Cardinal de Richelieu

The Duke of Buckingham had to do with a mind immeasurably superior to his own; and if he, in the autumn of 1625, was pushing on a quarrel with France, Cardinal de Richelieu’s game, for the present, was to disappoint him. The English fleet, playing at piracy, carried off French merchant ships: English influence led the Dutch to recall the fleet they had lent to France; a serious annoyance to Richelieu, who had not yet had time to make a navy. He had other reasons for being angry with King Charles, who, from Henrietta’s first arrival in England, had frankly shown his dislike of the “Monsers” she brought with her and seemed ready to treat all his marriage promises, open or secret, as waste paper. But Richelieu intended England to be the powerful mediator between Louis XIII. and the Huguenots; to this end, he ignored a whole series of pin-pricks, invited English ambassadors to Paris, and let it be understood that France, once at peace internally, would be ready to give active help in Germany.

That bleeding wound of civil war had so weakened the campaign in North Italy as to make it ineffectual. An Austrian force, pouring down over the Saint-Gothard, had reinforced Genoa, and Lesdiguières, with no fleet to support him, had been obliged to retire. But the Spaniards had failed to recover the Valtelline. It remained for the present in the hands of the French; a difficult question to be settled with the Pope, and Cardinal Barberini’s mission to that end resulted in nothing but words. He went back to Rome, in high discontent, at the end of September, and Richelieu, so far from slackening his hold, sent the Maréchal de Bassompierre to reinforce the Marquis de Cœuvres in Switzerland. It seemed that there was nothing to be done in the Catholic interest with “le Roy du Roy,” the man people already called atheist, Huguenot, “le Cardinal de la Rochelle.”

This was not quite the case, however. Though Richelieu would not treat with Cardinal Barberini, he had already entrusted his other self, Père Joseph, with powers for negotiating with Urban VIII. at Rome. At the moment, the mission of Barberini made this impossible, but it seems that the Capuchin—never publicly mentioned in State affairs, but always to be found pulling the strings for Richelieu in the background—passed on his instructions to the Comte du Fargis, French ambassador at Madrid, who set to work on the hard task of framing a treaty to please everybody—Spain, Austria, the Pope, the Grison Leagues and France—but notably that secret party in France, headed by the Queen-mother, M. de Marillac, afterwards Chancellor, and Père de Bérulle, among whom Richelieu’s opponents were now to be found. M. du Fargis, in his communications with the Spanish Minister, Count Olivarez, considered rather the wishes of this French ultra-Catholic party, reported to him by his brilliant and mischievous wife, now in Paris, than the intentions of Richelieu. The consequence was, that several attempts at a treaty were scornfully repudiated by the French government, and it was not till May 1626 that any agreement was arrived at. A nominal sovereignty over the Valtelline was restored to the Grisons, and Spain renounced any right of passage. The Catholic religion was established in the valley, and the forts were restored to the Pope, to be demolished by his troops. All parties were fairly satisfied, except the Duke of Savoy, whose quarrel with Genoa was coolly set aside without any reference to him. And the English government, which had almost forced the French Huguenots to accept an unprofitable peace from Louis XIII. in February, saw with immense irritation the conclusion of peace between France and Spain. This was not the end they had worked for; and the secret diplomacy of Richelieu was regarded in England as a dishonourable trick.

He cared not at all. Peace was necessary to him at this time: how necessary, a glance at his home projects is enough to prove. He now set to work upon them in earnest; backed up by public opinion, both in 1625 and 1626, in the shape of assemblies of the Notables—princes, dukes, and peers of France, archbishops and bishops, crown officers, presidents of courts of law, and the provost of the merchants of Paris. At these assemblies the chief personages of the kingdom were invited to advise the King. Richelieu took care that their advice should accord with his own, for his day of absolute power was only dawning. He had his way with them: as a body, they gave their consent to his policy at home and abroad.

The creation of a navy was his most popular measure. No longer should the King of France be forced to borrow ships where he could, to protect French coasts and French merchant vessels against “pirates of all nations.” Michel de Marillac, if he had secretly opposed Richelieu in the affair of the Spanish treaty, was heartily with him here, and he was one of those whose eloquence led the Notables to vote with enthusiasm the building or purchase of forty-five battle-ships. The sea-going trade of France, its enormous losses and dangers under the present system, was the text which inspired Marillac.

“We have everything we need,” he cried, “to make us strong at sea. We have wood and iron for ship-building, linen and flax for sails and cordage; sailors in abundance, who will serve our neighbours if not employed at home; the best ports in Europe ... and yet our neighbours rob us of our fishing ... pirates ravage our coasts and carry off the King’s subjects captive to Barbary.”

It was time, he said, that France should wake from her lethargy of many years.

The words of Marillac on this occasion were the thoughts of Richelieu, and he set about carrying them out in his own way. He had already taken to himself supreme power over naval affairs, by buying out the Duc de Montmorency and presenting himself with letters patent which conferred the new office of Grand Master and Superintendent-General of Navigation and Commerce.

Authority over the army—which he made almost entirely from small and chaotic beginnings till it became the force that conquered at Rocroy—was gained by Richelieu through the abolition of the old office of Constable of France. The Duc de Lesdiguières, its last holder, died in 1626, and military supremacy under the King passed into the hands of a War Minister—that is to say, into those of Richelieu himself.

Equally difficult with the creation of army and navy were the necessary reforms in the Church, in finance, in local government, and the establishment throughout France of order and the royal authority. The Cardinal shrank from nothing. Many of the details of his projected work were never carried out, and it has been well said that he was a more successful statesman abroad than at home, where a mass of privileges and vested interests, with the growing necessity for heavy taxes, were millstones hung round a financial reformer’s neck. Richelieu’s success in crushing the great nobles brought no benefit to the common people; it was all for the advantage of the King. Among his early dreams were those of encouraging agriculture and manufactures after the example of Henry IV. and Sully; but he did little good of this kind, except in the way of colonisation. Under his protection new French commercial companies, after a long struggle with England, gained a more secure footing in Canada and the West Indies.

For the first few years of Richelieu’s ministry he was working against tremendous odds. His health was terribly bad. All through the winter of 1625-6 he suffered from fever and constant headaches, so that he was often forced to leave Paris in the midst of his work and to fly for rest and change to one of his country-houses. Once at least, when summoned back on public affairs to the Petit-Luxembourg, he writes to Claude Bouthillier: “I am so persecuted by my head ... my pain is excessive.... I am so persecuted by my head, I know not what to say. But even were I worse, I would rather die than not drag these important affairs to a conclusion.”

At this very time, in the spring of 1626, the discontent he had already caused in high quarters began to show its teeth, and the first of many conspiracies was formed against him.

He had very few sincere friends except in his own family, and among the men who worked with him, and whom he entirely trusted. Marie de Médicis, indeed, had not yet actually broken with him; they were apparently on the same terms as before. But in actual fact the distance between them was widening every day. Influenced by Bérulle, the Queen-mother had become more dévote; she disapproved of the long delay in making peace with Rome and Spain, and of the treaty with the Huguenots, helped on by the intervention of heretic England. She was angry with England for other reasons: the presumption of Buckingham, the treatment of the young Queen’s French household. All these things were turning her mind against Richelieu’s policy. And he was not very diplomatic with regard to his patroness. He showed too plainly perhaps that her friendship was no longer of the highest importance to him. He had gained what he wanted; he was the first man in France, indispensable to the King. Ill, impatient, overworked, straining every nerve to keep his hold on affairs and his influence with his royal master, it was hardly strange that he should fail a little in grateful attention to a stupid elderly woman, even though he owed her everything.

But Marie de Médicis was not responsible for this first great “storm,” as the Cardinal calls it in his Memoirs. The clouds rolled up round the King’s young brother, Monsieur, Duc d’Anjou, and were brought to a head by Richelieu’s decision that he should marry Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the only child of the last lord of Champigny and the present possessor of his enormous wealth.

The plan of this match was nothing new. Henry IV. and Marie de Médicis had betrothed the heiress to their son Nicolas, Duc d’Orléans, when both were infants. After the boy’s early death it was proposed that he should be replaced by his younger brother, Gaston, but there was no formal contract. The Queen had never renounced the idea, specially welcome to her because of her friendship with the girl’s mother, the Duchesse de Montpensier, afterwards Duchesse de Guise, and of the warm affection she had always felt for Mademoiselle de Montpensier herself, who was now twenty-one, three years older than Gaston, and of a singularly sweet character.

As to Monsieur, he has been described often enough. Handsome, intelligent, weak, foolish, restless, impressionable, gay and agreeable, false and cowardly, he inherited little of Henry IV. but his vices and frivolities. He had been ill-trained by his governor, Colonel—now Maréchal—d’Ornano, the Corsican officer who had won his post by devotion to Luynes at the time of Concini’s death. Since those days d’Ornano had owed some gratitude to Cardinal de Richelieu, and he was now superintendent of his former pupil’s household. The Cardinal had lately displeased him by refusing to admit him, with Monsieur, to the royal Council; and disappointed personal ambition was the chief cause of his throwing in his lot with those who were bent on making Monsieur the head of an opposing party in the State. On the whole, d’Ornano was probably more foolish than dangerous. Great ladies did what they pleased with him; and he seems to have confided his dreams of power, both for his young master and for himself, to no less a person than Père Joseph, the actual ear of Richelieu.

But the centre of the cyclone was not in Monsieur’s own household: it was in the heart of the young childless Queen. Long afterwards Anne of Austria told Madame de Motteville that she had done all she could to prevent Monsieur’s marriage with Mademoiselle de Montpensier, believing that marriage to be entirely against her own interests. Already she was neglected enough, unhappy enough. Louis XIII., if not the worst of husbands, was sulky, suspicious, resentful. The Queen and her intimate friends lived in an atmosphere of gloom, almost of persecution, under the shadow of the King and his Minister. Louis hated Madame de Chevreuse, and with some reason if it is true that her wild spirits had led Anne into romping games which more than once cost France a Dauphin.

But it seemed to the Queen that Gaston’s proposed marriage made her position hopeless. If he had children, heirs to the crown, his wife would certainly be regarded as the first woman in France, and the prospect filled Anne with jealous misery. Personally, of course, she could do little in opposition, and the extent of her share in the great conspiracy was much exaggerated by scandalous tongues and pens. But Madame de Chevreuse threw herself into her mistress’s cause with all the more energy because she hated both Richelieu and the King. The Maréchal d’Ornano’s discontent found a hearty ally in her, loveliest and most daring of intrigantes, and also in the Princesse de Condé, who had her own reasons for disliking the Montpensier marriage. That younger branch of the Bourbons would thus be exalted above the branch of Bourbon-Condé, now next in succession to the crown. If Monsieur must marry—a troublesome necessity—the Condés wished for a match between him and their daughter Anne-Geneviève, now seven years old. The delay would please the Queen; in the meantime the Prince de Condé was ready to back Maréchal d’Ornano in demanding honours and appanages for Monsieur and even a share in the government. The alternative to the Condé marriage was one with a foreign princess; in either case the young prince would be independent of his brother, his mother and Cardinal de Richelieu. He was as popular, lively and good-natured as the King was unsociable and forbidding; and under the circumstances such a “cabale,” as Richelieu calls it, was likely to spread far.

The Cardinal saw his danger. The greater among the conspirators were rather scornful of caution and secrecy. If Richelieu’s knowledge of their objects was at first vague, hardly a rebel name escaped him. From the Prince de Condé, still holding aloof from the Court, and the young Comte de Soissons, who intended himself to marry Mademoiselle de Montpensier, to César, Duc de Vendôme, governor of Brittany, who was prepared to make his province the head-quarters of an insurrection, and his brother Alexandre, the Grand Prior, with many others of less high descent but yet among les grands—Richelieu knew them all. Behind them loomed shadows of foreign Powers: the Dutch, indignant at the coldness of their ally and at her treaty with Spain; the English, “from faithlessness alone”; the Spaniards, from natural enmity and interested ambition; the Duke of Savoy, to avenge his wounded pride; and then, of course, the Huguenot party in France—past experience teaching them, Richelieu says bitterly, that they always profited by the troubles of the State.

The ends of the conspiracy revealed themselves with a certain slowness, reaching the Cardinal through one spy and another. All through the spring of 1626 the air was full of dark and threatening rumours. Opposition to the Montpensier marriage was a mere starting-point. Monsieur was little but the figure-head of a faction opposed to the whole of Richelieu’s policy and bent on forcing his fall. The refusal of Monsieur’s demands was to be the signal for open revolt, in which the Huguenots would make common cause with the princes and half the great nobles of the kingdom. The boldest conspirators talked of killing the Cardinal, “the dragon who watched unceasingly over his master’s safety”; of throwing the King into prison, and in case of his death of marrying Monsieur to the Queen. It seems certain that Anne herself was unjustly accused of being even aware of such desperate schemes as these; but she was never quite cleared from the injurious suspicion.

Early in May, when the Court was at Fontainebleau, Richelieu decided to strike; he had evidence enough to convince the King that his brother’s attitude was dangerous. M. d’Ornano came to wait on His Majesty. Louis received him graciously. The same night he was arrested, and the next night found him a prisoner at the castle of Vincennes. His brothers and intimate friends were thrown into the Bastille. “My husband is dead,” said Madame d’Ornano when she heard of his capture; and the words were spoken but a few months too soon.

Monsieur was furiously angry. He remonstrated loudly with the King, who merely answered that he had acted on the advice of his Council. The Prince then attacked M. d’Aligre, the Chancellor, a timid personage, who humbly excused himself, declaring that he had given no advice of the kind. Gaston went blustering to Richelieu, from whom he met with a different reception and a different reply. The Cardinal not only acknowledged that the King had asked his advice; he added that he had given it strongly in favour of the arrest of M. d’Ornano, which he considered absolutely necessary for the good of the State and of Monsieur himself. Gaston replied with insulting language and flung away.

“The Cardinal hated Monsieur,” says a writer of the time, and we can well believe it—with the scornful hatred of a proud and brilliant man bearing the whole burden of the State on his shoulders, and finding himself constantly thwarted and threatened by an insolent, privileged boy. He hated him more because of the reconciliations he had to arrange, the flatteries he had to use, the fatherly yet respectful manner in which the King’s brother must be treated by the King’s First Minister—conscious, for the next dozen years, that his sickly master might die childless and be succeeded by this young fellow whose will and power for mischief were only balanced by his weakness of character. Until the birth of a Dauphin, in 1638, destroyed Gaston’s political importance, he was to be the chief obstacle in Richelieu’s career, the chief thorn in his side.

The arrest of the Maréchal d’Ornano had all the effect that Richelieu intended; but if it warned and terrified the more prudent conspirators, it infuriated the bolder, younger spirits of Monsieur’s faction. Madame de Chevreuse and a few young men, led by the Grand Prieur de Vendôme and Henry de Talleyrand-Périgord, Comte de Chalais, decided that Richelieu must die. They planned that Monsieur should invite himself and a party of his friends to dine with the Cardinal at Fleury, his country-house near Fontainebleau. This gracious act might be supposed to mean that the Prince forgave his friend’s arrest. But the real intention was that the Cardinal’s guests should murder him. In the confusion that would follow, Monsieur’s party meant to do as they pleased with the King and the government.

Richelieu was saved by the weakness of one of the chief conspirators. The Comte de Chalais, Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe, a young man of twenty-eight, was at this time the favoured lover of Madame de Chevreuse. He would have killed a dozen cardinals to please her, and he was ready to stab her enemy with his own hand. For all that, he ruined the enterprise. On the eve of the great day he confided the plan to Commander de Valençay, a loyal courtier, though a friend of his own.

M. de Bassompierre may tell the story, for he was at Fontainebleau at the time.

“The said Commander reproached him for his treachery, that being the King’s servant he should dare to undertake this against his First Minister; saying that he must give him warning, and that in case he refused to do this he would do it himself: to which Chalais, being intimidated, consented; and they both went in that same hour to Fleury, in order to warn M. le Cardinal, who thanked them, and begged them to go and inform the King of the same: which they did; and the King, at eleven o’clock in the evening, sent to order thirty of his gendarmes and thirty light horse to go immediately to Fleury. The Queen-mother also dispatched thither the nobles of her household. It happened as Chalais had said: towards three o’clock in the morning Monsieur’s officers arrived at Fleury, sent to prepare his dinner. M. le Cardinal left them in the house, came to Fontainebleau, and went straight to the bed-chamber of Monsieur, who was getting up, and was sufficiently amazed to see him. He reproached Monsieur for not having honoured him with his commands to provide dinner, which he would have done as best he could, and said that he had left the house in possession of his people. After this, having handed Monsieur his shirt, he went away to the King, and afterwards to the Queen-mother” ... leaving Gaston effectually frightened by his terrible coolness.

So ended the Fleury plot. The friends of M. de Chalais were completely puzzled as to how the information could have reached Richelieu, until, the Court having returned to Paris, he made his confession to Madame de Chevreuse, promising more faithfulness in future.

For a moment a kind of paralysis seems to have seized both parties in the game. Ill in body and troubled in mind, realising that his public life must be one long struggle against deadly foes at home and abroad, Richelieu actually offered his resignation to the King. It was plain, he said, that he alone was the cause of divisions in the State. His enemies were so many that he lived at Court in continual peril of assassination. If it were the King’s will that in spite of danger he should continue to serve him, he was ready to do so, but he knew that his departure would be for the peace of the realm. Writing also to the Queen-mother, he begged her to take his part with the King, adding that unless he could be more careful of his health in future his career as a statesman would of necessity be short.

Such fits of depression were nothing new. It is likely enough that Richelieu was in earnest, for the moment at least. But if his object was to measure the confidence and loyalty he might expect from his master through the difficult times he foresaw, the experiment succeeded. In a long and kind letter, Louis refused to let his Minister go.

“Mon Cousin,” he wrote, “... I have every confidence in you, and never has any one served me as well as you.... I desire and beg you not to retire, for my affairs would go ill.... I pray you to have no fear of the calumnies which in my Court no one can escape.... Be assured that I will protect you against every one, and that I will never abandon you. The Queen, my mother, promises you as much.... Be assured that I shall never change, and that, by whomsoever you may be attacked, you will have me for your second.”

As to the Cardinal’s health, the King promised to spare him as much as possible, to dispense him from all visits, and to give him frequent rest and relaxation. Following on these favours, he ordered him for his greater security a guard of a hundred men.

After the Fleury affair, Richelieu retired for some days to his house at Limours. Here, at the end of May, he received two important visits. One was from the Prince de Condé, tired of his isolation, alarmed by the fate of d’Ornano, and convinced at length that the man at the head of affairs would be safer as a friend than as an enemy. He was well received, for Richelieu had already given Louis XIII. the counsel which he now acted upon—the wise counsel given long ago by the Duke of Milan to Louis XI.—that the princes leagued against the King should be divided amongst themselves.

Monsieur le Prince slept at Limours, and remained the next day to dinner. He talked—Condé always talked much and plausibly—and the Cardinal, by his own account, listened respectfully and answered frankly. They discussed the affairs of Monsieur. It was Condé’s opinion that he should be kindly treated, but kept in his place: as to the Maréchal d’Ornano, his arrest had been “a master-stroke” and should be followed up by his trial. He recommended to the Cardinal more caution in dealing with powerful men, but would not hear of his retirement from the head of affairs. It would be the ruin of the State, he said. He told him that he had long desired his friendship; that France had never before seen so great or so disinterested a Minister, whose glorious deeds could not be denied, even by his enemies. All this and much more flattery ended in an alliance between the Prince and the Cardinal, which actually lasted their lives. Condé became a loyal subject of the King and a devoted adherent and admirer of Richelieu.

The other visit was from Monsieur himself. The consequences of this interview were not so lasting, though for the moment satisfactory. The royal boy was in a chastened frame of mind. He was ready to make his formal submission to the King, without any condition, even as to the safety of M. d’Ornano, who had thus a foretaste of the destiny of all Monsieur’s friends. Richelieu’s fatherly admonitions had their full effect. The next day, in Paris—Pentecost, May 31—the Prince vowed on the Gospels eternal love and loyalty to the King and to the Queen his mother. A solemn family compact was drawn up and signed: Louis, Marie, Gaston.

The Cardinal’s next step was the disgrace of M. d’Aligre, the Chancellor, who had failed to face Monsieur in the matter of d’Ornano’s arrest. The seals were transferred to Michel de Marillac. Then the Vendôme princes had their turn.

If the Duc de Vendôme—the “César-Monsieur” flattered and feared by Henry IV.’s Court—had been a man of character to match his position, no one of the great nobles could have equalled him in power and popularity. Even as a vain and vicious coward, few men in the kingdom were more dangerous to Richelieu’s plans and Louis XIII.’s government. From his province of Brittany, the Duke had watched the failure of the great conspiracy in which he and his brother were deeply engaged. They feared, and with reason, that their own ruin would follow that of the Maréchal d’Ornano. As the month of May passed, and nothing was done, César proceeded to fortify himself at Nantes, while Alexandre, a bolder man, watched events in Paris and sought, not without success, to discover the real mind of his half-brother the King.

Early in June came the startling news that Louis and the Court were setting out for Brittany. They were already on the road, and the Cardinal, lingering a few days at Limours for his health’s sake, was about to follow, when he was unexpectedly visited by Alexandre de Vendôme, hurrying post-haste to fetch his brother from Nantes to meet the displeased King.

From Richelieu’s own account, it was a characteristic interview. He had long distrusted these two young men, whom Henry IV. had indulged and exalted with the short-sighted idea that they would be Louis XIII.’s most loyal subjects. On the contrary, says Richelieu, both contributed to every effort that was made to shake the royal authority, and both—had they been able—would have done the kingdom irreparable harm. With grim satisfaction the Cardinal saw these royal birds now struggling in the net he had spread for them. It was not necessary to spare them as Gaston, legitimate prince and heir-presumptive, had been spared.

Richelieu has been accused of deceiving the Grand Prior with false hopes of favour and clemency, thus encouraging him to place his brother and himself in the King’s hands. He might have thought himself justified in doing so, if necessary. On the contrary, if he is to be believed, he tried to guard against any accusation of the kind. He pretended to be aware neither of the anxious terror that had brought the young man to Limours, nor of the “fausse hardiesse” which led him to play this game of bluff for himself and for his brother, acting innocence and a frank readiness to face the King.

“When the Grand Prior told the Cardinal that he was going to fetch his brother, he did not answer him that he was doing either well or ill, because he saw that they could not save themselves, or resist the King’s power, if they remained in Brittany, and he thought it better that His Majesty should take the trouble to fetch them thence, or even take them on their road, than give them a pretext to say” (what they did say) “that they had been attracted by fine words, deceived and caught by false hopes.”

Finding that the Cardinal would give him no clear lead, Alexandre de Vendôme hastened on his way. A few days later, he and his brother, “making a virtue of necessity,” met the King at Blois. The next day, both were arrested and conveyed to the castle of Amboise, from which they were transferred to Vincennes. The Duc de Vendôme’s question—“What about Monsieur? Has he been arrested or no?”—was hardly needed to warn Richelieu, who arrived at Blois that same evening, that the conspiracy was still alive and dangerous.

The Comte de Chalais, unimaginably rash and foolish, was playing a game he could only lose. His escape after the Fleury affair had been narrow enough, and he had then solemnly promised loyalty to the Cardinal, even undertaking to act as his spy, informing him of any evil counsels that might reach Monsieur. But Chalais was not his own master. Madame de Chevreuse drove him into a path where there was no more turning back, and after the arrest of the Vendôme princes he became the active agent and cat’s-paw of a new combination of old rebel forces which swiftly dragged Monsieur into its centre, his vows of loyalty hardly spoken and the ink of his signature not yet dry.

While the King continued his slow progress into Brittany to assure himself of the loyalty of the province, he was actually enveloped in a cloud of conspiracy. Every night, according to Bassompierre, the Comte de Chalais visited Monsieur in his room, and for two or three hours talked and plotted treason: an easy adventure for the Master of the King’s Wardrobe, who had his lodging close to royalty. The plan was that Monsieur should leave the Court and fly either south-west or north-east; either to the Huguenots at La Rochelle, prepared to receive him by the influence of Madame de Chevreuse and Madame de Rohan, or to the Duc d’Épernon and his son at Metz. The Comte de Soissons, whom the King had left behind as governor of Paris, furious at the arrest of his friends the Vendôme princes, was eager not only to help with arms and men towards a civil war, but to seize his own advantage by carrying off Mademoiselle de Montpensier.

This last detail of the plot, it seems, was the first to reach the King’s ears, and he defeated it by sending for the heiress and her mother, the Duchesse de Guise, who immediately followed the Court on its westward journey.

This piece of ill-luck was swiftly followed by others. Monsieur himself was undecided, timid, difficult to move to instant action. Disliking the Huguenot leaders, he was unwilling to place himself in their hands. Metz was his favourite idea; but the Marquis de la Valette would not act independently of his father, and the old Duc d’Épernon, it seems, had had enough of quarrels with the King, for he went so far as to send him the letter that Monsieur had written.

Richelieu seems to have felt a certain scornful pity for the unfortunate Chalais, whose evil report was brought to him by other spies. More than once he had him warned that he was on the road to ruin; yet “the poor gentleman” went on with his desperate schemes. And even the spies had not discovered the extent of these. Chalais was betrayed to his destruction by a friend, the Comte de Louvigny, who quarrelled with him because he would not take his side in some trivial dispute with the Comte de Candale, another son of the Duc d’Épernon. Chalais made it clear that neither he nor his friends could afford to be on ill terms with that family.

This quarrel took place between Saumur and Nantes, as the Court travelled down the Loire in all the fresh beauty of early summer. M. de Bassompierre, who was present, a courtier of long experience, thought nothing of it—a mere matter of an amourette—and it is pretty certain that public opinion was with him in denouncing Louvigny as “ce méchant garçon” for the revenge he took. Having been known as “parfait ami de Chalais,” the confidant of his secrets, he straightway poured them all into the ears of the Cardinal and the King. Bassompierre hints that in his rage and spite he told even more than the truth; but that alone was enough to condemn Chalais.

He was arrested at Nantes on July 8. On the 11th, the Estates of Brittany were opened by the King amid loyal rejoicings, a new governor, the Maréchal de Thémines, taking the place of the Duc de Vendôme. By this appointment Richelieu showed a certain magnanimity; forgetting his own brother’s death at the hands of the Maréchal’s son, he remembered and rewarded the old soldier’s faithfulness in 1616, when by the arrest of Condé he had checked the rebel party and lightened the task of the Richelieu-Barbin ministry.

While Chalais lay in prison through those summer days, his fate, if ever doubtful, was decided by the poltroonery of the prince for whom he had conspired. To assure his own safety and to gain some of his ends, if not all, Monsieur made a full confession to the Cardinal first, then to the King in Council. In his long and confused declarations, preserved in the French Archives, a few points stand out clearly: that he described all his plans against the State, especially against the Cardinal; treason, revolt, murder, and civil war: that he denounced all his friends, not only d’Ornano and Chalais, but his Vendôme half-brothers, the Comte de Soissons and many more. He did not quite spare Madame de Chevreuse or even the Queen. On the other hand, he once again promised obedience to the King and consented to marry Mademoiselle de Montpensier; but the reward he asked for his submission was not, as it might well have been, the pardon of his friends, but the great appanage that he had long demanded. Richelieu found it politic to satisfy him so far, and Gaston became Duke of Orléans and of Chartres and Count of Blois; but his actual income, in the form of pensions, still depended largely on the pleasure of the King.

“After which,” says Richelieu, “the marriage was made without further difficulty on Monsieur’s side. The Cardinal married them on August 5, in the Chapel of the Fathers of the Oratory at Nantes, in whose house the Queen-mother was lodged.”

In the last days, when the formalities of the trial of Chalais were already begun, Monsieur made some weak attempt to save him; but the victim was marked for death. His own prayers, entreaties, and despairing confessions, his mother’s agonised letter to the King, the efforts of some of his friends—more courageous than Madame de Chevreuse, who dared not even answer his last adoring letters—were all of no avail. He was condemned to the frightful death of a traitor.

The King commuted its worst horrors. Chalais was beheaded at Nantes on August 19. At the end he bore his fate like a soldier; and if his agony was unusually long and terrible, the cause lay in the mistaken kindness of his friends, who had managed to kidnap the public executioner. His place was taken by a condemned wretch from the prison who thus earned his own pardon. They say that at the twentieth blow from that unskilful arm young Chalais still groaned—“Jésus Maria!” and a shudder of pity ran through the staring crowd.