yielded. Conscience made a coward of him. He had wronged her so much in
one way that he must make some compensating concessions to her in
another. This weakness was part of his mental attitude towards her,
which swung constantly between confidence and diffidence, esteem and
indifference, affection and coldness; at times he inclined to put her
from him entirely; at others he opined that no one on his Council was
more capable of the administration of affairs. Even in the indignation
aroused by the proof he held of her disloyalty, he was too just not to
admit the provocation he had given her. So he submitted to a
reconciliation on her own terms, and pledged himself to renounce
Charlotte. We have no right to assume from the sequel that he was not
sincere in the intention.
By the following May events proved the accuracy of Sully’s judgment.
The court was at Fontainebleau when the last bulwark of Henry’s
prudence was battered down by the vanity of that lovely fool,
Charlotte, who must be encouraging her royal lover to resume his
flattering homage. But both appear to have reckoned without the lady’s
husband.
Henry presented Charlotte with jewels to the value of eighteen thousand
livres, purchased from Messier, the jeweller of the Pont au Change; and
you conceive what the charitable ladies of the Court had to say about
it. At the first hint of scandal Monsieur de Conde put himself into a
fine heat, and said things which pained and annoyed the King
exceedingly. Henry had amassed a considerable and varied experience of
jealous husbands in his time; but he had never met one quite so
intolerable as this nephew of his. He complained of it in a letter to
Sully.
“My friend,—Monsieur the Prince is here, but he acts like a man
possessed. You will be angry and ashamed at the things he says of me. I
shall end by losing all patience with him. In the meanwhile I am
obliged to talk to him with severity.”
More severe than any talk was Henry’s instruction to Sully to withhold
payment of the last quarter of the prince’s allowance, and to give
refusals to his creditors and purveyors. Thus he intended also, no
doubt, to make it clear to Conde that he did not receive a pension of a
hundred thousand livres a year for nothing.
“If this does not keep him in bounds,” Henry concluded, “we must think
of some other method, for he says the most injurious things of me.”
So little did it keep the prince in bounds—as Henry understood the
phrase—that he immediately packed his belongings, and carried his wife
off to his country house. It was quite in vain that Henry wrote to him
representing that this conduct was dishonouring to them both, and that
the only place for a prince of the blood was the court of his
sovereign.
The end of it all was that the reckless and romantic Henry took to
night-prowling about the grounds of Conde’s chateau. In the disguise of
a peasant you see his Majesty of France and Navarre, whose will was law
in Europe, shivering behind damp hedges, ankle-deep in wet grass,
spending long hours in love-lore, ecstatic contemplation of her lighted
window, and all—so far as we can gather—for no other result than the
aggravation of certain rheumatic troubles which should have reminded
him that he was no longer of an age to pursue these amorous
pernoctations.
But where his stiffening joints failed, the Queen succeeded. Henry had
been spied upon, of course, as he always was when he strayed from the
path of matrimonial rectitude. The Concinis saw to that. And when they
judged the season ripe, they put her Majesty in possession of the
facts. So inflamed was she by this fresh breach of trust that war was
declared anew between the royal couple, and the best that Sully’s wit
and labours could now accomplish was a sort of armed truce.
And then at last in the following November the Prince de Conde took the
desperate resolve of quitting France with his wife, without
troubling—as was his duty—to obtain the King’s consent. On the last
night of that month, as Henry was at cards in the Louvre, the Chevalier
du Guet brought him the news of the prince’s flight.
“I never in my life,” says Bassompierre, who was present, “saw a man so
distracted or in so violent a passion.”
He flung down his cards, and rose, sending his chair crashing over
behind him. “I am undone!” was his cry. “Undone! This madman has
carried off his wife—perhaps to kill her.” White and shaking, he turned
to Bassompierre. “Take care of my money,” he bade him, “and go on with
the game.”
He lurched out of the room, and dispatched a messenger to the Arsenal
to fetch M. de Sully. Sully obeyed the summons and came at once, but in
an extremely bad temper, for it was late at night, and he was
overburdened with work.
He found the King in the Queen’s chamber, walking backward and forward,
his head sunk upon his breast, his hands clenched behind him. The
Queen, a squarely-built, square-faced woman, sat apart, attended by a
few of her ladies and one or two gentlemen of her train. Her
countenance was set and inscrutable, and her brooding eyes were fixed
upon the King.
“Ha, Grand Master!” was Henry’s greeting, his voice harsh and strained.
“What do you say to this? What is to be done now?”
“Nothing at all, sire,” says Sully, as calm as his master was excited.
“Nothing! What sort of advice is that?”
“The best advice that you can follow, sire. This affair should be
talked of as little as possible, nor should it appear to be of any
consequence to you, or capable of giving you the least uneasiness.”
The Queen cleared her throat huskily. “Good advice, Monsieur le Duc,”
she approved him. “He will be wise to follow it.” Her voice strained,
almost threatening. “But, in this matter, I doubt wisdom and he have
long since become strangers.”
That put him in a passion, and in a passion he left her to do the
maddest thing he had ever done. In the garb of a courier, and with a
patch over one eye to complete his disguise, he set out in pursuit of
the fugitives. He had learnt that they had taken the road to Landrecy,
which was enough for him. Stage by stage he followed them in that
flight to Flanders, picking up the trail as he went, and never pausing
until he had reached the frontier without overtaking them.
It was all most romantic, and the lady, when she learnt of it, shed
tears of mingled joy and rage, and wrote him impassioned letters in
which she addressed him as her knight, and implored him, as he loved
her, to come and deliver her from the detestable tyrant who held her in
thrall. Those perfervid appeals completed his undoing, drove him mad,
and blinded him to everything—even to the fact that his wife, too, was
shedding tears, and that these were of rage undiluted by any more
tender emotion.
He began by sending Praslin to require the Archduke to order the Prince
of Conde to leave his dominions. And when the Archduke declined with
dignity to be guilty of any such breach of the law of nations, Henry
dispatched Coeuvres secretly to Brussels to carry off thence the
princess. But Maria de’ Medici was on the alert, and frustrated the
design by sending a warning of what was intended to the Marquis
Spinola, as a result of which the Prince de Conde and his wife were
housed for greater security in the Archduke’s own palace.
Checkmated at all points, yet goaded further by the letters which he
continued to receive from that most foolish of princesses, Henry took
the wild decision that to obtain her he would invade the Low Countries
as the first step in the execution of that design of a war with Spain
which hitherto had been little more than a presence. The matter of the
Duchy of Cleves was a pretext ready to his hand. To obtain the woman he
desired he would set Europe in a blaze.
He took that monstrous resolve at the very beginning of the new year,
and in the months that followed France rang with preparations. It rang,
too, with other things which should have given him pause. It rang with
the voice of preachers giving expression to the popular view; that
Cleves was not worth fighting for, that the war was unrighteous—a war
undertaken by Catholic France to defend Protestant interests against
the very champions of Catholicism in Europe. And soon it began to ring
too, with prophecies of the King’s approaching end.
These prognostics rained upon him from every quarter. Thomassin, and
the astrologer La Brosse, warned him of a message from the stars that
May would be fraught with danger for him. From Rome—from the very pope
himself came notice of a conspiracy against him in which he was told
that the very highest in the land were engaged. From Embrun, Bayonne,
and Douai came messages of like purport, and early in May a note was
found one morning on the altar of the church of Montargis announcing
the King’s approaching death.
But that is to anticipate. Meanwhile, Henry had pursued his
preparations undeterred by either warnings or prognostications. There
had been so many conspiracies against his life already that he was
become careless and indifferent in such matters. Yet surely there never
had been one that was so abundantly heralded from every quarter, or
ever one that was hatched under conditions so propitious as those which
he had himself created now. In his soul he was not at ease, and the
source of his uneasiness was the coronation of the Queen, for which the
preparations were now going forward.
He must have known that if danger of assassination threatened him from
any quarter it was most to be feared from those whose influence with
the Queen was almost such as to give them a control over her—the
Concinis and their unavowed but obvious ally the Duke of Epernon. If he
were dead, and the Queen so left that she could be made absolute regent
during the Dauphin’s minority, it was those adventurers who would
become through her the true rulers of France, and so enrich themselves
and gratify to the full their covetous ambitions. He saw clearly that
his safety lay in opposing this coronation—already fixed for the 13th
May—which Maria de’ Medici was so insistent should take place before
his departure for the wars. The matter so preyed upon his mind that
last he unburdened himself to Sully one day at the Arsenal.
“Oh, my friend,” he cried, “this coronation does not please me. My
heart tells me that some fatality will follow.”
He sat down, grasping the case of his reading-glass, whilst Sully could
only stare at him amazed by this out-burst. Thus he remained awhile in
deep thought. Then he started up again.
“Pardieu!” he cried. “I shall be murdered in this city. It is their
only resource. I see it plainly. This cursed coronation will be the
cause of my death.”
“What a thought, sir!”
“You think that I have been reading the almanach or paying heed to the
prophets, eh? But listen to me now, Grand Master.” And wrinkles
deepened about the bold, piercing eyes. “It is four months and more
since we announced our intention of going to war, and France has
resounded with our preparations. We have made no secret of it. Yet in
Spain not a finger has been lifted in preparation to resist us, not a
sword has been sharpened. Upon what does Spain build? Whence her
confidence that in despite of my firm resolve and my abundant
preparations, despite the fact announced that I am to march on the last
of this month, despite the fact that my troops are already in Champagne
with a train of artillery so complete and well-furnished that France
has never seen the like of it, and perhaps never will again—whence the
confidence that despite all this there is no need to prepare defences?
Upon what do they build, I say, when they assume, as assume they must,
that there will be no war? Resolve me that, Grand Master.”
But Sully, overwhelmed, could only gasp and ejaculate.
“You had not thought of it, eh? Yet it is clear enough Spain builds on
my death. And who are the friends of Spain here in France? Who was it
intrigued with Spain in such a way and to such ends as in my lifetime
could never have been carried to an issue? Ha! You see.”
“I cannot, sire. It is too horrible. It is impossible!” cried that
loyal, honest gentleman. “And yet if you are convinced of it, you
should break off this coronation, your journey, and your war. If you
wish it so, it is not difficult to satisfy you.”
“Ay, that is it.” He came to his feet, and gripped the duke’s shoulder
in his strong, nervous hand. “Break off this coronation, and never let
me hear of it again. That will suffice. Thus I can rid my mind of
apprehensions, and leave Paris with nothing to fear.”
“Very well. I will send at once to Notre Dame and to St. Denis, to stop
the preparations and dismiss the workmen.”
“Ah, wait.” The eyes that for a moment had sparkled with new hope, grew
dull again; the lines of care descended between the brows. “Oh, what to
decide! What to decide! It is what I wish, my friend. But how will my
wife take it?”
“Let her take it as she will. I cannot believe that she will continue
obstinate when she knows what apprehensions you have of disaster.”
“Perhaps not, perhaps not,” he answered. But his tone was not sanguine.
“Try to persuade her, Sully. Without her consent I cannot do this
thing. But you will know how to persuade her. Go to her.”
Sully suspended the preparations for the coronation, and sought the
Queen. For three days, he tells us, he used prayers, entreaties, and
arguments with which to endeavour to move her. But all was labour lost.
Maria de’ Medici was not to be moved. To all Sully’s arguments she
opposed an argument that was unanswerable.
Unless she were crowned Queen of France, as was her absolute right, she
would be a person of no account and subject to the Council of Regency
during the King’s absence, a position unworthy and intolerable to her,
the mother of the Dauphin.
And so it was Henry’s part to yield. His hands were tied by the wrongs
that he had done, and the culminating wrong that he was doing her by
this very war, as he had himself openly acknowledged. He had chanced
one day to ask the Papal Nuncio what Rome thought of this war.
“Those who have the best information,” the Nuncio answered boldly, “are
of opinion that the principal object of the war is the Princess of
Conde, whom your Majesty wishes to bring back to France.”
Angered by this priestly insolence, Henry’s answer had been an
impudently defiant acknowledgment of the truth of that allegation.
“Yes, by God!” he cried. “Yes—most certainly I want to have her back,
and I will have her back; no one shall hinder me, not even God’s
viceregent on earth.”
Having uttered those words, which he knew to have been carried to the
Queen, and to have wounded her perhaps more deeply than anything that
had yet happened in this affair, his conscience left him, despite his
fears, powerless now to thwart her even to the extent of removing those
pernicious familiars of hers of whose plottings he had all but positive
evidence.
And so the coronation was at last performed with proper pomp and
magnificence at St. Denis on Thursday, the 13th May. It had been
concerted that the festivities should last four days and conclude on
the Sunday with the Queen’s public entry into Paris. On the Monday the
King was to set out to take command of his armies, which were already
marching upon the frontiers.
Thus Henry proposed, but the Queen—convinced by his own admission of
the real aim and object of the war, and driven by outraged pride to
hate the man who offered her this crowning insult, and determined that
at all costs it must be thwarted—had lent an ear to Concini’s purpose
to avenge her, and was ready to repay infidelity with infidelity.
Concini and his fellow-conspirators had gone to work so confidently
that a week before the coronation a courier had appeared in Liege,
announcing that he was going with news of Henry’s assassination to the
Princes of Germany, whilst at the same time accounts of the King’s
death were being published in France and Italy.
Meanwhile, whatever inward misgivings Henry may have entertained,
outwardly at least he appeared serene and good-humoured at his wife’s
coronation, gaily greeting her at the end of the ceremony by the title
of “Madam Regent.”
The little incident may have touched her, arousing her conscience. For
that night she disturbed his slumbers by sudden screams, and when he
sprang up in solicitous alarm she falteringly told him of a dream in
which she had seen him slain, and fell to imploring him with a
tenderness such as had been utterly foreign to her of late to take
great care of himself in the days to come. In the morning she renewed
those entreaties, beseeching him not to leave the Louvre that day,
urging that she had a premonition it would be fatal to him.
He laughed for answer. “You have heard of the predictions of La
Brosse,” said he. “Bah! You should not attach credit to such nonsense.”
Anon came the Duke of Vendome, his natural son by the Marquise de
Verneuil, with a like warning and a like entreaty, only to receive a
like answer.
Being dull and indisposed as a consequence of last night’s broken rest,
Henry lay down after dinner. But finding sleep denied him, he rose,
pensive and gloomy, and wandered aimlessly down, and out into the
courtyard. There an exempt of the guard, of whom he casually asked the
time, observing the King’s pallor and listlessness, took the liberty of
suggesting that his Majesty might benefit if he took the air.
That chance remark decided Henry’s fate. His eyes quickened
responsively. “You advise well,” said he. “Order my coach. I will go to
the Arsenal to see the Duc de Sully, who is indisposed.”
On the stones beyond the gates, where lackeys were wont to await their
masters, sat a lean fellow of some thirty years of age, in a dingy,
clerkly attire, so repulsively evil of countenance that he had once
been arrested on no better grounds than because it was deemed
impossible that a man with such a face could be other than a villain.
Whilst the coach was being got ready, Henry re-entered the Louvre, and
startled the Queen by announcing his intention. With fearful insistence
she besought him to countermand the order, and not to leave the palace.
“I will but go there and back,” he said, laughing at her fears. “I
shall have returned before you realize that I have gone.” And so he
went, never to return alive.
He sat at the back of the coach, and the weather being fine all the
curtains were drawn up so that he might view the decorations of the
city against the Queen’s public entry on Sunday. The Duc d’Epernon was
on his right, the Duc de Montbazon and the Marquis de la Force on his
left. Lavordin and Roquelaure were in the right boot, whilst near the
left boot, opposite to Henry, sat Mirebeau and du Plessis Liancourt. He
was attended only by a small number of gentlemen on horseback, and some
footmen.
The coach turned from the Rue St. Honore into the narrow Rue de la
Ferronerie, and there was brought to a halt by a block occasioned by
the meeting of two carts, one laden with hay, the other with wine. The
footmen went ahead with the exception of two. Of these, one advanced to
clear a way for the royal vehicle, whilst the other took the
opportunity to fasten his garter.
At that moment, gliding like a shadow between the coach and the shops,
came that shabby, hideous fellow who had been sitting on the stones
outside the Louvre an hour ago. Raising himself by deliberately
standing upon one of the spokes of the stationary wheel, he leaned over
the Duc d’Epernon, and, whipping a long, stout knife from his sleeve,
stabbed Henry in the breast. The King, who was in the act of reading a
letter, cried out, and threw up his arms in an instinctive warding
movement, thereby exposing his heart. The assassin stabbed again, and
this time the blade went deep.
With a little gasping cough, Henry sank together, and blood gushed from
his mouth.
The predictions were fulfilled; the tale borne by the courier riding
through Liege a week ago was made true, as were the stories of his
death already at that very hour circulating in Antwerp, Malines,
Brussels, and elsewhere.
The murderer aimed yet a third blow, but this at last was parried by
Epernon, whereupon the fellow stepped back from the coach, and stood
there, making no attempt to escape, or even to rid himself of the
incriminating knife. St. Michel, one of the King’s
gentlemen-in-waiting, who had followed the coach, whipped out his sword
and would have slain him on the spot had he not been restrained by
Epernon. The footmen seized the fellow, and delivered him over to the
captain of the guard. He proved to be a school-master of
Angouleme—which was Epernon’s country. His name was Ravaillac.
The curtains of the coach were drawn, the vehicle was put about, and
driven back to the Louvre, whilst to avoid all disturbance it was
announced to the people that the King was merely wounded.
But St. Michel went on to the Arsenal, taking with him the knife that
had stabbed his master, to bear the sinister tidings to Henry’s loyal
and devoted friend. Sully knew enough to gauge exactly whence the blow
had proceeded. With anger and grief in his heart he got to horse, ill
as he was, and, calling together his people, set out presently for the
Louvre, with a train one hundred strong, which was presently increased
to twice that number by many of the King’s faithful servants who joined
his company as he advanced. In the Rue de la Pourpointicre a man in
passing slipped a note into his hand.
It was a brief scrawl: “Monsieur, where are ye going? It is done. I
have seen him dead. If you enter the Louvre you will not escape any
more than he did.”
Nearing St. Innocent, the warning was repeated, this time by a
gentleman named du Jon, who stopped to mutter:
“Monsieur le Duc, our evil is without remedy. Look to yourself, for
this strange blow will have fearful consequences.”
Again in the Rue St. Honore another note was thrown him, whose contents
were akin to those of the first. Yet with misgivings mounting swiftly
to certainty, Sully rode amain towards the Louvre, his train by now
amounting to some three hundred horse. But at the end of the street he
was stopped by M. de Vitry, who drew rein as they met.
“Ah, monsieur,” Vitry greeted him, “where are you going with such a
following? They will never suffer you to enter the Louvre with more
than two or three attendants, which I would not advise you to do. For
this plot does not end here. I have seen some persons so little
sensible of the loss they have sustained that they cannot even simulate
the grief they should feel. Go back, monsieur. There is enough for you
to do without going to the Louvre.”
Persuaded by Vitry’s solemnity, and by what he knew in his heart, Sully
faced about and set out to retrace his steps. But presently he was
overtaken by a messenger from the Queen, begging him to come at once to
her at the Louvre, and to bring as few persons as possible with him.
“This proposal,” he writes, “to go alone and deliver myself into the
hands of my enemies, who filled the Louvre, was not calculated to allay
my suspicions.”
Moreover he received word at that moment that an exempt of the guards
and a force of soldiers were already at the gates of the Arsenal, that
others had been sent to the Temple, where the powder was stored, and
others again to the treasurer of the Exchequer to stop all the money
there.
“Convey to the Queen my duty and service,” he bade the messenger, “and
assure her that until she acquaints me with her orders I shall continue
assiduously to attend the affairs of my office.” And with that he went
to shut himself up in the Bastille, whither he was presently followed
by a stream of her Majesty’s envoys, all bidding him to the Louvre. But
Sully, ill as he was, and now utterly prostrated by all that he had
endured, put himself to bed and made of his indisposition a sufficient
excuse.
Yet on the morrow he allowed himself to be persuaded to obey her
summons, receiving certain assurances that he had no ground for any
apprehensions. Moreover, he may by now have felt a certain security in
the esteem in which the Parisians held him. An attempt against him in
the Louvre itself would prove that the blow that had killed his master
was not the independent act of a fanatic, as it was being represented;
and vengeance would follow swiftly upon the heads of those who would
thus betray themselves of having made of that poor wretch’s fanaticism
an instrument to their evil ends.