They all went over singing the psalm, When Israel went out of Egypt, and on the 16th of September, 1568, Conde entered La Rochelle. “I fled as far as I could,” he wrote the next day, “but when I got here I found the sea; and, inasmuch as I don’t know how to swim, I was constrained to turn my head round and gain the land, not with feet, but with hands.” He assembled the burgesses of La Rochelle, and laid before them the pitiable condition of the kingdom, the wicked designs of people who were their enemies as well as his own: he called upon them to come and help; he promised to be aidful to them in all their affairs, and, “as a pledge of my good faith,” said he, “I will leave you my wife and children, the dearest and most precious jewels I have in this world.” The mayor of La Rochelle, La Haise, responded by offering him “lives and property in the name of all the citizens,” who confirmed this offer with an outburst of popular enthusiasm. The Protestant nobles of Saintonge and Poitou flocked in. A royal ally was announced; the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, was bringing her son Henry, fifteen years of age, whom she was training up to be Henry IV. Conde went to meet them, and, on the 28th of September, 1568, all this flower of French Protestantism was assembled at La Rochelle, ready and resolved to commence the third religious war.
It was the longest and most serious of the four wars of this kind which so profoundly agitated France in the reign of Charles IX. This one lasted from the 24th of August, 1568, to the 8th of August, 1570, between the departure of Conde and Coligny for La Rochelle and the treaty of peace of St. Germain-en-Laye: a hollow peace, like the rest, and only two years before the St. Bartholomew. On starting from Noyers with Coligny, Conde had addressed to the king, on the 23d of August, a letter and a request, wherein, “after having set forth the grievances of the Reformers, he attributed all the mischief to the Cardinal of Lorraine, and declared that the Protestant nobles felt themselves constrained, for the safety of the realm, to take up arms against that infamous priest, that tiger of France, and against his accomplices.” He bitterly reproached the Guises “with treating as mere policists, that is, men who sacrifice religion to temporal interests, the Catholics inclined to make concessions to the Reformers, especially the Chancellor de l’Hospital and the sons of the late Constable de Montmorency.” The Guises, indeed, and their friends did not conceal their distrust of De l’Hospital, any more than he concealed his opposition to their deeds and their designs. Whilst the peace of Longjumeau was still in force, Charles IX. issued a decree interdicting all Reformers from the chairs of the University and the offices of the judicature; L’Hospital refused to seal it: “God save us from the chancellor’s mass!” was the remark at court. L’Hospital, convinced that he would not succeed in preserving France from a fresh civil war, made up his mind to withdraw, and go and live for some time at his estate of Vignay This “apparition hard by” was war, everywhere present or imminent in the centre and south-west of France, accompanied by all those passions of personal hatred and vengeance which are characteristic of religious wars, and which add so much of the moral sufferings to the physical calamities of life. L’Hospital, when sending the seals to the queen-mother, who demanded them of him, considered it his bounden duty to give her without any mincing, and the king whom she governed, a piece of patriotic advice. “At my departure,” he says in his will and testament, “I prayed of the king and queen this thing, that, as they had determined to break the peace, and proceed by war against those with whom they had previously made peace, and as they were driving me from the court because they had heard it said that I was opposed to and ill content with their enterprise, I prayed them, I say, that if they did not acquiesce in my counsel, they would, at the very least, some time after they had glutted and satiated their hearts and their thirst with the blood of their subjects, embrace the first opportunity that offered itself for making peace, before that things were reduced to utter ruin; for, whatever there might be at the bottom of this war, it could not but be very pernicious to the king and the kingdom.” During the two years that it lasted, from August, 1568, to August, 1570, the third religious war under Charles IX. entailed two important battles and many deadly faction-fights, which spread and inflamed to the highest pitch the passions of the two parties. On the 13th of March, 1569, the two armies, both about twenty thousand strong, and appearing both of them anxious to come to blows, met near Jarnac, on the banks of the Charente; the royal army had for its chief Catherine de’ Medici’s third son, Henry, Duke of Anjou, advised by the veteran warrior Gaspard de Tavannes, and supported by the young Duke Henry of Guise, who had his father to avenge and his own spurs to win.
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The Prince of Conde, with Admiral de Coligny for second, commanded the Protestant army. We make no pretension to explain and discuss here the military movements of that day, and the merits or demerits of the two generals confronted; the Duke of Aumale has given an account of them and criticised them in his Histoire des Princes de Conde, with a complete knowledge of the facts and with the authority that belongs to him. “The encounter on the 13th of March, 1569, scarcely deserves,” he says, “to be called a battle; it was nothing but a series of fights, maintained by troops separated and surprised, against an enemy which, more numerous to begin with, was attacking with its whole force united.”. A tragic incident at the same time gave this encounter an importance which it has preserved in history. Admiral de Coligny, forced to make a retrograde movement, had sent to ask the Prince of Conde for aid; by a second message he urged the prince not to make a fruitless effort, and to fall back himself in all haste. “God forbid,” answered Conde, “that Louis de Bourbon should turn his back to the enemy!” and he continued his march, saying to his brother-in-law, Francis de la Rochefoucauld, who was marching beside him, “My uncle has made a ‘clerical error’ (pas de clerc, a slip); but the wine is drawn, and it must be drunk.” On arriving at the battle-field, whither he had brought with him but three hundred horse, at the very moment when, with this weak escort, he was preparing to charge the deep column of the Duke of Anjou, he received from La Rochefoucauld’s horse a kick which broke one of the bones of his leg; and he had already crushed an arm by a fall. We will borrow from the Duke of Aumale the glorious and piteous tale of this incident. “Conde turned round to his men-at-arms, and showing first his injured limbs and then the device, ‘Sweet is danger for Christ and for fatherland!’ which fluttered upon his banner in the breeze, ‘Nobles of France,’ he cried, ‘this is the desired moment Remember in what plight Louis de Bourbon enters the battle for Christ and fatherland!’ Then, lowering his head, he charges with his three hundred horse upon the eight hundred lances of the Duke of Anjou. The first shock of this charge was irresistible; such for a moment was the disorder amongst the Catholics that many of them believed the day was lost; but fresh bodies of royalists arrive one after another. The prince has his horse killed under him; and, in the midst of the confusion, hampered by his wounds, he cannot mount another. In spite of all, his brave comrades do not desert him; Soubise and a dozen of them, covered with wounds, are taken; an old man, named La Vergne, who had brought with him twenty-five sons or nephews, is left upon the field with fifteen of them, ‘all in a heap,’ says D’Aubigne. Left almost alone, with his back against a tree, one knee upon the ground, and deprived of the use of one leg, Conde still defends himself; but his strength is failing him; he sees two Catholic gentlemen to whom he had rendered service, Saint-Jean and D’Argence; he calls to them, raises the vizor of his helmet, and holds out to them his gauntlets. The two horsemen dismount, and swear to risk their lives to save his. Others join them, and are eager to assist the glorious captive. Meanwhile the royal cavalry continues the pursuit; the squadrons successively pass close by the group which has formed round Conde. Soon he spies the red cloaks of the Duke of Anjou’s guards. He points to them with his finger. D’Argence understands him, and, ‘Hide your face!’ he cries. ‘Ah D’Argence, D’Argence, you will not save me,’ replies the prince. Then, like Caesar, covering up his face, he awaited death the poor soul knew only too well the perfidious character of the Duke of Anjou, the hatred with which he was hunting him down, and the sanguinary orders he would give. The guards had gone by when their captain, Montesquion, learned the name of this prisoner. ‘Slay, slay, mordioux!’ he shouted; then suddenly wheeling his horse round, he returns at a gallop, and with a pistol-shot, fired from behind, shatters the hero’s skull.” [Histoire des Princes de Conde, by M. le Duc d’Aumale, t. ii. pp. 65-72.] |
The death of Conde gave to the battle of Jarnac an importance not its own. A popular ditty of the day called that prince “the great enemy of the mass.” “His end,” says the Duke of Aumale, “was celebrated by the Catholics as a deliverance; a solemn Te Deum was chanted at court and in all the churches of France. The flags taken were sent to Rome, where Pope Pius IV. went with them in state to St. Peter’s. As for the Duke of Anjou, he showed his joy and his baseness together by the ignoble treatment he caused to be inflicted upon the remains of his vanquished relative, a prince of the blood who had fallen sword in hand. At the first rumor of Conde’s death, the Duke of Montpensier’s secretary, Coustureau, had been despatched from headquarters with Baron de Magnac to learn the truth of the matter. ‘We found him there,’ he relates, ‘laid upon an ass; the said sir baron took him by the hair of the head for to lift up his face, which he had turned towards the ground, and asked me if I recognized him. But as he had lost an eye from his head, he was mightily disfigured; and I could say no more than it was certainly his figure and his hair, and further than that I was unable to speak.’ Meanwhile,” continues the Duke of Aumale, “the accounts of those present removed all doubt; and the corpse, thus thrown across an ass, with arms and legs dangling, was carried to Jarnac, where the Duke of Anjou lodged on the evening of the battle. There the body of Conde was taken down amidst the sobs of some Protestant prisoners, who kissed, as they wept, the remains of their gallant chief. This touching spectacle did not stop the coarse ribaldry of the Duke of Anjou and his favorites; and for two days the prince’s remains were left in a ground-floor room, there exposed to the injurious action of the air and, to the gross insults of the courtiers. The Duke of Anjou at last consented to give up the body of Conde to the Duke of Longueville, his brother-in-law, who had it interred with due respect at Vendome in the burial-place of his ancestors.”
When in 1569 he thus testified, from a mixture of hatred and fear, an ignoble joy at the death of Louis de Conde, the valiant chief of Protestantism, the Duke of Anjou did not foresee that, nearly twenty years later, in 1588, when he had become Henry III., King of France, he would also testify, still from a mixture of hatred and fear, the same ignoble joy at sight of the corpse of Henry de Guise, the valiant chief of Catholicism, murdered by his order and in his palace.
As soon as Conde’s death was known at La Rochelle, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, hurried to Tonnay-Charente, whither the Protestant army had fallen back; she took with her her own son Henry, fifteen years old, and Henry de Bourbon, the late Prince of Conde’s son, who was seventeen; and she presented both of them to the army. The younger, the future Henry IV., stepped forward briskly. “Your cause,” said he, “is mine; your interests are mine; I swear on my soul, honor, and life, to be wholly yours.” The young Conde took the same oath. The two princes were associated in the command, under the authority of Coligny, who was immediately appointed lieutenant-general of the army. For two years their double signature figured at the bottom of the principal official acts of the Reformed party; and they were called “the admiral’s pages.” On both of them Jeanne passionately enjoined union between themselves, and equal submission on their part to Coligny, their model and their master in war and in devotion to the common cause. Queen, princes, admiral, and military leaders of all ranks stripped themselves of all the diamonds, jewels, and precious stones which they possessed, and which Elizabeth, the Queen of England, took in pledge for the twenty thousand pounds sterling she lent him. The Queen of Navarre reviewed the army, which received her with bursts of pious and warlike enthusiasm; and leaving to Coligny her two sons, as she called them, she returned alone to La Rochelle, where she received a like reception from the inhabitants, “rough and loyal people,” says La Noue, “and as warlike as mercantile.” After her departure, a body of German horse, commanded by Count Mansfeld, joined Coligny in the neighborhood of Limoges. Their arrival was an unhoped-for aid. Coligny distributed amongst them a medal bearing the effigy of Queen Jeanne of Navarre with this legend: “Alone, and with the rest, for God, the king, the laws, and peace.”