CAMEO
VIII.

Marriage of Louis XIII. 1614.

had the small-pox on the road, and had to wait at Poitiers for her recovery.

On the 18th of November she was espoused at Bordeaux to the Duke of Guise as proxy for the Prince of Asturias, and on the same day the Duke of Uxeda, representing her brother, married Anne of Austria at Burgos.

On the 9th of November, 1615, two splendid tents were erected on the Isle of Pheasants in the middle of the boundary river Bidassoa, and there the two young ladies were exchanged for one another, Anne having first signed a renunciation of all possible rights to the Crown of Spain for herself and her heirs. She was six days older than the King, a fair girl with beautiful hair; but no one paid much heed to her, her young husband least of all. He apparently attended to nothing but his hawks and hounds, while disputes ran high between Condè and the Marquis d'Ancre ; reconciliations were attempted and quarrels broke out again, and every prince or great nobleman was disgusted and on the verge of rebellion.

Concini saw that universal hatred was directed against him and his wife and would fain have escaped. His only daughter died at thirteen in 1617, and his grief was very great. Marshal Bassompierre went to see them, and condoled with them, and the Marquis then said that not only was he overwhelmed with sorrow for his daughter, but that he foresaw his own approaching ruin. He implored his wife to return to Italy with him while yet there was time; but she declared that it would be cowardly and ungrateful to forsake the Queen after all her benefactions. After all, they were not malicious favourites. They had been like tame animals about the Court, and all they can be accused of is of receiving the wealth that the Queen heaped upon them, and accepting the bribes freely offered, while they were incapable of strengthening her hands against the anarchy of the nobility, and they had acquiesced in the effacement of the King and his entire want of training in his duties.

Luynes, however, was resolved to rise on the ruins of the favourites. He constantly talked to the King of the bondage in which they kept him; and Louis, at sixteen, felt some stirrings of ambition, and considerable interest in a plot which gave him no trouble.

Several men whom Luynes trusted were brought to the palace and employed about the hawks. Luynes also confided in one of the captains of the guards, the Baron de Vitry, whom he had been observed never to salute when d'Ancre passed by. After making Vitry take an oath of secrecy, Luynes told him of the plot and brought him to the King, who gave him orders to shoot down Concini, promising him the marshal's baton if he complied. Vitry consented, drew his brother and brotherin-law into the scheme, and then chose out other gentlemen, whom he posted in different parts of the court of the Louvre.

For the 25th of April the King had announced a hunting party, and stationed horses and a carriage in readiness for an escape in case of A failure. One of the guards was stationed at the gate of the Louvre to

watch for the marquis's coming from his own house to go to his wife's
apartments in the Louvre, and await a summons from the Queen. At
ten o'clock the guard saw him, and called Vitry who came out, collecting
all whom he had stationed in the court, each of them with a pistol under
his cloak. They met Concini and thirty gentlemen attendants, and
Vitry was in such haste that he would have passed him if his brother-in-
law, M. de Hallier, had not said, "Brother, there's the marshal !"
"Where?" cried Vitry.

"Here," cried another, firing the first shot; others did the same, Concini dropped on his knees, Vitry and the rest despatched him with their swords, and instantly stripped the body of everything valuable.

The young King looked out at the window with his great carabine, and called out "Thanks, friends, now I am a King!" He desired that his father's old counsellors should be sent for, and there were loud cries of Vive le Roi ! in response.

The tidings came to the Queen Mother, who began to weep and lament, but for her own fall, not for that of her friends, whom she accused of having brought her into trouble. Some one said, "Ah! madame, you alone can restrain the poor Maréchale when she hears this terrible news."

"You

"I have something else to do," she almost brutally answered, don't know how to tell her? Go and sing in her ears L'hanno ammazzato." Nor would she give the unhappy woman a shelter in her rooms. She presently sent for the King, but he would not come; indeed he was standing on a billiard-table, receiving compliments from the former malcontents, who seem to have considered that a murder by command of a King was no crime.

The unfortunate Leonora was found on her bed, the mattress stuffed with her jewels. She was dragged to the Bastille, and her husband's body was buried at night under the organ at the church of S. Germain ; but the populace tore it up, dragged it about the streets, and finally burnt it. Luynes pretended to think all sorts of dangers to the King might lurk in his mother's apartments. He actually came and searched them for barrels of gunpowder prepared to blow up the Court. He shut the Queen up closely, and would not let her see any one, not even her children, and at last, as a favour, she was permitted to retire to Blois.

The little son of Concini, a boy of twelve, was arrested, and kept without clothes or food for a whole day. Then the Count of Fieschi, equerry to the young Queen, brought him to her and told her no one could dance a branle so well. Anne of Austria gave him some sweetmeats, made him dance, and he was then imprisoned at Nantes.

Leonora, destitute of everything, was shut up in the Conciergerie, and the Parliament were called on to try her for treason and sorcery!

The proofs were, her consultations with a Jew physician, whom the Grand Duke of Tuscany had sent with his daughter; her having had a newly killed cock applied to her head when in great pain; her trick of rolling wax in her fingers; her possession of the schemes of nativity of

CAMEO
VIII.

Murder of
Concini.

1617.

CAMEO
VIII.

the Queen and her children; and her ascendency over the Queen. She replied calmly and sensibly to all the interrogations, and one of her Execution of replies has become proverbial. When she was asked by what witchcraft she had enthralled the Queen, she answered, "Only by the power of a strong mind over a weak one."

Leonora.

1617.

All that really was proved was, that the poor woman had lived in constant dread of being a mark for sorcery, and that her supposed incantations were only intended to protect herself. Her doom was, however, decided, though five judges refused to take part in it, and the Procureur-Général Bret only agreed to the sentence because Luynes gave him his word of honour that she would be pardoned.

The sentence was that she should be beheaded and afterwards burnt, her goods confiscated, and her son's blood attainted. She had only expected to be banished, and she cried aloud in her native tongue, Oimé, poveretta!

There was no pardon for her, and she underwent her sentence with great courage and composure, only, as she saw the assembled crowds, saying, "What a number of people to see one poor afflicted woman! Her demeanour changed their hatred into pity, and assuredly no woman was ever more cruelly and unjustly treated.

Though Louis XIII. talked of his father's counsellors, there was no more place for the best of them—Sully and Duplessis Mornay. Once indeed he did send for Sully, who walked grand, stiff, and grave through a laughing host of fashionable youths, who were sneering at the dress of the last generation.

Sire," he said to the young King, "when your Majesty's father did me the honour to speak with me on business, the first thing he did was to send away all the buffoons."

Louis never requested an interview with him again, and Sully bitterly felt the contrast. He often took out and kissed the medallion of the head of the great Henri, which hung by a chain round his neck, speaking of him as his dear master. The duke retired to his estates, and spent his time between Sully, Château Villebon, and at La Chapelle d'Angillon, a stately ducal palace, where he kept an almost regal Court, so much so that the domestic doctor declared himself to have visited eighty sick gentlemen and soldiers in one morning, without perceiving any diminution in the train, or difficulty in performing the service of the house.

It was managed with great grandeur and austerity. The duke spent some time every morning in prayer and reading; then went to work with four secretaries on his Memoirs, which were all addressed to himself "You were wounded-you climbed a tree-you advised the King." He also attended to business, for he was still Grand Master of the Ordnance and Governor of Poitou and Rochelle, and was the adviser of all the Huguenots.

Afterwards he went for a short walk. Then a great bell was rung and the whole household stood marshalled in order to see him march

out, his equerries and gentlemen before him, then two Swiss guards, and then himself, with a favoured friend or two: French and Swiss guards came behind, and two porters last. Dinner was in the great hall, the duke and duchess sitting on armchairs, all his family on stools. Only the chief guests, gentlemen and ladies of honour, dined with him; but there was a second table for the younger folk in another hall. After sitting for some time after dinner, there ensued another stately walk with all the same ceremonies, or a drive in the park with the duchess. Then followed a few more hours of business and a supper in

the same order.

Many Roman Catholics were in his household, and he took care that they should diligently follow their religion, though he does not seem to have been as fond of sermons as were most of the Huguenots. His wife had been a Roman Catholic, but joined him in worship on her marriage. Still, however, when in the castle of Villebon, she used to haunt a private gallery where she could hear the Hours sung in an adjɔining church, and she and her daughter, the Duchess of Rohan, washed all the altar linen with their own hands. Yet when the duke, in 1641, was dying, at eighty-two years of age, she refused to admit some Capuchin friars, whom he had wished to see, sending word that if they persisted in trying to enter, they should be thrown into the moat. She probably could not bear that his death should contradict his life. She worked tapestry beautifully, and was a dame with all the nobility, grandeur, and good sense that befitted the wife of Maximilien de Rosny.

САМЕО VIII. Sully's household

and death. 1641.

CAMEO IX. Calvinistic doctrine.

THE term Arminian is so often supposed to mean a species of heretic, and to mark as such some of our greatest and best Churchmen, that we must go into its history, although it came from a foreign soil.

Calvin had laid great stress on those passages of the Epistle to the Romans which speak of the foreknowledge of God as to the ultimate fate of each individual. Thence he deduced the doctrine of predestination, which denied that the lot of human beings depended on themselves, and declared that they had no real free will, but were from the first destined either to mercy or to wrath, and moved like puppets under their doom. This teaching, of course, led, on the one hand to careless assurance, on the other to reckless despair, though happily there were many loving and faithful souls between these two extremes who never realised the full import of their creed. While the struggle was for life and death between Rome and the Reformation, the details of teaching were not examined into, but in the peace of European weapons, the theological war began.

The doctrine of predestination was the most fully expressed in what was called the Heidelberg Catechism; and a synod of the pastors of Holland had decreed that this must be signed by all their preachers, and be to them what the Thirty-nine Articles are to the English Church and the Confession of Augsburg to the Lutherans. Many preachers hesitated to pledge themselves to doctrines that they did not think Scriptural nor according to primitive faith, and still more, not accordant with the eternal mercy of God. Of these Jacob Hermann, a minister of Amsterdam, or as he Latinised his name, Arminius, was the foremost, and under his influence a number of clergy refused their signature.

The University of Leyden in 1603 chose Arminius as their Professor