Index