Cardinal de Richelieu

For the last three or four years of Cardinal de Richelieu’s life his figure stands out against a horizon glowing with the fires of victory.

After the death of Bernard of Saxe-Weimar in 1639, Richelieu’s diplomacy transferred his army and his lieutenants to Louis XIII.’s service, and the conquest of Alsace for France was the consequence. The Comte de Guébriant, the brilliant soldier who succeeded Weimar in the command, carried the war into Germany, and by a series of victories, in conjunction with the Swedes, “made the Emperor tremble in Ratisbon.”

In the Spanish Netherlands, the Maréchal de la Meilleraye took Arras after a two months’ siege, and gave back to France the ancient province of Artois. In northern Italy the campaign was more troublesome. The princes of Savoy, the new Duke being a child, disputed the regency with their sister-in-law Christine of France, and allied themselves with Spain. Christine herself, influenced by Père Monot, had leanings towards the imperial side, and it was not till the Spaniards had swept over Piedmont and taken Turin and besieged Casale that she brought herself to turn for help to Richelieu. Even then, jealous for her son’s independence and her own, she would not consent to send him to France for education, much less to hand over his whole dominions to be occupied by her brother’s armies. Her obstinacy triumphed, for Richelieu withdrew his conditions and sent the Comte d’Harcourt to relieve Casale and retake Turin; operations which were brilliantly carried out. The Spaniards were driven out of the country; the Savoyard princes, finding the fortunes of war against them, submitted to the Duchess-regent, who returned victorious to her capital. France gained, besides a firm alliance with Savoy, a paramount position in North Italy.

Spain was in trouble by land and by sea. Her fleets were defeated and half destroyed by the French in the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay, and by the Dutch, Richelieu’s allies, in the English Channel. The old province of Catalonia, with the frontier counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne, revolted against the burdens heaped on them by Olivarez and offered their allegiance to the King of France. French armies overran Roussillon, besieged Perpignan, and driving on over the mountains, fought side by side with the rebels in Catalonia. Before the death of Richelieu almost all the province was in French hands, and his brother-in-law, the Marquis de Brézé, had reigned for some months as Viceroy at Barcelona. It looked as though the south-eastern frontier of France would be extended, as in the days of Charlemagne, to the Ebro. The power of Spain was furthered handicapped by the revolt of Portugal. Encouraged by France, she claimed and seized her independence, recalled her old royal family of Braganza to the throne, and added one more to the active allies of Richelieu.

The tragic end of the Comte de Soissons was a more personal triumph for the Cardinal. Monsieur le Comte had spent his time at Sedan in weaving plots with the Duc de Bouillon and the wild Archbishop of Rheims, now Duc de Guise, while waiting for some turn of events that might restore his fortunes. In the summer of 1641 Richelieu decided to break up this nest of conspirators. He required the Duc de Bouillon to withdraw his hospitality, and ordered the Comte de Soissons to banish himself to Venice. Both refused. It was now open war between them and Richelieu. They tried, but failed, to draw Gaston d’Orléans into their quarrel; for once he was prudent in time. They published a manifesto, as usual declaring themselves loyal subjects of Louis XIII., moved solely by a patriotic desire to get rid of the tyrant Minister. “Pour le Roy, contre le Cardinal,” was the device on their banners.

They prepared to invade France with a small army of imperial troops, supported by Duke Charles of Lorraine, who was now prepared to break his last treaty with Richelieu. They were met by a royal army commanded by the brave but lethargic Coligny, Maréchal de Châtillon. He was rather seriously beaten by the rebels in the first and only engagement of the little campaign. But this news, which cost Richelieu a few hours of great wrath and anxiety, was followed immediately by other news which made it of no importance: “the bitter and the sweet,” His Eminence wrote to M. Bouthillier—“the sweet” being the death of Soissons, who was shot by an unknown hand in the confusion of that victorious skirmish through the woods of La Marfée, on the left bank of the Meuse.

Richelieu had a right to rejoice, for one of his trusted spies wrote to him: “If M. le Comte had not been killed, he would have been welcomed by the half of Paris ... so says every one ... and that all France would have joined him, because of the sol au livre and the other vexations laid upon the people, who are very malcontent.”

The revolt died with Soissons, for neither Bouillon nor Guise bore a name to be followed far. Bouillon submitted and was pardoned; Guise fled to Brussels, and did not return till the days of the “bonne Régence.” The Cardinal persuaded Louis—with difficulty, they say—not to wreak his vengeance on the Prince’s dead body, but to restore him to his mother. Some time afterwards His Eminence paid a visit of condolence to Madame la Comtesse. “Elle étoit sur son lict, et ne respondit aux complimens que par ses larmes.”

The death of Louis de Bourbon freed Richelieu not only from a political and personal enemy, but from one of the proudest of the princes who scorned the lofty social claims of himself and his family. These reached their highest point in 1641. His uncle, Amador de la Porte, was Grand Prior of France, and enjoyed several rich governments. His pious and eccentric brother, Alphonse, was Archbishop of Lyons, Primate of Gaul, and Cardinal. Richelieu could not make a statesman of this worthy ecclesiastic, but those who failed to treat him with the honour due to a great prince of the Church found themselves in disgrace. The Cardinal’s first cousin, Charles de la Porte, Marquis de la Meilleraye, was a Marshal of France, Grand Master of the Artillery with his residence at the Arsenal, and a Knight of the Order. One of the Cardinal’s favourite commanders, he distinguished himself in many campaigns, and, though a good man in the main, was said to have enriched himself from the public finances. He afterwards succeeded Richelieu as Governor of Brittany.

The Cardinal did his best to pour honours on the families of his two sisters, Françoise and Nicole. Madame de Combalet, now Duchesse d’Aiguillon and all-powerful with her uncle, had one brother, François de Vignerot, Marquis du Pont-de-Courlay, who ruined himself in spite of splendid appointments and earned terrible scoldings from the Cardinal, who paid his debts and as far as possible disinherited him. It was his eldest son, Armand Jean, born in 1629, whom the Cardinal adopted as heir to his name, arms, and titles, and the greater part of his possessions. This boy took the name of Du Plessis, and succeeded to the duchy, peerage, and estates of Richelieu. The title of Marquis de Richelieu passed to the younger brother, Jean Baptiste Amador de Vignerot, and his descendants succeeded in time to the duchy of Aiguillon, left by Madame d’Aiguillon to her niece, her brother’s only daughter, Mademoiselle d’Agénois.

The Marquis de Maillé-Brézé, whose unhappy wife died in 1635, accepted enormous benefits from his brother-in-law without much show of thanks. In Richelieu’s last years he held some of the highest military commands in the kingdom, and was too clever and capable not to acquit himself well, though with airs of ennui and fits of temper. His children did not inherit his intelligence. His son, Armand Jean, Duc de Fronsac, failed to distinguish himself in the navy; his daughter, Claire Clémence, a dull little girl with a touch of the heroic, hardly seemed equal to her fate—that of linking the family of Richelieu with the blood royal of France.

The brilliant matches made by the Cardinal’s cousins, Mesdemoiselles de Pontchâteau and others, had already proved that, as Montglat says, “the greatest were happy and honoured to be allied with him.” Among these “greatest” was the first prince of the blood, the Prince de Condé. He had been Richelieu’s faithful and rather servile follower ever since their reconciliation in 1626, being shrewd enough to see that this was the path to wealth and power. So early as 1633, when Mademoiselle de Brézé was only five years old, he had proposed a marriage between her and his son Louis, Duc d’Enghien, and the Cardinal had accepted the offer. In 1641 the marriage was celebrated in Paris with great magnificence. The bridegroom was sulky and unwilling: already, at twenty, he was a fighting hero, a man of the world, and desperately in love with Mademoiselle du Vigean. To him his childish little wife was profoundly uninteresting. But the match gave keen pleasure to Cardinal de Richelieu; and the Prince de Condé proved his satisfaction by offering to marry his daughter, Mademoiselle de Bourbon (the famous Duchesse de Longueville), to young Armand de Maillé-Brézé. The Cardinal replied, according to Mademoiselle de Montpensier, with dignity and good sense: “Qu’il vouloit bien donner des demoiselles à des princes, et non pas des gentilhommes à des princesses.”

But there was the other side of the shield. There were dark shadows behind the victories and social triumphs which lifted France and her great Minister so high in Europe. During Richelieu’s last years his armies were sometimes forced to other work than that of fighting Imperialists. The provincial government of France had become, in many quarters, little but a hard and extortionate system of tax-collecting, and the richest districts naturally fared the worst. When Bullion, Bouthillier’s colleague in the management of the finances, wrote despairingly in the autumn of 1639 to Chavigny, “Nous sommes maintenant au fond du pot,” and added his fear that foreign war might bring about civil war, the great fertile province of Normandy, ruined by injustice, tyranny, and enormous taxation, was actually in open rebellion; the “Va-nu-pieds” were marching in bands over the country, murdering tax-gatherers, destroying Government property, while even the tradespeople of Rouen and Caen rose and burned the houses and bureaux of the royal officers and killed them and their servants in the streets.

Richelieu wrote very sharply to his financiers on their mismanagement and ill-judged severity. As to the Normandy affair, they must remedy that “by prudence and skill,” as best they could: no troops could be spared to help them. However, His Eminence had to yield to necessity, and Colonel de Gassion, with 6,000 men, marched into Normandy, occupied Caen and Rouen, put hundreds of peasants to the sword, hanged or sent to the galleys hundreds more, while those who escaped fled the country. The whole population was disarmed; the Norman Parliament ceased for the time to exist, and the province had to pay a heavy indemnity besides all the arrears of the taxes it had refused, which were reimposed in the fullest rigour. The towns were deprived of all their liberties and privileges, their municipal courts being suspended; for two years Normandy was governed by a Royal Commission, and lay in deep disgrace under a kind of martial law. All this was an example—extreme, certainly—of Richelieu’s domestic government, the wrong side of his glory.

The Norman revolt worried him terribly; the more so as he knew that it was instigated by his enemies; not Spain alone, but England, hindered by internal troubles from taking an open part in the war. Richelieu had indeed earned little gratitude from Charles I. His creation of a navy, his colonising and trading policy, had for years made France a dangerous rival to England in home and foreign seas, and of late his far-seeing statesmanship, by encouraging the rebel party in Scotland, had helped to bias the King in favour of his mother-in-law’s quarrel. Marie de Médicis was an honoured guest at the English Court for nearly three years, from 1638 to 1641.

This old friend and enemy of the Cardinal did not survive him. She died, poor and miserable, at Cologne, in the summer of 1642: her children reigning in all Christendom, she had not an inch of earth to call her own. The Cardinal, lying ill at Tarascon, caused a solemn service to be held in her memory.

Another deepening shadow on his last years was the state of his health. In addition to the old ills of frequent fever and headache, he now suffered from painful and distressing complaints which kept him constantly in the hands of physician or surgeon; and the consequences were much depression, irritability, and suspiciousness, with increased hardness and severity to those who offended him, so that great and small feared him more than ever and loved him less. In this condition of mind and body he entered on the year 1642, during which he was to encounter his last conspiracy, to suffer his last doubts of the King’s trust and favour, and triumphantly to end his career.

Already, in the autumn and winter of 1641, there was mortal enmity between Richelieu and the young favourite he had given to Louis XIII. The success of Cinq-Mars was complete: the King could not pass a day without him; he was Grand Equerry, cut a splendid figure at Court, was popular and gay, made love to great ladies, dreamed of marrying Princess Marie de Gonzague and climbing to the highest rank in the kingdom. If the friendship of the King had stormy episodes which might have warned a less vain and confident courtier against putting his trust in princes, there were also times when Louis was ready to listen with grim enjoyment and even with sympathy to the young man’s rash talk against the Cardinal. Richelieu had not found in Cinq-Mars the tool he expected, and revenged himself sharply by word and deed. He treated “M. le Grand” with scornful anger as an impertinent boy, laughed at his social ambitions and barred his access to the royal Council.

Cinq-Mars swore vengeance; his talk was of “poniards and pistols.” He had been a secret ally of the Sedan conspirators; now, with a few confederates, among whom were his intimate friends M. de Fontrailles and M. de Thou, he began seriously to plot the destruction of the Cardinal. The first idea was simply assassination; but the dangers were obvious, and François de Thou had a troublesome conscience. They widened their plan into a political conspiracy, including Monsieur, the lately pardoned Duc de Bouillon, and the Spanish government. De Thou shrank also from high treason, but he was not the man to betray his friends; he had been injured in his career by Richelieu, and also, private reasons apart, regarded him as “the oppressor of France and the perturbator of Europe.” His hope seems to have been that Louis himself might be induced by his favourite’s strong influence to dismiss his Minister.

If this ever seemed probable, it was in the early days of 1642. The King and the Cardinal were both ill when they left Paris for Roussillon, the Spanish campaign being in full swing. They travelled separately, the royal party a day in advance; the Cardinal’s suite was so large that the same night’s lodging was seldom enough for both, and the progress was slow. Leaving Paris in January, they reached Narbonne in the second week of March.

Cinq-Mars had not wasted his time. He had gone so far, they say, with the bored, discontented King, as to suggest not only the Cardinal’s disgrace, but his murder. Louis listened, says Aubery, with horror; yet he neither warned the Cardinal nor took any steps to defend him. He wrote to him indeed in the first days of March, when the weary journey was nearly over, “songés seulement à vostre persone”; but this might naturally refer to Richelieu’s health, which was growing worse every day. The King saw no real danger, probably, in the irresponsible chatter of M. le Grand. He was half amused; he was often very impatient of his Minister’s domineering temper, and not unwilling to use his favourite as a safety-valve. In that there was nothing new; but all the history shows that the King leaned on the Cardinal’s genius, trusted him, if he did not love him, and had too much good sense ever seriously to think of depriving the kingdom of his services.

Cinq-Mars was discouraged, at least as to the violent death he proposed for the Cardinal. Not only was the King a little cold, for his favour was beginning to wane, but Monsieur and the Duc de Bouillon, on whose presence and help he had counted, were prudently careful to keep at a distance. He placed all his hopes, therefore, on the secret treaty with Spain, which was actually brought to him at Narbonne. Fontrailles, disguised as a Capuchin friar, had carried it to Madrid for the signature of Olivarez. In it the King of Spain promised an army of 17,000 men and a large sum of money to Monsieur, the Duc de Bouillon, and Cinq-Mars, who were to command this force under the Emperor and to hold Sedan in his name while Spain invaded France. All the French conquests of the last four years were to be restored, and the work of Richelieu entirely undone. The precious document was sent to Monsieur for his signature, which he, with newly developed caution, was in no hurry to give. Richelieu had offered the command in North Italy to the third chief conspirator, Bouillon. His brother, the Vicomte de Turenne, always of stainless loyalty, was fighting in Roussillon with the Maréchal de la Meilleraye and the young Duc d’Enghien.

The King passed on to the siege of Perpignan, leaving the Cardinal seriously ill at Narbonne. His sufferings at this time, both of mind and body, were very great, and may be traced through the letters which, day by day, he dictated and sent to M. de Noyers, his Secretary for War, in attendance on the King. Louis was himself far from well, but the Cardinal’s constant, eager inquiries, during this enforced separation, betray anxieties beyond the matter of health; for Cinq-Mars was always at his post, and if Richelieu knew nothing yet of the Spanish treaty, he suspected everything as to his enemy’s personal designs. The thought of these, and the agony of clinging to that power which, in the last resort, depended on the favour of the King, were worse to the strong spirit than days and nights of pain caused by cruel sores and barbarous remedies.

Early in May he writes from Narbonne: “Unluckily, though the surgeons say I am better, they cannot lift me from one bed to another without extraordinary pain”; and three days later: “As I thought to be entering the haven, a new tempest has driven me far away.” A fresh abscess had appeared on his already crippled right arm. “To console me, they talk of playing with knives again, on which I shall find it hard to resolve, having neither strength nor courage enough. I pray God to grant me these, that I may conform to His will.” Two days later: “I suffered extraordinary pain last night.... They have decided to make an opening in the bend of the arm. But they fear they may cut the vein. I am in the hand of God. I would I had finished my testament, but I cannot do it without you, and you cannot move till Perpignan is taken.”

The slight ease given by the operation lasted only a few days, more abscesses forming; and it seems that the Cardinal thought himself a dying man. M. de Noyers having arrived at his pressing summons, Pierre Falconis, notary-royal of the town of Narbonne, was employed to write out that remarkable will of seventeen sheets which shows his mind at its clearest and strongest. Madame d’Aiguillon and M. de Noyers were his executors, and among the witnesses were Cardinal Mazarin and Hardouin de Péréfixe, his chamberlain, afterwards Archbishop of Paris. Falconis attested that “mondit seigneur le Cardinal-Duc” was unable, owing to the state of his right arm, himself to sign his testament.

The end was not yet. The doctors advised a move from the marshes and stagnant lakes of Narbonne to the healthier air of Provence and the Rhône. Any ordinary conveyance was impossible for the Cardinal’s pain-racked body. He travelled in his bed, carried by eighteen men in an immense litter hung with crimson and gold. So large, we are told, was the “machine,” that gateways had to be widened, doors and windows taken out, walls pulled down, at the many stopping-places on His Eminence’s journey. He was overtaken by bad news: the Maréchal de Guiche had been defeated by the Spaniards near Cambray, and for a few days there was great alarm in the north of France, with new outcries against the Cardinal; his enemies were even mad enough to accuse him of having arranged the defeat in order to prove himself still necessary to France. If this absurd report reached him, his already troubled mind was soothed by a letter from the King, brought to him at Arles by M. de Chavigny: “Je finiroy en vous asseurant que quelque faux bruit qu’on fasse courre je vous ayme plus que jamais et qu’il y a trop longtemps que nous sommes ensemble pour nous jamais séparer ce que je veux bien que tout le monde sache.”

Richelieu’s reply to that letter was to send the King, by the hand of Chavigny, a copy or rough sketch of his brother’s secret treaty with Spain.

By what means that copy reached him has been one of the secrets of history. Among many guesses, Michelet favours the story that Queen Anne, aware of the treaty, took this means of making her peace with the Cardinal. But it seems more likely, on the whole, that Richelieu’s own spies at the Court of Madrid had made the discovery. In any case it meant for him a final triumph.

At first the King was irresolute. Ill from the heat, he had returned to Narbonne from the camp at Perpignan, leaving the siege to his officers. Though he knew Cinq-Mars to be a traitor, he did not at once arrest him, half hoping, perhaps, that the “pauvre diable” might save his life by escaping over the frontier. Fontrailles had already done so, but Cinq-Mars, proud, foolhardy, confident in his master’s affection, followed him to Narbonne. Urgent letters to the King from the Cardinal decided his fate. When too late he hid himself in a house at Narbonne; the mistress had pity on his curly head, but her hard-hearted husband denounced him; the royal guards seized him and conveyed him to the castle of Montpellier. De Thou, the least guilty of all and the first to be taken, was sent to Tarascon, where Richelieu had already arrived. The Duc de Bouillon, arrested at Casale, was brought back to France and imprisoned at Lyons in the old castle of Pierre-Encise, which in those days still dominated the city.

The King’s illness disinclined him to linger in the south, either for the conquest of Roussillon or for the trial of traitors. On the very day of his favourite’s arrest he left Narbonne for Fontainebleau, and stopped at Tarascon for an interview with the Cardinal. Both were so ill that Louis was carried on a bed into his Minister’s room, and there, side by side, the rulers of France, neither of whom had a year to live, discussed the Spanish treaty and its authors. Louis gave them up, without conditions, to the vengeance of Richelieu. He, assured of the King’s eternal faith and affection, forgot bodily pain in mental triumph, and was ready to take up, with all his old energy, the full regal power and authority with which he found himself suddenly invested. This extended not only to the punishment of State criminals, but to the Spanish campaign and the whole government of the south.

It seems that Bouillon and Cinq-Mars had a legal loophole of escape. They appeared in the actual treaty only as “deux seigneurs de qualité,” their names, with that of Sedan, being added in a secret memorandum; Monsieur and His Catholic Majesty of Spain were the only two persons openly mentioned. The fate of his fellow-conspirators therefore depended largely on Monsieur; and they, knowing this, may well have despaired.

He was at Blois, “faisant le malade,” when the news of the arrest of Cinq-Mars reached him. As a first precaution, he burned the original treaty. Then, finding that all was known, he sent the Abbé de la Rivière to Richelieu with letters of confession and grovelling entreaties for pardon. Richelieu told the messenger that his master deserved death, and might think himself fortunate if he escaped with confiscation and banishment. He had no longer the saving quality of being heir to the throne of France. He was terribly frightened. The Cardinal, with great show of severity, insisted that he should renounce for ever all “charges and administrations” in the kingdom, and should retire for the present, on a pension, to Annecy in Savoy, after being confronted at Lyons with his captive confederates. This trial the King spared him; but he had to save himself by signing a declaration that Messieurs de Bouillon and de Cinq-Mars were in fact the two “seigneurs de qualité” to whom the Spanish treaty referred.

Cinq-Mars and de Thou were brought to their trial at Lyons. Rumour and gossip seem to have coloured too highly the dramatic situation so often painted and described. According to the story believed by Madame de Motteville, M. de Montglat, and society generally, both prisoners were conveyed by river, the boat in which they travelled being towed by the great barge on which the Cardinal had embarked in his gorgeous litter. As a fact, it was de Thou alone who made part of this spectacle of vindictive triumph, Cinq-Mars being fetched by a troop of horse from Montpellier. The voyage against the swift waters of the Rhone was long and slow. On each bank a squadron of the Cardinal’s guards kept pace with the boats. They left Tarascon on August 17, and did not reach Lyons till September 3, when de Thou, with Cinq-Mars, joined the Duc de Bouillon in the castle of Pierre-Encise.

Their trial began immediately; and for Cinq-Mars the verdict was certain, even had not the jury been partly composed of Richelieu’s own commissioners, notably that Laubardemont who had for years been a name of terror to his enemies. Chancellor Séguier, with a touch of humanity, tried to save François de Thou: this gallant gentleman was plainly guiltless of any active conspiracy. But there were old private grudges in his case, and Richelieu’s state of mind and body made any hope of mercy vain. Laubardemont, acting for him, brought up an old law of Louis XI. which punished with death those who knew of a plot without revealing it. This law had seldom been carried out in full severity, but its existence was enough to condemn the man who had been a too faithful friend, and de Thou shared Cinq-Mars’ sentence. The Duc de Bouillon saved his head by resigning his strong fortress of Sedan to the King—“who much desired it,” says Montglat, “because it was situated on the river Meuse, and served as a retreat for all the malcontent.”

The sentence, pronounced on September 12, was carried out that same day in the square of the Hôtel de Ville at Lyons. Many writers have described the heroic calmness with which the two young men met their death and the universal pity and mourning throughout society. M. de Montglat expresses the feeling of his order. “Thus died M. le Grand, aged twenty-two years, handsome, well-made, generous, liberal, and having all the parts of an honnête homme, had he not been ungrateful to his benefactor, and had he shown more judgment in his conduct. As to M. de Thou, he was beloved of every one: he was indeed a man of great merit, regretted by the whole Court, where many believed that he was condemned without reason.”

Three days before the execution Perpignan opened its gates to the French, and Cardinal de Richelieu, who left Lyons for Paris as soon as the trial was over, wrote from his first stage to M. de Chavigny: “These three words are to tell you that Perpignan is in the King’s hands and that M. le Grand and M. de Thou are in the other world, where I pray God they may be happy.”

Louis XIII., we are told, received the news of his old favourite’s death with equal heartlessness—“remembering no more the friendship he had borne him and without any feeling of compassion.”

Travelling in his great “machine,” the Cardinal made his slow journey chiefly by canals and rivers. October was advanced when he slept the last night at Fontainebleau, embarked on the Seine, landed in Paris, and was borne on to his retreat at Rueil, the Court being at Saint-Germain.

It was a triumphal return; his enemies were fallen; and from every side news of fresh victories came to greet the dying Minister who had given France her new place among the nations.