ABSTRACT
This excerpt on the arrest and execution of Count Montgomery in Paris on Saturday 26 June 1574 is from the sixteenth-century journals of Pierre de L’Estoile, a notary in the Parlement de Paris, France’s highest sovereign law court. 1 It describes the execution of Gabriel de Lorges, Count Montgomery (Comte de Montgomméry), a nobleman famous for having held the joust that pierced the eye of King Henri II in 1559, killing him. Although it was an accident, Henri’s widow, Catherine de Medici, never forgave Montgomery, and he would spend much of the rest of his life fighting in the subsequent Wars of Religion against royalist forces. He became a Huguenot, the name for French Protestants, although they called themselves ‘members of the Reformed Religion’. He was eventually caught in 1574 during a planned insurrection in Normandy and convicted of treason. The entry describes his beheading and quartering in the Place de Grève, and his head being (temporarily) placed on a post in the same square, all of which was standard practice for someone convicted of this crime. He claimed that the insurrection was ordered by ‘the second person of France’, which at that point could have meant the King’s younger brother, the duke of Anjou, who would eventually openly join the Protestant side against the Court. L’Estoile goes into detail about how Montgomery was stripped of his nobility and all his worldly goods, leaving his large family intestate, penniless and unable to hold office. This was perhaps the most shocking element of the punishment, as nobility was (and is) inherently about the passing on of estates and goods to one’s heirs. The excerpt is also notable for Montgomery’s outburst at a Franciscan preacher, revealing as it does how Montgomery discovered the Protestant faith.
