Louis had, however, recalled Jeannin and Sillery to his councils, both of whom were jealous of the Prince, and wounded by his arrogance, and who did not, consequently, hesitate to advise the King to offer conditions to the reformed party, and to endeavour to conclude a peace; while Marie de Medicis earnestly seconded their views, expressing at the same time her desire to become once more associated in the government.
To her extreme mortification Louis hesitated; he had resolved to share his authority only with his favourites, and he was aware that Marie would not enter into their views; while he was equally averse to permit the interference of Richelieu, whose power over the mind of the Queen-mother was matter of notoriety. In this dilemma he appealed to the two ministers, who, eager to counteract the influence of Condé, urged him to accede to her wishes, representing at the same time the danger which he must incur by exciting her displeasure, and thus inducing her to oppose his measures. When he urged the powerlessness to which she was reduced by her late reverses, they respectfully reminded him that her faction, although dispersed for the moment, was by no means annihilated; nor did they fail to impress upon him that her adhesion would be necessary in order to enable him to counteract the pretensions of the Prince de Condé, who had already given evidence of his anxiety to place himself at the head of affairs, and to govern the nation in his name. This argument prevailed. The Queen-mother was admitted to the Council on the understanding that the Bishop of Luçon should be excluded, and she accepted the condition without comment, feeling convinced that when she had succeeded in establishing her own position, she should find little difficulty in accomplishing all minor measures.[68]
Madame de Luynes had no sooner ascertained that she had irretrievably lost the favour of the King than she devoted herself to Anne of Austria, who was soon induced to forget her previous jealousy, and to whom her society ere long became indispensable. In many respects the tastes of the girl-Queen and the brilliant widow of the Connétable were singularly similar, although Anne was a mere tyro in gallantry beside her more experienced friend. Both were young, handsome, and giddy; greedy of admiration, and regardless of the comments of those about them; and never perhaps did any Princess of Spain more thoroughly divest herself of the morgue peculiar to her nation than the wife of Louis XIII, whose Court set at defiance all etiquette which interfered with the amusement of the hour. In vain did the King and his mother expostulate; Anne of Austria merely pouted and persisted; and even her panegyrist, Madame de Motteville, has recorded that she did not hesitate in after-years to admit that she had numbered among her adorers the Duc de Montmorency, who previously to the passion with which she inspired him had been the devoted slave of the beautiful Marquise de Sablé;[69] the Duc de Bellegarde, of whose antiquated worship she made for a while the jest of her circle, and her own pastime; and finally, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who, mistaking her levity for a more tender feeling, was presumptuous and reckless enough to endanger her reputation;[70] while her imprudent encouragement of the attentions of Richelieu, which subsequently caused her so much and such bitter suffering, has also become matter of history. In addition to Madame de Luynes, Anne of Austria had adopted as her especial favourites the intriguing Princesse de Conti and Mademoiselle de Verneuil, the natural sister of the King; and while Louis was absorbed by visions of absolute empire, and meditating the destruction of his Protestant subjects, the private circle of the Queen was loud with revelry, and indulging in amusement to the very verge of impropriety.
At the period of the sovereign's return to Paris hopes were entertained that Anne would shortly give an heir to the French throne; and while Marie de Medicis, whose policy it had been to maintain the coldness and indifference of the royal couple, was trembling at the increase of influence which could not fail to accrue to the young Queen should she become the mother of a Dauphin, Louis was impatiently anticipating the moment which would enable him to present to his good citizens of Paris a successor to his regal honours. Great therefore was his consternation when he was apprised that the Queen, while running across the great hall of the Louvre with Madame de Luynes and Mademoiselle de Verneuil, had fallen and injured herself so severely that all hopes of a Dauphin were for the moment at an end.
In the first paroxysm of his anger he ordered the two ladies, whom he, perhaps justly, regarded as the cause of the accident, to quit the palace within three days on pain of his most serious displeasure; but the Duchess, to whom exile from the Court was equivalent to a death-warrant, lost no time in despatching a messenger to the Prince de Joinville (who had recently assumed the title of Duc de Joyeuse), entreating him to exert all his influence to save her from this disgrace; nor did she make the appeal in vain. The Prince, who was devotedly attached to her, at once declared himself her champion, and despite the advice of his friends, not only induced Louis to rescind his order, but offered his hand to the lady, who subsequently became celebrated as Duchesse de Chevreuse; and together with her own pardon also obtained that of Mademoiselle de Verneuil, with permission to both parties to retain their position in the Queen's household.[71]
Meanwhile the Prince de Condé continued to urge upon the King the expediency of following up his project of aggression against the Protestants, and proposed to him that he should join the army with Monsieur his brother, leaving Marie de Medicis in the capital; for which advice many designing and unworthy motives were attributed to him by his enemies. As an immediate consequence such an arrangement must naturally have tended to increase the dependence of the young sovereign upon himself, while the late accident of the Queen having removed all prospect of a new heir to the throne, should the chances of war prove fatal to the King and the Duc d'Anjou, the crown of France became the legitimate right of Condé himself. What tended to strengthen the belief that the Prince actually contemplated such a result, was the fact that it had been predicted to him by an astrologer that at the age of four and thirty he would be King of France; and the superstition so common at the time caused considerable faith to be placed in the prophecy, not only by himself but by many of his friends. Condé had now attained to within a year of the stated period; and as a few months previously Louis had been seriously indisposed, while the Duc d'Anjou had barely escaped with life from an illness which he had not yet thoroughly conquered, not a doubt was entertained by the party opposed to him that his great anxiety to see himself at the head of an army arose from his conviction that in such a position he should be the more readily enabled to enforce his pretensions.[72]
Be his motives what they might, however, the ministers, who were anxious that Louis should absent himself from the capital before he fell under the dominion of a new favourite who might thwart their own views, zealously seconded the advice of M. de Condé; and although Marie de Medicis strenuously opposed the renewal of civil warfare, and the Duc de Lesdiguières represented to the King the ardent desire of the Protestants to conclude a peace, all their efforts were impotent to counteract the pernicious counsels of the Prince, which were destined to darken and desecrate all the after-reign of Louis XIII. Marie then endeavoured to dissuade the King from heading his troops in person; or, should he persist in this design, at least to forego that of leaving her in the capital, and of exposing Monsieur to the dangers of the campaign. All that she could obtain was a promise that the Duc d'Anjou should remain in Paris, while as Louis had named no precise period for his own departure it was believed that he would not leave the city before the termination of the Easter festival, and that meanwhile circumstances might occur to induce him to change his resolution. But while Marie de Medicis indulged in this hope, the same anticipation had produced a different effect upon the minds of Condé and his party, who secretly urged upon the King that longer delay could only tend to afford facilities to the Protestants for strengthening their faction, and consequently their means of resistance, an argument which determined Louis at once to carry out his project; and so alarmed was the Prince lest some circumstance might supervene to impede the departure of the monarch, that he finally induced him to have recourse to the undignified expedient of quitting the Louvre by a back entrance at dusk on Palm Sunday, and of proceeding to Orleans, where he remained until the close of Easter, awaiting the arrival of the great officers of his household, who had no sooner joined him than he embarked with the troops who had been stationed there, and hastened with all possible speed to Nantes, where he appointed the Prince de Condé lieutenant-general of his army.[73]
The indignation of the Queen-mother was unbounded when she became apprised of the departure of the King, which she at once attributed to the anxiety of M. de Condé to remove him beyond her own influence, and she consequently made immediate preparations for following the royal fugitive; but although she exerted all her energy to accomplish this object, her mental agitation overcame her physical strength; and when she reached the town of Nantes, which Louis had already quitted, she was unable to proceed farther, and was compelled by indisposition to remain inactive, and to leave her adversaries in possession of the field.
The war which supervened was one of great triumph to the royal army, if indeed the massacre of his own subjects can reflect glory upon a sovereign; but the laurels gained by Louis and his troops were sullied by a series of atrocious and bootless cruelties, which made them matter of reproach rather than of praise. In vain did the Maréchal de Lesdiguières, the Duc de Bouillon, and even Sully, who had once controlled the destinies of France, make repeated offers of submission; the Prince de Condé had sufficient influence over the infatuated King to render every appeal useless, and to induce him to persist in the wholesale slaughter of the unhappy Protestants.
In the affair of La Rochelle alone Bassompierre informs us that "there died upon the field, killed in cold blood, and without resistance, more than fifteen hundred men, while more than as many prisoners were taken who were sent to the galleys: the rest were put to death by the followers of M. de la Rochefoucauld and by the peasantry. So that M. de Soubise re-entered La Rochelle with thirty horsemen out of the seven hundred whom he had with him, and not four hundred infantry of the seven thousand who comprised his army on the preceding day." [74]