The King of Navarre appoints a special commission for the trial
of Brilland--Brilland is put to the question--His confessions
under torture implicate the Princesse de Condé, but on the
following day he disavows them--He is found guilty and condemned
to be dismembered by horses--The princess denies the competency
of the court and appeals to the Parlement of Paris--But the King
of Navarre and the commissioners ignore the decrees of that
body--The commission directs that the princess shall be brought
to trial--She gives birth to a son--The prosecution is dropped,
but the princess remains in captivity--The Président de Thou
interests himself in her case--Means by which he obtains from
Henri IV. the recognition of her son’s rights, and, with them,
the acknowledgment of the princess’s innocence.
After ordering the arrest of the Princesse de Condé, the King of
Navarre appointed a special commission, composed of twelve judges, for
the trial of Brilland; while, as the accused had protested against
his examination being conducted by Fiefbrun, who appears to have been
a personal enemy, Henri replaced him by Valette, Grand Provost of
Navarre, the more willingly since he was aware that Fiefbrun was a
devoted partisan of the princess.
The commissioners decided that Brilland should be put to the question.
“On entering the torture-chamber, he protested, in the first place,
that everything that he might say would be owing to the violence of
the pain, and that he knew nothing about the poison, and that he was
innocent. Nevertheless, when the torture was applied, he accused Madame
in this sense, that she and he had plotted the poisoning of the late
prince from the time that he [Condé] was aware of her behaviour, and
that, on leaving this town, his Excellency had recommended him to keep
watch over her actions, and to take care of her, declaring that, after
she was brought to bed, he should chastise her for her misconduct; and
that when he [Brilland] informed her of this, the said project was
resolved upon ...; that the said poison had been sent to the ...; that
it had come from M. d’Épernon. He further said that La Doussinière,
_maître d’hôtel_ of his aforesaid lord, had administered the
aforesaid poison in a chicken stuffed with eggs.”[132]
After this so-called confession had been extracted from him, the
wretched man was released from the rack and taken back to prison.
There, on the following day, he was visited by the commissioners,
who ordered his confession to be read over to him. “He disavowed it;
protested that what he had said was false; declared that what he had
done was to escape the violence of the pain: exonerated those whom he
had accused; and maintained his innocence and that he was ignorant
of the poison. At the same time, he confirmed the truth of all the
aforesaid confessions that he had made and signed in the course of the
trial, with the exception of that made under torture ... and declared
that he believed _Madame la Princesse_ and those whom he had
accused to be innocent, and that he knew nothing about the poison.”
Brilland was found guilty and condemned to the most barbarous of all
forms of punishment--to be dismembered by horses. Against this sentence
he appealed.
In the meanwhile, the Princesse de Condé had been formally charged
with complicity in the murder of her husband and summoned before
the commission. She refused to appear, denying the competency of
the tribunal and claiming the privileges of the peerage. The judges
overruled the princess’s objections, whereupon she petitioned Henri
III. that her case should be tried by the Grande Chambre of the
Parlement of Paris. His Majesty having returned a favourable answer,
she appealed to the Parlement, and obtained from that body a degree
calling the affair before it, prohibiting “all judges and others whom
it may concern from taking any further proceedings,” and ordering that
all the documents relating to the case should be immediately forwarded
to the registrar of the court, on the ground that the wives of the
Princes of the Blood were no more able than their husbands to be tried
save by the Parlement of Paris. At the same time, it appointed two
celebrated advocates, François de Montholon and Simon Marion, to act as
counsel for the princess.
The commissioners at Saint-Jean-d’Angely appear to have paid no
attention to these injunctions. The princess again appealed to the
Parlement, which issued a second decree, confirming the first and
ordering the commissioners to appear themselves before it, to answer
for their disobedience. The King of Navarre, who had no intention of
surrendering the conduct of an affair of such great consequence to
himself to the royal judges, from whom he had everything to fear,
replied by issuing a counter-decree, which rejected the pretensions
of the princess, maintained the competency of the tribunal he had
appointed, and ordered the commissioners to prosecute the affair, “in
conformity with the procedure which they had followed hitherto.”
In consequence, the sentence passed upon Brilland was confirmed, and
on 11 July, 1588, the condemned man suffered his terrible fate. “He
gave on this occasion,” writes de Thou, “several proofs of madness,
although he confessed that he was guilty of several other crimes, and
that he recognized the justice of the sentence that the commissioners
chosen to try him had pronounced. He began, however, to blaspheme in
a scandalous fashion, so that those who assisted at the execution
had great difficulty in making him return to his right senses, which
caused people to think that his mind was not very sound, and that, in
consequence, much reliance ought not to be placed on his evidence.”
On the same day, the fugitive page, Belcastel, was executed in effigy.
As for Corbais, the _valet de chambre_, who had fled with the page
and had been trapped so neatly outside the gates of Poitiers, we are
not told what was decided upon in regard to him. He is not mentioned
again in the proceedings.
After the execution of Brilland, the proceedings against the
Princesse de Condé were continued. The Prince de Condé and the Comte
de Soissons demanded to be received as parties to the prosecution,
and their request was granted by the commissioners. The princess once
more appealed to the Parlement of Paris, which issued a third decree,
forbidding Conti and Soissons to pursue the affair except before the
Parlement, and ordering the arrest of the commissioners and the seizure
and sequestration of their property.
This decree, like the two which had preceded it, was treated with
contempt, since the Parlement was, of course, powerless to enforce
it, and on 19 July the commissioners directed that the princess
should be brought to trial, but that, on account of her pregnancy,
the trial should not begin until forty days after her confinement.
In the meanwhile, she was very strictly guarded in the house of the
Sieur de Saint-Mesme, governor of Saint-Jean-d’Angely, in which she
had been shut up ever since her arrest, and only permitted to see a
very few persons. “During the six months that she was enceinte,” writes
Fiefbrun, “she was retained in her lodging, subjected to a thousand
slanders, and interrogated frequently by the chosen and incompetent
judges, not as a great princess, but as a simple demoiselle, without
any regard to her rank or her privileges. I leave all those who have
heard it spoken about to imagine how many anguishes, how much despair,
assailed her soul during that long time, in which she was not permitted
to speak or to confer with any one save two or three of her intimates,
without any other counsel or assistance.”
On 1 September, 1588, six months after the death of her husband, the
captive princess gave birth to a son, Henri de Bourbon, second of that
name, and third Prince de Condé. Fiefbrun gravely assures us that, at
the moment of the boy’s birth, “an extraordinary light was observed in
the heavens, and that, on the day of his baptism, the sky being serene
and cloudless, a clap of thunder was heard, which several persons who
understood meteors regarded as of good augury.”
Less importance, however, was attached to these happy prognostications
than to a circumstance which appeared to remove the suspicion on which
the charge against the princess had been principally based, namely,
that she was with child by the page Belcastel, and had poisoned her
husband to escape his just vengeance. This was the striking resemblance
which the infant prince bore to the late Prince de Condé, which was
admitted even by some who had until then been inclined to believe in
the guilt of the princess. “To-day, at noon precisely,” wrote the
governor of Saint-Jean-d’Angely to the Duc de Thouars, “_Madame la
Princesse_, your sister, has been delivered of the most beautiful
prince imaginable, and with more resemblance (so far as one can judge
at his age) to the late Monseigneur, his father, than one can describe.
For which I praise God, as do an infinite number of honourable people,
your servants.”
And Gilbert, the mayor of the town, wrote that “he had seen to-day the
dead father born again in a child so like him in every respect that
there was not a man living but was of opinion that never had son so
closely resembled his father.”
Desmoustiers, the pastor of the Protestant Church of
Saint-Jean-d’Angely, and Delacroix, the late prince’s chaplain, bore
similar testimony, the former declaring that the boy resembled his
father “_en tout et partout_”; while the latter concluded his
letter by observing: “Thus does Our Lord (just Judge) cause the truth
concerning the poisoning to be known.”[133]
Whether it was that the birth of a son had given the Princesse de
Condé a certain prestige with the Protestants, disposed to see in
this child a hope for the future, or that the want of proofs rendered
the prosecution difficult to continue, or that the King of Navarre’s
attention was occupied by weightier matters, the investigation was not
resumed, and the members of the commission which had been appointed
to conduct it dispersed. The princess, nevertheless, remained in
captivity, although she now enjoyed a certain amount of liberty,
since she went twice a week to see her little son, who had been put
out to nurse at Mazeroy, near Saint-Jean-d’Angely; and a path across
the fields between Beaufief and the road leading to that town, which
she generally followed, bears to this day the name of “_le chemin
de la princesse_.”[134] She was unable to obtain either the trial
before the Parlement of Paris which she had repeatedly demanded or her
liberty, and she appealed in vain to her relatives, to the neighbouring
nobility, and to every person of importance whom chance happened to
bring to Saint-Jean-d’Angely, to use their influence on her behalf. But
neither her relatives nor the different nobles to whom she addressed
herself seemed disposed to take any active steps in her favour, and it
was left to a magistrate, the Président de Thou, to be the first to
interest himself in the forsaken woman.
In the summer of 1589, de Thou, charged with a mission from Henri IV.,
passed through Saint-Jean-d’Angely, and the princess, since she was
unable either to receive or to visit him herself, had the happy idea
of sending to him her daughter Éléonore and the little Henri, with a
request that he would accord them his protection. The kind heart of the
worthy president was touched, and he promised to do everything in his
power on behalf of the princess and her children. Several years passed,
however, before circumstances permitted him to render any material
assistance to his illustrious clients.
Henri IV., as the King of Navarre had now become, did not appear
to cast any doubt upon the legitimacy of the little prince, since
he consented to stand godfather to him, and conferred upon him
indirectly the government of Guienne, which he himself had held
before his accession to the throne. But this informal acknowledgment
carried little weight, and, so long as the Princesse de Condé was
not exonerated from the terrible charge which was still hanging over
her, the boy’s position remained doubtful and precarious. Moreover,
when, after the conversion of Henri IV. and the submission of Paris,
tranquillity was to some degree restored, and the new King’s authority
better established, the late prince’s brothers wished to recommence
the proceedings against their sister-in-law, and urged his Majesty to
declare her child incapable of succeeding to the throne. For some time
their animosity frustrated all the efforts of de Thou on behalf of the
princess and her son, but at length he succeeded in outmanœuvring them.
In January, 1595, the King signed a new decree extending the provisions
of an article of the Edict of Peace of 1577, which admitted Protestants
to public office. The Parlement, however, refused to register it,
except on the condition that no member of the Reformed Faith should be
eligible for the post of governor or lieutenant-general of a province,
and persisted in its refusal, notwithstanding all the efforts of the
King to induce it to give way. The attitude of the Parlement placed
Henri IV. in a very embarrassing position, and de Thou, adroitly
seizing his opportunity, offered to secure the passing of the Edict,
provided that the King would guarantee that the young Prince de Condé,
the heir-presumptive to the throne, should be brought up in the
Catholic Faith. His Majesty, at first received this proposition very
ungraciously, but, seeing no other way out of the _impasse_, he
eventually accepted it, and directed the attorney-general to announce
to the Parlement that the Prince de Condé “would forthwith be taken out
of the hands of persons of the Protestant religion to be brought up in
that of Rome.”
This announcement not only secured the registration of the Edict,
but brought about the liberation of the Princesse de Condé, since to
recognize the rights of the son was to acknowledge the innocence of
the mother; and now that the favour of the King appeared to be gained,
the prisoner of Saint-Jean-d’Angely had no lack of supporters. A few
weeks later (June, 1595), Henri, Duc de Montmorency,[135] after having
taken at Dijon his oath as Constable of France, presented to Henri
IV. a petition signed by Diane de France,[136] widow of François,
Maréchal de Montmorency, Charles de Valois, Comte d’Auvergne,[137] the
Duc de Thouars, the Duc de Bouillon, the Baron de Montmorency-Damville,
and other relatives of the princess, praying him to direct that
the accusations brought against her should be adjudicated upon.
The King, by letters-patent, ordered the affair to be submitted to
the Parlement of Paris, and that the minutes of the proceedings at
Saint-Jean-d’Angely should be sent to the registrar of that body.
At the same time, he ordered the princess to be set at liberty, on
condition that the signatories to the petition should make themselves
responsible for her appearance when called upon.
In November, 1595, the princess and her son quitted
Saint-Jean-d’Angely, in charge of Jean de Vivonne, Marquis de Pisani,
whom the King had appointed the boy’s _gouverneur_. In the first
days of December, they arrived at the Château of Saint-Germain, which
had been provisionally assigned the little prince as a residence, and
where, by Henri IV.’s desire, the Parlement of France came to salute
him as first Prince of the Blood and heir-presumptive to the throne.
In the following May, the trial of the princess--if such a name
could be applied to an affair, the issue of which was a foregone
conclusion--came on for hearing. The Prince de Conti and the Comte
de Soissons had protested against everything that might be decided
as illegal, on the ground that the judgment of the case belonged to
the King alone, “holding his court garnished with peers, legitimately
assembled.” The Parlement summoned the two princes to appear before
it, and show cause why their sister-in-law should not be pronounced
innocent of the death of her husband. They refused, whereupon the
court declared all the proceedings in Saintonge null and void and
of no effect, “as contrary to the authority of the King, and to the
decrees of his Court of Parlement, and useful in no way whatsoever to
the furtherance of justice.” Finally, on 24 July, it issued a decree
declaring the princess “pure and innocent,” which, in accordance with
letters-patent issued by the King, was registered by all the provincial
Parlements.
Thus terminated the mysterious affair of Charlotte Catherine de la
Trémoille, Princesse de Condé.
But, as an eighteenth-century historian very rightly points out,
a case gained before the Parlement was not necessarily a victory
at the tribunal of public opinion; while over and over again that
body had quashed the decrees of the lesser courts only to have its
own verdict reversed by the judgment of history. The proceedings at
Saint-Jean-d’Angely were declared null and of no effect, but the affair
was not sent back for trial to the place where the supposed crime had
been committed, nor submitted to a new examination. Thus, the Princesse
de Condé, though pronounced innocent by the Law, was not exonerated
by a large section of the public; nor has time altogether effaced the
suspicions which remained in so many minds.[138]
Since all the documents connected with the investigation at
Saint-Jean-d’Angely were, by order of the Parlement, solemnly burned
by the registrar of the Court, in the presence of the First President,
Achille de Harlay, and the _rapporteur_, Édouard Molé, until some
fresh evidence shall be forthcoming, historians must renounce the hope
of discovering the truth of this _cause célèbre_, and content
themselves with more or less hazardous conjectures.
That the prince died from the effects of poison was undoubtedly the
firm belief of practically all his contemporaries. One writer of the
time alone, so far as we are aware, Joseph Texeira,[139] takes a
different view. In 1598, Texeira published an historical treatise, in
Latin, dealing with the principal events of Henri IV.’s reign,[140]
in the course of which he denied that the Prince de Condé had been
poisoned, and attributed his death to the injuries he had received at
Coutras, from which, as we have mentioned, he had suffered a great
deal of pain. Texeira pretends that the doctors who performed the
autopsy were divided as to the cause of death, and that the opinion of
those who held that it was due to natural causes was adopted, after
a solemn discussion, by the Faculty of Montpellier. But Désormeaux,
so devoted to the Condé family, confesses that, despite his active
researches, he was unable to find the proof of the two facts advanced
by Texeira in the documents of the time, whether published or in
manuscript, and if, after this avowal, he inclines to the same opinion,
it is because he cannot bring himself to believe that Texeira, Almoner
to the King and Councillor of State, was capable of a lie.[141]
But, admitting that the unfortunate prince was poisoned, what evidence
is there to connect his wife with the crime? Nothing whatever save the
confessions of Brilland, made under torture, and which he subsequently
denied, and the rumour of her undue intimacy with the page Belcastel,
about which, singularly enough, nothing seems to have been heard
until after her husband’s death. On the other hand, there are the
strongest possible reasons for believing her to be entirely innocent.
She was, undoubtedly, deeply in love with her husband at the time of
her marriage, and had given him, as we have seen, signal proofs of her
devotion; and it is, indeed, difficult to believe that in less than
two years her affection could have been transformed into a murderous
hatred. Moreover, she had apparently nothing to gain and much to lose
by his death, for in the line of succession he stood next to the King
of Navarre, a childless man, whose life was spent in the midst of
perils. In conniving at the murder of the Prince de Condé, quite apart
from the danger of detection and punishment, she would have deprived
herself of the prospect of becoming Queen of France.