On the twenty-second of December 1588, Henri de Guise discovered beneath his table-napkin a note warning him of mortal peril. Beneath the lines he inscribed his reply: that the King would not dare. On the following morning, the Duke entered the Château de Blois to attend a council where, according to Chateaubriand’s account, armed men were already lying in wait behind a door.
Ever since the opening of the Estates-General at Blois, Henry III and the Duke of Guise had contested the mastery of the realm. Guise stood at the head of the Holy League, having amassed an authority that the monarch deemed an intolerable menace. Chateaubriand imputes to him diverse designs: to resign his office of lieutenant-general, to obtain from the Estates the sword of the Constable of France, and thereafter to lay hands upon the armed forces of the kingdom; elsewhere in the chronicle, the Cardinal of Guise is said to have conceived that the King might be deposed and immured, while his brother seized the crown. The historian himself acknowledges that these schemes shifted with the hour. He offers no single, immutable design embraced by all parties, but rather exposes a field of rival ambitions contending around the throne.
The King, for his part, had set about preparing the Duke’s demise. In a secret council, Henry III is reported to have avowed that he could obtain no ordinary justice against a subject powerful enough to bring his very judges to trial. Chateaubriand, citing Étienne Pasquier, records that one or two councillors urged imprisonment and a trial conducted according to the forms of law. The others held that, in a crime of high treason, punishment ought to outrun judgment. The King resolved upon this latter course: the decision to dispatch Guise would not pass through the courts.
Chateaubriand depicts an enterprise prepared by calculated degrees. Henry III affected a desire to withdraw from worldly affairs, ordering cells for Capuchin friars to be fitted up directly above his bedchamber. He likewise accustomed the Cardinal of Guise to visit the château to treat of maintaining the Marshal de Matignon in his government of Guyenne. In the royal view, these tokens of feebleness had lulled Guise’s suspicions to sleep. Concurrently, the King received repeated warnings touching the designs imputed to the League’s chieftain: the Duke of Épernon forwarded letters to him, while the Duke of Mayenne and the Duke of Aumale conveyed intelligence by confidential emissaries. The chronicle further notes that Henry III cited these advices in a public manifesto published in February 1589.
The Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici, is herself said to have exhorted her son to vigilance. On the tenth of November, she summoned him to speak of what concerned his life, his honour, and his estate. Two gentlemen present in the apartment remained at a distance; as the King withdrew, they overheard Catherine adjuring him to tarry no longer, and not to suffer himself to be taken unawares as he had been upon the Day of the Barricades in Paris. The narrative then depicts Guise pacing the terrace of the château, visibly agitated for upwards of two hours upon learning of this interview.
The twenty-third of December was not the earliest date appointed for the murder. The King’s advisers had deferred the stroke, while Guise, repeatedly forewarned, hesitated to quit Blois. Three days beforehand, he had inquired of his intimates whether he ought to retire to Orléans. Their counsels were divided: some urged him to remain so as to reap the fruits of the Estates, while others stood in dread of the King. Chateaubriand relates that Mendreville pressed him to rise up in force, to which the Duke reportedly answered that he would not flee, even should death enter by the window. On the eve of the assassination, the Duke of Elbeuf warned him yet again; Guise brushed the counsel aside, making light of the threats that had already reached him.
Meanwhile, the King had ordered the disposition of his men. On the evening of the twenty-second, he summoned sundry lords, members of his council, and the Forty-Five ordinary gentlemen. Larchant, captain of the bodyguards, was instructed to post himself in the Duke’s path, under colour of presenting a petition touching the soldiers’ pay. He was thereafter to bar the passages, placing men upon the staircase and near the Galerie des Cerfs. The summoned gentlemen were then to take up their posts within the chamber, the old cabinet, and the connecting passages, according to the commands the King would deliver to them at daybreak.
At four o’clock on the morning of December twenty-third, Henry III rose and locked Duhalde, and subsequently such guards as presented themselves, within the Capuchin cells. The councillors arrived by a narrow, angled passage cut through the King’s bedchamber, the ancient doorway having been walled up. The King then released his men and led them back in strict silence, for fear of awakening the Queen Mother, who lay sick upon the floor below. He addressed them on the peril he attributed to Guise, demanding their service. They replied that they stood ready to put the Duke to death.
The Marshal d’Aumont had at first demurred, since Henry III had sworn reconciliation with the Duke but a few weeks prior. He was persuaded that Guise had been the first to violate that pact. The King then chose eight gentlemen armed with daggers, placing at their side Loignac, who bore only a sword. Other men, stationed in the old cabinet, were instructed to strike the Duke down upon his entry should he break through the first assailants. The command was to strike as the Duke passed from the council chamber into the old cabinet. The King withdrew to an apartment overlooking the gardens, though Chateaubriand depicts him as incapable of resting still, consumed with dread as to the issue of the ambuscade.
Guise was still abed when his valets roused him near eight o’clock. He was informed that the King was preparing to depart. Upon the terrace, Lasalle implored him to proceed no further. D’Aubencourt warned him in turn. The Duke held to his way. Larchant then presented the promised petition, feigning to await payment for the very guards who were about to turn upon him. Entering the council chamber, the Duke seated himself before the hearth. Chateaubriand, following Pasquier, records that he complained of cold and of a spasm at the heart, while several drops of blood fell from his nostrils. Those who witnessed the scene saw therein no certain harbinger of doom.
The King summoned Guise into the old cabinet. Nambu, an usher of the chamber charged with guarding the passage, initially refused entry to the messenger, until the King ordered him to open. The Duke arose, took up his cloak and gloves, saluted the lords of the council, and traversed the chamber where the guards had risen to attend him. In the narrow corridor, he turned about. At that moment, Montléry the elder sprang upon him, striking him with a dagger. The other gentlemen fell upon him in turn with their blades. Chateaubriand’s narrative records that he called his assailants his friends and pleaded for mercy—words derived from early testimonies out of which the historian wove his scene. Despite the blows, the Duke reportedly dragged his assailants from one end of the chamber to the other before sinking down upon the royal bed.
The Cardinal of Guise, detained within the council chamber, heard his brother’s cries and attempted to rise. The Marshal d’Aumont commanded him to keep his seat, declaring that the King had need of him. The Cardinal and the Archbishop of Lyon were forthwith arrested, immured in the Capuchin cells, and subsequently conveyed to the Tour de Moulins. Henry III came forth to view the Duke, already dead according to the chronicle, and spurned the corpse’s face with his foot. Chateaubriand also records the words the monarch is said to have uttered before the remains.
On the morrow, the twenty-fourth of December, the Cardinal of Guise was murdered within the Tour de Moulins by four men whom the chronicle records as having been hired for coin. This was no execution pronounced by a tribunal, but the second assassination of an operation carried out in the sovereign’s name. In the wake of these two deaths, Henry III caused several kinsmen and partisans of the Duke to be seized, among them the Duchess of Nemours, her son the Prince of Joinville, and the Archbishop of Lyon. Other lords of the League fled Blois; the shops were shuttered. Chateaubriand adds that the corpses were thereafter consumed by fire and their ashes cast into the river.
At Blois, royal authority had determined that Henri de Guise should see neither dock nor dungeon; the fate of his brother, murdered on the following day, gave bloody confirmation to that decree.