Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe by Stuart Carroll Read Free Book Online Page B

insisted on completing her year on probation as the humblest novice, sleeping in the common dormitory, going barefoot, and rigidly observing every fast. Despite her reclusion, she continued to play an important part in Claude’s life. Until her death in 1547, she continued to maintain her rights to the Angevin inheritance in Italy and signed herself ‘Queen of Sicily’. She received visits by her children and grandchildren, jogging consciences habituated to the frivolities of court. Philippa’s renunciation of the world had more immediate consequences for Claude. She renounced her dower and enabled him to take up residence in Joinville and, in an ostentatious show of favouritism, bequeathed all her moveable property to him alone.
    Just before his mother entered the cloister, another woman, Antoinette de Bourbon, entered his life. She would play a dominating role in family affairs for the next sixty years, outliving her husband and all her sons. Unusually for an aristocratic match, love seems to have played a part in their union. It was in 1512 that Claude, as part of the suite of the heir to the throne of France, the Count of Angoulême, who was visiting his betrothed, the Duchess of Brittany in the Hôtel des Tournelles, first encountered Antoinette, daughter of Marie de Luxembourg, Countess of Saint-Pol and François, Count of Vendôme, the great-grandfather of King Henry IV. The two were able to talk alone, a rare occurrence for teenagers of the opposite sex in those days; and following this, Claude, aged only 16, asked Angoulême to procure 17-year-old Antoinette’s hand in marriage. The dowry was fixed at 40,000 livres and they married in June 1513 in the royal parish church of Saint-Paul in Paris beneath the stained glass which depicted Joan of Arc.
    The marriage was a vital step in Claude’s political career. He had married into the royal family itself. Members of the House of Bourbon were styled princes of the blood in recognition of their privileged status, as heirs to the throne. Though Antoinette claimed descent from Saint-Louis through eight generations, the counts of Bourbon-Vendôme were in fact cadets of the ducal House of Bourbon, and in many respects her maternal line, the House of Luxembourg, which had provided five Holy Roman Emperors and many queens, was the greater. The Vendôme were very much in the shadow of Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, the king’s most powerful vassal who controlled a large swathe of central France. When the Count of Angoulême ascended the throne as Francis I in 1515, Charles was made constable, the highest office in the kingdom, which gave him control of military affairs. The close alliance between the Houses of Lorraine and Bourbon was sealed the same year when Duke Charles’s sister, Renée, married Antoine, Duke of Lorraine. Henceforth there was to be a close affinity between the various branches of the Houses of Lorraine and Bourbon, and their fluctuating relationship was a dominating feature of French politics for the rest of the century.
    Though he was only two years younger than Francis and had known him from boyhood, Claude did not figure among the young king’s confidants. He did however share the king’s passion for deeds of chivalry and tales of derring-do. The day after his marriage to Antoinette, Claude fought in a tourney, upending Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, favourite of Henry VIII. Francis too was physically powerful, a man of action who was happiest when riding to hounds, tilting in the joust, or performing in a masque. A young knight like Claude was fortunate to come of age just as the blossom in the Indian summer of French chivalry burst into bloom. Francis was the ideal of the roi chevalier : energetic, vigorous, and eager for glory. Since 1494 the Valois had been intervening militarily in Italy in pursuit of their rights to the duchy of Milan and, through the House of Anjou, their claim to the kingdom of Naples—a claim in which the Guise, too,