Cardinal de Richelieu

Richelieu worked hard in his diocese for the next three years, struggling all the while with ill-health and impatience. He went to Paris once during this time and offered his services to the powerful Concini, who received him graciously; but nothing more came of it. And the Queen was for the present inaccessible. Another disappointment was his failure to be elected as representative of his ecclesiastical province, Bordeaux, at a convocation of the clergy which was held in Paris in the early days of the Regency. On this occasion the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Cardinal de Sourdis—nicknamed Sordido—showed himself an enemy to the aspiring young man.

But no envious Metropolitan could keep Richelieu long in the background. He was becoming a very popular figure in the west country, of which Poitou and its learned capital were the centre. His private life appears to have been blameless. He kept up an affectionate intercourse with his own family. For his mother he was still “mon malade,” from childhood a sickly, brilliant creature, a subject of uneasiness and pride. His sister, Madame du Pont-de-Courlay, turned to him for sympathy in a money loss or the death of a little child. He never lost sight of his brother Alphonse, the Carthusian, whose refusal had made him a bishop, and whom, in later years of power, he dragged from his cloister to be Archbishop and Cardinal.

He was a favourite with most of his neighbours, clerical and lay. His correspondence bears witness to the wideness of his acquaintance and interests, both public and private; people appealed to him as a friend, an arbitrator, and he never disappointed them. He was courteous, kind, even tender in his language: “episcopal and benign.” He was on the politest terms with such of the great men as occasionally crossed his path: the Duc de Sully, governor of Poitou, now no longer a courtier and an absentee; the Duc de Villeroy, still in office, father of his friend M. d’Alincourt, and others of high rank and importance. His letters to such men as these, as well as to his more intimate friends, might have foreshadowed his coming greatness for those who had eyes to see. To the general company, however, the writer whose well-turned assurances and compliments had such a background of passionate ambition for his own and for his country’s glory, was nothing but a clever phrase-maker, a young man of seven-and-twenty who could talk and argue, convert a few Protestants, deal discreetly with the wrangles of religious women. And outside a limited circle the name of Richelieu was probably unknown, except as that of a pensioned courtier of the Regency.

While the Bishop of Luçon waited for his opportunity, political and religious unrest was deepening in France. Henry IV.’s policy of opposition to the House of Austria and alliance with Savoy, Holland, and the German Protestants, had been set aside very early in the new reign, and two royal marriages were arranged to bind France closer to the Holy See and Catholic Europe. Louis XIII. was to be married to the Infanta Anna of Spain—known to history as Anne of Austria—and his eldest sister, Élisabeth, to the Infant of Spain, afterwards Philip IV. These marriages seem to have pleased nobody in France except the Regent, her immediate Court circle and her Ministers, whose only hope of keeping their place lay in her favour. The Foreign Secretary, Villeroy, the Chancellor, Brûlart de Sillery, the Connétable de Montmorency, were among the Queen’s advisers in this affair. Most of the nobles, and especially the princes, were more or less in opposition; the strengthening of the Crown by so close an alliance with Spain did not suit their interests. Henry IV. himself, when the project was first laid before him by the Spanish Ambassador in 1610, had not listened encouragingly.

The Huguenot party was both displeased and alarmed. Assemblies were held at Nîmes, at Saumur, at La Rochelle; but the leaders, such as the Ducs de Bouillon and de Rohan—Sully’s son-in-law—were not ready to proceed to civil war. Condé, at first throwing in his lot with them, soon went farther. He gathered troops in the west and threatened Poitiers, after publishing, with the other princes, a fierce manifesto against the Regent and her advisers. The young Bishop of Poitiers, Richelieu’s friend, took matters with a high hand, closed the gates in the Queen’s name, and prepared to defend the town against Condé, with the high approval of the future Abbé de St Cyran, a worthy member, like himself, of the Church Militant. The Prince’s bands overran Poitou, annoying the peaceable inhabitants, Madame de Richelieu among them, exacting large sums and quartering themselves in the villages.

In a fiery letter to M. de Neufbourg, an officer of Condé’s ally, the Duc de Mayenne, the Bishop of Luçon expresses his amazement that his mother has been thought worthy of so little courtesy. “Be good enough,” he says, “to exempt the parish of Saulnes, which belongs to Madame de Richelieu, from the lodging of troops and the contributions they demand. I would have written direct to him (M. de Mayenne) had not his treatment of my mother made me aware that he either believes me to be no longer of this world or that he deems me now and for ever incapable of doing him any service. Therefore I address myself to you....”

Like his episcopal brother of Poitiers, Richelieu took his stand openly on the side of Royalty and against the horde of greedy nobles who caught at any pretext to add to their own possessions and power. It was not only the political necessities of his later life that made him their enemy.

The flame of civil war soon died down. In May 1614 the Queen signed the treaty of St. Menehould, which pacified the princes, after some delay, by granting most of their desires. Condé, Nevers, Vendôme, Mayenne, Longueville, Bouillon and others received enormous pensions, as well as fortresses and governments; last, not least, the States-General were summoned, as the manifesto had demanded, to discuss the grievances of the three estates of the realm. The Huguenot party had already obtained some satisfaction. For the time, the Regent and her ministers had bought victory: the arrangements for the Spanish marriages went steadily on.

The Bishop of Luçon was directed by Sully, governor of Poitou, to supervise “with gentleness” the election in his diocese of deputies for the States-General. He did his duty, no doubt, in the matter; but the election that interested him was that of the diocese of Poitiers. There his friends were working for him. La Rocheposay, the warlike Bishop, his lieutenant Saint-Cyran, and Richelieu’s faithful Bouthillier, smoothed the way for his uncontested election as one of the two deputies of the clergy of Poitiers. The old city, so lately in a stage of siege, rang joy-bells on August 10, the appointed day. All over Poitou, all over France, the bells were ringing, for every estate in the kingdom hoped much from the States-General. It may at once be said that rich and poor, great and small, were disappointed. What the bells rang in was not liberty, release from taxes, confirmation of rights, but the reign of Richelieu. And in consequence of that reign the voice of France in her States-General was not heard again for one hundred and seventy-five years—not until, in 1789, “the whirligig of Time brought in his revenges.”

The States-General of 1614 were formally opened in Paris on Monday, October 27. On Sunday took place the customary procession from the great Convent of the Augustins on the left bank, along the quay, winding through narrow streets crowded with spectators and hung with tapestry, to the bridge over the Seine which led most directly to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, where a solemn high mass was to be celebrated. It was a procession gay with colour and variety, although most of the clergy and all the Third Estate were in sober black. But the way was kept throughout by the royal guards, Swiss and French, in their varied liveries. Archers marched alongside, bearing immense tapers, faint flames quivering in the chilly air of the early autumn morning. Many of the deputies shivered, and complained of the cold.

It was a representative procession. The religious Orders, parish clergy, and trade corporations of Paris, the canons of Notre Dame, the doctors of the University—these led the way. Then came the hundred and ninety-two deputies of the Tiers État, walking four by four, with their distinguished President, Robert Miron, provost of the merchants. Then a hundred and thirty-two nobles in Court dress with swords. Then the clerical deputies, a hundred and forty, followed by the bishops and archbishops in purple and the cardinals in red. Then the Archbishop of Paris, bearing the sacred Host under a gorgeous canopy. Then the boy-King, walking in white, his mother in deep black, her young children, her attendant ladies and gentlemen; Queen Marguerite de Valois, the “aunt” of the Royal Family, and various other great ladies, princes, and nobles attached to the Court. After these followed the whole Parliament and the Municipality of Paris, with many officials and guards.

Like a wave of noise, colour and light, with its tramping feet and flickering candles, under the heavy clangour of the great bells, the procession rolls into Notre Dame, and the Cardinal-Archbishop of Bordeaux, Richelieu’s hated Metropolitan, thunders out his sermon to the Estates of France: “Fear God. Honour the King.”

The three Estates held their sittings in three of the vast rooms of the Convent of the Augustins, but the opening ceremony took place in the hall of the old Hôtel de Bourbon, east of the Louvre. There the little King, a dark, solemn boy, whose majority, on entering his fourteenth year, had lately been celebrated, sat enthroned “on violet velvet, powdered with golden lilies.” On his right were the two Queens, Marie and Marguerite, and the young Princess Élisabeth, the future Queen of Spain. His brother Gaston, a lively, pretty child of five, his little sisters Christine and Henriette Marie, sat on his left; a gorgeous ring of princes, courtiers and great ladies surrounded them. In theory, the body of the hall was kept for deputies; in fact, it was inconveniently crowded by Parisians, chiefly hangers-on of the Court. “Tout était plein de dames et de damoiselles, de gentilshommes et autre peuple,” says Florimond Rapine, the chronicler. The deputies were indignant, and it was long before all could find places. Then the wild, ill-assorted assembly listened kindly to a few stammering words from Louis XIII., and impatiently to a long harangue from Chancellor Sillery, which committed the Government to nothing.

The ceremonies of opening and closing were very much the same. Three months of arguing and quarrelling, during which Paris was frequently in an uproar, the Prince de Condé claiming homage that nobody would pay, the Duc d’Épernon insulting the Parliament, gentlemen fighting in the streets, the Estates themselves divided into violent parties for and against the Pope and Spain, the Third Estate demanding the abolition of pensions and privileges, the nobles and clergy angrily defending their rights, brought the assembly once more together at the Hôtel de Bourbon, in the presence of the Court.

Manners had not improved. Two thousand of the baser sort of courtiers, men and women, with numbers of people of all kinds, had crowded into the best places. Rapine saw “cardinals, bishops, priors, abbots, the nobility and all the Third Estate, crowded and pushed without order, respect, or consideration, among the pikemen and halberdiers.”

In the midst of this babel, the spokesmen of the three Orders had to present to the King their cahiers, containing the result of their stormy deliberations. First it was the turn of the clergy; and their orator, chosen, like his fellows, by the influence of the Queen-Regent, was the Bishop of Luçon.

He had already gained much credit, during the debates of the last three months, for eloquence and judgment; he was one of the group of young and brilliant bishops who supported Cardinal du Perron, always his friend, in his efforts to bring the Tiers État into harmony with the views of the clergy. The burning question was an article resolved on by the Tiers, demanding that the King’s complete independence of every power, spiritual or temporal, except God alone, should be made “a fundamental law of the State.” It was the old Gallican, anti-Roman doctrine, which, as far as the middle classes of France were concerned, had been growing in strength for some years. It had fought the League; it opposed the Jesuits; it defied the authority of the Pope. It rose up in anger against the courtly politicians who now, with their Spanish alliances, were contradicting and nullifying the policy of Henry IV.

There were Gallicans among the clergy, but the majority were Ultramontane, equally loyal to the Pope and to the Queen-Regent’s government. Cardinal du Perron and his distinguished phalanx wasted hours of eloquence—and the Cardinal was both a great orator and an attractive man—in persuading the Tiers to withdraw their obnoxious article. Matters were made worse by the Parliament of Paris, Gallican and anti-Spanish to the core, which openly supported the Tiers, as also did Condé and his followers and the Huguenot party under Bouillon.

Forty years later, Louis XIV.’s whip was to teach both nobles and Parliament the meaning of that divine right and absolute power which they were now eager to claim for their kings. On this occasion the article was referred to Louis XIII., and by his authority was expunged from the cahier of the Tiers État.

It was in a spirit of triumphant loyalty, therefore, both to his Order and to the King—or rather, to the Queen and her councillors—that Armand de Richelieu made the oration which gained him his first real fame. He stood before the whole of France—all France that signified, for even the humble millions were represented, though mostly by men of law—slight and delicate, with a pleasant voice, an easy, graceful manner, eyes bright and clear, yet thoughtful, a mouth both strong and smiling under the thin moustache brushed sharply upwards, which always gave him the look of a soldier.

His discourse lasted an hour, and gave great satisfaction to all his hearers, who were struck by the discretion with which he touched on many difficult subjects “without offending anybody.” It was indeed a delicate task, to complain of the treatment bestowed on the Church and her clergy by the chief authorities in the kingdom; to praise the clergy, their learning, probity and self-denial, and to claim for them a larger share in the management of State affairs; to point out the many abuses of lay patronage; to condemn the excesses of some Huguenots while declaring that no weapons but example, instruction and prayer should be used against those who, “if blinded by error,” yet lived peaceably under the royal authority; to remonstrate against unfair taxation, corruption and bribery in high places; to demand the reduction of pensions and the abolition of duels, according to the laws of “the great Henry”:—and in the same breath to praise the Queen-Regent for the great things she had already done in preserving “peace, repose and public tranquillity,” chief of which was that “sacred bond of a double marriage” which was soon to unite “the greatest kingdoms of the world.” In short, while performing the full duty prescribed by his Order, to make himself persona grata to Marie de Médicis, was a task worthy of Armand de Richelieu.

The Baron de Sénecé, spokesman of the nobles, followed the Bishop of Luçon, but had little to say. On the other hand Robert Miron, who spoke—on his knees—for the Tiers État, had a great deal. He drew a frightful picture of the “wounds and sorrows” of the poor people of France, their constant labour and heavy burdens. He complained bitterly of the abuses in the Church, the privileges, oppressions, public and private violence of the nobles, the delays and the corruption of justice, the ravages of armed men.

“Without the labour of the poor people,” he cried, “where were the tithes of the Church—the vast possessions of the nobility, their wide lands, their great fiefs—the houses, the incomes, the heritages of the Third Estate? And further, who gives your Majesty the means of keeping up the royal dignity, of providing for the necessary expenses of the State, within and without the kingdom? who gives the means of raising men for the wars, if not the labourer and the taxes he pays?” And he added those remarkable words: “It is to be feared that despair may teach the poor people that the soldier is but a peasant bearing arms, and that when the vinedresser takes up an arquebus, he may become hammer instead of anvil.”

But Miron, like the other speakers, professed devoted loyalty to the King, only begging that the royal authority might interfere to protect the poor people. And Miron’s harangue, like the others, had no real consequence whatever. Richelieu observes in his Memoirs that the States-General ended without advantage to anybody.

The deputies were dismissed, contumelious and discontented, and returned to the provinces freshly burdened by their expenses.

The Bishop of Luçon went back to his diocese; but his speech was printed by the famous Cramoisy. The Court consoled itself for a very tiresome winter by one of the most magnificent Mid-Lent ballets that Paris had ever seen.