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the massacre spread terror among Protestants. Throughout the kingdom congregations held hastily organized secret musters, drew up rolls of those able to bear arms, and hatched plots to seize control of towns. The opening chapter in a terrible story and the beginning of a civil war that would last thirty-six years, Wassy continues to reverberate across the centuries. A new word ‘massacre’ was added to the political lexicon, a sound to which, in recent years, we have become inured. Up until the 1550s, ‘massacre’ had meant the chopping block used by French butchers, their meat cleaver being termed a ‘massacreur’. 34 Within a year the ‘butcher of Wassy’ was himself dead. Prior to the events of 1 March 1562 there had been at least one attempt to assassinate him but, in the wake of the massacre, the Protestants had even greater cause for revenge. The duke’s murder heralded an end to an older form of politics based on knightly chivalric ideals and ushered in a new ideological age in which political assassination was construed as an instrument of divine will. In France, massacres and the assassinations were to become regular occurrences, the Guise fated to be both conspirators and the victims of conspiracy. In the new political age, their image as murderers or martyrs was shaped and manipulated by the opposing religious parties in order to mobilize public opinion across Europe. In order to understand how and why these upheavals occurred we must turn to the origins of the family and chart their rise to power.

2: 'ALL FOR ONE: ONE FOR ALL'

    The mythic dictum of The Three Musketeers is far from original; it was for generations the motto of the House of Lorraine. In 1477, François de Guise’s grandfather, René II, Duke of Lorraine, rode into battle against Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, behind the ‘banner of his ancestors’, which depicted an arm protruding from a cloud and clutching a sword over which was written Une pour toutes .  François’s father, Claude, the second son of René II, who was born at Condé on the Moselle in 1496, changed the emphasis to express solidarity and steadfastness when he took his own motto: Toutes pour une . Là et non plus (‘All for one. Here and no further’). 1 The ideal of family unity is universal, and the reality of family tensions too.
    Relations between family members in the past were no less passionate than today, the stuff of perennial squabbling and reconciliation. In the past the stakes were even higher because power and wealth was predicated on the possession of land, which was acquired principally by inheritance and marriage. Today’s complex families, with their high proportion of step-parents, half-sisters and brothers and multiple sets of in-laws, was much the same as the distant past, where it was high rates of mortality and re-marriage, not family breakdown, that complicated kin relations. Property sharpened the emotional bonds between family members, establishing a sense of dependence or independence, embittering the excluded, and shaping the ambitions of the clever and the cunning. Among the aristocracy the stakes were higher and sibling and generational rivalry had serious political implications: a contested inheritance could result in blood-letting.  The genius of King Lear is timeless. But for contemporaries, its dissection of the rivalry, treachery, and murder that consumes a family made it no fable.
    The Guise rise to power was initially predicated on royal service and the favour of the King of France. But their ability to profit from it in the long term, and to hold on to power once favour was withdrawn, was due to an extraordinary level of family solidarity. The Guise did not suffer from the rivalries and jealousies that tore other families apart—the road to political impotence. Individuals acted in the interests of the group; sons invariably deferred to their father, younger brothers to the eldest male. It was recognized that an