Cardinal de Richelieu

Richelieu had triumphed. Monsieur was safely married; for the moment contented and rangé. The restless, foolish, unhappy Chalais was dead; the Maréchal d’Ornano had died in prison, not without a suspicion of poison which seems unjustified; the Vendôme brothers were securely bolted into the damp dungeons of Vincennes; the Comte de Soissons had fled to Savoy; Madame de Chevreuse, banished from the Court, had taken refuge with Duke Charles of Lorraine; Queen Anne was in disgrace. Conspiracy was scotched, if not killed; the storm had blown over, and the highest in France, it seemed, lay at the Cardinal’s mercy.

By two popular edicts he pursued his plan of crushing the nobles and making the King supreme. One destroyed, first in Brittany, then all over France, every feudal stronghold that was not needed for the defence of province or kingdom. Such a measure was something of a revolution, for it struck sharply at the local strength and independent authority of the nobles, great and small. Peasants and townspeople were delighted to help the royal officials in smashing gates and tearing down tall watch-towers and walls six feet thick, which had threatened their liberty for so many centuries. As is usual in revolutions, a good deal of injustice was done; many proprietors suffered for the sins of a few; promised indemnities were not paid. And after all, Richelieu or no Richelieu, civilisation was in fact advancing. Manners were changing. Every year widened the difference between the centuries, left Henry IV. farther behind and brought Louis XIV. nearer. Richelieu, in his dealing with the great men, their fortresses and their governments, only hurried the inevitable march. But he also gained his own immediate ends.

The other famous edict forbade duels. They had long been forbidden, under the severest penalties; but the passions of men and the usages of society had been too strong for the law, which had become almost a dead letter. The nobles of France fought each other “by day and night, by moonlight, by torchlight, in the public streets and squares,” and on the slightest quarrel. The Church protested, the law threatened, without avail. Richelieu once more brought forward the royal authority, forbidding duels on pain of death, with the firm intention of making an example of any man who should dare to disobey.

The occasion was not long in coming. François de Montmorency, Comte de Bouteville, was one of the best-known duellists in France—or in Europe, for that matter. At twenty-seven he had already fought twenty-two duels. Fighting was his passion. “If you want to fight,” said the Président de Chevry to a punctilious gentleman, “go and pull a hair out of Bouteville’s beard; il vous fera passer votre envie.”

In the spring of 1627 Bouteville was in Flanders, having made France too hot to hold him. The Archduchess Isabel, from her Court at Brussels, wrote to ask his pardon of Louis XIII., who refused it, adding, however, that he might return to France safe from justice, on condition that he appeared neither in Paris nor at Court. This answer touched Bouteville’s pride. He had a quarrel with the Baron de Beuvron; he resolved to fight it out in Paris in the teeth of King, Cardinal, and edicts new and old. Each man had two seconds: it was a triple duel with swords, three against three; and it was fought in broad daylight in the Place Royale, the most fashionable square in Paris. The windows of the high red houses were crowded with spectators.

Both principals escaped unhurt; but the Comte des Chapelles, Bouteville’s second, killed his adversary, M. de Bussy d’Amboise, governor of Vitry. Honour being satisfied, the survivors fled for their lives. M. de Beuvron and two other men got away safely to England. M. de Bouteville and M. des Chapelles, on their way to Lorraine, were foolhardy enough to sleep at Vitry, where the fatal news had outrun them, and “the dead man’s mother,” says Bassompierre, “arrested them.”

They were brought back to Paris, imprisoned in the Bastille, and after a short trial sentenced to death. Then the whole opinion of society rose passionately in their favour. Such edicts were useless; human nature could not obey them. Men must quarrel, and there was one honourable, approved way of settling their quarrels: they must fight. If they did not they were scorned as cowards; the King himself sneered at their prudence, their obedience to his own edicts. Thus cried every gentleman in France, and the Cardinal’s heart must have echoed the cry. Though he would not save the victims, saying that it was a question which throat should be cut—that of the duel or that of the law; though he listened unmoved to the prayers of their friends and relations—the Princesse de Condé and the Duc de Montmorency were Bouteville’s cousins, for the best blood of France ran in his veins—yet the words with which, in his Memoirs, he mourns the two young men, have a ring of sincerity. Famous for courage in their lives, it did not fail them, he says, at the approach of a disgraceful death.

“There was nothing feeble in their speech, nothing low in their actions. They received the news of death as if it had been that of pardon.... They were well prepared to die.... There was one difference between them: Bouteville appeared sad in those last hours, and the Comte des Chapelles joyful; Bouteville sad for the faults he had committed, and the other joyful for the hope he had of Paradise.”

The two were beheaded in the Place de Grève on June 21, 1627. Their deaths, following on his signal triumphs of the preceding year, made the name of Richelieu hateful and terrible to the nobles of France. They began to feel that he might be as almighty in power as he was relentless in action. But they did not cease to fight duels.

Another tragic event in the early summer of that year was the death of Monsieur’s young wife, a few days after the birth of her child—not the prince whose arrival had been anxiously expected all the winter, the suspense adding pride and importance to Monsieur and Madame, gloom and jealousy to the King and Queen—but a princess, afterwards known as the Grande Mademoiselle, the greatest heiress in Europe, whose distinguished, eccentric presence was to be familiar to the French Court for more than sixty years.

“That death,” says Bassompierre, “changed the face of the Court, gave rise to new designs, and in short was the cause of many evils which have since come to pass.”

The Duchess had no more sincere mourner than Cardinal de Richelieu. “Deplorable ... prejudicial to the welfare of the State,” he writes of the death of Madame, “... who in ten months was wife of a great prince, sister-in-law of the three first and greatest kings of Christendom, a mother, and a corpse.”

The Cardinal had good reasons for his regret. Monsieur, who since his marriage had lived peaceably, content with his own trifling amusements, influenced by his wife’s gentle attraction rather than by a set of ambitious favourites, now became once more a centre of varied intrigue. And it was not only his ready disloyalty, but the constant scandal of his private life, which induced Louis XIII. and Richelieu to do their best to satisfy his restless spirit. The foolish and vicious boy, a widower at nineteen, was after all the only hope of the direct royal line.

By way of consoling the Prince and occupying his mind, “the King,” says a memoir-writer of that century, “proposed to him all kinds of honest exercise, principally that of the chase: there being hardly a day on which His Majesty did not so divert himself, he imagined that Monsieur would take the same pleasure in it”—which he did not, being a Parisian and a gambler. “And since Monsieur possessed no house near Paris where he could sometimes take the air, His Majesty thought well to give him that of Limours, belonging to the Cardinal de Richelieu; thus gratifying His Highness in the belief that he would take pleasure in beautifying it. It was purchased at the same price for which it had been acquired, which amounted to 400,000 livres, including the domain of Montlhéry; and with a further payment of 300,000 livres to the Cardinal de Richelieu, as well for the furniture as for his expenditure and the improvements he had made.”

The writer goes on to explain that the Cardinal gladly seized this opportunity of getting rid of Limours.

“The Cardinal was disgusted with that house, finding it unpleasant and unhealthy; both because of its low situation, yet without fountains or other waters, and because of many other things that were lacking; and he was happy to seize a good chance of getting rid of it, and greatly to his advantage; which he could not have expected in any other quarter. For the Queen-mother’s persuasion decided the King to gratify the Cardinal her creature, in whom she had then every confidence.”

The last sentence hardly bears the stamp of truth. In the year 1627 and later, Richelieu could not be described as the creature of Marie de Médicis, and her confidence in him had almost ceased to exist.

In the spring of that year the discontent between France and England flashed out into war. This had been imminent since the early autumn of 1626, when Charles I. roughly drove out his wife’s French household; and Bassompierre’s embassy of remonstrance had only smoothed matters over for the time. Richelieu did not desire war with England; it meant a new struggle with the Huguenots. He intended to fix his own date for that, and to make it final. He was not yet ready. But this time Buckingham’s jealous anger and restless ambition were strong enough to force his hand. Louis XIII. had refused to receive the Duke again at the French Court. This, according to contemporaries, be they right or wrong, was the chief and secret cause of the war. Outwardly, it was brought about by quarrels and piracies on both sides at sea, as well as by Charles I.’s sympathy with the oppressed Huguenots; but every enemy of Richelieu’s government, Protestant or Catholic, was more or less drawn into a coalition against him. Not only the Duc de Soubise and his friends in England, and the Duc de Rohan in Languedoc, but Duke Charles of Lorraine, influenced by Madame de Chevreuse, the Duke of Savoy and his guest the Comte de Soissons, and the Archduchess Isabel, ruler of the Low Countries, who did her best to draw Spain to England’s side, were concerned in this great enterprise of crushing Cardinal de Richelieu. As a fact, at this very time, Spain and France were allied by treaty against England; but Richelieu differed from the Queen-mother and the rest of the Catholic party in profoundly distrusting Olivarez; and he knew, quite as well as his many enemies did, that an English victory would leave France, divided in herself, standing alone against Europe.

From mid-winter onward, the English fleet was preparing; through what enormous difficulties, readers of English history know. From week to week, all through the spring, more and more alarming reports crossed the Channel: the English were coming; any day might see their sails in the north-west, bearing down on the coast of France. La Rochelle was their destination; but they could not reach the Huguenot city without first seizing one or both of the islands, Ré and Oléron, which guard it from the sea. Of these, Ré was now the strongest, new royal forts having been built there since the last Huguenot revolt, to overawe the town. Convinced that the English “could do nothing there,” Richelieu threw himself with fiery energy into the task of strengthening Oléron and the forts on the mainland. His letters, written during those months to the governors of towns and castles on the coast, especially to M. de Guron, governor of Marans, M. de Launay-Razilly, commanding in Oléron, M. de Toiras and others, including his brother-in-law the Marquis de Brézé, and his friend and lieutenant M. de Sourdis, Bishop of Maillezais, afterwards Archbishop of Bordeaux—kinsman and successor of his enemy Cardinal Sordido—are a really wonderful study. Few great statesmen have shown such a genius for detail. As the danger approached his letters flew to all parts of the coast, and in reading them one may almost hear the heavy strokes of the axe in Breton forests, the hammering of ship-builders, the creaking of cordage, the clank of arms and the rolling of cannon-balls, the rumbling of waggons laden with tools, powder, provisions for the islands. M. de Guron, through those months of March, April and May, can have slept but little. He had to understand “at half a word.” He had to cope with the angry tempers of the men who worked under him; he had to consider the poor people of the islands and to take care that the soldiers did not oppress them. Over and over again Richelieu writes in the interest of the peasants; they must not be taxed or tormented. In fact, they were neighbours of his old Luçon days; a very few miles to the north, the spire of his cathedral rose over the marshes; almost every letter shows his familiarity with every inch of that coast.

Another characteristic point is the gentle tone in which Richelieu writes of the Huguenots, grimly watching from the walls of La Rochelle the strengthening of the islands, the gathering of armies, the hurrying to their coast of a crowd of young Catholic nobles, the desperate energy of equipment with which ships and boats were being collected from north and south to meet the coming storm. The people of La Rochelle were anxious, and with reason. Their minds were divided, not altogether rejoicing in the English descent, as they proved a little later—for when the Duc de Soubise, coming from England, presented himself at the gates, they were shut against him until his mother, old Madame de Rohan of the dreams and visions, went down herself to the harbour, commanded that the gates should be opened, took his hand and led him in. The citizens of La Rochelle might resist the rulers of their own country, but they were not unanimously ready to welcome a foreign invader, and it was Richelieu’s policy to encourage this doubtfulness. Writing to M. de Navailles, commander of the cavalry in the island of Ré, he more than once enjoins him to assure Messieurs de la Rochelle, who might be disquieted by the warlike preparations going on at their very gates, of the excellent intentions of His Majesty. They need fear nothing, as long as they paid him the respect and obedience they owed. These military works were not for their harm, but for his own security. Again, writing to his uncle the Commander de la Porte, governor of Angers, Richelieu says: “Let the Huguenots spread what reports they will: provided they continue in obedience, they will always be well treated. We intend no harm to them, but only to prevent their doing any.”

The alarms and the frenzied preparations went on through the spring and far into the summer, and were at their height while the Bouteville affair and the death of Madame occupied the mind of Paris. On the day of the royal obsequies at Saint-Denis, the English fleet had already sailed from “Porsemus,” as Richelieu spells it, and ten or twelve days later it appeared off La Rochelle. Louis XIII. had already left Paris for the west coast. Monsieur was appointed lieutenant-general of the royal armies in Poitou, which were actually commanded by the King’s old cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, with Louis de Marillac, brother of the Chancellor, as second in command, and by the Marshals de Schomberg and de Bassompierre. Later in the year, the Prince de Condé and the Duc de Montmorency were charged with checking the Duc de Rohan in Languedoc. By that time, Toiras being blockaded by the English in the Isle of Ré, and the attitude of La Rochelle being no longer doubtful, Richelieu had ceased to show patience and toleration of the King’s rebels. The day he had long foreseen had at last arrived. “Faut ruiner les Huguenots. Si Ré se sauve, facile. S’il se perd, plus difficile, mais faisable et nécessaire comme l’unique remède de la perte de Ré. Autrement les Anglois et Rochelois seroyent unis et puissans.”

These notes form part of a report drawn up by the Cardinal’s secretaries of an interview between himself and Condé, which took place at Richelieu in the early autumn. The words may probably have been Condé’s: that foolish firebrand was in favour of setting the whole kingdom in a blaze of religious war, of persecuting the Protestants and pulling down their houses, in hopes that they might make such reprisals as would infuriate the country against them and lead to something like their extermination. These mad ideas were far enough from Richelieu; but he, equally with Condé, was now resolved to crush the rebel power, and to bring all Frenchmen under the King’s authority.

But a long and difficult struggle lay before him.

The King was ill when he left Paris, and after one day’s journey fever seized him so violently that he could go no farther. For weeks he lay between life and death at Villeroy, on the road to Orléans. He was there in the middle of July, when a courier arrived from the Marquis de Brézé, bringing news that the English had landed in Ré, and after sharp fighting, many precious lives being lost on both sides, had forced M. de Toiras to retire into the fort of Saint-Martin, where he was closely besieged. No one disputed the desperate courage of Toiras; but he earned great blame from the Cardinal for his rashness and want of foresight; the citadel being hardly in a state of defence, and provisioned for seven or eight weeks only. Boasting that he could drive off the English with one arm, he had indeed never faced the possibility of being shut up in Saint-Martin. The despised enemy was to teach him a sharp lesson.

The situation was serious to the last degree, and Richelieu had to meet it alone. The King was far too ill to hear such news, and his life was more valuable to France than any forts and islands: the Cardinal had to accept a responsibility never yet openly his. Walking gingerly in a crowd of enemies, he had till now sheltered himself under the authority of the King. Now he rose supreme, to give those “prompt and powerful orders” which, as he says, were the only way to face the storm. “A thousand cares tormented and agitated his mind; but the greatest of all, which troubled him most, was to show no anxiety before the King.... All the day he was with him; at night he seldom left him; and yet his mind was always busy with the orders which secretly, from hour to hour, he had to send out for the succour of the island and the hindering of the English.... For he heard that there was scarcity in the forts of Ré, and that, if not promptly relieved, they were lost.”

From the gates of Villeroy rode couriers, agents, envoys, carrying orders and money to all parts. The State funds were so low that Richelieu was compelled to use his own money and credit: he ventured all without hesitation. He sent a large sum to Le Havre, for the equipment of five ships; to Saint-Malo, for eight ships and eleven great guns; to Brouage and Les Sables d’Olonne, that any quantity of provisions of all kinds, wine, meat, flour, biscuit, might be ready to be thrown into the besieged citadel. For that purpose he ordered a number of pinnaces from Bayonne and the river-mouths on the Bay of Biscay, which could approach the islands, sailing or rowing, when the weather made large ships useless. Three bold sea-captains, Beaulieu, Courcelles, and Canteleu, promised to carry victuals into Ré or to die in the attempt. Richelieu invited help from Spain, in accordance with treaties; but that cautious government waited to send ships till Buckingham had sailed away for England and something like a French navy, created by Richelieu’s marvellous practical energy and commanded by the Duc de Guise, was cruising in the waters of La Rochelle.

This did not happen till December. No relief of Saint-Martin became possible till the first days of October, when on a stormy night a number of small boats slipped through the English fleet and brought in a supply of provisions and a reinforcement of four hundred men to M. de Toiras and his starving, exhausted garrison. By this time the King had recovered, and he and the Cardinal had joined the army before La Rochelle.

With their arrival the luck turned, and the English attack began to fail, though the people of La Rochelle were now ready to give Buckingham everything he wanted, except—for after all, they were French—a permanent foothold in their islands. The commanders on the coast, under Richelieu’s immediate orders, worked with double activity. Schomberg landed in Ré, Saint-Martin was relieved, and after some hard fighting the English were driven back with serious loss to their ships. A few days later Buckingham sailed away to England, leaving behind him the best part of his army, colours, horses, guns, and baggage. He never saw France again. The English flags taken in Ré were carried in triumph through Paris and hung up in Notre Dame.

And now the fight, one of the sternest in history, the details of which would fill a volume, was between Cardinal de Richelieu and the proud old city of La Rochelle, the stronghold which for two hundred years, either in politics or religion, had repeatedly and successfully braved the kings of France. “The Cardinal had to expect,” says M. Martin, “a terrible resistance. The population of La Rochelle, swelled by the zealous Huguenots of the surrounding country, numbered at least thirty thousand souls—a race of fierce and intrepid corsairs, hardened to fatigue and danger, accustomed, for sixty years past, to live with restless vigilance in the perpetual state of siege which they had imposed on themselves in order to preserve their stormy liberties.”

These liberties Richelieu was resolved that they should no longer enjoy. And except for the support of the King and of his few trusted lieutenants, he was almost alone in that resolution. The nobles of France, even the commanders of the army, saw very well that the entire conquest of the Huguenots was a long step towards their own impotence under an absolute King and a strong Minister. Even the gay soldier Bassompierre said half seriously, “We shall be fools enough to take La Rochelle!” Such opinions, of which he was well aware, did not give the Cardinal a moment’s pause. He made some attempt to disarm his enemies by civilities to the Queen-mother, by obtaining a Cardinal’s Hat for her saintly and distinguished friend Père de Bérulle—his own friend in his Luçon days; but he was too clever to expect much result, and he probably cared little at this moment, when all his instincts of a soldier, a born general, were flaming up within him at the sight of camps to be ruled, armies to be moved, great towering walls to be laid low. Ruin might follow, if it must: the Huguenots should have their lesson.

He had summoned Père Joseph, his chief counsellor, to join him before La Rochelle. The Capuchin walked from Paris in leisurely fashion, visiting convents in Poitou and preaching by the way. He reached the camp on one of those days in October when the Cardinal, lately arrived, was absent on the coast directing the despatch of fresh troops and stores to the islands. He was lodged in the Cardinal’s quarters, a small moated house called Pont-la-Pierre, on the sand-hills, only a hundred paces from the flat sea-shore at Angoulins, just south of La Rochelle. That very night there was an alarm that five hundred men were coming in boats from the town, to blow up the house and kill or capture the Cardinal. Though two regiments, according to Bassompierre, were quartered at Angoulins, the house was outside immediate help, and on a dark and windy night might well be surprised. Père Joseph had scarcely arrived when he was invaded by M. de Marillac and two hundred musketeers. A whole army indeed was on foot to receive the adventurers. Regiments were lying flat among the dunes; the King himself was on horseback all night in heavy rain, watching behind Pont-la-Pierre with a troop of cavalry. All these precautions seemed absurd to Bassompierre and his brother officers, who did not love the Cardinal or appreciate the King’s anxious care for his safety. After all, the expected attack did not come off. Either the men of La Rochelle were warned, or, as Père Joseph thought, the weather was too much for them. He himself was praised by the King for his intrepidity; for when he might have retired to the royal quarters he preferred to remain at Pont-la-Pierre in charge of the Cardinal’s papers.

The character of Louis XIII. never shows so well as in time of war. The gloomy, nervous, irresolute young man was a daring soldier. In spite of his weak health he shunned no hardship; the outdoor endurance learnt in the hunting-field proved itself of real value in battle and siege. Early in December of that year, when the regular blockade of La Rochelle had begun, Cardinal de Richelieu wrote to the Queen-mother with a report of the King’s health:

“... Although the country is most evil, tempest, wind and rain being the usual course, and the soil constantly a quagmire, His Majesty does not cease to dwell here with as much gaiety as if he were in the most beautiful place in the world.... He is constantly at work ... he has regulated his army, reformed his regiments ... he reviews his army, visits his works.... The day before yesterday he spent three hours on the dyke that he is making, to bar the harbour. Not only did he overlook the work, but set an example by working with his own hands. His Majesty alone does much more to advance his affairs than all those who have the honour to be employed under his command. The men of La Rochelle make little sorties, but are always beaten back.”

The Cardinal was wise enough to give the King the credit of all his own marvellous doings at this time. It was practicable to blockade La Rochelle by land; but as long as the harbour and channel were open, it was impossible to hinder the city from receiving supplies by sea. At the same time, the difficulties connected with the land siege were considerable enough; and the army regulations carried out by Richelieu, mentioned in his letter to Marie de Médicis, were as stern as they were necessary. Three leagues of circumvallation, strengthened by forts and redoubts, had to be held by a host of more or less undisciplined men, whose careless commanders thought more of their own interests and their own quarrels than of the service of the King. Before Louis and the Cardinal arrived on the scene, the Duc d’Angoulême had been negligent or humane enough to allow the Rochellois to come out into their fields and gather in their harvest; and after the siege had really begun, he allowed a hundred and twenty oxen to be smuggled one night into the city. It might have cost a lesser man his head.

Richelieu once in full authority, no more such weakness was shown; but if implacably stern towards the besieged, he showed himself just and benevolent towards both the King’s soldiers and the poor peasants of that unhappy land, who had dragged on miserable lives through generations of religious wars. The soldiers were forbidden to rob the peasants, or to interfere with their field work. The army was regularly paid and provided with food and clothing, while the officers found themselves reinforced and overshadowed by a crowd of warlike ecclesiastics, the Bishops of Maillezais, of Mende, of Nîmes, and others, not to mention Père Joseph and his train of friars, who fought and fortified, preached and prayed, besieging the heretics in the spirit of crusaders and waging a holy war for Richelieu’s political ends.

The Duc d’Angoulême, with his fellow generals Schomberg and Bassompierre—Monsieur having quickly withdrawn from the uncomfortable siege to find amusement and mischief in Paris—commanding an army from which blasphemy and crime were banished, were charged with the land blockade and with such outside work as pulling down the castles of rebel Huguenot nobles in the neighbouring country—among them that of the Duc de Soubise. Warned by such severities, and impressed by the failure of the English to succour La Rochelle, several of the Huguenot gentlemen of Poitou came into the camp to assure the King of their loyalty. The most distinguished among them, the Duc de la Trémoïlle, listened to the persuasive voice of Père Joseph and became a Catholic, and certain of his friends followed his example—a signal triumph for Richelieu which was not encouraging to the starving heroes of La Rochelle. Towards the same time the young Comte de Soissons returned from Savoy, and instead of supporting the Duc de Rohan, as he had threatened, in Languedoc, asked the King’s pardon and joined the royal army.

In February 1628 the King’s cheerful interest in the siege suddenly failed. The monotony of camp life, the slow advance of the necessary works, and the horrible weather, bored him unbearably: “son ennui vint jusqu’à tel point,” writes Richelieu, “qu’il estimoit sa vie être en péril s’il ne faisoit un tour à Paris.” He may probably have been right, for the damp marshes on which the army lived were hardly healthy for a man subject to low fever; Richelieu himself was prostrated by it several times in that spring. All the same, he was angry and scornful at the King’s desertion. He was also uneasy on his own account, for Paris seethed with the intrigues of his deadly enemies, and political clouds were gathering in the south. For a moment it seemed possible that La Rochelle would escape: the departure of both King and Cardinal would have brought the siege to an end. In remaining alone, Richelieu made a bold venture which was justified. The King returned from Paris in April; in the meanwhile, he made the Cardinal his lieutenant-general, with supreme authority over his forces by land and sea.

Richelieu’s first care was to finish the great dyke or mole by means of which alone the harbour of La Rochelle could be barred against all entrance from the sea. Two famous workmen from Paris, Métezeau and Tiriot, engineer and master-mason, undertook this tremendous piece of work, at which the regiments laboured in turn. Several times, in the early winter, the great beams and blocks of stone were swept away by furious seas, but Richelieu only began again: the two arms of the mole were well advanced in spring, and the Rochellois could watch from their ramparts the growing of those cruel prison walls against which Atlantic waves tumbled in vain. The narrow passage in the centre was blocked by sunken ships laden with stones, and then the doomed city was in the hands of her enemies: they had only to wait for her surrender.

We may see Cardinal de Richelieu as artists have fancied him, standing on the wet rugged stones of the great mole, green water washing and foaming almost round his feet. Immense hulls of English ships loom in the offing, and small boats full of armed men are dancing on the waves. The gigantic beams of the chevaux de frise protecting the mole are splintered by cannon-balls. A fresh breeze is blowing: the Cardinal’s scarlet cloak falls back from his slight steel-clad shoulders; he wears a sword; he is bare-headed, except for a skull-cap. He stands in his high boots, with folded arms, looking out to sea, unmoved, confident in his defences; while a group of soldiers and ecclesiastics, some yards behind him, talk and stare excitedly.

The Cardinal’s mole and his other fortifications were too much for the English fleet when it returned in May: it hardly even attempted an attack, but sailed away in a week, leaving La Rochelle a prey to famine, though not yet to despair.

The story of that terrible summer has often been told: how fresh English promises, with the desperate heroism of Guiton, the famous mayor, encouraged the town to hold out to the last; how the weak died by thousands, and the strong lived on grass, shell-fish, stewed hides and leather and worse food still; how old men, women and children, driven out of the city as useless mouths, were not allowed, even at the request of Madame de Rohan, to pass through the royal lines, but were forced to turn back, so that many, the gates being shut upon them, died miserably between the walls and the camp.

It was the end of September, three weeks after the murder of Buckingham, when an English fleet and army arrived at last, too late: a French fleet awaited them, French batteries were in full force. The harbour was not to be entered, even by means of fire-ships, and after two days’ hard fighting the winds of heaven declared themselves against the luckless city; a gale forced the English to run for shelter, and the prayers of La Rochelle could not induce them to renew the battle. A week later the city surrendered to the King: quite half her population were dead; less than two hundred remained of her heroic fighting men.

On October 30 Cardinal de Richelieu entered the city on horseback. It was a fearful sight. “On trouva la ville pleine de morts, dans les chambres, dans les maisons, et dans les rues et places publiques;” for the wretched survivors had lacked strength to bury their dead. On the morning of All Saints’ Day the victorious commander said mass in the reconsecrated Church of Sainte-Marguerite, assisted by his lieutenant, M. de Sourdis, now Archbishop of Bordeaux. He then carried the keys of the city to meet the King, who made his state entry on the same day, the Cardinal riding alone before His Majesty, preceded by the three commanders of the army. An enormous convoy of provisions was a more welcome sight to the wolfish creatures crowding in their streets full of tragedy and falling on skeleton knees at Louis XIII.’s feet.

The city, once submissive, was treated severely, but not barbarously. Richelieu would crush rebels with his whole strength, but he left men free to practise their own religion, provided it did not interfere with their obedience to the State. In this he was consistent: a wiser man than Louis XIV., he would never have revoked the great Henry’s edict and deprived France of a multitude of her most capable citizens. The walls and towers of La Rochelle were razed to the ground; the city lost her proud self-governing independence, and became subject to the royal authority. But an amnesty was offered to the leading Huguenots, and the Cardinal placed the gallant Guiton, corsair by nature, in command of one of His Majesty’s ships.