of Medina del Campo. He was taken thither in a coach with an escort of
arquebusiers.
“Why convey a poor pastry-cook with so much honour?” he asked his
guards, half-mockingly.
Within the coach he was accompanied by a soldier named Cervatos, a
travelled man, who fell into talk with him, and discovered that he
spoke both French and German fluently. But when Cervatos addressed him
in Portuguese the prisoner seemed confused, and replied that although
he had been in Portugal, he could not speak the language.
Thereafter, throughout that winter, examinations of the three chief
prisoners—Espinosa, Frey Miguel, and the Princess Anne—succeeded one
another with a wearisome monotony of results. The Apostolic Commissary
interrogated the princess and Frey Miguel; Don Rodrigo conducted the
examinations of Espinosa. But nothing was elicited that took the matter
forward or tended to dispel its mystery.
The princess replied with a candour that became more and more tinged
with indignation under the persistent and at times insulting
interrogatories. She insisted that the prisoner was Don Sebastian, and
wrote passionate letters to Espinosa, begging him for her honour’s sake
to proclaim himself what he really was, declaring to him that the time
had come to cast off all disguise.
Yet the prisoner, unmoved by these appeals, persisted that he was
Gabriel de Espinosa, a pastry-cook. But the man’s bearing, and the air
of mystery cloaking him, seemed in themselves to belie that
asseveration. That he could not be the Prior of Crato, Don Rodrigo had
now assured himself. He fenced skilfully under examination, ever
evading the magistrate’s practiced point when it sought to pin him, and
he was no less careful to say nothing that should incriminate either of
the other two prisoners. He denied that he had ever given himself out
to be Don Sebastian, though he admitted that Frey Miguel and the
princess had persuaded themselves that he was that lost prince.
He pleaded ignorance when asked who were his parents, stating that he
had never known either of them—an answer this which would have fitted
the case of Don Sebastian, who was born after his father’s death, and
quitted in early infancy by his mother.
As for Frey Miguel, he stated boldly under examination the conviction
that Don Sebastian had survived the African expedition, and the belief
that Espinosa might well be the missing monarch. He protested that he
had acted in good faith throughout, and without any thought of
disloyalty to the King of Spain.
Late one night, after he had been some three months in prison, Espinosa
was roused from sleep by an unexpected visit from the Alcalde. At once
he would have risen and dressed.
“Nay,” said Don Rodrigo, restraining him, “that is not necessary for
what is intended.”
It was a dark phrase which the prisoner, sitting up in bed with tousled
hair, and blinking in the light of the torches, instantly interpreted
into a threat of torture. His face grew white.
“It is impossible,” he protested. “The King cannot have ordered what
you suggest. His Majesty will take into account that I am a man of
honour. He may require my death, but in an honourable manner, and not
upon the rack. And as for its being used to make me speak, I have
nothing to add to what I have said already.”
The stern, dark face of the Alcalde was overspread by a grim smile.
“I would have you remark that you fall into contradictions. Sometimes
you pretend to be of humble and lowly origin, and sometimes a person of
honourable degree. To hear you at this moment one might suppose that to
submit you to torture would be to outrage your dignity. What then...”
Don Rodrigo broke off suddenly to stare, then snatched a torch from the
hand of his alguaziles and held it close to the face of the prisoner,
who cowered now, knowing full well what it was the Alcalde had
detected. In that strong light Don Rodrigo saw that the prisoner’s hair
and beard had turned grey at the roots, and so received the last proof
that he had to do with the basest of impostures. The fellow had been
using dyes, the supply of which had been cut short by his imprisonment.
Don Rodrigo departed well-satisfied with the results of that surprise
visit.
Thereafter Espinosa immediately shaved himself. But it was too late,
and even so, before many weeks were past his hair had faded to its
natural grey, and he presented the appearance of what in fact he was—a
man of sixty, or thereabouts.
Yet the torture to which he was presently submitted drew nothing from
him that could explain all that yet remained obscure. It was from Frey
Miguel, after a thousand prevarications and tergiversations, that the
full truth—known to himself alone—was extracted by the rack.
He confessed that, inspired by the love of country and the ardent
desire to liberate Portugal from the Spanish yoke, he had never
abandoned the hope of achieving this, and of placing Don Antonio, the
Prior of Crato, on the throne of his ancestors. He had devised a plan,
primarily inspired by the ardent nature of the Princess Anne and her
impatience of the conventual life. It was while casting about for the
chief instrument that he fortuitously met Espinosa in the streets of
Madrigal. Espinosa had been a soldier, and had seen the world. During
the war between Spain and Portugal he had served in the armies of King
Philip, had befriended Frey Miguel when the friar’s convent was on the
point of being invaded by soldiery, and had rescued him from the peril
of it. Thus they had become acquainted, and Frey Miguel had had an
instance of the man’s resource and courage. Further, he was of the
height of Don Sebastian and of the build to which the king might have
grown in the years that were sped, and he presented other superficial
resemblances to the late king. The colour of his hair and beard could
be corrected; and he might be made to play the part of the Hidden
Prince for whose return Portugal was waiting so passionately and
confidently. There had been other impostors aforetime, but they had
lacked the endowments of Espinosa, and their origins could be traced
without difficulty. In addition to these natural endowments, Espinosa
should be avouched by Frey Miguel than whom nobody in the world was
better qualified in such a matter—and by the niece of King Philip, to
whom he would be married when he raised his standard. It was arranged
that the three should go to Paris so soon as the arrangements were
complete, where the Pretender would be accredited by the exiled friends
of Don Antonio residing there—the Prior of Crato being a party to the
plot. From France Frey Miguel would have worked in Portugal through his
agents, and presently would have gone there himself to stir up a
national movement in favour of a pretender so fully accredited. Thus he
had every hope of restoring Portugal to her independence. Once this
should have been accomplished, Don Antonio would appear in Lisbon,
unmask the impostor, and himself assume the crown of the kingdom which
had been forcibly and definitely wrenched from Spain.
That was the crafty plan which the priest had laid with a singleness of
aim and a detachment from minor considerations that never hesitated to
sacrifice the princess, together with the chief instrument of the
intrigue. Was the liberation of a kingdom, the deliverance of a nation
from servitude, the happiness of a whole people, to weigh in the
balance against the fates of a natural daughter of Don John of Austria
and a soldier of fortune turned pastry-cook? Frey Miguel thought not,
and his plot might well have succeeded but for the base strain in
Espinosa and the man’s overweening vanity, which had urged him to
dazzle the Gonzales at Valladolid. That vanity sustained him to the
end, which he suffered in October of 1595, a full year after his
arrest. To the last he avoided admissions that should throw light upon
his obscure identity and origin.
“If it were known who I am...” he would say, and there break off.
He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and he endured his fate with calm
fortitude. Frey Miguel suffered in the same way with the like dignity,
after having undergone degradation from his priestly dignity.
As for the unfortunate Princess Anne, crushed under a load of shame and
humiliation, she had gone to her punishment in the previous July. The
Apostolic Commissary notified her of the sentence which King Philip had
confirmed. She was to be transferred to another convent, there to
undergo a term of four years’ solitary confinement in her cell, and to
fast on bread and water every Friday. She was pronounced incapable of
ever holding any office, and was to be treated on the expiry of her
term as an ordinary nun, her civil list abolished, her title of
Excellency to be extinguished, together with all other honours and
privileges conferred upon her by King Philip.
The piteous letters of supplication that she addressed to the King, her
uncle, still exist. But they left the cold, implacable Philip of Spain
unmoved. Her only sin was that, yielding to the hunger of her starved
heart, and chafing under the ascetic life imposed upon her, she had
allowed herself to be fascinated by the prospect of becoming the
protectress of one whom she believed to be an unfortunate and romantic
prince, and of exchanging her convent for a throne.
Her punishment—poor soul—endured for close upon forty years, but the
most terrible part of it was not that which lay within the prescription
of King Philip, but that which arose from her own broken and humiliated
spirit. She had been uplifted a moment by a glorious hope, to be cast
down again into the blackest despair, to which a shame unspeakable and
a tortured pride were added.
Than hers, as I have said, there is in history no sadder story.
V. THE END OF THE “VERT GALANT”
The Assassination of Henry IV
In the year 1609 died the last Duke of Cleves, and King Henry IV. of
France and Navarre fell in love with Charlotte de Montmorency.
In their conjunction these two events were to influence the destinies
of Europe. In themselves they were trivial enough, since it was as much
a commonplace that an old gentleman should die as that Henry of Bearn
should fall in love. Love had been the main relaxation of his otherwise
strenuous life, and neither the advancing years—he was fifty-six at
this date—nor the recriminations of Maria de’ Medici, his
long-suffering Florentine wife, sufficed to curb his zest.
Possibly there may have been a husband more unfaithful than King Henry;
probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous, his taste in
women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny outnumbered that of his
grandson, the English sultan Charles II. He differs, however, from the
latter in that he was not quite as Oriental in the manner of his
self-indulgence. Charles, by comparison, was a mere dullard who turned
Whitehall into a seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the
high adventure, and knew how to be gallant in two senses.
This gallantry of his is not, perhaps, seen to best advantage in the
affair of Charlotte de Montmorency To begin with he was, as I have
said, in his fifty-sixth year, an age at which it is difficult, without
being ridiculous, to unbridle a passion for a girl of twenty.
Unfortunately for him, Charlotte does not appear to have found him so.
On the contrary, her lovely, empty head was so turned by the flattery
of his addresses, that she came to reciprocate the passion she
inspired.
Her family had proposed to marry her to the gay and witty Marshal de
Bassompierre; and although his heart was not at all engaged, the
marshal found the match extremely suitable, and was willing enough,
until the King declared himself. Henry used the most impudent
frankness.
“Bassompierre, I will speak to you as a friend,” said he. “I am in
love, and desperately in love, with Mademoiselle de Montmorency. If you
should marry her I should hate you. If she should love me you would
hate me. A breach of our friendship would desolate me, for I love you
with sincere affection.”
That was enough for Bassompierre. He had no mind to go further with a
marriage of convenience which in the sequel would most probably give
him to choose between assuming the ridiculous role of a complacent
husband and being involved in a feud with his prince. He said as much,
and thanked the King for his frankness, whereupon Henry, liking him
more than ever for his good sense, further opened his mind to him.
“I am thinking of marrying her to my nephew, Conde. Thus I shall have
her in my family to be the comfort of my old age, which is coming on.
Conde, who thinks of nothing but hunting, shall have a hundred thousand
livres a year with which to amuse himself.”
Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in
Henry’s mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been less
acute, no doubt because his vision was dazzled by the prospect of a
hundred thousand livres a year. So desperately poor was he that for
half that sum he would have taken Lucifer’s own daughter to wife,
without stopping to consider the disadvantages it might entail.
The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of 1609.
Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last precisely
what was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against it, but the
Queen, too, was carefully instructed in the matter by Concino Concini
and his wife Leonora Galigai, the ambitious adventurers who had come
from Florence in her train, and who saw in the King’s weakness their
own opportunity.
The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the relations
between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to breaking-point.
And then, whilst the trouble of Henry’s own making was growing about
him until it threatened to overwhelm him, he received a letter from
Vaucelas, his ambassador at Madrid, containing revelations that changed
his annoyance into stark apprehension.
When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, “leaving all the
world his heirs”—to use Henry’s own phrase—the Emperor had stepped in,
and over-riding the rights of certain German princes had bestowed the
fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke Leopold. Now this was an
arrangement that did not suit Henry’s policy at all, and being then—as
the result of a wise husbanding of resources—the most powerful prince
in Europe, Henry was not likely to submit tamely to arrangements that
did not suit him. His instructions to Vaucelas were to keep open the
difference between France and the House of Austria arising out of this
matter of Cleves. All Europe knew that Henry desired to marry the
Dauphin to the heiress of Lorraine, so that this State might one day be
united with France; and it was partly to support this claim that he was
now disposed to attach the German princes to his interests.
Yet what Vaucelas told him in that letter was that certain agents at
the court of Spain, chief among whom was the Florentine ambassador,
acting upon instructions from certain members of the household of the
Queen of France, and from others whom Vaucelas said he dared not
mention, were intriguing to blast Henry’s designs against the house of
Austria, and to bring him willy-nilly into a union with Spain. These
agents had gone so far in their utter disregard of Henry’s own
intentions as to propose to the Council of Madrid that the alliance
should be cemented by a marriage between the Dauphin and the Infanta.
That letter sent Henry early one morning hot-foot to the Arsenal, where
Sully, his Minister of State, had his residence. Maximilien de Bethune,
Duke of Sully, was not merely the King’s servant, he was his closest
friend, the very keeper of his soul; and the King leaned upon him and
sought his guidance not only in State affairs, but in the most intimate
and domestic matters. Often already had it fallen to Sully to patch up
the differences created between husband and wife by Henry’s persistent
infidelities.
The King, arriving like the whirlwind, turned everybody out of the
closet in which the duke—but newly risen—received him in bed-gown and
night-cap. Alone with his minister, Henry came abruptly to the matter.
“You have heard what is being said of me?” he burst out. He stood with
his back to the window, a sturdy, erect, soldierly figure, a little
above the middle height, dressed like a captain of fortune in jerkin
and long boots of grey leather, and a grey hat with a wine-coloured
ostrich plume. His countenance matched his raiment. Keeneyed, broad of
brow, with a high-bridged, pendulous nose, red lips, a tuft of beard
and a pair of grizzled, bristling moustachios, he looked half-hero,
half-satyr; half-Captain, half-Polichinelle.
Sully, tall and broad, the incarnation of respectability and dignity,
despite bed-gown and slippers and the nightcap covering his high, bald
crown, made no presence of misunderstanding him.
“Of you and the Princesse de Conde, you mean, sire?” quoth he, and
gravely he shook his head. “It is a matter that has filled me with
apprehension, for I foresee from it far greater trouble than from any
former attachment of yours.”
“So they have convinced you, too, Grand-Master?” Henry’s tone was
almost sorrowful. “Yet I swear that all is greatly exaggerated. It is
the work of that dog Concini. _Ventre St. Gris!_ If he has no respect
for me, at least he might consider how he slanders a child of such
grace and wit and beauty, a lady of her high birth and noble lineage.”
There was a dangerous quiver of emotion in his voice that was not
missed by the keen ears of Sully. Henry moved from the window, and
flung into a chair.
“Concini works to enrage the Queen against me, and to drive her to take
violent resolutions which might give colour to their pernicious
designs.”
“Sire!” It was a cry of protest from Sully.
Henry laughed grimly at his minister’s incredulity, and plucked forth
the letter from Vaucelas.
“Read that.”
Sully read, and, aghast at what the letter told him, ejaculated: “They
must be mad!”
“Oh, no,” said the King. “They are not mad. They are most wickedly
sane, which is why their designs fill me with apprehension. What do you
infer, Grand-Master, from such deliberate plots against resolutions
from which they know that nothing can turn me while I have life?”
“What can I infer?” quoth Sully, aghast.
“In acting thus—in daring to act thus,” the King expounded, “they
proceed as if they knew that I can have but a short time to live.”
“Sire!”
“What else? They plan events which cannot take place until I am dead.”
Sully stared at his master for a long moment, in stupefied silence, his
loyal Huguenot soul refusing to discount by flattery the truth that he
perceived.
“Sire,” he said at last, bowing his fine head, “you must take your
measures.”
“Ay, but against whom? Who are these that Vaucelas says he dare not
name? Can you suggest another than...” He paused, shrinking in horror
from completing the utterance of his thought. Then, with an abrupt
gesture, he went on, “... than the Queen herself?”
Sully quietly placed the letter on the table, and sat down. He took his
chin in his hand and looked squarely across at Henry.
“Sire, you have brought this upon yourself. You have exasperated her
Majesty; you have driven her in despair to seek and act upon the
councils of this scoundrel Concini. There never was an attachment of
yours that did not beget trouble with the Queen, but never such trouble
as I have been foreseeing from your attachment to the Princess of
Conde. Sire, will you not consider where you stand?”
“They are lies, I tell you,” Henry stormed. But Sully the
uncompromising gravely shook his head. “At least,” Henry amended, “they
are gross exaggerations. Oh, I confess to you, my friend, that I am
sick with love of her. Day and night I see nothing but her gracious
image. I sigh and fret and fume like any callow lad of twenty. I suffer
the tortures of the damned. And yet... and yet, I swear to you, Sully,
that I will curb this passion though it kill me. I will stifle these
fires, though they consume my soul to ashes. No harm shall come to her
from me. No harm has come yet. I swear it. These stories that are put
about are the inventions of Concini to set my wife against me. Do you
know how far he and his wife have dared to go? They have persuaded the
Queen to eat nothing that is not prepared in the kitchen they have set
up for her in their own apartments. What can you conclude from that but
that they suggest that I desire to poison her?”
“Why suffer it, sire?” quoth Sully gravely. “Send the pair packing back
to Florence, and so be rid of them.”
Henry rose in agitation. “I have a mind to. _Ventre St. Gris!_ I have a
mind to. Yes, it is the only thing. You can manage it, Sully. Disabuse
her mind of her Suspicions regarding the Princess of Conde; make my
peace with her; convince her of my sincerity, of my firm intention to
have done with gallantry, so that she on her side will make me the
sacrifice of banishing the Concinis. You will do this, my friend?”
It was no less than Sully had been expecting from past experience, and
the task was one in which he was by now well-practiced; but the
situation had never before been quite so difficult. He rose.
“Why, surely, sire,” said he. “But her Majesty on her side may require
something more to reconcile her to the sacrifice. She may reopen the
question of her coronation so long and—in her view—so unreasonably
postponed.”
Henry’s face grew overcast, his brows knit. “I have always had an
instinct against it, as you know, Grand Master,” said he, “and this
instinct is strengthened by what that letter has taught me. If she will
dare so much, having so little real power, what might she not do if...”
He broke off, and fell to musing. “If she demands it we must yield, I
suppose,” he said at length. “But give her to understand that if I
discover any more of her designs with Spain I shall be provoked to the
last degree against her. And as an antidote to these machinations at
Madrid you may publish my intention to uphold the claims of the German
Princes in the matter of Cleves, and let all the world know that we are
arming to that end.”
He may have thought—as was long afterwards alleged—that the threat
itself should be sufficient, for there was at that time no power in
Europe that could have stood against his armies in the field.
On that they parted, with a final injunction from Sully that Henry
should see the Princesse de Conde no more.
“I swear to you, Grand Master, that I will use restraint and respect
the sacred tie I formed between my nephew and Charlotte solely so that
I might impose silence upon my own passion.”
And the good Sully writes in comment upon this: “I should have relied
absolutely upon these assurances had I not known how easy it is for a
heart tender and passionate as was his to deceive itself”—which is the
most amiable conceivable way of saying that he attached not the
slightest faith to the King’s promise.
Nevertheless he went about the task of making the peace between the
royal couple with all the skill and tact that experience had taught
him; and he might have driven a good bargain on his master’s behalf but
for his master’s own weakness in supporting him. Maria de’ Medici would
not hear of the banishment of the Concinis, to whom she was so deeply
attached. She insisted with perfect justice that she was a bitterly
injured woman, and refused to entertain any idea of reconciliation save
with the condition that arrangements for her coronation as Queen of
France—which was no more than her due—should be made at once, and that
the King should give an undertaking not to make himself ridiculous any
longer by his pursuit of the Princess of Conde. Of the matters
contained in the letter of Vaucelas she denied all knowledge, nor would
suffer any further inquisition.