Possibly there may have been a husband more unfaithful than King Henry; probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous, his taste in women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny outnumbered that of his grandson, the English sultan Charles II. He differs, however, from the latter in that he was not quite as Oriental in the manner of his self-indulgence. Charles, by comparison, was a mere dullard who turned Whitehall into a seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the high adventure, and knew how to be gallant in two senses.
This gallantry of his is not, perhaps, seen to best advantage in the affair of Charlotte de Montmorency To begin with he was, as I have said, in his fifty-sixth year, an age at which it is difficult, without being ridiculous, to unbridle a passion for a girl of twenty. Unfortunately for him, Charlotte does not appear to have found him so. On the contrary, her lovely, empty head was so turned by the flattery of his addresses, that she came to reciprocate the passion she inspired.
Her family had proposed to marry her to the gay and witty Marshal de Bassompierre; and although his heart was not at all engaged, the marshal found the match extremely suitable, and was willing enough, until the King declared himself. Henry used the most impudent frankness.
“Bassompierre, I will speak to you as a friend,” said he. “I am in love, and desperately in love, with Mademoiselle de Montmorency. If you should marry her I should hate you. If she should love me you would hate me. A breach of our friendship would desolate me, for I love you with sincere affection.”
That was enough for Bassompierre. He had no mind to go further with a marriage of convenience which in the sequel would most probably give him to choose between assuming the ridiculous role of a complacent husband and being involved in a feud with his prince. He said as much, and thanked the King for his frankness, whereupon Henry, liking him more than ever for his good sense, further opened his mind to him.
“I am thinking of marrying her to my nephew, Conde. Thus I shall have her in my family to be the comfort of my old age, which is coming on. Conde, who thinks of nothing but hunting, shall have a hundred thousand livres a year with which to amuse himself.”
Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in Henry’s mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been less acute, no doubt because his vision was dazzled by the prospect of a hundred thousand livres a year. So desperately poor was he that for half that sum he would have taken Lucifer’s own daughter to wife, without stopping to consider the disadvantages it might entail.
The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of 1609. Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last precisely what was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against it, but the Queen, too, was carefully instructed in the matter by Concino Concini and his wife Leonora Galigai, the ambitious adventurers who had come from Florence in her train, and who saw in the King’s weakness their own opportunity.
The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the relations between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to breaking-point. And then, whilst the trouble of Henry’s own making was growing about him until it threatened to overwhelm him, he received a letter from Vaucelas, his ambassador at Madrid, containing revelations that changed his annoyance into stark apprehension.
When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, “leaving all the world his heirs”—to use Henry’s own phrase—the Emperor had stepped in, and over-riding the rights of certain German princes had bestowed the fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke Leopold. Now this was an arrangement that did not suit Henry’s policy at all, and being then—as the result of a wise husbanding of resources—the most powerful prince in Europe, Henry was not likely to submit tamely to arrangements that did not suit him. His instructions to Vaucelas were to keep open the difference between France and the House of Austria arising out of this matter of Cleves. All Europe knew that Henry desired to marry the Dauphin to the heiress of Lorraine, so that this State might one day be united with France; and it was partly to support this claim that he was now disposed to attach the German princes to his interests.