The Life of Marie de Medicis Volume I Part 10

The Duc de Bouillon, who was conscious that he had not been altogether guiltless of partic.i.p.ation in the crime for which the less cautious Biron had just suffered death, deeming it expedient to provide for his own safety, took refuge in his viscounty of Turenne, where, however, he did not long remain inactive; and reports of his continued disaffection having reached the ears of the King, he was, in his turn, summoned to the royal presence in order to justify himself; but the example of his decapitated friend was still too recent to encourage him to such a concession; and instead of presenting himself at Court he despatched thither a very eloquent letter, in which he informed the monarch that, being aware of the falsehood and artifice of his accusers, he entreated him to dispense with his appearance in the capital; and to approve instead, that, for the satisfaction of his Majesty, the French nation, and his own honour, he should present himself before the Chamber of Castres; that a.s.sembly forming an integral portion of the Parliament of Toulouse, which held jurisdiction over his own viscounty of Turenne.

Having forwarded this missive to the sovereign, he hastened to Castres, where he appeared as he had suggested, and caused his presence to be registered. The determination of Henry to compel his attendance at Paris was, however, only strengthened by this act of defiance; and having ascertained that the King was about to despatch a messenger to compel his obedience, M. de Bouillon left Castres in haste for Orange, whence he proceeded, by way of Geneva, to Heidelberg, and placed himself under the protection of the Prince Palatine, after having declared his innocence to Elizabeth of England and the other Protestant sovereigns, and entreated their support and mediation.

Thus far, with the exception of Biron himself, all the members of this famous conspiracy had escaped with their lives, and some among them without loss, either of freedom or of property; one of their number, however, was fated to be less fortunate, and this one was the Baron de Fontenelles,[203] a man of high family, who had for several years rendered himself peculiarly obnoxious to the King and his ministers, and whose atrocious barbarities caused him to fall unpitied. This wretched man, after having been put to the torture, was, by the sentence p.r.o.nounced against him by the council, broken alive upon the wheel, where he suffered the greatest agony during an hour and a half. His lieutenant was condemned to the gallows for having been the medium of his communication with the Spanish Government; although, even as he was ascending the fatal ladder, he continued to declare that he had always been ignorant of the contents of the packets which he was charged to deliver, and could neither read nor write.[204]

With the life of Biron, the conspiracy had terminated; while his fate had not failed to produce universal consternation. His devotion to the early fortunes of the King had been at once so great and so efficient, his military renown was so universally acknowledged, and his favour with the monarch was so apparently beyond the reach of chance or change, that his unhappy end pointed a moral even to the proudest, and so paralysed the spirit of those who might otherwise have felt inclined to question the royal authority, that even the nearest and dearest of his friends uttered no murmur; while those individuals who had dreaded to find themselves compromised by his ruin, and who, to their equal surprise and satisfaction, discovered that, while he had unguardedly preserved all the papers which could tend to his own destruction, he had destroyed every vestige of their criminality, rejoiced at their escape, and flattered themselves that their partic.i.p.ation in his treachery would for ever remain undiscovered; a circ.u.mstance which rendered them at once patient and silent.

That the necessity for taking the life of the Marechal had been bitterly felt by the King himself, we have already shown; and it was further evinced when he declared to those who interceded for the doomed man, that had his personal interests alone been threatened by the treason of the criminal, he should have found it easy to pardon the wrong that had been done him; but that, when he looked into the future, and remembered that the safety of the kingdom which had been confided to him, and of the son who was to succeed him upon the throne, must both be compromised by sparing one who had already proved that his loyalty could not be purchased by mercy, he held himself bound to secure both against an evil for which there was no other safeguard than the infliction of the utmost penalty of the law.

Many argued that, having spared the lives of the Ducs d'Epernon, de Bouillon, and de Mayenne,[205] all of whom had at different times been in arms against him, Henry might equally have shown mercy to Biron; but while they urged this argument, they omitted to remember that the political crime of these three n.o.bles had not been aggravated, like that of the Marechal, by private wrong; and that they had not, by an unyielding obstinacy, and an ungrateful pertinacity in rebellion, exhausted the forbearance of an indulgent monarch. Moreover, Biron, in grasping at sovereignty, had not hesitated to invite the intrusion of foreign and hostile troops into French territory, or to betray the exigencies and difficulties of the army under his own command to his dangerous allies; thus weakening for the moment, and imperilling for the future, the resources of a frank and trusting master; two formidable facts, which justified the severity alike of his King and of his judges.

The lesson was a salutary one for the French n.o.bility, who had, from long impunity, learnt to regard their personal relations with foreign princes as matters beyond the authority of the sovereign, and which could involve neither their safety nor their honour; for it taught them that the highest head in the realm might fall under an accusation of treason; and that, powerful as each might be in his own province or his own government, he was still responsible to the monarch for the manner in which he used that power, and answerable to the laws of his country should he be rash enough to abuse it.

That Henry felt and understood that such must necessarily be the effect produced by the fate of the Marechal there can be little doubt, as well as that he was still further induced to impress so wholesome a conviction upon the minds of his haughty aristocracy by the probability of a minority, during which the disorders incident to so many conflicting and imaginary claims could not fail to convulse the kingdom and to endanger the stability of the throne; while it is no less evident that, once having forced upon their reason a conviction of his own ability to compel obedience where his authority was resisted, and to a.s.sert his sovereign privilege where he felt it to be essential to the preservation of the realm, he evinced no desire to extend his severity beyond its just limits. Thus, as we have seen, with the exception of the Baron de Fontenelles, who had drawn down upon himself the terrible expiation of a cruel death, rather by a long succession of crime than by his a.s.sociation in the conspiracy of Biron, all the other criminals already judged had escaped the due punishment of their treason; while the Comte d'Auvergne, after having been detained during a couple of months in the Bastille, was restored to liberty at the intercession of his sister, Madame de Verneuil, who pledged herself to the monarch that he was guilty only in so far as he had been faithful to the trust reposed in him by the Marechal, and had forborne to betray his secret, while he had never actively partic.i.p.ated in the conspiracy. She moreover a.s.sured Henry, who was only anxious to find an opportunity of pardoning the Count--an anxiety which the tears and supplications of the Marquise, as well as his own respect for the blood of the Valois inherited by D'Auvergne from his royal father, tended naturally to increase--that the prisoner was prepared, since the death of Biron had freed him from all further necessity for silence, to communicate to his Majesty every particular of which he was cognizant. The concession was accepted; the Count made the promised revelations; and his liberation was promptly followed by a renewal of the King's favour.

Towards the close of the year, intelligence having reached Henry that the Prince de Joinville, who was serving in the army of the Archduke, had, in his turn, suffered himself to be seduced from his allegiance by the Spaniards, he gave instant orders for his arrest; but the Prince no sooner found himself a prisoner than he declared his readiness to confess everything, provided he were permitted to do so to the King in person and in the presence of Sully. His terms were complied with; and, as both Henry and his minister had antic.i.p.ated from the frivolous and inconsequent character of their new captive, it at once became apparent that no idea of treason had been blent with the follies of which he had been guilty, but that they had merely owed their origin to his idle love of notoriety. A correspondence with Spain had become, as we have shown, the fas.h.i.+on at the French Court; and Joinville had accordingly, in order to increase his importance, resolved to effect in his turn an understanding with that country. During his audience of the King he so thoroughly betrayed the utter puerility of his proceedings that the monarch at once resolved to treat him as a silly and headstrong youth, towards whom any extreme measure of severity would be alike unnecessary and undignified; and he had consequently no sooner heard Joinville's narration to an end than he desired the presence of his mother the d.u.c.h.esse de Guise and his brother the Duke,[206] and as they entered the royal closet, somewhat startled by so sudden a summons, he said, directing their attention to the delinquent: "There stands the prodigal son in person; he has filled his head with follies; but I shall treat him as a child and forgive him for your sakes, although only on condition that you reprimand him seriously; and that you, my nephew,"

addressing himself particularly to the Duke, "become his guarantee for the future. I place him in your charge, in order that you may teach him wisdom if it be possible."

In obedience to this command M. de Guise, who was well aware with how rash and intemperate a spirit he was called upon to contend, at once, with the royal sanction, reconducted Joinville to his prison, where during several months the young Prince exhausted himself in threats, murmurs, and every species of verbal extravagance, until wearied by the monotony of confinement he finally subsided into repentance, and was, upon his earnest promise of amendment, permitted to exchange his chamber in the Bastille for a less stringent captivity in the Chateau de Dampierre.[207] Such was the lenient punishment of the last of the conspirators; and it was a.s.suredly a clever stroke of policy in the monarch thus to cast a shade of ridicule over the close of the cabal, which, having commenced with a tragedy, had by his contemptuous forbearance almost terminated in an epigram.

The Court, after having pa.s.sed a portion of the summer at St. Germain, removed in the commencement of August to Fontainebleau, the advanced pregnancy of the Queen having rendered her anxious to return to that palace. But any gratification which she might have promised herself, in this her favourite place of residence, was cruelly blighted by the legitimation of the son of Madame de Verneuil, which was formally registered at this period. Nor was this the only vexation to which she was exposed, the notoriety of the King's intrigues becoming every day more trying alike to her temper and to her health; while the new concession which had been made to the vanity--or, as the Marquise herself deemed it, to the honour--of the favourite, induced the latter to commit the most indecent excesses, and to increase, if possible, the almost regal magnificence of her attire and her establishment, at the same time that her deportment towards the Queen was marked by an insolent disrespect which involved the whole Court in perpetual misunderstandings.

As it had already become only too evident that the unfortunate Marie de Medicis possessed but little influence over the affections of her husband, however he might be compelled to respect the perfect propriety and dignity of her character, the cabal of the favourite daily increased in importance; and the measure of the Queen's mortification overflowed, when, soon after the royal visit to Fontainebleau, Henry took leave of her in order to visit Calais, and she ascertained that he had on his way stopped at the Chateau de Verneuil, whither he had been accompanied by the Marquise. It was in vain that M. de Sully--to whom the King had given strict charge to endeavour by every method in his power to reconcile the Queen to his absence, and to provide for her amus.e.m.e.nt every diversion of which she was in a condition to partake--exerted himself to obey the command of the monarch; Marie was too deeply wounded to derive any consolation from such puerile sources, nor was it until the return of her royal consort, when his evident anxiety and increased tenderness once more led her to believe that she might finally wean him from his excesses and attach him to herself, that she once more became calm.

On the 11th of November the antic.i.p.ated event took place, and the Queen gave birth to her eldest daughter[208] in the same oval chamber in which the Dauphin first saw the light.[209] The advent of Elisabeth de France was not, however, hailed with the same delight by Marie as had been that of her first-born; on the contrary, her disappointment was extreme on ascertaining the s.e.x of the infant, from the fact of her having placed the most entire confidence in the a.s.surances of a devotee named Soeur Ange, who had been recommended to her notice and protection by the Sovereign-Pontiff, and who had, before she herself became cognizant of the negotiations for her marriage, foretold that she would one day be Queen of France. This woman, who still remained in her service, had repeatedly a.s.sured her that she need be under no apprehension of bearing daughters, as she was predestined by Heaven to become the mother of three princes only; and after having, with her usual superst.i.tion, placed implicit faith in the flattering prophecy, Marie no sooner discovered its fallacy than she abandoned herself to the most violent grief, refusing to listen to the consolations of her attendants, and bewailing herself that she should have been so cruelly deceived, until the King, although he in some measure partic.i.p.ated in her annoyance, succeeded in restoring her to composure by bidding her remember that had she not been of the same s.e.x as the child of which she had just made him the father, she could not have herself realised the previous prediction of Soeur Ange; an argument which, coupled with the probability that the august infant beside her might in its turn ascend a European throne, was in all likelihood the most efficacious one which could have been adopted to reconcile her to its present comparative insignificance.

FOOTNOTES:

[158] Cesar de Vendome was the son of Henri IV and _la belle Gabrielle._ He became Governor of Brittany, and superintendent-in-chief of the national navigation. Henry also bestowed on him as an appanage the duchy of Vendome. He married the daughter of Philip Emmanuel of Lorraine, Duc de Mercoeur, by whom he had three children: Isabelle, who became the wife of Charles Amedee, Duc de Nemours; Louis, who died single; and Francois, Duc de Beaufort.

[159] Jean de Berthault (or Bertaut) was born at Caen in 1552. He was first-almoner of Catherine de Medicis, Abbot of Aulnai, and subsequently Bishop of Seez. He was a pupil of Ronsard, and a friend of Desportes. He wrote a great number of sacred and profane poems, psalms, and sonnets.

He also produced a "Funeral Oration on Henri IV," and a "Translation of St. Ambroise." He died in 1611.

[160] _Amours du Grand Alcandre_, p. 41.

[161] _Amours du Grand Alcandre_, p. 42.

[162] Claude de Lorraine, Prince de Joinville, was the fourth son of Henri, Duc de Guise, surnamed the _Balafre_, brother of Charles, Duc de Mayenne, and of Louis, Cardinal de Guise. He married Marie de Rohan, d.u.c.h.esse de Chevreuse, the daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Duc de Montbazon, and peer of France, and was subsequently known as Duc de Chevreuse. He died in 1657.

[163] _Amours du Grand Alcandre_, pp. 272, 273.

[164] Dreux du Radier, vol. vi. p. 85. Saint-Edme, p. 218.

[165] _Amours du Grand Alcandre_, p. 274.

[166] _Amours du Grand Alcandre_, p. 276.

[167] Mademoiselle de Sourdis was the daughter of Francois d'Es...o...b..eau, Seigneur de Jouy, de Launay, Marquis de Sourdis, etc., and of Isabelle Babou, Dame d'Alluie, daughter of Jean Babou, Seigneur de la Bourdaisiere, and aunt of Gabrielle d'Estrees. He was deprived of the government of Chartres by the League; but was restored by Henri III at the entreaty of Gabrielle.

[168] Caterina Selvaggio was one of the Queen's favourite Italian waiting-women.

[169] Sully, _Mem_. vol. iv. pp. 93, 94.

[170] Rambure, _MS. Mem_. vol. i. p. 332.

[171] Capefigue, _Hist, de la Reforme, de la Ligue, et du Regne de Henri IV_, vol. viii. pp. 147, 148.

[172] _Histoire de la Mere et du Fils_, a continuation of the _Memoirs of Richelieu,_ incorrectly attributed to Mezeray, vol. i. p. 7.

[173] Sully, _Note to Memoirs_, vol. iv. pp. 95, 96.

[174] Richelieu, _La Mere et le Fils_, vol. i. p. 7.

[175] Claude, Seigneur de la Tremouille, second Duc de Thouars, peer of France, Prince de Talmond, was born in the year 1566, and first bore arms under Francois de Bourbon, Duc de Montpensier. He embraced the reformed religion, and attached himself to the fortunes of Henri de Navarre, subsequently King of France, whom he followed to the sieges of Rouen and Poitiers, and the battle of Fontaine-Francaise; after which the King conferred upon him the rank of peer of France. He was the brother-in-law of the Duc de Bouillon. He died in the castle of Thouars, to which he had retired, suspected of treason, after refusing to return to Court to justify himself, on the 25th of October 1604, in his thirty-eighth year.

[176] Jean Louis de Nogaret de la Valette, Due d'Epernon, was the younger son of an old Gascon family, who sought his fortunes at the French Court under the name of Caumont. After the death of Charles IX, he offered his services to Henri de Navarre, subsequently Henri IV; but was ultimately admitted to the intimacy of Henri III, who caused him to be instructed in politics and literature, and made him one of his _mignons_. He was next created Duc d'Epernon, first peer and admiral of France, colonel-general of infantry, and held several governments. On the death of Henri III, this enn.o.bled adventurer once more became a partisan of his successor, and commanded the royal forces during the war in Savoy; but throughout the whole of this reign he lived in constant misunderstanding with the Court and the King, and was even suspected of the act of regicide which deprived France of her idolised monarch. It was the Duc d'Epernon who, immediately after that event, convoked the Parliament, caused the recognition of Marie de Medicis as Regent, and formed a privy council over which he presided. Banished by the Concini during their period of power, he reappeared at Court after their fall, but Richelieu would not permit him to hold any government office, and, moreover, deprived him of all his governments save that of Guienne. He died in 1642.

[177] Daniel, vol. vii. p. 408.

[178] Pedro Henriques Azevedo, Conde de Fuentes.

[179] Montfaucon, vol. v. pp. 405-407.

[180] Edme de Malain, Baron de Luz, Lieutenant-Governor of Burgundy, was the son of Joachim de Malain and Marguerite d'Epinac. He was deeply involved in the conspiracy of the Marechal de Biron, and would infallibly have perished with him had he not been induced by the President Jeannin to reveal all that he knew of the plot to Henri IV, on condition of a free pardon. He survived his treachery for ten years, and in 1613 was killed in a duel by the Chevalier de Guise. His son, Claude de Malain, having sworn to avenge his death, in his turn challenged M.

de Guise, at whose hands he met with the same fate as his father.

[181] Jacques de Lanode, Sieur de la Fin, was a petty Burgundian n.o.bleman, whose spirit of intrigue was perpetually involving those to whom he attached himself in cabals and factions. He had been actively engaged at one time in the affairs of the Duc d'Alencon, and at another, he was no less busily engaged in instigating Henri III to aggressive measures against the Duc de Guise. Since that period he had negotiated with the ministers of Spain and Savoy, and by these means he had contracted a great intimacy with the Duc de Biron, to whom he affected to be distantly related, and over whom he acquired such extraordinary ascendancy by his subtle and unceasing flattery that the weak Marechal became a mere puppet in his hands, and, misled by his vanity, suffered himself to be persuaded that his merit had been overlooked and his services comparatively unrewarded, and that he was consequently fully justified in aspiring even to regal honours, and in using every exertion to attain them.

[182] Matthieu, _Histoire des Derniers Troubles arrivez en France_, book ii. p. 411.

[183] Pierre Fougeuse, Sieur Descures.

[184] Pierre Jeannin was the architect of his own fortunes. He was born at Autun in 1540, where his father followed the trade of a tanner, and was universally respected alike for his probity and his sound judgment.

The future president, after receiving the rudiments of his education in his native town, was removed to Bourges, where he became a pupil of the celebrated Cujas. In 1569 he was entered as an advocate at the Parliament of Burgundy, where he greatly distinguished himself during the s.p.a.ce of two years, at the expiration of which time he was appointed provincial advocate and member of the Burgundian States; and in this capacity he justified, by his extraordinary talents, the choice of his fellow-citizens. On one occasion a wealthy individual, enchanted by his eloquence, waited upon him at his house, and expressed a desire to have him for a son-in-law, inquiring, however, at the same time, the amount of his property. Jeannin, by no means disconcerted at the abruptness of his visitor, pointed with a smile first to his head and then to his books: "You see it before you," he said with honest pride; "I have not, nor do I require, a greater fortune." Tradition is silent as regards the termination of the interview. In the following year (1572) Jeannin was present at the council which was held during the frightful ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew, where he secured the friends.h.i.+p of the Comte de Charny, at that period Grand Equerry of France, Lieutenant-General of Burgundy, and provisional governor of the province during the absence of the Duc d'Aumale, then Governor of Paris; and in the same year he was deputed from the _tiers-etat_ of Burgundy to the States-General, convoked at Blois by Henri III. It was on that occasion that he began to comprehend the designs of the Guises, and made the celebrated speech in favour of religious toleration which does so much honour to his memory. By Henri III he was successively appointed governor of the chancelry of Burgundy, councillor of the provincial Parliament, and subsequently president.--_Pet.i.tot_.

[185] Daniel, vol. vii. pp. 414, 415. Perefixe, vol. ii. p. 367.

Matthieu, _Hist. des Derniers Troubles_, book ii. p. 411.

[186] Charles de Bourbon-Conti, Comte de Soissons, espoused the cause of the King of Navarre, whom he accompanied to the battle of Coutras in 1587. Henry promised to him the hand of his sister, Catherine de Navarre, to whom he presented him immediately afterwards, when a reciprocal affection was the result. M. de Soissons, however, abandoned the reform party, and did not return to it until after the death of Henri III. He served actively and zealously during the League; but having discovered that the King did not intend to fulfil his promise of marrying him to the Princess, he quitted him during the siege of Rouen in 1592, on the pretext of illness, and hastened to Bearn, hoping to induce Catherine to become his wife before the King could interfere to prevent their union, and by engaging himself to support his brother, the Cardinal de Bourbon, to make himself master of the possessions of the house of Navarre beyond the Loire. On reaching Bearn, however, he found Henry already there, and was obliged to withdraw without having accomplished either object. A short time subsequently he renewed his friends.h.i.+p with that monarch, and officiated as Duke of Normandy at his coronation at Chartres in 1594.

[187] Perefixe, vol. ii. p. 369.

[188] Louis de l'Hopital de Vitry, knight of all the Royal Orders, and Captain of the King's bodyguard, was descended from the ill.u.s.trious and ancient family of the Marquis de Sainte-Meme and de Montpellier, Comtes d'Entremons.

[189] Charles de Choiseul, Marquis de Praslin, the representative of one of the most ill.u.s.trious families of France, was a descendant of the ancient Comtes de Langres. He distinguished himself at the siege of La Fere in 1580, at that of Paris in 1589, and at the battle of Aumale in 1592. Henri IV made him a captain of his bodyguard, and Louis XIII, in 1619, bestowed upon him the _baton_ of marshal of France. He died in 1626, in his sixty-third year.

[190] Mezeray a.s.serts, and with greater probability, that Henry's parting words were: "Since you will not speak out, adieu, Baron" (_Hist, de France_, vol. x. p. 201); while Perefixe gives a third version, a.s.serting that the King took leave of him by saying: "Well then, the truth must be learnt elsewhere; adieu, Baron de Biron" (_Hist, de Henri le Grand_, vol. ii. p. 371).

[191] Sully, _Mem_. vol. iv. pp. 108, 109.