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

indicating a level of intimacy with the king that his brother never achieved. To Francis he was a ‘companion of the heart’, sharing the king’s interest in the arts and he was admitted to the Privy Council in 1530. 22 He juggled the possession of no less than eleven dioceses throughout his life. Some were held only briefly before resigning them to men whose careers he wished to promote; others were earmarked for his nephews or administered by ‘straw men’ who handed over a cut of their revenue. He held on to the three wealthiest—Metz, Narbonne, and Albi—for the duration of his life.
    He was abbot of thirteen monasteries during his career, including some of the richest in the kingdom, such as Fécamp, Marmoutier, and Gorze.
    Many of these benefices owned significant property in Paris. Jean established his principal residence in the magnificent palace of his abbey of Cluny, situated on the Left Bank. Built between 1485 and 1498, it is one of the greatest examples of Parisian Renaissance architecture. In Guise possession until 1621, it was where James V lodged when he came to Paris in 1536 and it can still be visited today as the National Museum of Medieval Art. Jean had it sumptuously refurbished in the latest Renaissance style, employing Italians, like Cellini, who had worked at Fontainebleau, and filling it with objets d’art purchased by his agents in Rome and Venice. Its purpose was to house a salon devoted to the latest art and music.
    Jean and Claude were both great music lovers. Clément Janequin, the most famous and prolific composer of popular chansons in Renaissance France, first composed for Claude in 1528, with his song La Chasse , which celebrated the duke’s recent promotion to the head of the royal hunt. For the next thirty years Janequin composed several works for various members of the family, and when he died in 1558 he was chaplain of the ducal household. A family tradition of music patronage had begun which would last for another 150 years. The Guise were not just appreciative listeners: Jean’s nephew, Charles, was a good lute player. When the composer of madrigals and choirmaster of the Sistine chapel, Jacques Arcadelt, quit papal service in 1553 to become choirmaster of the Guise court, it was recognition that the family ranked among the most cultured patrons in Europe. Arcadelt’s popularity—his music was popular in Italy and France for more than a century and his first book of madrigals was reprinted no less than fifty-eight times—was built on his gift for marrying Italian and French styles and for writing catchy tunes which were easy to play and sing. Arcadelt’s move to France has been called ‘the most significant musical event of the decade’. 23
    The Guise recognized the propaganda uses of music. The glorious defence of Metz (1553) by Claude’s son, François, was celebrated in a composition for five voices composed by Janequin, a genre of heroic song that was reprised by Janequin’s imitator Guillaume Costeley in his four-voice panegyric to the duke’s capture of Calais in 1558. The Italian-style music that emanated from the Guise court in the years before the Wars of Religion had an immense influence, inspiring poets like Ronsard and du Bellay.
    Thus far, Jean fits the pattern of a worldly and cultured Renaissance cardinal. What marked him out from other princes of the Church, and indeed, his own family, was that he belonged to the evangelical wing of the French, or Gallican Church. 24 He did not hide his beliefs, to the extent that for a decade the Protestants thought him a fellow traveller.
    In 1526 a correspondent of the Basel reformer, Guillaume Farel, reported that he often talked to the cardinal at court and found him ‘certainly not unfavourable towards the Gospels’. 25 And the following year the reformer, Capito, wrote favourably to Zwingli of Jean’s protection of imprisoned evangelicals and of his support for clerical marriage. In the decades before 1564,