CHAPTER VIII
Departure of Anjou for Poland—Condé, compromised in the conspiracy of the “Politiques,” escapes to Strasbourg, where he reverts to the Protestant faith—Death of Charles IX., who is succeeded by the King of Poland—Flight of the new King from Cracow—Death of the Princesse de Condé: extravagant grief of Henry III.—Condé invades France at the head of an army of German mercenaries—The “Paix de Monsieur”—Condé endeavours to establish himself in the West of France—Formation of the League and renewal of the civil war—Condé refuses the hand of Mlle. de Vaudémont, Henry III.’s sister-in-law—His second Odyssey—He commands the Huguenot forces in Poitou and Saintonge—He proposes for the hand of Charlotte Catherine de la Trémoille—Letter of Mlle. de la Trémoille to the prince—He visits her at the Château of Taillebourg—Disastrous expedition of Condé against Angers—He is obliged to take refuge in Guernsey.
The Court escorted the King of Poland as far as La Fère, Condé accompanying it. On taking leave of the Prince, his Majesty informed him that he had obtained for him the restoration of his government of Picardy and permission to proceed thither whenever he wished. This pretended favour was really a precautionary measure, for fresh troubles were brewing, and Catherine desired to separate Condé and the King of Navarre, and deprive the latter, who was erroneously believed to be as vacillating as his father, of the support and advice of his kinsman. However, Condé was well-pleased to turn his back on the Court, where he had suffered so many humiliations, and at the end of the autumn he set out for Amiens.
The Massacre of St. Bartholomew had been not only a crime, but a blunder of the most fatal kind. It had shocked and horrified the moderate Catholic party—the “Politiques” as they had now begun to be called—and convinced their leaders, the Montmorencies, that the Queen-Mother intended their ruin after that of the Bourbons and the Châtillons. The result was a rapprochement between the “Politiques” and the Huguenots, which, by the beginning of 1574, had developed into a vast conspiracy enveloping nearly the whole of France. Its secret head was Catherine’s youngest son, the ambitious and treacherous François, Duc d’Alençon, who had long chafed under the subjection to which his brother’s dislike and his mother’s indifference had relegated him, and was determined to assert himself at all hazards.
The plans of the conspirators were carefully laid. At the end of February, risings were to take place simultaneously in Normandy, Picardy, Champagne, Poitou, Dauphiné, Guienne, and Languedoc; while a bold Huguenot chief, the Sieur de Guitry-Bertichères, with several hundred men, was to force the gates of the Château of Saint-Germain, where the Court was then residing, and carry off Alençon and the King of Navarre, who would at once put themselves at the head of the rebels.
Unfortunately for them, Guitry’s enterprise, on which the success of the whole movement hinged, failed through his own precipitation. Owing to some misunderstanding, he anticipated the day, and appeared with his men in the environs of Saint-Germain some time before he was expected. Catherine’s suspicions were at once aroused, and her remarkable skill in unravelling the tangled threads of even the most complicated intrigues soon placed her in possession of the whole plot. In the early hours of the following morning (23–24 February), she hurried the Court off to Paris. Charles IX., travelling in a litter, surrounded by the Swiss in battle-array, as during the retreat from Meaux, while she herself followed in her coach with Navarre and Alençon, whom she was determined not to allow out of her sight.
Meanwhile, the rebels had risen in arms and issued a manifesto demanding various reforms, though it was obvious that these were only a cloak for their real intentions, and that, should the rising prove successful, its effect would be to deprive the King of Poland of the succession to the throne, which must speedily become vacant, in favour of the more accommodating Alençon. Catherine, however, invested with full powers by the illness of the King, took prompt and energetic measures to meet the danger. Three armies were despatched against the rebels of Normandy, the South, and Central France; Navarre and Alençon, who were found to be planning an attempt at escape, with the connivance of two of the latter’s favourites, La Môle and Coconnas, were shut up in the keep of the Château of Vincennes, and a commission appointed to examine them; while the two gentlemen were brought to trial on a charge of high treason, condemned and executed; the Maréchaux de Montmorency and de Cossé, who had had the temerity to come to Court to endeavour to justify their conduct, were seized and thrown into the Bastille, and orders were sent to Amiens for the arrest of Condé.
Condé had not yet been guilty of any overt act of rebellion; but he had been compromised by the avowals of the pusillanimous Alençon, who had made a full confession, and also by those wrung from Coconnas in the anguish of torture.[99] Warned in time, however, he succeeded in affecting his escape, and fled to Strasburg, where he lost no time in returning publicly to the faith from which in his heart he had never wavered. His wife, to whom he had been reconciled, and who was three months pregnant, he left behind him. They were never to meet again.
On 31 May of that year, the unhappy Charles IX. expired, “rejoicing that he left no heir in such an age, since he knew of his own sad experience how wretched was the state of a child-king, and how wretched the kingdom over which a child ruled.” On the previous day, he had publicly declared the King of Poland his lawful heir and successor, and his mother Regent until his return to France; and Catherine wrote, urging her favourite son to return without delay and take possession of his birthright.
The latter needed no pressing. Although he had only occupied the throne of Poland a few months, he was already heartily tired of his kingdom, both the people and the customs of which were utterly distasteful to one of his indolent and luxurious temperament; and he was impatiently awaiting the event which should recall him to France—and the Princesse de Condé. Absence, so far from diminishing, had only served to increase his devotion to that lady. “I love her so greatly, as you know,” he wrote to one of his confidants at the Court, “that you must certainly inform me of everything that befalls her, for the sake of the tears that I shed for her. But I will speak no more of her, for love is intoxicated.” And he employed a good part of his time in inditing to her passionate letters, written in his own royal blood!
So soon as the news of his brother’s death reached him, he quitted his sombre palace at Cracow, secretly, in the middle of the night, accompanied by some of his French attendants, and rode without drawing rein until he reached the Moravian frontier, hotly pursued by his indignant subjects, who, singularly enough, had conceived for him a great affection, and wished to compel him to remain their ruler. The explanation he subsequently condescended to give of this escapade, was that the condition of France was so disturbed that even a week’s delay might imperil his succession. Nevertheless, having once shaken the dust of his adopted country off his feet, he seemed in no hurry to return to his own; he preferred to travel by way of Vienna and Turin, where he extravagantly rewarded the hospitality of the Duke of Savoy by the restoration of Pinerolo, the gate of Italy; and it was not until the beginning of September that he turned his steps towards France.
At Bourgoin, he was met by Catherine and the greater part of the Court. The Queen-Mother brought with her the King of Navarre and Alençon, whom she had set at liberty, having first extracted an oath from them that they would “neither attempt nor originate anything to the detriment of his Majesty the King and the state of his realm.” They were still, however, kept under very close observation by her Majesty, and treated very much like naughty schoolboys.
After a short stay at Bourgoin, the Court proceeded to Lyons, where it remained for several weeks, its sojourn being marked by splendid festivities. In the middle of October, a sad event came to interrupt these rejoicings: news arrived that, on the 13th, the Princesse de Condé had died in Paris, in giving birth to a daughter.[100]
Brantôme assures us that Henri III. had fully resolved to petition the Pope to annul the marriage of Marie de Clèves and Condé—“which he would not have refused, since he was so great a king, and for divers other reasons that one wots of”—and to make the lady his queen; and it would seem that the princess was not indisposed to such an arrangement. However that may be, his Majesty exhibited the most extravagant grief at the death of his inamorata. On opening the letter which contained the fatal news, he instantly fell down in a dead faint, and was carried to his apartments, which he caused to be draped in black velvet, and where he remained shut up for several days, for the first two of which he persistently refused to touch either food or wine. When he, at length, reappeared, he was clad in the deepest mourning, and the points of his doublet and even the ribbons of his shoes were garnished with little death’s-heads. From that moment little death’s-heads in gold, coral, or crystal became the trinket à la mode.
From being the life and soul of every fête and pleasure-party, the grief-stricken King now plunged into the most extravagant devotion, and at Avignon, to which the Court had removed, with the idea of affording him some distraction from his sorrow, nothing would content him but to join the Flagellants, a sect very strong in the Papal city, who, dressed in sackcloth, nightly paraded the streets by torchlight, chanting the Miserere and scourging one another with whips. The Court and the Royal Family were compelled to follow suit; and the Cardinal de Lorraine, unaccustomed to such mortification of the flesh, caught a chill which caused his death.
Theatrical as was Henri III.’s grief it was, nevertheless, of a more durable nature than such exhibitions usually are; and, some months later, the Cardinal de Bourbon was obliged to have the body of the Princesse de Condé removed from the vaults of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in which it had been temporarily deposited, the King refusing to enter the abbey, as long as those precious remains were there. Even his marriage to the sweet and charming Louise de Lorraine,[101] which took place at Rheims, in February, 1575,[102] three days after his Sacre, seems to have been a tribute to the memory of his lost love, for the young lady, whom he had met at Nancy, on his way to Poland in the autumn of 1573, had first attracted his attention by the resemblance she bore to the Princesse de Condé.
Condé was still a fugitive in Germany when the news of his bereavement reached him. It can scarcely have failed to cause him pain, for, notwithstanding her relations with Henri III., he had remained attached to his wife; but the reflection that now that her royal admirer had reappeared upon the scene, she would, had she lived, most certainly have brought fresh scandal upon his name, must have served to temper his grief. In the previous July, he had been proclaimed chief of the confederates by a Huguenot-Politique assembly which had met at Milhaud; but he made no attempt to return to France, but wandered about Germany and Switzerland, negotiating with the Protestant princes and enlisting soldiers. With the aid of English gold, he finally succeeded in raising a small army, and, in the early autumn of 1575, he despatched part of it, under the command of Montmorency-Thoré, to the assistance of Alençon, who had just succeeded in effecting his escape from the Court and had placed himself at the head of the confederates.[103] But this force was too weak to effect anything, and was defeated by the Duc de Guise at Dormans.[104]
Having levied fresh troops to replace those he had lost, in the following April, Condé himself re-entered France, after an absence of two years, crossed the Loire, near La Charité, and effected a junction with the troops of Alençon in the Bourbonnais. Henri III. and Catherine were obliged to negotiate, and on 6 May another hollow peace—the “Paix de Monsieur”—was signed at Beaulieu. The Protestants obtained greater concessions than any which they had yet enjoyed; the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was formally disavowed and the property of Coligny and other prominent victims restored to their heirs; and eight fortresses were handed over to the Reformers, as security for the due observance of the treaty. Alençon received the addition to his appanage of Anjou, Berry, Touraine and Maine, and assumed the title of Duc d’Anjou, which had been that of Henri III. before his accession to the throne; while the King of Navarre was confirmed in his government of Guienne and Condé in that of Picardy. The last-named prince was also guaranteed Péronne as a place of surety and a gratification. But, so far as he was concerned, the treaty remained a dead-letter: he never saw a sol of the money, nor was his authority ever acknowledged in Picardy, where Jacques d’Humières, governor of Péronne, a friend of the Guises, refused to deliver that fortress into his hands and formed a confederacy between the partisans of the Guises and the bigoted Catholics to oppose him.
Deeply irritated by this breach of faith, Condé determined to seek compensation in the west, and proceeded to take possession of Cognac and Saint-Jean-d’Angely, and to purchase, from the Sieur de Pons, the government of the important fortress of Brouage. Then he went to La Rochelle, where, “by a succession of very able orations,” he succeeded in convincing the citizens, who were at first inclined to regard his pretensions with suspicion, that their mayor and bailiffs were quite unworthy of their confidence, and that they could not do better than entrust themselves to his protection, with the result that in a few weeks he was virtually master of the town.
But the concession granted the Huguenots at the “Paix de Monsieur” had aroused, as had been the case after the Peace of Saint-Germain, the most violent resentment among the more zealous Catholics, who regarded them in the light of a betrayal of their faith; and the efforts of Condé to consolidate his position in the West stimulated the growth of that confederacy which had already been formed against him in Picardy. The movement spread with astonishing rapidity, especially among the fanatical population of Paris, and soon grew into a general “Holy League,” or association of the extreme Catholic party throughout the kingdom.
The formation of the League, whose members were binding themselves to regard as enemies all who refused to join it, greatly alarmed Henri III., and, after an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a promise from the Guises that they would do nothing calculated to lead to a breach of the recent peace, he decided that the only course open to him was to place himself at its head. This decision rendered a new war inevitable, and early in 1577 it duly broke out.
In the South, the Huguenots contrived to hold their own, but Condé, who commanded in Poitou and Saintonge, with the title of the King of Navarre’s Lieutenant-General, fared badly, largely, it would seem, through his own want of military capacity, and was soon obliged to take refuge in La Rochelle, and look on helplessly while the enemy conquered the whole of the surrounding country. Finally, he made his way into Guienne and joined his cousin, upon whom he, very unfairly, endeavoured to throw the blame of his ill-success in the West. In September, the Peace of Bergerac, another ineffectual treaty, which granted in the main what that of the previous year had already promised, nominally put an end to the war, though private hostilities—storming of châteaux, assassinations, and pillage—still continued.
At the end of the following year, Marguerite de Valois joined her husband at Nérac. Catherine, whom the King left free to intrigue as she pleased, accompanied her daughter, bringing with her her “squadron,” whose charms wrought much havoc among the gentlemen of Henri’s little Court. She remained there several months, but the results of her visit fell very far short of her expectations, and, on her return to Paris, she made overtures to Condé, who, since the last war, had been on far from cordial terms with the King of Navarre. With a view to separating him entirely from his cousin, she offered him the hand of the Queen’s sister, Mlle. de Vaudémont, together with a considerable pension and the restoration of his government of Picardy. Condé declined the marriage, on the plea of difference in religion, and the next thing Catherine heard about him was that he had made his way in disguise into Picardy, and seized the town of La Fère, by means of a stratagem (November, 1579).
The prince was left in peaceable possession of La Fère for some months, though his efforts to extend his influence through the rest of the province were unsuccessful. But when, in the spring of 1580, the “Lovers’ War” broke out, he was compelled to abandon his conquest and take refuge in the Netherlands. From there he crossed to England and endeavoured to obtain assistance from Elizabeth; but, failing in this, returned to the Netherlands, and, after taking part in the defence of Ghent, in which he exhibited great courage, made his way into Germany and concluded a treaty with the Elector Palatine, but on such disadvantageous terms that the French Protestants promptly repudiated it. He then began a little war on his own account in the Cevennes; but in November the King of Navarre made peace with the Court at Fleix, and obliged him to suspend his somewhat futile operations.
The Treaty of Fleix was followed by four years of anarchic peace, which were passed by Condé chiefly at Saint-Jean-d’Angely. He had been reconciled to the King of Navarre, and the two cousins visited one another on several occasions; but this reconciliation was never really sincere, for Condé was not a little jealous of the military reputation which Henri had acquired in the last war, and he and the more fanatical section of the Protestants disapproved of the moderation shown by the young king, and sometimes endeavoured to compel him to adopt measures which his good sense condemned.
On 11 June, 1584, the Duc d’Anjou died of consumption at Château-Thierry. His death made the King of Navarre heir-presumptive to the French crown, and, as Henri III. had, for some time past, abandoned all hope of leaving children behind him, the question of the succession at once became of paramount importance. But the accession of a heretic to the throne was repugnant to the whole Catholic population, and was certain to be violently opposed by a considerable section of it. For the intimate connexion of the State and the orthodox Church was held to be a fundamental law of the monarchy; and even men of moderate views, who were willing enough that the Huguenots should be tolerated, were alarmed at the prospect of their domination.
Very intelligent, whenever he could contrive to free himself for a time from his idle and voluptuous habits, Henri III. had foreseen this, and, about the middle of May—that is to say, about three weeks before Anjou’s death—had despatched one of his favourites, the Duc d’Épernon, to the King of Navarre, “bearing him letters in which he admonished, exhorted, and entreated him, seeing that the life of the Duc d’Anjou, his brother, was despaired of, to come to Court and go to Mass, because he desired to recognize him as his true heir and successor, and to give him such rank and dignity near his person as his qualification of brother-in-law and heir to the throne deserved.” The Protestants testified the greatest uneasiness at these overtures, and began to approach Condé, with a view to his adoption as the leader of the party, in the event of the King of Navarre again renouncing their faith. But their alarm was groundless, for, though Henri held but lightly by his creed, and all the Catholics about him besought him to remove the one obstacle to his succession, he felt that the time had not come when he could afford to offend the Huguenots. And so, with many protestations of gratitude and loyalty, he declared himself unable to accede to his Majesty’s wishes.
The fact that the legitimate heir to the throne was a heretic made the renewal of the civil war inevitable, and, on the death of Anjou, the Guises and the League at once began to organize their forces for the coming struggle. The wretched, vacillating King was intimidated into giving them his countenance and support; and, on 15 July, 1585, signed the Treaty of Nemours, which promised the revocation of all the edicts in favour of toleration, and placed at the disposal of the League all the resources of the Crown. Having secured the assistance of the temporal power, they next summoned the spiritual to their aid, and persuaded the new Pope, Sixtus V., to launch against the two princes a Bull of Excommunication, wherein he declared them “degraded from their fiefs and baronies, and incapacitated from succession to the Crown of France.” The cousins issued a scornful response, a copy of which was posted up even in Rome itself, and war began.
Condé again received the command of the Huguenot forces in Poitou and Saintonge, and found himself opposed by the Duc de Mercœur. The prince’s army was inferior in numbers to that of the Catholics, but he contrived to surprise the enemy in their camp near Fontenay, and drove them in confusion across the Loire; after which, strengthened by the arrival of reinforcements for La Rochelle, he laid siege to Brouage.
Condé’s attention was not, however, entirely absorbed by military matters at this juncture. Notwithstanding the rather unfortunate outcome of his first matrimonial venture, he had for some time past been desirous of marrying again; and, shortly before the renewal of hostilities, he had decided to propose for the hand of Charlotte Catherine de la Trémoille, only daughter of Louis III., Duc de Thouars, Prince de Tarente and de Talmont, and Jeanne de Montmorency.
Charlotte de la Trémoille’s father, who, by the way, had been a fanatical Catholic and a determined opponent of Condé in Poitou, of which province he was lieutenant-general, had died some years before, since which the girl had lived with her mother at the Château of Thouars, in Anjou. She was now seventeen, very pretty, very intelligent, and of a highly romantic disposition, for the Duchesse de Thouars, who appears to have had little affection for her daughter, had left her very much to her own devices, and she was accustomed to spend a good deal of her time in the perusal of the “Amadis” and other fashionable works of imagination.
Condé despatched one of his officers to the Duchesse de Thouars to make the first overtures on his behalf. They were favourably received, and the duchess hastened to send her daughter to the Château of Taillebourg, a fortress of some importance on the banks of the Charente, whither she intended to follow her, so that his Highness might have an opportunity of paying his addresses to the young lady, and she of discussing with him the financial side of the affair. The alliance of the first Prince of the Blood, one of the leaders of the Huguenots, was very flattering to the pride of the La Trémoilles, who did not share the prejudices of the late head of the family; indeed, the young Duc de Thouars, although a Catholic, had taken up arms for Condé.
As for Charlotte, to her romantic imagination, the prospect of sharing the fortunes of a prince who had experienced enough adventures to satisfy the most gluttonous of knight-errants, and who, if he had not yet achieved any very brilliant success, had supported his reverses with a fortitude which had gained him the admiration of even his enemies, could not fail to make a powerful appeal, and she looked forward with impatience to the conclusion of the negotiations.
On learning of the favourable reception of his overtures, Condé, who was besieging Brouage, lost no time in addressing to the Duchesse de Thouars a formal request for her daughter’s hand. The duchess informed Charlotte, who wrote to the prince the following letter:
“Madame,[105]
“I am not able, it seems to me, to thank you as I should wish for the honour that it pleases you to do me by your letter, and for the good-will which it appears you entertain for me, which oblige me to serve you in such fashion that I shall esteem myself very happy all my life if I am favoured by your commands, which I shall execute with as much fidelity as any creature in the world. And, since I know that Madame de la Trémoille, my mother, is replying to what you have been so good as to write to her, I shall say nothing on this subject, save that my intention has ever been to conform to her will, and that it will remain so eternally, and to assure you again Monsr (sic) that my little merit must prevent me from believing what it pleases you to express for me.... I thank you very humbly for the honour which I receive from your suit, although I know that I am in no way worthy of it, which places me under a very great obligation to you. I shall leave to Madame de la Trémoille, my mother, to reply on the subject of the journeys of the bearer of this, for all that I have desired my whole life, is to follow these commands, in which I shall never fail, and, in token of this, I shall kiss your hands.
“Your very humble servant, etc., etc.”[106]
On learning that Mlle. de Trémoille had arrived at Taillebourg, Condé quitted his camp at Brouage and proceeded thither. He took with him the greater part of the Huguenot cavalry, and we may imagine with what a thrill of pleasure the romantic Charlotte must have beheld this valiant prince coming to woo her accompanied by so splendid an array of mail-clad horsemen. Nor was she less pleased when, at the gateway of the château, her suitor dismissed his imposing escort, and, to show his confidence, entered with three or four of his officers only.
All smiles and blushes the young châtelaine came forward to greet him, and, though Condé was usually very reserved with women, Mademoiselle was so pretty and so sympathetic that soon he found himself discoursing of his wars and his wanderings as though he had known her for years. Before the evening was over, Charlotte had decided that the hero of her dreams had indeed materialized; while the prince was completely charmed. “The two betrothed,” writes a contemporary biographer of the latter, “promised henceforth to live and die together, provided that they obtained the consent of Madame de la Trémoille, of which Mademoiselle her daughter was sufficiently assured;”[107] and Condé might have said with Othello:
“She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I lov’d her that she did pity them.”
Mlle. de la Trémoille gave that very night a proof of her devotion to her future husband. As the garrison of Taillebourg contained several men who, she had reason to suspect, were by no means well-disposed towards the Huguenot leader, “she did not take any repose all night, but watched with extreme care over his safety until the morning, placing the sentinels herself and making hourly inquiries of the rounds if they had discovered anything which might trouble the repose of our amorous prince.”[108]
Early on the morrow, Condé left Taillebourg, but, before his departure, he gave Mlle. de la Trémoille, “two lines in his own handwriting and signed by him, containing the assurance of his good faith touching their future marriage.” Then, “after a thousand reiterated promises that death alone should be the separation of their union,” he took leave of his betrothed and returned to Brouage.
The siege of this town was progressing rapidly; Condé’s forces closely invested it on the land side, while the little Huguenot fleet blockaded the port; a portion of the outworks had already been captured, and its fall seemed assured, when the prince thoughtlessly engaged in a most disastrous enterprise.
It happened that a Huguenot captain named Rochemorte, attached to a small force which Condé had sent across the Loire to make an incursion into Anjou and Normandy, had succeeded, with a mere handful of men, in taking by surprise the citadel of Angers. The town, however, remained in the hands of the Catholics; the daring Rochemorte and his little band were being closely besieged, and, unless reinforcements speedily arrived, he would be obliged to capitulate. This news caused great excitement in the Protestant camp, and the prince, instead of contenting himself by the despatch of a force sufficient to enable Rochemorte to hold the captured citadel, was persuaded by his flatterers to go in person and attempt the capture of the town. So brilliant a success, they assured him, would entirely eclipse the military reputation of the King of Navarre, change the whole course of events, and strike such consternation into the enemy that very soon he might be able to carry the war to the very gates of Paris.
It was a most rash undertaking, for not only was Angers a strongly-fortified town, but the neighbourhood was the point of concentration for the Catholic armies destined to operate in the South, and was swarming with the enemy. However, his jealousy of his cousin, and his anxiety to distinguish himself in the eyes of his lady-love, rendered him deaf to the voice of reason; and, after wasting a good deal of precious time in preparations for his expedition, he set off for Angers, at the head of some 2000 horse, three-fourths of whom were mounted arquebusiers.
On the way, he had an interview with the Duchesse de Thouars, who was journeying to Taillebourg to join her daughter. Henri III., it appears, had lately brought pressure to bear upon the duchess to persuade her to break off the negotiations for the marriage, and, as the latter was beginning to feel seriously uneasy as to the future of her prospective son-in-law, she received him very coldly and endeavoured to evade giving the consent which he demanded. Perceiving how the land lay, Condé refrained from pressing the matter; and, after overwhelming her with protestations of friendship, took his departure, and despatched in all haste a courier to Taillebourg, with the following message, written on a leaf of his tablets:
“I have found Madame, your mother, whether from fear or otherwise, very much opposed to my happiness. I hope to conquer her severity by my perseverance and my conduct, swearing that you alone possess my heart, and that neither her prejudice nor any accident shall be able to prevent me from remaining until death your unchanging serviteur.”[109]
On 21 October, the prince arrived beneath the walls of Angers. He came too late, for, two days before, Rochemorte had been killed, and the citadel had capitulated. His wisest course would have been to retreat at once, for, although he had received reinforcements after crossing the Loire, his army did not exceed 3000 men, and hostile columns were already gathering in his rear. However, he determined to endeavour to carry the town by storm, and made two assaults, both of which were repulsed with considerable loss. Then, very reluctantly, he gave the order to retire; but there was some delay in carrying it out, and scarcely had his vanguard crossed the Loire, than the enemy’s cavalry appeared on both banks of the river. For a moment, he thought of endeavouring to make his way along the right bank of the Loire to the Huguenot stronghold of Sancerre, but, learning that the Catholics were in force in that direction, he abandoned it, and decided that the only course to adopt was for his followers to disperse and endeavour to creep through the meshes of the net which was closing round them. He himself, with a few officers, turned northwards, and succeeded in reaching Saint-Malo, where he embarked for Guernsey.
In that little island the unfortunate prince remained for more than two months. He was almost in despair, for he well knew that his folly, which had deprived the Huguenot forces of the West of their chief, many of their principal officers, and the greater part of their cavalry, must have ruined their operations in that part of the country, and compelled them to remain wholly on the defensive. Moreover, he saw no immediate prospect of being able to return to France, for, though he had applied for assistance to Elizabeth, that princess was unwilling at this juncture to offend the French Court, and he got nothing from her but expressions of sympathy. One day, however, in January, 1586, he perceived two ships-of-war flying the Rochellois ensign, approaching the island. They cast anchor; an officer landed, handed the delighted prince a letter from Mlle. de la Trémoille, and informed him that they had been sent to convey him to La Rochelle.
But let us see how Mlle. de la Trémoille had been faring during her lover’s enforced absence from France.