Cardinal de Richelieu

The Sieur de Pontchartrain, in his Memoirs, gives a vivid account of the state of France in the winter of 1616-17. He was not exactly an impartial judge, since he had himself been a Minister of State under the Duc de Villeroy, and he saw things from his patron’s point of view. But he was an honest man.

Like Sully, he entirely failed to realise the political genius of the Bishop of Luçon, treating him and his colleagues as contemptible creatures of Concini. He writes of “the bad management of affairs, the small regard shown by the Queen-mother for the King, from whom all affairs are concealed, the unjust detention of M. le Prince de Condé and the alienation of all the other princes and great men, the ambitious designs, hurtful to France, of the Maréchal d’Ancre and of his wife, the banishment from affairs of all the old Ministers of State, and the establishment of two or three who have neither merit nor experience, except as ministering to the passions of the Maréchal and his wife (these were M. Mangot, Barbin, and Richelieu-Luçon).... Thus all things were embroiled; and in order to fortify herself against evil designs, the Queen-mother, assisted by the counsel of the said Maréchal d’Ancre and of the said sieurs Barbin, Mangot, and Richelieu, Bishop of Luçon, resolved to prepare openly for war.”

Pontchartrain concludes that the sole motive of this worthless and tyrannical council was to maintain the Maréchal in absolute power: also that under the confusion of war expenditure might be concealed the “great gifts, pensions and appointments” which he took from the national finances.

That the Queen-mother was wrong-headed and foolish, that Concini’s haughty swagger and Leonora’s avarice and secret intrigues were hateful and degrading elements in both Court and government, no one can deny. But those who stand farther off than Pontchartrain may see what was hidden from him, and probably from many worthy persons of his day—that Barbin, Mangot and Richelieu were not unpatriotic in advising war against the rebel princes and nobles, whose motives, after all, were no purer than those of Concini.

As to themselves, Barbin was a man of clean hands, a rare attribute in those days; clear-headed and wise. Mangot, if not brilliant, had the merit of being loyal to his colleagues. Richelieu, in this first short ministry, gave every sign of future greatness, and in a way which makes not only Pontchartrain, but Sully, seem unnaturally blind. Henry’s old Minister was one of those who spoke most slightingly of the man who, more than any other, was to carry on Henry’s foreign policy.

He was amazingly eager and young. He sprang into office like a soldier into the saddle, his whole mind and body devoted at once to the service of his country. The administration of his poor little diocese had taught him to command men. That those who worked with him felt his superiority, not only in position but in talent, is shown by the fact that he was at once given precedence over the other Ministers. The Comte de Brienne resented this, observing in an unfriendly manner that a Bishop should reside in his diocese. The Maréchal d’Ancre, on the other hand, pressed Richelieu to resign his see. His motive was plain, and had nothing to do with the welfare of the people of Luçon: being thus deprived of his chief means of living, the young Minister would be entirely dependent on his patron’s will. Richelieu was far too clever to yield, and the advice of his friend Barbin strengthened his refusal. “Considering the changes which might come about, either through the changeable humours of that personage or by accidents to his fortune, I would never consent, which made him unreasonably angry.”

He resigned his post of chaplain to the reigning Queen, in which he was succeeded by the young Bishop of Langres, Sébastien Zamet, second son of the great financier, and afterwards a conspicuous figure in the history of Port-Royal.

The first duty of the new Ministers was to crush a new rebellion, for the Ducs de Bouillon and de Nevers, demanding the release of Condé and the fall of Concini, had set the east of France in a blaze. Three armies had to be raised and sent to meet them. The commanders were chosen—the Comte d’Auvergne, the Duc de Guise, the Maréchal de Montigny; a harder matter was to find the men and the money. By means of a new tax, Richelieu and Barbin were able to hire a few thousand mercenaries from Flanders, Germany, Holland and Switzerland; the rest were recruited in France by gentlemen who took a heavy commission on their loyal work: indeed, as usual, the soldiers saw little of their promised pay, and were driven, as usual, to extract a living from the wretched people of the provinces. Champagne, the Île de France, the Nivernais, suffered in this winter of 1616 as Berry, Touraine and Poitou had done twelve months before.

One of the complaints of the malcontent princes against the government was the state of the national finances; in truth, the half-dozen years since Henry’s death had reduced France from relative prosperity to something very like bankruptcy. But Richelieu retorted on the princes by a published statement, meant to enlighten the country as to the fate of some of its funds. The Prince de Condé had received 3,665,990 livres; the late Comte de Soissons, his wife and son (Charles de Bourbon died in 1612, and his family were even more restless and greedy than himself), 1,600,000 livres; the old Prince de Conti, now also dead, and his worldly widow, 1,400,000 livres; the Duc de Longueville, 1,200,000 livres; the Duc de Mayenne, 2,000,000 livres; the Duc de Vendôme, 600,000 livres; the Duc d’Épernon, 700,000 livres; the Duc de Bouillon, 1,000,000 livres; all, says M. Martin, without counting “salaries, pensions, and gifts to their friends and servants.” As a livre was about the same as a franc, and then worth five times as much as now, the smallest of these “gratifications” was equal to £120,000, and the largest to nearly £800,000 sterling. It must be added that the eight Marshals of France and six other great officers of the Crown received four times as much as in the days of Henry.

The royal armies were successful; they drove the princes before them, destroying their strongholds, and besieged them in the fortified towns to which they retreated. “They were in despair,” says Pontchartrain. Henry de Richelieu, a keen and good soldier, served as aide-de-camp to the Maréchal de Montigny.

It was at this time that Richelieu, as Secretary of State, gave the Powers of Europe the first intimation that French policy was not for ever to be bound up with the interests of Spain—a great change, after nearly seven years of Marie de Médicis’ rule, and a striking forecast of the future. England, Holland, and Germany were assured of the friendship of France, on the understanding that no assistance was given to the rebel princes. The Spanish marriages, Richelieu’s ambassadors assured the Protestant Powers, did not bind Louis XIII. either to Rome or to Spain “to the prejudice of our ancient allies.” The King would give equal treatment to his subjects of either religion. “No Catholic is so blind as to esteem a Spaniard, in matters of State, more highly than a French Huguenot.”

Independence of Spain had already been practically shown by Richelieu in not forbidding the Duc de Lesdiguières, governor of Dauphiné, himself a distinguished Huguenot, to lead an army of his own across the Alps in order to support Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy in his quarrel with the Spanish Viceroy of Milan.

Thus Richelieu was already giving Europe a taste of his strength, and advancing, fast and fearlessly, beyond the narrow lines of the Bishop of Luçon’s courtly speech before the States-General. He was no longer “the man of the clergy,” but “the man of France.” Naturally he was losing the confidence of his empty-headed patron, who scolded the Ministers like schoolboys and was violently jealous of Richelieu’s growing influence with the Queen.

“By God, sir,” he wrote to him on some small matter of discontent, “I complain of you: you treat me too ill; you treat for peace without me; you make the Queen write to me that for the love of her I am to cease my pursuit of M. de Montbazon for the money he owes me. In the name of all the devils, what do you and the Queen expect me to do? Rage gnaws me to the bones.”

A Ministry that depended on such a favourite was on a slippery slope indeed. The difficulties, at home and abroad, were enormous, and the wonder is that Richelieu and his colleagues, during their few months of uncertain power, were able to do so much.

Just at this time, when he was fighting the princes and parleying with Europe, the Abbé de Marolles gives a snapshot of him worth many formal portraits. The Abbé was then a young scholar at the university. His father, Claude de Marolles, a well-known soldier and courtier, once commanding the Swiss Guard, had joined the rebel princes and was attempting to negotiate between the Duc de Nevers and the commanders of the royal army.

M. Mangot, the Keeper of the Seals, sent for young Michel de Marolles and inquired of him whether he had received letters from his father or had had news from any of his father’s people. He warned him to hide nothing of the truth—“parce qu’il y alloit du service du roi.”

“There was M. de Luçon, in black, flung back (renversé) in a leathern chair, while M. le Garde des Sceaux stood up while speaking to me....” Presently, “M. de Luçon, who knew my father pretty well and esteemed him, rose up in his chair and said that in truth he did not believe that M. de Marolles had turned against the King’s service of his own free will, but that he was sorry he should have found himself engaged in so bad a cause. Then he added very low that I might retire, and that he did not advise me to remain in Paris.”

Such a warning, in those days, was not to be despised, and the young scholar was sent to his home in Touraine.

In spite of the political and military successes of the Ministers he was supposed to rule, the storm which overwhelmed the unlucky Concini was gathering all through that winter at the Louvre. Paris was careless and gay: after letting out her rage by sacking his house, she was content to enjoy the scurrilous songs and pamphlets, her favourite food, which rang through the streets and were sold by hundreds on the Pont Neuf.

“The year began joyously,” writes Bassompierre, a lighter-hearted witness than Pontchartrain, and a loyal courtier of Marie de Médicis. “Many fine assemblies, at which, besides gambling, feasting, and comedy, there was also good music. Time passed pleasantly at the Fair of Saint-Germain.”

The Maréchal and Leonora shared little in these amusements. He, at least, was troubled with a heavy presentiment of misfortune to come, and a present grief, the illness and death of their little daughter, caused them both “un cruel déplaisir.” The friendly soul Bassompierre, who had known him in his Florentine days, visited them in their sorrow on the very day of the child’s death. He found them together, “fort affligés,” in the little house close to the Louvre.

“I tried as well as I could to console or divert him, but the more I spoke the more he grieved, and weeping answered me nothing, except “Seignor, je suis perdu; seignor, je suis ruiné; seignor, je suis misérable.”

Bassompierre begged him to consider that he was a Marshal of France, and therefore that such lamentations, though worthy of his wife, were unworthy of him; adding in the candid fashion of the time that although he had lost an amiable daughter he had yet four nieces, by whose means he might ally himself with any four great French houses that he might choose—“and many other things which God inspired me to say.”

“Ah, monsieur,” replied Concini, “I truly mourn my daughter, and shall mourn her as long as I live. Nevertheless, I am a man able to endure with constancy a grief such as this; but the ruin of myself and my wife, my son and my house, which I see before my eyes, and which my wife’s obstinacy makes inevitable, causes me to lament and to lose patience.”

He went on to tell Bassompierre the familiar story of his life, curious enough from his own point of view. According to him, he had been perfectly happy and prosperous till within the last few months—since, in fact, to outward view, he had possessed almost sovereign power. His excitable southern nature was not made to stand firm against the assaults of fortune, party hatred, popular fury and insult; in all this he saw warnings from heaven of coming ruin, terrible and complete. On his knees, he said, he had implored his wife to retire with him to Italy, where with their immense fortune they could establish themselves magnificently and leave a fine heritage to their son. But the Maréchale, with more courage, if also with a more greedy, unsatisfied ambition, absolutely refused to leave France. It was cowardly and ungrateful, she said, to think of forsaking the Queen, to whom they owed their honours and their wealth. “If it were not for my obligations to my wife,” he said, “I would leave her, and go where neither nobles of France nor common people would follow and find me.”

Bassompierre went away reflecting how men uplifted by fortune are often inspired to foresee a coming fall; but also how seldom they have resolution enough to avoid it.

If Concini was sincere in his wish to leave his dangerous eminence, this episode throws a tragic light on his conduct during the first three months of 1617. His insolent bravado at Court and elsewhere seems now the desperation of an adventurer fighting hopelessly for his life. It was hardly necessary for M. de Luynes to poison the King’s mind against the Maréchal d’Ancre; he did it himself. A day seldom passed without some new insult, some fresh mark of disrespect shown to Royalty. The Maréchal laughed at the boy, teased him, did not uncover in his presence. Standing with one or two attendants at a window in the Louvre, Louis looked down with proud and gloomy eyes on the Maréchal’s splendid suite as it pranced in the courtyard without a salute to spare for him. When the King wanted money—which frequently happened, for his mother did not indulge him in that way or any other—the Maréchal asked him, with an air of dashing liberality which deeply offended the boy, why he had not applied to him.

Luynes was an ambitious man, of course; but any loyal servant of the King would have done well to be angry, and Concini, by refusing him one of his nieces in marriage, had made a personal enemy of him. While Louis, sad and bored from childhood, went his melancholy way, catching little birds, wheeling barrows of turf to make banks in the Tuileries gardens, his handsome falconer was always there, whispering a deeper discontent into ears by no means dull. The removal of Concini, his wife and his parasites, would mean the Queen-mother’s fall from the height of power she had usurped ever since the King was declared major, thus ending her regency. It would mean the submission of the rebel princes and nobles, who were even now declaring themselves, by secret letters and messages, faithful servants of the King. It would seat Louis XIII. on his father’s throne.

There was only one way. Louis was at first unwilling that the Maréchal should be killed. He discussed other plans with Luynes and two or three confidants. He might escape from Paris to Amboise, where a brother of Luynes was in command and where his friends might gather round him; or he might join the princes, taking the command of their forces, which would thus become his own. These ideas reached the Queen-mother, and his guards were changed for others whom she could trust. Escape was made impossible, and from that time Concini was doomed.

Luynes and his fellows, with the King’s full consent, plotted the affair with M. de Vitry, captain of the guard, a bold, resolute man. On the morning of Monday, April 24, this officer with a few companions met Concini at the entrance of the Louvre on his way to pay his daily visit to the Queen.

“Sir,” said Vitry, “I arrest you, by order of the King.”

“À moi!” cried Concini, laying his hand on his sword; but before his train of startled courtiers knew what was happening, three of Vitry’s men had fired their pistols in his face; he fell dead, shot through the brain.

Not a sword was drawn to avenge him; the words “By order of the King,” had suddenly recovered their old magic power, and the whole palace echoed with “Vive le Roi!”

On that fatal morning, the Bishop of Luçon was paying an early visit to a distinguished doctor of the Sorbonne, one of the rectors of the University. The news reached the two theologians by means of a third, who brought it from the Palais de Justice. M. d’Ornano, one of the conspirators, had been sent there direct from the Louvre to inform the Parliament of what had happened: such a precaution was necessary, for Paris was already in an uproar. Rumour cried in the streets that the young King had been wounded, and by the hand of the Maréchal. The shops were hastily shut and crowds were pouring towards the Louvre, to meet the news that the King was well and the Maréchal dead. Then Paris burst into acclamations of joy.

For the Bishop of Luçon the event was of the most serious consequence, but he wasted neither time nor words in lamenting his patron.

“I was the more surprised,” he says, “as I had never foreseen that those who were near the King would be strong enough to design such an enterprise. I immediately quitted the company of that doctor, famous both for his teaching and his virtue, who did not forget to say quite à propos what I might have expected from a man of his learning—as to the inconstancy of fortune and the uncertainty of all that may seem most settled in human life.”

On the Pont Neuf, as he drove home, the Bishop met his friend M. du Tremblay, full of the news, who told him that the King was inquiring for him. Before presenting himself at the Louvre, he sought out his terrified colleagues, Mangot and Barbin, who feared the worst for themselves and for him. It was agreed that they should go one by one, the Bishop first, to receive His Majesty’s commands.

It was the first really alarming crisis in Richelieu’s life. There is no doubt that so clever a man must have expected something of the kind, must have known that the favourite’s tyranny could not last for ever. It was only a few days indeed since he and Barbin, having discovered that Concini meant to get rid of them and to replace them with more submissive Ministers, had privately offered their resignation to the Queen, who refused to receive it. Also, it seems, with a view to his own safety, Richelieu had made some advances towards friendship with M. de Luynes. But, for all that, the moment was dangerous. Both Court and populace were likely to turn against those who had owed their power to the dead Maréchal; various threats and warnings had already reached the ears of Barbin. For Richelieu himself, as he mounted the grand staircase of the Louvre, the signs were not exactly favourable. “I saw many faces of those who had caressed me two hours before, and who now did not recognise me.”

In the great gallery, crowded with courtiers and armed men, young Louis XIII. was standing on a billiard table, to be seen by all. There is a picturesque story that he cried out, on seeing the Bishop approach, “Eh bien, Luçon! me voilà hors de votre tyrannie!” Whatever the boy may have thought or said, M. de Luynes was not so impolitic as to make a mortal enemy of the most brilliant man in the kingdom. Mangot might be scornfully neglected, Barbin might be imprisoned—as they were—but Luçon seemed worth winning, or at least keeping in the balance till the King and his mother had arranged their differences.

According to Richelieu’s own account, the King spoke to him kindly—“saying that he knew I had always loved him (he used those words) and had taken his part on various occasions, in consideration of which he would treat me well.” M. de Luynes joined in, with protestations of friendship. But this was merely personal. When Richelieu tried to plead for his colleagues, who deserved the royal favour neither more nor less than himself, Luynes would not listen. He also replied very coldly to the Bishop’s request to see the Queen-mother, now strictly guarded in her own rooms.

He gave him to understand, however, that he was still of the royal Council, and advised him to present himself in the Council-chamber. Richelieu did so; but only to be treated as an intruder. The old Ministers, Villeroy, Jeannin and the rest, were already in their former places, and were deeply engaged in the business of reversing Richelieu’s policy; while sending despatches to all the provinces, to the armies, to the rebel princes and to foreign courts with the news that the King of France had at length come to his own.

It was a curious position for the late Secretary of State. After standing for a few minutes inside the door, speaking to one or two councillors, he thought it best to retire quietly, and went home to his house.

At the Louvre, shut up in her apartments, but still surrounded by her ladies, the Queen-mother lamented with hard, tearless passion—not the death of her favourite, which troubled her little, but the loss of her own authority. Fear of the future and of her son’s vengeance filled her mind, to the exclusion of every other human feeling. She had no pity to spare even for the miserable Leonora, her lifelong friend, who was seized by the guards immediately after her husband’s death, plundered of all her treasures and imprisoned, first in the Louvre, then in the Bastille, her son Henry Concini, a boy of thirteen, having been torn from her. The little Comte de la Pena, as they called him, was a pretty boy and a famous dancer. The Comte de Fiesque, the young Queen’s equerry, took him under his protection and brought him to her. Anne made him dance, fed him with sweetmeats, and kept him in her household till his fatal name condemned him also to prison. Some time later, he was set free and sent back to Italy.

The murderers of Concini robbed his dead body of money and jewellery and left it lying under a staircase in the court of the Louvre, near the gate through which crowds of Parisians of every rank, who had trembled before the Maréchal, came crowding to pay their homage to the King. During the day his house near the Louvre and his wife’s apartments were completely sacked and pillaged, their flying servants chased in all directions. In the evening his body was carried secretly across the way to the Church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois and buried, with no funeral rites, behind the organ.

But the fury and rage of the mob were far from being satisfied. The Parisians of 1617 were the ancestors of those of 1793. “The next morning,” says Pontchartrain, “the 25th of the said month of April, day of Saint Mark, about ten o’clock, a few women and children, in the Church of Saint-Germain of the Auxerrois, began to say one to another, standing over the place where he had been interred: ‘See where they have buried that tyrant: is it right that he, who did so much evil, should lie in holy ground and in a church? No, no; out with him; throw him on a dunghill!’ And exciting each other with such words, they began with sticks to break up the stone under which the body lay; the women using knives and scissors, until strong men began to lend a hand. In less than half an hour two or three hundred persons were assembled; they raise the stone, take out the body, tie cords round the neck, drag it out of the church and thence through the streets, with horrible shouts and yells, some saying it should be thrown into the river, others that it should be burnt, others that it should be hanged on a gibbet; each one worse than the last. Thus they found themselves at the end of the Pont Neuf, where there were two or three gibbets set up.”

Gibbets had been planted here and there in the city by Concini’s orders, “to frighten those who dared speak ill of him.” To cut the horrible story short, they hanged his dead body on one of these and then tore it to pieces with the savagery of wild beasts, burning part and throwing part into the river.

Richelieu was an eye-witness of these horrors. He was on his way to visit the Pope’s Nuncio, and his coach drove on to the bridge, a favourite thoroughfare, to find it a mass of people absorbed in their dreadful work and “so drunk with fury that there was no means of getting them to make way for the passage of coaches.”

The Bishop’s coachman was indiscreet enough to take matters with the usual high hand and to attempt to force his way. One of the men who was roughly hustled made a loud complaint.

“At that instant,” Richelieu writes, “I saw my peril, in case any one should cry out that I was a partisan of the Maréchal d’Ancre. To save myself, after violently threatening my coachman, I asked them what they were doing, and when they had answered me according to their fury against the Maréchal, I said to them, ‘You are men who would die to serve the King: shout, all of you, Vive le Roi!’ I led them off, and thus I gained free passage, and I took good care not to return the same way; I recrossed by the Pont Notre Dame.”

A few days later, after a painful interview with her son—at which her stony calm broke down and she wept bitterly—and after formal farewells from court and city, Marie de Médicis quitted Paris for an honourable captivity at the Château de Blois. Her younger children took leave of her at the gate of the city. She was accompanied by a train of faithful servants, French and Italian, among whom the most distinguished was the Bishop of Luçon; it was largely owing to his influence with Luynes that the Queen had not been treated with greater severity.

Two months later, after an unfair and absurd trial, the Maréchale d’Ancre was beheaded in the Place de Grève and her remains burnt to ashes. Most of the money, property, and possessions which she and her husband had accumulated during their years of power was bestowed upon the King’s friend and favourite, now Duc de Luynes and Lieutenant-General of Normandy. For his own not very considerable share in the ruin and death of Concini and his wife, Louis XIII. was rewarded by the French people with the title of “Le Juste.”