Aspiration, Representation and Memory: The Guise in Europe, 1506–1688 ed. by Jessica Munns, Penny Richards, Jonathan Spangler (review)

Jessica Munns comments in her chapter in the present volume that ‘no other family of the European nobility has had a comparable impact on British drama to that of the Guise’ (p. 183). This would hold true more generally: the Guise are one of the few widely familiar — or notorious — European noble dynasties. Yet this familiarity is almost exclusively focused on the sixteenth century and on the three key figures of François, second duc de Guise, Marie de Guise, mother of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henri, the third duc de Guise. The main object of the present volume is not to explore the family in its sixteenth-century manifestations (although Munns and Penny Richards both provide interesting surveys of the reputation of the family). The core of the book — five chapters out of nine — is concerned with the family’s seventeenth-century history, and above all with the life, times, and cultural representations of Henri II, fifth duc de Guise (1614–1664). Henri, who embodied a quintessentially baroque blend of unresolved contradictions, pursued a series of ambitious goals fuelled by his awareness of the immense dynastic legacy of the Guise family. In all cases his efforts were undermined by a combination of his impracticality, credulity, and ineptitude. A striking glimpse of this formidable family’s inheritance is provided in Robert Sturges’s account of the medieval and, especially, crusading legacy of the family, with their (claimed) links to Godefroi de Bouillon, and Jean de Joinville’s celebration of their ancestors in his Vie de saint Louis (1309). However, no less crucial to the identity of the Guise was Italy, and in the case of Henri II it was the family’s links to Naples through the Anjou connection that was to motivate his two most chimerical projects: his unsuccessful involvement in the Neapolitan revolt of 1647–48, and his second, opportunistic attempt to invade Naples in 1654. These two campaigns receive detailed treatment from Silvana D’Alessio and Charles Gregory, and both authors rightly contrast the bad organization, dismal leadership, and negative consequences of the operations with the extent to which they could be fitted into a grand narrative of the family’s historical reputation. Henri II realized that the odds were stacked against the success of these campaigns. Heavy investment in self-aggrandizing military campaigns, only tepidly supported by the French crown, was well beyond the private resources of Henri II himself. Yet, as the articles of Michèle Benaiteau and David Taylor demonstrate so ably in their different literary and artistic ways, the drive for reputation and family standing left Henri little choice but to adopt these routes as another means that might bolster dynastic claims central to the family’s identity and status as princes étrangers in a world of aristocratic ‘grade inflation’. All this came at a price, and Jonathan Spangler’s article aptly reminds us that behind the extravagant policies of Henri II stood the restraining presence of his mother, guardian and manager of the Guise estates, who succeeded in preserving the dynastic inheritance in the face of the extensive financial and political challenges posed by her son.