After a short stay at Bourgoin, the Court proceeded to Lyons, where it remained for several weeks, its sojourn being marked by splendid festivities. In the middle of October, a sad event came to interrupt these rejoicings: news arrived that, on the 13th, the Princesse de Condé had died in Paris, in giving birth to a daughter.[100]
Brantôme assures us that Henri III. had fully resolved to petition the Pope to annul the marriage of Marie de Clèves and Condé—“which he would not have refused, since he was so great a king, and for divers other reasons that one wots of”—and to make the lady his queen; and it would seem that the princess was not indisposed to such an arrangement. However that may be, his Majesty exhibited the most extravagant grief at the death of his inamorata. On opening the letter which contained the fatal news, he instantly fell down in a dead faint, and was carried to his apartments, which he caused to be draped in black velvet, and where he remained shut up for several days, for the first two of which he persistently refused to touch either food or wine. When he, at length, reappeared, he was clad in the deepest mourning, and the points of his doublet and even the ribbons of his shoes were garnished with little death’s-heads. From that moment little death’s-heads in gold, coral, or crystal became the trinket à la mode.
From being the life and soul of every fête and pleasure-party, the grief-stricken King now plunged into the most extravagant devotion, and at Avignon, to which the Court had removed, with the idea of affording him some distraction from his sorrow, nothing would content him but to join the Flagellants, a sect very strong in the Papal city, who, dressed in sackcloth, nightly paraded the streets by torchlight, chanting the Miserere and scourging one another with whips. The Court and the Royal Family were compelled to follow suit; and the Cardinal de Lorraine, unaccustomed to such mortification of the flesh, caught a chill which caused his death.
Theatrical as was Henri III.’s grief it was, nevertheless, of a more durable nature than such exhibitions usually are; and, some months later, the Cardinal de Bourbon was obliged to have the body of the Princesse de Condé removed from the vaults of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in which it had been temporarily deposited, the King refusing to enter the abbey, as long as those precious remains were there. Even his marriage to the sweet and charming Louise de Lorraine,[101] which took place at Rheims, in February, 1575,[102] three days after his Sacre, seems to have been a tribute to the memory of his lost love, for the young lady, whom he had met at Nancy, on his way to Poland in the autumn of 1573, had first attracted his attention by the resemblance she bore to the Princesse de Condé.
Condé was still a fugitive in Germany when the news of his bereavement reached him. It can scarcely have failed to cause him pain, for, notwithstanding her relations with Henri III., he had remained attached to his wife; but the reflection that now that her royal admirer had reappeared upon the scene, she would, had she lived, most certainly have brought fresh scandal upon his name, must have served to temper his grief. In the previous July, he had been proclaimed chief of the confederates by a Huguenot-Politique assembly which had met at Milhaud; but he made no attempt to return to France, but wandered about Germany and Switzerland, negotiating with the Protestant princes and enlisting soldiers. With the aid of English gold, he finally succeeded in raising a small army, and, in the early autumn of 1575, he despatched part of it, under the command of Montmorency-Thoré, to the assistance of Alençon, who had just succeeded in effecting his escape from the Court and had placed himself at the head of the confederates.[103] But this force was too weak to effect anything, and was defeated by the Duc de Guise at Dormans.[104]
Having levied fresh troops to replace those he had lost, in the following April, Condé himself re-entered France, after an absence of two years, crossed the Loire, near La Charité, and effected a junction with the troops of Alençon in the Bourbonnais. Henri III. and Catherine were obliged to negotiate, and on 6 May another hollow peace—the “Paix de Monsieur”—was signed at Beaulieu. The Protestants obtained greater concessions than any which they had yet enjoyed; the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was formally disavowed and the property of Coligny and other prominent victims restored to their heirs; and eight fortresses were handed over to the Reformers, as security for the due observance of the treaty. Alençon received the addition to his appanage of Anjou, Berry, Touraine and Maine, and assumed the title of Duc d’Anjou, which had been that of Henri III. before his accession to the throne; while the King of Navarre was confirmed in his government of Guienne and Condé in that of Picardy. The last-named prince was also guaranteed Péronne as a place of surety and a gratification. But, so far as he was concerned, the treaty remained a dead-letter: he never saw a sol of the money, nor was his authority ever acknowledged in Picardy, where Jacques d’Humières, governor of Péronne, a friend of the Guises, refused to deliver that fortress into his hands and formed a confederacy between the partisans of the Guises and the bigoted Catholics to oppose him.
Deeply irritated by this breach of faith, Condé determined to seek compensation in the west, and proceeded to take possession of Cognac and Saint-Jean-d’Angely, and to purchase, from the Sieur de Pons, the government of the important fortress of Brouage. Then he went to La Rochelle, where, “by a succession of very able orations,” he succeeded in convincing the citizens, who were at first inclined to regard his pretensions with suspicion, that their mayor and bailiffs were quite unworthy of their confidence, and that they could not do better than entrust themselves to his protection, with the result that in a few weeks he was virtually master of the town.
But the concession granted the Huguenots at the “Paix de Monsieur” had aroused, as had been the case after the Peace of Saint-Germain, the most violent resentment among the more zealous Catholics, who regarded them in the light of a betrayal of their faith; and the efforts of Condé to consolidate his position in the West stimulated the growth of that confederacy which had already been formed against him in Picardy. The movement spread with astonishing rapidity, especially among the fanatical population of Paris, and soon grew into a general “Holy League,” or association of the extreme Catholic party throughout the kingdom.
The formation of the League, whose members were binding themselves to regard as enemies all who refused to join it, greatly alarmed Henri III., and, after an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a promise from the Guises that they would do nothing calculated to lead to a breach of the recent peace, he decided that the only course open to him was to place himself at its head. This decision rendered a new war inevitable, and early in 1577 it duly broke out.
In the South, the Huguenots contrived to hold their own, but Condé, who commanded in Poitou and Saintonge, with the title of the King of Navarre’s Lieutenant-General, fared badly, largely, it would seem, through his own want of military capacity, and was soon obliged to take refuge in La Rochelle, and look on helplessly while the enemy conquered the whole of the surrounding country. Finally, he made his way into Guienne and joined his cousin, upon whom he, very unfairly, endeavoured to throw the blame of his ill-success in the West. In September, the Peace of Bergerac, another ineffectual treaty, which granted in the main what that of the previous year had already promised, nominally put an end to the war, though private hostilities—storming of châteaux, assassinations, and pillage—still continued.