3: Chapter III (1610)
<< 2: Chapter II (1609-10) || 4: Chapter IV (1610) >>
It was in the latter part of the Carnival, the Saturday night preceding
Shrove Tuesday, 1610. The winter had been a rigorous one in Brussels,
and the snow lay in drifts three feet deep in the streets. Within and
about the splendid palace of Nassau there was much commotion. Lights and
flambeaux were glancing, loud voices, martial music, discharge of pistols
and even of artillery were heard together with the trampling of many
feet, but there was nothing much resembling the wild revelry or cheerful
mummery of that holiday season. A throng of the great nobles of Belgium
with drawn swords and menacing aspect were assembled in the chief
apartments, a detachment of the Archduke's mounted body-guard was
stationed in the courtyard, and five hundred halberdiers of the burgher
guilds kept watch and ward about the palace.
The Prince of Conde, a square-built, athletic young man of middle
stature, with regular features, but a sulky expression, deepened at
this moment into ferocity, was seen chasing the secretary of the French
resident minister out of the courtyard, thwacking him lustily about the
shoulders with his drawn sword, and threatening to kill him or any other
Frenchman on the spot, should he show himself in that palace. He was
heard shouting rather than speaking, in furious language against the
King, against Coeuvres, against Berny, and bitterly bewailing his
misfortunes, as if his wife were already in Paris instead of Brussels.
Upstairs in her own apartment which she had kept for some days on pretext
of illness sat the Princess Margaret, in company' of Madame de Berny,
wife of the French minister, and of the Marquis de Coeuvres, Henry's
special envoy, and a few other Frenchmen. She was passionately fond of
dancing. The adoring cardinal described her as marvellously graceful and
perfect in that accomplishment. She had begged her other adorer, the
Marquis Spinola, "with sweetest words," that she might remain a few days
longer in the Nassau Palace before removing to the Archduke's residence,
and that the great general, according to the custom in France and
Flanders, would be the one to present her with the violins. But Spinola,
knowing the artifice concealed beneath these "sweetest words," had
summoned up valour enough to resist her blandishments, and had refused a
second entertainment.
It was not, therefore, the disappointment at losing her ball that now
made the Princess sad. She and her companions saw that there had been
a catastrophe; a plot discovered. There was bitter disappointment and
deep dismay upon their faces. The plot had been an excellent one. De
Coeuvres had arranged it all, especially instigated thereto by the father
of the Princess acting in concurrence with the King. That night when all
was expected to be in accustomed quiet, the Princess, wrapped in her
mantilla, was to have stolen down into the garden, accompanied only by
her maid the adventurous and faithful Philipotte, to have gone through a
breach which led through a garden wall to the city ramparts, thence
across the foss to the counterscarp, where a number of horsemen under
trustworthy commanders were waiting. Mounting on the crupper behind one
of the officers of the escort, she was then to fly to the frontier,
relays of horses having been provided at every stage until she should
reach Rocroy, the first pausing place within French territory; a perilous
adventure for the young and delicate Princess in a winter of almost
unexampled severity.
On the very morning of the day assigned for the adventure, despatches
brought by special couriers from the Nuncius and the Spanish ambassador
at Paris gave notice of the plot to the Archdukes and to Conde, although
up to that moment none knew of it in Brussels. Albert, having been
apprised that many Frenchmen had been arriving during the past few days,
and swarming about the hostelries of the city and suburbs, was at once
disposed to believe in the story. When Conde came to him, therefore,
with confirmation from his own letters, and demanding a detachment of the
body-guard in addition to the burgher militiamen already granted by the
magistrates, he made no difficulty granting the request. It was as if
there had been a threatened assault of the city, rather than the
attempted elopement of a young lady escorted by a handful of cavaliers.
The courtyard of the Nassau Palace was filled with cavalry sent by the
Archduke, while five hundred burgher guards sent by the magistrates were
drawn up around the gate. The noise and uproar, gaining at every moment
more mysterious meaning by the darkness of night, soon spread through the
city. The whole population was awake, and swarming through the streets.
Such a tumult had not for years been witnessed in Brussels, and the
rumour flew about and was generally believed that the King of France at
the head of an army was at the gates of the city determined to carry off
the Princess by force. But although the superfluous and very scandalous
explosion might have been prevented, there could be no doubt that the
stratagem had been defeated.
Nevertheless, the effrontery and ingenuity of de Coeuvres became now
sublime. Accompanied by his colleague, the resident minister, de Berny,
who was sure not to betray the secret because he had never known it--his
wife alone having been in the confidence of the Princess--he proceeded
straightway to the Archduke's palace, and, late in the night as it was,
insisted on an audience.
Here putting on his boldest face when admitted to the presence, he
complained loudly of the plot, of which he had just become aware,
contrived by the Prince of Conde to carry off his wife to Spain against
her will, by main force, and by assistance of Flemish nobles, archiducal
body-guard, and burgher militia.
It was all a plot of Conde, he said, to palliate still more his flight
from France. Every one knew that the Princess could not fly back to
Paris through the air. To take her out of a house filled with people,
to pierce or scale the walls of the city, to arrange her journey by
ordinary means, and to protect the whole route by stations of cavalry,
reaching from Brussels to the frontier, and to do all this in profound
secrecy, was equally impossible. Such a scheme had never been arranged
nor even imagined, he said. The true plotter was Conde, aided by
ministers in Flanders hostile to France, and as the honour of the King
and the reputation of the Princess had been injured by this scandal, the
Ambassador loudly demanded a thorough investigation of the affair in
order that vengeance might fall where it was due.
The prudent Albert was equal to the occasion. Not wishing to state the
full knowledge which he possessed of de Coeuvres' agency and the King's
complicity in the scheme of abduction to France, he reasoned calmly with
the excited marquis, while his colleague looked and listened in dumb
amazement, having previously been more vociferous and infinitely more
sincere than his colleague in expressions of indignation.
The Archduke said that he had not thought the plot imputed to the King
and his ambassador very probable. Nevertheless, the assertions of the
Prince had been so positive as to make it impossible to refuse the guards
requested by him. He trusted, however, that the truth would soon be
known, and that it would leave no stain on the Princess, nor give any
offence to the King.
Surprised and indignant at the turn given to the adventure by the French
envoys, he nevertheless took care to conceal these sentiments, to abstain
from accusation, and calmly to inform them that the Princess next morning
would be established under his own roof; and enjoy the protection of the
Archduchess.
For it had been arranged several days before that Margaret should leave
the palace of Nassau for that of Albert and Isabella on the 14th, and the
abduction had been fixed for the night of the 13th precisely because the
conspirators wished to profit by the confusion incident on a change of
domicile.
The irrepressible de Coeuvres, even then hardly willing to give up the
whole stratagem as lost, was at least determined to discover how and by
whom the plot had been revealed. In a cemetery piled three feet deep
with snow on the evening following that mid-winter's night which had been
fixed for the Princess's flight, the unfortunate ambassador waited until
a certain Vallobre, a gentleman of Spinola's, who was the go-between of
the enamoured Genoese and the Princess, but whom de Coeuvres had gained
over, came at last to meet him by appointment. When he arrived, it was
only to inform him of the manner in which he had been baffled, to
convince him that the game was up, and that nothing was left him but to
retreat utterly foiled in his attempt, and to be stigmatized as a
blockhead by his enraged sovereign.
Next day the Princess removed her residence to the palace of the
Archdukes, where she was treated with distinguished honour by Isabella,
and installed ceremoniously in the most stately, the most virtuous, and
the most dismal of courts. Her father and aunt professed themselves as
highly pleased with the result, and Pecquius wrote that "they were glad
to know her safe from the importunities of the old fop who seemed as mad
as if he had been stung by a tarantula."
And how had the plot been revealed? Simply through the incorrigible
garrulity of the King himself. Apprised of the arrangement in all its
details by the Constable, who had first received the special couriers of
de Coeuvres, he could not keep the secret to himself for a moment, and
the person of all others in the world to whom he thought good to confide
it was the Queen herself. She received the information with a smile, but
straightway sent for the Nuncius Ubaldini, who at her desire instantly
despatched a special courier to Spinola with full particulars of the time
and mode of the proposed abduction.
Nevertheless the ingenuous Henry, confiding in the capacity of his deeply
offended queen to keep the secret which he had himself divulged, could
scarcely contain himself for joy.
Off he went to Saint-Germain with a train of coaches, impatient to get
the first news from de Coeuvres after the scheme should have been carried
into effect, and intending to travel post towards Flanders to meet and
welcome the Princess.
"Pleasant farce for Shrove Tuesday," wrote the secretary of Pecquius, "is
that which the Frenchmen have been arranging down there! He in whose
favour the abduction is to be made was seen going out the same day
spangled and smart, contrary to his usual fashion, making a gambado
towards Saint-Germain-en-Laye with four carriages and four to meet the
nymph."
Great was the King's wrath and mortification at this ridiculous exposure
of his detestable scheme. Vociferous were Villeroy's expressions of
Henry's indignation at being supposed to have had any knowledge of or
complicity in the affair. "His Majesty cannot approve of the means one
has taken to guard against a pretended plot for carrying off the
Princess," said the Secretary of State; "a fear which was simulated by
the Prince in order to defame the King." He added that there was no
reason to suspect the King, as he had never attempted anything of the
sort in his life, and that the Archduke might have removed the Princess
to his palace without sending an army to the hotel of the Prince of
Orange, and causing such an alarm in the city, firing artillery on the
rampart as if the town had been full of Frenchmen in arms, whereas one
was ashamed next morning to find that there had been but fifteen in all.
"But it was all Marquis Spinola's fault," he said, "who wished to show
himself off as a warrior."
The King, having thus through the mouth of his secretary of state warmly
protested against his supposed implication in the attempted abduction,
began as furiously to rail at de Coeuvres for its failure; telling the
Duc de Vendome that his uncle was an idiot, and writing that unlucky
envoy most abusive letters for blundering in the scheme which had been so
well concerted between them. Then he sent for Malherbe, who straightway
perpetrated more poems to express the King's despair, in which Henry was
made to liken himself to a skeleton with a dried skin, and likewise to a
violet turned up by the ploughshare and left to wither.
He kept up through Madame de Berny a correspondence with "his beautiful
angel," as he called the Princess, whom he chose to consider a prisoner
and a victim; while she, wearied to death with the frigid monotony and
sepulchral gaieties of the archiducal court, which she openly called her
"dungeon" diverted herself with the freaks and fantasies of her royal
adorer, called him in very ill-spelled letters "her chevalier, her heart,
her all the world," and frequently wrote to beg him, at the suggestion of
the intriguing Chateau Vert, to devise some means of rescuing her from
prison.
The Constable and Duchess meanwhile affected to be sufficiently satisfied
with the state of things. Conde, however, received a letter from the
King, formally summoning him to return to France, and, in case of
refusal, declaring him guilty of high-treason for leaving the kingdom
without the leave and against the express commands of the King. To this
letter, brought to him by de Coeuvres, the Prince replied by a paper,
drawn up and served by a notary of Brussels, to the effect that he had
left France to save his life and honour; that he was ready to return when
guarantees were given him for the security of both. He would live and
die, he said, faithful to the King. But when the King, departing from
the paths of justice, proceeded through those of violence against him, he
maintained that every such act against his person was null and invalid.
Henry had even the incredible meanness and folly to request the Queen to
write to the Archdukes, begging that the Princess might be restored to
assist at her coronation. Mary de' Medici vigorously replied once more
that, although obliged to wink at the King's amours, she declined to be
his procuress. Conde then went off to Milan very soon after the scene
at the Nassau Palace and the removal of the Princess to the care of the
Archdukes. He was very angry with his wife, from whom he expressed a
determination to be divorced, and furious with the King, the validity of
whose second marriage and the legitimacy of whose children he proposed
with Spanish help to dispute.
The Constable was in favour of the divorce, or pretended to be so, and
caused importunate letters to be written, which he signed, to both Albert
and Isabella, begging that his daughter might be restored to him to be
the staff of his old age, and likewise to be present at the Queen's
coronation. The Archdukes, however, resolutely refused to permit her to
leave their protection without Conde's consent, or until after a divorce
had been effected, notwithstanding that the father and aunt demanded it.
The Constable and Duchess however, acquiesced in the decision, and
expressed immense gratitude to Isabella.
"The father and aunt have been talking to Pecquius," said Henry very
dismally; "but they give me much pain. They are even colder than the
season, but my fire thaws them as soon as I approach."
"P. S.--I am so pining away in my anguish that I am nothing but skin and
bones. Nothing gives me pleasure. I fly from company, and if in order
to comply with the law of nations I go into some assembly or other,
instead of enlivening, it nearly kills me."--[Lettres missives de Henri
vii. 834].
And the King took to his bed. Whether from gout, fever, or the pangs of
disappointed love, he became seriously ill. Furious with every one, with
Conde, the Constable, de Coeuvres, the Queen, Spinola, with the Prince of
Orange, whose councillor Keeremans had been encouraging Conde in his
rebellion and in going to Spain with Spinola, he was now resolved that
tho war should go on. Aerssens, cautious of saying too much on paper of
this very delicate affair, always intimated to Barneveld that, if the
Princess could be restored, peace was still possible, and that by moving
an inch ahead of the King in the Cleve matter the States at the last
moment might be left in the lurch. He distinctly told the Advocate, on
his expressing a hope that Henry might consent to the Prince's residence
in some neutral place until a reconciliation could be effected, that the
pinch of the matter was not there, and that van der Myle, who knew all
about it, could easily explain it.
Alluding to the project of reviving the process against the Dowager, and
of divorcing the Prince and Princess, he said these steps would do much
harm, as they would too much justify the true cause of the retreat of the
Prince, who was not believed when he merely talked of his right of
primogeniture: "The matter weighs upon us very heavily," he said, "but
the trouble is that we don't search for the true remedies. The matter is
so delicate that I don't dare to discuss it to the very bottom."
The Ambassador had a long interview with the King as he lay in his bed
feverish and excited. He was more impatient than ever for the arrival
of the States' special embassy, reluctantly acquiesced in the reasons
assigned for the delay, but trusted that it would arrive soon with
Barneveld at the head, and with Count Lewis William as a member for
"the sword part of it."
He railed at the Prince of Orange, not believing that Keeremans would
have dared to do what he had done but with the orders of his master.
He said that the King of Spain would supply Conde with money and with
everything he wanted, knowing that he could make use of him to trouble
his kingdom. It was strange, he thought, that Philip should venture to
these extremities with his affairs in such condition, and when he had so
much need of repose. He recalled all his ancient grievances against
Spain, his rights to the Kingdom of Navarre and the County of St. Pol
violated; the conspiracy of Biron, the intrigues of Bouillon, the plots
of the Count of Auvergne and the Marchioness of Verneuil, the treason of
Meragne, the corruption of L'Hoste, and an infinity of other plots of the
King and his ministers; of deep injuries to him and to the public repose,
not to be tolerated by a mighty king like himself, with a grey beard. He
would be revenged, he said, for this last blow, and so for all the rest.
He would not leave a troublesome war on the hands of his young son. The
occasion was favourable. It was just to defend the oppressed princes
with the promptly accorded assistance of the States-General. The King of
Great Britain was favourable. The Duke of Savoy was pledged. It was
better to begin the war in his green old age than to wait the pleasure
and opportunity of the King of Spain.
All this he said while racked with fever, and dismissed the Envoy at
last, after a long interview, with these words: "Mr. Ambassador--I have
always spoken roundly and frankly to you, and you will one day be my
witness that I have done all that I could to draw the Prince out of the
plight into which he has put himself. But he is struggling for the
succession to this crown under instructions from the Spaniards, to whom
he has entirely pledged himself. He has already received 6000 crowns for
his equipment. I know that you and my other friends will work for the
conservation of this monarchy, and will never abandon me in my designs to
weaken the power of Spain. Pray God for my health."
The King kept his bed a few days afterwards, but soon recovered.
Villeroy sent word to Barneveld in answer to his suggestions of
reconciliation that it was too late, that Conde was entirely desperate
and Spanish. The crown of France was at stake, he said, and the Prince
was promising himself miracles and mountains with the aid of Spain,
loudly declaring the marriage of Mary de' Medici illegal, and himself
heir to the throne. The Secretary of State professed himself as
impatient as his master for the arrival of the embassy; the States being
the best friends France ever had and the only allies to make the war
succeed.
Jeannin, who was now never called to the council, said that the war was
not for Germany but for Conde, and that Henry could carry it on for eight
years. He too was most anxious for Barneveld's arrival, and was of his
opinion that it would have been better for Conde to be persuaded to
remain at Breda and be supported by his brother-in-law, the Prince of
Orange. The impetuosity of the King had however swept everything before
it, and Conde had been driven to declare himself Spanish and a pretender
to the crown. There was no issue now but war.
Boderie, the King's envoy in Great Britain, wrote that James would be
willing to make a defensive league for the affairs of Cleve and Julich
only, which was the slenderest amount of assistance; but Henry always
suspected Master Jacques of intentions to baulk him if possible and
traverse his designs. But the die was cast. Spinola had carried off
Conde in triumph; the Princess was pining in her gilt cage in Brussels,
and demanding a divorce for desertion and cruel treatment; the King
considered himself as having done as much as honour allowed him to effect
a reconciliation, and it was obvious that, as the States' ambassador
said, he could no longer retire from the war without shame, which would
be the greatest danger of all.
"The tragedy is ready to begin," said Aerssens. "They are only waiting
now for the arrival of our ambassadors."
On the 9th March the King before going to Fontainebleau for a few days
summoned that envoy to the Louvre. Impatient at a slight delay in his
arrival, Henry came down into the courtyard as he was arriving and asked
eagerly if Barneveld was coming to Paris. Aerssens replied, that the
Advocate had been hastening as much as possible the departure of the
special embassy, but that the condition of affairs at home was such as
not to permit him to leave the country at that moment. Van der Myle, who
would be one of the ambassadors, would more fully explain this by word of
mouth.
The King manifested infinite annoyance and disappointment that Barneveld
was not to make part of the embassy. "He says that he reposes such
singular confidence in your authority in the state, experience in
affairs, and affection for himself," wrote Aerssens, "that he might treat
with you in detail and with open heart of all his designs. He fears now
that the ambassadors will be limited in their powers and instructions,
and unable to reply at once on the articles which at different times have
been proposed to me for our enterprise. Thus much valuable time will be
wasted in sending backwards and forwards."
The King also expressed great anxiety to consult with Count Lewis William
in regard to military details, but his chief sorrow was in regard to the
Advocate. "He acquiesced only with deep displeasure and regret in your
reasons," said the Ambassador, "and says that he can hope for nothing
firm now that you refuse to come."
Villeroy intimated that Barneveld did not come for fear of exciting the
jealousy of the English.
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