Condé and his bride-elect were both at Blois when the Queen of Navarre arrived there. It was some years since Jeanne had passed any time at the Court, and it had changed very much for the worse in the interval. In a letter to her son, she stigmatizes it, with good reason, as “the most vicious and corrupt society that ever existed.” “No one that I see here,” she writes, “is exempt from its evil influences. Your cousin, the marchioness,[93] is so greatly changed that she gives no sign of belonging to the Religion, if it be not that she abstains from attending Mass; for, in all else, save that she abstains from this idolatry, she conducts herself like other Papists, and my sister Madame la Princesse[94] sets an even worse example. This I write to you in confidence. The bearer of this letter will tell you how the King emancipates himself; it is a pity. I would not for any consideration that you should abide here. For this reason, I desire to see you married, that you and your wife may withdraw yourselves from this corruption; for, although I believed it to be very great, it surpasses my anticipation. Here, it is not the men who solicit the women, but the women the men. If you were here, you would never escape, save by some remarkable mercy of God.”
Although Jeanne strenuously resisted all attempts of the King and Catherine to draw her son to Blois, she felt perfectly at ease in regard to Condé’s presence there, for the young prince’s Calvinism was of that rigid type which made no distinction between pleasure and vice, and, unlike his cousin, he had never shown any inclination for feminine society. He had, nevertheless, quickly succumbed to the charms of his beautiful fiancée, though his awkward attempts at love-making must have aroused no small amount of amusement; for the Queen of Navarre wrote to her son that “if he could not make love with better grace than his cousin, she counselled him to leave the matter alone.”
The marriage of Condé and Marie de Clèves took place on 10 August, 1572, at the Château of Blandy, near Melun, the seat of the Marquise de Rothelin, mother of the Dowager-Princesse de Condé, in the presence of Charles IX., Henri of Navarre, his fiancée Marguerite de Valois, the two queens, Catherine de’ Medici and Elizabeth of Austria, and a great number of noblemen of both religions; and was celebrated “tout-à-fait à la Huguenote.” For the Reformers, however, it seemed to take place under somewhat mournful auspices, since she who had planned it was no more. Jeanne d’Albret had arrived in Paris in the last week in May; on 4 June she was taken ill, and on the 9th she died, at the age of forty-four. Sinister rumour were circulated concerning her death, and it was asserted that the Queen-Mother had caused her to be poisoned. But, as we have pointed out in a previous work, there can be no question that Jeanne’s health had been gradually failing for some time past, and the most trustworthy evidence goes to indicate that she died a natural death.[95]
Immediately after the marriage, Condé and his bride came to Paris for the marriage of the young King of Navarre, which was celebrated with the utmost magnificence on Monday, 18 August. But the wedding festivities were of very brief duration; for on the Friday came the attempted assassination of Coligny, and on the Sunday the terrible Massacre of St. Bartholomew, to which Catherine had been driven by the failure of the lesser crime.
Very early in the morning—the massacre had begun about two hours after midnight by the murder of Coligny at his lodging in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois—the King of Navarre and Condé, who were both lodged with their brides in the Louvre, were arrested and conducted to Charles IX.’s cabinet. “Take that canaille away!” cried Charles, pointing to the attendants of Navarre, who had been apprehended with their master; and the hapless gentlemen were led out and mercilessly butchered in the courtyard of the palace. Then the half-mad King, who was beside himself with passion, informed the princes that all that was being done was by his orders; that they had allowed themselves to be made the leaders of his enemies, and that their lives were justly forfeited. As, however, they were his kinsmen and connections, he would pardon them, if they conformed to the religion of their ancestors, the only one he would henceforth tolerate in his realm. If not, they must prepare to share the fate of their friends.
Navarre, of a more politic and wary disposition than his cousin, and, besides, somewhat indifferent on the subject of religion, assumed a conciliatory tone, begging the King not to compel him to outrage his conscience, and to consider that he was now not only his kinsman, but closely connected with him by marriage. Condé, on the other hand, courageously replied that he refused to believe the King capable of violating his most sacred pledges, but that he was accountable for his religion to God alone, and would remain faithful to it, even if it cost him his life. “Madman! conspirator! rebel! son of a rebel!” cried the infuriated monarch. “If in three days you do not change your tone, I will have you strangled!” And he dismissed them from his presence, with directions that they should be most strictly guarded.
The conversion of the two princes greatly occupied the Court. The young Queen of Navarre, a fervent Catholic, spared no effort to persuade her husband to return to the fold of the Church, and found zealous auxiliaries in the Cardinal de Bourbon, the Queen’s confessor the Jesuit Maldonato, and Sureau des Roziers, an ex-Huguenot pastor, who had been converted to Catholicism by the sound of arquebuses. The astute Béarnais, who already seems to have had some presentiment of the part he was one day to play, was not the man to sacrifice a great future to his attachment to the Reformed doctrines, and accordingly feigned to lend an attentive ear to the arguments of his teachers.
Condé was the object of like solicitation, to which, however, he replied with anger and contempt. His obstinacy so enraged the King that one day, when he learned that the prince had proved more than usually contumacious, he called for his arms, swearing that he would proceed to his cousin’s apartments, at the head of his guards, and slay him with his own hand. Probably, he only intended to intimidate him into submission; but his queen, the gentle and pious Elizabeth of Austria, believing that he was in earnest, threw herself at his feet, and besought him not to stain his hands with his kinsman’s blood. His Majesty yielded to her entreaties and contented himself with summoning Condé to his presence, and, when he appeared, shouting in a voice of thunder: “Mass, death, or Bastille! Choose!” “God allows me not, my lord and king,” replied the prince quietly, “to choose the first. Of the others, be it at your pleasure, whichever God may in His providence direct!”
Despite this bold answer, he shortly afterwards consented to abjure, “laying upon the head of Des Roziers the risk of his damnation”; the King of Navarre did likewise; and on 3 October, the “converted” princes addressed to the Pope a very humble letter, begging him to accept their submission and admit them into the fold. Condé and Marie de Clèves also expressed their regret for having allowed themselves to be united in wedlock without the rites of Holy Church.
Gregory XIII., who had just caused a medal to be struck with his own portrait on one side, and, on the other, a destroying angel immolating the Huguenots, was graciously pleased to accord the petition of the young couple, and granted them absolution and dispensation, in virtue of which they were married again, this time according to the Catholic ritual, in the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (December, 1572).