house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, emboldened apparently by a promise of his protection which Condé had given him. A few days later, having some business with the prince, he had the hardihood to go to the Hôtel de Condé, attended by a suite of thirty gentlemen, at a time when Condé was giving a sumptuous fête in honour of Lord Hay, the British Ambassador Extraordinary, to which all the princes and great nobles had been invited. The company were at table when he arrived, but he went into the banquet-hall, in which he found Bouillon, Mayenne and other sworn enemies of his, spoke with Condé for some time, and then took his departure, “all these gentlemen glaring at him and he at them.”
Next morning, the prince sent for Concini and told him that he had had great difficulty on the previous day in restraining his friends from falling upon him and killing him as he was leaving his hôtel, and that they all threatened to abandon him if he did not withdraw his protection from the marshal. In consequence, he was unable to protect him any longer, and he counselled him strongly to retire to Normandy, of which province he had recently been appointed lieutenant-general, in exchange for the surrender of a similar office in Picardy. Concini followed the prince’s advice—or rather his orders—went to the Louvre to take leave of the King and the Queen-Mother, and left Paris the next day (August 15). “It is impossible to say,” adds Bassompierre, “how much his departure discredited the Queen-Mother, when it was seen that a servant of hers could not live in safety in Paris, save so long as Monsieur le Prince pleased; while it augmented the reputation and authority of Monsieur le Prince.”
Chief of the grandees and also chief of the King’s counsellors, Condé might perhaps have been content to live on good terms with the Queen-Mother and to use with moderation the large share of power which she had abandoned to him. “But his partisans were unable to suffer their reunion.” Longueville surprised Péronne; Bouillon, the “demon of rebellion,” the turbulent Mayenne, the restless Vendôme, urged him to seize the supreme power, on pain of abandoning him. He is said to have avowed to Barbin that “it was plain that nothing more remained for him but to remove the King from his throne and put himself in his place.” If he had really entertained any such intention, he would hardly have made a confidant of one of the most devoted of the Queen-Mother’s adherents; but, any way, the Court believed that he was secretly stirring up the people and the clergy and tampering with the officers of the Guards and the captains of the citizen militia, and was plotting to change the form of government. On the advice probably of the new Ministers Barbin and Mangot, and of Concini’s wife, Marie de’ Medici resolved to forestall Condé by arresting him, together with Bouillon, Mayenne, and Vendôme. Fearing that the officers of the Guards might refuse to lay hands on the first Prince of the Blood, she decided to dispense with their services and to entrust the task to the Marquis de Thémines, a brave old Gascon noble who had served with distinction in the Wars of Religion, assisted by d’Elbène, a captain of light cavalry.
“On Thursday, the first day of September, at three o’clock in the morning,” says Bassompierre, “I was awakened by a gentleman-servant of the Queen named La Motte, who came to tell me, on her behalf, to come to the Louvre, disguised and alone, which I did. On entering the Louvre, I found one of the Gardes du Corps of the King named La Barre, who happened to be on guard that night. La Barre was Quartermaster of the Swiss, and I told him to come with me into the Queen’s ante-chamber and wait at the door while I entered her chamber, as I did not doubt that it was some matter relating to the Swiss which was the cause of my being sent for.
“I found the Queen in deshabille, with MM. Mangot and Barbin on either side of her, while M. de Fossé[105] was standing a little way behind them. As I entered, she said to me: ‘You do not know why I have sent for you so early, Bassompierre.’ ‘Madame,’ I answered, ‘I do not know the reason.’ ‘I will tell you anon,’ said she, and then began to walk about, and so continued for near half-an-hour; while I spoke to M. de Fossé, whom I was very astonished to see there, as the Queen had dismissed him for having accompanied the Commandeur de Sillery when he was exiled from the Court.[106]
“At length, the Queen entered her cabinet, bidding us follow her, and said to me: ‘I intend to make prisoners of Monsieur le Prince and MM. de Vendôme, Mayenne, and Bouillon. I desire that the Swiss be here at eleven o’clock this morning, that is to say, about the Tuileries, for, if I am forced by the people to leave Paris, I shall retire with them to Mantes. I have my jewels packed up and 40,000 crowns in gold—they are here—and I shall take my children with me, if I am forced to go, though I pray that God may forbid it, and I do not think it will be necessary. But I am fully resolved to submit to any peril and inconvenience that I may encounter rather than lose my authority and suffer that of the King to perish. I desire also that, when the time arrives, you will go, with your Swiss, to the gate [of the Louvre], to resist an attack, if one should be made, and to die there for the service of the King, as I promise myself that you will be ready to do.’ ‘Madame,’ I replied, ‘I shall not deceive the good opinion that you entertain of me, as you will know to-day, if such should be the case. Meantime, Madame, be pleased to permit me to go and summon the Swiss from their quarters.’ ‘No,’ said she, ‘you shall not go out.’ ‘It is strange of you, Madame,’ said I, ‘to distrust a man to whom you are confiding the person of the King, your own, and those of your children. However, I have at this door a man whom I can trust, and I will send him to the quarters of the Swiss. Rely on me, Madame, and rest assured that the fête will not be spoiled by me.’ She permitted me to go out, and I sent La Barre to fetch the Swiss. I asked her what she intended to do with the French Guards, when she said that she feared that M. de Créquy[107] had been won over by Monsieur le Prince. ‘Not against the King, Madame,’ said I, ‘for I know that for the King he would die a thousand deaths, if that were possible.’ Upon that she said: ‘I must send for him, and neither of you must go out until Monsieur le Prince has entered.’ She sent also for M. de Saint-Géran[108]; while La Curée[109] came with the King when he descended to the Queen-Mother’s apartments at nine o’clock. The Queen spoke to these gentlemen, and when I asked her by whom Monsieur le Prince was to be arrested, she answered: ‘I have provided for that.’
“Monsieur le Prince came at eight o’clock to attend the Council, and the Queen-Mother, looking at him as everyone came to hand him petitions, said: ‘There is the King of France, but his royalty will be like that of the Twelfth Night King; it will not last long.’
“Upon that, she despatched Créquy and myself to the gate of the Louvre to place the Guards under arms, and meantime she sent to summon Monsieur le Prince to her presence. Afterwards she sent to tell us that if Monsieur le Prince came to the gate, we should arrest him. We sent back word that this was so important an order that we ought to have it from her own lips, and that she should have given it us while we were in her chamber; but that, if it pleased her to send a lieutenant of the Guards du Corps to arrest him, we would render him every assistance, and, meantime, I would give orders that no one was to pass out of the gate. And I placed thirty Swiss halberdiers there, while Créquy gave a like order to the French Guards.
“A moment later, there came a valet de chambre of the Queen to tell us that Monsieur le Prince had been arrested.”[110]
So soon as the arrest of Condé had been effected, Saint-Géran and La Curée, with detachments of the Gensdarmes and Light Cavalry of the Guard, were sent to apprehend Bouillon, Mayenne, and Vendôme; but all three princes had prudently taken to flight.
Much to the relief of Marie de’ Medici, the bulk of the populace remained unmoved, though the Dowager-Princesse de Condé drove about the streets, crying out: “To arms, good people! The Maréchal d’Ancre has caused Monsieur le Prince to be assassinated!” A crowd, however, collected before Concini’s house in the Faubourg-Saint-Germain, broke in the door and sacked it from basement to attic, after which they were proceeding to demolish it, when the French Guards arrived and dispersed them.
“A little while after the arrest of Monsieur le Prince,” says Bassompierre, “some rioters, or some members of the said prince’s household, began to throw stones against the windows of the Maréchal d’Ancre’s house. Then, others joining them with the hope of plunder, took the pieces of timber from beyond the Luxembourg, which was then being built, to break open the door of the said house. Eight or ten men and women who were within escaped, terror-stricken, by a back door; and a number of masons from the Luxembourg having joined the mob, they entered and pillaged this rich house, in which they found furniture worth more than 200,000 crowns. So soon as the Queen-Mother heard of it, she ordered M. de Liancourt, Governor of Paris, to go and put a stop to the tumult. He went with the archers of the Watch, but, perceiving that it was no place for him, returned; and the people continued to pillage all day, and were not interfered with.... The next day the King commanded M. de Créquy to take the companies of the French Guards just relieved from duty and drive away the people, who were continuing, not to plunder—for that was already accomplished—but to demolish the Maréchal d’Ancre’s house. This M. de Créquy did, and placed soldiers there to guard it.”
The same day that Condé was arrested, the King, at his mother’s request, created Thémines a marshal of France. His appointment, Bassompierre tells us, aroused great indignation amongst a number of gentlemen who considered that their own military services gave them a better claim to that dignity, and they complained loudly, the loudest of all being M. de Montigny, formerly Governor of Paris, who, while travelling to the capital that morning, had met Vendôme flying for his life, and had obligingly lent him his own post-horses, which were fresh, as the prince’s were exhausted. To pacify Montigny, the King created him a marshal likewise. Then Saint-Géran, “perceiving that it was only necessary to complain to get what one wanted,” extorted from his Majesty a written promise that he too should be made a marshal, while Créquy obtained a brevet of duke and peer. The Queen-Mother said to Bassompierre that evening: “Bassompierre, you have not asked for anything like the others.” “Madame,” was the diplomatic answer, “an occasion on which we have only performed our simple duty is not one on which to ask for recompense. But I hope that when, by great services, I shall have merited them, the King will bestow upon me honours and emoluments without my asking him.”
On September 5, Marie de’ Medici instituted a Council of War, to which she summoned the Maréchal de Brissac, Praslin, Saint-Luc, Saint-Géran, and Bassompierre, and also the recently dismissed Ministers Villeroy and Jeannin, to discuss the means of raising an army to combat the fugitive princes, who had established themselves at Soissons, where their adherents were gathering round them. This Council, however, had only held one or two meetings, under the presidency of the Maréchal de Brissac, when a most embarrassing incident caused its sittings to be suspended.
It will be remembered that, in 1605, the Comte d’Auvergne, Charles IX’s son by Marie Touchet, now Madame d’Entragues, had been condemned to death for high treason, a sentence subsequently commuted by Henri IV to perpetual imprisonment in the Bastille. This commutation, however, had not been a formal one, so that the death-sentence remained nominally suspended over the captive’s head. At the end of the previous June, the Queen-Mother had set Auvergne at liberty, with the object of opposing him to the cabal of the Princes; and when, a few weeks later, the news arrived that Longueville had seized Péronne, she sent him, at the head of two companies of the French Guards and a detachment of cavalry, to invest the place. But, by some extraordinary oversight, she had omitted to furnish Auvergne with the usual letters of abolition, and, in the absence of his sovereign’s formal pardon for his offences, he occupied a position somewhat analogous to that of a convict on ticket-of-leave.
A day or two after the Council of War had been appointed, Auvergne returned from Péronne, and asked Barbin whether he were expected to attend its sessions. Barbin gave him to understand that he was; and at the next meeting of the Council the prince entered the room and coolly took his seat at the head of the table. Brissac was so overcome with astonishment and indignation that he was quite unable to utter any protest; but Bassompierre, boiling with rage at the sight of a man who had twice conspired against the life of his beloved master, and was still technically a traitor under sentence of death, presuming to attend, much less to preside, over their counsels, rose at once and moved to one of the windows, beckoning Saint-Géran and Créquy to follow him. His friends shared his indignation, and, having consulted together, they called Brissac and told him that it would be “a reproach and a shame to him” if he suffered the Comte d’Auvergne to take his place. The marshal thereupon declared that, provided that they and La Curée would support him—for these four with their troops were masters of the Louvre—he would kill the count with his own hand, if he returned for the afternoon session and again took his place at the head of the council-board. The others applauded this decision, but, happily, Praslin joined them, and, on learning of what was intended, pointed out that the wisest course would be to request the Queen-Mother to order the Comte d’Auvergne not to attend the Council or to suspend its sessions, whereby they would escape the “inconvenience” which might arise were a marshal of France to kill a Prince of the Blood at the council-board.
It was decided to follow his advice, and to delegate to him the duty of informing the Queen-Mother that they would not permit the count to preside over the Council or even attend it. Marie de’ Medici, we are told, took their remonstrances in very good part, and, since she did not care to offend Auvergne by excluding him from the Council, decided that that body should not meet again.
On September 25, Guise and his brother Joinville, who had followed the other princes to Soissons, with the apparent intention of throwing in their lot with them, returned to Paris and came to the Louvre to pay their respects to the Queen-Mother and assure her of their unalterable fidelity. Her Majesty received them very graciously; nevertheless, she appears to have entertained a strong suspicion that they had other motives in returning to the capital. For that evening, when the courtiers were retiring from her apartments, she desired Bassompierre to remain, as she wished to speak to him, and said: “Bassompierre, I have resolved to transfer Monsieur le Prince from here, and intend to entrust his removal to you. Here is the Maréchal de Thémines, who arrested him, and who has guarded him in the Louvre with difficulty. But it is to be feared that, if I keep him here any longer, some attempt may be made to rescue him, which could easily be done.... Besides, if he remains here, the King and I are prevented from leaving, should we desire to go to Saint-Germain or some other place, since, in that event, he would no longer be in security. In consequence, I have resolved to place him in the Bastille, and desire that you should take charge of his removal.”
“She then told me,” says Bassompierre, “that it was the King’s intention that I should not wait for li honori, li bieni, li carichi. These were her words.”
Bassompierre replied that the honour of her Majesty’s confidence was in itself sufficient recompense for the slight service which she was demanding of him, and that he would readily undertake to conduct the prince safely to the Bastille. About this she need have no fear, since, even if Condé’s adherents were to get wind of what was intended, long before they had had time to gather in sufficient numbers to attempt a rescue, he would have the prisoner under lock and key again.
He then inquired if the Queen-Mother had any orders to give as to the manner of the prince’s removal, and, on being told that she left all the arrangements entirely to his discretion, proceeded to form the escort, which was composed of 200 of the French Guards and 100 Swiss, chosen from those who were posted before and behind the Louvre—for the palace was guarded night and day, like a beleaguered fortress upon which an assault might at any moment be delivered—another body of 50 Swiss, whom he summoned from their quarters in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a few of his own and the Queen’s gentlemen, on horseback, a dozen men of the Gardes du Corps, and six of the Swiss of the Guard (the Cent-Suisses). The French Guards were posted opposite the gate of the Louvre; the rest were drawn up in the courtyard, where a coach was in waiting to convey the prisoner and Thémines, who was to ride with him, to the Bastille.
His preparations completed, Bassompierre, accompanied by Thémines, ascended to the room where Condé was confined, and awakened the prince, “who was in great apprehension,” being evidently under the impression that they had come to conduct him to execution. Thémines having reassured him on this score, he went with the marshal down to the courtyard and entered the coach; Bassompierre mounted his horse, and the cortège moved off. Bassompierre, with the mounted gentlemen and fifty of the Swiss, led the way; then came the coach, guarded on either side by the Gardes du Corps and the Swiss of the Guard, with their partizans and halberds; while the French Guards and the rest of the Swiss brought up the rear. Thus they wended their way through the dark, silent streets towards the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, no one being encountered on their march save a few belated pedestrians, and, in less than an hour after they left the Louvre, the gates of the Bastille had closed upon the first Prince of the Blood.
Before setting out for the Bastille, Bassompierre had judged it advisable to send a messenger to assure the Duc de Guise, whose hôtel lay on their way[111] and who, he thought, might take alarm if he learned that soldiers were approaching, that nothing was intended against him. The messenger was only just in time, for Guise, warned by a friend living near the Louvre that troops were assembling at the palace, and persuaded that his arrest was their objective, had promptly decided on flight; and he and some of his attendants were already dressed and preparing to get to horse.
CHAPTER XVI
Serious illness of the young King, who, however, recovers—Bassompierre and Mlle. d’Urfé—Gay winter in Paris—Richelieu enters the Ministry as Secretary of State for War—His foreign policy—His energetic measures to put down the rebellion of the Princes—Return of Concini—His arrogance and presumption—Singular conversation between Bassompierre and Concini, after the death of the latter’s daughter—Policy pursued by Marie de’ Medici and Concini towards Louis XIII—Humiliating position of the young King—His favourite, Charles d’Albert, Seigneur de Luynes—Bassompierre warns the Queen-Mother that the King may be persuaded to revolt against her authority.
At the end of October, Louis XIII fell ill, and on All-Hallows’ Eve “had a convulsion, which it was apprehended would develop into apoplexy.” His physicians were of opinion that if he had a second attack it would probably prove fatal; and Marie de’ Medici, on learning of this, sent for Bassompierre and kept him at the Louvre all night, so as to be in readiness to summon the Swiss to her support, in the event of the King’s death. However, the young monarch passed a good night, and by the morning all danger was over.
On the following day, Bassompierre set out for Burgundy, at the head of 300 cavalry, to meet and take command of a new levy of two regiments of Swiss, raised to assist the Government in dealing with the rebellious Princes. He left Paris with no little reluctance, since he had just embarked in a new love-affair with Mlle. d’Urfé, who is described by Tallemant des Réaux as the flower of the Queen’s maids-of-honour; and it was naturally most provoking to have to go campaigning at such a moment. However, love had to give place to duty.
Bassompierre’s orders were to hold the Swiss and his little force of cavalry at the disposal of Bellegarde, Governor of Burgundy, who had been sent into the Bresse to the assistance of Charles Emmanuel’s heir, the Prince of Piedmont, who was defending Savoy against an army commanded by his kinsman, the Duc de Nemours. This army had originally been raised by Nemours to co-operate with the forces of Charles Emmanuel in the war which had broken out between him and Spain; but the duke had been persuaded, by the specious promises of the Governor of Milan, to turn it against his relatives. However, on reaching Provins, Bassompierre learned that, through the intervention of Bellegarde, a treaty had been signed between the Prince of Piedmont and Nemours, and that the latter had disbanded his army.
At Saint-Jean de Losne, near Beaune, he met the Swiss, and, having administered to them the usual oath of fidelity, led them to Châtillon-sur-Seine, where he received orders to send one regiment into the Nivernais and the other into Champagne, to be distributed amongst different garrisons in those provinces.
At the beginning of December, he returned to Paris, eager to sun himself once more in the smiles of Mlle. d’Urfé; and his disgust may therefore be imagined when, scarcely had he arrived, than he received a visit from his kinsman, the wealthy Duc de Cröy,[112] who informed him that the same lady’s charms had made so deep an impression upon him that he proposed to lay, not only his heart, but his ancient title and all his possessions at her feet. And, all unconscious that his relative had a prior claim to Mlle. d’Urfé’s affections, he begged him to make, on his behalf, a formal proposal for her hand to her parents.
Dissimulating his mortification, Bassompierre accepted this commission; but, as he is not ashamed to confess, with the intention of preventing the marriage, if by any means that could be effected. However, “his efforts were in vain, for the duke surmounted all the difficulties that he put in his way,” and at the beginning of 1617 Mlle. d’Urfé became Duchesse de Cröy.
Bassompierre did not, as we may suppose, waste much time in regrets for the loss of his inamorata, since, notwithstanding that a civil war was in progress and that almost every day brought such cheerful intelligence as that one gentleman’s château had been sacked or another’s unfortunate tenants rendered homeless, the winter of 1617 in Paris was a very gay one, and what with dancing, gambling and love-making, his days and nights must have been pretty well occupied:—
“I won that year at the game of trictrac, from M. de Guise, M. de Joinville and the Maréchal d’Ancre, 100,000 crowns. I was not out of favour at the Court, nor with the ladies, and had a number of beautiful mistresses.”
To turn, however, from trivial to important matters.
At the end of 1616 Bassompierre writes in his journal:
“During my journey to Burgundy, the Seals had been taken away from M. du Vair and given to Mangot, and Mangot’s charge of Secretary of State to M. de Lusson.”
Now, the “M. de Lusson” of whom Bassompierre speaks was none other than Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, Bishop of Luçon, afterwards Cardinal de Richelieu, who on November 30, 1616, had entered the Ministry as Secretary of State for War.
Scarcely had this great man touched public affairs than it was recognised that a firmer and surer hand was guiding the helm; a new spirit seemed to be infused into the Government. The tone of Henri IV suddenly reappeared in French diplomacy, and the ambassadors at Courts opposed to the pretensions of the House of Austria, justly alarmed by the Spanish marriages, were instructed to inform the sovereigns to whom they were accredited that these marriages were by no means to be regarded as portending any intention on the part of the Very Christian King to embrace the interests of Spain or the Holy See, to the detriment of the old alliances of France or to the principle of religious toleration in his realm.
And, at the same time as he reassured the old allies of France, Richelieu took energetic measures to put down rebellion at home. He appealed to public opinion by the issue of pamphlets and proclamations, in which he effectively combated the arguments advanced by the Princes to justify their revolt, and pointed out that these same men who complained of the disorder of the finances had themselves bled the State to the tune of over fourteen million livres—he gave a schedule showing the sums paid to each of them—not counting the emoluments of the charges bestowed upon them and the pensions and gratifications accorded to their friends and servants.
Nor did he confine himself to words. This time, the Government, inspired by him, showed none of its accustomed pusillanimity. A royal declaration was launched against Nevers, who, now that Condé was in prison, had assumed the leadership of his party; a second against Mayenne, Vendôme, and Bouillon; three armies were raised to take the field against them, which one by one reduced their strongholds to submission; the estates of many of their supporters were sequestrated; soldiers who had taken up arms to join them were, if captured, hanged without mercy; and, finally, a decree, duly registered by the Parlement, notwithstanding that it struck at at least one of that body, provided for the confiscation of the property of all the rebels.
It was the misfortune of Richelieu and his colleagues that they passed for the creatures of a foreign favourite detested by everyone. At the beginning of December, 1616, Concini, who had remained in Normandy since the scene at the Hôtel de Condé which had led to his compulsory withdrawal from the capital, returned to Paris, more arrogant and more presumptuous than ever, and burning to avenge the humiliations he had suffered. To strike terror into the partisans of the Princes, he caused gibbets to be erected in different parts of the town; he “caused everyone to be watched and spied upon, even in the houses, to see who entered or left Paris,” and “imprisoned those who gave him the smallest umbrage, without any form of trial.” Already in possession of the citadel of Caen, he occupied the Pont-de-l’Arche, the strongest fortress in Normandy; proposed to rebuild the fort of Sainte-Catherine, above Rouen, which had been destroyed during the Wars of Religion; acquired by purchase the governments of Meulan, Pontoise, and Corbeil; offered Bassompierre 600,000 livres for his post of Colonel-General of the Swiss, and was credited with the intention of getting himself named Constable of France. It was evident that he contemplated making himself a sort of king in Normandy, and that, when the Princes were crushed, there would be no limits to his ambition. He had, however, at the beginning of 1617, a moment of alarm and despondency. The death of his only daughter, Marie Concini, to whom he was tenderly attached and for whom he had dreamed of some alliance which would unite his fortunes to those of one of the great families of France, struck him with a superstitious fear, as the precursor of the ruin of himself and his wife.
“The marshal’s daughter fell ill and died,” writes Bassompierre, “at which both he and his wife were cruelly afflicted. I shall relate a conversation which passed between him and myself on the day of her death, by which one may see that he had a prevision of what afterwards happened to him.
“I went to visit him on the morning of that day, and again after dinner, at that little house on the Quai du Louvre to which he and his wife had retired. But he had given orders that I was to be requested to defer our interview until some other time, and afterwards he sent to ask me to come to see him at his house in the evening. Finding him in sore distress, I endeavoured sometimes to console, sometimes to divert, him; but his grief augmented the more I spoke to him, and he answered nothing to all I said, save: ‘Signor, I am undone! Signor, I am ruined! Signor, I am miserable!’ At last, I bade him consider the character of a marshal of France, which he represented, and which did not permit of him indulging in lamentations, pardonable in his wife, but unworthy of him. And I went on to say that assuredly he had lost a very amiable daughter and one who would have been very useful to advance his fortunes, but that he had four nieces to take his daughter’s place, who might afford him as much consolation, if he brought them to live with him, and much support to his fortunes, by means of alliances with four of the great families of France, of which he would have the choice. And I said several other things which God inspired me to tell him. At length, after weeping for some time, he said to me:—
“ ‘Ah, Monsieur! I do truly regret my daughter, and shall regret her so long as I live. Yet am I a man who could patiently endure such an affliction; but the ruin of myself, my wife, my son,[113] and my family which I see approaching before my eyes and which, owing to the obstinacy of my wife, is inevitable, makes me lament and lose all patience. I reveal this to you as to a true friend, from whom I have all my life received assistance and friendship, and to whom, I confess, I have not rendered the like, or acted as I should and might have done. But, basta! I will make amends, please God! Know, Monsieur, that ever since I mingled with the world I have learned to know it, and to see, not only the elevation of fortunes but their decline and fall; and that a man attains to a certain point of felicity, after which he descends or falls headlong, according to the height which he has reached. If you did not know the meanness of my origin, I should endeavour to disguise it from you; but you saw me in Florence, debauched, dissolute; sometimes in prison, sometimes banished, and always plunged in a disorderly and evil course of life. I was born a gentleman and of good parentage; but when I came to France, I had not a sou and owed 8,000 crowns. My marriage and the favour of the Queen gave me great influence during the lifetime of the late King, and brought me much wealth, advancement, charges and honours during the regency of the Queen; and I laboured to second and push on Fortune as much as any man could have done, so long as I perceived that she was favourable. But when I recognised that she was ceasing to favour me, and that she was giving me warnings of her departure and her flight, I resolved to make an honourable retreat and to enjoy in peace, with my wife, the great riches which the liberality of the Queen had bestowed upon us or our own industry had acquired. For which reason, for some months past, I have importuned my wife in vain, and at every blow I receive from Fortune I renew my entreaties. When I saw that a powerful party had arisen in France which had taken me for the pretext for its revolt, and had proclaimed me one of the five tyrants whom it was seeking to destroy;[114] when M. Dolet, who was my creature,[115] my counsellor, my trusted friend, and, I may say, my servant, died; when an infamous shoemaker of Paris put an affront upon me—upon me, a marshal of France!—when I was forced to quit my establishments in Picardy and my citadel of Amiens, and to leave Ancre as a prey to M. de Longueville, my enemy; when I was compelled to retire, or rather to fly, into Normandy, I represented to my wife that amongst the great obligations we owed to God, that of warning us to retreat was not the least. We have seen since then our house sacked, with the loss of more than 200,000 crowns; and we have seen two of our people hanged before our faces for having given, as we ordered them, a beating to that scoundrel of a shoemaker. What had we to wait for but the death of my daughter to warn us that our ruin is at hand, but that there is yet the chance to escape, if we resolve promptly to seek a retreat. For this I have provided by offering the Pope 600,000 crowns for the usufruct during our lives of the duchy of Ferrara, where we might have passed the remainder of our days in peace and have still left two millions in gold to our children. And this I will make apparent to you. We have real property to the value of at least a million livres in France: in the marquisate of Ancre, Lesigny, my house in the Faubourg (Saint-Germain) and this one. I have redeemed our estate at Florence, which was mortgaged, and my share in it is worth 100,000 crowns. I have a million livres besides, even after the pillage of our house, in furniture, jewels, plate and money. My wife and I have also appointments which will sell for a million livres at a fair valuation, in those of Normandy, First Gentleman of the Chamber, Intendant of the Queen’s Household, and dame d’atours, retaining my office of marshal of France. I have 600,000 crowns invested with Fedeau,[116] and more than 100,000 pistoles in other concerns. Might we not, Monsieur, be content with this? Have we anything further to wish for, if we do not desire to offend God, Who is warning us by such evident signs of our entire ruin? I have been all the afternoon with my wife imploring her to retire; I have been on my knees before her, seeking to persuade her the more effectively. But she is more determined than ever to remain, and reproaches me with wishing to abandon the Queen, who has given us, or enabled us to acquire, so many honours and so much wealth. Monsieur, I see myself so irremediably ruined that, if I were not, as everyone knows, under such great obligations to my wife, I would leave her and go where neither the nobles nor the people of France would come to seek me. Judge, Monsieur, whether I have not reason for my distress, and whether, apart from the loss of my daughter, the approach of this second disaster ought not to torment me doubly.’
“I said what I could to console him and divert him from these thoughts,” concludes Bassompierre, “and withdrew. I wish to show from this discourse how men, especially those whom Fortune has elevated, have inspirations and forebodings of disaster, without possessing the resolution to prevent or escape it.”
Concini’s despondency passed as quickly as it had come, and scarcely was his daughter in her grave, than he was once more flaunting his wealth and his power in the faces of Court and town. No Prince of the Blood had ever gone abroad attended by a more numerous or more gorgeous retinue; his pride was so great that he scarcely deigned to notice the existence of any but the great nobles; while, as for the Ministers, he regarded them as his servants, and not finding them sufficiently docile, planned to replace them by creatures of his own. Marie de’ Medici herself began to grow weary of the presumption of the husband and the ill-humour of the wife, who appears to have been a martyr to neuralgia, and often treated her mistress in a manner against which even the Queen-Mother’s sluggish nature rebelled. At length, she suggested the advisability of the precious pair returning to Florence with the spoil which they had amassed; but Concini wished to tempt Fortune to the end.
Fortune, however, might have smiled on him for some time longer, if only he had possessed sufficient foresight to assure himself of the affection of the young King. Unhappily for him, he had done just the contrary. On his advice, the Queen-Mother had pursued towards Louis XIII much the same policy which Catherine de’ Medici had adopted in the case of Charles IX, and carefully kept at a distance from her son all those whom she considered might attempt to inspire him with a thought of ambition. But, less astute than Catherine, Marie had seen no reason to distrust a Provençal gentleman, Charles Albert, Seigneur de Luynes, twenty-three years older than the King, who excelled in the training of hawks and falcons. Falconry was a sport in which Louis XIII delighted above all others, and he soon became so much attached to Luynes that his gouverneur Souvré grew jealous and forbade the latter to enter the King’s chamber. Héroard, Louis XIII’s first physician, relates in his curious Journal that the lad was overcome by grief and indignation on learning of this; begged his mother to dismiss Souvré, and “from excess of anger, had five days of fever.” From “Master of the birds of the Cabinet” the young King made his favourite chief of his gentlemen-in-ordinary, and in 1615 gave him the government of Amboise.
Notwithstanding that her son had now, according to the laws of France, attained his majority, Marie de’ Medici excluded him from Councils and all discussion of State affairs, and forbade the Ministers and Counsellors of State even to speak to him, on the ground that his Majesty’s health was too delicate for him to be troubled with the cares of his realm. As he grew older, the Queen-Mother and Concini watched him more closely, and, fearing lest he might escape from them, no longer allowed him to visit Saint-Germain or Fontainebleau, on the pretext that, in the disturbed condition of the country, it was unsafe for the King to leave Paris. For some months past, therefore, the unfortunate youth, who was passionately fond of hunting, had been deprived of his favourite amusement, and had found himself reduced to a walk in the Tuileries, where he might often be seen watching the gardeners at their work and sometimes helping them.
Often the Maréchal d’Ancre, escorted by two or three hundred gentlemen, passed through the courtyard of the Louvre, on his way to or from the Queen-Mother’s apartments, before the eyes of his sovereign, who was generally accompanied only by Luynes and a few valets; and the young monarch, who was not without a sense of his kingly dignity, was shocked that a subject should venture to parade his ill-gotten wealth in this fashion in his own palace. For, thanks to Luynes, he was by this time perfectly well-informed as to the source of Concini’s riches. He himself was habitually kept short of money, and, on one occasion, was unable to obtain a sum of 2,000 crowns from the Treasury, the Queen-Mother having given orders that it was to be refused him. And, to complete his humiliation, Concini offered to advance him the money. The parvenu boasted of having raised at his own expense a force of 6,000 Liégeois for service against the Princes, and wrote to the King begging him not to trouble about the expense which he had incurred for his Majesty’s service—as though his vast fortune was not entirely composed of the money of him he was pretending to oblige.[117]
It seems strange that Marie de’ Medici and Concini, so careful to keep away from the King everyone whom they considered might encourage him to assert his independence of his mother’s tutelage, should have for so long entertained no suspicion of Luynes. At length, however, their eyes began to be opened, and one day towards the end of January, 1617, Luynes sent one of his servants to Bassompierre to inform him that the Queen-Mother purposed to exile him (Luynes) from the Court, on the ground that “he wished to carry off the King and take him out of Paris,” and to ask for his good offices to disabuse her Majesty’s mind. These were unnecessary, as it proved to be merely a rumour; but “Luynes made the King believe that it was the Maréchal d’Ancre who had spread this report, to see how the King would take it; whereby the King became more and more incensed against the Maréchal d’Ancre, and high words passed between Luynes and the said marshal.”
“The same evening,” continues Bassompierre, “as the Queen was speaking to me about this matter, I said to her: ‘Madame, it seems to me that you do not think enough of yourself, and that, one of these days, they will take away the King from under your wing. They are inciting him against your creatures first, and afterwards they will incite him against you. Your authority is only precarious, which will cease from the moment that the King no longer desires it, and they will harden him little by little until he does not desire it any more. And it is easy to persuade young people to emancipate themselves. If the King were to go, one of these days, to Saint-Germain, and were to order M. d’Épernon and myself to come there to him, and then told us that we were no longer to recognise your authority, we are your very obliged servants, but we should be unable to do any other thing than to come and bid you farewell, and to beg you very humbly to excuse us, if, during your administration of the State, we had not served you as well as we ought to have done. Judge, Madame,” I continued, “whether the other officers would be able to act otherwise, and whether you would not be left with empty hands after such an administration.”
CHAPTER XVII
Bassompierre joins the Royal army in Champagne as Grand Master of the Artillery by commission—Surrender of Château-Porcien—Bassompierre is wounded before Rethel—He sets out for Paris in order to negotiate the sale of his office of Colonel-General of the Swiss to Concini—He visits the Royal army which is besieging Soissons—A foolhardy act—Singular conduct of the garrison—The Président Chevret arrives in the Royal camp with the news that Concini has been assassinated—Details of this affair—Bassompierre continues his journey to Paris—His adventure with the Liégeois cavalry of Concini.
About the middle of March, Bassompierre was sent as Grand Master of the Artillery by commission to join the army of Champagne, commanded by the Duc de Guise, who had as his second in command the Maréchal de Thémines, while Praslin was also serving under him. He found the army laying siege to Château-Porcien, situated on the right bank of the Aisne, two leagues from Rethel. Nevers, who was Governor of Champagne and Brie and Duc de Rethelois, occupied, in virtue of this double title, several places in that part of the country, and their reduction was the chief object of the campaign.
Guise bombarded the citadel of Château-Porcien for some days with little effect; but when he turned his guns on the town, it speedily surrendered; and Bassompierre, with four companies of the French Guards and as many of the Swiss, marched in and took possession. In the course of the day the commandant of the citadel sent to ask for a parley, and was conducted by Bassompierre to Guise’s quarters, where, after a lively discussion as to whether or not the garrison were to be permitted to march out with the honours of war, terms were arranged, and next morning the citadel capitulated.
After Guise, with a part of his cavalry, had made an unsuccessful attempt to surprise an infantry regiment of the enemy quartered in a village near Laon, and the Château of Wassigny had been taken, Thémines was despatched to Rocroi to dismantle and bring up six of the guns from that fortress; and on April 8 the army advanced to Rethel and laid siege to it.
Here Bassompierre’s troubles began; and artillery officers who served during the late war in that part of France under similar climatic conditions will appreciate the difficulties with which he had to contend.