CHAPTER X
The King of Navarre appoints a special commission for the trial of Brilland—Brilland is put to the question—His confessions under torture implicate the Princesse de Condé, but on the following day he disavows them—He is found guilty and condemned to be dismembered by horses—The princess denies the competency of the court and appeals to the Parlement of Paris—But the King of Navarre and the commissioners ignore the decrees of that body—The commission directs that the princess shall be brought to trial—She gives birth to a son—The prosecution is dropped, but the princess remains in captivity—The Président de Thou interests himself in her case—Means by which he obtains from Henri IV. the recognition of her son’s rights, and, with them, the acknowledgment of the princess’s innocence.
After ordering the arrest of the Princesse de Condé, the King of Navarre appointed a special commission, composed of twelve judges, for the trial of Brilland; while, as the accused had protested against his examination being conducted by Fiefbrun, who appears to have been a personal enemy, Henri replaced him by Valette, Grand Provost of Navarre, the more willingly since he was aware that Fiefbrun was a devoted partisan of the princess.
The commissioners decided that Brilland should be put to the question. “On entering the torture-chamber, he protested, in the first place, that everything that he might say would be owing to the violence of the pain, and that he knew nothing about the poison, and that he was innocent. Nevertheless, when the torture was applied, he accused Madame in this sense, that she and he had plotted the poisoning of the late prince from the time that he [Condé] was aware of her behaviour, and that, on leaving this town, his Excellency had recommended him to keep watch over her actions, and to take care of her, declaring that, after she was brought to bed, he should chastise her for her misconduct; and that when he [Brilland] informed her of this, the said project was resolved upon ...; that the said poison had been sent to the ...; that it had come from M. d’Épernon. He further said that La Doussinière, maître d’hôtel of his aforesaid lord, had administered the aforesaid poison in a chicken stuffed with eggs.”[132]
After this so-called confession had been extracted from him, the wretched man was released from the rack and taken back to prison. There, on the following day, he was visited by the commissioners, who ordered his confession to be read over to him. “He disavowed it; protested that what he had said was false; declared that what he had done was to escape the violence of the pain: exonerated those whom he had accused; and maintained his innocence and that he was ignorant of the poison. At the same time, he confirmed the truth of all the aforesaid confessions that he had made and signed in the course of the trial, with the exception of that made under torture ... and declared that he believed Madame la Princesse and those whom he had accused to be innocent, and that he knew nothing about the poison.”
Brilland was found guilty and condemned to the most barbarous of all forms of punishment—to be dismembered by horses. Against this sentence he appealed.
In the meanwhile, the Princesse de Condé had been formally charged with complicity in the murder of her husband and summoned before the commission. She refused to appear, denying the competency of the tribunal and claiming the privileges of the peerage. The judges overruled the princess’s objections, whereupon she petitioned Henri III. that her case should be tried by the Grande Chambre of the Parlement of Paris. His Majesty having returned a favourable answer, she appealed to the Parlement, and obtained from that body a degree calling the affair before it, prohibiting “all judges and others whom it may concern from taking any further proceedings,” and ordering that all the documents relating to the case should be immediately forwarded to the registrar of the court, on the ground that the wives of the Princes of the Blood were no more able than their husbands to be tried save by the Parlement of Paris. At the same time, it appointed two celebrated advocates, François de Montholon and Simon Marion, to act as counsel for the princess.
The commissioners at Saint-Jean-d’Angely appear to have paid no attention to these injunctions. The princess again appealed to the Parlement, which issued a second decree, confirming the first and ordering the commissioners to appear themselves before it, to answer for their disobedience. The King of Navarre, who had no intention of surrendering the conduct of an affair of such great consequence to himself to the royal judges, from whom he had everything to fear, replied by issuing a counter-decree, which rejected the pretensions of the princess, maintained the competency of the tribunal he had appointed, and ordered the commissioners to prosecute the affair, “in conformity with the procedure which they had followed hitherto.”
In consequence, the sentence passed upon Brilland was confirmed, and on 11 July, 1588, the condemned man suffered his terrible fate. “He gave on this occasion,” writes de Thou, “several proofs of madness, although he confessed that he was guilty of several other crimes, and that he recognized the justice of the sentence that the commissioners chosen to try him had pronounced. He began, however, to blaspheme in a scandalous fashion, so that those who assisted at the execution had great difficulty in making him return to his right senses, which caused people to think that his mind was not very sound, and that, in consequence, much reliance ought not to be placed on his evidence.”
On the same day, the fugitive page, Belcastel, was executed in effigy. As for Corbais, the valet de chambre, who had fled with the page and had been trapped so neatly outside the gates of Poitiers, we are not told what was decided upon in regard to him. He is not mentioned again in the proceedings.
After the execution of Brilland, the proceedings against the Princesse de Condé were continued. The Prince de Condé and the Comte de Soissons demanded to be received as parties to the prosecution, and their request was granted by the commissioners. The princess once more appealed to the Parlement of Paris, which issued a third decree, forbidding Conti and Soissons to pursue the affair except before the Parlement, and ordering the arrest of the commissioners and the seizure and sequestration of their property.
This decree, like the two which had preceded it, was treated with contempt, since the Parlement was, of course, powerless to enforce it, and on 19 July the commissioners directed that the princess should be brought to trial, but that, on account of her pregnancy, the trial should not begin until forty days after her confinement. In the meanwhile, she was very strictly guarded in the house of the Sieur de Saint-Mesme, governor of Saint-Jean-d’Angely, in which she had been shut up ever since her arrest, and only permitted to see a very few persons. “During the six months that she was enceinte,” writes Fiefbrun, “she was retained in her lodging, subjected to a thousand slanders, and interrogated frequently by the chosen and incompetent judges, not as a great princess, but as a simple demoiselle, without any regard to her rank or her privileges. I leave all those who have heard it spoken about to imagine how many anguishes, how much despair, assailed her soul during that long time, in which she was not permitted to speak or to confer with any one save two or three of her intimates, without any other counsel or assistance.”
On 1 September, 1588, six months after the death of her husband, the captive princess gave birth to a son, Henri de Bourbon, second of that name, and third Prince de Condé. Fiefbrun gravely assures us that, at the moment of the boy’s birth, “an extraordinary light was observed in the heavens, and that, on the day of his baptism, the sky being serene and cloudless, a clap of thunder was heard, which several persons who understood meteors regarded as of good augury.”
Less importance, however, was attached to these happy prognostications than to a circumstance which appeared to remove the suspicion on which the charge against the princess had been principally based, namely, that she was with child by the page Belcastel, and had poisoned her husband to escape his just vengeance. This was the striking resemblance which the infant prince bore to the late Prince de Condé, which was admitted even by some who had until then been inclined to believe in the guilt of the princess. “To-day, at noon precisely,” wrote the governor of Saint-Jean-d’Angely to the Duc de Thouars, “Madame la Princesse, your sister, has been delivered of the most beautiful prince imaginable, and with more resemblance (so far as one can judge at his age) to the late Monseigneur, his father, than one can describe. For which I praise God, as do an infinite number of honourable people, your servants.”
And Gilbert, the mayor of the town, wrote that “he had seen to-day the dead father born again in a child so like him in every respect that there was not a man living but was of opinion that never had son so closely resembled his father.”
Desmoustiers, the pastor of the Protestant Church of Saint-Jean-d’Angely, and Delacroix, the late prince’s chaplain, bore similar testimony, the former declaring that the boy resembled his father “en tout et partout”; while the latter concluded his letter by observing: “Thus does Our Lord (just Judge) cause the truth concerning the poisoning to be known.”[133]
Whether it was that the birth of a son had given the Princesse de Condé a certain prestige with the Protestants, disposed to see in this child a hope for the future, or that the want of proofs rendered the prosecution difficult to continue, or that the King of Navarre’s attention was occupied by weightier matters, the investigation was not resumed, and the members of the commission which had been appointed to conduct it dispersed. The princess, nevertheless, remained in captivity, although she now enjoyed a certain amount of liberty, since she went twice a week to see her little son, who had been put out to nurse at Mazeroy, near Saint-Jean-d’Angely; and a path across the fields between Beaufief and the road leading to that town, which she generally followed, bears to this day the name of “le chemin de la princesse.”[134] She was unable to obtain either the trial before the Parlement of Paris which she had repeatedly demanded or her liberty, and she appealed in vain to her relatives, to the neighbouring nobility, and to every person of importance whom chance happened to bring to Saint-Jean-d’Angely, to use their influence on her behalf. But neither her relatives nor the different nobles to whom she addressed herself seemed disposed to take any active steps in her favour, and it was left to a magistrate, the Président de Thou, to be the first to interest himself in the forsaken woman.
In the summer of 1589, de Thou, charged with a mission from Henri IV., passed through Saint-Jean-d’Angely, and the princess, since she was unable either to receive or to visit him herself, had the happy idea of sending to him her daughter Éléonore and the little Henri, with a request that he would accord them his protection. The kind heart of the worthy president was touched, and he promised to do everything in his power on behalf of the princess and her children. Several years passed, however, before circumstances permitted him to render any material assistance to his illustrious clients.
Henri IV., as the King of Navarre had now become, did not appear to cast any doubt upon the legitimacy of the little prince, since he consented to stand godfather to him, and conferred upon him indirectly the government of Guienne, which he himself had held before his accession to the throne. But this informal acknowledgment carried little weight, and, so long as the Princesse de Condé was not exonerated from the terrible charge which was still hanging over her, the boy’s position remained doubtful and precarious. Moreover, when, after the conversion of Henri IV. and the submission of Paris, tranquillity was to some degree restored, and the new King’s authority better established, the late prince’s brothers wished to recommence the proceedings against their sister-in-law, and urged his Majesty to declare her child incapable of succeeding to the throne. For some time their animosity frustrated all the efforts of de Thou on behalf of the princess and her son, but at length he succeeded in outmanœuvring them.
In January, 1595, the King signed a new decree extending the provisions of an article of the Edict of Peace of 1577, which admitted Protestants to public office. The Parlement, however, refused to register it, except on the condition that no member of the Reformed Faith should be eligible for the post of governor or lieutenant-general of a province, and persisted in its refusal, notwithstanding all the efforts of the King to induce it to give way. The attitude of the Parlement placed Henri IV. in a very embarrassing position, and de Thou, adroitly seizing his opportunity, offered to secure the passing of the Edict, provided that the King would guarantee that the young Prince de Condé, the heir-presumptive to the throne, should be brought up in the Catholic Faith. His Majesty, at first received this proposition very ungraciously, but, seeing no other way out of the impasse, he eventually accepted it, and directed the attorney-general to announce to the Parlement that the Prince de Condé “would forthwith be taken out of the hands of persons of the Protestant religion to be brought up in that of Rome.”
This announcement not only secured the registration of the Edict, but brought about the liberation of the Princesse de Condé, since to recognize the rights of the son was to acknowledge the innocence of the mother; and now that the favour of the King appeared to be gained, the prisoner of Saint-Jean-d’Angely had no lack of supporters. A few weeks later (June, 1595), Henri, Duc de Montmorency,[135] after having taken at Dijon his oath as Constable of France, presented to Henri IV. a petition signed by Diane de France,[136] widow of François, Maréchal de Montmorency, Charles de Valois, Comte d’Auvergne,[137] the Duc de Thouars, the Duc de Bouillon, the Baron de Montmorency-Damville, and other relatives of the princess, praying him to direct that the accusations brought against her should be adjudicated upon. The King, by letters-patent, ordered the affair to be submitted to the Parlement of Paris, and that the minutes of the proceedings at Saint-Jean-d’Angely should be sent to the registrar of that body. At the same time, he ordered the princess to be set at liberty, on condition that the signatories to the petition should make themselves responsible for her appearance when called upon.
In November, 1595, the princess and her son quitted Saint-Jean-d’Angely, in charge of Jean de Vivonne, Marquis de Pisani, whom the King had appointed the boy’s gouverneur. In the first days of December, they arrived at the Château of Saint-Germain, which had been provisionally assigned the little prince as a residence, and where, by Henri IV.’s desire, the Parlement of France came to salute him as first Prince of the Blood and heir-presumptive to the throne.
In the following May, the trial of the princess—if such a name could be applied to an affair, the issue of which was a foregone conclusion—came on for hearing. The Prince de Conti and the Comte de Soissons had protested against everything that might be decided as illegal, on the ground that the judgment of the case belonged to the King alone, “holding his court garnished with peers, legitimately assembled.” The Parlement summoned the two princes to appear before it, and show cause why their sister-in-law should not be pronounced innocent of the death of her husband. They refused, whereupon the court declared all the proceedings in Saintonge null and void and of no effect, “as contrary to the authority of the King, and to the decrees of his Court of Parlement, and useful in no way whatsoever to the furtherance of justice.” Finally, on 24 July, it issued a decree declaring the princess “pure and innocent,” which, in accordance with letters-patent issued by the King, was registered by all the provincial Parlements.
Thus terminated the mysterious affair of Charlotte Catherine de la Trémoille, Princesse de Condé.
But, as an eighteenth-century historian very rightly points out, a case gained before the Parlement was not necessarily a victory at the tribunal of public opinion; while over and over again that body had quashed the decrees of the lesser courts only to have its own verdict reversed by the judgment of history. The proceedings at Saint-Jean-d’Angely were declared null and of no effect, but the affair was not sent back for trial to the place where the supposed crime had been committed, nor submitted to a new examination. Thus, the Princesse de Condé, though pronounced innocent by the Law, was not exonerated by a large section of the public; nor has time altogether effaced the suspicions which remained in so many minds.[138]
Since all the documents connected with the investigation at Saint-Jean-d’Angely were, by order of the Parlement, solemnly burned by the registrar of the Court, in the presence of the First President, Achille de Harlay, and the rapporteur, Édouard Molé, until some fresh evidence shall be forthcoming, historians must renounce the hope of discovering the truth of this cause célèbre, and content themselves with more or less hazardous conjectures.
That the prince died from the effects of poison was undoubtedly the firm belief of practically all his contemporaries. One writer of the time alone, so far as we are aware, Joseph Texeira,[139] takes a different view. In 1598, Texeira published an historical treatise, in Latin, dealing with the principal events of Henri IV.’s reign,[140] in the course of which he denied that the Prince de Condé had been poisoned, and attributed his death to the injuries he had received at Coutras, from which, as we have mentioned, he had suffered a great deal of pain. Texeira pretends that the doctors who performed the autopsy were divided as to the cause of death, and that the opinion of those who held that it was due to natural causes was adopted, after a solemn discussion, by the Faculty of Montpellier. But Désormeaux, so devoted to the Condé family, confesses that, despite his active researches, he was unable to find the proof of the two facts advanced by Texeira in the documents of the time, whether published or in manuscript, and if, after this avowal, he inclines to the same opinion, it is because he cannot bring himself to believe that Texeira, Almoner to the King and Councillor of State, was capable of a lie.[141]
But, admitting that the unfortunate prince was poisoned, what evidence is there to connect his wife with the crime? Nothing whatever save the confessions of Brilland, made under torture, and which he subsequently denied, and the rumour of her undue intimacy with the page Belcastel, about which, singularly enough, nothing seems to have been heard until after her husband’s death. On the other hand, there are the strongest possible reasons for believing her to be entirely innocent. She was, undoubtedly, deeply in love with her husband at the time of her marriage, and had given him, as we have seen, signal proofs of her devotion; and it is, indeed, difficult to believe that in less than two years her affection could have been transformed into a murderous hatred. Moreover, she had apparently nothing to gain and much to lose by his death, for in the line of succession he stood next to the King of Navarre, a childless man, whose life was spent in the midst of perils. In conniving at the murder of the Prince de Condé, quite apart from the danger of detection and punishment, she would have deprived herself of the prospect of becoming Queen of France.