The Court escorted the King of Poland as far as La Fère, Condé accompanying it. On taking leave of the Prince, his Majesty informed him that he had obtained for him the restoration of his government of Picardy and permission to proceed thither whenever he wished. This pretended favour was really a precautionary measure, for fresh troubles were brewing, and Catherine desired to separate Condé and the King of Navarre, and deprive the latter, who was erroneously believed to be as vacillating as his father, of the support and advice of his kinsman. However, Condé was well-pleased to turn his back on the Court, where he had suffered so many humiliations, and at the end of the autumn he set out for Amiens.
The Massacre of St. Bartholomew had been not only a crime, but a blunder of the most fatal kind. It had shocked and horrified the moderate Catholic party—the “Politiques” as they had now begun to be called—and convinced their leaders, the Montmorencies, that the Queen-Mother intended their ruin after that of the Bourbons and the Châtillons. The result was a rapprochement between the “Politiques” and the Huguenots, which, by the beginning of 1574, had developed into a vast conspiracy enveloping nearly the whole of France. Its secret head was Catherine’s youngest son, the ambitious and treacherous François, Duc d’Alençon, who had long chafed under the subjection to which his brother’s dislike and his mother’s indifference had relegated him, and was determined to assert himself at all hazards.
The plans of the conspirators were carefully laid. At the end of February, risings were to take place simultaneously in Normandy, Picardy, Champagne, Poitou, Dauphiné, Guienne, and Languedoc; while a bold Huguenot chief, the Sieur de Guitry-Bertichères, with several hundred men, was to force the gates of the Château of Saint-Germain, where the Court was then residing, and carry off Alençon and the King of Navarre, who would at once put themselves at the head of the rebels.
Unfortunately for them, Guitry’s enterprise, on which the success of the whole movement hinged, failed through his own precipitation. Owing to some misunderstanding, he anticipated the day, and appeared with his men in the environs of Saint-Germain some time before he was expected. Catherine’s suspicions were at once aroused, and her remarkable skill in unravelling the tangled threads of even the most complicated intrigues soon placed her in possession of the whole plot. In the early hours of the following morning (23–24 February), she hurried the Court off to Paris. Charles IX., travelling in a litter, surrounded by the Swiss in battle-array, as during the retreat from Meaux, while she herself followed in her coach with Navarre and Alençon, whom she was determined not to allow out of her sight.
Meanwhile, the rebels had risen in arms and issued a manifesto demanding various reforms, though it was obvious that these were only a cloak for their real intentions, and that, should the rising prove successful, its effect would be to deprive the King of Poland of the succession to the throne, which must speedily become vacant, in favour of the more accommodating Alençon. Catherine, however, invested with full powers by the illness of the King, took prompt and energetic measures to meet the danger. Three armies were despatched against the rebels of Normandy, the South, and Central France; Navarre and Alençon, who were found to be planning an attempt at escape, with the connivance of two of the latter’s favourites, La Môle and Coconnas, were shut up in the keep of the Château of Vincennes, and a commission appointed to examine them; while the two gentlemen were brought to trial on a charge of high treason, condemned and executed; the Maréchaux de Montmorency and de Cossé, who had had the temerity to come to Court to endeavour to justify their conduct, were seized and thrown into the Bastille, and orders were sent to Amiens for the arrest of Condé.
Condé had not yet been guilty of any overt act of rebellion; but he had been compromised by the avowals of the pusillanimous Alençon, who had made a full confession, and also by those wrung from Coconnas in the anguish of torture.[99] Warned in time, however, he succeeded in affecting his escape, and fled to Strasburg, where he lost no time in returning publicly to the faith from which in his heart he had never wavered. His wife, to whom he had been reconciled, and who was three months pregnant, he left behind him. They were never to meet again.
On 31 May of that year, the unhappy Charles IX. expired, “rejoicing that he left no heir in such an age, since he knew of his own sad experience how wretched was the state of a child-king, and how wretched the kingdom over which a child ruled.” On the previous day, he had publicly declared the King of Poland his lawful heir and successor, and his mother Regent until his return to France; and Catherine wrote, urging her favourite son to return without delay and take possession of his birthright.
The latter needed no pressing. Although he had only occupied the throne of Poland a few months, he was already heartily tired of his kingdom, both the people and the customs of which were utterly distasteful to one of his indolent and luxurious temperament; and he was impatiently awaiting the event which should recall him to France—and the Princesse de Condé. Absence, so far from diminishing, had only served to increase his devotion to that lady. “I love her so greatly, as you know,” he wrote to one of his confidants at the Court, “that you must certainly inform me of everything that befalls her, for the sake of the tears that I shed for her. But I will speak no more of her, for love is intoxicated.” And he employed a good part of his time in inditing to her passionate letters, written in his own royal blood!
So soon as the news of his brother’s death reached him, he quitted his sombre palace at Cracow, secretly, in the middle of the night, accompanied by some of his French attendants, and rode without drawing rein until he reached the Moravian frontier, hotly pursued by his indignant subjects, who, singularly enough, had conceived for him a great affection, and wished to compel him to remain their ruler. The explanation he subsequently condescended to give of this escapade, was that the condition of France was so disturbed that even a week’s delay might imperil his succession. Nevertheless, having once shaken the dust of his adopted country off his feet, he seemed in no hurry to return to his own; he preferred to travel by way of Vienna and Turin, where he extravagantly rewarded the hospitality of the Duke of Savoy by the restoration of Pinerolo, the gate of Italy; and it was not until the beginning of September that he turned his steps towards France.
At Bourgoin, he was met by Catherine and the greater part of the Court. The Queen-Mother brought with her the King of Navarre and Alençon, whom she had set at liberty, having first extracted an oath from them that they would “neither attempt nor originate anything to the detriment of his Majesty the King and the state of his realm.” They were still, however, kept under very close observation by her Majesty, and treated very much like naughty schoolboys.