Remonstrance of the Prince of Condé

Now, this obedience was the beginning of everything he has since continued, by opposing those whom the Queen judged to be her enemies, and against whom she wished to be on guard. And for greater testimony of the doubt she had of them, it will please her to recall the command she had given several times to the said Lord Prince concerning the secretary Marseille. Now, when the said men of Guise, through the machinations they were conducting both in Paris and elsewhere, openly brought to light what they had hidden beforehand, the Queen confirmed and reiterated to the said Lord Prince, both by letters and by messengers, the command she had already given him to resist the force and violence they were planning to do to his Majesty. The Queen (in this regard), he most humbly beseeches—and as much as the word of a Queen must remain firm and inviolable—to reflect upon the things she wrote to him in her own hand, which he is now constrained to produce before the eyes of everyone, to make known to all his innocence through the very letters of the Queen. For he is assured that she will not have forgotten what she wrote to him from Fontainebleau in the month of March last, recommending to him the conservation of the person of the King and her own, in these words:

I commend to you both the mother and the children.

And consequently, what she wrote to him in her own hand by the Sieur de Bouchannes, when the forces of those of Guise were in Paris: namely, that he was not to disarm until his