Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/684

Rh 652 MAZARIN panied Jerome Colonna as chamberlain to the university of Alcala in Spain. There he distinguished himself more by his love of gambling and his gallant adventures than by study, but made himself a thorough master, not only of the Spanish language and character, but also of that romantic fashion of Spanish love-making which was to help him greatly in after life, when he became the servant of a Spanish queen. On his return to Rome he took his degree as Doctor Utri usque Juris, and then became captain of infantry in the regiment of Colonna, which took part iu the war in the Valtelline. During this war he gave proofs of much diplomatic ability, and Pope Urban VIII. entrusted him, in 1629, with the difficult task of putting an end to the war of the Mantuan succession. His success marked him out for further distinction. He was presented to two canonries in the churches of St John Lateran and Sta Maria Maggiore, although he had only taken the minor orders, and had never been consecrated priest ; he negotiated the treaty of Turin between France and Savoy in 1632, became vice-legate at Avignon in 1634, and nuncio at the court of France from 1634-36. But he began to wish for a wider sphere than papal negotiations, and, seeing that he had no chance of becoming a cardinal except by the aid of some great power, he accepted Richelieu s offer of entering the service of the king of France, and in 1639 became a naturalized Frenchman. In 1640 Richelieu sent him to Savoy, where the regency of Christine, the duchess of Savoy, and sister of Louis XIII., was disputed by her brothers-in-law, the princes Maurice and Thomas of Savoy, and he succeeded not only in firmly establishing Christine but in winning over the princes to France. This great service was rewarded by his promotion to the rank of cardinal on the presentation of the king of France in December 1641. On the 4th December 1642 Cardinal Richelieu died, and on the very next day the king sent a circular letter to all officials ordering them to send in their reports to Cardinal Mazarin, as they had formerly done to Cardinal Richelieu. Mazarin was thus acknowledged supreme minister, but he still had a difficult part to play. The king evidently could not live long, and to preserve power he must make himself necessary to the queen, who would then be regent, and do this without arousing the suspicions of the king or the distrust of the queen. His measures were ably taken, and when the king died on May 14, 1643, to every one s surprise her husband s minister remained the queen s. The king had by a royal edict cumbered the queen-regent with a council and other restrictions, and it was necessary to get the parlement of Paris to overrule the edict, and make the queen absolute regent, which was done with the greatest complaisance. Now that the queen was all-powerful, it was expected she would at once dismiss Mazarin and summon her own friends to power. One of them, Potier, bishop of Beauvais, already gave himself airs as prime minister, but Mazarin had had the address to touch both the queen s heart by his Spanish gallantry and her desire for her son s glory by his skilful policy abroad, and he found himself able easily to overthrow the clique of Importants, as they were called. That skilful policy was shown in every arena on which the great Thirty Years War was being fought out. Mazarin had inherited the policy of France during the Thirty Years War from Richelieu. He had inherited his desire for the humiliation of the house of Austria in both its branches, his desire to push the French frontier to the Rhine and maintain a counterpoise of German states against Austria, his alliances with the Netherlands and with Sweden, and his four theatres of war on the Rhine, in Flanders, in Italy, and in Catalonia. This is not the place to examine the campaigns of the last five years of the great war (see CONDK, TURENNE), but it was Mazarin alone who directed the French diplomacy of the period. He it was who made the peace of Bromsebro between the Danes and the Swedes, and turned the latter once again against the empire; he it was who sent Lionne to make the peace of Castro, and combine the princes of North Italy against the Spaniards, and who made the peace of Ulm between France and Bavaria, thus detaching the emperor s best ally. He made one fatal mistake, he dreamt of the French frontier being the Rhine and the Scheldt, and that a Spanish princess might bring the Spanish Netherlands as dowry to Louis XIV. This roused the jealousy of the United Provinces, and they made a separate peace with , Spain in January 1648; but the valour of the French generals made the skill of the&quot; Spanish diplomatists of no avail, for Turenne s victory at Zusmarshausen, and Cond6 s at Lens, caused the peace of Westphalia to be definitely signed in October 1648. This celebrated treaty belongs rather to the history of Germany than to a life of Mazarin ; but two questions have been often asked, whether Mazarin did not delay the peace as long as possible in order to more completely ruin Germany, and whether Richelieu would have made a similar peace. To the first question Mazarin s letters, published by M. Cheruel, prove a complete negative, for in them appears the zeal of Mazarin for the peace. On the second point, Richelieu s letters in many places indicate that his treatment of the great question of frontier would have been more thorough, but then he would not have been hampered in France itself. &quot;We must now notice that strange period of the Fronde which has always been variously treated, for modern historians have written its history from many different standpoints, all of which can be categorically supported from the varying mdmoires of the principal actors. Now, however, thanks to the labours of M. Cousin on the carnets of Mazarin, which contain the substance of his inmost thoughts, and of M. Cheruel on the letters written to and by Mazarin, it is possible to construct a more accurate and trustworthy history of the Fronde than has ever yet been attempted. It is not, however, intended here to trace the whole history of the Fronde, interesting as that would be, but merely to trace the policy of Mazarin throughout the epoch. The origin of both the Frondes was partly Mazarin s fault. In 1645 the parlement of Paris had pro tested against certain taxes, and had been checked by a lit de justice ; and when, in 1648, it united its members in the Chambre de Saint Louis for the general reform of the kingdom, Mazarin and the queen, instead of holding another lit de justice, calling the states-general, or trans ferring the parlement out of Paris, any of which measures would have broken its power, foolishly believed in the influence of the victory of Lens, and threw the people of Paris on the side of the parlement by the arrest of Broussel. The Fronde of the princes and the nobles, on the other hand, was largely due to Mazarin s absorption of political power. These Frondeurs were not, like their ancestors, moved by great religious and political sympathies, but by merely selfish aims for restoring the old licence of duel and intrigue, and were only united in one sentiment, hatred to Mazarin. That this was so was greatly Mazarin s own fault; he had tried consistently to play off Gaston of Orleans against Conde&quot;, and their respective followers against each other, and had also, as his carnets prove, jealously kept any courtier from getting into the good graces of the queen-regent except by his means, so that it was not unnatural that the nobility should hate him, while the queen found herself surrounded by his creatures alone. Events followed each other quickly ; the day of the barricades was followed by the peace of Ruel, the peace of Ruel by the arrest of the princes, by the battle of Rethel, and Mazarin s exile to Briihl before the union of the two