Cardinal de Richelieu

In this swift and sudden way Richelieu fell from power. The position in which he now found himself was difficult enough. He was the Queen-mother’s chief friend and confidant in the early days of her exile at Blois, and the head of her council, but he was surrounded by mischievous rivals, some Italian, some French, who played him false and undermined his influence. The Queen’s household, following its royal mistress’s lead, was all plot and intrigue, delusion and fury. Almost the only wise person, besides Richelieu himself, was his old friend Madame de Guercheville, Marie’s lady of honour. She, at least, saw good cause for the Bishop of Luçon’s endeavour to keep the little captive Court at Blois in favour with the Court of the Louvre by a constant and civil correspondence with the almighty Luynes. She saw the force of the Bishop’s reasoning—that the actual state of things must be accepted—that the King was the King, and his subjects, including his mother, might as well rebel against Heaven. Therefore Richelieu was doing his best for Her Majesty—and incidentally for himself too—by representing her and her servants as absolutely devoted to the service of the King.

It is natural enough that Luynes, listening to Richelieu’s enemies, was not inclined to trust him, either as to the Queen-mother’s peaceable loyalty or his own. But he made no mistake as to the Bishop’s political genius; and therefore, it seems, he decided to deprive the Queen-mother of his services.

The intrigue is not very clear, even to this day. Richelieu had a letter from his brother, the Marquis, warning him that the King was displeased with him and that he would shortly be ordered to retire to his diocese. Afterwards it appeared that the information, conveyed by friends at Court to Henry de Richelieu, was false, or at least premature. But the Bishop acted on it without delay. Knowing that Marie would not willingly part with him, he asked for a fortnight’s leave of absence and went to the Château de Richelieu. From thence he wrote to the King and to Luynes, protesting his loyalty and complaining of the calumnies of his enemies. The King sent a cold reply, advising him to attend to the duties of his diocese and to remain within its bounds till further orders.

Marie de Médicis was passionately angry, and wrote furious letters to her son and the favourite. It was treating her not like a mother, but like a slave, she said, thus to affront her by removing her most capable servant. But her bitter complaints were of no avail.

Richelieu resigned himself in a more dignified fashion. Every action of his life must be considered in view of the fact that he was a politician of extraordinary cleverness, with clear eyes fixed unchangeably on the future of power which he always meant to attain. For five months, under most troublesome circumstances, he had practically ruled France. He had built his castle eagerly, swiftly, successfully; and then a far less clever man, by whispering into the ready ear of a boy, had shaken it to the ground. It had been built, of course, on the wrong foundation: the Bishop of Luçon had plenty of time to reflect, as he sat among his books at Coussay, on the too late realised truth that divinity hedged a king, that Louis XIII. was the master.

It is doing Richelieu no injustice to suggest that if he had been well received in the King’s Council-chamber on that tragic April 24, he might never have followed the Queen-mother to Blois. His sincere admirer, M. Avenel, says, “His first thoughts were given to the Court and the Ministry; only his second to exile and the Queen: ambitious by temperament, generous from necessity, the seeming heroism of his fidelity in misfortune reduces itself to this.”

And that very semblance of heroic fidelity was probably based on the calculation that Marie de Médicis, being the King’s mother and a person not easily crushed or ignored, would be reconciled to her son before many months had passed by. That Richelieu had any real feeling for her beyond the banal devotion of a courtier seems exceedingly doubtful. He was a hard creature, made of steel and flame, and Marie, a dozen years older than himself, was not an attractive woman. The hasty retreat from Blois was no personal grief to him.

In short, Richelieu now set himself to please—or rather, not to displease—Louis XIII., on whose favour his fortunes so clearly depended. His faith in the future never really deserted him, though for seven years, like Jacob, he served and waited in the wilderness.

During that first summer, at his pleasant priory of Coussay, he wrote a book.

The worthy Père Cotton, the Jesuit confessor of Henry IV. and Louis XIII., had been dismissed by Luynes. His successor, the Père Arnoux, a much less discreet personage, preached a violent sermon before the King against the Protestants, accusing them of misunderstanding and misinterpreting the Bible. Four ministers of Charenton, learned men, published a spirited reply, which was suppressed by royal order, after discussions in the Sorbonne and the Parliament. But the Huguenots boasted loudly that the Catholics could not defend themselves, and it appeared to the Bishop of Luçon that indeed the Church had supplied no remedy to save souls from the evil effects of reading “that pernicious book.”

“Therefore,” he says, “I employed the leisure of my solitude in answering it; and owing to the length of time during which I had been diverted from the exercise of my profession, I laboured with such ardour that in six weeks I finished the work.”

This Defence of the Catholic Faith was a book of 250 pages, full of theological learning, and written with moderation, tact, and practical good sense. The Bishop here preached again those doctrines of toleration, of conversion by reasoning, not by force, with which he had met the Huguenots of his diocese ten years before. It was the book of a statesman as much as of a theologian. He marshalled an army of arguments to prove the ministers in the wrong; enjoined on the schismatics loyalty and obedience to the laws; but for the King he advised gentleness and patience; the object to be sought by all being national unity and peace. The book was printed at Poitiers, and published within three months of its beginning. It was greatly admired, and added much to its author’s reputation; but also, as he notes rather sadly, “it burdened me with envy.” His enemies saw that they had not silenced the Bishop of Luçon by banishing him to his diocese.

There, during these months of enforced residence, he seems to have worked with all the freshness and “ardour” consequent on absence and change of thoughts. He writes in August to the Nuncio: “I am here in my diocese, where I try to make known by all my actions that I have and shall have no other passion than doing all I can for the glory of God.” A word of personal complaint in his letters is rare. He was surrounded by his friends, living in a pleasant and healthy little château where the people loved him. Sébastien Bouthillier was now Dean of Luçon and his constant companion. He had his books, collected in the days when he, La Rocheposay, Saint-Cyran and the rest found their diversion in study; and if all these things were not the passion of his life, yet he loved them still. He might have been far more of a bookworm than he really was, from the tone of his letters at this time. “I live at a little hermitage among books” ... “I am living quietly here in the enjoyment of my books” ... “Serving God and my friends, I am resolved to spend the time quietly among my books and my neighbours;” and much more of the same kind. Now and then, it is true, when news from the great outside world comes to him, sitting helpless in his hermitage, he is seized with restless impatience and confesses himself malheureux. But this is only in letters to his own family and to his friend Père Joseph: the face turned to the King and to all public personages is dignified, grave and serene.

Richelieu watched, from distance and obscurity, the still rising fortunes of the Duc de Luynes. The lucky Provençal, of doubtful nobility, was able to choose a wife among the noblest, richest and most beautiful women in France. He refused Mademoiselle de Vendôme, Henry IV.’s daughter—who afterwards married the Duc d’Elbeuf—probably from fear and dislike of her odious brother. He would have nothing to say to Mademoiselle d’Ailly and her enormous fortune, but arranged a marriage for her with his younger brother Cadenet, a dashing soldier, who took the title of Duc de Chaulnes from one of her estates. His own choice fell on Marie de Rohan, daughter of the Duc de Montbazon, then a lovely wild girl of seventeen. After his death she married the Duc de Chevreuse, a younger brother of the Duc de Guise, and was for years the most admired beauty and most mischievous woman in Europe.

Another piece of news was the removal of the Prince de Condé, “ce petit brouillon,” whom Luynes had not dared to set free, from the Bastille to the Château de Vincennes. His wife, Charlotte de Montmorency, was now allowed to share his imprisonment, and the consequence was the birth of Princess Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon, afterwards the famous Madame de Longueville. Louis de Bourbon, the great Condé, was not born till after his father’s release.

Later in the year, the Duc de Villeroy died at seventy-four. He was one of the best of those old Ministers of State whom Henry IV. left to his widow, the Regent. The Pope’s Nuncio, Bentivoglio, had a high opinion of him. “Great was his experience, great his integrity; ... a good Frenchman and a good Catholic,” says the Italian diplomat. Richelieu describes him as a sincere man of good judgment, but narrow-minded and jealous, and adds that he died after fifty-one years’ service with clean hands, possessing little more than he had inherited from his fore-fathers. It was a fine testimonial to Villeroy from the young rival who, if only for a few months, had thrown him into the shade.

Richelieu was less generous with regard to Jacques-Auguste de Thou, the “faithful and austere,” “light of France” and “prince of historians,” as Camden called him, who died in that same year. Richelieu observes of him that his piety was not equal to his learning, that knowledge and action are different things, and that the speculative science of government needs certain qualities of mind not always found to match it. The inwardness of this criticism lies in the fact that de Thou, in his Latin History of the sixteenth century, made certain scornful and severe remarks on Richelieu’s ancestors and the part they took in the Wars of Religion. Richelieu, exceedingly sensitive as to the honour of his family, never forgave this, and when in 1642 François-Auguste de Thou lost his head in the Cinq-Mars catastrophe, it was currently believed that the Cardinal might have spared him but for those paragraphs in his father’s history.

In November 1617 Nicole du Plessis-Richelieu, the Bishop’s younger sister, was married quietly in Paris to a distinguished but eccentric Angevin noble, the Marquis de Maillé-Brézé. Nicole was now a woman of thirty. She had lived at Richelieu until her mother’s death; her portion cannot have been large; of her brothers, one was a more or less struggling courtier, one a monk, one a politician out of office. She possessed little beyond a singular beauty and charm; the Marquis de Brézé, who married her for love, cannot have foreknown the brilliant thing he was doing. Brother-in-law to the most powerful man in Europe, father-in-law of the great Condé, Marshal of France, governor of Anjou, Viceroy of Catalonia, the Marquis had everything; and, “extravagant” as he was, cared most of all for a good dog and a new book. But the marriage turned out unhappily. Nicole de Richelieu went out of her mind—one of her mad fancies being that she was made of glass—and died shut up in the castle of Saumur. M. de Brézé was a bad husband, though a clever and accomplished man. According to the stories of the time, it was his unkindness and brutal infidelity that upset poor Nicole’s weak brain.

The Bishop, of course, was not present at his sister’s marriage; but he appears to have made all the necessary arrangements with M. de Brézé, leaving the actual ceremony to be managed by Henry de Richelieu and his young wife.

The Duc de Luynes was nervous on his lonely pinnacle of power. The presence of the Queen-mother at Blois was a constant anxiety to him; she was not only, in his eyes, an enemy to the State, but his own personal and unforgiving enemy. And more than the Queen-mother he feared her friends; certain of the great nobles, who were already beginning to resent his exaltation, and those former ministers who had been the real strength of her rule. Barbin was still in the Bastille. With an appearance of leniency, Luynes made his imprisonment easier and winked at a correspondence between him and the Queen. Copies of every letter came into the hands of Luynes. Marie’s messengers boasted of their mistress’s new freedom and speedy return to the Court.

These intrigues, dangerous from Luynes’ point of view, came to a sudden end. Barbin, strictly imprisoned, nearly lost his head; many arrests were made; two or three poor creatures who had written pamphlets on the Queen’s side were cruelly put to death; Marie’s own imprisonment was made much more rigorous, royal guards and royal spies with new and strict orders being set to watch the Château de Blois.

Thus setting himself to terrorise the Queen-mother and her friends, Luynes did not forget the Bishop of Luçon. On Wednesday in Holy Week, 1618, Richelieu received a letter from the King full of vague accusations of “goings and comings and secret proceedings which caused umbrage and suspicion, affecting the King’s service and the tranquillity of his subjects,” ordering him to retire immediately to Avignon, there to remain till further commands.

“I was not surprised at receiving this despatch,” he says in his Memoirs, “having always expected unjust, barbarous and unreasonable treatment from the cowards who governed us.... But as I was accused of acting against His Majesty’s service, I humbly begged him to send some dispassionate person to examine the facts on the spot, being sure that by such means His Majesty would be convinced of my innocence.”

It does not appear indeed that Richelieu had been much concerned, if at all, in the recent intrigues between Blois and Paris. But Luynes was afraid of him; and he was forced to depart instantly for that exile which was the saddest experience of his younger life—proving once more the old truth that the night is darkest before the dawn.

He left Luçon on Good Friday, for the royal commands admitted of no delay, and started on the long, difficult, cross-country journey from Poitou to the Venaissin. In wind-swept Avignon, still a half-Italian city belonging to the Pope, he hired a house and settled himself to endure the cruel idleness of banishment. He was not alone. His brother and brother-in-law, M. de Richelieu and M. du Pont-de-Courlay, shared his exile, for they too were old adherents of the Queen-mother, and Luynes feared them all. He shut up his captive birds in the same cage—“a great consolation to us,” says the Bishop, “though it was not done for that end, but in order to keep us in sight together.”

Once more he flung himself into hard study. He wrote or dictated a large collection of fragmentary notes, which took the form of a kind of apology or explanation of his political views and doings. He wrote a religious book, L’Instruction du Chrétien, planned long before. He seems to have led a solitary and studious life, seeing few people, writing few letters except to his diocese, meditating much and suffering much, for he was ill in body as in mind.

And in the autumn the gloom of exile was deepened by severe family sorrows. The young Marquise de Richelieu, Marguerite Guiot des Charmeaux, whom her husband had been obliged to leave behind, died at Richelieu after the birth of her first child. The little boy, François Louis, only lived a few weeks, and was then laid in the vault at Braye with his mother and his ancestors. It was not long before Henry de Richelieu himself joined that company.

He was terribly grieved and desolate. Every glimpse that we have of his wife shows her good and charming, and the blows of fortune may well have seemed to both brothers too heavy to bear. The child’s death meant the extinction of the direct male line of du Plessis-Richelieu.

After some weeks, by the intervention of their old friend Bassompierre, the Marquis and his brother-in-law M. du Pont-de-Courlay were allowed to go to Richelieu and to Paris on their family business. The Bishop remained alone at Avignon.

His solitude there was of his own choice, for the Vice-Legate and other dignitaries were ready to make much of him, and a letter to his brother, written in February 1619, shows him very sensible of some special kindness. He commissions M. de Richelieu to buy and to send him the most beautiful hackney he can find—“mais belle tout-à-fait”—probably such a gentle, ambling creature as a Vice-Legate would ride—as well as pieces of choice goldsmith’s work to hang on watches. His anxiety is that the presents should be “something conformable to his condition,” for it is better to give nothing at all than “un maigre présent.” The Bishop of Luçon, in poverty and exile, had already the splendid tastes of the Éminentissime.

But in actual fact he was very solitary and intensely sad. For once in his life he seems to have lost faith in his star, and as the conviction that he would die in exile gained strength, he thought a good deal of the poor little diocese he might never see again. He wrote a curious document, a kind of last will, dated February 8, and addressed to the Chapter of Luçon. After some expressions of sincere affection, he leaves his body to the Cathedral, “that I may repose when dead in the same place where, living, I desire to be....”

“... The place of my sepulture shall be, if you please, immediately above the singers’ desk, leaving the higher part of the choir, as more honourable, for those who shall come after me....

“I leave you also all the silver plate of my chapel, my ornaments, and hangings of Flemish tapestry, to adorn the choir, without any condition whatever, trusting to be helped by your prayers....

“If I could leave you anything more, I would very willingly do so; my will surpassing my power, my wishes for you must supply the defect.

“The first benefit I wish you is to live in clear consciousness of your condition, keeping before your eyes that this world is but illusion, and that there is no profit or contentment except in the service of God, who never forsakes them who serve Him.

“I desire for you a bishop who, equalling me in affection, may surpass me in all other qualities.... I conjure him, whoever he may be, to reside with you, to visit his diocese, to encourage in their duty, by his example and his teaching, those who have the care of souls under him, to maintain and augment the seminary founded at Luçon, to which I leave a thousand livres and my whole library....”

To this seminary for priests, a favourite foundation of his, Richelieu had already given the revenues of an abbey in Poitou. He ends his testament by beseeching the Chapter to live in the closest union with his successor.

“After this, Sirs, it only remains to conjure you to love my memory as that of a person who tenderly loves you and passionately desires your salvation.”

Richelieu’s final farewell to the Luçon Chapter was written four years later, in less affectionate and more businesslike terms. He was about to be plunged in the political whirlpool which swallowed the rest of his life, when he resigned the see in favour of M. de Bragelogne, receiving in exchange the Abbey of Notre Dame du Wast in the diocese of Le Mans, a canonry and prebend at St. Martin of Tours, and a retiring pension of 6,000 livres.

The town of Blois was asleep in the dark small hours of February 23, when Queen Marie de Médicis got out of her window in the Château, climbed or slid down a hundred and twenty feet of ladders—a really wonderful feat in a woman of her size and indolence—hurried through the silent streets to the bridge over the Loire, got into a coach with two or three attendants and some boxes of money and jewels, and drove off, first to Loches, then to Angoulême. When Blois, castle and town, awoke in the morning, the captive royal bird had flown.

The affair had been arranged, with extraordinary cleverness and secrecy, by the Abbé Rucellai, one of those Italians in Marie’s household whose intrigues had brought about the disgrace of Richelieu. The active agent was the old Duc d’Épernon.

He had been a courtier of Henry III. and Henry IV., and had not yet taken up arms in actual rebellion. It was he who stood by Marie de Médicis after the death of Henry, and faced the Parliament with a fierce declaration of her right to the Regency. She had not been grateful: the Maréchal d’Ancre took the place in her court which d’Épernon considered his due. Too proud for a lower position, he retired to his estates and governments, which were many, including the town of Metz, Saintonge, and the Angoumois. The rule of Luynes was quite as offensive to him as that of Concini had been, and the plot for the Queen’s escape was welcomed by one of the boldest, most romantic and adventurous characters of the century.

When the time drew near, the Duke was at Metz. It was necessary to gain the Angoumois by a secret dash across France, beset with so many dangers that the chroniclers called that ride “le voyage d’Amadis.” His province successfully reached, the Duke sent two active young men to Blois to manage the actual escape, and himself waited for the Queen at Loches, then conveying her to a place of greater safety. She was now free to make terms with her son or to set France on fire against him.

The Duc de Luynes heard of Her Majesty’s “sortie” with amazement and alarm. He had long watched her uneasily; and his brother afterwards told Richelieu that he had resolved to take the King to Blois on the pretext of a friendly visit, but really to convey the Queen-mother “politely” to Amboise, his own stronghold, where “she would remain for the future under good and sure guard.” He knew well that her quarrel with him grew more bitter with every month of her captivity. During that very winter he had married her second daughter, Madame Christine, to the Prince of Piedmont, the Duke of Savoy’s son, with scarcely the formal courtesy of asking her consent. Such an insult Marie was not likely to forget.

Once at liberty, she might become the rallying centre for all the discontented in the kingdom, and Luynes knew that they were many. He had offended the nobles by withdrawing various pensions, and had set the great Protestant party against him by royal decrees, especially one which aimed at restoring Catholic worship in the little kingdom of Béarn.

For a few days civil war seemed imminent. The King and Luynes, both furiously angry, began to raise troops, and talked of riding off to the west. But Luynes was not Concini. He was prudent au fond, some say timid, and no soldier. He began to ask advice from wiser men in Paris and elsewhere, even from the Duc de Bouillon, head of the Protestants, and they all with one voice counselled peace. Besides, the nobles showed no great eagerness to rebel suddenly against the King by joining the Queen-mother and d’Épernon, while Marie’s letters to her son gave a kind of basis for negotiations. It was resolved to throw the actual blame of the affair on d’Épernon, and a royal edict at once deprived him of all his appointments and governments, while ambassadors, carefully chosen to please the Queen, were sent to her at Angoulême. It seemed possible that such persuasive tongues as those of her old favourite the Père de Bérulle and of the Comte de Béthune, Sully’s more courtly brother and a devoted servant of Henry IV., might induce her to accept the terms offered by her son to renounce the company of rebels against his authority, and to choose a peaceable residence in some other part of the kingdom.

There were those in Paris at the moment who did not wait for the failure of these negotiations to suggest an even wiser plan. One man in France could manage the Queen-mother: he was in exile at Avignon. Restore him to her council; give him authority to mediate between her and the King; his cleverness and moderation would soon bring her to a less violent frame of mind, and so arrange matters to the King’s satisfaction.

The originators of this idea were Richelieu’s two faithful friends, the Dean of Luçon and Père Joseph.

The wonderful friar had been much away from France during Richelieu’s exile. He had been to Rome and to Spain, travelling mostly on foot, as the rule of his Order required. He had been working hard on the details of a new crusade against the Turks, with the object not only of rescuing the Holy Places, but of driving Islam out of Europe. It was the favourite dream of Joseph’s life. He worked at its realisation in concert with the Duc de Nevers, Charles de Gonzague, who was descended, through his mother, from the Christian emperors of the East. These two, with the Pope’s sanction, founded a crusading order of chivalry, “La Milice Chrétienne,” and before the Thirty Years War broke out their scheme had become popular throughout Catholic Europe. But it was an anachronism, a mediæval romance, and as such it soon died away. The two camps of Christendom had each other to fight. The revolt of the Bohemian Protestants sealed the fate of Constantinople and Palestine.

Père Joseph’s crusading ardour was equalled by his devotion to Richelieu. He and Bouthillier worked so well on the minds of Luynes and of the King that it was decided to recall the Bishop from his exile and to send him to join the Queen-mother at Angoulême, with the understanding that while faithfully serving Her Majesty he would counsel nothing against the King’s interest and the nation’s welfare. The letter of recall was written by Louis XIII.’s own hand, and was conveyed to Avignon by M. du Tremblay, Père Joseph’s brother. Riding post-haste, he arrived there on March 7, 1619.

Here Richelieu may tell his own story.

“As soon as I had received His Majesty’s despatch, though the weather was extraordinarily bad, the snow deep and the cold extreme, I posted away from Avignon to obey my orders, led both by inclination and duty. But my haste was soon interrupted, for in a little wood near Vienne I fell in with a troop of thirty men of the Sieur d’Alincourt’s guards, commanded by his captain of the guard, who met me with arms lowered, saying that they had orders to arrest me. I begged the captain to show me his powers, but he was provided with none. He replied to me that he was executing the orders of the Sieur d’Alincourt, who had his orders from the King....”

The Bishop’s impatient rage may be imagined. He was also greatly alarmed, for it was only too possible that the King might have changed his mind. Resistance was out of the question. M. du Tremblay rode off to Lyons, where M. d’Alincourt was governor—he was the son of the Duc de Villeroy, and had befriended Richelieu in his young days—in order to find out which of the royal commands was the latest in date. The Bishop and his servants were conveyed by the soldiers to Vienne, the stupid captain treating his prisoner “like a criminal.” A sleepless night at the inn was made more hideous by bands of men fighting in the streets; a sham rescue, it seems, was devised by the captain for the greater credit of himself and his men. No wonder that the Bishop was exceedingly angry. “I thought you were ignorant,” said he, “but I now see you are malicious.”

In the meanwhile, M. du Tremblay had laid the King’s letter before the governor of Lyons, who perceived that he had made a mistake. It had arisen from a morsel of gossip sent him by his son, who was at court when the news of the Queen’s escape arrived, and to whom the Duc de Luynes had hurriedly said—“If your father could arrest the Bishop of Luçon, he would do us a great pleasure.” Luynes probably forgot the words, spoken before the idea of making use of the Bishop as a mediator had even been suggested; but M. d’Alincourt made haste to act upon them, sending spies to Avignon and cleverly arranging the enterprise, “which was not a very difficult one,” observes Richelieu, “there being question only of stopping a man travelling alone.”

The governor did his best to “change his rigour into civility.” He sent his coach to meet the Bishop on his way to Lyons, with a letter to his captain, who was much astonished and ashamed. Richelieu showed no resentment. He easily forgave the captain, dined with M. d’Alincourt at Lyons, and then pursued his journey. Its risks were not over, for the snow lay deep in the high wild country between Lyons and Limoges, and the King’s troops, who were abroad in those parts, pursued the Bishop for some distance, supposing him to be the Duc d’Épernon’s son, the Archbishop of Toulouse.

Richelieu arrived at Angoulême on March 27, after a journey of more than three weeks. It was again Wednesday in Holy Week. According to his own account he was not made welcome, except by Madame de Guercheville. The Duc d’Épernon and his party looked on him with doubt and suspicion as an emissary of the King. Marie de Médicis, surrounded by them, hardly dared to show her feelings of relief and joy.