Volume I Part 2 (1/2)
The Princesses of Mayenne,[38] of Aumale,[39] and of Longueville,[40]
were next the subject of the royal comments; but they were all either too fair or too dark, too old or too plain; nor were Mesdemoiselles de Rohan,[41] de Luxembourg,[42] or de Guemenee[43] more fortunate: the first was a Calvinist, the second too young, and the third not to his taste.
Long ere the King had arrived at this point of his discourse, the keen-sighted minister had fathomed his determination to raise some obstacle in every instance; and he began to entertain a suspicion that this was not done without a powerful motive, which he immediately became anxious to comprehend. Thus, therefore, when Henry pressed him to declare his sentiments upon the subject, he answered cautiously: ”I cannot, in truth, hazard an opinion, Sire; nor can I even understand the bent of your own wishes. Thus much only do I comprehend--that you consent to take another wife, but that you can discover no princess throughout Europe with whom you are willing to share the throne of France. From the manner in which you spoke of the Infanta, it nevertheless appeared as though a rich heiress would not be unacceptable; but surely you do not expect that Heaven will resuscitate in your favour a Marguerite de Flandres, a Marie de Bourgogne, or even permit Elizabeth of England to grow young again.”
”I antic.i.p.ate nothing of the kind,” was the sharp retort; ”but how know I, even were I to marry one of the princesses I have enumerated, that I should be more fortunate than I have hitherto been? If beauty and youth could have ensured to me the blessing of a Dauphin, had I not every right to antic.i.p.ate a different result in my union with Madame Marguerite? I could not brook a second mortification of the like description, and therefore I am cautious. And now, as I have failed to satisfy myself upon this point, tell me, do you know of any one woman in whom are combined all the qualities which I have declared to be requisite in a Queen of France?”
”The question is one of too important a nature, Sire, to be answered upon the instant,” said Sully, ”and the rather that I have never hitherto turned my attention to the subject.”
”And what would you say,” asked Henry with ill-concealed anxiety, ”were I to tell you that such an one exists in my own kingdom?”
”I should say, Sire, that you have greatly the advantage over myself; and also that the lady to whom you allude must necessarily be a widow.”
”Just as you please,” retorted the King; ”but if you refuse to guess, I will name her.”
”Do so,” said Sully with increasing surprise; ”for I confess that the riddle is beyond my reach.”
”Rather say that you do not wish to solve it,” was the cold reply; ”for you cannot deny that all the qualities upon which I insist are to be found combined in the person of the d.u.c.h.esse de Beaufort.”
”Your mistress, Sire!”
”I do not affirm that I have any intention, in the event of my release from my present marriage, of making the d.u.c.h.ess my wife,” pursued Henry with some embarra.s.sment; ”but I was anxious to learn what you would say, if, unable to find another woman to my taste, I should one day see fit to do so.”
”Say, Sire?” echoed the minister, struggling to conceal his consternation under an affected gaiety; ”I should probably be of the same opinion as the rest of your subjects.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: GABRIELLE D'ESTReES. [Paris Richard Bentley and Son 1890]]
The King had, however, made so violent an effort over himself, in order to test the amount of forbearance which he might antic.i.p.ate in his favourite counsellor, and was so desirous to ascertain his real sentiments upon this important subject, that he exclaimed impatiently: ”I command you to speak freely; you have acquired the right to utter unpalatable truths; do not, therefore, fear that I shall take offence whenever our conversation is purely confidential, although I should a.s.suredly resent such a liberty in public.”
The reply of the upright minister, thus authorized, was worthy alike of the monarch who had made such an appeal, and of the man to whom it was addressed. He placed before the eyes of his royal master the opprobrium with which an alliance of the nature at which he had hinted must inevitably cover his own name, and the affront it would entail upon every sovereign in Europe. He reminded him also that the legitimation of the sons of Madame de Beaufort, and the extraordinary and strictly regal ceremonies which he had recently permitted at the baptism of the younger of the two (throughout the whole of which the infant had been recognized as a prince of the blood-royal, although the King had himself refused to allow the registry of the proceedings until they were revised, and the obnoxious pa.s.sages rescinded), could not fail, should she ever become Queen of France, in the event of her having other children, to plunge the nation into those very struggles for the succession from which he had just declared his anxiety to preserve it.
”And this strife, Sire,” he concluded fearlessly, ”would be even more formidable and more frightful than that to which you so anxiously alluded; for you will do well to remember that not only the arena in which it must take place will be your own beloved kingdom of France, while the whole of civilised Europe stands looking on, but that it will be a contest between the son of M. de Liancourt and the King's mistress--the son of Madame de Monceaux, the divorced wife of an obscure n.o.ble, and the declared favourite of the sovereign; and, finally, between these, the children of shame, and the Dauphin of France, the son of Henri IV and his Queen. I leave you, Sire, to reflect upon this startling fact before I venture further.”
”And you do well,” said the monarch, as he turned away; ”for truly you have said enough for once.” [44]
It will be readily conceived that at the close of this conference M. de Sully was considerably less anxious than before to effect the divorce of the infatuated sovereign; nor was he sorry to remind Henry, when he next touched upon the subject, that they had both been premature in discussing the preliminaries of a second marriage before they had succeeded in cancelling the first. It was true that Clement VIII, in his desire to maintain the peace of Europe, had readily entered into the arguments of MM. de Marquemont,[45] d'Ossat,[46] and Duperron,[47] whom the Duke had, by command of the monarch, entrusted with this difficult and dangerous mission, when they represented that the birth of a dauphin must necessarily avert all risk of a civil war in France, together with the utter hopelessness of such an event unless their royal master were released from his present engagements; and that the sovereign-pontiff had even expressed his willingness to second the washes of the French monarch. But the consent of Marguerite herself was no less important; and with a view to obtain this, the minister addressed to her a letter, in which he expressed his ardent desire to effect a reconciliation between herself and the King, in order that the prayers of the nation might be answered by the birth of a Dauphin; or, should she deem such an event impossible, to entreat of her to pardon him if he ventured to take the liberty of imploring her Majesty to make a still greater sacrifice.
Sully had felt that it was unnecessary to explain himself more clearly, as a reconciliation between Henri IV and his erring consort had, from the profligate life which she was known to have led at Usson, become utterly impossible; nor could she doubt for an instant the nature of the sacrifice which was required at her hands. It was not, therefore, without great anxiety that he awaited her reply, which did not reach him for the s.p.a.ce of five months; at the expiration of which period he received a letter, wherein she averred her willingness to submit to the pleasure of the King, for whose forbearance she expressed herself grateful; offering at the same time her acknowledgments to the Duke himself for the interest which he exhibited towards her person. From this period a continued correspondence was maintained between the exiled Queen and the minister; and she proved so little exacting in the conditions which she required as the price of her concession, that the affair would have been concluded without difficulty, had not the favourite, who was privy to the negotiation, calculating upon her influence over the mind of the monarch, suddenly a.s.sumed an att.i.tude which arrested its progress.
For a considerable time she had aspired to the throne; but it was not until she learnt that the agents of the King in Rome were labouring to effect the dissolution of his marriage with Marguerite de Valois, and that the Duc de Luxembourg[48] was also about to visit the Papal Court in order to hasten the conclusion of the negotiations, that she openly declared her views to Sillery,[49] whom she knew to be already well affected towards her, declaring that should he be instrumental in inducing the King to make her his wife, she would pledge herself to obtain the seals for him on his return from Rome, as well as the dignity of chancellor so soon as it should be vacant.[50]
Sillery, whose ambition was aroused, was not slow to obey her wishes; and, finding the Pope unwilling to lend himself to the haste which was required of him, he not only informed him privately that, in the event of a divorce, his royal master was ready to espouse the Princesse Marie de Medicis, his kinswoman (although at this period Henry evinced no inclination towards such an alliance), but even when he discovered that his Holiness remained unmoved by this prospect of family aggrandizement, he ventured so far as to hint, in conjunction with the Cardinal d'Ossat, that it was probable, should the Pontiff continue to withhold his consent to the annullation of the King's present marriage, he would dispense with it altogether, and make the d.u.c.h.esse de Beaufort Queen of France: a threat which so alarmed the sovereign-prelate that, immediately declaring that he placed the whole affair in the hands of G.o.d, he commanded a general fast throughout Rome, and shut himself up in his oratory, where he continued for a considerable time in fervent prayer. On his reappearance he was calm,[51] and simply remarked: ”G.o.d has provided for it.”
A few days subsequently a courier arrived at Rome with intelligence of the death of the d.u.c.h.ess.
Meanwhile Gabrielle, by her unbridled vanity, had counteracted all the exertions of her partisans. Aware of her power over the King, and believing that this divorce from Marguerite once obtained, she should find little difficulty in overcoming all other obstacles, she was unguarded enough prematurely to a.s.sume the state and pretensions of the regality to which she aspired, affecting airs of patronage towards the greatest ladies of the Court, and lavis.h.i.+ng the most profuse promises upon the sycophants and flatterers by whom she was surrounded. The infatuation of the King, whose pa.s.sion for his arrogant mistress appeared to increase with time, tended, as a natural consequence, to encourage these unseemly demonstrations; nor did the friends of the exiled Queen fail to render her cognizant of every extravagance committed by the woman who aspired to become her successor; upon which Marguerite, who, morally fallen as she was in her own person, had never forgotten that she was alike the daughter and the consort of a king, suddenly withdrew her consent to the proposed divorce; declaring, in terms more forcible than delicate, that no woman of blighted character should ever, through her agency, usurp her place.
The sudden and frightful death of the d.u.c.h.ess, which shortly afterwards supervened, having, however, removed her only objection to the proposed measure, her marriage with the King was, at length, finally declared null and void, to the equal satisfaction of both parties. The event which Marguerite had dreaded had now become impossible, and she at once[52] forwarded a personal requisition to Rome, in which she declared that ”it was in opposition to her own free will that her royal brother King Charles IX and the Queen-mother had effected an alliance to which she had consented only with her lips, but not with her heart; and that the King her husband and herself being related in the third degree, she besought his Holiness to declare the nullity of the said marriage.” [53]
On the receipt of this application, the Pontiff--having previously ascertained that the demand of Henry himself was based on precisely the same arguments, and still entertaining the hope held out to him by Sillery that the King would, when liberated from his present wife, espouse one of his own relatives--immediately appointed a committee, composed of the Cardinal de Joyeuse, the Archbishop of Arles,[54] and the Bishop of Modena, his nuncio and nephew, instructing them, should they find all circ.u.mstances as they were represented, to declare forthwith the dissolution of the marriage.[55]
Meanwhile the King, whose first burst of grief at the loss of the d.u.c.h.ess had been so violent that he fainted in his carriage on receiving the intelligence, and afterwards shut himself up in the palace of Fontainebleau during several days, refusing to see the princes of the blood and the great n.o.bles who hastened to offer their condolences, and retaining about his person only half a dozen courtiers to whom he was personally attached, had recovered from the shock sufficiently to resume his usual habits of dissipation and amus.e.m.e.nt. In the extremity of his sorrow he had commanded a general Court mourning, and himself set the example by a.s.suming a black dress for the first week; but as his regret became moderated, he exchanged his sables for a suit of violet, in which costume he received a deputation from the Parliament of Paris which was sent to condole with him upon the bereavement that he had undergone![56]