The Constable was dispatched, in charge of Andelot, to Orléans, where he had the Princesse de Condé for hostess; Condé was conducted by Montmorency’s second son, the Baron de Damville, to whom he had surrendered, to the quarters of Guise. In these detestable wars, prisoners were often treated with great harshness and cruelty, and sometimes, as we have just seen, their lives were not even spared when they happened to fall into the hands of some personal enemy. But Guise received Condé with as much courtesy and deference as the Black Prince had shown his royal captive at Poitiers. He placed at his disposal the peasant’s cottage in which he was quartered, apologizing for being compelled to give so poor a reception to so illustrious a visitor, and it was only at the prince’s repeated request that he consented to share with him this humble lodging. They supped together off the same coarse fare, conversing amicably the while, and the same bundle of straw served them for a bed. The duke, however, could well afford to show magnanimity towards a fallen foe, for, now that the King of Navarre and Saint-André were dead, and Condé and the Constable prisoners, he had no rival but Coligny to fear, and the predominance of his ambitious House seemed assured.
The day after the battle, Condé was again entrusted to the care of Damville, who had only surrendered his prisoner to Guise as an act of deference, and who was subsequently constituted his legal custodian by a special authority from the King. Damville, who naturally regarded him as a hostage for the safety of his father, the Constable, guarded him very strictly, though his servants were allowed to remain with him, and a Huguenot pastor named Pérussel, who had also been taken prisoner, was authorized to minister to his spiritual needs and conducted a long “prêche” in his chamber every day. After being successively conducted to Chartres, Blois, and Amboise in the wake of the Court, he was incarcerated by the Regent’s orders, in the Château of Onzain, an old feudal fortress, about three leagues from the last-named town.[18] Here he succeeded in bribing two of his gaolers, and arranged with their assistance to escape in the disguise of a peasant. But one of the men betrayed the plot to Damville, and Condé learned that all had been discovered by seeing the other soldier dangling from a gibbet erected beneath his window. After this, the prince was deprived of his servants, placed in solitary confinement, and most rigorously guarded; and a rumour began to spread, though it was probably without foundation, that the Guises intended to compel Catherine to have him again brought to trial for high treason.
Meanwhile, the Duc de Guise had laid siege to Orléans, the last stronghold left to the Reformers. The town taken, it was his intention to call out the ban and arrière-ban, for which purpose a tax had been levied on the revenues of the Church, overwhelm Coligny, who with the Huguenot cavalry was overrunning Normandy, drive the English from Le Havre and Dieppe, and convert his office of Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, which the King had been obliged to confer upon him in recognition of his services at Dreux, into a dictatorship.
The defenders of Orléans, decimated by famine and the plague, were incapable of offering more than a feeble resistance; the outworks were quickly captured, and the final assault was daily expected, when, on the evening of February 15, 1563, while returning from a reconnaissance, the duke was mortally wounded by a Huguenot fanatic, Poltrot de Méré, who fired upon him from the shelter of a copse. He expired six days later, to the undisguised joy of the Reformers and to the secret relief of Catherine, who dreaded nothing so much as the prospect of a second period of Guise ascendancy.
The death of the Duc de Guise paved the way for peace; and, through the intervention of Catherine and the Princesse de Condé, it was arranged that the prince and the Constable should meet and discuss its conditions. On March 7, two barges, the first coming from Orléans, the second from the opposite bank of the Loire, arrived at the Île-aux-Bœufs, situated a little below the town. In one was the Constable, under the care of his nephew, Andelot; in the other, Condé, under that of Damville. “There was a handsome boat ready for them, laid over with planks to make it broad and chamberlike, and covered with tapestry from the sun, where they should have ‘parlemented’ together.” But the uncle and nephew, unwilling to risk their conversation being overheard, “liked better to walk, which they did for two hours, d’Anville (sic), l’Aubespine and d’Aussy standing by, but not within hearing.”[19]
Then they parted, without having arrived at any agreement, since Condé insisted that the “Edict of January” should be re-established in its entirety, to which Montmorency absolutely declined to consent, declaring that the Catholics would refuse to observe it. The Constable was escorted back to Orléans, and the prince to the Catholic camp at Saint-Mesmin.
On the morrow, they returned to the Île-aux-Bœufs. This time the prince’s barge was followed by another, in which sat Catherine de’ Medici, Condé’s only surviving brother, the Cardinal de Bourbon, and the Duc d’Aumale, and two of the Queen-Mother’s maids of honour. It was remarked that these two damsels were the most beautiful of the bevy of young beauties whom Catherine had collected round her, and there was a shrewd suspicion that it was for that very reason they had been chosen to attend her Majesty upon this occasion. History has not preserved the name of the elder, but that of the younger was Isabelle de Latour-Limeuil, a lady who was destined to play a very prominent part in Condé’s life.
Condé was a bad subject for prison life, and the rigorous detention to which he had been subjected at the Château of Onzain had not been without its effect upon him; he was anxious to safeguard the interests of his co-religionists, but he was still more anxious to recover his liberty. “The little man to whom I have spoken,” wrote the Prince de la Roche-sur-Yon, who had had an interview with him some days before, to Catherine, “is very desirous to see the end of these troubles; he will accommodate himself to everything.” The writer had correctly judged the situation.
The conference was renewed, this time in the presence of the Queen-Mother. Catherine had always exercised a great influence over Condé, and, only a few months before, in an interview between them at Thoury, she had all but brought him to conclude peace on her own conditions, when Coligny had interfered and caused the negotiations to be broken off. Now, however, Coligny was far away, and Catherine did not fail to press her advantage home. She made an eloquent appeal to the prince’s patriotism; she flattered him; she “insinuated that, if he were to conclude peace without being too obstinate over the conditions, he should be elevated to the rank of the late King of Navarre, his brother,[20] and might do, from that time, all that he wished for those of the Religion.”
