Cardinal de Richelieu

In the year 1585, when Elizabeth of England was at the height of her power, when Mary of Scotland lay in prison within two years of her death, when Philip of Spain was beginning to dream of the Invincible Armada, when Henry of Guise and the League were triumphing in France, the future dominator of European politics was born.

Armand Jean du Plessis, third and youngest son of François du Plessis, Seigneur de Richelieu, was an infant of no great importance. Even his birthplace, for a long time, was not known with any certainty.

His family was noble, but not of the higher nobility which governed provinces, commanded armies, and glittered at Court. He belonged to that race of French country gentlemen which led a strenuous life in the sixteenth century, either for good or evil—perhaps mostly for evil. They were generally poor, proud, and greedy. If, by fair means or foul, they could capture a rich wife of their own station, so much the better; if not, they readily sacrificed birth for money, and bestowed an old name, coat and sword, rough manners and ruinous walls, on some heiress of the bourgeoisie. When the resource of marriage failed, such a gentleman would turn himself into a mercenary soldier, Catholic or Huguenot, or creep into Court employment in the shadow of some great noble of his province; or failing such honest means, he might clap on a mask and take to highway robbery, rich travellers being better worth pillaging than the peasants who hid in their hovels as his horse’s heavy hoofs clanked by. Sometimes Religion herself, or the false Duessa who personified her in those days, might help a needy gentleman to a livelihood. There was many an abbot who had never been a monk; and there were lucky families—that of Du Plessis, for instance—who possessed a bishopric as provision for a younger son.

The Du Plessis were an old family of Poitou. In that ancient and famous province they had held several fiefs so far back as the early thirteenth century; but they were a wandering, fighting race, without strong attachment, it seems, to their native soil. One of them is said to have gone to England in the suite of Guy de Lusignan, and to have married a noble English wife. Another journeyed to Cyprus with the same distinguished patron. In the Hundred Years War, two Du Plessis brothers were found fighting on opposite sides, French and English. Pierre, the elder, head of the less distinguished branch of the family, was a robber of Church property as well as a traitor to the national cause; but in the way of morals there was not much to choose between him and his brother Sauvage, the patriot, in favour of whom their father threatened to disinherit him.

Sauvage was a man of strong, acquisitive character, and everything prospered in his hands, though he began his career by carrying off a younger brother’s wife. It was his son, Geoffroy, who laid the real foundation of future greatness by his marriage with Perrine Clérembault, of a good old family, whose brother was Seigneur of Richelieu. Louis de Clérembault, who held a post in the Court of Charles VII, left his fortune and estates to François du Plessis, his sister’s son. The young man not only succeeded to the fortified château of Richelieu and a good position in his native province, but also to a connexion with the Court which lasted into the reign of Louis XI, and which helped him to lift his family a step higher by marrying his own son, François, to the daughter of Guyon Le Roy, of Chavigny, in the Forest of Fontevrault, a distinguished courtier, and Vice-Admiral of France under François I. This François du Plessis de Richelieu was great-grandfather to the famous Cardinal.

An ecclesiastical turn—for the sake of gain rather than of godliness—was given to the family by its relationship with that “true prelate of the Renaissance,” Jacques Le Roy, uncle of Madame de Richelieu. He was successively Abbot of Villeloing, Cluny, and St. Florent-de-Saumur, and Archbishop of Bourges, and in him the bad sixteenth-century alliance between the Church and the world, the consequence of royal nomination to benefices, might be seen at its most flourishing point.

He chose three out of his five Richelieu great-nephews to follow in his footsteps. Two of them rose to be abbot and bishop; the other, Antoine, took the vows as a monk at Saumur against his will, and after a short religious life varied by floggings and other punishments for rebellion, unfrocked himself and ran away to the wars. Known throughout his military life as “the Monk,” he was a cruel and ferocious soldier. With his brother François, a man of very different type, he first saw service in the Italian campaigns under the Maréchal de Montluc. Both brothers returned to Poitou towards 1560, and both took the Catholic side in the religious civil war which raged for years in the miserable western provinces of France, where Protestantism, from various causes, had taken a firm hold. Attached to the Guise faction, the brothers became special partisans of the Duc de Montpensier, the King’s lieutenant in Poitou and their own near neighbour at the Château de Champigny. His army swept the province with fire and sword, and among his many fierce and adventurous followers François and Antoine du Plessis-Richelieu led the way.

The former, however, seems to have been an honest soldier rather than a bloodthirsty demon. He, nicknamed “le Sage” and regretted as “un fort brave gentilhomme,” lost his life in an expedition against the English, who had occupied Le Havre. Le Moine survived his brother some years, and his fame as a fighter became worth a post at Court and a knightly order. With an ever-growing reputation for vice and violence, he was killed in a street brawl in Paris—“mort symbolisante à sa vie,” says the chronicler l’Estoile. His most characteristic exploit, and the most startling among many, was the single-handed massacre of a hundred Huguenots who had taken refuge in a church near Poitiers. Antoine de Richelieu “amused himself” by shooting down these poor defenceless creatures in cold blood.

So much for the Cardinal’s great-uncles. His grandfather, Louis du Plessis, Seigneur de Richelieu, the eldest of the family, died a young man, but not before he had helped on its fortunes by a marriage profitable in dignity, if not in coin. The heir of Richelieu was of a quieter spirit than his brothers. He entered the household of a fine old noble—Antoine de Rochechouart, seneschal of Toulouse, distinguished for valour in the reigns of Louis XII and François I—as lieutenant of his bodyguard; and very shortly married his master’s daughter, thus distantly connecting his famous grandson with one of the noblest old ducal families in France, from which sprang Madame de Montespan and her brilliant brothers and sisters, the Duc de Vivonne, Madame de Thianges, and the learned Abbess of Fontevrault. His Rochechouart grandmother was the one precious link between Cardinal de Richelieu and the higher nobility.

M. de Rochechouart was poor, probably extravagant, and his daughter Françoise, whom tradition makes neither young, pretty, nor amiable, seems to have lived in a sort of dependence on the great Dame Anne de Polignac, dowager of La Rochefoucauld, at Verteuil, where Charles V was royally entertained in 1539. These circumstances may account for the mésalliance which Mademoiselle de Rochechouart certainly made in marrying Louis du Plessis. Her interest gained him the Court appointment of échanson, or chief butler, to Henry II. But he was neither clever nor prudent, and his widow was left with five young children, very little money, a sharp, proud temper, and a deep discontent with her lot in life.

She settled herself at Richelieu, then only a small castle on an island in the river Mable, in the heart of a country terribly disturbed by civil war, and commanded, from the neighbouring hills, by the strongholds of unfriendly neighbours. Here she brought up her children, of whom the second son, François, was the father of Cardinal de Richelieu.

The story goes that a tragic event made François lord of Richelieu. There was a feud, centuries old, between the Du Plessis in their moated castle and the family of Mausson, perched upon the hill. The quarrel had been in abeyance during the peaceable, absentee life of Louis du Plessis, but when his proud widow, with her haughty, passionate boys, took up her abode at Richelieu, it broke out again furiously. Louis, the eldest son, was just growing into manhood, an officer in the Duc de Montpensier’s guards, when he fell out with the Sieur de Mausson over that ancient bone of contention, a seat in church.

Both families attended the village church of Braye, on the forest slope close by. In those days, and long afterwards, the chief gentleman in the parish had rights over the church quite as jealously guarded as any other of his feudal privileges. He sat with his family high up in the choir. He ordered the hour of mass, and the curé did not venture to begin before he arrived. The congregation followed his lead throughout. When he was absent, his servants sat in his place and insolently demanded the honours due to him. His coat of arms was hung up for all to see. If he died, the bells chimed unceasingly for forty days, and the church was hung with black velvet for a year and a day.

It appears that the Sieur de Mausson and the young Seigneur de Richelieu both demanded honours which could not be paid to both. The young man, pushed on by his mother, made an angry resistance to the Mausson claims. His neighbour, by way of settling the question, lay in wait for Louis and murdered him.

Madame de Richelieu thought of nothing but revenge. Her younger son, François, was page to King Charles IX.: she sent for him, and he lived at Richelieu, mother and son with one object, one intention, till the watched-for time came. Then one day, when Mausson was fording the river, François and his men rushed out from the shadow of the willows. They had set a cunning trap for the enemy, a cart-wheel hidden under water, and while his restive horse was plunging, they fell upon him and killed him. So ended the feud between Mausson and Richelieu, still a lingering tradition in the valley of the Mable.

There was not much justice in those days, but it appears that François was obliged to fly the country. He wandered as far as Poland, where Henry of Anjou was playing at being King, and shared in the adventures of that most worthless of the Valois when he ran away with the Polish crown jewels and travelled round by Austria and Venice to succeed Charles IX on the throne of France.

François de Richelieu became Henry’s trusted servant. Certainly there was nothing of the mignon about him. Very tall, thin, solemn and dismal, his looks were suitable to his dreary but necessary office—first Provost of the King’s house, then Grand Provost of France, charged with arresting malefactors and presiding over their punishment. He was known at Court as “Tristan l’Hermite,” so that he must have struck his contemporaries as resembling, not in his office alone, the famous Provost of Louis XI.

François de Richelieu was affianced in early youth, before the Mausson affair drove him abroad, to Suzanne de la Porte, who belonged by birth to the higher bourgeoisie of his native province. Circumstances brought about this marriage, to which one cannot imagine that the proud Françoise de Rochechouart gave a very willing consent.

The family of La Porte, highly respectable, and clever with all the Poitevin shrewdness, possessed estates in Poitou and elsewhere. François de la Porte, the Cardinal’s maternal grandfather, was a brilliant scholar at the University of Poitiers, only second in fame to that of Paris, and first in Europe for the study of Roman law in the original spirit; keen, solid, logical, practical.

François de la Porte became a learned and distinguished advocate in the law-courts of Paris, but did not lose interest in his own province and his neighbours there. He appears to have been specially concerned with the affairs of Louis de Richelieu, who, according to Tallemant, was not only very poor, but “embrouilla furieusement sa maison,” and left his family in real distress. M. de la Porte made himself very useful to Dame Françoise de Richelieu, no doubt partly as to the management of her more distant property, difficult enough in those desperate times, and satisfied the vanity with which his contemporaries credit him by marrying his daughter to her son. The exact date of the marriage does not seem to be known.

As Grand Provost, François de Richelieu had a house in Paris, in the Rue du Bouloy, and all probabilities point to the fact of his son Armand having been born there. He was certainly baptized in Paris, though not till eight months after his birth, the delay being caused partly by his extreme delicacy, partly by the long and dangerous journey from Poitou which had to be made by his grandmother, who was present at the church of Saint-Eustache as one of his sponsors.

The others were two Marshals of France, Armand de Gontaut-Biron and Jean d’Aumont; each of whom gave the child a name. Both these gallant soldiers are celebrated by Voltaire in the Henriade:

Both were intimate friends of the Grand Provost, and joined him later in placing their swords at the command of Henry IV.

The name of François de Richelieu is frequently to be met with in the documents of Henry III.’s reign. He received the highest honour Royalty could bestow, the Order of the Holy Spirit. The King’s personal safety depended largely on him, and allowing for the general corruption of the time, he seems to have performed his duties, often secret and mysterious, with honesty, loyalty, and courage. On that wild day in 1588, when the Duc de Guise had been welcomed by Paris with mad enthusiasm, when the streets were chained and barricaded against the King’s troops, and Henry was escaping from his “ungrateful city,” it was the Grand Provost who checked the pursuers at the Porte de la Conférence. Old writers say that the gate took its name from that circumstance, and tell how “François de Richelieu, Grand Prévôt de France, père du Cardinal de même nom, arrêta les Parisiens qui vouloient suivre le Roi, pour tâcher de le surprendre.”

Luckily for his own fame, this “wise officer” was not an active agent in the murder of the Duc de Guise at Blois, a few months later. But he was sent to the Hôtel de Ville to arrest those dignified citizens whom the King suspected of being concerned in the Guise conspiracy. And in the following summer he performed his last duty towards Henry III. by arresting the miserable monk, Jacques Clément, whom the Duchesse de Montpensier, sister of Guise, had persuaded to earn his salvation by murdering the King, “enemy of the Catholic religion.”

In the confusion that followed Henry’s death, the wise “Tristan” did not trust himself to the faction of the Guises. With other Catholic nobles, and in spite of family traditions, he turned to the one man in whose hands he saw safety for France and himself, the Protestant Henry of Navarre. That clever Prince received him cordially and confirmed him in his appointments. So it came to pass that the nephew of “the Monk” reddened his sword with Catholic blood at Arques and at Ivry, and followed his new King, still as Grand Provost of France, to the camp before Paris. There his career was cut short by a fever in the summer of 1590, at the age of forty-two.