The making of a king (24 page)

CHAPTER XIV 1609 — 10

Henri and Mademoiselle de Montmorency— The King's desire for domestic peace — His forebodings — Henri and his son — The Infanta's portrait—Chances of war— Sully and the Dauphin.

ON March 2, 1610, the Dauphin was present at a ceremony forming part of an episode displaying the King in his least worthy aspect. This was the betrothal, to be followed shortly by the marriage, of the Prince de Conde and Charlotte de Montmorency, daughter of the Constable who had refused to allow his family shield to be blemished by a match between his son and the King's daughter.

The story of Henri's latest passion, his infatuation for young Bassompierre's destined bride, scarcely emerged from childhood, is too well known to call for more than a passing notice. Bassompierre, a courtier by profession and taste, warned that he had to choose between his promised wife and the King's favour, made little difficulty in relinquishing his claim to the first ; and Henri bestowed her upon his cousin, Conde, first Prince of the Blood, counting upon the young man's indifference to throw no obstacle in his path ; and anticipating that Conde, ill-favoured, of bad reputation, and addicted to wine, would not prove a formidable

rival in the girl's affections.

And yet it is singular that, almost at this moment, Henri had been contemplating the possibility of a compromise whereby, if Marie de Medicis would, for her part, agree to the dismissal of her Italian favourites, he would himself engage to give her no further cause for complaint. Whether he would, at this stage, have kept his pledge is questionable; that it was offered in good faith cannot be doubted. Weary of a continual condition of domestic strife, he was un-feignedly anxious to arrange a basis of agreement.

If this ultimate phase of a great man's existence is painful to those to whom he is a hero, it was probably in many ways no less painful to the hero himself. To Henri's happiness love and approval were, as some one has pointed out, specially necessary ; and the sense that by many of those around him he was neither loved nor approved cannot have failed to be bitter. Underlying, too, his natural gaiety, was the melancholy not seldom accompanying it, and the latter at times gained the upper hand. To Montigny and Cicogne, two of his friends and companions, he once said that he would rather be dead ; and when they strove to prove how small was his reason for desiring death, he remained unconvinced.

" You are happier than I," he told them.

Troubled in mind and spirit, he was oppressed by public as well as domestic cares. Rumours of intrigues with Spain disquieted him the more owing to their vagueness. Concini and his wife were known to be in communication with the enemy ; hints were thrown out of other traitors whose names were withheld. Who was false, who true ? Who could tell ? That

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The Making of a King

the Queen's sympathies were increasingly enlisted on the Spanish side was certain. More and more the marriage scheme had possession of her mind. An alliance with his old antagonist, to replace his engagements with Protestant princes, was urged upon the King, and whilst he was firm in adherence to his pledges, the difference of opinion between himself and his wife on a question of vital importance will have accentuated their chronic condition of discord. The distrust of her husband with which the Queen had been inspired by the Concini had increased to so great a degree that she entertained suspicions wounding alike to his honour and to his good sense ; declined to eat what he sent her from his table, and even caused her food to be prepared in the apartments of the Italian couple.

Swayed by the influence of her favourites, Marie was also bent upon obtaining from the King that which she had long desired— namely, her own coronation, to be accompanied by every adjunct of ceremonial magnificence, with the object of finally asserting her position and that of her children, and of making it known to the world.

This last demand was both comprehensible and pardonable. That she was still, after more than ten years of marriage, uncrowned, might have supplied a weapon to be used against her in hostile hands. War was imminent; the King was to be once more in the field, and Marie was to fill the place of Regent in his absence. It was of the last importance that no shadow of doubt should be allowed to rest upon her position. That she was not to possess undivided authority, but was to share it with a Council of State,

was regarded by her as an insult, and she was the more urgent in requiring that her Sacre should take place before Henri quitted Paris.

With this demand, reasonable though it was, the King was most unwilling to comply. In spite of his sagacity and shrewdness, reiterated warnings of coming calamity had made their impression upon his mind. He was haunted by the memory of prophecies according to which he was not destined to survive his fifty-eighth year ; and was oppressed in particular by forebodings that, should he yield to the Queen's importunities and permit her coronation to take place, misfortune would ensue.

It was in this mood of melancholy that the idea of restoring domestic concord by means of mutual concession had occurred to him. Nothing came of it; Marie did not close with his offer, and a last and disgraceful chapter was unhappily to be added to his record. The true tragedy was not the catastrophe of May 14, 1610. The day that Ravaillac's knife did its work was no more than the consummation, the climax, of the tragedy enacted during Henri's last years, when the greatness of the great King had struggled for mastery with his littleness, and the last had not seldom got the upper hand ; when, to quote Michelet, the man, " loved and lovable, whose strength was invoked by all the world, but in whom the principle of duty was absent, and who was weak and changeable, declined and sank." Irresponsible, strangely devoid of the moral sense, one questions whether he was so much as conscious of his fall. Of that fall the episode rhich filled so important a place in the history of

his last year was proof, had proof been needed. Duty, morality, pride, dignity, self-respect, were all to be sacrificed to an emotion. It must have been difficult even for those who loved him, and they were many, not to feel something approaching to contempt.

Where public matters did not conflict with his personal interests he continued firm, refusing to yield to the pressure brought to bear upon him in reference to the disposal of his children. Madame, if he could compass it, was to become the wife of the Prince of Wales— a gallant lad who talked of nothing but learning the art of war under Henri himself; the Dauphin was destined to be married to the heiress of Lorraine, and in the summer young Bassompierre was dispatched on a secret embassy with the object of sounding the Duke, her father, on the subject. The King, as it fell out, was to have no voice in the settlement of these matters.

" I pray God," he told Louis, as he drank to him on his eighth birthday, " I pray God that, in twenty years' time, I may be able to give you the whip."

"Pas, s'il vous plait," was the Dauphin's reply.

u What ! " said the King in mock protest, " You would not have me able to give it to you ? "

" Pas, s'il vous plait," repeated the child.

There was no fear of it. Eight months later Henri was dead.

In graver moods the King would look on to the future, when he would have been removed from the scene of action, and would make his forecasts as to the course of events. Calling his wife, in jesting fashion, Madame la Regente, he admitted, in answer to her

protests, that she might be right in desiring, in her own interest, the lengthening of his life. The words were spoken when, once more, his will had been brought into collision with that of his heir, and he had again recognised the strain of obstinacy in the boy's nature.

The quarrel had taken place over a mere trifle — a question of jumping over a ditch a foot and a half wide in the park at Fontainebleau. The boy had leapt it standing, without " making any difficulty. Bidden by his father to attempt it running, he answered by a dogged refusal ; afraid lest, miscalculating his distance, he should fall in and become an object of the derision from which he shrank with the sensitiveness not uncommon in children. The King, unused to disobedience, was roused to anger so violent that, had he not been prevented, he would have immersed the boy in the water ; but all was of no avail. Threatened with the whip, Louis replied that he would prefer it to taking the required leap ; accepting his punishment—administered in spite of a tardy offer of compliance—with defiance and protesting that he was not hurt.

In the scene which followed between King and Queen Henri gave utterance to a prediction as to the future awaiting his wife.

" You wept," he told her sternly, " because I have had your son whipped a little severely. You will one day weep much more for his misfortunes or for your own. . . . Of one thing I can assure you — that you being of the temper I know, and foreseeing what will his—you being self-willed, not to say headstrong,

and he stubborn, you will certainly have a bone to pick with one another."

In which Henri was to prove, to Marie de Medicis' cost, right.

If, with regard to his heir, Henri's system of discipline was sharp, he acted with deliberate intention. His other children, Marie once complained, would not have been treated with a like severity ; nor did he deny the charge, giving his reasons for what might wear the guise of injustice. Should they play the fool, he said, they would not escape punishment. No one would whip the Dauphin.

During these last years of Henri's life the struggle of contending aims at Court found expression in the fact that, in spite of his well-known sentiments, efforts were persistently renewed to rouse and keep alive Louis's interest in the Infanta. Did he not consider her beautiful ? asked the Marquis de Gudalesta, visiting the Dauphin on the way to Spain. Would he not like to possess her portrait ?

Though answering politely in the affirmative, the boy was careful to reassert his loyalty to national traditions. His heart, he added, was French. Yet, notwithstanding the proviso, the attempts of his mother and her friends to instil their ideas into his mind had not been fruitless."

" There is my wife," he told his playmates one day, as he pointed to a picture of Anne hanging in the Queen's chamber. " One must go and take her," he said, when M. de Souvre observed that the Spaniards might not consent to surrender their Princess.

Meantime, the engagement of the Prince de Conde and Mademoiselle de Montmorency had been followed by their marriage, notwithstanding certain misgivings as to the future which had caused the bridegroom-elect to suggest to the King that the arrangement should be cancelled. Henri had been fully determined to carry it out; the Prince, poor, young, of doubtful legitimacy, and accustomed to maintain an attitude of submissive docility towards the King, was in no position to assert his independence ; and, reassured by Henri, he consented to allow matters to proceed. The wedding accordingly took place quietly at Chantilly, the bride's home, during the month of May.

Not many weeks had elapsed before the Prince's apprehensions were justified, and it had been made plain to him that, were his wife's honour to be safeguarded, she would be best kept at a distance from Court. Showing more spirit than had been expected of him, he acted upon this conviction, in spite of the fact that both the Princess herself and her father, dazzled by the possibilities contained in the King's passion, testified a disposition to play into Henri's hands, and a paper demanding that the marriage should be annulled received the signature of the bride.

The King's indignation at Conde's conduct was as great as if he had undoubted right on his side.

" I beg you to believe," he wrote to the Constable in June, " that my nephew, your son-in-law, behaves like the devil here. It will be necessary that you and I should speak to him together, so that he may be good."

Conde was in no wise disposed to amend his ways to