Cardinal de Richelieu

While his coach rumbled and jolted through miry ways towards the south-west, Armand de Richelieu had time to consider what he had done and hoped to do. The objects of his ambition were always the same: political power and the command of men. His career might seem to have met with a sharp check in these long months of illness, followed by banishment to remote wilds, so far from the sources of light and of favour, Paris and the King. But if he felt this, he was not the man to be seriously disheartened.

A diocese, after all, is not a bad school for governing one’s fellow-creatures. Some of Richelieu’s biographers think that he deliberately took up the work of a resident bishop with the idea of gaining experience for the larger career on which his heart was set: some, that in his state of chronic poverty he found the provinces a more honourable abode than the capital. In any case, he threw himself with eager energy into work which was difficult enough; the province of Poitou, and especially Lower Poitou, being desolated and devoured by war and by taxes, torn to pieces by schism, unhealthy, dismal, neglected, its old traditions, both of Church and State, fallen into ruin and forgetfulness. And Luçon itself, with its fine old cathedral lifted proudly and sadly above the mouldy roofs of the bourg, neither town nor village, seemed to lie at the other end of the world, near upon the sea, beyond leagues of wide wet marsh scattered with miserable little farms and cottages and crossed by half-drained roads and stagnant canals, the few wretched peasants shivering with fever.

The occasional visits of Jacques du Plessis de Richelieu, who had now been dead sixteen years, were Luçon’s latest experience of episcopal care. Certainly the diocese owed nothing to the Richelieu family, which had swallowed its revenues and let its cathedral tumble down; but with a touching faith in the future not unjustified, it offered a hearty welcome to young Armand de Richelieu. He entered his territory at Fontenay-le-Comte, a cheerful little town which prided itself, like the rest of Poitou, on having produced many great men. The Bishop was received here, not only by the inhabitants, but by a deputation from the Chapter of Luçon, and they harangued each other with various flattering remarks. But through the formalities of the time there pierces that clear decided meaning which is never absent from any utterance of Richelieu’s, even as a young man of three-and-twenty. His speeches were never written for him. There were anger and injury in the minds of the Luçon Chapter, and he knew it. “I am not happy enough,” he said, “to have all your hearts.” But now that he and they were to live together, things would be very different. They would learn to know him, and to wish him well. For his part, he was ready to forget the past, highly esteeming the law which the ancients called “amnistie d’oubliance.” Possibly there was a wry face here and there among the old canons at this touch of generosity, and it was not very long, in fact, before they began to quarrel with their new Bishop; but he had brought with him from Paris the fame of a preacher and a theologian, and the dull little town was en fête on that saint’s day in December when Richelieu first said mass and preached in his own cathedral.

All, indeed, seemed peace and harmony. Even the Protestants, who were rather numerous in the diocese and in all that part of France, had a friendly word from the new Bishop on his arrival. One of the speeches which has been preserved was addressed to the crowd in the street. After telling them how much he valued their joyful faces and cries of welcome, he added, “I know there are those in this company who are divided from us as to belief; in spite of which, I hope we may be united in affection, and I will do all that is possible to bring this to pass.”

Here one seems to see the germ of that idea of religious toleration which influenced Richelieu’s policy in later years. If he could persuade the Huguenots to be “Frenchmen first and Protestants afterwards,” he was always willing to give them liberty of worship. If he crushed them, it was because they were a fighting faction which endangered, in his view, the unity of France and the power of the monarchy.

From his dilapidated palace, the heavy old buildings of which leaned up against cathedral walls battered by wars and by weather, Richelieu wrote in the spring of 1609 to a certain Madame de Bourges, who lived in Paris, in the Rue des Blanc-manteaux, near the newly fashionable Place Royale. This lady seems to have been a friend of his mother’s family, and to have been married to one of a succession of distinguished physicians who practised in Paris during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was certainly an obliging person. Possibly her husband or son had attended the young Bishop in his four months’ illness.

He begins his letter by thanking Madame de Bourges for a million kindnesses, and especially for some ecclesiastical vestments she had sent him. He found himself badly off for many necessary ornaments, former bishops of Luçon having left little behind them. And no wonder: they had not made it their residence for sixty years, we are told, and fighting Huguenots had stormed and devastated the place.

“... I am now in my barony,” he writes, “beloved of everybody, so they tell me, and I can only repeat it; but you know all beginnings are good. I shall have no lack of occupation here, I assure you, for everything is in such ruins that repairing will be hard work. I am extremely ill-lodged, for I have no fire anywhere, because of the smoke ... no remedy but patience. I assure you that I have the most horrid bishopric in France, the most muddy and the most disagreeable.... There is no place to walk, no garden, no alley, no anything, so that I am imprisoned in my house....”

He is immensely interested in his furniture and his household, showing in these young days all the taste for careful detail, all the love of magnificence and show, which was to characterise the great Minister, the man with millions to spend where a poor little Bishop of Luçon had only hundreds.

He tells Madame de Bourges, of whose kind and active interest he seems very sure, that he has bought the velvet bed belonging to his aunt, Madame de Marconnay. He has also come into possession of a stately bed with hangings of silk and gold, which belonged to his great-uncle, “deffunct M. de Luçon.” This style is out of fashion, apparently, for he asks advice and help as to arranging the episcopal bed with Bergamesque tapestry. A little later, he concludes that even a beggar like himself must entertain his neighbours with a noble air, so that the country may esteem him “un grand monsieur.” He will therefore be obliged to Madame de Bourges if she will let him know the cost of two dozen silver plates “de belle grandeur.” He hopes to get them for five hundred crowns, but seems pretty sure that his kind friend will make up any deficiency: “I know that for the sake of a hundred crowns you would not let me have anything mean.”

In return for all these services the Bishop was expected to interest himself in finding a husband for Madame de Bourges’ daughter Magdeleine. The task was not easy: he assures his correspondent that there is not a gentleman in the country possessing either money or goods. “Nous sommes tous gueux en ce pays, et moi le premier,” he says with a light-hearted air.

From the first he was very fortunate in his servants, several of whom came to him at this time and stayed with him all his life. One of these was his maître d’hôtel, a young man named La Brosse, who had been in the service of the late Duc de Montpensier. La Brosse ordered everything in the household, knew how the Bishop’s guests should be entertained, and troubled him with nothing but accounts. This was well, for the work of the diocese, once undertaken, was enough to occupy both thought and time.

The destitution of the flock was twofold—bodily and spiritual. Richelieu’s first care was to get his poor people relieved of some of the heavy burden of taxes which weighed them down. Under the system of those days, France was divided into pays d’états and pays d’élection. The pays d’états—chiefly provinces which had been originally independent of the crown of France—were taxed by their own representative Estates, sitting at the principal town. The pays d’élection were assessed by crown officials, who farmed out the taxes to local companies; and among the provinces thus farmed was that of Poitou.

The system meant local greed, dishonesty and oppression; the small townspeople of such a place as Luçon and the country-folk of its poverty-stricken neighbourhood had no redress from the tax-gatherers of Poitiers. The worst burden of all was the direct tax known as la taille. A man paid this on all his possessions in money and kind, and it always amounted to a quarter of his property, sometimes to a great deal more. The clergy and nobles were exempt from la taille, which crushed the poor peasants and the smaller people to the earth.

In later years, Louis XIII.’s Minister was ready enough to tax these suffering millions for the sake of absolutism and glory; but the young Bishop of Luçon, not yet hardened by power, touched by the piteous sight of thin hands worn by toil, the bread snatched from them by those who made an unfair living out of the taxes, wrote to head-quarters at Poitiers more than one letter of strong remonstrance, letters in which a warm indignation pierces through the studied courtesy of the words.

He writes of “the misery of the place, the poverty of the people, the excessive tax of the taille which they have paid till now....” He begs that the load they have to bear may be lightened. He reminds the officials that their own town pays much less than it ought, and hints very plainly that unless things are voluntarily set right, he will call the higher powers of justice to his aid.

As one would naturally expect, the traitants of Poitiers, worthy forerunners of the farmers-general of a later century, took very little notice of the appeal or the veiled threat of M. de Luçon—a young fellow, a “new broom,” who might as well mind his own ecclesiastical business and let the King’s taxes alone. But he was as good as his word. Two months later he wrote to the Minister of Finance, the all-powerful Sully, to lay the grievances of his flock before him; the appeal being seconded by his courtier brother, Henry de Richelieu. Thus the Poitevin tax-gatherers had a taste of Richelieu’s quality.

The spiritual needs of the diocese were quite as crying and as serious. Religious matters all over France were in a terrible state, and nowhere worse than in Bas-Poitou. “Error and vice were rampant,” says a writer of the time. Where the Church was concerned, Christianity seemed extinct; and Huguenot zeal had died down into political discontent. Church property was misused, wasted on pensions to princes and courtiers; the bishops were worldly and non-resident, the monasteries were scandalously corrupt, and their revenues often in lay hands; the parish clergy were ignorant and poor, and the long civil wars had made havoc with the churches; many had been desecrated, put to profane uses, if not destroyed altogether. It was only forty or fifty years since the “Monk” Richelieu and men like him had stormed over Poitou, and the memory of his exploits was still green.

The consequence of all this was a state of morals and civilisation which has been described by Michelet—not without exaggeration, possibly—in his terrible chapters on witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dark and cruel superstitions haunting the God-forsaken villages; horrible Mumbo-Jumbo rites, relics of heathenism, performed on lonely heaths or in the shadow of the forests; families in which black magic and sorcery were handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter—such were the discoveries lying in wait for any active bishop who visited his diocese in the year 1609.

Armand de Richelieu was such a bishop; and the horror of these early experiences may partly explain the Minister’s terrible severity, many years later, towards Urbain Grandier, the unworthy priest who was accused of bewitching the Ursuline nuns of Loudun.

During his residence, from 1609, with intervals, to 1614, Richelieu threw all his young strength into the labour of civilising and christianising Bas-Poitou. Travelling into every corner of the province, he preached, confirmed, scolded, advised, converted. Great and small had to listen to his admonitions. His passion for order and discipline brought new and amazing experiences to a parish clergy which had lived as it listed, idle, drunken, immoral, in the happy delusion that no one would ever interfere. Richelieu interfered to some purpose.

One of his chief objects was to get the appointment of the curés into his own hands. Many livings—if they could be called so—were in the gift of private persons, subject to an episcopal consent which was never refused: others belonged to abbeys, and this often meant, in the end, the patronage of some prince or noble to whom the monastic revenues were paid. For instance, a hundred benefices in the diocese of Luçon alone, and many more elsewhere, belonged to the great Benedictine abbey of Saint-Michel-en-l’Ermitage, of which the Comte de Soissons, the King’s cousin, was the titular abbot. There is little to be said in that prince’s favour; he was a man of “mœurs infâmes”; but Richelieu, in later years his son’s bitter and powerful enemy, had occasion to write M. le Comte a quite grovelling letter of thanks in 1609. He had made the Bishop his “vicar” with regard to all the clergy in the diocese of Luçon who depended on the Abbey of Saint-Michel.

Richelieu dealt with private patrons in a more plain-spoken way. “One called André” having been preferred to a benefice by a great lady, Madame de Sainte-Croix, the Bishop flatly declined to allow so incapable a man “to lead a flock dear to Jesus Christ.” Yet, with all his firmness, he was kind. If the patroness would set a good example to the diocese by placing her living among those to which, after careful examination, the Bishop undertook to appoint the best men, he was willing that André should try his powers with the rest. So strong, so wise and religious, are the arguments of the letter, that its result is not surprising. Madame de Sainte-Croix sent her presentation to the Bishop en blanc. Nobody knows what became of the unlucky André.

Richelieu was not satisfied with appointing his curés; he was determined to educate them. Here he was moved by the new spirit of the time, working so actively in the Jesuits, led by the King’s confessor, Père Cotton, and no less in Pierre de Bérulle, the evangelist, who had just introduced into France the Congregation of the Oratory. His second house in France, for the express purpose of training men for the ministry, was established at Luçon during these years of Richelieu’s residence. Bérulle, a man of old family and of most lovable character, was at this time an intimate friend and associate of the Bishop of Luçon. There came a day of estrangement and political enmity.

Richelieu’s provincial life was by no means solitary. The young and sturdy Bishop of Poitiers, M. de la Rocheposay, son of a bold fighter of the League and worthy of his name, was a neighbour and friend of Poitevin origin; and attached to both cathedrals there were men of distinction, of theological science, burning with zeal not only for the advance of religion and the conversion of heretics, but for the honour and glory of the bishops they loyally served. One of the grand vicars of M. de Poitiers was no less a personage than Duvergier de Hauranne, afterwards known as the Jansenist Abbé de St. Cyran, the famous director of Port-Royal. One of the canons, afterwards dean, of Luçon was Sébastien Bouthillier, Abbé de la Cochère, to whose devotion and cleverness, now and in later years, Richelieu owed much. These young men, with others like-minded, fought hard for the Catholic religion in their province of Poitou; preaching, teaching, holding disputations with Protestant ministers—a work in which the Bishop of Luçon, with his learning fresh from the Sorbonne, distinguished himself highly. They also had their “diversions” in common, which consisted in hard study, keen argument, and preparation for further spiritual conquests. As for real spirituality of mind, there is no doubt that Saint-Cyran, mystic, Augustinian, uncompromising, outstripped his companions as far on that path as Richelieu did on another—the path of political genius.

Luçon in its fever-haunted marshes did not keep the Bishop long. He lived much at Coussay, a priory and small château belonging to his family, in a more hilly and healthy part of his diocese not so far from Poitiers. He seems to have been happy here, away from his quarrelsome Chapter and near his friends: the traditions of Coussay, we are told, still preserve his memory; not as the great Cardinal, but as “prieur et châtelain” of that little village and domain. He was also a good deal at Les Roches, another priory he possessed between Chinon and Saumur, close to Fontevrault, in the north-west corner of his diocese. Here he was very near his old home, Richelieu, where his mother, aunt, and younger sister were still living, the fierce old Rochechouart grandmother having been some years dead.

At Les Roches, it seems, began the famous and lifelong friendship between Armand de Richelieu and François Le Clerc, Marquis du Tremblay, now a man of two-and-thirty, thin, red-haired, deeply marked with the small-pox, who had already made his name as Père Joseph, a Capuchin monk of extraordinary talent and energy. The future Éminence grise was Angevin by birth, had been a soldier, but at twenty-two had thrown himself passionately into “religion.” Before Richelieu came to Luçon, Père Joseph was carrying on a valiant conflict of eloquence, persuasion and violence combined, with the Protestants throughout these western quarters, many of whom were considerable by descent and actual power. Père Joseph was attracted by difficulty. Whatever the truth about his after life may be—history tells contrary tales—there is no doubt that at this time he was an ardent reformer in his own sense of the word and a man of deep personal religion. It was owing to him, and to his friend the Abbess of Fontevrault, Eléonore de Bourbon, aunt of Henry IV., that a Capuchin convent was established at Saumur in the teeth of the Protestant governor, Du Plessis-Mornay. From this convent and others, notably Fontenay, in the diocese of Luçon, Lent preachers were sent out into all parts. Richelieu welcomed them with “extreme joy.” But it was not till a year or two later, after King Henry’s death, when his views and hopes were fast extending beyond diocesan limits, that he and Père Joseph found themselves working together in the difficult and complicated affairs of the Abbey of Fontevrault.