Before the writer had finished his letter, a servant came in to tell him that the Prince was gone.[356]
July, 1544] DEATH OF RENÉ
A Spanish officer on the spot wrote a touching account of the Prince's last moments. From the first the doctors gave little hope, and when the Emperor heard of René's critical state he hastened to the wounded hero's bedside, and knelt down, holding his hand in his own. The Prince knew him, and begged him as a last favour to confirm the will which he had made a month before, and take his young cousin and heir, William of Nassau, under his protection. Charles promised to do all in his power for the boy, and, with tears streaming down his face, kissed the Prince's cheek before he passed away.
"His Majesty the Emperor," continued the same writer, "saw him die, and after that retired to his chamber, where he remained some time alone without seeing anyone, and showed how much he loved him. The grief of the whole army and of the Court are so great that no words of mine can describe it."[357]
Aug., 1544] LA SQUELETTE DE BAR
From all sides the same bitter wail was heard. There was sorrow in the ancient home at Bar, where René's marriage had been celebrated with great rejoicing four years before. The Duke and Duchess wept for their gallant brother-in-law, and Christina thought, with tender regret, of the hero who in youthful days had seemed to her a very perfect knight. The sad news was sent to De Courrières at the English camp before Boulogne, by his Lieutenant of Archers, and the veteran shed tears over the gallant Prince whom he had often followed to victory. Great was the lamentation at Brussels when the truth became known. Nothing but weeping was heard in the streets, and Queen Mary retired to the Abbey of Groenendal to mourn for the loss which the Netherlands had sustained by René's untimely death.[358] In his own city of Breda the sorrow was deeper still. There his faithful wife, Anne of Lorraine, was waiting anxiously for news from the battle-field. Her father had died a few weeks before, and now her lord was torn from her in the flower of his age, and she was left a childless widow. Early in the year she had given birth to a daughter, who was christened on the 25th of February, and called Mary, after her godmother, the Queen of Hungary, but who died before she was a month old. Now report said that she was about to become a mother for the second time, but her hopes were once more doomed to disappointment. By René's last will, his titles and the greater part of his vast estates passed to his cousin William of Nassau, a boy of eleven, while a large jointure and the rich lands of Diest were left to Anne for her life.[359] The Prince's corpse, clad in the robes of a knight of the Golden Fleece, was borne to Breda, and buried with his forefathers; but his heart was enshrined in the Collegiate Church of Bar, among the tombs which held the ashes of his wife's ancestors. On his death-bed René had expressed a wish that a representation of his face and form, not as he was in life, but as they would appear two years after death, should be carved on his tomb. This strange wish was faithfully carried out by Anne of Lorraine, who employed Ligier-Richier, the gifted Lorraine sculptor, to carve a skeleton with upraised hand clasping the golden casket which contained the dead hero's heart. The figure, carved in fine stone of ivory whiteness, was, as it were, a literal rendering of the words, "Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." At the Revolution, the Collegiate Church of Bar, with the chapel of the Lorraine Princes, which Montaigne called the most sumptuous in France, was entirely destroyed; but René's monument was saved and placed in the Church of St. Étienne, where it is commonly known as "La Squelette de Bar."[360]
The memory of this popular Prince lingered long in the land of his birth, and his fame lived in the songs of Flanders and Holland for many generations. One of the best known begins with the lines:
"C'est le Prince d'Orange,
Trop matin s'est levé,
Il appela son page,
Mon Maure, est-il bridé?
Que maudit soit la guerre—
Mon Maure, est-il bridé?"[361]
And so the story goes on through many stanzas, which tell how, in spite of his wife's dark forebodings, the hero rode out to the wars to fight against the French, how he met with his fatal wound, and never came home again.