In January, 1595, the King signed a new decree extending the provisions of an article of the Edict of Peace of 1577, which admitted Protestants to public office. The Parlement, however, refused to register it, except on the condition that no member of the Reformed Faith should be eligible for the post of governor or lieutenant-general of a province, and persisted in its refusal, notwithstanding all the efforts of the King to induce it to give way. The attitude of the Parlement placed Henri IV. in a very embarrassing position, and de Thou, adroitly seizing his opportunity, offered to secure the passing of the Edict, provided that the King would guarantee that the young Prince de Condé, the heir-presumptive to the throne, should be brought up in the Catholic Faith. His Majesty, at first received this proposition very ungraciously, but, seeing no other way out of the impasse, he eventually accepted it, and directed the attorney-general to announce to the Parlement that the Prince de Condé “would forthwith be taken out of the hands of persons of the Protestant religion to be brought up in that of Rome.”
This announcement not only secured the registration of the Edict, but brought about the liberation of the Princesse de Condé, since to recognize the rights of the son was to acknowledge the innocence of the mother; and now that the favour of the King appeared to be gained, the prisoner of Saint-Jean-d’Angely had no lack of supporters. A few weeks later (June, 1595), Henri, Duc de Montmorency,[135] after having taken at Dijon his oath as Constable of France, presented to Henri IV. a petition signed by Diane de France,[136] widow of François, Maréchal de Montmorency, Charles de Valois, Comte d’Auvergne,[137] the Duc de Thouars, the Duc de Bouillon, the Baron de Montmorency-Damville, and other relatives of the princess, praying him to direct that the accusations brought against her should be adjudicated upon. The King, by letters-patent, ordered the affair to be submitted to the Parlement of Paris, and that the minutes of the proceedings at Saint-Jean-d’Angely should be sent to the registrar of that body. At the same time, he ordered the princess to be set at liberty, on condition that the signatories to the petition should make themselves responsible for her appearance when called upon.
In November, 1595, the princess and her son quitted Saint-Jean-d’Angely, in charge of Jean de Vivonne, Marquis de Pisani, whom the King had appointed the boy’s gouverneur. In the first days of December, they arrived at the Château of Saint-Germain, which had been provisionally assigned the little prince as a residence, and where, by Henri IV.’s desire, the Parlement of France came to salute him as first Prince of the Blood and heir-presumptive to the throne.
In the following May, the trial of the princess—if such a name could be applied to an affair, the issue of which was a foregone conclusion—came on for hearing. The Prince de Conti and the Comte de Soissons had protested against everything that might be decided as illegal, on the ground that the judgment of the case belonged to the King alone, “holding his court garnished with peers, legitimately assembled.” The Parlement summoned the two princes to appear before it, and show cause why their sister-in-law should not be pronounced innocent of the death of her husband. They refused, whereupon the court declared all the proceedings in Saintonge null and void and of no effect, “as contrary to the authority of the King, and to the decrees of his Court of Parlement, and useful in no way whatsoever to the furtherance of justice.” Finally, on 24 July, it issued a decree declaring the princess “pure and innocent,” which, in accordance with letters-patent issued by the King, was registered by all the provincial Parlements.
Thus terminated the mysterious affair of Charlotte Catherine de la Trémoille, Princesse de Condé.
But, as an eighteenth-century historian very rightly points out, a case gained before the Parlement was not necessarily a victory at the tribunal of public opinion; while over and over again that body had quashed the decrees of the lesser courts only to have its own verdict reversed by the judgment of history. The proceedings at Saint-Jean-d’Angely were declared null and of no effect, but the affair was not sent back for trial to the place where the supposed crime had been committed, nor submitted to a new examination. Thus, the Princesse de Condé, though pronounced innocent by the Law, was not exonerated by a large section of the public; nor has time altogether effaced the suspicions which remained in so many minds.[138]
Since all the documents connected with the investigation at Saint-Jean-d’Angely were, by order of the Parlement, solemnly burned by the registrar of the Court, in the presence of the First President, Achille de Harlay, and the rapporteur, Édouard Molé, until some fresh evidence shall be forthcoming, historians must renounce the hope of discovering the truth of this cause célèbre, and content themselves with more or less hazardous conjectures.
That the prince died from the effects of poison was undoubtedly the firm belief of practically all his contemporaries. One writer of the time alone, so far as we are aware, Joseph Texeira,[139] takes a different view. In 1598, Texeira published an historical treatise, in Latin, dealing with the principal events of Henri IV.’s reign,[140] in the course of which he denied that the Prince de Condé had been poisoned, and attributed his death to the injuries he had received at Coutras, from which, as we have mentioned, he had suffered a great deal of pain. Texeira pretends that the doctors who performed the autopsy were divided as to the cause of death, and that the opinion of those who held that it was due to natural causes was adopted, after a solemn discussion, by the Faculty of Montpellier. But Désormeaux, so devoted to the Condé family, confesses that, despite his active researches, he was unable to find the proof of the two facts advanced by Texeira in the documents of the time, whether published or in manuscript, and if, after this avowal, he inclines to the same opinion, it is because he cannot bring himself to believe that Texeira, Almoner to the King and Councillor of State, was capable of a lie.[141]
But, admitting that the unfortunate prince was poisoned, what evidence is there to connect his wife with the crime? Nothing whatever save the confessions of Brilland, made under torture, and which he subsequently denied, and the rumour of her undue intimacy with the page Belcastel, about which, singularly enough, nothing seems to have been heard until after her husband’s death. On the other hand, there are the strongest possible reasons for believing her to be entirely innocent. She was, undoubtedly, deeply in love with her husband at the time of her marriage, and had given him, as we have seen, signal proofs of her devotion; and it is, indeed, difficult to believe that in less than two years her affection could have been transformed into a murderous hatred. Moreover, she had apparently nothing to gain and much to lose by his death, for in the line of succession he stood next to the King of Navarre, a childless man, whose life was spent in the midst of perils. In conniving at the murder of the Prince de Condé, quite apart from the danger of detection and punishment, she would have deprived herself of the prospect of becoming Queen of France.