“Very well. I will send at once to Notre Dame and to St. Denis, to stop the preparations and dismiss the workmen.”
“Ah, wait.” The eyes that for a moment had sparkled with new hope, grew dull again; the lines of care descended between the brows. “Oh, what to decide! What to decide! It is what I wish, my friend. But how will my wife take it?”
“Let her take it as she will. I cannot believe that she will continue obstinate when she knows what apprehensions you have of disaster.”
“Perhaps not, perhaps not,” he answered. But his tone was not sanguine. “Try to persuade her, Sully. Without her consent I cannot do this thing. But you will know how to persuade her. Go to her.”
Sully suspended the preparations for the coronation, and sought the Queen. For three days, he tells us, he used prayers, entreaties, and arguments with which to endeavour to move her. But all was labour lost. Maria de’ Medici was not to be moved. To all Sully’s arguments she opposed an argument that was unanswerable.
Unless she were crowned Queen of France, as was her absolute right, she would be a person of no account and subject to the Council of Regency during the King’s absence, a position unworthy and intolerable to her, the mother of the Dauphin.
And so it was Henry’s part to yield. His hands were tied by the wrongs that he had done, and the culminating wrong that he was doing her by this very war, as he had himself openly acknowledged. He had chanced one day to ask the Papal Nuncio what Rome thought of this war.
“Those who have the best information,” the Nuncio answered boldly, “are of opinion that the principal object of the war is the Princess of Conde, whom your Majesty wishes to bring back to France.”
Angered by this priestly insolence, Henry’s answer had been an impudently defiant acknowledgment of the truth of that allegation.
“Yes, by God!” he cried. “Yes—most certainly I want to have her back, and I will have her back; no one shall hinder me, not even God’s viceregent on earth.”