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

when the Council of Trent finally established the boundaries of orthodoxy in the Catholic Church, it was common for educated Catholics to hold beliefs that would later be considered dissident. The limits of Jean’s tolerance were tested by people he considered sectarian riff-raff, or Anabaptists, and he assisted his brother in the campaign of 1525, raising troops and burning two heretics in Metz. But his protection of others reveals the growing polarization between Catholics in this period. In the 1520s, the Sorbonne, and in particular the fanatical Noël Beda, launched a campaign against those who sought to use the new humanist learning to translate and reinterpret the bible. One of Beda’s principal targets was his former pupil at Montaigu College, Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus turned to the Cardinal of Lorraine for help against the conservatives, dedicating his 1527 translation of the commentary on the epistles of the Galatians safe in the knowledge that ‘you have always in your hands the Gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles'. 26
    Psalm-singing was the classic form of worship associated with the Calvinists, and Calvin had engaged Clément Marot, a leading poet and evangelical who had composed for the cardinal until his denunciation as a heretic in 1535, to translate them into French. The Protestant hymn book was born. In 1545 the Sorbonne condemned Marot’s translation. However, the Psalms were not only sung by Protestants—there were many evangelical Catholics who defied the ban. And there were other vernacular translations of the Psalms used by both Catholics and Protestants alike. Those of Jean de Poictevan, a humanist who based his translations on Greek and Hebrew texts, were dedicated to the Cardinal of Lorraine. In his preface, Poictevan made specific reference to the 1545 prohibition on unauthorized biblical translations, indicating that his defiance of the Sorbonne was due to the cardinal’s protection. In 1548 and 1549, Louis des Masures, translator of Virgil and a friend to leading Protestant intellectuals such as Ramus and Calvin’s chief lieutenant, Beza, undertook to finish off Marot’s work. At this time he was the cardinal’s principal secretary and councillor and had spent the previous twenty years in a circle of writers who had gathered round Jean in an atmosphere that was humanist, Erasmian, and evangelical. Towards the end of his life Francis I turned against the evangelicals and persecution of those suspected of heterodox beliefs was stepped up. The net did not only sweep up Protestants. Marot fled France in 1543, but the austere environment of Geneva was not conducive to poetry and he moved to Italy where he died in 1544. Marot’s friend and fellow humanist Etienne Dolet was less fortunate; on return from Italian exile in 1546 he was condemned by the Sorbonne as a relapsed atheist and burned at the stake. Rabelais had more powerful protectors: when the Tiers Livre was condemned by the Sorbonne in 1546 he fled to Metz, knowing that the Cardinal of Lorraine was bishop there and that he would be unharmed. 27
    Jean’s interest in and patronage of humanist learning developed alongside his diplomatic activities; his specialization in Italian affairs complementing his intellectual interests—he was a notable patron of Italian vernacular poetry. At the age of only 17 he had been appointed French ambassador to the Holy See. In the papal conclave in 1534, he led the French delegation and successfully promoted the candidacy of Alexander Farnese, who as Paul III was more reform-minded than other candidates, but who was less compliant to French wishes than he hoped. At home, Jean posed as the protector of Italians and of Italian interests, and they in turned recognized him as the most important go-between with the king. In 1535 the papal nuncio went as far as to call him ‘half of the king’s soul'. 28 Visits to Italy on royal business were also an opportunity for Jean to promote his own interests and to