He was wounded at the Battle of Dormans (October 10, 1575), and was thereafter known, like his father, as "Le Balafré". With a charismatic and brilliant public reputation,[1] he rose to heroic stature among the Catholic population of France as an opponent of the Huguenots.
In 1576 he formed the Catholic League to keep the new heir, the Protestant Henry of Navarre, off the throne. The talent and dash of Guise contrasted favorably with the vacillation and weakness of Henry III, and he was said to have claimed a Carolingian descent and cast eyes on the throne. This led to the stage of the Wars of Religion known as the War of the Three Henries (1584-88). However, on the death in 1584 of François, Duke of Anjou, the king's brother (which left Henry of Navarre, the Protestant champion, as heir-male), Guise concluded the Treaty of Joinville with Philip II of Spain. This compact declared that the Cardinal de Bourbon should succeed Henry III, in preference to Henry of Navarre. Henry III now sided with the League (1585), which made war with great success on the Protestants. Guise sent his cousin Charles, Duke of Aumale to lead a rising in Picardy (which could also support the retreat of the Spanish Armada). Alarmed, Henry III ordered Guise to remain in Champagne; he defied the king and on May 9, 1588 Guise entered Paris, bring to a head his ambiguous challenge to royal aurthority in the Day of the Barricades and forcing King Henry to flee.
The League now controlled France; the king was forced to accede to its demands and created Guise Lieutenant-General of France. But Henry III refused to be treated as a mere cipher by the League, and decided upon a bold stroke. On December 23, 1588, at the Château de Blois, Guise was summoned to attend the king, and was at once assassinated. His brother Louis II, Cardinal of Guise was assassinated by "the Forty-five", the king's bodyguard, the next day. The deed aroused such outrage among the remaining relatives and allies of Guise that Henry III was forced to take refuge with Henry of Navarre. (Henry III was assassinated the next year by Jacques Clément, agent of the Catholic League).
The Duc de Guise appears as an archetypal Machiavellian schemer in Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris.
L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise, Op. 128, first shown at the Salle Charras in Paris on 16 November 1908, was the first film to include a score written by a well-known classical composer (Camille Saint-Saëns).
