CHAPTER I
BIRTH. PARENTAGE. DESCENT. PEACEFUL TIMES. A GALLANT SOLDIER. HUGUENOTS AND CATHOLICS. MORE STORM-CLOUDS. A STATELY HOME. THE IDLE SWORD. A ROYAL SUMMONS; AND A DEATH SUMMONS. A TROUBLED WIFE AND MOTHER. AN UNFORTUNATE PRINCESS. A DOUBTFUL HONOUR. ROUND-HAND AND RULED PAPER. A NAUGHTY LITTLE GIRL. SISTERS INDEED. HAPPY DAYS. THE RUBENS PORTRAIT
Charlotte de la Trémoille was born at Thonars in Poitou in 1601. The fine old château[[1]] in which the first days of her eventful life dawned upon her was the heritage of her ancestors, and now by right of birth belonged to her father, Claude de la Trémoille. The château is beautifully situated upon a hill, around whose base the river Thone runs so far as to give it the appearance of an island.
[1]. Now the Mairie.
Charlotte was the second child of her parents, whose style and title are thus described in their contract of marriage signed at Chatelhéraut in 1598:—
Claude de la Trémoille, Duke de Thonars, peer of France, Prince de Tarente and de Talmont, with the very noble and gracious Dame Charlotte Brabantine de Nassau, daughter of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, and of his third wife, Charlotte de Bourbon Montpensier.
Thus the noblest blood of France and of Nassau ran in the veins of the child who was destined to play such an heroic part in the land of her adoption, and whose romantic story stands enshrined in England’s historic annals.
She was born in days of comparative peace: the Wars of the League were at an end, the accession of Henri IV. to the crown of France had silenced the clash of martial strife. Catholic and Calvinist no longer fought at the sword’s point. The Edict of Nantes, extending liberty of conscience and civil rights to the Protestants, had brought at least outward tranquillity. The act of Henri IV. in abjuring the Reformed faith and entering the Roman Communion had justified the hopes of all moderate minds. The Reformed party, with Henri’s lifelong friend and good genius—the minister Sully—at its head, had seconded the wishes of the Catholics, and advised him to the change.
The effect was magical, restoring tranquillity to distracted France. The ravaged fields and hillsides were once more clothed with growing grain and vines. “Husbandry and pastures,” said Sully, “were the true treasures of Peru, and the paps which nourished the kingdom.”
Claude de la Trémoille, a Huguenot by birth, had always concerned himself less about politics and polemics than fealty to his royal master. A certain sturdy, loyal singleness of mind seems to have been a distinguishing characteristic of his race. The Duke was a born soldier. From the moment he could wield a sword, it had been employed for France and the King. Henri had need of his valiant subject, and did not forget to reward his services. It was after his brave fighting at Fontaine-Française, 1595, that the King raised the territory of Thonars to the rank of a peerage; and three years later, Claude de la Trémoille married the daughter of William the Silent.
Still, though peace and prosperity once more smiled upon the face of the country, the bitterness of religious difference rankled. Mutual jealousy further aggravated the soreness. The Catholics were arrogant in their triumph, and never lost sight of the fact that it was Henri’s policy which had drawn him into their ranks. The Protestants, on the other hand, lost their inspiration when the King became a Catholic. Their allegiance to the sovereign remained; but their devotion to the man cooled. Theoretically, civil prerogative might be extended to them; but practically, their advice in the guidance of the State was not sought. The Court party was not slow to let them understand this fact, in defiance of the King’s goodwill and affection which he never lost for his old co-religionists. Already the clouds of the sad and troubled future were beginning to gather for the Huguenots. Sullen and disappointed, their leaders retired from the Court, and with them went the Duke de Thonars, to occupy himself exclusively with the affairs of his own estate and the interests of his family.
He had four children—two sons and two daughters. He lived in great state at Thonars; and when Monsieur de Rosny, the Duke de Sully, came to Poitou to assume the governorship of the province, he received him with great magnificence.
Still, though he had hung up his sword, the Duke regarded it longingly, and at the smallest incitement was ready to take it down. The chance came before a very few years had passed. The great Protestant leader, the Duke de Bouillon, who, by his second marriage with a daughter of William the Silent, was the brother-in-law of the Duke de Thonars, had compromised himself in the matter of the Maréchal Biron’s treasonable correspondence with Spain; and Biron’s consequent disgrace with the King sorely troubled the peace of the family at Thonars.
The minister Sully, as full of goodwill towards de Thonars as of a desire to secure the services of so brave and tried a soldier, sent de Thonars a message to come to Paris. “The King,” he wrote, “contemplates war, and has need of you to fight against the Spaniards.”
De Thonars, who was still a young man of barely thirty-eight, had let fall to Sully a few words of dissatisfaction at his enforced inactivity, when the minister had been his guest at Thonars; and Sully now reminded him of these expressions. “Henri,” he wrote, “liked to see his Protestant servants about him, and objected to such powerful lords remaining long at a time in their own provinces. They might be lending themselves to the hatching of plots.”
Monsieur du Plessis Mornay, the great Huguenot leader and governor of Saumur, of which he had made a powerful Protestant stronghold, did his utmost to dissuade de la Trémoille from going to Court. “Excepting,” he said, “for those words which escaped you, I see no reason for your going.”
“But if I can be employed?” rejoined the more than willing de la Trémoille.
Du Plessis replied only by a stern, half-scornful silence, and went back to his château at Bonmoy near Saumur; but hardly had he arrived there, than he received a letter from Madame de la Trémoille, informing him that her husband had been seized with gout in the arm, and praying that if there should be no speedy improvement in his condition, du Plessis would come to him. On the following night, she further wrote that if he desired to see his friend alive, he must come quickly.
Du Plessis immediately hastened to Thonars, to find Monsieur de la Trémoille exhausted with fever, and gasping with semi-suffocation. He, however, rallied sufficiently to evince great pleasure at the sight of Monsieur du Plessis, “uttering with effort a few words, in which he displayed all his ordinary sense and judgment.” He was further able to recommend to his friend’s care his wife and four children, who were thus losing him while still so young. But the distractions of this life were fast slipping away from the dying man, and it was chiefly upon his soul’s welfare that Du Plessis conversed with him.
“It is not for me,” said de la Trémoille, “to speak of anything but that”; and, unheeding all else, he mustered his remaining strength and speech to discuss the life to come—replying always with words that showed his courage in the face of death, the assurance of his faith in Christ, and displaying the sound judgment which had distinguished him in the days of his health.
While de la Trémoille was thus struggling in the agonies of death, his daughter Charlotte lay ill with an attack of smallpox; and the distracted Duchess only left her husband’s bedside to tend the suffering child.
In the midst of all this trouble a message was brought her that her sister-in-law, the Princess de Condé, desired to speak with her. The Princess, she was told, had met with a mishap in the breaking-down of her coach upon the road near Thonars, and she asked her sister-in-law for the loan of her carriage. Little cordiality existed at this time between the Princess and her brother. Damaging reports of her had recently circulated. She was suspected in the first place of having poisoned her husband. She had, moreover, found difficulty in establishing proofs of the legitimacy of the son born to her after the Prince’s death. In addition to this, she had forsworn the Reformed faith, and given up her son, the little Prince de Condé, into the hands of the King to be reared in the Catholic creed.
Whether the Princess really wanted the coach in order to proceed on her journey, or whether she magnified the accident for the reason of the opportunity it afforded her of becoming reconciled to her brother, probably she alone knew; but in any case her visit was too late for that. Monsieur de la Trémoille was already speechless. “I cannot see her,” cried the Duchess, and she piteously entreated Monsieur du Plessis not to allow the Princess to enter the château. Du Plessis hesitated. He knew that the poor wife’s hopes that her husband might recover were vain. He thought it possible that the solemnity of the scene of her brother’s death-bed might exercise a salutary effect upon his sister’s mind; but the distress of the Duchess conquered him; and he wrote a respectful letter to the Princess begging her to defer her visit.
Thus Madame de Condé continued her journey to Paris without coming to Thonars; but she laid the blame of the refusal on Monsieur du Plessis, who found some difficulty in clearing himself with the King, for the affront that she considered she had received.
In the meantime, the Duke expired, aged only thirty-eight years. He left his wife and children under the guardianship of the Elector-palatine, of Prince Maurice of Nassau, of the Duke de Bouillon, and of Monsieur du Plessis. He desired on his death-bed that his children should be brought up in the Reformed faith.
Scarcely was he in his grave than the fulfilment of these dying wishes was gravely imperilled. The Huguenots had sunk into almost complete disfavour at Court. Death and disaffection had played sore havoc with the leaders of their party. Du Plessis was in disgrace; one reason for this, among others, being his close friendship with de Thonars, who, in his turn, was a connection of the Duke de Bouillon, still in rebellion. Why, demanded the Court party, did he mix himself up with such persons? On the other hand, the disquiet of the Protestants increased when the King gave orders for the little Duke de Thonars to be brought to Court, so that he might be educated with the Dauphin.
This was a great blow to Madame de la Trémoille; the child was only five years old, and she had just lost her daughter Elizabeth. To part with the boy now, was to lose him for ever. He would be severed alike from every domestic tie, as entirely as he would be estranged from Protestantism. She would sooner see him laid in his coffin than this. Monsieur du Plessis bestirred himself to resist the project. He represented to the King that its carrying out would create a real grievance for the Protestants. Already the Prince de Condé had been taken from them, and was it worth while, for the mere sake of having the boy about the Court, to irritate the Huguenots further?
Henri yielded the point, and the child was allowed to remain at Thonars, under his mother’s care. At the end of her first year of widowhood, however, Madame de la Trémoille, in obedience to the repeated commands of the King, repaired to Paris, leaving her children at Thonars.
The mother’s heart was doubtless not a little cheered during this enforced separation by the letters which reached her from her little daughter, who was now about six years old. “In the midst,” says her biographer, “of grave family documents relating to the family of de la Trémoille—side by side with parchments filled with pompous titles, or lengthy enumerations of estates and seignorial rights—one feels a curious stirring of the heart at sight of the big round-hand characters, written on ruled paper, which commemorate the first attempts of a child destined to do great deeds.”
Here is one of the letters:—
“Madame,—Since you have been gone, I have become very good, God be thanked. You will also find that I know a great deal. I know seventeen Psalms, all Pibrac’s quatrains, and the verses of Zamariel: and more than that, I can talk Latin. My little brother[[2]] is so pretty, that he could not be more so; and when people see him, they are able to talk of nothing else but of him. It seems a long time since we had the honour of seeing you. Madame, I pray you to love me. Monsieur de Saint Christophe tells me that you are well, for which I have thanked God. I pray heartily to God for you. I humbly kiss the hands of my good aunt, and of my little cousins.
[2]. The Count de Laval.
“I am, Madame, your very humble and very obedient and good daughter,
“Charlotte de la Trémoille.”
In learning the Psalms by heart, Charlotte was taught to follow the custom of all Protestant families of the time. For her Latin attainments she had doubtless to thank the still older custom of teaching the language to quite young children, in order that they should be able to follow the celebration of the Mass and the other services of the Roman Church; and though for young Huguenots the knowledge for this purpose was not necessary, Latin was still regarded as indispensable to the polite education of both sexes.
The children of Madame de la Trémoille occasionally accompanied her in her frequent absences from Thonars at this time, but generally they remained at home when she resided at Court or visited her relations in Holland. Yet, although separated from them, she took care to be informed of all their doings, so that she knew about their faults as well as the progress they made; for when she is at the Hague, in 1609, her daughter, then no more than eight years old, writes to her as follows:—
“Madame,—I am exceedingly sorry to have disobeyed you; but I hope henceforth you will not have occasion to complain of me, although hitherto I have not been too good: but I hope in future to be so very much so, that you will have reason to be satisfied, and that my Grandmama and my uncles will not find me ungrateful any more, as I hope to be obedient, and mindful of them. They have shown me their great kindness in having given me some beautiful New Year’s presents: that is to say, Madame (the Princess of Orange) has given me a carcanet of diamonds and rubies; the Princess of Orange, a pair of earrings; his Excellency, three dozen pearl and ruby buttons. My Uncle has given me a gown of cloth of silver. Monsieur Suart has done what you wished him to do.
“I beg you to love me always, and I shall all my life remain, Madame, your very humble and very obedient daughter and servant,
“Charlotte de la Trémoille.”
In 1609 Charlotte and her mother were together again, without being separated for any length of time for the next ten years. During this period, all the letters extant are written to the Duke de la Trémoille, her brother, who was generally absent from his family.
The young Duke was not such a good correspondent as his sister; and to the great annoyance of his mother, frequently delegated the writing of his letters home to some good-natured friend. He married his cousin, Marie de la Tour d’Auvergne, the daughter of the Duke de Bouillon and of Elizabeth of Nassau. In the young wife Charlotte found a true sister, and their mutual affection lasted through life.
Charlotte remained with her brother and sister-in-law at Thonars, and Monsieur du Plessis paid them occasional visits from his château of Forêt-sur-Sèvres. Although by nature and from circumstance a reserved and somewhat stern-mannered man, he seems to have been regarded with affection as well as with reverence by the family of his old friend.
Charlotte, when about nineteen years old, does not appear to have been strong in health. Her spirit, even in girlhood as throughout her life, was stronger than the flesh. It is unfortunate that her zeal as a correspondent frequently outruns her caligraphic powers, since her voluminous letters to her mother are full of interesting gossip; so much of them, that is to say, as are decipherable. The paper however, is no longer ruled, and the writing is not, as heretofore, done under the eyes of “Ma Mie,” the careful governess. Equally without heed to writing and spelling, she pours forth details of neighbouring doings, tells who comes to and from the château, and of what Monsieur du Plessis has said.
Always a very woman, the liking for dress occupies a prominent place in her mind—if its expression on paper does not belie her. Madame de la Trémoille’s mind’s eye is treated with word-pictures, infinite in detail and variety, of her daughter’s gowns “of cloth of silver, trimmed with gold fringe.” Mademoiselle’s jeweller and mantua-maker are important members of the household at sumptuous Thonars; and the young Duke de la Trémoille is no whit behind his sister in his taste for magnificence.
A portrait by Rubens of Charlotte, painted at the time of her marriage, shows us a bright, graceful girl. She wears a bodice of scarlet satin, and her hat is adorned with white plumes; she is looking over her shoulder with an arch smile.
The letters to her mother, though written in terms of the formal respect which the times exacted, are full of gaiety and lively sallies, and show that she enjoyed existence, sweetened as it was by close intercourse with her brother’s wife, who still, when the sea divided them, and the clouds of Charlotte de la Trémoille’s stormy life grew dense and almost without a ray of hope, remained the recipient of her confidences, till death severed the sisterly tie.