Henry of Condé

“ His only hope was now in Conde, but Conde at the outset, on arriving at the Louvre, offered his heart to the Queen as a sheet of white paper. Epernon and Soissons received him with delight, and exchanged vows of an eternal friendship of several weeks' duration. And thus all the princes of the blood, all the cousins of Henry of Navarre, except the imbecile Conti, were ranged on the side of Spain, Rome, Mary de' Medici, and Concino Concini, while the son of the Balafre, the Duke of Mayenne, and all their adherents were making common cause with the Huguenots. ”

“ Such was the disinterested patriot whom, in the infatuation of their lying fabrications, the murderers of Paris, their hands still reeking with the blood of thousands of women and children incontestably innocent of any crime laid to the charge of their husbands or fathers, pictured as plotting the wholesale assassination of the royal family—even to the very Henry of Navarre whose wedding he had come to honor by his presence—that he might place upon the throne of France that stubborn heretic, the Prince of Condé! ”

“ To the Duke of Guise, who had married her daughter, Anne d'Este, she administered a severe rebuke. "Had I been present," she said, "I would have prevented this ill-advised step. It is no trifling matter to treat a prince of the blood in such a manner. The wound is one that will long bleed; for no man has ever yet attacked the blood of France but he has had reason to regret it." [943]
Condé's courage. ”

“ Peace was yet far distant—peace, which Coligny preferred a thousand times to his own life, but would not purchase dishonorably by the sacrifice of civil liberty and of the right to worship his God according to the convictions of his heart and conscience. The burden of the defence of the Protestants had appeared sufficiently heavy when Condé, a prince of the blood, was alive to share it with him. ”

“ As soon as Conde’s death was known at La Rochelle, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, hurried to Tonnay-Charente, whither the Protestant army had fallen back; she took with her her own son Henry, fifteen years old, and Henry de Bourbon, the late Prince of Conde’s son, who was seventeen; and she presented both of them to the army. The younger, the future Henry IV., stepped forward briskly. “Your cause,” said he, “is mine; your interests are mine; I swear on my soul, honor, and life, to be wholly yours.” The young Conde took the same oath. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Was Condé, whom the king had only four or five months ago recognized by solemn edict as his "dear cousin and faithful servant and subject," a friend or a foe? Had peace been concluded with the Hugue [Pg 259] nots only that they might anew be treated as rebels and enemies? What had become of the prescribed amnesty? ”

“ While these victims of a blind bigotry were floating on under the windows of the Louvre toward the sea, Condé addressed to the queen mother a letter of warm remonstrance, and called upon her to avenge the causeless murder of so many innocent men and women; expressing the fear that, if justice were denied by the king and by herself, the cry of innocent blood would reach high heaven, and God would be [Pg 47] moved to inflict those calamities with which the unhappy realm was every day threatened. ”

“ Condé and Coligny earnestly begged the queen's ambassador to tell his mistress that "in case her Majesty were introduced by their means into Havre, Dieppe, and Rouen with six thousand men, only to keep those places, it would be unto them a great note of infamy." They would seem wantonly to have exposed to a foreign prince the very flower of Normandy, in giving into her hands cities which they felt themselves quite able to defend without assistance. ”

“ Smarting under the repeated acts of violence to which at every moment they were liable, and under the successive infringements upon the Edict of Amboise, the Huguenots urged the Prince of Condé to represent their grievances to the monarch, in the excellence of whose heart they had not yet lost confidence. The Protestant leader did not repel the trust. His appeal to Charles and to the queen mother was urgent. ”

“ In 1800 Condé arrived in England, where he resided for several years. On the restoration of Louis XVIII. he returned to France. He died in Paris in 1818. He wrote Essai sur la vie du grand Condé (1798) .
Louis Henry Joseph, duke of Bourbon (1756–1830) , son of the last named, was the last prince of Condé. Several of the earlier events of his life, especially his marriage with the princess Louise of Orleans, and the duel that the comte d’Artois provoked by raising the veil of the princess at a masked ball, caused much scandal. At the Revolution he fought with the army of the emigrés in Liége. ”

“ Henry ridiculed the idea of Conde's drawing money from him while occupying his time abroad with intrigues against his throne and his children's succession. He scoffed at the Envoy's pretences that Conde was not in receipt of money from Spain, as if a man so needy and in so embarrassing a position could live without money from some source ”

“ He greeted our leaders with elaborate ceremony, but, as far as I could judge, with little goodwill, and Catholics and Huguenots mingled together, forming one imposing body. Young Condé and his brother, the Marquis, rode between Guise and the Chevalier d'Angoulême; Henry himself was placed between the king's brothers, Anjou and Alençon.
The streets were packed with dense crowds of citizens; every balcony was filled, and fair ladies sat watching from the open windows. Here and there men shouted lustily for Monseigneur, but for Henry of Navarre there was no word of kindly welcome ”

“ The Prince of Condé had but two thousand crowns to meet the engagement. In this new perplexity the Huguenots, from the leaders down to the very lowest, gave a noble illustration of devotion to their [Pg 223] religion's cause. Condé and Coligny set the example by giving up their plate to replenish the empty coffers of the army. The captains urged, the ministers of the gospel preached, a generous sacrifice of property in the common interest. Their exhortations did not fall upon dull ears. Money, gold chains, silver, articles of every description, were lavishly contributed. ”

“ The people could scarcely credit the statement that the war was waged by the Guises simply for the liberation of their mortal enemy, Condé, especially when Condé himself indignantly repelled the attempt to separate him from the associates with whom he had entered into common engagements, not to add that the reputation of the Lorraine family, whose mouthpiece parliament might well be supposed to be, was not over good for strict adherence to truth. ”

“ In the council of the confederates, the next day, he spoke his mind freely. He reminded Condé that, from the very commencement of hostilities, the [Pg 117] triumvirs had offered the restoration of the Edict of January with the exclusion of the city of Paris; and that never had affairs stood on a better footing than now, [260] when two of the three chief authors of the war were dead, and the third was a prisoner. But the poor had surpassed the rich in devotion; the cities had given the example to the nobles. ”

“ The King of Navarre had disregarded the counsels of Calvin and other prudent advisers, who believed that, if he presented himself with a powerful escort at the gates of Orleans, the Guises would yield without a blow. [934] Antoine felt confident that his enemies would never venture to lay hands on a prince of the royal blood. His blind infatuation seemed to infect Condé also. ”

“ The king saved some, including his nurse and Ambrose Paré his surgeon, both Huguenots. Two others, destined in the future to play the highest parts in the kingdom, were saved by his orders. These were the two Huguenot princes, Henry of Navarre, and Henry de Condé. The king sent for them during the height of the massacre, and bade them recant or die.
"I mean, for the future," he said, "to have but one religion in my kingdom; the mass or death; make your choice."
The king of Navarre asked for time to consider the subject, reminding Charles of his promised protection. Condé was defiant. ”

“ The Princess de Condé had been dead upwards of four months, and buried in the abbey-church of St. Germain-des-Prés, when Henry, on entering the abbey, whither he was invited to a grand entertainment given there by Cardinal de Bourbon, felt such violent tremblings at his heart, that not being able to endure their continuance, he was going away; but they ceased all at once, on the body of the princess being removed from its tomb, and conveyed elsewhere for that evening. ”

“ Catharine's attempt to seduce Condé from the Huguenots.
To overthrow the political influence of the Huguenots she must seduce their leaders. Of this Catharine was sure. With whom, then, should she commence but with the brilliant Condé? The calm and commanding admiral, indeed, was the true head and heart of the late war—never more firm and uncompromising than after defeat—as reluctant to renounce war without securing, beyond question, the religious liberty he sought, as he had been averse to take up the sword at all in the beginning. Of such a man, however, little hope could be entertained. ”

“ His own servants and those of the admiral, with a few noblemen that came in from the neighborhood, swelled their escort to about one hundred and fifty horse. [582] With such a handful of men, and embarrassed in their flight by the presence of those whom their age or their sex disqualified for the endurance of the fatigues of a protracted journey, Condé and Coligny undertook to reach the friendly shelter of the walls of La Rochelle. It was a perilous attempt. The journey was one of several hundred miles, through the very heart of France. The cities were garrisoned by their enemies. ”

“ This was Louis of Condé—now doubly important to the court on account of the military undertaking that was on foot—who complained of the speaker's insolent words. So powerful a nobleman could not be despised. And so the voluble Damours, with his oration but half delivered, instead of meeting a gracious monarch's approval and returning home amid the plaudits of the multitude, was hastily taken in charge by the archers of the royal guard and carried off to prison. ”

“ Condé answered by saying that his own men were armed only to prevent the populace of Paris from making an attack upon the Protestants as they went to their place of worship. [46]
Anxieties of Catharine de' Medici.
For weeks the position of the queen mother had been one of peculiar difficulty and anxiety. That she was "well inclined to advance the true religion," and "well affected for a general reformation in the Church," as Admiral Coligny at this time firmly believed, [47] is simply incredible. ”

“ The Prince of Condé despatched young Téligny to carry his spirited reply to this extraordinary demand, and, not confining himself to the exhibition of its flagrant injustice, he recapitulated the daily multiplying infractions upon the edict. The Protestants were treated as enemies, he said, and were safe neither at home nor abroad. An open war could not be more bitter. ”

“ He was a member of that commission that sentenced Louis of Condé to death, in deference to the desires of another king and his uncles, the Guises; and the prince would doubtless have lost his head in consequence, but for the sudden death of Francis the Second. Since that time he had repeatedly acquiesced in the bloody sentences of the Parisian parliament. His voice was never heard opposing the proscription instituted in the late civil wars, even in the case of the atrocious sentence against Gaspard de Coligny. ”

“ Forgetting all decency, and even the law of nations, he insisted on punishing Condé as a rebel, and called on the Spanish Government formally to release the Princess. Spain refused; and this ridiculous passion may be said to have been the approximate cause of that formidable alliance against Spain in which, at the time of his death, Henry was about to engage.
The favour which Henry had shown his Protestant subjects had long rankled in the minds of the Catholics. He was held to be a renegade and a traitor. ”

“ It produced in Charles an alienation [Pg 210] [448] which the enemies of the Huguenots took good care to prevent him from ever completely forgetting. They represented the undertaking of Meaux as aimed, not at the counsellors of the monarch, but at the "Sacred Majesty" itself, and Condé and Coligny, with their associates, were pictured to the affrighted eyes of the fugitive boy-king as conspirators who respected none of those rights which are so precious in the view of royalty.
Negotiations opened. The Huguenots gradually abate their demands. ”

“ It is dated Montargis, Aug. 20, 1569: "Praying you ... to employ yourself, as I know you are accustomed to do, in whatsoever way shall be possible to you, in striving to arrive at a good peace, in which endeavor I, on my part, shall put forth all my power, if it shall please God. And if it cannot be a general one, at least it shall be to those who desire it, and who belong to us." Who, however, was the correspondent? The subscription, "Your good cousin, Renée of France," would appear to point to Admiral Coligny or some one of equal rank. Louis de Condé was no longer living. ”