THE PRINCES DE CONDE.* THE Due d'Aumale made a happy
selection of a subject upon which to employ his enforced leisure in exile when he determined to give the world a history of the House of Conde. He was fitted for the task by his literary abilities, his military knowledge, and his evident political sympathy for the valiant chiefs of the French Reformers ; but he had another reason for writing. " I was not influenced," he writes in a brief preface, " by party spirit when it occurred to me to profit by the numerous documents of which, through the kindness of the last of the Condes, I had become possessed, and to relate the lives of some of his most illustrious ancestors." And he claims, with reason, so far as we can judge, to have performed his work in good faith, and thinks he may say with Montaigne, " Cecy est un livre de bonne foy." The actors were conspicuous men, the story was well worthy of a special narrative, and with the Conde papers in his hands, the Due d'Aumale did well to place a fresh stone upon the monument set up by history over the graves of an extinct branch of a royal family which has left imperishable records in the house of Fame. And his contribution is polished, vivacious, lucid, and as impartial as could be reasonably expected from a Prince commenting upon Princes. Moreover, what Englishmen will most admire, is the ever present healthy sympathy for the nobler side of French cations' life,—for the cause of those brave men who, on the whole, fought a winning battle on behalf of religious freedom. The Great Conde, no doubt, yet not before he too had been a rebel, became one of the main arms of Louis XIV. ; but the rights of conscience survived the Dragonnades, and the Revolution avenged on the priests and the courtiers the wrongs of a trampled and betrayed minority.
Whether Robert le Fort, " the real head of the Dynastie Capetienne," was a Carlovingian, a Saxon noble, or a Paris butcher, the learned have not been able to ascertain with satisfac- tion to themselves or their readers ; but, says the Duc d'Aumale, 4' the accession of his grandson to the throne was the substitution of a National Royal House for a Government founded on conquest." The grandson was Hugues le Blanc, who owed his fortune to the possession of rich abbeys, among them that of St. Denis. '• Pourquoi," asks Renan, "Paris, ville si peu centrale, est elle la capitale de la France ? Parceque Paris a etc la ville des Capetiens, parceque l'abbe de St. Denis est devenu roi de France." The house of Bourbon sprang from the youngest male child of St. Louis, the most illustrious descendant of Robert le Fort. " An ancient barony, the inheritance of Beatrix, wife of [Robert de France] was erected into a dukedom in favour of Louis, his son, and gave to his descendants the name which they have retained, that of France being reserved for the royal branch." The ancestor of all the Bourbons now living was Jacques, first Comte de la Marche and Constable of France, who saved the King's life at Crecy, who was captured at Poitiers, who fell in battle with the Tard-versus at Brignais in 1361. From him descended the famous Constable de Bourbon who, outraged by the Court, took service under the Emperor Charles V., and finally, fighting for his own hand at the head of the free companions who had flocked to his standard, he died before the walls of Rome. Long after his death the bands which sacked Rome and overran the devastated plains of Italy, says the Due d'Aumale, "used still to repeat their favourite refrain :—
"Calla, calla, Julio Cesar, Annibal, Scipion :
Viva la fame de Borbon !"
It was from Charles, Duc de Vendome, a brother of the free- booting Constable, that the House of Conde sprang. He had seven sons, of whom five only reached manhood, and of these one only died a natural death, and he, a cardinal, expired in prison. What a picture of the age ! Antoine, the eldest of the five, was 'the father of Henry IV.; and Louis, the youngest, was the first Prince of Conde. He illustrated the title by striving with Coligny * History of the Princes of Condd in Me Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Trans- lated from the French of M. Is Due d'Aumale. By Robert Brown Borthwick. Vole. I. and II. London: Bentley. against the Guises, and was killed on the fatal field of Jarnac in his thirty-ninth year. His entrance on what may be called public
life at the age of nineteen did not seem to presage his distinction.
The first mention of him is in the Domestic Roll of Henry II., and he " appears there under the name of Louis Mr. de Ven- dome, gentilhomme de is chambre du Roi, aux gages de 1,200 livres.'" But he soon made way, if not with the Court party, at least with their opponents, and found himself allied with the Montmorencies and Chatillons, and two years after he married their near relative, Eleonore de Roye. From this point the Due d'Aumale follows very closely the fortunes of one who was described in a popular song as:—
Oe petit homme taut jolly,
Qui toujours cause et toujoure ry, Et toujours balsa sa mignonne,— Dieu Bard' do mal le petit homme."
In the war with the Spaniards, Conde played a conspicuous but
minor part, behaving with distinction at St. Quentin as a cavalry commander. But when peace was made, the Guises became all- powerful, and for the rest of his life the Prince was engaged in civil warfare. Though a dashing and resolute soldier, he was generally unfortunate in the field, and considering how often they were defeated, it is marvellous that the Reformers were, not re-
duced to dumb submission. They were exposed alike to open violence and secret treachery. At one moment the sudden death of Francis II. alone saved Conde from the headsman's axe. At the battle of Dreux he was not only routed by the skill and cool- ness of Guise,—he was captured. When he and his colleagues called in the aid of Elizabeth, she exacted hard conditions casting discredit on her allies, and when Conde agreed to a peace, the first thought of the Court was how it could be opportunely broken.
Concessions made in extremity were revoked in the pride of power, and one adventurous campaign succeeded another for many years. Conde's most brilliant military exploits were performed in 1567, when he blockaded Paris, won the battle of St. Denis, marched across France as far as the Moselle to join a body of German Reiters in the winter of 1567-68, and, returning towards the Loire, relieved Orleans, and was on the point of capturing Chartres, " the granary of Paris," when the Court party gave in. The error of the Protestant party seems to have been that they placed undue confidence in the Court, and failed to exact substantial secu- rities for the verbal concessions they had made. In this respect Conde was far more pliant than the Admiral, a more earnest, if a narrower leader. Yet it was to the organizing aptitudes of Coligny that the Protestant levies owed that approximation towards the order and regularity of modern armies which characterised the campaign of 1567-8. They had a transport train, a regular dis- tribution of provisions, they took up quarters on a methodical plan, and in their marches paid strict attention to military require- ments. The peace won in the spring was violated in the summer, and Conde with the Chatillons was in arms again before the autumn. This was his last campaign. After months of manoeuvr- ing and skirmishing, the royal army, under the Dec d'Anjou, caught the Protestants in loose order on the Charente ; in the furious but running combat which ensued, Conde was wounded, and then murdered in cold blood, after the fight, by a captain of the Royal Guard. The rout of Jarnac did not end the dreadful war. Fresh leaders sprang up, and notably one, then a boy, who, escaping the massacre of St. Bartholomew, lived to win battle after battle, and finally restore internal peace and religious liberty, Henry of Navarre. The Due d'Aumale has sketched in outline the brilliant career of the man who must share with the victor of Rocroi the glory of being foremost of his house as a soldier, Making allowance for the imperfect military apparatus he had to use, the talents of Henry IV. were as considerable as those of the Great Condo. Probably the only rival Henry had as a soldier in his own time was the Duke of Parma, whose knowledge of strategy and whose inventive imagination made him more than a match for his youthful rival. Farnese only flits like a giant shadow across these pages, but the slight mention of his doings is enough to reveal the presence on the scene of a great captain. By the side of Henry we have two Cowles in succession, also Henrys.
The romantic adventures of the second, with whose wife the King fell in love, furnish a very curious chapter on manners, and on the weakness as well as the power of famous monarchs.
Not the least interesting chapter at the present moment is the last, in which the Due d'Aumale describes the recovery of France under Henry IV., and briefly hints at the great objects of his policy. Henry, as he says, brought to the country justice and peace, and in ten years the devastations of forty were repaired. The object of the King was to destroy the predominance of the souse of Austria, which ruled in Madrid, Milan, Naples, as well as in Vienna. He did not live to begin his " great enterprise," but he prepared for opportunity. " At the beginning of 1610 the reserve in bullion had reached the then fabulous amount of forty- three millions of livres, and the arsenal contained a depot of arms and warlike material to which no other in Europe could be com- pared. The corps of cavalry and the old regiments of infantry were carefully maintained, and the kingdom teemed with men fit for service, with officers who had been trained in the civil wars, or who had completed their military education in the admirable school of Maurice of Nassau." The King had the sympathy of England, could depend entirely on the Dutch and Protestant Princes of Germany, had made treaties with the Swiss, had obtained promises from the Pope and the Duke of Savoy, and counted on success in his design to make a new map of Europe. An oppor- tunity arose out of the disputed succession to the Duchies of Cleves and Juliers, when the knife of Ravaillac struck down the great contriver. The notable fact, however, is that France had so soon not only recovered her internal strength, but had become a most formidable power. Early in 1610 the King had mustered at ChAlons an army of thirty-five thousand men, and thirty guns splendidly equipped ; his cavalry are described as magnificent, his infantry in perfect order. But these were only a portion of the host he was prepared to put in motion. The Doc d'Aumale quotes Sully as his authority for the French musters. There were of French and Swiss troops, 44,000 infantry, 5,600 cavalry, and 50 guns. Besides these there were the troops furnished by the several confederated States, exclusive of the Papal, German, and English contingents, to wit, 54,000 infantry, 7,000 cavalry, 45 guns ; these were to form the two armies of the Meuse and the Alps. But when the other troops were added, the Due d'Aumale estimates that Henry would have begun his war against the House of Austria with 220,000 men,—a huge host for those days. The moral may be easily applied to the existing state of affairs, for on several occasions France has shown a marvellous elasticity in recovering from severe losses. If she was never before burdened as she is now, never before were her latent and obvious resources so great. If ten years sufficed to efface the ravages of forty years of savage warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fewer will suffice in the nineteenth to recover from the effects of everything save the indemnity. Indeed, the subsequent history of the Condos will show to what a pitch of greatness France had reached half a century after the death of Henry, and how his magnificent successor, Louis XIV., not content to push the policy of Henry to moderate limits, almost ruined France by his overweening ambition. The power of France is inherent in her fertile soil and gallant race: in four or five years she will be mighty once more. Whether three stupendous lessons in a century and a half have made her wiser remains the problem of this generation.
Previous page
