De Preau, however, zealous as he was, made no impression upon the firmness of the Archduke. The Spanish Cabinet had rendered itself responsible for his opposition, and he defied the menaces of France, a circumstance which decided Henry upon immediate war. The resolution which he had taken of heading the army in person determined him, before his departure from France, solemnly to invest the Queen with the title of Regent during his absence; but the precautions which he took to name an efficient Council by whom she was to be assisted in the government of the kingdom excited the indignation and resentment of her personal favourites, especially of Concini, who thus saw himself rendered powerless when he had hoped to assert his influence and to improve his fortunes; and under the pressure of this disappointment he hastened to represent to his royal mistress the utter emptiness of the dignity with which Henry proposed to invest her.
"You are an uncrowned Queen," he said, "and you are about to become a powerless Regent. Thus, Madame, you will be known by two high-sounding titles, neither of which will in reality appertain to you. Cause yourself to be crowned, and then you will indeed possess the authority which is your due and the honour of which you have heretofore been unjustly deprived. Cease to be a puppet in the hands of a faithless husband, and at least compel this coming war, undertaken for the recovery of a new mistress, to be the means of establishing your own rightful position."
This advice was eagerly accepted by Marie, whose ambition had at length been aroused by a consideration of the failing health and advanced age of the King and the prospect afforded by the extreme youth of the Dauphin of a protracted minority, and she consequently hastened to express to Henry her earnest desire to feel herself in reality Queen of France before his departure from the kingdom, in order that she might not have to apprehend any neglect of her legitimate authority upon the part of the ministers whom he had selected to share with her the burthen of state affairs. The monarch, who had hitherto refused to listen to every suggestion which had been made to him of the propriety of showing this mark of consideration to his royal consort, was even less inclined to make the concession at this particular moment, when the expenses of his meditated campaign had been estimated at twelve hundred and fifty livres a month for the support of his own troops and an equal sum for those of his allies;[418] and he replied with considerable warmth that she had chosen her time for such a request most injudiciously, since she must be aware that he had neither the time nor the funds necessary to the indulgence of so puerile a vanity. The Queen, however, urged by her advisers, resolutely returned to the charge, declaring that she could assume no prominent position in the temporary government of the kingdom while her own remained so vague and undefined. She reminded him, moreover, of the uncomplaining patience with which she had awaited his pleasure upon this particular; a patience which, as she asserted, she could still have exercised had he not been about to cross the frontier, but which, under existing circumstances, she now considered as weak and pusillanimous in the mother of three princes.[419]
"At length, however," says Bassompierre, whose own more than questionable morality did not permit him to enact the censor upon his sovereign, "as he was the best husband in the world, he finished by giving his consent, and delayed his departure until she should have made her public entry into the capital." [420]
On retiring to his closet the King declared to one or two of his confidential friends, as he had already done on former occasions when the same question had been mooted, that the actual cause of the repugnance which he felt to accede to the wishes of the Queen arose from a firm conviction that her coronation would cost him his life, and that he should never leave Paris in safety, as his enemies could only hope to triumph by depriving him of existence.[421]
"Assuredly," pursues the quaint old chronicler from whom we have just quoted, "heaven and earth had given us only too many prognostics of what was to happen to him: it was in the year 1608 that a great eclipse nearly covered the whole body of the sun; in the preceding year 1607 that the terrible comet appeared; after which some three months or thereabout we had two earthquakes; then several monsters born in divers provinces of France; bloody rains that fell at Orleans and at Troyes; the great plague that afflicted Paris in the past year 1609; the furious overflowing of the Loire; next the Curé of Montargis found upon the altar, when he went to celebrate the mass, a scroll by which he was informed that his Majesty would be killed by a determined blow, and the said Curé of Montargis carried the paper to the Duc de Sully. Several conspiracies," he goes on to say, "must have been formed against the life of this good King, since from twenty quarters he received notice of it. The Pope Paul V sent him a courier express to warn him to be upon his guard, as very high and powerful ladies and some of the greatest nobles of his Court were involved in a plot against his life." [422]
What reason the King may have supposed himself to possess for considering his own death to be consequent upon the coronation of Marie, or whether he did actually so combine the two events in his own mind, it were impossible for posterity to decide; but it is at least certain that Rambure himself is not singular in adducing extraordinary coincidences and in lending his support to these superstitious terrors, for it is on record that Cardinal Barberino, who subsequently (in 1623) became Pope under the title of Urban VIII, and who was, at the period of which we now write, celebrated for his acquaintance with the occult sciences, as well as for his skill in astrology, sent a message to the King in the month of January, by which he cautioned him not to sojourn in any large city throughout the whole of the year, but more especially during the months of March, April, May, June, and July; declaring that, should he disregard the warning, he would be assassinated by an unfrocked monk of saturnine temperament born in his own kingdom; and adding that he would do well carefully to ascertain whether any individual answering to this description were then residing within his dominions, in order that should such an one be discovered, he might be closely watched; and he, moreover, concluded by assuring the monarch that if he would submit to absent himself from all the great cities of his kingdom during the months specified, he (the Cardinal) would answer with his life that he should escape the threatened peril.
This intimation, extraordinary as it seems, was, however, insignificant beside another which reached Henry at the same period through the Marquis Dufresne, his ambassador at the Court of Constantinople, who was instructed by the Sultan to desire him to take off the heads of the six principal nobles of his nation immediately on the receipt of his letter, and to be upon his guard against the greatest lady in his dominions, as well as against three persons who were in her confidence, whom he advised him to imprison during their lives, the whole of them being implicated in the plot.[423]
Both these communications may, however, find a probable solution in the circumstance of their having been made by individuals who had obtained information of a conspiracy against the life of the French King, a supposition rendered the more rational by the fact that although aware of the formidable army then organized in France, the Austrians made no preparation to resist a force which they were conscious was to be used against themselves; an inertness which could only be accounted for by the supposition that they were about to employ other and surer methods of evading the threatened evil.[424] But in addition to these probably political prophecies, others of a still more singular nature were made to Henry of his approaching fate. A young female named Anne de Comans voluntarily declared that a fatal conspiracy had been organized, whose avowed object was to terminate the existence of the monarch by violence, and even after his death she persisted in maintaining the truth of her assertion, not only orally but in writing; for which persistence she was pronounced to be insane, and so closely confined in an asylum for lunatics as actually to become in a few months the madwoman which she had been represented, although it would appear that great doubts were entertained as to her previous hallucination.[425] Six months before his death the King being in the house of Zamet retired immediately that he had dined to a private apartment, whence he sent to summon Thomassin, one of the most celebrated astrologers of the time, whom he interrogated respecting his own future destiny and that of his kingdom. In reply he was warned as usual to beware of the approaching month of May, and at length, irritated by his scepticism, the professor of the black art predicted to him not only the day but the very hour which was to terminate his existence.[426]
A short time subsequently a nobleman of Béarn arrived in Paris and requested an audience of the King, which he had no sooner obtained than he informed him that he had been instructed in a vision to seek his presence in order to warn him of his approaching death. Henry, however, who piqued himself in public upon denying credence to these supernatural revelations, and who, moreover, imagined that the object of his countryman was to obtain a recompense for his zeal, treated the matter lightly and ordered three hundred crowns to be presented to the stranger to defray his travelling expenses. This present he, however, respectfully refused, protesting that he had acted only upon a principle of duty, and that he should be amply recompensed should his warning suffice to induce the monarch to adopt such precautions as would enable him to escape the threatened peril.[427]