abrupt manner. The King went up to him and said: ‘M. de Sully, Monsieur le Prince has fled and has taken his wife with him.’ ‘Sire,’ answered he, ‘I am not surprised; and, if you had followed the counsel I gave you a fortnight since, when he left to go to Muret, you would have put him in the Bastille, and I should have kept him safe for you.’ ‘Well,’ said the King, ‘the thing is done; it is useless to say more about it; but tell me what I ought to do now.’ ‘By God, Sire! I know not,’ he replied; ‘but let me go back to the Arsenal, where I shall sup and sleep, and in the night I shall think of some good counsel, which I will bring you in the morning.’ ‘No,’ said the King, ‘I wish you to give it me at once.’ ‘I must think,’ said he, and with that he turned to the window which looked into the courtyard, and for a little time drummed upon it with his fingers. Then he came back to the King, who said: ‘Well, have you thought of something?’ ‘Yes, Sire,’ said he. ‘And what ought I to do?’ ‘Nothing, Sire.’ ‘What! Nothing?’ cried the King. ‘Yes, nothing,’ said M. de Sully. ‘If you do nothing at all, and show that you do not care about him, people will despise him; no one will assist him, not even the friends and servants whom he has here; and in three months, urged by necessity,[75] and by the little account that one takes of him, you will get him back on whatever conditions you please. But if you show that you are uneasy and are anxious to have him back, they will regard him as a personage of importance; he will be assisted with money by those without the realm; and divers persons, thinking to do you a despite, will protect him, although they would have left him alone if you had not troubled about him.’ ”
The King, however, was in no mood to follow this sage counsel, and preferred the strong measures proposed by Jeannin. He accordingly launched the Captain of the Watch in pursuit of the fugitives, and, when that officer returned empty-handed, sent Praslin to Brussels, where, as was generally expected, Condé had taken refuge, to demand his surrender from the Archduke Albert. The Archduke felt that he could not without shame deliver up a prince who came to seek an asylum against an all-powerful monarch who was endeavouring to dishonour his wife. On the other hand, he did not wish to offend Henri IV and afford him a pretext, which he might be only too ready to seize, for breaking the peace. He therefore tendered his good offices and made every effort to bring about an accommodation. But the King insisted on Condé’s unconditional submission and immediate return; while the prince demanded a place of surety on the frontier, with a convenient back-door, to enable him, at the first alarm, to leave the kingdom again.
The attitude assumed by Henri IV was so threatening, that Condé, judging it to be unsafe to remain in Flanders, confided his wife to the care of the Archduchess and took refuge at Milan, the governor of which, the Count de Fuentes, was a declared enemy of Henri IV and France. He had already appealed to Spain for protection; and Philip III instructed his Ambassador at the French Court, Don Inigo de Cardenas, to inform Henri IV that “he had taken the Prince de Condé under his protection, with the object of acting as a mediator in the matter and contributing by all means in his power to the repose and happiness of the Very Christian King.” The remainder of the despatch, however, shows that Philip was actuated by very different motives.
Condé’s departure from Brussels did not leave the Archduke in a less difficult position. It was not the prince, but the princess, whose return Henri IV most eagerly desired. He endeavoured to have her carried off, but the attempt failed.[76] He obliged the Constable to demand that she should be sent back to the paternal roof. The Archduke replied that he could not do so, except by her husband’s desire.
The King was the more exasperated by the resistance of the Archduke, as he had reason to believe that his ridiculous passion was returned. The princess, this child of sixteen, who had no affection for her husband and resented the inconvenience to which he had subjected her in order to save her honour, weary of her exile, far from her relatives and the Court of France, did not refuse the letters and presents of the King. Her entourage and Madame de Berny, the wife of the French Ambassador at Brussels, chanted continually the praises of her crowned adorer. She received verses in which Malherbe depicted in touching terms the grief of the great Alcandre. But Henri IV himself, in a letter to one of his agents, is not less pathetic:—
“I am writing to my beautiful angel: I am so worn out by these pangs that I am nothing but skin and bone. Everything disgusts me. I avoid company, and if, to observe the usage of society, I allow myself to be drawn into some assemblies, my wretchedness is complete.”
The princess, in her turn, appealed to “his heart,” and besought him, as “her knight,” to effect her deliverance.
For his “pangs” Henri IV regarded the Archduke and the Spaniards as responsible. Already on December 9, 1609, he had caused the Pope to be informed that “if the Spaniards contemplated employing the person of Monsieur le Prince to stir up trouble in his realm, he had the means and the courage to resent it, and to avenge the injuries and the offences which they might be able to do him.” The conduct of the Archduke was irreproachable; he had merely safeguarded his own dignity, and it was certainly not his fault that Condé was not reconciled to the King. But Philip III and his Government, although they had neither foreseen nor aided the prince’s flight, were now asking themselves what advantage they might derive from it. In the event of war with France, the first Prince of the Blood would be a valuable ally, and it is not improbable that a most imprudent manifesto which Condé issued at Milan, wherein, after detailing his grievances against Henri IV, he claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne of France, on the ground that the King’s first marriage had not been truly annulled, was inspired by Spain, with the idea of still further widening the breach between him and his sovereign.