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The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series

R >> Rafael Sabatini >> The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series




Thereafter Espinosa immediately shaved himself. But it was too
late, and even so, before many weeks were past his hair had faded
to its natural grey, and he presented the appearance of what in
fact he was--a man of sixty, or thereabouts.

Yet the torture to which he was presently submitted drew nothing from
him that could explain all that yet remained obscure. It was from
Frey Miguel, after a thousand prevarications and tergiversations,
that the full truth--known to himself alone--was extracted by the
rack.

He confessed that, inspired by the love of country and the ardent
desire to liberate Portugal from the Spanish yoke, he had never
abandoned the hope of achieving this, and of placing Don Antonio,
the Prior of Crato, on the throne of his ancestors. He had
devised a plan, primarily inspired by the ardent nature of the
Princess Anne and her impatience of the conventual life. It was
while casting about for the chief instrument that he fortuitously
met Espinosa in the streets of Madrigal. Espinosa had been a
soldier, and had seen the world. During the war between Spain and
Portugal he had served in the armies of King Philip, had
befriended Frey Miguel when the friar's convent was on the point
of being invaded by soldiery, and had rescued him from the peril
of it. Thus they had become acquainted, and Frey Miguel had had
an instance of the man's resource and courage. Further, he was of
the height of Don Sebastian and of the build to which the king
might have grown in the years that were sped, and he presented
other superficial resemblances to the late king. The colour of
his hair and beard could be corrected; and he might be made to
play the part of the Hidden Prince for whose return Portugal was
waiting so passionately and confidently. There had been other
impostors aforetime, but they had lacked the endowments of
Espinosa, and their origins could be traced without difficulty.
In addition to these natural endowments, Espinosa should be
avouched by Frey Miguel than whom nobody in the world was better
qualified in such a matter--and by the niece of King Philip, to
whom he would be married when he raised his standard. It was
arranged that the three should go to Paris so soon as the
arrangements were complete, where the Pretender would be
accredited by the exiled friends of Don Antonio residing there--
the Prior of Crato being a party to the plot. From France Frey
Miguel would have worked in Portugal through his agents, and
presently would have gone there himself to stir up a national
movement in favour of a pretender so fully accredited. Thus he
had every hope of restoring Portugal to her independence. Once
this should have been accomplished, Don Antonio would appear in
Lisbon, unmask the impostor, and himself assume the crown of the
kingdom which had been forcibly and definitely wrenched from
Spain.

That was the crafty plan which the priest had laid with a
singleness of aim and a detachment from minor considerations that
never hesitated to sacrifice the princess, together with the
chief instrument of the intrigue. Was the liberation of a
kingdom, the deliverance of a nation from servitude, the
happiness of a whole people, to weigh in the balance against the
fates of a natural daughter of Don John of Austria and a soldier
of fortune turned pastry-cook? Frey Miguel thought not, and his
plot might well have succeeded but for the base strain in
Espinosa and the man's overweening vanity, which had urged him to
dazzle the Gonzales at Valladolid. That vanity sustained him to
the end, which he suffered in October of 1595, a full year after
his arrest. To the last he avoided admissions that should throw
light upon his obscure identity and origin.

"If it were known who I am . . ." he would say, and there break
off.

He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and he endured his fate with
calm fortitude. Frey Miguel suffered in the same way with the
like dignity, after having undergone degradation from his
priestly dignity.

As for the unfortunate Princess Anne, crushed under a load of
shame and humiliation, she had gone to her punishment in the
previous July. The Apostolic Commissary notified her of the
sentence which King Philip had confirmed. She was to be
transferred to another convent, there to undergo a term of four
years' solitary confinement in her cell, and to fast on bread and
water every Friday. She was pronounced incapable of ever holding
any office, and was to be treated on the expiry of her term as an
ordinary nun, her civil list abolished, her title of Excellency
to be extinguished, together with all other honours and
privileges conferred upon her by King Philip.

The piteous letters of supplication that she addressed to the
King, her uncle, still exist. But they left the cold, implacable
Philip of Spain unmoved. Her only sin was that, yielding to the
hunger of her starved heart, and chafingunder the ascetic life
imposed upon her, she had allowed herself to be fascinated by the
prospect of becoming the protectress of one whom she believed to
be an unfortunate and romantic prince, and of exchanging her
convent for a throne.

Her punishment--poor soul--endured for close upon forty years,
but the most terrible part of it was not that which lay within
the prescription of King Philip, but that which arose from her
own broken and humiliated spirit. She had been uplifted a moment
by a glorious hope, to be cast down again into the blackest
despair, to which a shame unspeakable and a tortured pride were
added.

Than hers, as I have said, there is in history no sadder story.





V. THE END OF THE "VERT GALANT"

The Assassination of Henry IV



In the year 1609 died the last Duke of Cleves, and King Henry IV.
of France and Navarre fell in love with Charlotte de Montmorency.

In their conjunction these two events were to influence the
destinies of Europe. In themselves they were trivial enough,
since it was as much a commonplace that an old gentleman should
die as that Henry of Bearn should fall in love. Love had been the
main relaxation of his otherwise strenuous life, and neither the
advancing years--he was fifty-six at this date--nor the
recriminations of Maria de' Medici, his long-suffering Florentine
wife, sufficed to curb his zest.

Possibly there may have been a husband more unfaithful than King
Henry; probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous,
his taste in women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny
outnumbered that of his grandson, the English sultan Charles II.
He differs, however, from the latter in that he was not quite as
Oriental in the manner of his self-indulgence. Charles, by
comparison, was a mere dullard who turned Whitehall into a
seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the high
adventure, and knew how to be gallant in two senses.

This gallantry of his is not, perhaps, seen to best advantage in
the affair of Charlotte de Montmorency To begin with he was, as I
have said, in his fifty-sixth year, an age at which it is
difficult, without being ridiculous, to unbridle a passion for a
girl of twenty. Unfortunately for him, Charlotte does not appear
to have found him so. On the contrary, her lovely, empty head was
so turned by the flattery of his addresses, that she came to
reciprocate the passion she inspired.

Her family had proposed to marry her to the gay and witty Marshal
de Bassompierre; and although his heart was not at all engaged,
the marshal found the match extremely suitable, and was willing
enough, until the King declared himself. Henry used the most
impudent frankness.

"Bassompierre, I will speak to you as a friend," said he. "I am in
love, and desperately in love, with Mademoiselle de Montmorency.
If you should marry her I should hate you. If she should love me
you would hate me. A breach of our friendship would desolate me,
for I love you with sincere affection."

That was enough for Bassompierre. He had no mind to go further
with a marriage of convenience which in the sequel would most
probably give him to choose between assuming the ridiculous role
of a complacent husband and being involved in a feud with his
prince. 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."

Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in
Henry's mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been
less acute, no doubt because his vision was dazzled by the
prospect of a hundred thousand livres a year. So desperately poor
was he that for half that sum he would have taken Lucifer's own
daughter to wife, without stopping to consider the disadvantages
it might entail.

The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of
1609. Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last
precisely what was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against
it, but the Queen, too, was carefully instructed in the matter by
Concino Concini and his wife Leonora Galigai, the ambitious
adventurers who had come from Florence in her train, and who saw
in the King's weakness their own opportunity.

The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the
relations between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to
breaking-point. And then, whilst the trouble of Henry's own
making was growing about him until it threatened to overwhelm
him, he received a letter from Vaucelas, his ambassador at
Madrid, containing revelations that changed his annoyance into
stark apprehension.

When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, "leaving
all the world his heirs"--to use Henry's own phrase--the Emperor
had stepped in, and over-riding the rights of certain German
princes had bestowed the fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke
Leopold. Now this was an arrangement that did not suit Henry's
policy at all, and being then--as the result of a wise husbanding
of resources--the most powerful prince in Europe, Henry was not
likely to submit tamely to arrangements that did not suit him.
His instructions to Vaucelas were to keep open the difference
between France and the House of Austria arising out of this
matter of Cleves. All Europe knew that Henry desired to marry the
Dauphin to the heiress of Lorraine, so that this State might one
day be united with France; and it was partly to support this
claim that he was now disposed to attach the German princes to
his interests.

Yet what Vaucelas told him in that letter was that certain agents
at the court of Spain, chief among whom was the Florentine
ambassador, acting upon instructions from certain members of the
household of the Queen of France, and from others whom Vaucelas
said he dared not mention, were intriguing to blast Henry's
designs against the house of Austria, and to bring him willy-
nilly into a union with Spain. These agents had gone so far in
their utter disregard of Henry's own intentions as to propose to
the Council of Madrid that the alliance should be cemented by a
marriage between the Dauphin and the Infanta.

That letter sent Henry early one morning hot-foot to the Arsenal,
where Sully, his Minister of State, had his residence. Maximilien
de Bethune, Duke of Sully, was not merely the King's servant, he
was his closest friend, the very keeper of his soul; and the King
leaned upon him and sought his guidance not only in State affairs,
but in the most intimate and domestic matters. Often already had
it fallen to Sully to patch up the differences created between
husband and wife by Henry's persistent infidelities.

The King, arriving like the whirlwind, turned everybody out of
the closet in which the duke--but newly risen--received him in
bed-gown and night-cap. Alone with his minister, Henry came
abruptly to the matter.

"You have heard what is being said of me?" he burst out. He stood
with his back to the window, a sturdy, erect, soldierly figure, a
little above the middle height, dressed like a captain of fortune
in jerkin and long boots of grey leather, and a grey hat with a
wine-coloured ostrich plume. His countenance matched his raiment.
Keeneyed, broad of brow, with a high-bridged, pendulous nose, red
lips, a tuft of beard and a pair of grizzled, bristling
moustachios, he looked half-hero, half-satyr; half-Captain, half-
Polichinelle.

Sully, tall and broad, the incarnation of respectability and
dignity, despite bed-gown and slippers and the nightcap covering
his high, bald crown, made no presence of misunderstanding him.

"Of you and the Princesse de Conde, you mean, sire?" quoth he,
and gravely he shook his head. "It is a matter that has filled me
with apprehension, for I foresee from it far greater trouble than
from any former attachment of yours."

"So they have convinced you, too, Grand-Master?" Henry's tone was
almost sorrowful. "Yet I swear that all is greatly exaggerated.
It is the work of that dog Concini. Ventre St. Gris! If he has no
respect for me, at least he might consider how he slanders a
child of such grace and wit and beauty, a lady of her high birth
and noble lineage."

There was a dangerous quiver of emotion in his voice that was not
missed by the keen ears of Sully. Henry moved from the window,
and flung into a chair.

"Concini works to enrage the Queen against me, and to drive her
to take violent resolutions which might give colour to their
pernicious designs."

"Sire!" It was a cry of protest from Sully.

Henry laughed grimly at his minister's incredulity, and plucked
forth the letter from Vaucelas.

"Read that."

Sully read, and, aghast at what the letter told him, ejaculated:
"They must be mad!"

"Oh, no," said the King. "They are not mad. They are most wickedly
sane, which is why their designs fill me with apprehension. What
do you infer, Grand-Master, from such deliberate plots against
resolutions from which they know that nothing can turn me while
I have life?"

"What can I infer?" quoth Sully, aghast.

"In acting thus--in daring to act thus," the King expounded,
"they proceed as if they knew that I can have but a short time to
live."

"Sire!"

"What else? They plan events which cannot take place until I am
dead."

Sully stared at his master for a long moment, in stupefied
silence, his loyal Huguenot soul refusing to discount by flattery
the truth that he perceived.

"Sire," he said at last, bowing his fine head, "you must take
your measures."

"Ay, but against whom? Who are these that Vaucelas says he dare
not name? Can you suggest another than . . ." He paused,
shrinking in horror from completing the utterance of his thought.
Then, with an abrupt gesture, he went on, ". . . than the Queen
herself?"

Sully quietly placed the letter on the table, and sat down. He
took his chin in his hand and looked squarely across at Henry.

"Sire, you have brought this upon yourself. You have exasperated
her Majesty; you have driven her in despair to seek and act upon
the councils of this scoundrel Concini. There never was an
attachment of yours that did not beget trouble with the Queen,
but never such trouble as I have been foreseeing from your
attachment to the Princess of Conde. Sire, will you not consider
where you stand?"

"They are lies, I tell you," Henry stormed. But Sully the
uncompromising gravely shook his head. "At least," Henry amended,
"they are gross exaggerations. Oh, I confess to you, my friend,
that I am sick with love of her. Day and night I see nothing but
her gracious image. I sigh and fret and fume like any callow lad
of twenty. I suffer the tortures of the damned. And yet . . . and
yet, I swear to you, Sully, that I will curb this passion though
it kill me. I will stifle these fires, though they consume my
soul to ashes. No harm shall come to her from me. No harm has
come yet. I swear it. These stories that are put about are the
inventions of Concini to set my wife against me. Do you know how
far he and his wife have dared to go? They have persuaded the
Queen to eat nothing that is not prepared in the kitchen they
have set up for her in their own apartments. What can you
conclude from that but that they suggest that I desire to poison
her?"

"Why suffer it, sire?" quoth Sully gravely. "Send the pair
packing back to Florence, and so be rid of them."

Henry rose in agitation. "I have a mind to. Ventre St. Gris! I
have a mind to. Yes, it is the only thing. You can manage it,
Sully. Disabuse her mind of her Suspicions regarding the Princess
of Conde; make my peace with her; convince her of my sincerity,
of my firm intention to have done with gallantry, so that she on
her side will make me the sacrifice of banishing the Concinis.
You will do this, my friend?"

It was no less than Sully had been expecting from past
experience, and the task was one in which he was by now well-
practiced; but the situation had never before been quite so
difficult. He rose.

"Why, surely, sire," said he. "But her Majesty on her side may
require something more to reconcile her to the sacrifice. She may
reopen the question of her coronation so long and--in her view--
so unreasonably postponed."

Henry's face grew overcast, his brows knit. "I have always had an
instinct against it, as you know, Grand Master," said he, "and
this instinct is strengthened by what that letter has taught me.
If she will dare so much, having so little real power, what might
she not do if . . ." He broke off, and fell to musing. "If she
demands it we must yield, I suppose," he said at length. "But
give her to understand that if I discover any more of her designs
with Spain I shall be provoked to the last degree against her.
And as an antidote to these machinations at Madrid you may
publish my intention to uphold the claims of the German Princes
in the matter of Cleves, and let all the world know that we are
arming to that end."

He may have thought--as was long afterwards alleged--that the
threat itself should be sufficient, for there was at that time no
power in Europe that could have stood against his armies in the
field.

On that they parted, with a final injunction from Sully that
Henry should see the Princesse de Conde no more.

"I swear to you, Grand Master, that I will use restraint and
respect the sacred tie I formed between my nephew and Charlotte
solely so that I might impose silence upon my own passion."

And the good Sully writes in comment upon this: "I should have
relied absolutely upon these assurances had I not known how easy
it is for a heart tender and passionate as was his to deceive
itself"--which is the most amiable conceivable way of saying that
he attached not the slightest faith to the King's promise.

Nevertheless he went about the task of making the peace between
the royal couple with all the skill and tact that experience had
taught him; and he might have driven a good bargain on his
master's behalf but for his master's own weakness in supporting
him. Maria de' Medici would not hear of the banishment of the
Concinis, to whom she was so deeply attached. She insisted with
perfect justice that she was a bitterly injured woman, and
refused to entertain any idea of reconciliation save with the
condition that arrangements for her coronation as Queen of
France--which was no more than her due--should be made at once,
and that the King should give an undertaking not to make himself
ridiculous any longer by his pursuit of the Princess of Conde. Of
the matters contained in the letter of Vaucelas she denied all
knowledge, nor would suffer any further inquisition.

From Henry's point of view this was anything but satisfactory.
But he yielded. Conscience made a coward of him. He had wronged
her so much in one way that he must make some compensating
concessions to her in another. This weakness was part of his
mental attitude towards her, which swung constantly between
confidence and diffidence, esteem and indifference, affection and
coldness; at times he inclined to put her from him entirely; at
others he opined that no one on his Council was more capable of
the administration of affairs. Even in the indignation aroused
by the proof he held of her disloyalty, he was too just not to
admit the provocation he had given her. So he submitted to a
reconciliation on her own terms, and pledged himself to renounce
Charlotte. We have no right to assume from the sequel that he was
not sincere in the intention.

By the following May events proved the accuracy of Sully's
judgment. The court was at Fontainebleau when the last bulwark of
Henry's prudence was battered down by the vanity of that lovely
fool, Charlotte, who must be encouraging her royal lover to
resume his flattering homage. But both appear to have reckoned
without the lady's husband.

Henry presented Charlotte with jewels to the value of eighteen
thousand livres, purchased from Messier, the jeweller of the Pont
au Change; and you conceive what the charitable ladies of the
Court had to say about it. At the first hint of scandal Monsieur
de Conde put himself into a fine heat, and said things which
pained and annoyed the King exceedingly. Henry had amassed a
considerable and varied experience of jealous husbands in his
time; but he had never met one quite so intolerable as this
nephew of his. He complained of it in a letter to Sully.

"My friend,--Monsieur the Prince is here, but he acts like a man
possessed. You will be angry and ashamed at the things he says of
me. I shall end by losing all patience with him. In the meanwhile
I am obliged to taut to him with severity."

More severe than any talk was Henry's instruction to Sully to
withhold payment of the last quarter of the prince's allowance,
and to give refusals to his creditors and purveyors. Thus he
intended also, no doubt, to make it clear to Conde that he did
not receive a pension of a hundred thousand livres a year for
nothing.

"If this does not keep him in bounds," Henry concluded, "we must
think of some other method, for he says the most injurious things
of me."

So little did it keep the prince in bounds--as Henry understood
the phrase--that he immediately packed his belongings, and
carried his wife off to his country house. It was quite in vain
that Henry wrote to him representing that this conduct was
dishonouring to them both, and that the only place for a prince
of the blood was the court of his sovereign.

The end of it all was that the reckless and romantic Henry took
to night-prowling about the grounds of Conde's chateau. In the
disguise of a peasant you see his Majesty of France and Navarre,
whose will was law in Europe, shivering behind damp hedges,
ankle-deep in wet grass, spending long hours in love-lore,
ecstatic contemplation of her lighted window, and all--so far as
we can gather--for no other result than the aggravation of
certain rheumatic troubles which should have reminded him that he
was no longer of an age to pursue these amorous pernoctations.

But where his stiffening joints failed, the Queen succeeded.
Henry had been spied upon, of course, as he always was when he
strayed from the path of matrimonial rectitude. The Concinis saw
to that. And when they judged the season ripe, they put her
Majesty in possession of the facts. So inflamed was she by this
fresh breach of trust that war was declared anew between the
royal couple, and the best that Sully's wit and labours could now
accomplish was a sort of armed truce.

And then at last in the following November the Prince de Conde
took the desperate resolve of quitting France with his wife,
without troubling--as was his duty--to obtain the King's consent.
On the last night of that month, as Henry was at cards in the
Louvre, the Chevalier du Guet brought him the news of the
prince's flight.

"I never in my life," says Bassompierre, who was present, "saw a
man so distracted or in so violent a passion."

He flung down his cards, and rose, sending his chair crashing
over behind him. "I am undone!" was his cry. "Undone! This madman
has carried off his wife--perhaps to kill her." White and
shaking, he turned to Bassompierre. "Take care of my money," he
bade him, "and go on with the game."

He lurched out of the room, and dispatched a messenger to the
Arsenal to fetch M. de Sully. Sully obeyed the summons and came
at once, but in an extremely bad temper, for it was late at
night, and he was overburdened with work.

He found the King in the Queen's chamber, walking backward and
forward, his head sunk upon his breast, his hands clenched behind
him. The Queen, a squarely-built, square-faced woman, sat apart,
attended by a few of her ladies and one or two gentlemen of her
train. Her countenance was set and inscrutable, and her brooding
eyes were fixed upon the King.

"Ha, Grand Master!" was Henry's greeting, his voice harsh and
strained. "What do you say to this? What is to be done now?"

"Nothing at all, sire," says Sully, as calm as his master was
excited.

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