Chapter VIII (2)

This opinion was, moreover, strengthened by the fact that throughout all these hostile preparations Henry did not discontinue his negotiations for the return of Madame de Condé to France. He pleaded the authority of her father, the anxiety of her more than mother the Duchesse d'Angoulême, his own authority over his subjects, the inclination of the Princess herself to be once more under the protection of her family; but all these pretexts signally failed. Yet neither Henry nor his agent M. de Preau would yield to discouragement; passion on the one hand, and ambition on the other, lent them strength to persevere; and having exhausted their first scheme of attack, they next represented the necessity of her presence at the approaching coronation of the Queen, where it was important that she should occupy the position suited to her rank as first Princess of the Blood; and next they alleged the impossibility of furthering her views in the separation from her husband which she was about to demand, unless she were enabled personally to expose her reasons to the Parliament. Moreover, Madame de Condé had written to the French ministers to complain of violence and imprisonment, and the King insisted upon the necessity of her liberation.

De Preau, however, zealous as he was, made no impression upon the firmness of the Archduke. The Spanish Cabinet had rendered itself responsible for his opposition, and he defied the menaces of France, a circumstance which decided Henry upon immediate war. The resolution which he had taken of heading the army in person determined him, before his departure from France, solemnly to invest the Queen with the title of Regent during his absence; but the precautions which he took to name an efficient Council by whom she was to be assisted in the government of the kingdom excited the indignation and resentment of her personal favourites, especially of Concini, who thus saw himself rendered powerless when he had hoped to assert his influence and to improve his fortunes; and under the pressure of this disappointment he hastened to represent to his royal mistress the utter emptiness of the dignity with which Henry proposed to invest her.

"You are an uncrowned Queen," he said, "and you are about to become a powerless Regent. Thus, Madame, you will be known by two high-sounding titles, neither of which will in reality appertain to you. Cause yourself to be crowned, and then you will indeed possess the authority which is your due and the honour of which you have heretofore been unjustly deprived. Cease to be a puppet in the hands of a faithless husband, and at least compel this coming war, undertaken for the recovery of a new mistress, to be the means of establishing your own rightful position."

This advice was eagerly accepted by Marie, whose ambition had at length been aroused by a consideration of the failing health and advanced age of the King and the prospect afforded by the extreme youth of the Dauphin of a protracted minority, and she consequently hastened to express to Henry her earnest desire to feel herself in reality Queen of France before his departure from the kingdom, in order that she might not have to apprehend any neglect of her legitimate authority upon the part of the ministers whom he had selected to share with her the burthen of state affairs. The monarch, who had hitherto refused to listen to every suggestion which had been made to him of the propriety of showing this mark of consideration to his royal consort, was even less inclined to make the concession at this particular moment, when the expenses of his meditated campaign had been estimated at twelve hundred and fifty livres a month for the support of his own troops and an equal sum for those of his allies;[418] and he replied with considerable warmth that she had chosen her time for such a request most injudiciously, since she must be aware that he had neither the time nor the funds necessary to the indulgence of so puerile a vanity. The Queen, however, urged by her advisers, resolutely returned to the charge, declaring that she could assume no prominent position in the temporary government of the kingdom while her own remained so vague and undefined. She reminded him, moreover, of the uncomplaining patience with which she had awaited his pleasure upon this particular; a patience which, as she asserted, she could still have exercised had he not been about to cross the frontier, but which, under existing circumstances, she now considered as weak and pusillanimous in the mother of three princes.[419]

"At length, however," says Bassompierre, whose own more than questionable morality did not permit him to enact the censor upon his sovereign, "as he was the best husband in the world, he finished by giving his consent, and delayed his departure until she should have made her public entry into the capital." [420]

On retiring to his closet the King declared to one or two of his confidential friends, as he had already done on former occasions when the same question had been mooted, that the actual cause of the repugnance which he felt to accede to the wishes of the Queen arose from a firm conviction that her coronation would cost him his life, and that he should never leave Paris in safety, as his enemies could only hope to triumph by depriving him of existence.[421]

"Assuredly," pursues the quaint old chronicler from whom we have just quoted, "heaven and earth had given us only too many prognostics of what was to happen to him: it was in the year 1608 that a great eclipse nearly covered the whole body of the sun; in the preceding year 1607 that the terrible comet appeared; after which some three months or thereabout we had two earthquakes; then several monsters born in divers provinces of France; bloody rains that fell at Orleans and at Troyes; the great plague that afflicted Paris in the past year 1609; the furious overflowing of the Loire; next the Curé of Montargis found upon the altar, when he went to celebrate the mass, a scroll by which he was informed that his Majesty would be killed by a determined blow, and the said Curé of Montargis carried the paper to the Duc de Sully. Several conspiracies," he goes on to say, "must have been formed against the life of this good King, since from twenty quarters he received notice of it. The Pope Paul V sent him a courier express to warn him to be upon his guard, as very high and powerful ladies and some of the greatest nobles of his Court were involved in a plot against his life." [422]

What reason the King may have supposed himself to possess for considering his own death to be consequent upon the coronation of Marie, or whether he did actually so combine the two events in his own mind, it were impossible for posterity to decide; but it is at least certain that Rambure himself is not singular in adducing extraordinary coincidences and in lending his support to these superstitious terrors, for it is on record that Cardinal Barberino, who subsequently (in 1623) became Pope under the title of Urban VIII, and who was, at the period of which we now write, celebrated for his acquaintance with the occult sciences, as well as for his skill in astrology, sent a message to the King in the month of January, by which he cautioned him not to sojourn in any large city throughout the whole of the year, but more especially during the months of March, April, May, June, and July; declaring that, should he disregard the warning, he would be assassinated by an unfrocked monk of saturnine temperament born in his own kingdom; and adding that he would do well carefully to ascertain whether any individual answering to this description were then residing within his dominions, in order that should such an one be discovered, he might be closely watched; and he, moreover, concluded by assuring the monarch that if he would submit to absent himself from all the great cities of his kingdom during the months specified, he (the Cardinal) would answer with his life that he should escape the threatened peril.

This intimation, extraordinary as it seems, was, however, insignificant beside another which reached Henry at the same period through the Marquis Dufresne, his ambassador at the Court of Constantinople, who was instructed by the Sultan to desire him to take off the heads of the six principal nobles of his nation immediately on the receipt of his letter, and to be upon his guard against the greatest lady in his dominions, as well as against three persons who were in her confidence, whom he advised him to imprison during their lives, the whole of them being implicated in the plot.[423]

Both these communications may, however, find a probable solution in the circumstance of their having been made by individuals who had obtained information of a conspiracy against the life of the French King, a supposition rendered the more rational by the fact that although aware of the formidable army then organized in France, the Austrians made no preparation to resist a force which they were conscious was to be used against themselves; an inertness which could only be accounted for by the supposition that they were about to employ other and surer methods of evading the threatened evil.[424] But in addition to these probably political prophecies, others of a still more singular nature were made to Henry of his approaching fate. A young female named Anne de Comans voluntarily declared that a fatal conspiracy had been organized, whose avowed object was to terminate the existence of the monarch by violence, and even after his death she persisted in maintaining the truth of her assertion, not only orally but in writing; for which persistence she was pronounced to be insane, and so closely confined in an asylum for lunatics as actually to become in a few months the madwoman which she had been represented, although it would appear that great doubts were entertained as to her previous hallucination.[425] Six months before his death the King being in the house of Zamet retired immediately that he had dined to a private apartment, whence he sent to summon Thomassin, one of the most celebrated astrologers of the time, whom he interrogated respecting his own future destiny and that of his kingdom. In reply he was warned as usual to beware of the approaching month of May, and at length, irritated by his scepticism, the professor of the black art predicted to him not only the day but the very hour which was to terminate his existence.[426]

A short time subsequently a nobleman of Béarn arrived in Paris and requested an audience of the King, which he had no sooner obtained than he informed him that he had been instructed in a vision to seek his presence in order to warn him of his approaching death. Henry, however, who piqued himself in public upon denying credence to these supernatural revelations, and who, moreover, imagined that the object of his countryman was to obtain a recompense for his zeal, treated the matter lightly and ordered three hundred crowns to be presented to the stranger to defray his travelling expenses. This present he, however, respectfully refused, protesting that he had acted only upon a principle of duty, and that he should be amply recompensed should his warning suffice to induce the monarch to adopt such precautions as would enable him to escape the threatened peril.[427]

Only a few nights previous to her coronation the Queen suddenly awoke from a profound slumber uttering a piercing shriek and trembling in every limb. Alarmed by her evident state of agony, the monarch, having at length succeeded in restoring her to a state of comparative composure, urged her to explain the cause of her terror, but for a considerable time she refused to yield to his entreaties. Overcome at last, however, by his evident anxiety and uneasiness, she informed him that she had just had a frightful dream, in which she had seen him fall under the knife of an assassin.[428]

Two remarkable coincidences also demand mention, particularly as they occurred at a distance from the capital. On the day of the King's assassination his shield, bearing his blazon, which was attached to the principal entrance of the château of Pau in Béarn, fell heavily to the ground and broke to pieces; while immediately afterwards the cows of the royal herd, which had previously been grazing quietly in the park, began to low in a frightful manner, and suddenly the bull known as _the king_ rushed violently against the gate whence the trophy had fallen and then sprang into the moat, where it was drowned. The effect produced upon the inhabitants of the district was instantaneous; loud and lamentable shouts of "The King is dead!" arose on all sides, and within two hours every Béarnais felt convinced that his beloved monarch had ceased to exist.[429]

It is useless to multiply these strange tales; but it is certain that they did not fail in their effect upon the mind of the monarch, however he might struggle to conceal the feelings which they excited, for Bassompierre relates that during the preparations which were making for the coronation of the Queen, Henry repeatedly alluded to his approaching death with a sadness which evinced his entire belief in the predictions that had reached him.

"I know not wherefore, Bassompierre," he said on one occasion, "but I am persuaded that I shall never again see Germany, nor do I believe that you will go to Italy. I shall not live much longer."

On the 1st of May, when returning from the Tuileries by the great gallery to the Louvre, supported in consequence of his gout by the Duc de Guise and the narrator himself, he said on reaching the door of the Queen's closet to his two attendants, "Wait for me here. I will hasten the toilet of my wife that she may not keep my dinner waiting." He was of course obeyed, and the Duke and Bassompierre, in order to while away the time, walked to the balcony that overhung the court of the Louvre, against which they leant watching what passed below, when suddenly the great hawthorn which occupied the centre of the area swayed for an instant and then fell to the earth with a loud crash in the direction of the King's private staircase without any apparent agency, as not a breath of air was stirring, nor was any one near it at the time.

The impressionable imagination of Bassompierre was deeply moved. "Would," he exclaimed to his companion, "that any sacrifice on my part could have averted so dire a presage as this. God preserve the King!"

"You are mad," was the reply of the Duke, "to connect the fortunes of the King with the fall of a tree."

"It may be so," was the melancholy rejoinder; "but neither in Italy nor in Germany would this circumstance fail to produce alarm. Heaven guard the monarch, and all who are near and dear to him!"

"You are two fools to amuse yourselves with these absurd prognostics," said Henry, who had approached them unheard during their momentary excitement. "For the last thirty years all the astrologers and mountebanks in the kingdom, as well as a host of other impostors, have predicted at given intervals that I was about to die, so that when the time comes some of these prophecies must prove correct and will be quoted as miracles, while all the false ones will be studiously forgotten."

The young nobles received the rebuke in silence; but the inexplicable accident which had just occurred was sufficient in so superstitious an age to arouse the liveliest forebodings in the minds of those by whom it was witnessed.[430]

FOOTNOTES:

[391] Mademoiselle de Montmorency was the daughter of Henri, first of the name, Duc de Montmorency, Marshal and Constable of France, celebrated in the history of the civil wars under the name of Damville, who died on the 2nd of April 1614, and of Louise de Budos, his second wife, who had, on her appearance at Court, attracted the attention of the King. This lady, who became the wife of the Connétable in 1593, died in 1598. Charlotte Marguerite was born in 1594, and was consequently but fifteen years of age when she entered the household of the Queen.

[392] Bentivoglio, _Della Fuga del Principe di Condé_.

[393] Bassompierre, _Mém_. p. 53.

[394] Bassompierre, _Mém_. p. 55.

[395] Hector de Pardaillan, Seigneur de Montespan, who died in 1611, at the advanced age of eighty years. He was the father of Antoine-Arnauld de Pardaillan, first Marquis d'Antin, grandfather of Roger-Hector, Marquis d'Antin, great-grandfather of Louis-Henri, Marquis de Montespan, the husband of Franchise Athenais de Rochechouart-Mortemart, the celebrated favourite of Louis XIV.

[396] _Mémoires_, p. 55.

[397] Mézeray, vol. x. p. 369.

[398] _Mémoires_, p. 56.

[399] Mézeray, vol. x. p. 365.

[400] _Mémoires_, p. 58.

[401] Sully, _Mém_. vol. vii. p. 189.

[402] Sully, _Mém_. vol. vii. pp. 191, 192.

[403] Mézeray, vol. x. pp. 370, 371.

[404] Montfaucon, vol. v. p. 425.

[405] Daniel, vol. vii. p. 498.

[406] Dreux du Radier, vol. vii. pp. 115, 116.

[407] Alexandre, Comte d'Elbène, celebrated for his military talent and prowess under Henri III and Henri IV.

[408] _Mémoires_, p. 67.

[409] François Annibal d'Estrées, Marquis de Coeuvres, subsequently duke, peer, and Marshal of France, was the son of Jean d'Estrées, Grand Master of Artillery, and the representative of an ancient and illustrious family. He was born in 1563, originally entered the Church, and became Bishop of Laon, to which see he was promoted by Henri IV himself. He, however, some time afterwards, abandoned the ecclesiastical profession and embraced that of arms. In this new career he soon distinguished himself. In 1626 he relieved the Duke of Mantua, took Trèves, and made himself conspicuous alike by his valour and his talent. When appointed, in 1636, ambassador-extraordinary to Rome, he maintained the interests of his sovereign with energy and perseverance, and his frankness and decision caused a misunderstanding between himself and Urban VIII. On his recall to France he refused to explain or to palliate his conduct, and died, leaving behind him the _Memoirs of the Regency of Marie de Medicis._

[410] Louis Potier, Marquis de Gêvres, was killed at the siege of Thionville in 1643.

[411] Jacques Nompar de Caumont, Duc de la Force, was the representative of a family which traced its descent from the eleventh century, and was the son of François, Seigneur de la Force, who fell during the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He bore arms in the Protestant army of Henri IV, and also placed himself at the head of the reformed party under Louis XIII, to whom, however, he surrendered in 1622, and subsequently became Marshal of France, and lieutenant-general of the army in Piedmont. He took Pignerol, defeated the Spaniards at Carignano in 1603, and possessed himself of several towns in Germany. He then returned to France, where he died in 1652.

[412] Albert, Archduke of Austria, was the sixth son of Maximilian II, and was born in 1559. In 1583 he was appointed Viceroy of Portugal, and in 1596 became Governor of the Low Countries under Philip II. He made himself master of Calais, Ardres, and Amiens, and married Isabel Clara Eugenia, the daughter of the Spanish King, who brought him as her dowry the Catholic Low Countries and Franche-Comté, and thus renewed the war with Holland. Defeated at Nieuwpoort by Maurice of Nassau in 1600, he possessed himself of Ostend in 1604, after a siege of three years, three months, and three days; but he was nevertheless compelled to conclude a truce of eight months in 1607, and another of twelve years in 1609. He died in 1621.

[413] Réné de Sainte Marthe de Châteauneuf, who became Keeper of the Seals under the regency of Marie de Medicis.

[414] Madame Henrietta Marie de France, who was married by procuration, by the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld, in the cathedral of Notre Dame, on the 11th of May 1625, to Charles I of England. This unfortunate Queen died suddenly at her country-house at Colombes in 1669.

[415] Daniel, vol. vii. pp. 502, 503, by whom these details were obtained from manuscript letters in the library of the Abbé d'Estrées.

[416] Hector de Preau was a Calvinist nobleman and Governor of Châtellerault.

[417] Mézeray, vol. x. p. 374.

[418] Mézeray, vol. x. p. 384.

[419] Mézeray, vol. x. p. 387. L'Etoile, vol. iv. p. 16.

[420] _Mémoires_, p. 70.

[421] Rambure, MS. _Mém_. vol. vi. pp. 27, 28.

[422] Rambure, _MS. Mém_. vol. vi. pp. 28, 29.

[423] Rambure, MS. _Mém_. vol. vi. pp. 29, 30.

[424] Mézeray, vol. x. p. 385.

[425] Mézeray, vol. x. pp. 376, 385.

[426] _Mém. pour l'Hist. de France_, vol. ii. p. 309.

[427] Dupleix, p. 411.

[428] L'Etoile, vol. iv. p. 31 _n_.

[429] Mézeray, vol. x. pp. 390, 391.

[430] Bassompierre, _Mém_. p. 70. Rambure, MS. _Mém_. vol. vi. p. 33.

END OF VOL. I