It’s always a mistake to fall in love with the dead. It’s
even sillier when the object of your affection lived in the 17th century and
would undoubtedly have been both dentally challenged and smelly. But there are
a handful of historical figures whose greatness owes as much to personality as actual
achievements, and when a writer seeks to understand them it’s all too easy to
become sucked in.
Ladies, gentlemen, and fellow
History Girls, I’m ashamed to present my first historical crush: Louis II de
Bourbon, Prince de Condé, known to history simply as ‘The Great Condé’.
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| Undoubtedly smelly |
His story is simply told. As son and heir to Condé, First Prince of the Blood, the young Duc
d’Enghien was forced to abandon the woman he loved and marry a thirteen year
old niece of Cardinal Richelieu. Deeply
embittered, he ignored and abused his wife, and took every opportunity to flee
to the army and the one life he felt at home.
But it paid off. In 1643 and at the age of just 21, he won a
spectacular victory over Spain at the crucial Battle of Rocroi, and overnight
became a popular hero. The victories of Freiburg and Nordlingen followed, and
later the vital Battle of Lens which effectively ended the Thirty Years War.
His downfall came with the two civil wars known as the Frondes. In
the first he loyally fought to repress the rebellion, but he soon succumbed to hubris and began to
issue demands against the Queen and her hated First Minister Mazarin. His
imprisonment sparked the second Fronde, and when a frightened Mazarin was
compelled to release him the new Prince of Condé led an army against Paris
itself. When peace was finally negotiated, an isolated Condé defected to Spain
and led its armies against his own country. Finally
defeated at the Battle of the Dunes, he was pardoned on account of previous
good service, and lived out the rest of his life in loyal retirement.
And there you have him. He was an arrogant, treacherous adulterer who
meddled in politics and was forgiven everything because he happened to be a
great soldier. He would seem, as Emily Bronte once memorably described a pile
of dead rabbits, a ‘strange choice of favourites’.
But we’re writers here, and our loves are not the same as
those of saner people. It’s the flawed
characters who get to us and break our hearts – and they didn’t come much more
flawed than Condé. In my opinion he's possibly the greatest tragic figure
Shakespeare never wrote.
He certainly has the stature, and France is full of paintings and sculptures to commemorate his deeds. There’s even a jewel named
after him, the pink 9 carat Condé diamond presented to him by the young Louis
XIV.
His name also carries the supernatural aura of legend, as when the dying
Louis XIII told the elder Condé that he dreamed his son had won a great victory
– just three days before the totally unexpected Battle of Rocroi. In some
districts he might almost have been canonised, as in the église Notre-Dame de
Saulges, where Christ is at the top, Saint Paul on the left – and on the right
is Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé.
He was certainly no saint, and his behaviour with the ladies
made him what we’d call a ‘bad boy’ today, but that somehow doesn’t detract
from his status. Everything about him was larger than life, right down to his
savagely beaked nose – and well, we know what they say about men with big noses...
And on the battlefield he was a giant. Napoleon considered
him an inferior strategist to his contemporary rival Turenne, but few have equalled
him in his inspirational ability to lead men. Rocroi was his first battle as commander, but
he disdained the traditional helmet in favour of a simple hat with a white
plume – and it was that hat that turned the tide. Here and everywhere, always where the danger
was thickest, that plume was the one constant symbol in the whole seething
chaos of a losing battle, and the broken French rallied to it, followed it to
victory. I remember crying when I first read the eyewitness accounts of it, and
again when I wrote the scene for ‘In the Name of the King'.
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| Condé at Rocroi |
He led from the front, the middle, the flanks, anywhere he
was needed, and he did it with a heroic passion that was the stuff of legend. At
the battle of Freiburg he was apparently so incensed at his troops’ reluctance
to advance that he threw his own marshal’s baton into the Bavarian lines – at
which, of course, his whole army rushed to reclaim it. His speeches were full
of honour and victory, but it was the simplest one his men remembered best: ‘Qui
m’aime me suive’ – which translates roughly as ‘If you love me, follow me.’ They
did both.
He was, in fact, a good old-fashioned hero, and one who
could give Indiana Jones a run for his money. He had horses shot from under him
and musket balls whizzing through his clothing, but always he turned up again,
ragged and filthy but eager for more. During the Second Fronde he was known for certain to be
a fugitive a hundred and twenty leagues away, but when a previously moribund army suddenly launched a daring attack at Bleaneau, Turenne exclaimed at
once ‘Ah! The Prince of Condé must be come!’
He was a master of the impossible, and the
poet Voiture was only half-joking when he wrote ‘I think if you had undertaken
it, you would catch the moon with your teeth.’
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| Battle of Faubourg St-Antoine outside Paris |
It's an appropriate image for this man.
We’re rarely aware of the bodies of historical figures but Condé's physical presence dominates everything he does. The hand
with which he made a ‘threatening gesture’ at the Councillor Quatre-Sous in the
Parlement, the foot which Mazarin embraced in his desperate attempt to
ingratiate himself, the arm that was drenched in blood up to the elbow after a
day at the Siege of Mardyck. This is a man who breathed and bled and sweated –
so much so that at the Battle of the Faubourg St-Antoine he stripped off his
armour and rolled naked in the grass to cool himself down.
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| Grande in every sense |
Women certainly felt
it, among them the Grande Mademoiselle herself. She was the only daughter of the King’s
brother, but there
was something about Condé that reduced her to a schoolgirlish
flutter. Her account of their meeting during the Battle of Faubourg St-Antoine dwells
with loving detail on the dust and sweat on his face, the blood on his collar,
the dishevelled state of his hair. When he burst into tears to lament the death
of his friends on the field, it was that manly heaving bosom that inspired her
to the act that ensured her own place in the history books – ordering the guns
of the Bastille to turn inward on the city in order to allow Condé’s army to
enter.
So what went wrong?
Much the same thing that went wrong with Coriolanus and
indeed Othello. Condé was a great soldier, but he was a rotten politician. Arrogantly assured of his own importance, he never suspected
the intrigues that might be conducted against him, and the scene in which
the wily Cardinal Mazarin induced him unwittingly to compose and sign the order for his
own arrest is one Shakespeare would love to have written.
It wasn’t that he was stupid – he was fluent in both Latin
and Greek – but that was part
of his tragedy. He knew he was being manipulated, and he knew how it would end. When his sister and brother
finally persuaded him to take up arms against his King, the Duchesse de Nemours
recalled his words: ‘You have engaged me in a strange plot, but I foretell that
you will weary of it sooner than I, and that in the end you will forsake me.’
He was right. Being once persuaded that the honourable path was to fight Mazarin,
he refused to change sides simply because it had become politically expedient
to do so.
He was in the wrong world. The enduring image
I have of him is almost of a child, a grubby boy-soldier who never quite grew
up. While other aristocrats vyed to be seen in the latest fashions,
he was careless with his clothes and usually filthy from his latest
scrap. He laughed like a child and enjoyed life like a child, even (or perhaps
especially) when it was most dangerous. When he was on the run from the King’s
forces he disguised himself as a humble courier, but to the despair
of his companions he insisted on trying to cook his own omelette at an inn,
just for the fun of it. The inevitable disaster with the hot pan and consequent
loud swearing let the cat well and truly out of the bag, but as his desperate
attendants dragged him back out and into the road ‘Monsieur le Prince was
laughing.’
To me he's a tragic hero, and to research his story is to wish it ended differently. Maybe it could have done, and I remember falling prey to that peculiarly female weakness of believing ‘I
would have understood him, I would have helped’. I couldn’t, of course, and a snob like Condé
would have had nothing to say to me anyway. It’s always a mistake to
give your heart to an unreliable, arrogant, womanizing aristocrat.
Especially when they’ve been dead for more than three
hundred years...
***
More about his world can be found at the Chevalier Series
website.
Rude messages can be left for A.L. Berridge at her own website
here.
