Cardinal de Richelieu

In Richelieu’s own mind his worst enemies were to be found among his nearest neighbours. “Les intrigues de cabinet,” says M. de Montglat, “donnèrent plus de peine au Cardinal de Richelieu que toute la guerre étrangère.” Not only mischievous great ladies like the Duchesse de Chevreuse, but every man or woman who had anything to do with the Court, were objects of his watchful suspicion, and to most of them, while they begged his favour and flocked to his entertainments, he seemed the cruel ogre, the mysterious sphinx, so long represented in history.

He never really trusted the King. Louis was fond of gossip, easily amused by small things, and often attracted by persons undesirable from Richelieu’s point of view. And even at his height of power he found it impossible to carry out the ideal arrangement which would have hindered any one not bound to his own service from approaching the King at times such as the petit coucher, when intimate talk was allowed, and men might even dare to tell a story against the Eminentissime himself. They would probably repent; for though Louis might laugh and enjoy such jokes, he had a way of repeating them to the Cardinal, if only with a half-childish notion of teasing him. The consequences to a chattering courtier might be serious.

The influence of these gentlemen with the King was seldom really dangerous, and yet the Cardinal was justified in his distrust, for the majority hated him, and he went about always with his life in his hand, not because of ambitious princes alone. Men’s consciences were no protection to him. For instance, the Abbé de Retz, afterwards Cardinal and Coadjutor of the Archbishop of Paris, felt little doubt that he would have done a right action, socially and politically, had he carried out a plan for killing Richelieu in the chapel of the Tuileries, at the long-deferred christening of Mademoiselle de Montpensier.

Over and over again Richelieu tried to confine the King’s special favour to persons chosen by himself, and over and over again he failed. It was not so much that people played him false, as that he found them—men and women—too proud, too independent, and too faithful to their order for the place he meant them to fill—that of the King’s favourites and his own spies. There was Mademoiselle de Hautefort, with whom Louis fell in love when she was a beautiful girl of fifteen, brought to Court from her native province by her grandmother, Madame de la Flotte, and appointed one of the Queen-mother’s maids-of-honour. After the “Day of Dupes,” when Marie de Médicis left France and her household was broken up, Madame de la Flotte became lady-in-waiting to the young Queen in the place of Madame du Fargis, whom Richelieu sent into exile; and Mademoiselle de Hautefort, transferred at the same time, was specially recommended by Louis to his wife’s favour.

At first, very naturally, Queen Anne was not pleased. Marie de Hautefort was in every way a dazzling person. Madame de Motteville declares that she made a greater effect at Court than any other beauty. “Her eyes were blue, large, and full of fire; her teeth white and even; her complexion had the white and red suitable to a fair beauty.” Added to this, she had a sharp tongue; she was high-spirited, “railleuse,” and by no means soft-hearted.

Louis XIII.’s love-affairs contrast curiously with those of his father. Nothing could be more innocent, more purely platonic, than his devotion to Mademoiselle de Hautefort. He hardly dared approach her; his talk was of dogs and of birds; and yet he showed the stormy jealousy and the sulks and humours of a passionate lover, and spent hours in writing songs and music for his lady. She disputed with him freely and laughed at him unmercifully.

At the beginning Richelieu encouraged this singular affection. But after about three years he saw reason to change his mind. Mademoiselle de Hautefort was not inclined to act as his political agent, and she had soon given the loyalty of a warm and generous nature to her mistress, the Queen, whom she saw neglected by Louis and subject to the tyranny of the Cardinal. This is to say that the woman most admired by the King had joined the Spanish party at Court and was rightly counted by Richelieu among his enemies.

It cost him little trouble to drive Mademoiselle de Hautefort out of favour—at least for a time. When Louis had become slightly tired of his quarrels with the fair beauty and slightly chilled by her friendship with the Queen, it was made easy for him to find consolation in the dark eyes of Louise de la Fayette, a cousin of Père Joseph, whose family was supposed to be devoted to the Cardinal.

Mademoiselle de la Fayette was as good and gentle as she was lovely; in the varied records of the French Court there exists no sweeter figure. During two years she and the eccentric King adored each other with a tender affection and mutual confidence quite absent from the Hautefort affair; yet this, like the other, never passed the bounds of friendship. It went so far, however, that the girl’s conscience was alarmed, and she began to think of taking refuge in a convent.

The idea was not unwelcome to Cardinal de Richelieu. The Court was full of his spies, who warned him that Mademoiselle de la Fayette’s intimate talk with the King was not to his advantage; that she was inspired by Père Caussin, the royal confessor, to speak to Louis in favour of his mother, his wife, his brother, and all the other victims of a warlike, heretical policy; that she was encouraged by her uncle the Bishop of Limoges and her brother the Chevalier de la Fayette, to set him against the Cardinal; that the Bishop had even been heard to say, “When the Cardinal is ruined, we will do this and that. As for me, I shall inhabit the Hôtel de Richelieu.”

The Court was buzzing with intrigues all through 1636, the “year of Corbie,” while the King still enjoyed, as far as possible, the society of the only woman who had ever loved him for his own sake. Mademoiselle de la Fayette, torn between conscience and affection, was dragged one way and the other by two sets of advisers, each headed by a dignified ecclesiastic moved by reasons beyond mere anxiety for her welfare and that of the King. The Père Carré, Superior of the Dominicans in Paris and a favourite director of Court ladies, was one of Richelieu’s chief spies and most devoted servants. Mademoiselle de la Fayette came to him for counsel. He encouraged her scruples and blessed her vocation: “Il faisait parler Dieu,” says M. Cousin, “selon l’intérêt et au commandement de Richelieu.”

On the other hand Père Caussin, a Jesuit, and apparently an honest man, took advantage of his place as the King’s confessor to advise Mademoiselle de la Fayette to remain at Court. He saw no reason why Louis should be deprived of a perfectly innocent friendship for the sake of foolish scruples and a half-imaginary vocation. Such an opinion, if disinterested, would have been worthy of all respect; but at the French Court, divided between Richelieu’s spies and Richelieu’s enemies, this was almost impossible. The reasons that had moved Cardinal de Bérulle and the brothers Marillac, the grievances of the Queen-mother, of the Pope and of the princes, all found voice in Père Caussin. He was closely allied, too, with another distinguished Jesuit, Père Monot, the confessor of Christine, Duchess of Savoy, who was at this very time in Paris working against Richelieu in the interests of Spain. Considering all this, it is no great wonder that Père Caussin presently found himself disgraced and banished to Brittany, a harmless Jesuit of eighty years old being appointed royal confessor in his place. It seems that Richelieu did not wish to break the tradition which gave the care of the King’s conscience to that Order.

Tired of intrigue, pushed on by Père Carré and her own doubts, Louise de la Fayette entered the Convent of the Visitation in the Rue Saint-Antoine, in May 1637. For some months the King continued to visit her there, until Richelieu, whose influence had been a good deal shaken by her arguments, had regained his personal power, and Mademoiselle de Hautefort, still at Court, her old dominion.

The tragi-comedy known as “the Affair of the Val-de-Grâce,” which played itself out in the summer of 1637, proved that Richelieu’s star was still in the ascendant. The war with Spain had added fresh distress to Queen Anne’s position, so long a false and lonely one. The secret sympathy of half the Court and of all the malcontents in the kingdom did not compensate the Queen for the loss of her friends, exiled one by one as Richelieu came to suspect them, or for the entire separation from her own family and its allies in Austria, the Netherlands, and Lorraine. The Queen did not easily resign herself. In spite of espionnage, she wrote and sent letters to her brothers, the King of Spain and the Cardinal-Infant, as well as to Madame de Chevreuse, living in banishment at Tours. These letters were written in a refuge to which spies did not penetrate: the Benedictine Abbey of the Val-de-Grâce in the Faubourg St. Jacques. The Abbess, of Spanish origin, was a devoted servant of the Queen.

It is no insult to Richelieu’s patriotism to believe that he had never pounced on smaller game with equal satisfaction. The famous letters themselves, if we may believe Madame de Motteville, contained no actual treason against the King or the State; but they did contain “railleries” against the Cardinal, and in any case they were written to the enemies of France, and belonged to the political opposition so long irreconcilable, which he crushed more sternly every year he lived. We may think what we please about his more personal motives of spite and revenge: that he had made love to the Queen and that she had laughed at him seemed to the gossips of the time a sufficient explanation of everything. The Cardinal, they said, wished to send her back to Spain, to divorce her from the King, to marry him to Madame de Combalet! In the following year that much-talked-of lady was consoled for the loss of so many great matches by being created Duchesse d’Aiguillon in her own right. Her uncle paid an enormous sum of money for the title and the estates belonging to it.

The Queen’s troubles in the summer of 1637 began with the intercepting, by Richelieu’s people, of a letter in cypher which she had written to Madame de Chevreuse. The bearer, La Porte, her valet-de-chambre, was the person to whom she trusted all her secret correspondence. Suddenly thrown into the Bastille, examined first by Richelieu’s terrible agents and then by the Cardinal himself, threatened with torture and death, the faithful man refused to say one word that could incriminate his royal mistress. Even the Cardinal admired his fidelity.

It was in August, and the Court was at Chantilly. The Queen in her alarm first denied everything, solemnly and on oath; then thought it prudent to make some kind of confession. She sent for the Cardinal, who came accompanied by his two chief secretaries, M. de Chavigny and M. de Noyers. Madame de Sénecé, the mistress of her household, was in attendance on the Queen.

The Cardinal, according to himself, was respectful, fatherly, but severe. When the Queen began to assure him of the harmlessness of her letters, he said at once that he did not believe her, but promised her his own faithful service and the King’s forgiveness if she would confess everything. On this, Anne sent the witnesses out of the room and remained alone with Richelieu. We have only his word for what passed: that the Queen, speaking “with much displeasure and confusion,” confessed to a correspondence with Spain and with Flanders, carried on by secret means and in terms which might justly displease the King; that she exclaimed several times, “Quelle bonté faut-il que vous ayez, Monsieur le Cardinal!”; that she protested her eternal gratitude, saying, “Give me your hand,” while holding out her own, famous for its beauty; which the Cardinal respectfully refused to touch.

He made her write and sign her confession, and then caused the King to bestow a formal forgiveness, not sweetened by a list of requirements as to her future conduct. She was to visit no convents and to write no letters without the King’s permission, her maids and her ladies-in-waiting, especially “Fillandre, première femme de chambre,” who had charge of her writing-desk, being set as spies and gaolers over her. Not much wonder that the lively little niece, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, visiting Chantilly in that disturbed month of August, found the Queen in bed, ill with fear and worry.

For this was not the end of it. The Cardinal was dissatisfied, still suspecting concealment. La Porte in his prison was once more threatened with torture. A spy was sent to him—one of the Queen’s officers, gained over by Richelieu and Laffemas. He brought a supposed message from the Queen to La Porte, commanding him to tell all he knew. But if Anne’s enemies were clever and resourceful, so also were her friends. The romantic courage of Mademoiselle de Hautefort and of the Chevalier de Jars, himself confined in the Bastille, had found a way of conveying a letter to La Porte, warning him of the extent of the Queen’s confessions. He was thus prepared to tell the same story—all of which seems to justify Richelieu’s suspicion.

Madame de Motteville says that the remembrance of those summer weeks at Chantilly “faisoit horreur à la Reine.” She was within an ace of following her mother-in-law’s example in a flight from France. Mademoiselle de Hautefort and the Prince de Marcillac—afterwards Duc de la Rochefoucauld—were ready to ride off with her to Brussels. Her life at the Court had become unendurable. Richelieu brought forward the terrors of the law in the person of Chancellor Séguier, who not only examined the Queen “like a criminal,” but made a thorough search at the Abbey of the Val-de-Grâce, where her letters and papers were supposed to be hidden. Either because the Abbess was fearless and loyal, or because there was nothing to find, the Chancellor found no papers of a later date than 1630.

So the storm passed over. Richelieu could prove nothing; the King and Queen were reconciled; and the only consequence was a fresh exile for Madame de Chevreuse, who rode for her life from Tours and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain.

Mademoiselle de Hautefort remained in favour for two more years; the Queen valued her friendship, and the King, after his final parting with Mademoiselle de la Fayette, had returned to his old love; she became a lady-in-waiting, with the title of Madame and other privileges. But Richelieu was still afraid of her. Rather cautiously and slowly, from 1637 till the end of 1639, he was working for her ruin. In the Queen’s very household he had a spy, long unsuspected and exceedingly clever at her odious trade, Mademoiselle de Chémerault, a young maid-of-honour, an intimate friend of Madame de Hautefort. From the most private interior of the Court, this girl reported every word and deed to a Madame Maline, who conveyed the information direct to Richelieu in letters which still exist, a mine of ancient gossip written in the curious jargon used by him in his secret notes. Everybody has a nickname: the Cardinal himself, in these notes, is sometimes Amadeo, sometimes l’Oracle; the King and Queen are Céphale and Procris; Madame de Hautefort is l’Aurore, Madame d’Aiguillon Vénus, Mademoiselle de la Fayette, la Délaissée, Mademoiselle de Chémerault herself, le bon Ange. These letters warned the Cardinal of all the loves and hatreds, the private and public discontents and desires, which moved the Queen and her friends, and kept him in touch with every detail of the stormy yet affectionate intercourse between Madame de Hautefort and the King. Her empire, if only intermittent, was dangerous; the more so, because she was known to be on friendly terms with the Comte de Soissons and with Monsieur.

Richelieu believed in “the expulsive power of a new affection.” Young Henry d’Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, was brought to Court by him with the definite object of distracting the King from the society of Madame de Hautefort. This plan being on the way to succeed, the Cardinal took advantage of one of the King’s journeys, when the lady was not there to plead her own cause, to accuse her of being as dangerous an intrigante as Madame de Chevreuse, adding that he could no longer endure this fighting in the dark, and that Louis must choose between Madame de Hautefort and himself. With some show of regret, the King yielded. Madame de Hautefort was banished from Court, and retired to her grandmother’s country estates. Four years later, when Richelieu and Louis XIII. were dead, she was recalled and honoured among the old friends who had been faithful to the Regent in adversity.

The Queen’s own troubles and humiliations came to an end in September 1638. On the 5th—Richelieu’s birthday and also the date on which he became Cardinal, Duke, and Peer—the long-wished-for Dauphin was born at Saint-Germain. All France rejoiced; the towns, especially Paris, held high festival, with singing of Te Deum, firing of cannon, ringing of bells, keeping open house for all comers. The Cardinal, who was in Picardy, wrote rapturous letters to the King and Queen.

“I hope and believe that God has given Monseigneur le Dauphin to Christendom to appease its troubles, and to bring to it the blessing of peace. I vow to him, from his birth, the same passionate devotion I have always had for the King and for your Majesty, whose faithful servant I am and shall be eternally....”

The Cardinal’s rejoicing was sincere. In the birth of the future Louis XIV. he rightly saw the triumph of his own policy as well as the saving of France from the danger, which the King’s weak health made imminent, of falling into the hands of Gaston d’Orléans and his crew. Two years later, in 1640, the birth of Philippe was an additional security.

But the joy of September 1638 was soon followed by one of the most real sorrows of Richelieu’s life. In December he lost Père Joseph, his adviser and shadow, the intimate friend of thirty years. Through all difficulties and changes the two men had worked together. Both were hard and pitiless politicians, driving at the same ends in Church and State. François du Tremblay, the monk, was the more imaginative, the more enthusiastic, and the less human of the two. He was not, like Richelieu, personally ambitious, and he lived the simple life of a friar, while his keen cleverness and ready, fearless resource made him the first of diplomatists. If he was eager for the Cardinal’s Hat steadily refused by Pope Urban VIII., it was because of the advantages this honour would have brought to his beloved Capuchin Order.

Père Joseph had been ill for some time at his convent in Paris when the Cardinal wrote to beg him to come to Rueil, offering to send his own litter that he might travel comfortably. This offer he accepted. Richelieu received him with much affection, and at first he seemed to rally: he dictated a circular letter to his congregation of the Filles du Calvaire, answered letters from missionaries in the East, and listened with pleasure to a book describing the exploits of Godefroy de Bouillon in the Holy Land; the spirit of a crusader was in him to the last. Another seizure brought him very near death, but he lingered till December 18, while Richelieu tried to cheer his “Ezéchiéli’s” failing ears with news of the victories by which France was now reaping the fruit of so much effort and suffering.

With great funeral pomp the Capuchin was borne back to Paris and buried in his convent church in the Rue St. Honoré, where for nearly a hundred and seventy years his stately Latin epitaph, composed by Cardinal de Richelieu, told the world how he had lived in the midst of splendour and riches, austere and poor. His bones lay beside those of the famous Père Ange, Duc de Joyeuse and Marshal of France. In 1804, when the already profaned church was pulled down and the Rue Mont-Thabor built over its site, their remains were removed to the cemetery of Montmartre.

Paris of the streets made her own epitaph for Père Joseph:

The Cardinal’s Hat desired by Richelieu for his old friend was eventually given to Jules Mazarin, the clever Italian statesman who, originally an agent of the Vatican but now naturalised in France, had risen so high in Richelieu’s opinion that he appointed him in Père Joseph’s place one of his principal Secretaries of State.

Mazarin was in fact a peacemaker between Richelieu and the Pope, and his promotion to be Cardinal was really a sign of their reconciliation. The Church of France had been supported by Rome in resistance to the new laws and revived taxes and the many complicated exactions made upon her great possessions in aid of the war. The cry of sacrilege rose high; the archbishops and bishops were divided, the majority eager to resist a Minister whom they called “tyrant,” “apostate,” and other hard names, the minority ready to hail Cardinal de Richelieu as “the Head of the Gallican Church.” There was actually a talk of appointing him Patriarch. Why not? said the Jesuits, wisely respectful of the civil power. Books and violent pamphlets were written on both sides of the question.

The Pope refused to issue bulls for the appointment of French bishops so long as the French Government held on its present course. Richelieu was prepared to do without them. The King refused to receive the Nuncio, or to recognize his authority. The Pope absolutely refused to confirm Richelieu’s own election as Abbot-General of the Orders of Cîteaux and Prémontré, or to countenance his project of advanced reform in his own Order of Cluny. A private quarrel in Rome made matters worse; one of the French Ambassador’s gentlemen was killed, and the ambassador’s wrath irritated the Pope into forbidding any funeral honours to be paid in Rome to Richelieu’s lieutenant, the soldier-Cardinal de la Valette, who died at Rivoli in the midst of his Savoyard campaign of 1639.

The quarrel was at last made up: for the French Church, as for the government, it was really a question of money, and both agreed to a compromise. Richelieu’s Finance Secretaries withdrew some part of their immense demands; the clergy, very unwillingly, granted the rest; Urban VIII. was appeased, and Mazarin became a Cardinal.

If Richelieu opposed the Pope, the friend of the Hapsburgs, and asserted the liberty of the Gallican Church in such matters, for instance, as the annulling of Monsieur’s marriage, he was neither unorthodox, nor unfriendly to different forms of religious effort. The great charities of the seventeenth century grew and flourished under his shadow. The spirit of St. François de Sales lived on in the Order of the Visitation, devoted to the sick and the poor. Vincent de Paul, with his Mission of Lazarist Fathers and his Sisters of Charity, bringing light into dark places and helping the miserable, both in Paris and in the deserts of the country, was a familiar and beautiful figure through most of Richelieu’s reign. Monsieur Vincent’s great Mission work, the training of the younger clergy, also nobly carried on by the congregations of the Oratory, of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet and of Saint-Sulpice, had lain very near Richelieu’s own heart in his young days.

The Cardinal extended his powerful protection to the teaching Orders, Jesuits, Ursulines, and others; and the reformed Benedictines of Saint-Maur, so famous for ecclesiastical and historical learning, owed their distinction largely to him. He did very much, indeed, towards the reform and discipline of the regular clergy, and with a longer life he might have removed many of the abuses which spoiled their religious ideal. But his chief and immediate object was to nationalize the Orders, and to bring them under the same authority with France as a whole.

“A central and supreme authority”; absolutism; obedience: these were the root-principles of Richelieu’s rule. He hated original, independent thought or action, in Church or State; it was of the nature of rebellion. Personal quite as much as political, this imperious, dominating temper was the chief secret of his triumph in matters where reason and equity have in the long run decided against him; for instance, the many cases in which he appointed his own judges and tribunals to try his prisoners, the slower and often fairer proceedings of the parliamentary law-courts being found unbearable by his impatient and positive mind.

The same dominating spirit explains Richelieu’s treatment of his old friend the Abbé de Saint-Cyran. He could be tolerant of Protestants: their private heresies mattered little, as long as their public conduct was loyal. But the advance of Jansenist opinions within the French Church was another thing. In the case of M. de Saint-Cyran, as strong-willed a personage as the Cardinal himself, it meant a very powerful spiritual influence not quite strictly orthodox, with a stiff morality and an independence of mind which judged and condemned much of the Cardinal’s own theory and practice. He did his best to win Saint-Cyran, whose learning and high character were of European fame. But bishoprics would not tempt the man who did not choose to range himself among the Cardinal’s slaves, who, though none too loyal to the Pope, declared openly that the Church could not annul Monsieur’s marriage, and who agreed with Jansenius in denouncing the alliance of France with heretics.

The great director and glory of Port-Royal was imprisoned at Vincennes in 1638, and remained there till after the death of Richelieu. The Eminentissime could not afford to tolerate a man the watchwords of whose spirit were independence, boldness, and truth. “He is more dangerous,” he said, “than half a dozen armies.”