Cardinal de Richelieu

On September 5, 1622—Richelieu’s thirty-seventh birthday—the faithful Sébastien Bouthillier sang his Nunc Dimittis. Writing from Rome to his brother, he said: “It seems to me that I now have nothing more to desire in this world, since M. de Luçon is Cardinal.... Indeed, God must destine him for the continuing of the great works in which he has already been employed, since He has raised him to this deserved dignity in spite of the most powerful impediments.”

The news arrived in France when Louis XIII. was at Avignon, his troops being engaged in that unlucky siege of Montpellier which closed his second campaign against the Protestants. A letter was immediately sent to the Queen-mother, who had spent the summer at Pougues-les-Eaux and was on her way to Lyons with her favourite Bishop in attendance. It reached her at a village on the road called La Pacaudière; there, she herself announced the news to Richelieu. From Lyons he started for Avignon, travelling down the Rhône, to thank the King in person. Three months later, the whole Court being at Lyons, his cardinal’s biretta was presented to him by His Majesty with solemn ceremony at the Archbishop’s palace. The first thing he did with the red cap so long desired was to lay it at the feet of Marie de Médicis. It would always remind him, he said, that he had vowed to shed his blood in her service.

And now—if one may venture on a quotation from M. Hanotaux’ vivid pages—“he moves to his right place, among the great and nobly born. His dignity is but the finishing touch. He is thirty-seven years old; thin, slender, hair and beard black, eye clear and piercing, he still has beauty, if beauty is compatible with an evident, intimidating superiority. He has the colourless complexion of a man worn by watching and suffering, gnawed by his own thoughts. It may with truth be said of him that the blade wears out the sheath; and indeed, long, slight and flexible, he is like a sword. He places the cardinal’s red cap on his triangular head. He wraps himself in flowing folds of purple. Thus, all red, he enters history, realising the most complete and powerful image of a ‘cardinal’ that imagination and art have ever dreamed.”

After this striking picture, it is interesting to read the impressions of Michelet, whose prejudices, historical and religious, hardly permitted him to be fair to Richelieu’s genius, not to mention his character.

Philippe de Champagne’s well-known portrait, painted at a much later date than 1622, but breathing all the stateliness, the sense of innate power, which M. Hanotaux so finely suggests, is the text for Michelet’s famous discourse. Philippe’s art is so true and so penetrating, he says, that it answers alike to historical knowledge and to popular impressions.

“In that grey-bearded, dull-eyed phantom with the delicate thin hands, history recognises the grandson of Henry the Third’s provost who shot Guise.” [N.B.—Richelieu was the Provost’s son, and the Provost did not shoot Guise.]

“He comes towards you. You are not reassured. The personage has an air of life. But is it really a man? A spirit? Yes, certainly an intelligence, firm, clear, luminous shall I say, or of sinister brilliancy? If he made a few steps forward, we should be face to face. I have no wish for it. I fear that strong head means nothing within—no heart, no bowels. I have seen too much, in my studies of sorcery, of those evil spirits who will not remain below, but return, and once again move the world.

“What contrasts in him! So hard, so supple, so entire, so broken! By what tortures must he have been ground down, made and unmade, or let us say, désarticulé, to have become this eminently artificial thing which walks and does not walk, which advances without apparent sight or sound, as if gliding over a noiseless carpet ... then, arrived, overturns all.

“He gazes on you from the depth of his mystery, the sphinx in the red robe. I dare not say, from the depth of his knavery. For, contrary to the ancient Sphinx, who dies if divined, this man seems to say: ‘Quiconque me devine en mourra.’”

Richelieu was now a Prince of the Church, equal to the greatest in the land. One of the ends of his “sfrenata ambizione” was gained, but he still had to wait till the incapacity of the Ministers of France compelled Louis XIII., half willingly, half unwillingly, for he admired the Cardinal’s talents while he feared his dominating character, to summon him to supreme political power.

During the twenty months of waiting, Richelieu indulged the natural tastes for building and collecting which had been, no doubt, trained and encouraged by Marie de Médicis, herself so great a lover of art in its more splendid forms. At this time and a little later he bought several châteaux at no great distance from Paris—Fleury, near Fontainebleau; Bois-le-Vicomte, which he afterwards exchanged with Gaston d’Orléans for Champigny, the hereditary property of his eldest daughter, the heiress of Montpensier; Limours, which he sold, after spending large sums on beautifying it; and Rueil, near Saint-Germain. This last, when bought by the Cardinal, was merely a small country-house. He made a magnificent place of it, with moats and terraces, a beautiful park, and gardens in the Italian style which were among the most famous of the century; cascades, fountains, arches, grottos, and a population of statues. He was a great buyer of statuary, with which all his houses and gardens were largely adorned. He posed as a very considerable patron of art, but his purchases were not made without economy; the sale of various ecclesiastical charges did not bring in an unlimited fortune. Nor was his taste always faultless, even by the pseudo-classical standard of the time.

In August 1623 he wrote a long letter to his private secretary, Michel Le Masle, Prior of Les Roches—formerly his servant at the Collège de Navarre—who had been sent to Italy on confidential business connected partly with the Queen-mother’s Florentine affairs, partly with the election of a new Pope, Urban VIII. Having treated of these subjects, the Cardinal goes on to private matters of his own.

“The Sieur Franchine advises me to ask if you can send me some marble statues and a marble basin; for he says that, not being real antiques, one can have them very cheap. I particularly want a statue about three feet high, and a handsome basin a foot and a half in diameter, to put on his head. If you have this made to order the statue must hold it with both hands above his head. You will remember that, being for a fountain, the statue and the basin must be pierced.... M. d’Alincourt five or six months ago had five very cheap statues brought from Rome. You will inquire into the price of marble, the charges of sculptors, in order that we may judge, on your return, whether the work may better be done there or in France.”

M. des Roches is then directed to find out the cost of “the following statues, in bronze”:

“A Jupiter six feet high, with the face of the late King, a crown on his head and a sceptre in his hand, dressed as Jupiter à l’antique.

“A Juno of the same size, with the face of the Queen, the eyes slightly turned towards heaven, to which she will point with one hand.

“A god Terminus, nine feet high, made after the sculptor’s fancy, to be set on a column in the midst of the garden.

“A Hercules eight or nine feet high, holding up his club in the air, pierced so that it may throw out water.”

And so forth. In his reply, M. des Roches was bold enough to question his patron’s taste on several points; remarking, for instance, that though water might spring forth from Samson’s jawbone of an ass, it could hardly do so from the club of Hercules.

Water played a great part in the garden decoration of those days. Canals, cascades, lakes, fountains glittered and splashed everywhere; and keen amusement was found in the various tricks played by unexpected jets d’eau. At Rueil the Cardinal had a wonderful grotto with a cavern into which he used to beguile his unlucky guests.

“An infinity of little jets d’eau spring out of the ground; figures of animals, of every kind, spurt water on every side; and when one tries to hurry out to escape all this water, the doors are blockaded by heavy water-falls; and outside the grotto other spouting figures complete the soaking of those who have passed through all this water.”

Such was the delightful humour of the time. And it was not only ladies and gentlemen, finely dressed, who were subjected to these little “surprises.” Walls were painted with marvellous perspectives which deceived the very birds of the air. They met their death while flying, as they thought, in the blue firmament of heaven.

Rueil was the Cardinal’s favourite residence outside Paris. His town house at this time was in the fashionable Place Royale; two or three years later he moved to the Petit-Luxembourg, a charming hôtel in the Rue Vaugirard, close to Marie de Médicis’ new palace. While high in her favour he had much to do with the artistic decoration of the Luxembourg. He superintended her financial affairs, and her builders, painters, furnishers worked to some extent under his orders. De Brosse, her architect, was supplied with money by his authority. Rubens, who was now painting the magnificent series of pictures in her honour; Poussin and Philippe de Champagne, young artists not yet famous, employed in smaller work about the palace, were dependent on him. We find him inquiring through M. des Roches if Guido Reni of Bologna, then at the height of his glory, will come to France for a couple of years to paint the late King’s battles in a gallery of the Queen’s new palace. But the Pope and all the Italian princes were struggling for Guido, and he did not care at this time to leave his own country.

While Richelieu and the Queen-mother waited and looked on, se ménageant, as a French writer says, and amusing themselves with matters of art, the confusion in State affairs went on deepening. The weakness and irresolution of the Ministers were destroying, day by day, French influence in Europe, while the power of Spain and Austria went on growing. Old allies of France were biting the dust. The progress of the war in Germany was against the Protestants; the Elector Palatine, King of Bohemia, had been driven from his dominions, and James I., his father-in-law, saw no wiser course than to bid for the help of Spain by marrying his heir to the Infanta; it was in this very year 1623 that Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham visited Paris on their way to Madrid. Such an alliance might have sealed the fate of France and almost made her a vassal of Spain; she was indeed approaching that state, in the helpless hands of Sillery and Puisieux.

At home the Court was full of quarrels and intrigues: the King, uneasy, discontented, and wilful enough, had not the wisdom or the character needed to dismiss his useless Ministers and to put a strong man in their place. He hunted more desperately than ever, and after a year or two of rapprochement was again becoming estranged from Queen Anne, who for her part fell completely under the influence of the beautiful young widow of Luynes, appointed by him superintendent of her household. After the death of Luynes, this appointment was violently disputed by Madame de Montmorency, widow of the old Constable, who had formerly held it. Madame de Luynes’ chance of keeping it lay in her second marriage with the Duc de Chevreuse, which ranged the great House of Guise on her side. The whole Court, men and women, flung themselves into this quarrel; duels were fought and bribes exacted. Finally, the King and the Ministers decided to suppress the office altogether, to the bitter disappointment of both parties and the wrath of the young Queen. The Queen-mother, with her favourite counsellor, and the Prince de Condé, fallen into disfavour at Court and withdrawn in his government of Berry, were the persons of chief importance who stood aloof from the fray, each watching for some change which might throw political power into the hands of the Prince or the Cardinal.

Richelieu, for his part, was neither patient nor idle, and while outwardly absorbed by palaces, pictures, statues, was working underground with an energy hardly realised by the men of his own day. He had few confidants. Père Joseph, as always, knew and understood him best and admired him most loyally; but Père Joseph was hardly in sympathy with the instrument chiefly used by Richelieu at this time—Fancan, the famous pamphleteer.

This strange and clever being was a canon of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. His family, Langlois by name, had long been attached to the fortunes of the house of Richelieu, and his brother was the Cardinal’s own man of business. The Sieur de Fancan had had a wider experience in the employment of the Duc de Longueville and of the Comtesse de Soissons. He had done some diplomatic work, and had developed bold opinions of his own in matters of politics and religion, posing as “bon français” in opposition to Luynes and the Spanish ultra-Catholic trend of affairs. His Protestant leanings carried him far, according to the correspondence with Germany and England discovered after his death.

For several years Fancan was high in Richelieu’s favour. Unknown, anonymous, brilliant, unscrupulous, he and one or two others made public opinion in France. His pamphlets or libelles, in their blue covers, were sold by hundreds on the bridges and in the book-shops of Paris. They attacked the Ministers of the moment in verse or prose full of ironical fury, personal violence and political wisdom, coarse, impudent and strong. Either in a direct or roundabout way they were addressed to the King. Sometimes France, on her dying bed, held converse with her ancient heroes; sometimes Henry the Great talked with the leaders of his time; sometimes unworthy favourites were gibbeted; sometimes the people cried to their sovereign in bitter complaint of religious tyranny and civil war, and boldly offered the counsel for which nobody asked them.

The King, the Ministers, the nobles, the literary men, the citizens, all read these pamphlets, talked of them, and did not forget them. Louis was much influenced by them; they touched his conscience and sense of truth, if they deepened the gloom in which he followed his hounds in the Forest of Saint-Germain. In the days of the Brûlarts and their successor, the Marquis de la Vieuville, while the affairs of the kingdom were slipping from bad to worse, the pamphlets not only complained more loudly than ever, they advised more strongly than ever, and the King knew well that their advice was good, however unwilling he might be to take it. They told him that there was one man in France whose hand ought to be on the helm, a man who would serve his own country and his own King, not the interests of a foreign power; a man of high courage, prudence and incomparable dexterity, as wise as he was brilliant, ready, like a burning torch, to consume himself in giving light to the State. This man would be the saviour of France, renewing the great days of Henry. It was hardly necessary to name the Cardinal de Richelieu.

Fancan only expressed the minds of all thinking men French or foreign, private or public, who were independent of the Ministers and above political jealousy. But while thus serving France and the Cardinal, he was too careful to serve himself. He was in fact a secret agent, receiving pay from both Catholic and Protestant powers, and successfully cheating them all. The independent game became dangerous when Richelieu was supreme. In the year 1627 it is noted in the Memoirs that “un nommé Fancan,” a spy whose business was to betray and ruin the State, was imprisoned in the Bastille. “All his ends were evil,” says Richelieu, “and the means he used to attain them were detestable and wicked. His ordinary work was the making of libelles in order to decry the government”(!).

A year later, Fancan died in prison. The whole story is mysterious; but Richelieu was as quick to rid himself of a suspected friend as of an open enemy.

In the winter of 1623-4 the Ministry of Sillery and Puisieux came suddenly to an end. These two men were followed into retirement by the scorn and hatred of a public which knew that they had used their power not only to weaken France in Europe, but to pile up large fortunes for themselves. The Chancellor was succeeded immediately by his colleague, M. de la Vieuville, a man of a bolder spirit and more patriotic views, but too nervous, irresolute and indiscreet to guide France through her present difficulties. Fancan, the ill-rewarded, attacked the new Minister with new pamphlets, accusing him and his family of appropriating public funds. To do La Vieuville justice, he began his rule by a very unpopular but necessary move towards economy in the system of universal pensions. It must also be remembered in his favour that he advised Louis XIII. to listen to the general voice and at this critical time to demand the services of Richelieu.

But neither he nor the King intended to give that formidable personage any real authority. Louis shrank in terror from “cet esprit altier et dominateur,” replying to his mother, when she pressed him to admit her favourite to the royal Council, in such prophetic words as these—“Madame, I know him better than you do: he is a man of immeasurable ambition.” With the idea of utilising the Cardinal’s talents while keeping him outside power, La Vieuville invented a new subordinate Council for the management of foreign affairs, and offered him the presidency. This did not mean a seat on the King’s Council, or any independent decision, for, as Richelieu pointed out in his dry and courteous letter of refusal, any resolution passed by this new body was liable to be negatived by the King and his Council. He excused himself on the ground of ill-health and of lack of recent experience in foreign affairs, declaring that he preferred a private life to “un si grand emploi.”

It was not difficult to understand these excuses. What was to be done with him? The King and La Vieuville tried to send him as ambassador to Spain, then to Rome; but he would not go. The Queen-mother obstinately pressed his claim to be admitted to the Council; she spared neither her son nor his Minister; she even held aloof from the Court in her discontent, and it seems that the fear of another serious breach with her had much influence with the King.

Towards the end of April, 1624, the complications in home and foreign affairs increasing every day, the pamphlets stinging more sharply, public and private voices waxing louder, La Vieuville found himself forced to advise the King to admit Richelieu to his Council—and this in the full consciousness that the Cardinal’s rise must mean his own fall. Even now he tried, in self-defence, to limit his new colleague’s power for mischief. He was to sit on the Council for the purpose of giving his opinion, but nothing more; he might use the influence, but not the authority, of a Minister of the Crown. Richelieu swept this fragile barrier easily away; indeed, from his own account, he ignored it altogether, and history would have forgotten it, but for some detailed reports sent from Paris to his masters by the Florentine ambassador.

The Cardinal’s Memoirs, with his letter to the King, show him by no means eager to accept the offered place which had been for so long “his one thought by day, his one dream by night.” All the intrigues of the affair were open to him, and if he despised and distrusted La Vieuville and the rest of the Council, he had little confidence in the jealous, uncertain temper of the King. Writing to Louis, he began by frankly acknowledging that God had given him “some enlightenment and strength of mind.” These qualities, however, were rendered unserviceable by extreme bodily weakness—so much so that he had lately besought the Queen-mother to relieve him from his light duties as superintendent of her household. Such indeed were his infirmities that he could not live without frequent excursions into the country. He added that he had many enemies, especially those of the Queen-mother, who would certainly, on his account, do their best to make mischief between their Majesties; while he assured the King that he would rather die than do anything against the welfare of the State, for which he would shed the last drop of his blood.

These same enemies would take advantage of the fact that the Cardinal’s opinion might frequently differ from that of His Majesty’s other Ministers; for, once on the Council, he would go his own way as to what he thought best for the King’s service. He would not be merely an ornamental figure, set up “to please the public imagination and to dazzle the eyes of the world,” but an honest statesman who would advise plainly and act boldly. All this he wished the King to understand, and underlying all this was the question—would Louis, as a loyal master, stand between a faithful servant and those enemies?

If, in spite of all considerations, the King remained in the same mind, the Cardinal said that he could only obey. The one condition was that, while working regularly with the rest of the Council, he must ask to be spared “the visits and solicitations of private persons,” which, besides occupying his time uselessly, would complete the ruin of his health.

It was a proud, straightforward letter. In it Louis XIII. felt the first strong grasp of the hand which was to hold and lead him almost to his life’s end.

Richelieu entered the Council on April 26, 1624. His first act was to demand precedence, as Cardinal, of all the other Ministers, and this was granted after long arguments; but he did not reach supreme power till the following autumn, when La Vieuville’s incapable government ended in sudden disgrace. Those were dishonest times; and it seems most probable that Richelieu, while outwardly friendly to La Vieuville, was not only opposing his uncertain policy but hastening his fall by the underground work of Fancan and other paid pamphleteers.

On August 13 the Marquis de la Vieuville carried his forced resignation to the King at Saint-Germain, was arrested by the captain of the guard and driven off to be imprisoned in the castle of Amboise. The government of France was already in the hands of Cardinal de Richelieu, and Louis XIII. had accepted the list of Ministers presented by him. The eighteen years’ career had begun which changed France, making absolutism possible, bringing in the Age of Louis XIV. and as a consequence, the Revolution.

Richelieu wrote to Père Joseph, who had lately been made Provincial of the Capuchin Order:

“You,” he said, “have been God’s chief agent in bringing me to this place of honour.... I pray you to hasten your journey, and to come to me as soon as possible, to share with me the management of affairs. There are pressing matters that I can confide to no one else, nor decide without your opinion. Come then quickly to receive these proofs of my esteem.”

From this time down to Père Joseph’s death, in 1638, the two Eminences, the Red and the Grey, were seldom parted.