Cardinal de Richelieu

A few days after the submission of La Rochelle a great storm destroyed the mole which had been the city’s destruction. Winds and floods devastated the west of France, and the Cardinal and the Chancellor were nearly drowned in crossing the Loire on their journey with the Court back to Paris.

There was no time for delay. France was on the eve of a new war; and, though the Huguenot question was not really settled as long as the Duc de Rohan kept rebellion stirring in Languedoc, Richelieu felt himself safe in laying it aside for the moment. Spain and Savoy had attacked the Duke of Mantua; his fortress of Casale in Montferrat had been blockaded by Spanish troops for some months before the fall of La Rochelle, but had held out gallantly in the hope of relief from France; indeed, a body of French volunteers had already forced their way in, led by the Cardinal’s trusted agent, M. de Guron, whom he had sent from La Rochelle to manage matters with Savoy until the French were free to act openly.

The difficulty now was that French opinion found itself deeply divided on the question of Mantua. The new Duke was Charles de Gonzague, Duc de Nevers, who had succeeded Vincenzo di Gonzaga as a lineal descendant of the old family. His succession to Mantua and Montferrat was disputed in various quarters and for various reasons. The Duke of Savoy claimed Montferrat, the Duke of Guastalla claimed Mantua; Spain would not have a French prince ruling in Italy, and the Emperor Ferdinand II. insisted on his right as suzerain to hold the provinces and to decide the matter.

The Duc de Nevers was one of the greatest nobles in France. And not only that: he was the head of the house of Paleologus, and the natural heir, had it still existed, to the throne of Constantinople. He was a high-minded, magnificent personage, brave, chivalrous, romantic—Père Joseph’s intimate friend and fellow-crusader. Under the regency he had been a disturbing element, and Marie de Médicis hated him for reasons of her own. In those days her rage against him had led her to speak scornfully of his birth and his race.

“Which coming to the Duke’s knowledge,” says M. de Montglat, “he said that he knew well the respect he owed her as the mother of his King; but that, on the other hand, every one was aware that the Gonzagas were princes before the Medici were gentlemen. These words so piqued the Queen that she never forgave him.”

Therefore there was a private motive of revenge behind the strong opposition offered by the Queen-mother and her friends—the Chancellor Marillac, on this occasion, joining his voice once more with those of the Cardinal de Bérulle, the Princesse de Conti and her lover Bassompierre, and all those of the Court who hated and envied Richelieu—to the plan of marching at once, with the victorious army of La Rochelle, to the succour of the Duke of Mantua. They argued that the troops needed rest after their eighteen months of hardship; that the Huguenot party was not yet really crushed and would have time to rise again; that the Duke of Mantua’s difficulties mattered little in comparison with a peaceful settlement at home. To these zealous Catholics it appeared horribly inconsistent that the Pope should send congratulations and command Te Deums, and that a Cardinal’s Hat should be bestowed on Alphonse de Richelieu, now Archbishop of Lyons—a striking departure from the precedent which forbade that honour to two brothers—all this to glorify the conquest of La Rochelle; while the hero of that conquest was ready and eager to plunge into war with the Catholic powers, Austria and Spain.

This was the keenest trial of strength that had yet taken place between the Queen-mother and her former protégé. To all her arguments she added those of family affections and old alliance: the Queen of Spain and the future Duchess of Savoy were the King’s sisters; peace with Spain and the Empire had been the chief object of her own policy as Regent. In reply, Richelieu maintained his views: the honour of France was concerned in the Mantuan affair; the Duke’s legitimate right could not be disputed; and if France were to suffer the pretensions of Spain, Savoy, and the Empire, she would be acting a part both cowardly and foolish. Never would Louis XIII.’s Minister consent thus to degrade his King. The Cardinal went on to make a statement of his policy and his intentions, promising that by the month of May Casale would be relieved and the royal army free to deal with the Huguenots in Languedoc. “So that your Majesty will, I hope, return victorious to Paris in the month of August.” In a more personal strain he reproached the King for want of confidence, and frankly pointed out, in Marie’s presence, the faults of character which made him a difficult master to serve. Then once more he alluded to his own weak health, and offered to lay down the burden of office, too heavy, he said, for him to bear.

Marie de Médicis listened, and perhaps, with her eyes fixed on her gloomy and worried son, hoped for an instant that the Cardinal’s career was ended. Nothing of the kind. “When the King had heard all this with as much patience as the humours of the great generally bestow on the most important affairs, he told the Cardinal that he was resolved to profit by what had been said, but would hear no more of his retirement.”

From this conference, says M. Martin, “Richelieu sortit roi.” Our point of view shows this as a fact; but neither the Cardinal himself nor his enemies saw it at the time. The Queen-mother’s hostility was only now becoming open and active; the “Day of Dupes,” when Richelieu ran his greatest risk and reached his zenith of power, was still almost two years distant.

The King left Paris for the south on January 15, 1629, travelling through eastern France, while the army of La Rochelle, under Marshals Schomberg, Bassompierre, and de Créquy, having “refreshed itself” among the mountains of Auvergne, marched to join His Majesty in Dauphiné. Cardinal de Richelieu travelled with the King from Châlons. On his way from Paris he stopped at Les Caves, near Nogent-sur-Seine, a country house belonging to his old friend Claude Bouthillier, then a Secretary of State, afterwards Surintendant des Finances, the father of young Léon Bouthillier, Comte de Chavigny, who became Richelieu’s right hand and was loved by him as a son. At Les Caves the Cardinal met the Prince de Condé, and conferred with him as to the crushing of the Huguenots in Languedoc. But he had room for other thoughts. A letter to M. Bouthillier, written on leaving Les Caves, is attractive in its detachment from the whirlpool of politics and war.

“I cannot leave your house to pursue my way,” he writes, “without thanking you for the good cheer Madame Bouthillier has bestowed on us; which was such, that if you had yourself been here you could have added nothing to it.... Also I must tell you that whereas you described this house as a farm, it may be called a very fine and pretty house, leaving nothing to be desired but the building of a gallery on the left hand of the entrance, in order to match the right wing....” In a postscript, the Cardinal advises M. Bouthillier as to the purchase of a château at Pont-sur-Yonne, where in later years, rich and beneficent, M. le Surintendant and his wife often entertained royalty.

A month later found Louis XIII. and his army at the foot of the Alps, on the frontiers of France and Piedmont. Some negotiations between Richelieu and the Prince of Piedmont, the King’s brother-in-law, having ended in nothing, the French proceeded to invade Savoyard territory. It was not an easy matter, in the first days of March, over mountain paths buried in snow, to reach and to storm the rocky and barricaded gorge which, beyond Mont Genèvre on the French side, led to the fortified town of Susa, the gateway of Piedmont. The whole gorge was commanded by Spanish and Piedmontese troops, firing down on the invaders; the Duke of Savoy himself was in the field.

In the dark hours of early morning, Louis XIII. led his regiments to the attack. Plunging on foot through the snow, “freely hazarding his person,” says Aubery, “and running the same risk as the least soldier in his army,” the story goes that the victory was largely owing to his own resolute courage. The marshals in command, they say, and even the Cardinal, were inclined to hesitate at an adventure that looked so dangerous. The King climbed the mountain and met a goatherd, who showed him a path by which the barricades and their defenders could be out-flanked. While the main body, under the marshals, rushed furiously on the barricades and cleared the gorge at the point of the sword, the royal musketeers scaled the rocks and drove down the enemy, first to the barricades, then along the road to Susa. In the helpless rout of his troops the Duke of Savoy narrowly escaped being taken prisoner.

A few days were enough to reduce the romantic mountain town of Susa, and the relief of Casale followed at once; for the furious energy of the French, acting as one man under the inspiring force of Richelieu, was too much for Charles Emmanuel of Savoy. He sent his daughter-in-law in great magnificence to visit her royal brother at Susa, and hastily made a treaty with France, of which he was not long in repenting; but the immediate and necessary consequence was the retirement from Montferrat of the Spanish general, Don Gonzalez de Cordova. A half-promise that Philip IV. of Spain would induce the Emperor to grant the new Duke of Mantua his desired investiture was not so easy of fulfilment.

There were diplomatie wheels within wheels. While Richelieu’s negotiations with Savoy and Spain were still in progress, Spain was turning a favourable ear to the Duc de Rohan, who proposed to “keep France in a state of war as long as His Catholic Majesty pleased”; undertaking that his party, if successful in establishing a Protestant republic in the south, should assure liberty of conscience and the free exercise of their religion to Catholics, on the condition of a handsome subsidy and pensions for himself and his brother. This agreement was actually signed at Madrid on May 3, when Richelieu was still at Susa, the King and the larger part of the army having already re-crossed the Alps and marched through Dauphiné to the Rhône. So far the prophecy had been fulfilled: the month of May had found the royal forces free to join Condé, Montmorency and d’Épernon, and thus to deal with the rebels in Languedoc.

They were not capable of much resistance. The brothers Rohan and Soubise, with their friends, had no regular army to oppose the King of France and his fifty thousand men. A recent treaty between France and England had deprived them of Charles I.’s possible help, and Richelieu’s movements were far too quick for Spain. By the middle of May the royal armies had poured like a devastating torrent over Languedoc and part of Guienne, destroying the green crops, the growing corn, all the year’s food of the strong little towns and villages, and driving the scattered people to the mountains. Every detail of the campaign was planned by Richelieu, and it was he who arranged that the King himself should escape the early summer heats by crossing the Cévennes to the Tarn country and carrying out there the general scheme of destruction.

The first step in the campaign was the decisive one, and cost more to both sides than all the rest. Privas on its high ridge, the gallant little stronghold of the Vivarais, seventeen years earlier the seat of a general Protestant Synod, was now called upon literally to give its life for the cause. After a fortnight’s fighting siege, during which many lives were lost, the inhabitants and the garrison insisted that their brave commander, St. André de Montbrun, should make terms with the King. These were refused, and the surrender had to be unconditional. Town and people were treated with terrible severity. Both besiegers and besieged have been blamed for a furious fire which broke out as the royal troops were entering the fortress; in the awful night of confusion and massacre that followed, Privas was sacked and burnt to the ground with every circumstance of savagery.

At such times Louis XIII. was hard and inflexible. He would have hanged St. André, had not the Cardinal intervened to save him. Indeed, on this occasion and others, Richelieu showed a humanity for which most writers have given him little credit. Towards political offenders he was indeed “the Iron Cardinal”—no mercy for those who came in the way of his great designs; but he had pity on the helpless fugitives of Privas.

He was ill in bed on the fatal night of May 29. “But in spite of his illness,” writes Aubery, “having mounted his horse with two hundred gentlemen, he went himself to meet the crowd of inhabitants who had forsaken their homes and their goods; and among others he saved twelve young girls from sixteen to eighteen years old, caused them to be led in safety to the Château d’Autremont, and recommended them with much charity to the Lady of that place, who took great care of them. Afterwards one brought to him an infant of seven months, found in the arms of his dead mother; and having praised and rewarded the soldier for saving from among the dead him who had but begun to live, he gave the child a nurse, and commanded that he should be well brought up and should be called Fortunat de Privas....”

That such actions should be remembered as exceptional, only proves what was then the usual fate of wretched non-combatants. The well-known horrors of the Thirty Years War, then raging in Germany, soon to be shared in by France, are witness enough. Compared with Tilly and Mansfeldt in their campaigns of mercenary ravage and slaughter, Richelieu’s dealings with the Huguenot faction appear, considering all things, actually gentle.

After the taking of Privas, the royal armies swept the south with little difficulty. One after another the towns and fortified villages opened their gates and laid down their arms, and when the King made his triumphal entry into Nîmes, early in July, Richelieu had attained the first great end of his policy; the Huguenot “state within the State” had practically ceased to exist.

The Duc de Rohan and the Protestants of the south, once conquered, were treated with moderation. A general amnesty was offered: Rohan retired to Venice, a free man. Liberty of conscience was assured by the confirmation of the Edict of Nantes. The one severe condition was the razing of all the Huguenot fortifications throughout the provinces. This had to be accepted and carried out, sorely against the will of the many proud little towns and village strongholds scattered through the mountains and valleys of that stern country, which now found themselves tame and defenceless under the power of the Crown. Only one town, Montauban of fighting memory, stood out and refused to destroy the walls and towers that were her glory and pride. She refused so obstinately that the King, tired of his hot campaign, began his journey back to Paris on July 15, leaving the Cardinal, himself ill of fever, to bring her to reason.

This he did with such success, after two or three weeks of argument, the Montauban deputies following him from town to town, that they at last consented to swallow the bitter pill of complete submission. In the middle of August he entered Montauban peaceably with a strong force, and was received with almost royal honours and specially harangued by the Protestant ministers. After lingering a few days to see the destruction of the ramparts well begun, “il retourna triomphant à Paris, au grand crève-cœur de ses ennemis.”

But those enemies were increasing in number, strength, and confidence. The chances seemed far more even to lookers-on of that day than to us, who possess the balances of history. The reigning Queen, the Queen-mother, Monsieur, all the princes of the blood except Condé—Alexandre de Vendôme had died at Vincennes in the early spring of 1629, and his family held Richelieu responsible—most of the great nobles and ladies of the Court; statesmen such as Michel de Marillac; Marshals of France such as his brother Louis, lately promoted to that rank, Bassompierre, and others; ecclesiastics such as the Cardinal de Bérulle—all these, openly or secretly, for personal or political reasons, were opposed to Richelieu. He had his hearty adherents, the followers of his star, but they were few and rather clever than powerful. His only real support was the King. And Louis XIII. showed considerable strength of character in standing by his Minister against such odds, social and religious.

Arriving victorious at Fontainebleau, Richelieu was received with angry coldness by Marie de Médicis. He had not only carried out the policy she hated as to Mantua, Spain, and Savoy, but he had shown the rebel Huguenots what seemed to her a scandalous toleration. A furious jealousy of his influence with the King was so evident a motive of her rage, that the Cardinal found it politic to bow before the storm.

Once more he solemnly offered his resignation to the King; once more Louis, torn between the claims of his mother and his Minister, having spent a day in tears, refused to receive it. On the contrary, he heaped fresh honours on the Cardinal. By letters patent he became “chief Minister of State,” the first time in French history that such an appointment had been formally made. A kind of peace was patched up with the Queen-mother. She and her friends only bided their time; the death of Cardinal de Bérulle, a few days after Richelieu’s return from the south, removed one of the best of her counsellors and left her more completely in the hands of a violent faction.

Now, in the autumn, the Duke of Mantua found himself again in a desperate plight. The Emperor Ferdinand, victorious over the Protestants of the north, turned to revenge the check that France had given to his feudal authority and to the armies of Spain. The unlucky Grisons found their country once more overrun, this time by an imperial army under Marshal Colalto, which descended the Val Tellina and stormed across the Lombard plain to the siege of Mantua, very slightly hindered by a Venetian force which had come to the Duke’s aid. At the same time the valiant old Marquis Spinola, the Spanish governor of Milan, invaded Montferrat and again besieged Casale, where M. de Toiras, the hero of the Isle of Ré, was now in command.

It looked as if the French were to lose all advantages gained by their brilliant spring campaign. The whole aspect of affairs was alarming, for the danger was not only that which the Duke of Mantua’s imploring letters pressed upon the King. Imperial armies were massing on the eastern frontier of France, threatening Champagne, and it was necessary that a French force should be sent to watch them. The Duke of Lorraine’s loyalty was uncertain. It cannot have been without misgivings that Richelieu placed that gate of the kingdom in charge of his suspected enemy Louis de Marillac, with Monsieur, the light and treacherous, in nominal chief command.

As to himself, he left Court intrigues behind him, left his master to the persuasions of men and women who hated him, and accepted the royal commission of “Lieutenant-Général de là les Monts,” which not only gave him the supreme command of the new Italian campaign, but made him the actual representative of Royalty in all matters political and military. No Constable of France had ever reached such a height of delegated power.

At ten o’clock in the morning of December 29 he took leave, says Aubery, of the King and the Queens at the Louvre. “He then dined in the chamber of Madame de Combalet, his niece, then lady-in-waiting to the Queen-mother, and towards three o’clock in the afternoon he mounted into his coach, having with him the Cardinal de la Valette and the Duc de Montmorency, who were both at one portière, and the Maréchaux de Bassompierre and de Schomberg at the other. Outside the gates of the Louvre he was joined by a troop of a hundred cavaliers, all men of rank, who accompanied him for half a league outside the city, where his train and his guards awaited him.... Thus he took his way, in the depth of winter, to carry succour to Montferrat, leaving the Court and Paris in a season whose rigour is particularly felt in the open country.”

Letters written by the Cardinal from Lyons show how his thoughts lingered behind at Paris, among the enemies and friends he had left there. Having obtained a piece of the True Cross from the Célestins at Avignon, he sent it, with a letter, to Marie de Médicis, by the hands of his niece, her lady-in-waiting. Enclosed with the treasure was a confidential letter to Madame de Combalet—one of his three friends in Marie’s household, the other two being his cousin Charles de la Meilleraye, captain of the guard, and Denys Bouthillier de Rancé, private secretary—asking her to beg from Her Majesty the favour of three lines in her own hand, to be shown to those who made it their business to inquire if she had written to him. Such lines would be of more value, he says, than whole sheets from the secretary, “qui est bon pour d’autres, mais non pour une antienne créature.”

The odd touch of something like sentiment, appealing to the Queen’s memory, seems to justify what has been said of the great Cardinal—that he did not understand women. It looks as if he had persuaded himself that the recent reconciliation would be lasting, that Marie had forgotten her grudges and might be expected, in his interest, to silence the curious and the impertinent.

A campaign against Germany and Spain sounded formidable, but in fact it resolved itself into a duel between Cardinal de Richelieu and the Duke of Savoy. That cunning old prince did not at once break through the Treaty of Susa, which bound him to take the French side in case the Duke of Mantua was again attacked by Spain; but he did his best, by every device in his power, to hinder the march of the French army. The danger did indeed become less immediate; plague, fever, and floods forced Marshal Colalto to retire from Mantua, and M. de Toiras held his own in Casale. Even before Richelieu had crossed the mountains, the Pope’s intervention brought about some talk of peace, while Charles Emmanuel made endless difficulties as to the terms on which the French, to gain Montferrat, should pass through the territories of Savoy.

But all these delays only made Richelieu more resolute and more impatient. He descended into Dauphiné, swept an army over the Alps in terrible weather, and took up his quarters at Susa, still in French hands. Charles Emmanuel continued the game he was playing with both sides; the Cardinal soon knew that while negotiating with him as to joint action against Spain the Duke was in communication with the Spanish and imperial commanders, was trying to make sure of the passes behind the French army, and was delaying the supplies purchased with French gold for Casale. The Duke seemed, in fact, to hold the key of the situation.

This state of things did not last long. It may be said that when the Marquis du Chillou exchanged sword for crosier France lost a great field-marshal; yet it is only partly true. Over and over again Richelieu the soldier proved himself the match in genius, will, and spirit of Richelieu the cardinal and statesman. The conqueror of La Rochelle was now fully equal to the difficult campaign forced upon him by the disloyal movements of the Duke of Savoy.

Instead of crossing the frontier into Montferrat, to the immediate relief of Casale, Richelieu marched his 22,000 men on Rivoli, where his false ally, with his sons and the armed forces of Savoy, lay in wait to command the French rear. At the news of this advance, Duke and princes, Savoyards and Piedmontese, fled back pell-mell to Turin.

It was one of the picturesque moments in Richelieu’s life. At the dawn of a March day, under torrents of rain and hail, he forded the swollen river Dora at the head of his cavalry. The infantry crossed by a narrow bridge. Horse and foot were alike in a bad humour, after many days of forced marches in terrible weather by mountain and plain. They cursed their leader freely enough as he splashed through the ford and caracoled on the farther bank, armed to the teeth and escorted by pages and guards. Little trace of the ecclesiastic in that handsome general officer, his worn face under a feathered hat, a steel cuirass on his body, ready to share in all the hardships of his discontented men. In his Memoirs Richelieu has nothing but good to say of the soldiers, whose insolence, according to others, vexed him at the time. “The poor soldiers did their duty gaily,” he writes. But the next day all grievances were forgotten. In snug quarters at Rivoli, drinking the Duke of Savoy’s good wine and devouring his stores, the men were shouting merrily, “Vive le grand Cardinal de Richelieu!”

He was too wise to advance against Spain and Austria, leaving Savoy and Piedmont to attack him in the rear. His next move really decided the war. He swept back towards the mountains, took Pinerolo after a short siege, and seized on several strong frontier places, the gateways of the Alps between Dauphiné and Piedmont. Once more, as in earlier centuries, “France held the keys of Italy.”

The war dragged on through the summer; its history must be read elsewhere. The Court moved to Lyons, and Richelieu met the King at Grenoble early in May. Together, in a short and easy campaign, they conquered Savoy. Chambéry opened its gates on May 15.

The extreme unhealthiness of the season—plague raging in Northern Italy—prevented Louis from personally taking the command of his Italian army. From St. Jean de Maurienne he and the Cardinal watched the course of events, while sending the Duc de Montmorency across Mont Cenis with troops to reinforce the marshals in command at Pinerolo. The combined armies made fresh conquests and behaved magnificently; but the great heat and the ravages of disease were enemies as formidable as Spaniards and Imperialists, who on their side held doggedly to their objects and gained at least one tremendous success. The storming of Mantua by the Emperor’s troops on the night of July 17 was a crime against civilisation. Art treasures never to be replaced were lost and destroyed in the sack of the old Gonzaga palace on its gleaming lake, a shrine of Renaissance beauty since the days of Isabella d’Este.

Immediately after this catastrophe Charles Emmanuel of Savoy died of despair at the loss of his towns and provinces. His son, the husband of Madame Christine of France, was more alive to the wisdom of an alliance with Louis XIII. An obstacle was thus removed from the path of the peace negotiations, which went on in spite of active war all through the summer and the early autumn; the chief agents in them being Père Joseph, at the Diet of Ratisbon, and a young Italian diplomat in the service of the Pope, named Giulio Mazarini.

When, late in October, the war ended with the retirement of the Austrians and Spaniards, the relief of Casale, and the restoration of Mantua to Duke Charles, it seemed as if Richelieu’s triumphs abroad and at home were signal and complete. And yet, at this very time, he was on the edge of destruction.