Not only did he consent to the marriage against which he had so indignantly protested, but he furnished the most damning evidence against the leaders of the conspiracy of which he was the chief. He revealed all the communications into which Ornano had entered with the discontented nobles and with foreign princes, undeterred by the knowledge that the unfortunate marshal, for whom he had professed so much zeal, was already awaiting his trial on a capital charge. He declared that it was the Grand Prieur de Vendôme, likewise in Richelieu’s clutches, who had counselled him to go to Fleury and assassinate the Cardinal, if he refused to set Ornano at liberty. He denounced the Comte de Soissons, the Duc de Longueville, Soubise, and many others, some of whom had but a very remote connection with the conspiracy. And he gave so circumstantial an account of his relations with Chalais and of the persistent efforts the latter had made to push him into revolt, that he rendered it quite futile for that misguided young man to attempt any defence. Finally, he confessed that Anne of Austria had several times entreated him to refuse his consent to the marriage proposed to him, except on the condition that Ornano should be set at liberty, and declared that, more than two years before, Madame de Chevreuse had advised him to remain unmarried, promising that, in the event of the King’s death, he should marry the Queen.
It was decided to bring Chalais to trial before one of those special commissions to which Richelieu henceforth assigned most State prosecutions, for greater certainty of result. It assembled at Nantes, under the presidency of the new Chancellor, Michel de Marillac, and no one doubted that Richelieu intended to make a terrible example of the Master of the Wardrobe.
The unfortunate young man comprehended this, and his courage failed him. He would have led the most forlorn of hopes or faced the most redoubtable of bretteurs cheerfully enough, but he shrank in terror from the shadow of the headsman’s axe. With the scaffold before his eyes, he revealed himself as the most cowardly of poltroons and rivalled in baseness even Monsieur himself.
But, while denouncing his accomplices, he, to the mortification of Richelieu, kept faith with Madame de Chevreuse, and neither before the commission, nor in the private examinations to which he was subjected, could anything compromising to the duchess be extracted from him. His passion for this woman who had lured him to his destruction was as potent as ever, and from his gloomy dungeon he addressed to her letters filled with extravagant expressions of adoration, which the lovers of those days were wont to employ, but which come strangely from a man menaced by a traitor’s death.[43] Madame de Chevreuse, not unnaturally, refused to incriminate herself in writing, and though she sent, on more than one occasion, verbal messages to the prisoner, these do not appear to have reached him. Anyway, Richelieu, who was particularly anxious to secure evidence against the duchess, whom he knew to be one of his most dangerous enemies, contrived to persuade Chalais that she had forgotten her hapless admirer and was occupied with other love-affairs, and that she had not scrupled to save herself at his expense. Exasperated to the last degree against the woman who, he believed, had repaid his devotion by such base ingratitude, and in the delusive hope that further important revelations might induce the Cardinal to spare his life, the wretched Chalais was gradually led to make the gravest accusations against the duchess. It was all useless. So soon as Richelieu judged that he had extracted from the prisoner all the information he could hope, the proceedings were hurried on, and on August 18 the court pronounced the inevitable sentence, and “declared Henri de Talleyrand, Sieur de Chalais, attainted and convicted of the crime of lèse-majesté”; for reparation whereof it condemned him to be taken by the executioner of the High Justice, and conducted, with bare head, to the Place de Bouffay of Nantes, and there, on a scaffold which should be erected for that purpose, to have his head struck off and placed on a pike on the Porte de Sauvetour, his body to be quartered and fastened to gibbets at the four principal avenues of the said town, and that, before execution, he should be subjected to torture for the revelation of his accomplices. The court further declared all his property forfeited to the King, his posterity ignoble and roturière and deprived of all the privileges of the nobility, and ordered his residences to be demolished and his woods cut down to within a man’s height of the ground.
This barbarous sentence was modified by the King, who, “yielding to the very humble prayer of the Dame de Chalais, mother of the said Chalais, and to several of his faithful and affectionate subjects, to whom the said Chalais was related,” remitted all that was uselessly cruel, and directed that, after decapitation, the body should be given to his mother for burial in holy ground. His Majesty also annulled the attainder.
Before going to execution, the condemned man withdrew all the accusations he had made against Madame de Chevreuse, declaring that “what he had written, he had written in the extremity of rage and by reason of an erroneous belief which he entertained that she had deceived him,” and, after signing the recantation, he sent for his confessor and charged him to inform the King that everything he had said against the Queen and Madame de Chevreuse was false.
In the hope that the intercession of Monsieur, who had been shamed into making some belated efforts to induce the King to spare Chalais’s life, and that the gain of a few days might mean his salvation, the friends of the condemned had bribed the executioner of Nantes to leave the town. Their intervention merely served to make the unhappy man’s end the more cruel, for, instead of postponing the execution until the headsman of Nantes could be fetched, Richelieu sent for a criminal then lying under sentence of death in the prison of Nantes, who, on the promise that he should be accorded his life, undertook to replace him. The improvised executioner bungled the business in the most shocking manner, and, according to one contemporary account, more than thirty blows were required before the head at last fell. Chalais’s body was given to his mother, who caused it to be buried beneath the high altar in the Church of the Franciscans at Nantes.[44]
Such was the end of Chalais and of the conspiracy which is sometimes known by his name, though it might with far more justice be called by that of Madame de Chevreuse, since it was she who had pulled the strings by which her luckless puppet of a lover danced to the scaffold. If it had succeeded, it would have changed the face of the realm, but its complete failure, which placed all its leaders, with the exception of the Comte de Soissons who had prudently taken to flight, in the power of Richelieu, immensely strengthened the government it was intended to overthrow. On September 2 the Maréchal d’Ornano anticipated the executioner by dying in prison,[45] and, two and a half years later, the Grand Prior followed him to the grave. The Duc de Vendôme remained in captivity until 1630, when he was set at liberty, though his government of Brittany, which had made him so great a power for mischief, was never restored to him.
As for Monsieur, he was discharged in order that he might marry Mlle. de Montpensier. The marriage contract was signed on August 5, and the wedding celebrated the following day by the triumphant Richelieu.
At the conclusion of the betrothal ceremony, the King, addressing Monsieur before Bassompierre, said: “Brother, I tell you before the Maréchal de Bassompierre, who loves you well, and who is my good and faithful servant, that I have never in my life accomplished anything which has pleased me so much as your marriage.” Monsieur then invited Bassompierre to walk with him in the garden which is on the bastion [of Nantes] and said to him: “Betstein,[46] you will see me now without fear, since I stand well with the King.” He then proposed to Bassompierre that he should enter his service as Surintendant of his Household and chief of his council, as Ornano had been, and begged him to speak to the King and obtain his consent. The marshal, however, begged to be excused, foreseeing that such a position, though very honourable and lucrative, was likely to prove extremely embarrassing. “I answered,” says he, “that if the King were to offer me 100,000 crowns a year to enter his service, I should decline, not because I should not deem it a great honour and that I have not an ardent desire to serve you, but because it would be necessary for me to deceive one or the other of you, and I am not skilful in that.”