There would not appear to have been any foundation for so terrible a charge, though the maréchale, who, besides being desperately enamoured of Condé, was a very ambitious woman, was certainly prepared to move heaven and earth to secure her elevation to the rank of Princess of the Blood. No sooner did she learn that poor Éléonore de Roye’s recovery had been pronounced hopeless than, with the object of establishing claims to the expected vacancy which it would be difficult to ignore, she made the prince a present of the estate and magnificent château of Valery, near Sens, which her luxurious husband had rebuilt and furnished with the most costly magnificence. At the time when it was made, the singularity of this donation was somewhat modified by the fact that the Queen-Mother had withdrawn her objections to the marriage of the Marquis de Conti and Mlle. de Saint-André. But when, after the death of the latter had put an end to this project, the maréchale not only confirmed the gift of Valery, but added to it a considerable part of the fortune left by her daughter, it was no longer possible to disguise the motive of such unexampled generosity; and people said very unkind things, both about the giver and the prince, who had accepted, apparently without a blush, an almost regal present from one of his avowed mistresses.
Other rumours espoused Condé to Catherine de Lorraine, daughter of the late Duc de Guise, or to her widowed mother, Anne d’Este, still very beautiful; while others again united him to Mary, Queen of Scots.
The prince had no intention of gratifying the ambitions of the Maréchale de Saint-André, being of opinion that to become her husband would be to pay altogether too high a price for Valery. But he was not indisposed to a union with the Guises, for, though they had done him much injury in the past, the death of their illustrious head had deprived them of their influence, and he was of too generous a nature to cherish rancour against a fallen foe.
The Guises on their side, hated by the Huguenots, disliked by the Montmorencies, and distrusted by the Queen, were sincerely anxious for a union with Condé. At the end of December 1564, the Cardinal de Lorraine, returning from the Council of Trent, passed through Soissons, to which town the prince had come, on a visit to his sister, Catherine de Bourbon, abbess of the Convent of Notre-Dame. A very cordial interview took place between them, in which his Eminence suggested to Condé a marriage between him and Mary Stuart. The cardinal had already approached his niece on the subject, excusing the inconsistency of a Prince of the Church recommending a heretic as a husband on the ground that the Huguenots were so determined to compass his ruin that the marriage was absolutely necessary for his political salvation. It is true that he had received scant encouragement from that quarter, since the young queen strongly resented the idea that she should sacrifice her own inclinations for his Eminence’s advantage. “Truly I am beholden to my uncle,” she exclaimed, ironically. “So that it be well with him, he careth not what becometh of me.”[68] Nevertheless, the cardinal did not despair of ultimately obtaining her consent.
On leaving Soissons, the Cardinal de Lorraine proceeded to Paris, followed by “fifty arquebusiers and some hundreds of his friends and servants, with arms, pistols, and arquebuses.” On reaching Saint-Denis, he was met by a gentleman of the Maréchal de Montmorency, governor of the Île-de-France and his personal enemy, who warned him that he could not be permitted to enter the city with an armed retinue, since the edicts forbade it. The prelate, however, thought proper to ignore this warning, and, on 8 January, 1565, he and his whole company entered Paris by the Porte Saint-Denis. Near the Church of the Innocents they were met by Montmorency, at the head of a considerable force. The marshal called upon them to lay down their arms; one man refused and was immediately killed; the rest obeyed, and the cardinal, never remarkable for his personal courage, took refuge in the house of a merchant, where he remained until nightfall.[69]
This affair caused a great commotion. The partisans of the Guises assembled at Meudon, under the leadership of the Duc d’Aumale, and assumed a most threatening attitude; the Maréchal de Montmorency summoned his friends to his assistance, and, since he was known to favour the Huguenots, Coligny and a number of Protestant gentlemen hastened to Paris to offer him their services. To the general astonishment, however, Condé took the cardinal’s part and openly blamed Montmorency. “If,” said he, referring to the fracas by the Innocents, “this was intended for a jest, it was too much; if it was in earnest, too little.”
With the object of showing his sympathy with the cardinal in a more practical form, at the end of January, he, in his turn, had the pretension to enter Paris with three hundred horse. On reaching the Bastille, however, he received a message from Montmorency summoning him to retire immediately, which he did, though not without addressing a letter of protest to the King, which was the cause of violent dissensions in the Council, where the Cardinal de Bourbon took the part of his brother, and the Constable energetically defended the action of his son. On a second visit to the capital, which the prince paid a few weeks later, he assured the Bishop of Paris that he would protect the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and that he deplored the affront which had been offered the Cardinal de Lorraine; and when the Parlement complained that, in contravention of the edict, prêches had been held at his house, he answered that he had neither authorized nor attended them.
The conduct of the prince, which seemed to foreshadow a complete change of policy on his part, and to confirm the rumours already in circulation as to a matrimonial alliance with the Guises, naturally gave the greatest umbrage to the Huguenots, and the extreme section of the party, already, as we have seen, very dissatisfied with their leader, vented their annoyance in a stream of lampoons and satires. The Duc d’Aumale, in his “Histoire des Princes de Condé,” stigmatizes the Protestants as “unjust and ungrateful,” and declares that “there is no proof that Condé ever contemplated a union by marriage with the House of Lorraine.” “In any case,” continues the royal historian, “if he did ‘bind himself afresh’ to his former rivals; if he refused to take part in all the quarrels and to share all the passions which were raging around him, it was because he was sincerely desirous to obliterate the traces, and prevent the renewal, of the civil war.”
The Duc d’Aumale could not, however, have been aware, at the time when this was published, of a letter written by Mary Stuart to her aunt the Duchesse d’Arschot, from which it would appear that the project of a marriage between Condé and the beautiful young widow of François II. had not only been very favourably received by the prince, but that he had actually taken some active steps in the matter. “I hear,” writes Mary, “that the Prince de Condé has demanded my hand of my grandmother[70] and of the Cardinal de Lorraine, my uncle, and that he has made the most splendid offers imaginable, both in regard to religion and other matters.”[71]
Whatever offers Condé may have made, they had no effect upon Mary, who was now firmly resolved to marry Darnley, and was, besides, thoroughly disgusted with the unabashed selfishness of the Cardinal de Lorraine. But the Queen of Scotland was not the only card in his Eminence’s hand, and, though a match with the widowed Duchesse de Guise—whose infatuation for the fascinating Duc de Nemours was common knowledge—or with her daughter, a girl of thirteen, was not likely to prove so attractive to Condé, there was still a possibility that it might be arranged, and for months the Protestants were in a state of trepidation.