The making of a king (5 page)

not admit of doubt. At the time the plot was first hatching she had been embittered by her indignation and disappointment at the Florentine marriage, and would have been ready to take vengeance for what she considered, not unjustifiably, the breach of the King's promise that, should she bear him a son within the year, he would make hej: his wife. She had been told, and gave credit to the assertion, that Henri's death would profit her and her unborn child more than his life ; and, personally, her affection for him seems from first to last to have been small. The event upon which the King's promise had been conditional had not come to pass, but the sense that she had been betrayed remained. Nevertheless, the part she actually played in the conspiracy is involved in obscurity.

The bribes offered to each conspirator were shaped to meet their desires. Henri once removed, the spoil was to be divided : France was to be split up, and all concerned were to take their share. Savoy was assigned a portion of the booty, Spain another. Biron was to reap a rich reward.

Such was the condition of the plot already undermining the apparent prosperity of King and country when the short and successful campaign of 1600 had taken place. Savoy— scarcely caring, in the transitional state of affairs, to make a genuine resistance— was reduced to submission. Since Henri was to die to-morrow, why spend men and money in circumventing him to-day ?

Biron's attitude at this stage was again ambiguous. Some said he had engaged to lead the King into danger ; others asserted that, had this been the case,

he repented and did not fulfil his promise. At Lyons, when the war was over, he made to his master one of those half-confessions sometimes serving to salve a conscience, sometimes to disguise a crime. Resenting the King's refusal to make over to him the citadel of Bourg, he had, by his own account, indulged in evil dreams. So he told Henri. The King listened to the half, and took, or seemed to take, it for the whole. With generous imprudence he forgave the penitent.

" Marshal," he said, " never call Bourg to mind again ; and I also will never remember the past."

There was more than Bourg that Biron would have had to forget before he could accept, as freely as it was offered, his master's quittance. Henri may have divined it; but, bent upon recapturing the wandering affections of his old friend and comrade, he appears to have been incapable of believing that he would fail in the end to succeed. As, during the autumn weeks passed at Calais before the Dauphin's birth, reports reached him of the Duke's continued discontent ; of language used concerning himself convicting the speaker of disloyalty, he still adhered, with pathetic persistency, to his purpose of winning him back by kindness and trust. Money was given him — a large sum, wrung from Rosny's unwilling fingers. To the minister's warnings Henri turned a deaf ear. Whilst admitting incriminating facts and causes of complaint, he said lightly that Biron's rhodomontades, his menaces and his boasts, should not be taken too literally — he was a man who could not refrain from speaking ill of others and bragging of himself. When he was in the saddle and sword in hand, it was a different matter. And, in

spite of remonstrance, the King persisted in his attempt to regain his friend, heaping fresh favours upon him, and making him Envoy-extraordinary to England.

Perhaps, as Rosny imagined, Henri had not chosen the Marshal for this last post without a motive. The tragedy of Essex's treason and death was hardly a year old, and the King ma)i have fancied that the fate of Elizabeth's favourite might serve as a useful object-lesson to the Duke. Whether or not the shrewd old Queen divined Henri's intentions, she did her best to second them and to drive the lesson home. It may be that reports had made their way across the Channel, not to Biron's advantage.

" He was lost through pride," she told the Ambassador, pointing to the head of the man she had loved so well, still exposed to the public view. " He thought himself indispensable. See what he gained by it. If the King, my brother, believes me, he will do what has been done in London. He will cut off the heads of traitors."

What effect the. ghastly spectacle had on Biron is not recorded. It did not deter him from the course upon which he had entered. Bent upon his ruin, he went his way, to take up once more the threads of the wide-reaching conspiracy. Not long after the Dauphin's birth proofs of the Marshal's guilt that the King could not refuse to admit were in his hands. La Fin had played the part of a double traitor and had delivered up his accomplices. Leaning on the balcony at the Arsenal in close converse with the only friend, perhaps, who was unfalteringly true, Henri told Rosny what had come to his knowledge. The story had a double

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The Queen and the Concini 33

edge ; Biron's persistent infidelity was his master's defeat. Henri's patience and long-suffering had failed to win him back.

Summoning La Fin to Fontainebleau, he gained from him all the information he had to give. Yet he was determined to do nothing in haste. La Fin was at all events a liar—he had gone so far as to seek to incriminate Rosny himself—and the King was resolved that every charge should be sifted before he struck.

Thus winter and spring went by. At Saint-Germain the Dauphin lived and throve, an additional obstacle in the way of the contemplated dismemberment of the kingdom. And still the conspiracy spread, developing new features. Not only was the child, as well as his father, marked for death ; but none who, being of the blood royal, might aspire to the succession, were to be left alive.

The year, in spite of all Henri knew or suspected, had opened cheerfully. It was true that less than a month after his son's birth the King had braved his wife's displeasure by an attempt to effect a modification in the footing to which she had admitted her Italian favourites. Finding them both conversing with the Queen when she was in bed, he had told Leonora sharply to confine herself to her duty of arranging her

istress's hair, adding that, as she had no sense— giudicio —he would address himself to her husband. Leonora had wept all the next day, the Queen also shedding tears ; whilst Henri, by no means softened, ad observed aloud, when at table, that if his wife ould not have Princesses about her, and be served

by them, or by those who treated her as a Queen, she would not be recognised as Queen.

To Giovannini, the Tuscan" Resident, Concini—a sign of his growing arrogance—had behaved in such a fashion that the envoy expressed his wish to be recalled, to renounce all earthly courts, and to become the courtier of God alone..

Marie de Medicis was not a woman to submit meekly to her husband's will, and her refusal to admit the Marquise to her presence may have been a blow struck in return for the King's attack upon her favourites. She did not, however, persevere in the determination she had announced ; and by the end of January King, Queen, and Marquise were all apparently on friendly terms, and were visiting the Dauphin at Saint-Germain together. " The King and Queen came [to the nursery] at one o'clock," records Heroard, " the King and the Marquise at five. He laughed much and played with them."

Again and again Henri is found enjoying at the chateau a respite from the graver cares pressing upon him with increasing urgency ; sometimes amusing the child as he lies in his cradle ; watching him rocked ; having him brought to be present at his supper ; or walking with him on the terrace in the pleasant spring weather. Yet in the background of his mind, as he played with his little son, must have been the thought of the traitors who were laying their plots for his own destruction and that of his heir. Worse than all, he cannot, loath as he was to admit it, have escaped the suspicion that the Marquise was implicated in their designs. Amongst her many sins over-caution

The Queen and Madame de Verneuil 35

was not included, and some at least of the stories current concerning her must have reached his ears, affording him matter for reflection.

" The Florentine may have her son," she had declared. " I have my Dauphin. The King was my husband before he was hers," refusing also to accede to Henri's desire that the small pretender should be placed at Saint-Germain, to be the associate of "all the bastards there." A singular feature of the case was the degree of influence she was believed to exercise over matters which might have been considered wholly beyond her control. According to the Tuscan envoy she was reported to have a voice in the arrangements of the royal nursery, and was rumoured to have been instrumental in placing Madame de Montglat at its head. He had been told by a competent authority, added the Italian, that should the King die, and the Marquise's son fall into powerful hands, trouble might come of it. He further lamented—a curious proof of the Queen's policy at this moment—the caresses lavished by Marie on her rival, deploring the fact that no one had courage to open her eyes.

If the Queen's eyes had not been opened by all that had passed since her marriage it might have seemed difficult to perform the feat. Giovannini, however, was determined that she should not continue ignorant of the true state of affairs, and took his measures accordingly. An Italian priest, Torricello by name, had undertaken to place Marie on her guard, and, hether or not by means of his intervention, she uickly changed her attitude of conciliation. By May

e had adopted the line she pursued, though inter-

mittently, to the end, had refused to admit the Marquise to her presence, and had made complaint to the King of her insolence with regard to herself and to the Dauphin.

Irritated and angry, probably with both women alike, Henri can scarcely have blamed his wife. But at the present moment, engrossed by other and serious subjects of preoccupation, he had little time to spare for domestic cares. The conspiracy was drawing towards a head, and it was clear that steps must soon be taken to bring its promoters to justice.

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CHAPTER IV 1602

Progress of Biron's conspiracy—The traitors at Saint-Germain—Biron's letter—Henri ready to pardon him— He refuses to admit his guilt— Is arrested—The King and Madame de Verneuil at Saint-Germain.

THE present condition of affairs had produced a situation involving a severe strain upon the temper and nerves of the man against whom so many powerful enemies were leagued together. He knew much, he suspected more; but his policy was to disguise both knowledge and suspicion until the time should come when an effective blow could be struck. Practically and morally assured of the guilt of men with whom he was keeping up the semblance of friendly intimacy, he was compelled to treat them, as yet unconvicted of their crime, as if no suspicion of their treason was harboured in his mind, and to permit them to visit his heir. Now it is Epernon who has brought his three sons to pay their respects to their uture sovereign. All kiss the Dauphin's hands, and e Duke, " regarding him with attention, speaks in praise of him." A week or two later M. de Bouillon, steeped in treachery, is one of the guests at Saint-Germain. On the same day Hieronimo Taxis, Spanish mbassador, representative of the Power most per-istejit in hatred of the King and in league with all

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his foes, comes bareheaded to wait upon the child, explaining, as he bows low, that he had wished not to leave the country without seeing "him. With Bouillon and the men who had accompanied him to Saint-Germain, Taxis watches the boy, and the possibility of the Spanish marriage which eventually came to pass is discussed, as though 0 the guests had no knowledge of the plot laid to cut short the little life. More singular still, towards the end of April the arch-traitor, Biron himself, has the audacity to send his brother-in-law to carry a letter from him to Madame de Montglat, filled with professions of loyal attachment.

" Madame," he wrote, " my desire to have news of Monseigneur the Dauphin causes me to send this messenger to entreat you to give me tidings of him . . . for 1 have a passion and affection for him, hoping for his happy growth ; being of those who believe him to be given by God for the maintenance of this State. He could not fail to be generous, virtuous, and fortunate, being born of the King, my master, who possesses all these gifts more than any other King or Prince has possessed them. For my own part, I figure him to myself as the fairest, most amiable Prince that ever was or ever shall be ; for all my inclination is to love him ; and, besides the royalty the King will one day bequeath to him, he will leave him good and loyal subjects and servants. 1 should regret it if death should overtake me before I have given proof of this my ardent zeal, vowed to him as from the humble and obedient servant of the King, his father."