his brothers, at much expense and with great difficulty, Guise got together ten thousand men, four thousand of whom were cavalry. The double cross was the rallying sign of this little army. The time was come for Guise to perform his promise to Pope Leo, to fight stoutly in defence of the Church. And truly his hand was heavy upon the unfortunate and half frantic Lutherans, although to a certain extent he tempered its weight with mercy. Besieged in Saverne, the fanatics put to death the herald who summoned them to surrender. Learning that reinforcements from Germany were at hand, Guise hurried to meet them with three thousand men, and encountered them at the village of Lupstein, into which the Germans retreated, after a terrible conflict outside the place, and threw up a barricade as best they could, of carts, casks, and gabions. From the cover of these, and of the adjacent hedges, they kept up so obstinate a defence, that Guise, whose men fell fast, caused fire to be applied to the houses. But hardly had the flames begun their ravages, when the Count, seized with compassion, threw himself from his horse to assist in extinguishing them, and succeeded, at imminent risk to his own life, in saving upwards of four thousand persons of all ages. Nearly double that number perished; as many more at Saverne and in the mountains, to which the unfortunate Germans fled; and about fifteen thousand in a final engagement at Chenouville, which broke the strength of the fanatic host, and finally closed the campaign. During one of these battles, the soldiers of Guise beheld in the air the image of the Saviour attached to the cross, a phenomenon in which they saw assurance of victory.
"Once more," says M. de Bouillé, "Guise had rendered a most important service to the kingdom; he had also assumed a peculiar and marked position, and had fixed a point of departure for himself and his descendants, by striking, of his own accord, and without instructions from the Government, the first blows that Protestantism received in France: a circumstance often recalled, with more or less exultation, by the panegyrists of that family, and which procured Claude de Lorraine the nickname of the Great Butcher, given him by the heretics, who were exasperated by the loss of nearly forty thousand men, caused them by his arms in that fatal expedition."
Determined foes to the Reformed faith as both of them were, a distinction must yet be made between the Count of Guise assailing and slaughtering, with far inferior forces, a formidable body of armed and aggressive foreigners, and the fierce Balafré, wielding a murderous sword against his defenceless and inoffensive Huguenot countrymen, on the terrible night of St Bartholomew. If the amount of bloodshed at Saverne and Chenouville appears excessive, and implies that little quarter was given, it must yet be remembered that greater clemency to the vanquished might have had the most disastrous consequences to the handful of conquerors. The Council of Regency disapproved of Guise's conduct in the affair; taxing him with rashness in risking the whole of the small number of regular troops disposable for the defence of the kingdom. But there could hardly have been more pressing occasion to expose them; and Francis I., on returning from exile, recognised and rewarded that and other good services by elevating the county of Guise into a duchy and peerage – further enriching the newly-made duke with a portion of the crown domains. Such honours and advantages had previously been almost exclusively reserved for persons of the blood-royal. The Parliament remonstrated in vain; but Francis himself, before very long, repented what he had done. He took umbrage at the increasing popularity of the Duke of Guise, and gave ear to the calumnies and insinuations of the French nobles, who were irritated by the haughty bearing, great prosperity, and ambitious views of the house of Lorraine. The manner in which Francis testified his jealousy and distrust was unworthy of a monarch who has left a great name in history. He showed himself indulgent to those of his courtiers and officers who organised resistance to the influence and pretensions of the Guises. "One time, amongst others," says M. de Bouillé, "the Duke of Guise, governor of Burgundy, wishing to visit the castle of Auxonne, whose governorship was a charge distinct from that of the province, the titulary, Rouvray, a French gentleman, refused him admittance, which he would not have dared to do had Guise been recognised as prince. When the Duke complained of this treatment, the King, delighted, whilst taking advantage of his services, to see his pride and ambition thwarted, lauded the conduct of Rouvray, and laughed at him who had wished to play the prince of royal blood." For annoyances of this kind Guise sought compensation in popularity, thus tracing out for his descendants the line they should most advantageously follow.
The partial disfavour into which the Guises had fallen, during an interval of peace when their services were not indispensable, was dissipated by the zeal and talents exhibited by the Duke's brother, John Cardinal of Lorraine, in a most difficult and delicate negotiation with Charles V., and by the prompt good-will with which, when negotiation failed and war broke out, the Duke hurried to the relief of Peronne, accompanied by his eldest son, the Count of Aumale, then scarcely nineteen years old. Peronne la Pucelle was hard beset by the Count of Nassau, who pounded its ramparts with seventy-two pieces of cannon, and was defended with equal valour by Fleuranges, Marshal de la Marck, who repulsed an assault made simultaneously by two breaches, and destroyed a mine on which the enemy reckoned for his discomfiture. Want of supplies, and especially of powder, must soon, however, have compelled him to yield, but for a stratagem practised by Guise. That able commander selected four hundred resolute soldiers, loaded each of them with a bag containing ten pounds of powder, and set out, at six in the evening, from his headquarters at Ham, with the Count of Aumale, whose first experience of war this was, and to whom Guise, as he wrote to the King, "intended soon to give up his sword, as capable of doing better service in his young hands than in his own." Two hundred horsemen escorted them as far as the edge of the marshes of Peronne, and at midnight Guise, who had brought with him a large number of drummers and trumpeters, distributed these at different points around the besiegers' camp. Whilst they sounded and beat the charge, and the Imperialist generals, believing themselves attacked on all sides, hastily formed their troops for the combat, the powder-bearers, guided by a soldier of the garrison who had borne news of its distress from Fleuranges to Guise, crossed the marshes by means of a number of little roads and bridges, which the enemy himself had made to maintain his communications, and reached the moat, whence by means of ropes and ladders they entered the fortress. The last of them were just getting in when day broke, and the Count of Nassau discovered the trick that had been played him, and detached a body of cavalry to pursue Guise, then retreating with his drums and trumpets, and whose steady array discouraged attack. A few days later the Imperialists raised the siege, and Paris, which had been in consternation at the danger of Peronne, its last bulwark against the advancing foe, knew no bounds in its gratitude to the man to whom it thus, for the second time, was indebted for its salvation. Guise's great services in this and the following campaign rendered Francis I. indulgent to his still-recurring pretensions; to the arrogance which led him frequently to refuse obeying orders that did not emanate directly from the King, and to assume a sort of independence and irresponsibility in the exercise of his government. Looking back, through the clarifying medium of history, upon the character and conduct of Claude of Lorraine, we are disinclined to think that Francis had ever serious cause for mistrusting the loyalty of his powerful subject; whose encroachments, however, it cannot be denied, were sufficient grounds for jealousy and uneasiness. And on more than one occasion we find the royal anger – perhaps complete disgrace – averted from him only by the interest of his brother the Cardinal, to whom Francis could refuse nothing.
As a diplomatist and patron of the arts, Cardinal John of Lorraine occupies almost as elevated a pedestal in the gallery of distinguished Frenchmen of the sixteenth century, as does his brother Claude in his more active capacity of general of armies and administrator of provinces. His courtly qualities, and a congeniality of tastes – some of which, although they might be held excusable in a king, were scarcely to be palliated in a prelate, even in that age of lax morality – endeared him to Francis, who associated with him on a footing of great familiarity. His generosity and charity were on such a scale as at times to resemble prodigality and ostentation; his love of pleasure and addiction to gallantry were in like manner excessive. "He was," says M. de Bouillé, "a very lettered prince, a splendid patron of learned men, whom he treated as friends, and in whose labours he associated himself. A writer named Bertrand de Vaux, having presented and read to him a critical work, containing low personality, awaited, notwithstanding its base character, the recompense which the Cardinal always granted to those authors with whose productions he was satisfied. The prelate accordingly handed him a golden etui. 'Take this, friend Bertrand,' he said; 'it is to pay the fatigue and salary of the reader. The writer must seek payment from some