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 The local authorities proceeded to carry this out with a zeal due to long suffering, and the ruined medieval châteaus of France still bear witness to the action of Richelieu. Still there was no serious opposition to the new minister. The first serious conspiracy took place in 1626, the king’s brother, Gaston of Orleans, being the centre of it. His governor, Marshal D’Ornano, was arrested by Richelieu’s orders, and then his confidant, Henri de Talleyrand, marquis de Chalais and Vendôme, the natural sons of Henry IV. Chalais was executed and the marshal died in prison. The overthrow of the Huguenots in 1629 made Richelieu’s position seemingly unassailable, but the next year it received its severest test. Marie de’ Medici had turned against her “ungrateful” minister with a hatred intensified, it is said, by unrequited passion. In September 1630, while Louis XIII. was very ill at Lyons, the two queens, Marie and Anne of Austria, reconciled for the time, won the king’s promise to dismiss Richelieu. He postponed the date until peace should be made with Spain. When the news came of the truce of Regensburg Marie claimed the fulfilment of the promise. On the 10th of November 1630 the king went to his mother’s apartments at the Luxembourg palace. Orders were given that no one should be allowed to disturb their interview, but Richelieu entered by the unguarded chapel door. When Marie had recovered breath from such audacity she proceeded to attack him in the strongest terms, declaring that the king must choose between him or her. Richelieu left the presence feeling that all was lost. The king gave a sign of yielding, appointing the brother of Marillac, Marie’s counsellor, to the command of the army in Italy. But before taking further steps he retired to Versailles, then a hunting lodge, and there, listening to two of Richelieu’s friends, Claude de Saint-Simon, father of the memoir writer, and Cardinal La Valette, sent for Richelieu in the evening, and while the salons of the Luxembourg were full of expectant courtiers the king was reassuring the cardinal of his continued favour and support. The “Day of Dupes,” as this famous day was called, was the only time that Louis took so much as a step toward the dismissal of a minister who was personally distasteful to him but who was indispensable. The queen-mother followed the king and cardinal to Compiègne, but as she refused to be reconciled with Richelieu she was left there alone and forbidden to return to Paris. The next summer she fled across the frontiers into the Netherlands, and Richelieu was made a duke. Then Gaston of Orleans, who had fled to Lorraine, came back with a small troop to head a rebellion to free the king and country from “the tyrant.” The only great noble who rose was Henri, duc de Montmorenci, governor of Languedoc, and his defeat at Castelnaudary on the 1st of September 1632 was followed by his speedy trial by the parlement of Toulouse, and by his execution. Richelieu had sent to the block the first noble of France, the last of a family illustrious for seven centuries, the feudal head of the nobility of Languedoc; then, unmoved by threats or entreaties, inexorable as fate itself, he cowed all opposition by his relentless vengeance. He knew no mercy. The only other conspiracy against him which amounted to more than intrigue was that of Cinq Mars in 1642, at the close of his life. This vain young favourite of the king was treated as though he were really a formidable traitor, and his friend, De Thou, son of the historian, whose sole guilt was not to have revealed the plot, was placed in a boat behind the stately barge of the cardinal and thus conveyed up the Rhone to his trial and death at Lyons. The voyage was symbolical of Richelieu’s whole pitiless career.

Richelieu’s foreign policy was as inflexible as his home policy. To humble the Habsburgs he aided the Protestant princes of Germany against the emperor, in spite of the strong opposition of the disappointed Catholic party in France, which had looked to the cardinal as a champion of the faith. The year of Richelieu’s triumph over the Huguenots (1629) was also that of the Emperor Ferdinand’s triumph in Germany, marked by the Edict of Restitution, and France was threatened by a united Germany. Richelieu, however, turned against the Habsburgs young Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, paying him a subsidy of a million livres a year by the treaty of Bärwald of the 23rd of January 1631. The dismissal of Wallenstein, which is often attributed to the work of Father Joseph, Richelieu’s envoy to the diet of Regensburg in July and August of 1630, was due rather to the fears of the electors themselves, but it was of double value to Richelieu when his Swedish ally marched south. After the treaty of Prague, in May 1635, by which the emperor was reconciled with most of the German princes, Richelieu was finally obliged to declare war, and, concluding a treaty of offensive alliance at Compiègne with Oxenstierna, and in October one at St Germain-en-Laye with Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, he proceeded himself against Spain, both in Italy and in the Netherlands. The war opened disastrously for the French, but by 1642, when Richelieu died, his armies—risen from 12,000 men in 1621 to 150,000 in 1638—had conquered Roussillon from Spain; they held Catalonia, which had revolted from Philip IV. of Spain, and had taken Turin and forced Savoy to allow French troops on the borders of the Milanese. In Germany Torstensson was sweeping the imperialist forces before him through Silesia and Moravia. The lines of the treaty of Westphalia, six years later, were already laid down by Richelieu; and its epochal importance in European history is a measure of the genius who threw the balance of power from Habsburg to Bourbon. The predominance of Louis XIV. in European politics was largely due to the statesman who prepared France for his absolutism at home.

The magnitude of Richelieu’s achievement grows when one considers his relations with the king. Louis XIII. cordially disliked him, and would gladly have got rid of him if he had not been able to convince the king of the wisdom of everything he did. Thus obliged to assume the unpleasant role of tutor when delicate flattery was often most needful, the minister lectured and cajoled his master, always, until towards the last, giving credit to the king for his own successes, and overawing opposition by his imperious presence even when Louis was dabbling in plots against him (as in the case of Cinq Mars) behind his back. The king’s consciousness of his weakness was combined with a sense of duty, and it was upon these two chords that Richelieu played. Besides, he was eternally on the alert. Spies in every salon in Paris and every court in Europe kept the grim courtier informed of every change in his master’s disposition and every intrigue against himself. The piquant comments of his platonic friend, Mademoiselle de Hautefort, upon Richelieu were relished by the king until he was informed of others said to have been made by her upon himself. Then it was easy to supplant her with another favourite, Mademoiselle de Lafayette. When this devout maiden began to denounce the ungodly cardinal who was allied with heretics, her confessor—in Richelieu’s service—succeeded in inducing her to become a nun. Father Caussin, the king’s confessor, ventured the same comments, and Louis plotted like a schoolboy to turn his devotions into secret criticisms of state policies. Caussin was sent into Brittany, and the judicious and learned Jesuit, Jacques Sirmond, who succeeded him, kept clear of politics. Such was the atmosphere of the court in which Richelieu had to maintain his authority.

His own personality was his strongest ally. The king himself quailed before that stern, august presence. His pale, drawn face was set with his iron will. His frame was sickly and wasted with disease, yet when clad in his red cardinal’s robes, his stately carriage and confident bearing gave him the air of a prince. His courage was mingled with a mean sort of cunning, and his ambition loved the outward trappings of power as well as its reality; yet he never swerved from his policy in order to win approbation, and the king knew that his one motive in public affairs was the welfare of the realm—that his religion, in short, was “reason of state.” A clear conscience, not less than a sense of his own superiority to others at the court of Louis XIII., made the cardinal haughtily assert his ascendancy, and the king shared his belief in both.

No courtier was ever more assertive of his prerogatives. He claimed precedence over even princes of the blood, and one