The Admiral did not deny having given the money. Twenty écus, then a further hundred: the sums had indeed passed from his own hands into those of Poltrot de Méré. What he contested was what they had bought. In the eyes of the accuser, it was an assassination; in Coligny’s, the wages of an intelligencer and the cost of a better mount. The entire gulf between a captain of war and a procurer of murder now rested upon the ultimate purpose of a purse.
The horseman who received it had fired upon François de Guise on the 18th of February 1563, hard by Orléans. The Duke perished six days later. Between the pistol-shot and that demise, Poltrot had been taken, interrogated in the presence of Catherine de’ Medici, and brought to name the men who, by his reckoning, had incited him. The affair thus possessed a killer who avowed his deed. It was destined to drag on because his accusations reached the living, whom one could not haled into court so readily as him.
The Horse to Enter and Escape
In the deposition printed in 1563, Poltrot recounted a patient approach. He had passed between the Protestant chiefs, carried letters, joined the camp of Guise, and announced his repentance for having borne arms against the King. The Duke had received him kindly. The encampments of a civil war are not gates locked against the world: they welcome those who purport to quit the enemy, for their defection seems to bear witness to the righteous cause of those they join.
Poltrot had thereby mingled with the retinue of the Catholic commander. According to his confession, he watched for an occasion to strike and deferred it only because Guise seldom rode forth unattended. He purchased a Spanish horse from the Lord of La Mauvissière, bartering both coin and his previous beast. Such an acquisition was well fitted to the design of the fugitive he intended to become. It was just as well fitted, Coligny countered, to a scout tasked with riding swift with intelligence.
The siege of Orléans rendered delay perilous in the eyes of Poltrot. He declared he feared the fall of the city and the slaughter of its defenders. This justification was his own; it informs us how he framed his resolve, without lending his crime the virtue of a deliverance. On the 18th of February, he resolved to tarry no longer. He shadowed the Duke toward the Portereau, then took another path to await his return.
The Crossing of the River
Guise was crossing the Loiret in a small boat. The passage divided his company: all could not pass over together by this means, and several made the circuit by the bridge of Olivet. Brantôme, whose testimony is recorded in the annotations of the early edition consulted, was to trace the catastrophe to a parsimony in public works. It had been proposed to restore a bridge; the Duke had preferred to spare the royal purse. That recollection altered nothing, yet it offered those who had known him a precise ground upon which to fix their grief.
Poltrot heard a trumpet sound the Duke’s return. Once Guise had quitted the bark, he rode behind him. The Duke had but few attendants by his side. At a crossroad near his lodging, the rider drew near from behind and fired. He claimed to have aimed at the shoulder, believing the torso shielded by armor. He straightway spurred his horse into flight.
A good mount did not provide the path. The night cast him from his way; he stumbled upon a Swiss outpost, recognized the sentry’s call, and turned back. He wandered until he had run his horse into the ground, then sought shelter in a farmhouse. There he was taken. In the accounts of this capture, the assassin who had so minutely observed his victim’s movements proved incapable of directing his own far enough to elude pursuit.
The Confession and the Answer
Before the Queen and several grandees of the realm, Poltrot fell upon his knees. They demanded who had incited him, what end he sought, and what monies he had received. The printed text imputed repeated exhortations to Coligny; it implicated Théodore de Bèze as well, alongside another Reformed divine. It recounted private colloquies, scruples overcome, and promises of heavenly reward. Everything in it was framed to exhibit the gunman as the instrument of a loftier will.
Coligny answered in print. He rejected these supposed conferences, disputed the dates, and drew a firm distinction between those journeys of which he had knowledge and those foisted upon him. He did not seek to efface all commerce with Poltrot: the fellow had borne a dispatch for him, then supplied tidings from the enemy camp. The Admiral acknowledged the coin bestowed. He even acknowledged having heard the man speak of slaying Guise, but protested that he had neither instigated nor sustained the enterprise.
He lingered even upon the style by which the confession styled him. Why was he stubbornly designated as the Lord of Châtillon? The name was indeed his, but he perceived in it the idiom of his foes, eager to strip him in print of his office of Admiral. The question of which army truly served the King ran through the text as well. Thus a trial for murder carried within each designation the very war that had made the murder possible.
The Man to Be Kept Alive
Poltrot enlarged his accusations yet further. He cast suspicion upon La Rochefoucauld, because the latter had extended him a welcome. Regarding Condé, however, he professed to know nothing that implicated him. These nuances are of moment: not every name uttered was accompanied by proof, and even the accuser did not incriminate each Protestant leader without distinction.
Coligny demanded a confrontation. Let Poltrot be preserved until the peace, in a place where none might browbeat him nor dictate a fresh version of events; let them then be set face to face, under the authority of judges whom he did not challenge. He knew what an execution would wrest from his defense: the man whose written word was to be debated would no longer be there to answer for his contradictions.
They did not wait. Poltrot was tried, condemned, and executed in Paris on the 18th of March 1563. The accounts record discrepancies in his declarations; Coligny maintained that the man had cleared him before his judges and along the way to the scaffold. This interested assertion must remain attributed to him who advanced it. It is no more sufficient to settle the case than the initial confession was to convict all whom it named.
The killer was dead; the feud survived him. The widow and children of Guise pursued their accusations. The instruments and relations gathered in the nineteenth century show the challenges of judges, the interventions of royal authority, and the persistence of enmity far outlasting formal decrees. It was no longer a matter of seizing a horseman in a farmhouse: it had become necessary to validate, or to destroy, a version of the crime.
The purse was real. The horse had been bought. The Duke had received the shot. Yet these three certainties did not, of themselves, reveal who had commanded the trigger pulled. By putting Poltrot to death prior to the demanded confrontation, justice silenced his living voice without ever putting an end to the use that others would make of his words.