experience, took the measure of everything by the card; a courage rather steady than dashing; take him for all in all, he might be called an excellent captain. King Henry IV. had all this, save the liberality; but to make up for that item, his rank caused expectations as to the future to blossom, which made the hardships of the present go down. He had, amongst his points of superiority to the Duke of Mayenne, a marvellous gift of promptitude and vivacity, and far beyond the average. We have seen him, a thousand times in his life, make pat replies without hearing the purport of a request, and forestall questions without committing himself. The Duke of Mayenne was incommoded by his great bodily bulk, which could not support the burden either of arms or of fatigue duty. The other, having worked all his men to a stand-still, would send for hounds and horses for to begin a hunt; and when his horses could go no farther, he would run down the game afoot. The former communicated his heaviness and his maladies to his army, undertaking no enterprise that he could not support in person; the other communicated his own liveliness to those about him, and his captains imitated him from complaisance and from emulation.”
[Illustration: GABRIELLE D’ESTREES–130]
These politicians, these Christians, these warriors had, in 1600, a grave question to solve for Henry IV., and grave counsel to give him. He was anxious to separate from his wife, Marguerite de Valois, who had, in fact, been separated from him for the last fifteen years, was leading a very irregular life, and had not brought him any children. But, in order to obtain from the pope annulment of the marriage, it was first necessary that Marguerite should consent to it, and at no price would she consent so long as the king’s favorite continued to be Gabrielle d’Estrees, whom she detested, and by whom Henry already had several children. The question arose in in 1598, in connection with a son lately born to Gabrielle, who was constantly spreading reports that she would be the king’s wife. To give consistency to this report she took it into her head to have her son presented at baptism as a child of France, and an order was brought to Sully “to pay what was right to the heralds, trumpeters, and hautbois players who had performed at the baptism of Alexander, Monsieur, child of France.” After looking at the order, Sully detained it, and had another made out, which made no mention of Alexander. The men complained, saying, “Sir, the sum we ought to have for our attendance at the baptism of children of France has for a long while been fixed.” ” Away, away!” said Sully, in a rage; “I’ll do nothing of the sort; there are no children of France.” And he told the king about it, who said, “There’s malice in that, but I will certainly stop it; tear up that order.” And turning to some of his courtiers, “See the tricks that people play, and the traps they lay for those who serve me well and after my own heart. An order hath been sent to M. de Rosny, with the design of offending me if he honored it, or of offending the Duchess of Beaufort if he repudiated it. I will see to it. Go to her, my friend,” he said to Rosny; “tell her what has taken place; satisfy her in so far as you can. If that is not sufficient, I will speak like the master, and not like the man.” Sully went to the cloister of St. Germain, where the Duchess of Beaufort was lodged, and told her that he came by the king’s command to inform her of what was going on. “I am aware of all,” said Gabrielle, “and do not care to know any more; I am not made as the king is, whom you persuade that black is white.” “Ho! ho! madame,” replied Sully, “since you take it in that way, I kiss your hands, and shall not fail to do my duty for all your furies.” He returned to the Louvre and told the king. “Here, come with me,” said Henry; “I will let you see that women have not possession of me, as certain malignant spirits spread about that they have.” He got into Sully’s carriage, went with him to the Duchess of Beaufort’s, and, taking her by the hand, said, “Now, madame, let us go into your room, and let nobody else enter except you, and Rosny, and me. I want to speak to you both, and teach you to be good friends together.” Then, having shut the door quite close, and holding Gabrielle with one hand and Rosny with the other, he said, “Good God! madame, what is the meaning of this? So you would vex me for sheer wantonness of heart in order to try my patience? By God, I swear to you that, if you continue these fashions of going on, you will find yourself very much out in your expectations. I see quite well that you have been put up to all this pleasantry in order to make me dismiss a servant whom I cannot do without, and who has always served me loyally for five and twenty years. By God, I will do nothing of the kind, and I declare to you that if I were reduced to such a necessity as to choose between losing one or the other, I could better do without ten mistresses like you than one servant like him.”
Gabrielle stormed, was disconsolate, wept, threw herself at the king’s feet, and, “seeing him more strong-minded than had been supposed by those who had counselled her to this escapade, began to calm herself,” says Sully, “and everything was set right again on every side.”
But Sully was not at the end of his embarrassments or of the sometimes feeble and sometimes sturdy fancies of his king. On the 10th of April, 1599, Gabrielle d’Estrees died so suddenly that, according to the bias of the times, when, in the highest ranks, crimes were so common that they were always considered possible and almost probable, she was at first supposed to have been poisoned; but there seemed to be no likelihood of this. The consent of Marguerite de Valois to the annulment of her marriage was obtained; and negotiations were opened at Rome by Arnold d’Ossat, who was made a cardinal, and by Brulart de Sillery, ambassador ad hoc. But a new difficulty supervened; not for the negotiators, who knew, or appeared to know, nothing about it, but for Sully. In three or four weeks after the death of Gabrielle d’Estrees Henry IV. was paying court to a new favorite. One morning, at Fontainebleau, just as he was going out hunting, he took Sully by the hand, led him into the first gallery, gave him a paper, and, turning the other way as if he were ashamed to see it read by Sully, “Read that,” said he, “and then tell me your opinion of it.” Sully found that it was a promise of marriage given to Mdlle. Henriette d’Entraigues, daughter of Francis de Balzac, Lord of Entraigues, and Marie Touchet, favorite of Charles IX. Sully went up to the king, holding in his hand the paper folded up.
“What do you think of it?” said the king. “Now, now, speak freely; your silence offends me far more than your most adverse expressions could. I misdoubt me much that you will not give me your approval, if it were only for the hundred thousand crowns that I made you hand over with so much regret; I promise you not to be vexed at anything you can possibly say to me.” “You mean it, sir, and you promise not to be angry with me, whatever I may say or do?” “Yes, yes; I promise all you desire, since for anything you say it will be all the same, neither more nor less.” Thereupon, taking that written promise as if he would have given it back to the king, Sully, instead of that, tore it in two, saying, a “There, sir, as you wish to know, is what I think about such a promise.” “Ha! morbleu, what are you at? Are you mad?” “It is true, sir; I am a madman and fool; and I wish I were so much thereof as to be the only one in France.” “Very well, very well: I understand you,” said the king, “and will say no more, in order to keep my word to you; but give me back that paper.” “Sir,” replied Sully, “I have no doubt your Majesty is aware that you are destroying all the preparatives for your dismarriage, for, this promise once divulged,–and it is demanded of you for no other purpose,–never will the queen, your wife, do the things necessary to make your dismarriage valid, nor indeed will the pope bestow upon it his Apostolic blessing; that I know of my own knowledge.”
The king made no answer, went out of the gallery, entered his closet, asked for pen and ink, remained there a quarter of an hour, wrote out a second paper like that which had just been torn up, mounted his horse without saying a word to Sully whom he met, went hunting, and, during the day, deposited the new promise of marriage with Henriette d’Entraigues, who kept it or had it kept in perfect secrecy till the 2d of July, the time at which her father, the Count of Entiaigues, gave her up to, the king in consideration of twenty thousand crowns cash.
In the teeth of all these incidents, known or voluntarily ignored, the negotiations for the annulment of the marriage of Henry IV. and Marguerite de Valois were proceeded with at Rome by consent of the two parties. Clement VIII. had pronounced on the 17th of December, 1599, and transmitted to Paris by Cardinal de Joyeuse the decree of annulment. On the 6th of January, 1600, Henry IV. gave his ambassador, Brulart de Sillery, powers to conclude at Florence his marriage with Mary de’ Medici, daughter of Francis I. de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Joan, Archduchess of Austria and niece of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I. de’ Medici, who had often rendered Henry IV. pecuniary services dearly paid for. As early as the year 1592 there had been something said about this project of alliance; it was resumed and carried out on the 5th of October, 1600, at Florence with lavish magnificence. Mary embarked at Leghorn on the 17th with a fleet of seventeen galleys; that of which she was aboard, the _General,_ was all covered over with jewels, inside and out; she arrived at Marseilles on the 3d of November, and at Lyons on the 2d of December, where she waited till the 9th for the king, who was detained by the war with Savoy. He entered her chamber in the middle of the night, booted and armed, and next day, in the cathedral-church of St. John, re-celebrated his marriage, more rich in wealth than it was destined to be in happiness. Mary de’ Medici was beautiful in 1592, when she had first been talked about, and her portrait at that time had charmed the king; but in 1600 she was twenty-seven, tall, fat, with round, staring eyes and a forbidding air, and ill dressed. She knew hardly a word of French; and Henriette d’Entraigues, whom the king had made Marquise do Verneuil, could not help exclaiming when she saw her, “So that is the fat bankeress from Florence!”
Henry IV. seemed to have attained in his public and in his domestic life the pinnacle of earthly fortune and ambition. He was, at one and the same time, Catholic king and the head of the Protestant polity in Europe, accepted by the Catholics as the best, the only possible, king for them in France. He was at peace with all Europe, except one petty prince, the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emmanuel I., from whom he demanded back the marquisate of Saluzzo, or a territorial compensation in France itself on the French side of the Alps. After a short campaign, and thanks to Rosny’s ordnance, he obtained what he desired, and by a treaty of January 17, 1601, he added to French territory La Bresse, Le Bugey, the district of Gex, and the citadel of Bourg, which still held out after the capture of the town. He was more and more dear to France, to which he had restored peace at home as well as abroad, and industrial, commercial, financial, monumental, and scientific prosperity, until lately unknown. Sully covered the country with roads, bridges, canals, buildings, and works of public utility. The moment the king, after the annulment of his marriage with Marguerite de Valois, saw his new wife, Mary de’ Medici, at Lyons, she had disgusted him, and she disgusted him more every day by her cantankerous and headstrong temper; but on the 27th of September, 1601, she brought him a son, who was to be Louis XIII. Henry used to go for distraction from his wife’s temper to his favorite, Henriette d’Entraigues, who knew how to please him at the same time that she was haughty and exacting towards him. He set less store upon the peace of his household than upon that of his kingdom; he had established his favorite at the Louvre itself, close beside his wife; and, his new marriage once contracted, he considered his domestic life settled, as well as his political position.
He was mistaken on both points; he was not at the end of either his political dangers or his amorous fancies. Since 1595, his principal companion in arms, or rather his camp-favorite, Charles de Gontaut, Baron de Biron, whom he had made admiral, duke, and marshal of France, was, all the while continuing to serve him in the field, becoming day by day a determined conspirator against him. He had begun by being a reckless gamester; and in that way he lost fifteen hundred thousand crowns, about six millions (of francs) of our day. “I don’t know,” said he, “whether I shall die on the scaffold or not; but I will never come to the poorhouse.” He added, “When peace is concluded, the king’s love-affairs, the scarcity of his largesses, and the discontent of many will lead to plenty of splits, more than are necessary to embroil the most peaceful kingdoms in the world. And, should that fail, we shall find in religion more than we want to put the most lukewarm Huguenots in a passion and the most penitent Leaguers in a fury.” Henry IV. regarded Biron with tender affection. I never loved anybody as I loved him,” he used to say; “I would have trusted my son and my kingdom to him. He has done me good service; but he cannot say that I did not save his life three times. I pulled him out of the enemy’s hands at Fontaine-Francaise so wounded and so dazed with blows, that, as I had acted soldier in saving him, I also acted marshal as regarded the retreat.” Biron nevertheless prosecuted his ambitious designs; the independent sovereignty of Burgundy was what he aspired to, and any alliance, any plot, was welcome as a stepping-stone. “Caesar or nothing,” he would say. “I will not die without seeing my head on a quarter-crown piece.” He entered into flagrant conspiracy with the King of Spain, with the Duke of Savoy, with the French malcontents, the Duke of Bouillon, and the Count of Auvergne. Henry IV. knew it, and made every effort to appear ignorant of it, to win Biron back to him; he paid his debts; he sent him on an embassy he tempted him to confessions which should entitle him to a full pardon. “Let him weep,” he would say, “and I will weep with him; let him remember what he owes me, and I will not forget what I owe him. I were loath that Marshal de Biron should be the first example of my just severity, and that my reign, which has hitherto been calm and serene, should be charged all at once with thunder and lightning.” He employed Rosily to bring Biron to confess. “My friend,” said he, “here is an unhappy man, the marshal. It is a serious case. I am anxious to spare him. I cannot bring myself to harm a man who has courage, who has served me so long and been so familiar with me. My fear is that, though I spare him, he will not spare me or my children, or my kingdom. He would never confess anything to me; he behaves to me like a man who has some mischief in his heart. I beg you to see him. If he is open with you, assure him that he may come to me and I will forgive him with all my heart.” Rosny tried and failed. “It is not I who want to destroy this man,” said the king; “it is he who wants to destroy himself. I will myself tell him that, if he lets himself be brought to justice, he has no mercy whatever to expect from me.” He saw Biron at Fontainebleau, received him after dinner, spoke to him with his usual familiarity, and pointing to his own equestrian statue in marble which was on the mantelpiece, said, “What would the King cf Spain say if he saw me like that, eh?” “He would not be much afraid of you,” answered Biron. Henry gave him a stern look. The marshal tried to take back his words: “I mean, sir, if he were to see you in that statue yonder, and not in your own person.” The retreat was not successful; the shot had taken effect; Henry left the room, went back into his closet, and gave orders to his captain of the guard to arrest him. Then he returned to the room and said, “Marshal, reflect upon what I have said to you.” Biron preserved a frigid silence. “Adieu, Baron de Biron!” said the king, thus by a single word annulling all his dignities, and sending him before his proper judges to answer for his treasons. On the 18th of June, 1602, he brought the marshal before the court of Parliament. The inquiry lasted three weeks. Biron was unanimously condemned to death by a hundred and twenty-seven judges “for conspiracies against the king’s person, attempts upon his kingdom, and treasons and treaties with the enemies of the kingdom.” The king gave to this sentence all the alleviations compatible with public interests. He allowed Biron to make his will, remitted the confiscation of his property, and ordered that the execution should take place at the Bastille, in the presence of certain functionaries, and not on the Place de Greve and before the mob. When Biron found himself convicted and sentenced, he burst into a fury, loaded his judges with insults, and roared out that “if he were driven to despair and frenzy, he would strangle half of those present and force the other half to kill him.” The executioner was obliged to strike him unawares. Those present withdrew dumbfounded at the crime, the prisoner’s rage, the execution, and the scene.
When the question of conspiracies and conspirators–with Spain against France and her king had thus been publicly raised and decided, it entailed another: had the Spanish monks, the Jesuits, to call them by their own name, taken part therein? Should proceedings accordingly be taken against them? They were no longer in France; they had been banished on the 29th of December, 1594, by a solemn decree of Parliament, after John Chatel’s attempt. They were demanding their return. The pope was demanding it for them. If at other times,” they said, “the society had shown hostility to France and her king, it was because, though well received everywhere else, especially in the dominions of the King of Spain, they had met in France with nothing but persecutions and insults. If Henry would be pleased to testify good will towards them, he would soon find them devoted to his person and his throne.” The question was debated at the king’s council, and especially between Henry IV. and Sully when they were together.
[Illustration: Henry IV. and his Ministers—-138]
Sully did not like the return of the Jesuits. “They are away,” said he; “let them remain so. If they return, it will be all very fine for them to wish, and all very fine for them to act; their presence, their discourse, their influence, involuntary though it be, will be opposed to you, will heat your enemies, will irritate your friends; hatred and mistrust will go on increasing.” The king was of a different opinion. “Of necessity,” he said to Sully, “I must now do one of two things: admit the Jesuits purely and simply, relieve them from the defamation and insults with which they have been blasted, and put to the proof all their fine sentiments and excellent promises, or use against them all severities that can be imagined to keep them from ever coming near me and my dominions. In which latter case, there is no doubt it would be enough to reduce them to utter despair, and to thoughts of attempting my life; which would render me miserable or listless, living constantly in suspicion of being poisoned or assassinated, for these gentry have communications and correspondence everywhere, and great dexterity in disposing men’s minds as it seems good to them. It were better for me to be dead, being therein of Caesar’s opinion that the pleasantest death is that which is least foreseen and apprehended.” The king then called to remembrance the eight projected or attempted assassinations which, since the failure of John Chatel, from 1596 to 1603, had been, and clearly established to have been, directed against him. Upon this, Sully at once went over to the king’s opinion. In September, 1603, letters for the restoration of the Jesuits were issued and referred to the Parliament of Paris. They there met, on the 24th of December, with strong opposition and remonstrances that have remained celebrated, the mouthpiece being the premier president Achille de Harlay, the same who had courageously withstood the Duke of Guise. He conjured the king to withdraw his letters patent, and to leave intact the decree which had banished the Jesuits. This was not, he said, the feeling of the Parliament of Paris only, but also of the Parliaments of Normandy and Burgundy; that is, of two thirds of the magistrates throughout the king dom. Henry was touched and staggered. He thanked the Parliament most affectionately; but, “We must not reproach the, Jesuits for the League,” said he; “it was the fault of the times. Leave me to deal with this business. I have managed others far more difficult.” The Parliament obeyed, though with regret, and on the 2d of January, 1604, the king’s letters patent were enregistered.
This was not the only business that Henry had at heart; he had another of another sort, and, for him, more difficult to manage. In February, 1609, he saw, for the first time, at the court of France, Charlotte Marguerite, third daughter of the Constable de Montmorency, only sixteen years old. “There was at that time,” say all contemporaries, “nothing so beautiful under heaven, or more graceful, or more perfect.” Before presenting her at court, her father had promised her to Francis de Bassompierre, descended from a branch of the house of Cloves, thirty years old, and already famous for his wit, his magnificence, and his gallantry. He was one of the principal gentlemen of the chamber to the king. Henry IV. sent for him one morning, made him kneel on a hassock in front of his bed, and said that, obtaining no sleep, he had been thinking of him the night before, and of getting him married. “As for me,” says Bassompierre, “who was thinking of nothing so little as of what he wanted to say to me, I answered that, if it were not for the constable’s gout, it would have already been done. ‘No,’ said he to me, ‘I thought of getting you married to Mlle. d’Aumale, and, in consequence of that marriage, of renewing the Duchy of Aumale in your person.’ I asked him if he wanted me to have two wives. Then he said to me with a deep sigh, ‘Bassompierre, I will speak to thee as a friend. I have become not only enamoured, but mad, beside myself, about Mlle. de Montmorency. If thou wed her and she love thee, I shall hate thee; if she loved me, thou wouldst hate me. It is better that this should not be the cause of destroying our good understanding, for I love thee affectionately and sincerely. I am resolved to marry her to my nephew the Prince of Conde, and keep her near my family. That shall be the consolation and the support of the old age which is coming upon me. I shall give my nephew, who is young and loves hunting ten thousand times better than women, a hundred thousand francs a year to pass his time, and I want no other favor from her but her affection, without looking for anything more.”
Thoroughly astounded and put out as he was, Bassompierre reflected that it was, so far as he was concerned, “an amour modified by marriage,” and that it would be better to give way to the king with a good grace: and, “I withdraw, sir,” he said, on very good terms as regarded Mdlle. de Montmorency as well as himself. The king embraced him, wept, promised to love him dearly, saw him again in the evening in company with Mdlle. de Montmorency, who knew nothing, and conversed a long while with the young princess. When she retired, perceiving that Bassompierre was watching her, she shrugged her shoulders, as if to hint to him what the king had said to her. “I lie not,” says Bassompierre: “that single action pierced me to the heart; I spent two days in tormenting myself like one possessed, without sleeping, drinking, or eating.” Two or three days afterwards the Prince of Conde, announced that he intended to marry Mdlle. de Montmorency. The court and the city talked of nothing but this romance and the betrothal which immediately followed.
Henry IV. was fifty-six. He had been given to gallantry all his life; and he had never been faithful or exacting in his attachments. He was not one of those on whom ridicule fastens as fair prey; but he was so under the dominion of his new passion that the young Princess of Conde, who had at first exclaimed, “Jesus, my God, he is mad!” began to fancy to herself that she would be queen before long. Mary de Medici became jealous and uneasy. She determined to take her precautions, and demanded to be crowned before the king set out on the campaign which, it was said, he was about to commence against Austria in accordance with his grand design and in concert with the Protestant princes of Germany, his allies. The Prince of Conde had a fit of jealousy; he carried off his wife first into Picardy; and then to Brussels, where he left her. Henry IV., in respect, first, of going to see her, then of getting her to come back, then of threatening to go after her out of France, took some wild and puerile steps, which, being coincident with his warlike announcements and preparations, caused some strange language to be used, and were injurious to his personal weight as well as to his government’s character for steadiness. Sully grew impatient and uneasy. Mary de’ Medici was insisting strongly upon being crowned. The prospect of this coronation was displeasing to Henry IV., and he did not conceal it. “Hey! my friend,” he said to Sully: “I know not what is the meaning of it, but my heart tells me that some misfortune will happen to me.” He was sitting on a low chair which had been made for him by Sully’s orders at the Arsenal, thinking and beating his fingers on his spectacle-case; then all on a sudden he jumped up, and slapping his hands upon his thighs, “By God,” he said, “I shall die in this city, and shall never go out of it. They will kill me; I see quite well that they have no other remedy in their dangers but my death. Ah! accursed coronation! Thou wilt be the cause of my death.” “Jesus! Sir,” cried Sully, “what fancy of yours is this? If it continue, I am of opinion that you should break off this anointment and coronation, and expedition and war; if you please to give me orders, it shall soon be done.” “Yes, break off the coronation,” said the king: “let me hear no more about it; I shall have my mind at rest from divers fancies which certain warnings have put into it. To bide nothing from you, I have been told that I was to be killed at the first grand ceremony I should undertake, and that I should die in a carriage.” “You never told me that, sir; and so have I often been astounded to see you cry out when in a carriage, as if you had dreaded this petty peril, after having so many times seen you amidst cannon-balls, musketry, lance-thrusts, pike-thrusts, and sword-thrusts; without being a bit afraid. Since your mind is so exercised thereby, if I were you, I would go away to-morrow, let the coronation take place without you, or put it off to another time, and not enter Paris for a long while, or in a carriage. If you please, I will send word to Notre-Dame and St. Denis to stop everything and to withdraw the workmen.” “I am very much inclined,” said the king; ” but what will my wife say? For she hath gotten this coronation marvellously into her head.” “She may say what she likes; but I cannot think that, when she knows your opinion about it, she will persist any longer.”
Whatever Sully might say, Mary de’ Medici “took infinite offence at the king for his alarms: the matter was disputed for three days, with high words on all sides, and at last the laborers were sent back to work again.”
Henry, in spite of his presentiments, made no change in his plans; he did not go away; he did not defer the queen’s coronation; on the contrary, he had it proclaimed on the 12th of May, 1610, that she would be crowned next day, the 13th, at St. Denis, and that on Sunday, the 16th, she would make her entry into Paris. On Friday, the 14th, he had an idea of going to the Arsenal to see Sully, who was ill; we have the account of this visit and of the king’s assassination given by Malherbe, at that time attached to the service of Henry IV., in a letter written on the 19th of May, from the reports of eye-witnesses, and it is here reproduced, word for word.
[Illustration: The Arsenal in the Reign of Henry IV.—-143]
“The king set out soon after dinner to go to the Arsenal. He deliberated a long while whether he should go out, and several times said to the queen, ‘My dear, shall I go or not?’ He even went out two or three times, and then all on a sudden returned, and said to the queen, ‘My dear, shall I really go?’ and again he had doubts about going or remaining. At last he made up his mind to go, and, having kissed the queen several times, bade her adieu. Amongst other things that were remarked he said to her, ‘I shall only go there and back; I shall be here again almost directly.’ When he got to the bottom of the steps, where his carriage was waiting for him, M. de Praslin, his captain of the guard, would have attended him, but said to him, ‘Get you gone; I want nobody; go about your business.’
“Thus having about him only a few gentlemen and some footmen, he got into his carriage, took his place on the back seat at the left hand side, and made M. d’Epernon sit at the right. Next to him, by the door, were M. de Montbazon and M. de la Force; and by the door on M. d’Epernon’s side were Marshal de Lavardin and M. de Crsqui; on the front seat the Marquis of Mirabeau and the first equerry. When he came to the Croix-du-Tiroir he was asked whither it was his pleasure to go; he gave orders to go towards St. Innocent. On arriving at Rue de la Ferronnerie, which is at the end of that of St. Honors on the way to that of St. Denis, opposite the Salamandre he met a cart, which obliged the king’s carriage to go nearer to the ironmongers’ shops which are on the St. Innocent side, and even to proceed somewhat more slowly, without stopping, however, though somebody, who was in a hurry to get the gossip printed, has written to that effect. Here it was that an abominable assassin, who had posted himself against the nearest shop, which is that with the _Coeur couronng perce d’une fleche,_ darted upon the king, and dealt him, one after the other, two blows with a knife in the left side; one, catching him between the armpit and the nipple, went upwards without doing more than graze; the other catches him between the fifth and sixth ribs, and, taking a downward direction, cuts a large artery of those called venous. The king, by mishap, and as if to further tempt this monster, had his left hand on the shoulder of M. de Montbazon, and with the other was leaning on M. d’Epernon, to whom he was speaking. He uttered a low cry and made a few movements. M. de Montbazon having asked, ‘What is the matter, sir?’ he answered, ‘It is nothing,’ twice; but the second time so low that there was no making sure. These are the only words he spoke after he was wounded.
“In a moment the carriage turned towards the Louvre. When he was at the steps where he had got into the carriage, which are those of the queen’s room, some wine was given him. Of course some one had already run forward to bear the news. Sieur de Csrisy, lieutenant of M. de Praslin’s company, having raised his head, he made a few movements with his eyes, then closed them immediately, without opening them again any more. He was carried up stairs by M. de Montbazon and Count de Curzon en Quercy, and laid on the bed in his closet, and at two o’clock carried to the bed in his chamber, where he was all the next day and Sunday. Somebody went and gave him holy water. I tell you nothing about the queen’s tears; all that must be imagined. As for the people of Paris, I think they never wept so much as on this occasion.”
The grief was deep and general, at the court as well as amongst the people, in the provinces as well as at Paris; and with the grief were mingled surprise and alarm, and an idea, also, that the king had died unhappy and uneasy. On the 14th of May, in the morning, before starting upon his visit to the Arsenal, he had gone to hear mass at the Feuillants’ [order of St. Bernard]; and on his return he said to the Duke of Guise and to Bassompierre, who were in attendance, “You do not understand me now, you and the rest; but I shall die one of these days, and, when you have lost me, you will know my worth and the difference there is between me and other kings.” “My God, sir,” said Bassompierre, “will you never cease vexing us by telling us that you will soon die? You will live, please God, some good, long years. You are only in the flower of your age, in perfect bodily health and strength, full of honor more than any mortal man, in the most flourishing kingdom in the world, loved and adored by your subjects, with fine houses, fine women, fine children who are growing up.” Henry sighed as he said, “My friend, all that must be left.”
These are the last words that are to be found of his in contemporary accounts; a few hours afterwards he was smitten to death in his carriage, brought back to the Louvre, laid out on his bed; one of his councillors of state, M. de Vie, seated on the same bed, had put to his mouth his cross of the order, and directed his thoughts to God; Milon, his chief physician, was at the bedside, weeping: his surgeons wanted to dress his wounds; a sigh died away on his lips, and “It is all over,” said the physician; “he is gone.” Guise and Bassompierre went out to look after what was passing out of doors; they met “M. de Sully with some forty horse, who, when he came up to us, said to us in tearful wise, ‘Gentlemen, if the service ye vowed to the king is impressed upon your souls as deeply as it ought to be with all good Frenchmen, swear all of ye this moment to keep towards the king his son and successor the same allegiance that ye showed him, and to spend your lives and your blood in avenging his death?’ ‘Sir,’ said Bassompierre, ‘it is for us to cause this oath to be taken by others; we have no need to be exhorted thereto;’ Sully turned his eyes upon him, he adds, and then went and shut himself up in the Bastille, sending out to ‘seize and carry off all the bread that could be found in the market and at the bakers’. He also despatched a message in haste to M. de Rohan, his son-in-law, bidding him face about with six thousand Swiss, whose colonel-general he was, and march on Paris.” Henry IV. being dead, it was for France and for the kingship that Sully felt alarm and was taking his precautions.
[Illustration: The Louvre—-145]
CHAPTER XXXVII.—-REGENCY OF MARY DE’ MEDICI. (1610-1617.)
On the death of Henry IV. there was extreme disquietude as well as grief in France. To judge by appearances, however, there was nothing to justify excessive alarm. The edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598) had put an end, so far as the French were concerned, to religious wars. The treaty of Vervins (May 2, 1598) between France and Spain, the twelve years’ truce between Spain and the United Provinces (April 9, 1609), the death of Philip II. (September 13, 1598), and the alliance between France and England seemed to have brought peace to Europe. It might have been thought that there remained no more than secondary questions, such as the possession of the marquisate of Saluzzo and the succession to the duchies of C1eves and Juliers. But the instinct of peoples sees further than the negotiations of diplomats. In the public estimation of Europe Henry IV. was the representative of and the security for order, peace, national and equitable policy, intelligent and practical ideas. So thought Sully when, at the king’s death, he went, equally alarmed and disconsolate, and shut himself up in the arsenal; and the people had grounds for being of Sully’s opinion. Public confidence was concentrated upon the king’s personality. Spectators pardoned, almost with a smile, those tender foibles of his which, nevertheless, his proximity to old age rendered still more shocking. They were pleased at the clear-sighted and strict attention he paid to the education of his son Louis, the dauphin, to whose governess, Madame de Montglas, he wrote, “I am vexed with you for not having sent me word that you have whipped my son, for I do wish and command you to whip him every time he shows obstinacy in anything wrong, knowing well by my own case that there is nothing in the world that does more good than that.” And to Mary de’ Medici herself he added, “Of one thing I do assure you, and that is, that, being of the temper I know you to be of, and foreseeing that of your son, you stubborn, not to say headstrong, madame, and he obstinate, you will verily have many a tussle together.”
[Illustration: Marie de Medicis—-147]
Henry IV. saw as clearly into his wife’s as into his son’s character. Persons who were best acquainted with the disposition of Mary de’ Medici, and were her most indulgent critics, said of her, in 1610, when she was now thirty-seven years of age, “that she was courageous, haughty, firm, discreet, vain, obstinate, vindictive and mistrustful, inclined to idleness, caring but little about affairs, and fond of royalty for nothing beyond its pomp and its honors.” Henry had no liking for her or confidence in her, and in private had frequent quarrels with her. He had, nevertheless, had her coronation solemnized, and had provided by anticipation for the necessities of government. On the king’s death, and at the imperious instance of the Duke of Epernon, who at once introduced the queen, and said in open session, as he exhibited his sword, “It is as yet in the scabbard; but it will have to leap therefrom unless this moment there be granted to the queen a title which is her due according to the order of nature and of justice,” the Parliament forthwith declared Mary regent of, the kingdom. Thanks to Sully’s firm administration, there were, after the ordinary annual expenses were paid, at that time in the vaults of the Bastille or in securities easily realizable, forty-one million three hundred and forty-five thousand livres, and there was nothing to suggest that extraordinary and urgent expenses would come to curtail this substantial reserve. The army was disbanded, and reduced to from twelve to fifteen thousand men, French or Swiss. For a long time past no power in France had, at its accession, possessed so much material strength and so much moral authority.
[Illustration: Concini, Leonora Galigai, and Mary de’ Medici—-149]
But Mary de’ Medici had, in her household and in her court, the wherewithal to rapidly dissipate this double treasure. In 1600, at the time of her marriage, she had brought from Florence to Paris her nurse’s daughter, Leonora Galigai, and Leonora’s husband, Concino Concini, son_ of a Florentine notary, both of them full of coarse ambition, covetous, vain, and determined to make the best of their new position so as to enrich themselves, and exalt themselves beyond measure, and at any price. Mary gave them, in that respect, all the facilities they could possibly desire; they were her confidants, her favorites, and her instruments, as regarded both her own affairs and theirs. These private and subordinate servants were before long joined by great lords, court-folks, ambitious and vain likewise, egotists, mischief-makers, whom the strong and able hand of Henry IV. had kept aloof, but who, at his death, returned upon the scene, thinking of nothing whatever but their own fortunes and their rivalries. They shall just be named here pell-mell, whether members or relatives of the royal family or merely great lords the Condes, the Contis, the Enghiens, the Dukes of Epernon, Guise, Elbeuf, Mayenne, Bouillon, and Nevers, great names and petty characters encountered at every step under the regency of Mary de’ Medici, and, with their following, forming about her a court-hive, equally restless and useless. Time does justice to some few men, and executes justice on the ruck: one must have been of great worth indeed to deserve not to be forgotten. Sully appeared once more at court after his momentary retreat to the arsenal; but, in spite of the show of favor which Mary de’ Medici thought it prudent and decent to preserve towards him for some little time, he soon saw that it was no longer the place for him, and that he was of as little use there to the state as to himself; he sent in, one after the other, his resignation of all his important offices, and terminated his life in regular retirement at Rosny and Sully-sur-Loire. Du Plessis- Mornay attempted to still exercise a salutary influence over his party.
“Let there be no more talk amongst us,” said he, “of Huguenots or Papists; those words are prohibited by our edicts. And, though there were no edict at all, still if we are French, if we love our country, our families, and even ourselves, they ought henceforth to be wiped out of our remembrance. Whoso is a good Frenchman, shall to me be a citizen, shall to me be a brother.” This meritorious and patriotic language was not entirely without moral effect, but it no longer guided, no longer inspired the government; egotism, intrigue, and mediocrity in ideas as well as in feelings had taken the place of Henry IV. Facts, before long, made evident the sad result of this. All the parties, all the personages who walked the stage and considered themselves of some account, believed that the moment had arrived for pushing their pretensions, and lost no time about putting them forward. Those persons we will just pass in review without stopping at any one of them. History has no room for all those who throng about her gates without succeeding in getting in and leaving traces of their stay. The reformers were the party to which the reign of Henry IV. had brought most conquests, and which was bound to strive above everything to secure the possession of them by extracting from them every legitimate and practicable consequence. Mary de’ Medici, having been declared regent, lost no time about confirming, on the 22d of May, 1610, the edict of Nantes and proclaiming religious peace as the due of France. “We have nothing to do with the quarrels of the grandees,” said the people of Paris; “we have no mind to be mixed up with them.” Some of the preachers of repute and of the party’s old leaders used the same language. “There must be nought but a scarf any longer between us,” Du Plessis-Mornay would say. Two great Protestant names were still intact at this epoch: one, the Duke of Sully, without engaging in religious polemics, had persisted in abiding by the faith of his fathers, in spite of his king’s example and attempts to bring him over to the Catholic faith: the other, Du Plessis-Mornay, had always striven, and was continuing to strive, actively for the Protestant cause. These two illustrious champions of the Reformed party were in agreement with the new principles of national right, and with the intelligent instincts of their people, whose confidence they deserved and seemed to possess.
But the passions, the usages, and the suspicions of the party were not slow in reappearing. The Protestants were highly displeased to see the Catholic worship and practices re-established in Bearn, whence Queen Jeanne of Navarre had banished them; the rights of religious liberty were not yet powerful enough with them to surmount their taste for exclusive domination. As a guarantee for their safety, they had been put in possession of several strong places in France; neither the edict of Nantes nor its confirmation by Mary de’ Medici appeared to them a sufficient substitute for this guarantee; and they claimed its continuance, which was granted them for five years. After Henry IV.’s conversion to Catholicism, his European policy had no longer been essentially Protestant; he had thrown out feelers and entered into negotiations for Catholic alliances; and these, when the king’s own liberal and patriotic spirit was no longer there to see that they did not sway his government, became objects of great suspicion and antipathy to the Protestants. Henry had constantly and to good purpose striven against the spirit of religious faction and civil war; anxious, after his death, about their liberty and their political importance, the Reformers reassumed a blind confidence in their own strength, and a hope of forming a small special state in the midst of the great national state. Their provincial assemblies and their national synods were, from 1611 to 1621, effective promoters of this tendency, which before long became a formal and organized design; at Saumur, at Tonneins, at Privas, at Grenoble, at Loudun, at La Rochelle, the language, the movements, and the acts of the party took more and more the character of armed resistance, and, ere long, of civil war; the leaders, old and new.
Duke Henry of Rohan as well as the Duke of Bouillon, the Marquis of La Force as well as the Duke of Lesdiguieres, more or less timidly urged on the zealous Protestants in that path from which the ancient counsels of Sully and Mornay were not successful in deterring them. On the 10th of May, 1621, in the assembly at La Rochelle, a commission of nine members was charged to present and get adopted a, plan of military organization whereby Protestant France, Warn included, was divided into eight circles, having each a special council composed of three deputies at the general assembly, under a chief who had the disposal of all the military forces; with each army-corps there was a minister to preach; the royal moneys, talliages, aid and gabel, were to be seized for the wants of the army; the property of the Catholic church was confiscated, and the revenues therefrom appropriated to the expenses of war and the pay of the ministers of the religion. It was a Protestant republic, organized on the model of the United Provinces, and disposed to act as regarded the French kingship with a large measure of independence. When, after thus preparing for war, they came to actually make it, the Protestants soon discovered their impotence; the Duke of Bouillon, sixty-five years of age and crippled with gout, interceded for them in his letters to Louis XIII., but did not go out of Sedan; the Duke of Lesdiguieres, to whom the assembly had given the command of the Protestants of Burgundy, Provence, and Dauphiny, was at that very moment on the point of abjuring their faith and marching with their enemies. Duke Henry of Rohan himself, who was the youngest, and seemed to be the most ardent, of their new chiefs, was for doing nothing and breaking up. “If you are not disposed to support the assembly,” said the Marquis of Chateauneuf, who had been sent to him to bring him to a decision, “it will be quite able to defend itself without you.” “If the assembly,” said Rohan, feeling his honor touched, “does take resolutions contrary to my advice, I shall not sever myself from the interest of our churches; “and he sacrificed his better judgment to the popular blindness. The Dukes of La Tremoille and of Soubise, and the Marquises of La Force and of Chatillon followed suit. As M. de Sismondi says, to these five lords and to a small number of towns was the strength reduced of the party which was defying the King of France.
Thus, since the death of Henry IV., the king and court of France were much changed: the great questions and the great personages had disappeared. The last of the real chiefs of the League, the brother of Duke Henry of Guise, the old Duke of Mayenne, he on whom Henry, in the hour of victory, would wreak no heavier vengeance than to walk him to a stand-still, was dead. Henry IV.’s first wife, the sprightly and too facile Marguerite de Valois, was dead also, after consenting to descend from the throne in order to make way for the mediocre Mary de’ Medici. The Catholic champion whom Henry IV. felicitated himself upon being able to oppose to Du Plessis-Mornay in the polemical conferences between the two communions, Cardinal de Perron, was at the point of death. The decay was general, and the same amongst the Protestants as amongst the Catholics; Sully and Mornay held themselves aloof or were barely listened to. In place of these eminent personages had come intriguing or ambitious subordinates, who were either innocent of or indifferent to anything like a great policy, and who had no idea beyond themselves and their fortunes. The husband of Leonora Galigai, Concini, had amassed a great deal of money and purchased the Marquisate of Ancre; nay, more, he had been created Marshal of France, and he said to the Count of Bassompiere, “I have learned to know the world, and I am aware that a man, when he has arrived at a certain pitch of prosperity, comes down with a greater run the higher he has mounted. When I came to France, I was not worth a son, and I owed more than eight thousand crowns. My marriage and the queen’s kind favor has given me much advancement, office, and honor; I have worked at making my fortune, and I pushed it forward as long as I saw the wind favorable. So soon as I felt it turning, I thought about beating a retreat and enjoying in peace the large property we have acquired. It is my wife who is opposed to this desire. At every crack of the whip we receive from Fortune, I continue to urge her. God knows whether warnings have been wanting. My daughter’s death is the last, and, if we do not heed it, our downfall is at hand.” Then he quietly made out an abstract of all his property, amounting to eight millions, with which he purposed to buy from the pope the usufruct of the duchy of Ferrara, and leave his son, besides, a fine inheritance. But his wife continued her opposition; it would be cowardly and ungrateful, she said, to abandon the queen: “So that,” cried he, “I see myself ruined without any help for it; and, if it were not that I am under so much obligation to my wife, I would leave her and go some whither where neither grandees nor common folk would come to look after me.”
This modest style of language did not prevent Marshal d’Ancre from occasionally having strange fits of domineering arrogance. “By God, sir,” he wrote to one of his friends, “I have to complain of you; you treat for peace without me; you have caused the queen to write to me that, for her sake, I must give up the suit I had commenced against M. de Montbazon to get paid what he owes me. In all the devils’ names, what do the queen and you take me for? I am devoured to my very bones with rage.” In his dread lest influence opposed to his own should be exercised over the young king, he took upon himself to regulate his amusements and his walks, and prohibited him from leaving Paris. Louis XIII. had amongst his personal attendants a young nobleman, Albert de Luynes, clever in training little sporting birds, called butcher-birds (pies grieches, or shrikes), then all the rage; and the king made him his falconer and lived on familiar terms with him. Playing at billiards one day, Marshal d’Ancre, putting on his hat, said to the king, “I hope your Majesty will allow me to be covered.” The king allowed it, but remained surprised and shocked. His young page, Albert de Luynes, observed his displeasure, and being anxious, himself also, to become a favorite, he took pains to fan it.
[Illustration: Louis XIII. and Albert de Luynes—-154]
A domestic plot was set hatching against Marshal d’Ancre. What was its extent and who were the accomplices in it? This is not clear. However it may have been, on the 24th of April, 1617, M. de Vitry, captain of the guard (_capitaine de quartier_) that day in the royal army which was besieging Soissons, ordered some of his officers to provide themselves with a pistol each in their pockets, and he himself went to that door of the Louvre by which the king would have to go to the queenmother’s. When Marshal d’Ancre arrived at this door, “There is the marshal,” said one of the officers; and Vitry laid hands upon him, saying, “Marshal, I have the king’s orders to arrest you.” “Me!” said the marshal in surprise, and attempting to resist.
[Illustration: Murder of Marshal d’Ancre—-155]
The officer fired upon him, and so did several others. It was never known, or, at any rate, never told, whose shot it was that hit him; but, “Sir,” said Colonel d’Ornano, going up to the young king, “you are this minute King of France: Marshal d’Ancre is dead.” And the young king, before the assembled court, repeated with the same tone of satisfaction, “Marshal d’Ancre is dead.” Baron de Vitry was appointed Marshal of France in the room of the favorite whom he had just murdered. The day after the murder, the mob rushed into the church of St. German- l’Auxerrois, where the body of Marshal d’Ancre had been interred; they heaved up the slabs, hauled the body from the ground, dragged it over the pavement as far as the Pont-Neuf, where they hanged it by the feet to a gallows; and they afterwards tore it in pieces, which were sold, burned, and thrown into the Seine. The ferocious passions of the populace were satisfied; but court-hatred and court-envy were not; they attacked the marshal’s widow, Leonora Galigai. She resided at the Louvre, and, at the first rumor of what had happened, she had sent to demand asylum with the queen-mother. Meeting with a harsh refusal, she had undressed herself in order to protect with her body her jewels which she had concealed in her mattresses. The moment she was discovered, she was taken to the Bastille and brought before the Parliament. She began by throwing all the blame upon her husband; it was he, she said, who had prevented her from retiring into Italy, and who had made every attempt to push his fortunes farther. When she was sentenced to death, Leonora recovered her courage and pride. “Never,” said a contemporary, “was anybody seen of more constant and resolute visage.” “What a lot of people to look at one poor creature!” said she at sight of the crowd that thronged upon her passage. There is nothing to show that her firmness at the last earned her more of sympathy than her weaknesses had brought her of compassion. The mob has its seasons of pitilessness. Leonora Galigai died leaving one child, a son, who was so maltreated that he persisted in refusing all food, and, at last, would take nothing but the sweetmeats that the young queen, Anne of Austria, married two years before to Louis XIII., had the kindness to send him.
We encounter in this very insignificant circumstance a trace of one of those important events which marked the earliest years of Mary de’ Medici’s regency and the influence of her earliest favorites. Concini and his wife, both of them, probably, in the secret service of the court of Madrid, had promoted the marriage of Louis XIII. with the Infanta Anne of Austria, eldest daughter of Philip III., King of Spain, and that of Philip, Infante of Spain, who was afterwards Philip IV., with Princess Elizabeth of France, sister of Louis XIII. Henry IV., in his plan for the pacification of Europe, had himself conceived this idea, and testified a desire for this double marriage, but without taking any trouble to bring it about. It was after his death that, on the 30th of April, 1612, Villeroi, minister of foreign affairs in France, and Don Inigo de Caderiias, ambassador of the King of Spain, concluded this double union by a formal deed. They signed on the same day, at Fontainebleau, between the King and Queen-regent of France on one side and the King, of Spain on the other, a treaty of defensive alliance to the effect “that those sovereigns should give one another mutual succor against such as should attempt anything against their kingdoms or revolt against their authority; that they should, in such case, send one to the other, at their own expense for six months, a body of six thousand foot and twelve hundred horse; that they should not assist any criminal charged with high treason, and should even give them over into the hands of the ambassadors of the king who claimed them.” It is quite certain that Henry IV. would never have let his hands be thus tied by a treaty so contrary to his general policy of alliance with Protestant powers, such as England and the United Provinces; he had no notion of servile subjection to his own policy, but he would have taken good care not to abandon it; he was of those, who, under delicate circumstances, remain faithful to their ideas and promises without systematic obstinacy and with a due regard for the varying interests and requirements of their country and their age. The two Spanish marriages were regarded in France as an abandonment of the national policy; France was, in a great majority, Catholic, but its Catholicism differed essentially from the Spanish Catholicism: it affirmed the entire separation of the temporal power and the spiritual power, and the inviolability of the former by the latter; it refused assent, moreover, to certain articles of the council of Trent. It was Gallican Catholicism, determined to keep a pretty large measure of national independence, political and moral, as opposed to Spanish Catholicism, essentially devoted to the cause of the papacy and of absolutist Austria. Under the influence of this public feeling, the two Spanish marriages and the treaty which accompanied them were unfavorably regarded by a great part of France: a remedy was desired; it was hoped that one would be found in the convocation of the states-general of the kingdom, to which the populace always looked expectantly; they were convoked first for the 16th of September, 1614, at Sens; and, afterwards, for the 20th of October following, when the young king, Louis XIII., after the announcement of his majority, himself opened them in state. Amongst the members there were one hundred and forty of the clergy, one hundred and thirty-two of the noblesse, and one hundred and ninety-two of the third estate. The clergy elected for their president Cardinal de Joyeuse who had crowned Mary de’ Medici; the noblesse Henry de Bauffremont, Baron of Senecey, and the third estate Robert Miron, provost of the tradesmen of Paris.
These elections were not worth much, and have left no trace on history. The chief political fact connected with the convocation of the, states-general of 1614, was the entry into their ranks of the youthful Bishop of Lucon, Armand John dot Plessis de Richelieu, marked out by the finger of God to sustain, after the powerful reign of Henry IV. and the incapable regency of Mary de’ Medici, the weight of the government of France. He was in, two cases elected to the states-general, by the clergy of Loudun and by that of Poitou. As he was born on the 5th of September, 1585, he was but twenty-eight years old in 1614. He had not been destined for the church, and he was pursuing a layman’s course of study at the college of Navarre, under the name of the Marquis de Chillon, when his elder brother, Alphonse Louis du Plessis de Richelieu, became disgusted yith ecclesiastical life, turned Carthusian, and resigned the unpretending bishopric of Lucon in favor of his brother Armand, whom Henry IV. nominated to it in 1605, instructing Cardinal du Perron, at that time his charge d’affaires at Rome, to recommend to Pope Paul V. that election which he had very much at heart. The young prelate betook himself with so much ardor to his theological studies, that at twenty years of age he was a doctor, and maintained his theses in rochet and camail as bishop-nominate. At Rome some objection was still made to his extreme youth; but he hastened thither, and delivered before the pope a Latin harangue, which scattered all objections to the wind. After consecration at Rome, in 1607, he returned to Paris, and hastened to take possession of his see of Lucon, “the poorest and the nastiest in France,” as he himself said. He could support poverty, but he also set great store by riches, and he was seriously anxious for the expenses of his installation. “Taking after you, that is, being a little vain,” he wrote to one of his fair friends, Madame de Bourges, with whom he was on terms of familiar correspondence about his affairs, “I should very much like, being more easy in my circumstances, to make more show: but what can I do? No house; no carriage; furnished apartments are inconvenient; I must borrow a coach, horses, and a coachman, in order to at least arrive at Lucon with a decent turn-out.” He purchased second-hand the velvet bed of one Madame de Marconnay, his aunt; he made for himself a muff out of a portion of his uncle the Commander’s martenskins. Silver-plate he was very much concerned about. “I beg you,” he wrote to Madame de Bourges, “to send me word what will be the cost of two dozen silver dishes of fair size, as they are made now; I should very much like to get them for five hundred crowns, for my resources are not great. I am quite sure that for a matter of a hundred crowns more, you would not like me to have anything common. I am a beggar, as you know; in such sort that I cannot do much in the way of playing the opulent; but at any rate, when I have silver dishes, my nobility will be considerably enhanced.”
He succeeded, no doubt, in getting his silver dishes and his well-appointed episcopal mansion; for when, in 1614, he was elected to the states-general, he had acquired amongst the clergy and at the court of Louis XIII. sufficient importance to be charged with the duty of speaking, in presence of the king, on the acceptance of the acts of the council of Trent, and on the restitution of certain property belonging to the Catholic church in Warn. He made skilful use of the occasion for the purpose of still further exalting and improving the question and his own position. He complained that for a long time past ecclesiastics had been too rarely summoned to the sovereign’s councils, “as if the honor of serving God,” he said, “rendered them incapable of serving the king;” he took care at the same time to make himself pleasant to the mighty ones of the hour; he praised the young king for having, on announcing his majority, asked his mother to continue to watch over France, and “to add to the august title of mother of the king that of mother of the kingdom.” The post of almoner to the queen-regnant, Anne of Austria, was his reward. He carried still further his ambitious foresight; in February, 1615, at the time when the session of the states-general closed, Marshal d’Ancre and Leonora Galigai were still favorites with the queen-mother; Richelieu laid himself out to be pleasant to them, and received from the marshal in 1616 the post of secretary of state for war and foreign affairs. Marshal d’Ancre was at that time looking out for supports against his imminent downfall. When, in 1617, he fell and was massacred, people were astonished to find Richelieu on good terms with the marshal’s court-rival Albert de Luynes, who pressed him to remain in the council at which he had sat for only five months. To what extent was the Bishop of Lucon at that time on terms of understanding with the victor? There is no saying; but to accept the responsibility of the new favorite’s accession was a compromising act. Richelieu judged it more prudent to remain Bishop of Lucon and to wear the appearance of defeat by following Mary de’ Medici to Blois, whither, since the fall of her favorites, she had asked leave to retire. He would there, he said, be more useful to the government of the young king; for, remaining at the side of Mary de’ Medici, he would be able to advise her and restrain her. He so completely persuaded Louis XIII. and Albert de Luynes, that he received orders to set out for Blois with the queen-mother, which he did on the 4th of May, 1617. The Bishop of Lucon, though still young, was already one of the ambitious sort who stake their dignity upon the ultimate success of their fortunes, success gained no matter at what price, by address or by hardihood, by complaisance or by opposition, according to the requirements of facts and times. Dignity apart, the young bishop had accurately measured the expediency of the step he was taking in the interest of his future, high-soaring ambition.
On arriving at Blois with the queen-mother, he began by dividing his life between that petty court in disgrace and his diocese of Lucon. He wished to set Albert de Luynes at rest as to his presence at the court of Mary de’ Medici, the devotion he showed her, and the counsels he gave her. He had but small success, however. The new favorite was suspicious and anxious. Richelieu appeared to be occupied with nothing but the duties of his office; he presided at conferences; and he published, against the Protestants, a treatise entitled _The Complete Christian (De la Perfection du Chretien)_. Luynes was not disposed to believe in these exclusively religious preoccupations; he urged upon the king that Richelieu should not live constantly in the queen-mother’s neighborhood, and in June, 1617, he had orders given him to retire to the courtship of Avignon. Pope Paul V. complained that the Bishop of Lucon was exiled from his diocese. “What is to be done about residence,” said he, “which is due to his bishopric? and what will the world say at seeing him prohibited from going whither his duty binds him to go?” The king answered that he was surprised at the pope’s complaint. “An ecclesiastic,” said he, “could not possibly be in any better place than Avignon, church territory; my lord the Bishop of Lucon is far from finding time for nothing but the exercises of his profession; I have discovered that he indulged in practices prejudicial to my service. He is one of those spirits that are carried away far beyond their duty, and are very dangerous in times of public disorder.”
Richelieu obeyed without making any objection; he passed two years at Avignon, protesting that he would never depart from it without the consent of Luynes and without the hope of serving him. The favor and fortune of the young falconer went on increasing every day. He had, in 1617, married the daughter of the Duke of Montbazon, and, in 1619, prevailed upon the king to have the estate of Maille raised for him to a duchy-peerage under the title of Luynes. In 1621 he procured for himself the dignity of constable, to which he had no military claim. Louis XIII. sometimes took a malicious pleasure in making fun of his favorite’s cupidity and that of his following. “I never saw,” said he, “one person with so many relatives; they come to court by ship-loads, and not a single one of them with a silk dress.” “See,” said he one day to the Count of Bassompierre, pointing to Luynes surrounded by a numerous following: “he wants to play the king, but I shall know how to prevent it; I will make him disgorge what he has taken from me.” Friends at court warned Luynes of this language; and Luynes replied with a somewhat disdainful impertinence, “It is good for me to cause the king a little vexation from time to time: it revives the affection he feels for me.” Richelieu kept himself well informed of court-rumors, and was cautious not to treat them with indifference. He took great pains to make himself pleasant to the young constable. “My lord,” he wrote to him in August, 1621, “I am extremely pleased to have an opportunity of testifying to you, that I shall never have any possession that I shall not be most happy to employ for the satisfaction of the king and yourself. The queen did me the honor of desiring that I should have the abbey of Redon; but the moment I knew that the king and you, my lord, were desirous of disposing of it otherwise, I gave it up with very good cheer, in order that being in your hands you might gratify therewith whomsoever you pleased; assuring you, my lord, that I have more contentment in testifying to you thereby that which you will on every occasion recognize in me, than I should have had by an augmentation of four thousand crowns’ income. The queen is very well, thank God. I think it will be very meet that from time to time, by means of those who are passing, you should send her news of the king and of you and yours, which will give her great satisfaction ” (Letters of Cardinal Richelieu, t. i. p. 690).
Whilst Richelieu was thus behaving towards the favorite with complaisance and modesty, Mary de’ Medici, whose mouthpiece he appeared to be, assumed a different posture, and used different language; she complained bitterly of the slavery and want of money to which she was reduced at Blois; a plot, on the part of both aristocrats and domestics, were contrived by those about her to extricate her; she entered into secret relations with a great, a turbulent, and a malcontent lord, the Duke of Epernon; two Florentine servants, Ruccellai and Vincenti Ludovici, were their go-betweens; and it was agreed that she should escape from Blois and take refuge at Angouleme, a lordship belonging to the Duke of Epernon. She at the same time wrote to the king to plead for more liberty. He replied, “Madame, having understood that you have a wish to visit certain places of devotion, I am rejoiced thereat. I shall be still more pleased if you take a resolution to move about and travel henceforward more than you have done in the past; I consider that it will be of great service to your health, which is extremely precious to me. If business permitted me to be of the party, I would accompany you with all my heart.” Mary replied to him with formal assurances of fidelity and obedience; she promised before God and His angels “to have no correspondence which could be prejudicial to the king’s service, to warn him of all intrigues, which should come to her knowledge, that were opposed to his will, and to entertain no design of returning to court save when it should please the king to give her orders to do so.” There was between the king, the queen-mother, Albert de Luynes, the Duke of Epernon and their agents, an exchange of letters and empty promises which deceived scarcely anybody, and which destroyed all confidence as well as all truthfulness between them. The Duke of Epernon protested that he had no idea of disobeying the king’s commands, but that he thought his presence was more necessary for the king’s service in Angoumois than at Metz. He complained at the same time that for two years past he had received from the court only the simple pay of a colonel at ten months for the year, which took it out of his power to live suitably to his rank. He set out for Metz at the end of January, 1619, saying, ii I am going to take the boldest step I ever took in my life.”
The queen-mother made her exit from Blois on the night between the 21st and 22d of February, 1619, by her closet window, against which a ladder had been placed for the desecnt to the terrace, whence a second ladder was to enable her to descend right down. On arriving at the terrace she found herself so fatigued and so agitated, that she declared it would be impossible to avail herself of the second ladder; she preferred to have herself let down upon a cloak to the bottom of the terrace, which had a slight slant. Her two equerries escorted her along the faubourg to the end of the bridge. Some officers of her household saw her pass without recognizing her, and laughed at meeting a woman between two men, at night and with a somewhat agitated air. “They take me for a bona roba,” said the queen. On arriving at the end of the faubourg of Blois, she did not find her carriage, which was to hwe been waiting for her there. When she had come up with it, there was a casket missing which contained her jewels; there was a hundred thousand crowns’ worth in it; the casket had fallen out two hundred paces from the spot; it was recovered, and the queen-mother got into her carriage and took the road to Loches, where the Duke of Epernon had been waiting for her since the day before. He came to meet her with a hundred and fifty horsemen. Nobody in the household of Mary de’Medici had observed her departure.
Great was the rumors when her escape became known, and greater still when it was learned in whose hands she had placed herself. It was civil war, said everybody. At the commencement of the seventeenth century, there were still two possible and even probable chances of civil war in France; one between Catholics and Protestants, and the other between what remained of the great feudal or quasi-feudal lords and the kingship. Which of the two wars was about to commence? Nobody knew; on one side there was hesitation; the most contradictory moves were made. Louis XIII., when he heard of his mother’s escape, tried first of all to disconnect her from the Duke of Epernon. “I could never have imagined,” said be, “that there was any man who, in time of perfect peace, would have had the audacity, I do not say to carry out, but to conceive the resolution of making an attempt upon the mother of his king . . . ; in order to release you from the difficulty you are in, Madame, I have determined to take up arms to put you in possession of the liberty of which your enemies have deprived you.” And he marched troops and cannon to Angoumois. “Many men,” says Duke Henry of Rohan, “envied the Duke of Epernon his gallant deed, but few were willing to submit themselves to his haughty temper, and everybody, having reason to believe that it would all end in a peace, was careful not to embark in the affair merely to incur the king’s hatred, and leave to others the honors of the enterprise.” The king’s troops were well received wherever they showed themselves; the towns opened their gates to them. “It needs,” said a contemporary, “mighty strong citadels to make the towns of France obey their governors when they see the latter disobedient to the king’s. will.” Several great lords held themselves carefully aloof; others determined to attempt an arrangement between the king and his mother; it was known what influence over her continued to be preserved by the Bishop of Lucon, still in exile at Avignon; he was pressed to return; his confidant, Father Joseph du Tremblay, was of opinion that he should; and Richelieu, accordingly, set out. The governor of Lyons had him arrested at Vienne in Dauphiny, and was much surprised to find him armed with a letter from the king, commanding that he should be allowed to pass freely everywhere. Richelieu was prepared to advise a reconciliation between king and queen-mother, and the king was as much disposed to exert himself to that end as the queen-mother’s friends. At Limoges the Bishop of Lucon was obliged to carefully avoid Count Schomberg, commandant of the royal troops, who was not at all in the secret of the negotiation. When he arrived at Angers a fresh difficulty supervened. The most daring, of the queen-mother’s domestic advisers, Ruccellai, had conceived a hatred of the bishop, and tried to exclude him from the privy council. Richelieu let be, “Certain,” as he said, “that they would soon fall back upon him.” He was one of the patient as well as ambitious, who can calculate upon success, even afar off, and wait for it. The Duke of Epernon supported him; Ruccellai, defeated, left the queen-mother, taking with him some of her most warmly attached servants. When the subordinates were gone, recourse was had, accordingly, to Richelieu. On the 10th of August, 1619, he concluded at Angouleme between the king and his mother a treaty, whereby the king promised to consign to oblivion all that had passed since Blois; the queen-mother consented to exchange her government of Touraine against that of Anjou; and the Duke of Epernon received from the town of Boulogne fifty thousand crowns in recompense for what he had done, and he wrote to the king to protest his fidelity. The queen-mother still hesitated to see her son; but, at his entreaty, she at last sent off the Bishop of Lucon from Angouleme to make preparations for the interview, and, five days afterwards, she set out herself, accompanied by the Duke of Epernon, who halted at the limits of his own government, not caring to come to any closer quarters with so recently reconciled a court. The king received his mother, according to some, in the little town of Cousieres, and, according to others, at Tours or Amboise. They embraced, with tears. “God bless me, my boy, how you are grown!” said the queen. “In order to be of more service to you, mother,” answered the king. The cheers of the people hailed their reconciliation; not without certain signs of disquietude on the part of the favorite, Albert de Luynes, who was an eye-witness. After the interview, the king set out for Paris again; and Mary de’ Medici returned to her government of Anjou to take possession of it, promising, she said, to rejoin her son subsequently at Paris. Du Plessis-Mornay wrote to one of his friends at court, “If you do not get the queen along with you, you have done nothing at all; distrust will increase with absence; the malcontents will multiply; and the honest servants of the king will have no little difficulty in managing to live between them.”
How to live between mother and son without being committed to one or the other, was indeed the question. A difficult task. For three months the courtiers were equal to it; from May to July, 1619, the court and the government were split in two; the king at Paris or at Tours, the queen-mother at Angers or at Blois. Two eminent men, Richelieu amongst the Catholics and Du Plessis-Mornay amongst the Protestants, advised them strongly and incessantly to unite again, to live and to govern together. “Apply yourself to winning the king’s good graces,” said Richelieu to the queen-mother: “support on every occasion the interests of the public without speaking of your own; take the side of equity against that of favor, without attacking the favorites and without appearing to envy their influence.” Mornay used the same language to the Protestants. “Do not wear out the king’s patience,” he said to them: “there is no patience without limits.” Louis XIII. listened to them without allowing himself to be persuaded by them; the warlike spirit was striving within the young man; he was brave, and loved war as war rather than for political reasons. The grand provost of Normandy was advising him one day not to venture in person into his province, saying, “You will find there nothing but revolt and disagreeables.” “Though the roads were all paved with arms,” answered the king, “I would march over the bellies of my foes, for they have no cause to declare against me, who have offended nobody. You shall have the pleasure of seeing it; you served the late king my father too well not to rejoice at it.” The queenmother, on her side, was delighted to see herself surrounded at Angers by a brilliant court; and the Dukes of Longueville, of La Tremoille, of Retz, of Rohan, of Mayenne, of Epernon, and of Nemours, promised her numerous troops and effectual support. She might, nevertheless, have found many reasons to doubt and wait for proofs. The king moved upon Normandy; and his quartermasters came to assign quarters at Rouen. “Where have you left the king?” asked the Duke of Longueville. “At Pontoise, my lord; but he is by this time far advanced, and is to sleep to-night at Magny.” “Where do you mean to quarter him here?” asked the duke. “In the house where you are, my lord.” “It is right that I yield him place,” said the duke, and the very same evening took the road back to the district of Caux. It was under this aspect of public feeling that an embassy from the king and a pacific mission from Rome came, without any success, to Rangers, and that on the 4th of July, 1619, a fresh civil war between the king and the partisans of the queen-mother was declared.
It was short and not very bloody, though pretty vigorously contested. The two armies met at Ponts de Ce; they had not, either of them, any orders or any desire to fight; and pacific negotiations were opened at La Fleche. The queen-mother declared that she had made up her mind to live henceforth at her son’s court, and that all she desired was to leave honorably the party with which she was engaged. That was precisely the difficulty. The king also declared himself resolved to receive his mother affectionately; but he required her to abandon the lords of her party, and that was what she could not make up her mind to do. In the unpremeditated conflict that took place at Ponts de Ce, the troops of the queen-mother were beaten. “They had two hundred men killed or drowned,” says Bassompierre, “and about as many taken prisoners.” This reverse silenced the queen’s scruples; there was clearly no imperative cause for war between her and the king, and the queen’s partisans could not be blind to the fact that, if the struggle were prolonged, they would be beaten.
The kingship had the upper hand in the country, and a consent was given to the desired arrangements. “Assure the king that I will go and see him to-morrow at Brissac,” said the queen-mother. “I am perfectly satisfied with him, and all I think of is to please him, and pray God for him personally, and for the prosperity of his kingdom.” A treaty was concluded at Angers on the 10th of August, 1620; the queen-mother returned to Paris; and the civil war at court was evidently, not put an end to never to recur, but stricken with feebleness and postponed.
Two men of mark, Albert de Luynes and Richelieu, came out of this crisis well content. The favorite felicitated himself on the king’s victory over the queen-mother, for he might consider the triumph as his own; he had advised and supported the king’s steady resistance to his mother’s enterprises. Besides, he had gained by it the rank and power of constable; it was at this period that he obtained them, thanks to the retirement of Lesdiguieres, who gave them up to assume the title of marshal-general of the king’s camps and armies. The royal favor did not stop there for Luynes; the keeper of the seals, Du Vair, died in 1621; and the king handed over the seals to the new constable, who thus united the military authority with that of justice, without being either a great warrior or a great lawyer. All he had to do was to wait for an opportunity of displaying his double power. The defaults of the French Protestants soon supplied one. In July, 1567, Henry IV.’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret, on becoming Queen of Navarre, had, at the demand of the Estates of Bearn, proclaimed Calvinism as the sole religion of her petty kingdom; all Catholic worship was expressly forbidden there; religious liberty, which Protestants everywhere invoked, was proscribed in Bearn; moreover, ecclesiastical property was confiscated there. The Catholics complained, loudly; the Kings of France were supporters of their plaint; it had been for a long time past repudiated or eluded; but on the 13th of August, 1620, Louis XIII. issued two edicts for the purpose of restoring in Bearn free Catholic worship, and making restitution of their property to the ecclesiastical establishments. The council of Pau, which had at first repudiated them, hastened to enregister these edicts in the hope of retarding at least their execution; but the king said, “In two days I shall be at Pau; you want me there to assist your weakness.” He was asked how he would be received at Pau. “As sovereign of Warn,” said he. “I will dismount first of all at the church, if there be one; but, if not, I want no canopy or ceremonial entry; it would not become me to receive honors in a place where I have never been, before giving thanks to God, from whom I hold all my dominions and all my power.” Religious liberty was thus reestablished at Pau. “It is the king’s intention,” said the Duke of Montmorency to the Protestants of Villeneuve-de-Berg, who asked that they might enjoy the liberty promised them by the edicts, “that all his subjects, Catholic or Protestant, be equally free in the exercise of their religion; you shall not be hindered in yours, and I will take good care that you do not hinder the Catholics in theirs.” The Duke of Montmorency did not foresee that the son and successor of the king in whose name he was so energetically proclaiming religious liberty, Louis XIV., would abolish the edict of Nantes whereby his grandfather, Henry IV., had founded it. Justice and iniquity are often all but contemporary.
It has just been said that not only Luynes, but Richelieu too, had come well content out of the crisis brought about by the struggle between Louis XIII. and the queen-mother. Richelieu’s satisfaction was neither so keen nor so speedy as the favorite’s. Pope Paul V. had announced, for the 11th of January, 1621, a promotion of ten cardinals. At the news of this, the queen-mother sent an express courier to Rome with an urgent demand that the Bishop of Lucon should be included in the promotion. The Marquis of Coeuvres, ambassador of France at Rome, insisted rather strongly, in the name of the queen-mother and of the Duke of Luynes, from whom he showed the pope some very pressing letters. The pope, in surprise, gave him a letter to read in the handwriting of King Louis XIII., saying that he did not at all wish the Bishop of Lucon to become cardinal, and begging that no notice might be taken of any recommendations which should be forwarded on the subject. The ambassador, greatly surprised in his turn, ceased to insist. It was evidently the doing of the Duke of Luynes, who, jealous of the Bishop of Lucon and dreading his influence, had demanded and obtained from the king this secret measure. It was effectual; and, at the beginning of the year 1621, Richelieu had but a vague hope of the hat. He had no idea, when he heard of this check, that at the end of a few months Luynes would undergo one graver still, would die almost instantaneously after having practised a policy analogous to that which Richelieu was himself projecting, and would leave the road open for him to obtain the cardinal’s hat, and once more enter into the councils of the king, who, however, said to the queen-mother, “I know him better than you, madame; he is a man of unbounded ambition.”
The two victories won in 1620 by the Duke of Luynes, one over the Protestants by the re-establishment in Warn of free worship for the Catholics, and the other over his secret rival Richelieu, by preventing him from becoming cardinal, had inspired him with great confidence in his good fortune. He resolved to push it with more boldness than he had yet shown. He purposed to subdue the Protestants as a political party whilst respecting their religious creed, and to reduce them to a condition of subjection in the state whilst leaving them free, as Christians, in the church. A fundamentally contradictory problem; for the different liberties are closely connected, one with another, and have need to be security one for another; but, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, people were not so particular in point of consequence, and it was thought possible to give religious liberty its guarantees whilst refusing them to general political liberty. That is what the Duke of Luynes attempted to do; to all the towns to which Henry IV. had bound himself by the edict of Nantes, he made a promise of preserving to them their religious liberties, and he called upon them at the same time to remain submissive and faithful subjects of the sovereign kingship. La Rochelle, Montauban, Saumur, Sancerre, Charite-sur-Loire, and St. Jean d’Angely were in this category; and it was to Montauban, as one of the most important of those towns, that Louis XIII. first addressed his promise and his appeal, inconsistent one with the other.
Some years previously, in May, 1610, amidst the grief and anxiety awakened by the assassination of Henry IV. by Ravaillac, the population of Montauban had maintained and testified a pacific and moderate disposition. The synod was in assembly when the news of the king’s death arrived there. We read in the report of the town-council, under date of May 19, 1610,
“The ecclesiastics (Catholic) having come to the council, the consuls gave them every assurance for their persons and property, and took them under the protection and safeguard of the king and the town, without suffering or permitting any hurt, wrong, or displeasure to be done them. . . . The ecclesiastics thanked them, and protested their desire to live and die in that town, as good townsmen and servants of the king . .” On the 22d of May, in a larger council-general, the council gives notice to the Parliament of Toulouse that everything shall remain peaceable. . . . Consul Beraud moves that “every one take forthwith the oath of fidelity we owe to his Majesty, and that every one also testify, by acclamation, his wishes and desires for the prosperity and duration of his reign.”
Ten years later, in 1620, the disposition of the Protestants was very much changed; distrust and irritation had once more entered into their hearts. Henry IV. was no longer there to appease them or hold them in. The restoration of the freedom of Catholic worship in Warn had alarmed and offended them as a violation of their own exclusive right proclaimed by Jeanne d’Albret. In January, 1621, during an assembly held at La Rochelle, they exclaimed violently against what they called “the woes experienced by their brethren of Warn.” Louis XIII. considered their remonstrances too arrogant to be tolerated. On the 24th of April, 1621, by a formal declaration, he confirmed all the edicts issued in favor of the liberty of Protestants, but with a further announcement that he would put down with all the rigor of the laws those who did not remain submissive and tranquil in the enjoyment of their own rights. This measure produced amongst the Protestants a violent schism. Some submitted, and their chiefs gave up to the king the places they commanded. On the 10th of May, 1621, Saumur opened her gates to him. Others, more hot-tempered and more obstinate, persisted in their remonstrances. La Rochelle, Montauban, and St. Jean d’Angely took that side. Duke Henry of Rohan and the Duke of Soubise, his brother, supported them in their resistance. Rohan went to Montauban, and, mounting into the pulpit, said to the assembly, “I will not conceal from you that the most certain conjecture which can be formed from the current news is, that in a short time the royal army will camp around your walls, since St. Jean d’Angely is surrendered, and all that remains up to here is weakened, broken down, and ready to receive the yoke, through the factions of certain evil spirits. I have no fear lest the consternation and cowardice of the rest should reach by contagion to you. In days past you swore in my presence the union of the churches. Of a surety we will get peace restored to you here. I pray you to have confidence in me, that on this occasion I will not desert you, whatever happen. Though there should be but two men left of my religion, I will be one of the two. My houses and my revenues are seized, because I would not bow beneath the proclamation. I have my sword and my life left. Three stout hearts are better than thirty that quail.”
The whole assembly vehemently cheered this fiery speech. The premier consul of Montauban, Dupuy, swore to live and die in the cause of union of the churches. “The Duke of Rohan exerted himself to place Montauban in a position to oppose a vigorous resistance to the royal troops. Consul Dupuy, for his part, was at the same time collecting munitions and victuals.” It was announced that the king’s army was advancing; and reports were spread, with the usual exaggeration, of the deeds of violence it was already committing. “At the news thereof, every nerve is strained to advance the fortifications “there is none that shirks, of whatever age, or sex, or condition; every other occupation ceases; night serves to render the day’s work bigger; the inhabitants are all a-sweat, soiled with dust, laden with earth.” Whilst the multitude was thus working pell-mell to put the town substantially in a state of defence, the warlike population, gentlemen and burgesses, were arming and organizing for the struggle. They had chosen for their chief a younger son of Sully’s, Baron d’Orval, devoted to the Protestant cause, even to the extent of rebellion, whilst his elder brother, the Marquis of Rosny, was serving in the royal army. Their aged father, Sully, went to Montauban to counsel peace; not that he exactly blamed the resistance, but he said that it would be vain, and that a peace on good terms was possible. He was listened to with respect, though he was not believed, and though the struggle was all the while persisted in. The royal army, with a strength of twenty thousand men, and commanded by the young Duke of Mayenne, son of the great Leaguer, came up on the 18th of August, 1621, to besiege Montauban, with its population of from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand. Besiegers and besieged were all of them brave; the former the more obstinate, the latter the more hare-brained and rash. The siege lasted two months and a half with alternate successes and reverses. The people of the town were directed and supported by commissions charged with the duty of collecting meal, preparing quarters for the troops, looking after the sick and wounded, and distributing ammunition. “Day and night, from hour to hour, one of the consuls went to inspect these services. All was done without confusion, without a murmur. Ministers of the Reformed church, to the number of thirteen, were charged to keep up the enthusiasm with chants, psalms, and prayers. One of them, the pastor Chamier, was animated by a zealous and bellicose fanaticism; he was never tired of calling to mind the calamities undergone by the towns that had submitted to the royal army; he was incessantly comparing Montauban to Bethulia, Louis XIII. to Nabuchodonosor, the Duke of Mayenne to Holofernes, the Montalbanese to the people of God, and the Catholics to the Assyrians. The indecision and diversity of views in the royal camp formed a singular contrast to the firm resolution, enthusiasm, and union which prevailed in the town. On the 16th and 17th of August the king passed his army in review; several captains were urgent in dissuading him from prosecuting the siege; they proposed to build forts around Montauban, and leave there the Duke of Mayenne “to harass the inhabitants, make them consume both their gunpowder and their tooth-powder, and, peradventure, bring them to a composition.” But the self-respect of the king and of the army was compromised; the Duke of Luynes ardently desired to change his name for that of Duke of Montauban; there was promise of help from the Prince of Conde and the Duke of Vendome, who were commanding, one in Berry and the other in Brittany. These personal interests and sentiments carried the day; the siege was pushed forward with ardor, although without combined effort; the Duke of Mayenne was killed there on the 16th of September, 1621; and, amongst the insurgents, the preacher Chamier met, on the 17th of October, the same fate. It was in the royal army and the government that fatigue and the desire of putting a stop to a struggle so costly and of such doubtful issue first began to be manifested. And, at the outset, in the form of attempts at negotiation. The Duke of Luynes himself had a proposal made to the Duke of Rohan, who was in residence at Castres, for an interview, which Rohan accepted, notwithstanding the mistrust of the people of Castres, and of the majority of his friends. The conference was held at a league’s distance from Montauban. After the proper compliments, Luynes drew Rohan aside into an alley alone, and, “I thank you,” he said, “for having put trust in me; you shall not find it misplaced; your safety is as great here as in Castres. Having become connected with you, I desire your welfare; but you deprived me, whilst my favor lasted, of the means of procuring the greatness of your house. You have succored Montauban in the very teeth of your king. It is a great feather in your cap; but you must not make too much of it. It is time to act for yourself and your friends. The king will make no general peace; treat for them who acknowledge you. Represent to them of Montauban that their ruin is but deferred for a few days; that you have no means of helping them. For Castres and other places in your department, ask what you will, and you shall obtain it. For your own self, anything you please (carte blanche) is offered you. . . . If you will believe me, you will get out of this miserable business with glory, with the good graces of the king, and with what you desire for your own fortunes, which I am anxious to promote so as to be a support to mine.”
Rohan replied, “I should be my own enemy if I did not desire my king’s good graces and your friendship. I will never refuse from my king benefits and honors, or from you the offices of a kind connection. I do well consider the peril in which I stand; but I beg you also to look at yours. You are universally hated, because you alone possess what everybody desires. Wars against them of the religion have often commenced with great disadvantages for them; but the restlessness of the French spirit, the discontent of those not in the government, and the influence of foreigners have often retrieved them. If you manage to make the king grant us peace, it will be to his great honor and advantage, for, after having humbled the party, without having received any check, and without any appearance of division within or assistance from without, he will have shown that he is not set against the religion, but only against the disobedience it covers, and he will break the neck of other parties without having met with anything disagreeable. But, if you push things to extremity, and the torrent of your successes does not continue,–and you are on the eve of seeing it stopped in front of Montauban,–every one will recover his as yet flurried senses, and will give you a difficult business to unravel. Bethink you that you have gathered in the harvest of all that promises mingled with threats could enable you to gain, and that the remnant is fighting for the religion in which it believes. For my own part, I have made up my mind to the loss of my property and my posts; if you have retarded the effects thereof on account of our connection, I am obliged to you for it; but I am quite prepared to suffer everything, since my mind is made up, having solemnly promised it and my conscience so bidding me, to hear of nothing but a general peace.”
The reply was worthy of a great soul devoted to a great cause, a soul that would not sacrifice to the hopes of fortune either friends or creed. It was a mark of Duke Henry of Rohan’s superior character to take account, before everything, of the general interests and the moral sentiments of his party. The chief of the royal party, the Duke of Luynes, was, on the contrary, absorbed in the material and momentary success of his own personal policy; he refused to treat for a general peace with the Protestants, and he preferred to submit to a partial and local defeat before Montauban, rather than be hampered with the difficulties of national pacification. At a council held on the 26th of October, 1621, it was decided to publicly raise the siege. The king and the royal army departed in November from the precincts of Montauban, which they purposed to attack afresh on the return of spring: the king was in a hurry to go and receive at Toulouse the empty acclamations of the mob, and he ordered Luynes to go and take, on the little town of Monheur, in the neighborhood of Toulouse, a specious revenge for his check before Montauban. Monheur surrendered on the 11th of December, 1621. Another little village in the neighborhood, Negrepelisse, which offered resistance to the royal army, was taken by assault, and its population infamously massacred. But in the midst of these insignificant victories, on the 14th of December, 1621, the royal favorite, the constable, interim keeper of the seals, Duke Albert of Luynes, had an attack of malignant fever, and died in three days at the camp of Longueville. “What was marvellously surprising, and gave a good idea of the world and its vanity,” says his contemporary, the Marquis of Fontaine Mareuil, “was that this man, so great and so powerful, found himself, nevertheless, to such a degree abandoned and despised, that for two days, during which he was in agony, there was scarcely one of his people who would stay in his room, the door being open all the time, and anybody who pleased coming in, as if he had been the most insignificant of men; and when his body was taken to be interred, I suppose, to his duchy of Luynes, instead of priests to pray for him, I saw some of his valets playing piquet on his bier whilst they were having their horses baited.”
It was not long before magnificence revisited the favorite’s bier. “On the 11th of January, 1622, his mortal remains having arrived at Tours, all the religious bodies went out to receive it; the constable was placed in a chariot drawn by six horses, accompanied by pages, Swiss, and gentlemen in mourning. He was finally laid in the cathedral-church, where there took place a service which was attended by Marshal de Lesdiguieres, the greatest lords of the court, the judicature, and the corporation. It is a contemporary sheet, the _Mercure Francais,_ which has preserved to us these details as to the posthumous grandeur of Albert de Luynes, after the brutal indifference to which he had been subjected at the moment of his death.
His brothers after him held a high historical position, which the family have maintained, through the course of every revolution, to the present day; a position which M. Cousin took pleasure in calling to mind, and which the last duke but one of Luynes made it a point of duty to commemorate by raising to Louis XIII. a massive silver statue almost as large as life, the work of that able sculptor, M. Rudde, which figured at the public exhibition set on foot by Count d’Haussonville, in honor of the Alsace-Lorrainers whom the late disasters of France drove off in exile to Algeria.
Richelieu, when he had become cardinal, premier minister of Louis XIII. and of the government of France, passed a just but severe judgment upon Albert de Luynes. “He was a mediocre and timid creature,” he said, “faithless, ungenerous, too weak to remain steady against the assault of so great a fortune as that which ruined him incontinently; allowing himself to be borne away by it as by a torrent, without any foothold, unable to set bounds to his ambition, incapable of arresting it, and not knowing what he was about, like a man on the top of a tower, whose head goes round and who has no longer any power of discernment. He would fain have been Prince of Orange, Count of Avignon, Duke of Albret, King of Austrasia, and would not have refused more if he had seen his way to it.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ p. 169, in the _Petitot Collection,_ Series v., t. xxii.]
This brilliant and truthful portrait lacks one feature which was the merit of the Constable de Luynes: he saw coming, and he anticipated, a long way off and to little purpose, but heartily enough, the government of France by a supreme kingship, whilst paying respect, as long as he lived, to religious liberty, and showing himself favorable to intellectual and literary liberty, though he was opposed to political and national liberty. That was the government which, after him, was practised with a high hand and rendered triumphant by Cardinal Richelieu to the honor, if not the happiness, of France.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.—-LOUIS XIII., CARDINAL RICHELIEU, AND THE COURT. (1622-1642.)
The characteristic of Louis XIV.’s reign is the uncontested empire of the sovereign over the nation, the authority of the court throughout the country. All intellectual movement proceeded from the court or radiated about it; the whole government, whether for war or peace, was concentrated in its hands. Conde, Turenne, Catinat, Luxembourg, Villars, Vendome belonged, as well as Louvois or Colbert, to the court; from the court went the governors and administrators of provinces; there was no longer any greatness existing outside of the court; there were no longer any petty private courts. As for the state, the king was it.
For ages past, France had enjoyed the rare good fortune of seeing her throne successively occupied by Charlemagne and Charles V., by St. Louis and Louis XI., by Louis XII., Francis I. and Henry IV., great conquerors or wise administrators, heroic saints or profound politicians, brilliant knights or models of patriot-kings. Such sovereigns had not only governed, but also impressed the imagination of the people; it was to them that the weak, oppressed by the great feudal lords, had little by little learned to apply for support and assistance; since the reign of Francis I., especially, in the midst of the religious struggles which had caused division amongst the noblesse and were threatening to create a state within the state, the personal position of the grandees, and that of their petty private courts, had been constantly diminishing in importance; the wise policy, the bold and prudent courage of Henry IV., and his patriotic foresight had pacified hatred and stayed civil wars; he had caused his people to feel the pleasure and pride of being governed by a man of a superior order. Cardinal Richelieu, more stern than Henry IV., set his face steadily against all the influences of the great lords; he broke them down one after another; he persistently elevated the royal authority; it was the hand of Richelieu which made the court and paved the way for the reign of Louis XIV. The Fronde was but a paltry interlude and a sanguinary game between parties. At Richelieu’s death, pure monarchy was founded.
[Illustration: RICHELIEU—-180]
In the month of December, 1622, the work was as yet full of difficulty. There were numerous rivals for the heritage of royal favor that had slipped from the dying hands of Luynes. The Prince of Conde, a man of ability and moderation, “a good managing man (_homme de bon menage_),” as he was afterwards called by the cardinal, was the first to get possession of the mind of the king, at that time away from his mother, who was residing at Paris. “It was not so much from dislike that they opposed her,” says Richelieu, “as from fear lest, when once established at the king’s council, she might wish to introduce me there. They acknowledged in me some force of judgment; they dreaded my wits, fearing lest, if the king were to take special cognizance of me, it might come to his committing to me the principal care of his affairs.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. ii. p. 193.] On returning to Paris, the king, nevertheless, could not refuse this gratification to his mother. However, “the prince, who was in the habit of speaking very freely, and could not be mum about what he had on his mind, permitted himself to go so far as to say that she had been received into the council on two conditions, one, that she should have cognizance of nothing but what they pleased, and the other, that, though only a portion of affairs was communicated to her, she would serve as authority for all in the minds of the people.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. ii. p. 194.] In fact, the queen-mother quite perceived that she was only shown the articles in the window, and did not enter the shop; “but, with all the prudence and patience of an Italian, when she was not carried away by passion, she knew how to practise dissimulation towards the Prince of Conde and his allies, Chancellor Sillery and his son Puisieux, secretary of state. She accompanied her son on an expedition against the Huguenots of the South, which she had not advised, “foreseeing quite well that, if she were separated from the king, she would have no part either in peace or war, and that, if they got on without her for ten months, they would become accustomed to getting on without her.” She had the satisfaction of at last seeing the Bishop of Lucon promoted to the cardinalship she had so often solicited for him in vain; but, at the same time, the king called to the council Cardinal Rochefoucauld, “not through personal esteem for the old cardinal,” says Richelieu, “but to cut off from the new one all hope of a place for which he might be supposed to feel some ambition.” Nevertheless, in spite of his enemies’ intrigues, in spite of a certain instinctive repugnance on the part of the king himself, who repeated to his mother, “I know him better than you, madame; he is a man of unbounded ambition,” the “new cardinal” was called to the council at the opening of the year 1624, on the instance of the Marquis of La Vieuville, superintendent of finance and chief of the council, who felt himself unsteady in his position, and sought to secure the favor of the queen-mother. It was as the protege and organ of Mary de’ Medici that the cardinal wrote to the Prince of Conde, on the 11th of May, 1624, “The king having done me the honor to place me on his council, I pray God with all my heart to render me worthy of serving him as I desire; and I feel myself bound thereto by every sort of consideration. I cannot sufficiently thank you for the satisfaction that you have been pleased to testify to me thereat. Therefore would I far rather do so in deed by serving you than by bootless words. And in that I cannot fail without failing to follow out the king’s intention. I have made known to the queen the assurance you give her by your letter of your affection, for which she feels all the reciprocity you can desire. She is the more ready to flatter herself with the hope of its continuance, in that she will be very glad to incite you thereto by all the good offices she has means of rendering you with His Majesty.” [_Lettres du Cardinal de Richelieu,_ t. ii. p. 5.] On the 12th of August, however, M. de la Vieuville fell irretrievably, and was confined in the castle of Amboise. A pamphlet of the time had forewarned him of the danger which threatened him when he introduced Richelieu into the council. “You are both of the same temper,” it said; “that is, you both desire one and the same thing, which is, to be, each of you, sole governor. That which you believe to be your making will be your undoing.”
From that moment the cardinal, in spite of his modest resistance based upon the state of his health, became the veritable chief of the council. “Everybody knew that, amidst the mere private occupations he had hitherto had, it would have been impossible for him to exist with such poor health, unless he took frequent recreation in the country.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. ii. p. 289.] Turning his attention to founding his power and making himself friends, he authorized the recall of Count Schomberg, lately disgraced, and of the Duke of Anjou’s, the king’s brother’s, governor, Colonel Ornano, imprisoned by the Marquis of La Vieuville. He, at the same time, stood out against the danger of concentrating all the power of the government in a single pair of hands. “Your Majesty,” he said, “ought not to confide your public business to a single one of your councillors and hide it from the rest; those whom you have chosen ought to live in fellowship and amity in your service, not in partisanship and division. Every time, and as many times as a single one wants to do everything himself, he wants to ruin himself; but in ruining himself he will ruin your kingdom and you, and as often as any single one wants to possess your ear and do in secret what should be resolved upon openly, it must necessarily be for the purpose of concealing from Your Majesty either his ignorance or his wickedrnpss.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. ii. p. 349.] Prudent rules and acute remarks, which Richelieu, when he became all-powerful, was to forget.
Eighteen months had barely rolled away when Colonel Ornano, lately created a marshal at the Duke of Anjou’s request, was again arrested and carried off a prisoner “to the very room where, twenty-four years ago, Marshal Biron had been confined.” For some time past “it had been current at court and throughout the kingdom that a great cabal was going on,” says Richelieu in his _Memoires,_ “and the cabalists said quite openly that under his ministry, men might cabal with impunity, for he was not a dangerous enemy.” If the cabalists had been living in that confidence, they were most wofully deceived. Richelieu was neither meddlesome nor cruel, but he was stern and pitiless towards the sufferings as well as the supplications of those who sought to thwart his policy. At this period, he wished to bring about a marriage between the Duke of Anjou, then eighteen years old, and Mdlle. de Montpensier, the late Duke of Montpensier’s daughter, and the richest heiress in France. The young prince did not like it. Madame de Chevreuse, it was said, seeing the king an invalid and childless, was already anticipating his death, and the possibility of marrying his widowed queen to his successor. “I should gain too little by the change,” said Anne of Austria one day, irritated by the accusations of which she was the object. Divers secret or avowed motives had formed about the Duke of Anjou what was called the “aversion” party, who were opposed to his marriage; but the arrest of Colonel Ornano dismayed the accomplices for a while. The Duke of Anjou protested his fidelity to his brother, and promised the cardinal to place in the king’s hands a written undertaking to submit his wishes and affections to him. The intrigue appeared to have been abandoned. But the “_dreadful (epouvantable) faction,_” as the Cardinal calls it in his _Memoires,_ conspired to remove the young prince from the court. The Duke of Vendome, son of Henry IV. and Gabrielle d’Estrees, had offered him an asylum in his government of Brittany; but the far-sighted policy of the minister took away this refuge from the heir to the throne, always inclined as he was to put himself at the head of a party. The Duke of Vendome and his brother the Grand Prior, disquieted at the rumors which were current about them, hastened to go and visit the king at Blois. He received them with great marks of affection. “Brother,” said he to the Duke of Vendome, laying his hand upon his shoulder, “I was impatient to see you.” Next morning, the 15th of June, the two princes were arrested in bed. “Ah! brother,” cried Vendome, “did not I tell you in Brittany that we should be arrested?” “I wish I were dead, and you were there,” said the Grand Prior. “I told you, you know, that the castle of Blois was a fatal place for princes,” rejoined the duke. They were conducted to Amboise. The king, continually disquieted by the projects of assassination hatched against his minister, gave him a company of musketeers as guards, and set off for Nantes, whither the cardinal was not slow to go and join him. In the interval, a fresh accomplice in the plot had been discovered.
This time it was in the king’s own household that he had been sought and found. Henry de Talleyrand, Count of Chalais, master of the wardrobe, hare-brained and frivolous, had hitherto made himself talked about only for-his duels and his successes with women. He had already been drawn into a plot against the cardinal’s life; but, under the influence of remorse, he had confessed his criminal intentions to the minister himself. Richelieu appeared touched by the repentance, but he did not forget the offence, and his watch over this “unfortunate gentleman,” as he himself calls him, made him aware before long that Chalais was compromised in an intrigue which aimed at nothing less, it was said, than to secure the person of the cardinal by means an ambush, so as to rid him at need. Chalais was arrested in his bed on the 8th of July. The Marquis la Valette, son of the Duke of Epernon and governor or Metz had been asked to give an asylum to Monsieur in case he decided upon flying from the court, had answered after embarrassed fashion; the cardinal had his enemies in a trap He went to call on Monsieur; it was in Richelieu’s own house, and under pretext of demanding hospitality of him, that the conspirators calculated upon striking their blow. “I very much, regret,” said the cardinal to Gaston, “that your Highness did, not warn me that you and your friends meant to do me the honor of coming to sup with me. I would have exerted myself, to entertain them and receive them to the best of my ability.” [_Journal de Bassompierre,_ t. ii.] Monsieur seemed to be dumbfounded; he still thought of flight, but Madame de Guise had just arrived at Nantes with her daughter, Mdlle. de Montpensier; Madame de Chevreuse had been driven from court; the young prince’s friends had been scared or won over; and President le Coigneux, his most honest adviser, counselled him get the cardinal’s support with the king. “That rascal,” said the president, “gets so sharp an edge on his wits, that it is necessary to avail one’s self of all sorts of means to undo what he does.” Monsieur at last gave way, and consented to married, provided that the king would treat it as appanage. Louis XIII., in his turn, hesitated, being attracted by the arguments of certain underlings, “folks ever welcome, as being apparently out of the region of political interests, and seeming to have an eye in everything to their master’s person only.” They represented to the king that if the Duke of Anjou were to have children, he would become of more importance in the country, which would be to the king’s detriment. The minister, boldly demanded of the king the dismissal of “those petty folks who insolently abused his ear.” Louis XIII., in his turn gave way; and on the 5th of August, 1626, the cardinal celebrated the marriage of Gaston, who became Duke of Orleans on, the occasion, with Mary of Bourbon, Mdlle. de Montpesier. “No viols or music were heard that day and it was said in the bridegroom’s circle that there was no occassion for having Monsieur’s marriage stained with blood. This was reported,to the king, and to the cardinal who did not at all like it.”
When Chalais, in his prison, heard of the marriage, he undoubtedly conceived some hope of a pardon, for he exclaimed, as the cardinal himself says, “That is a mighty sharp trick, to have not only scattered a great faction, but, by removing its object, to have annihilated all hopes of re-uniting it. Only the sagacity of the king and his minister could have made such a hit; it was well done to have caught Monsieur between touch-and-go (_entre bond et volee_). The prince, when he knows of this, will be very vexed, though he do not say so, and the count (of Soissons, nephew of Conde) will weep over it with his mother.”
The hopes of Chalais were deceived. He had written to the king to confess his fault. “I was only thirteen days in the faction,” he said; but those thirteen days were enough to destroy him. In vain did his friends intercede passionately for him; in vain did his mother write to the king the most touching letter. “I gave him to you, sir, at eight years of age; he is a grandson of Marshal Montluc and President Jeannin; his family serve you daily, but dare not throw themselves at your feet for fear of displeasing you; nevertheless, they join with me in begging of you the life of this wretch, though he should have to end his days in perpetual imprisonment, or in serving you abroad.” Chalais was condemned to death on the 18th of August, 1626, by the criminal court established at Nantes for that purpose; all the king’s mercy went no farther than a remission of the tortures which should have accompanied th execution. He sent one of his friends to assure his mother of his repentance. “Tell him,” answered the noble lady, that I am very glad to have the consolation he gives me of, his dying in God; if I did not think that the sight of me would be too much for him, I would go to him and not leave him until his head was severed from his body; but, being unable to be of any help to him in that way, I am going to pray God for him.” And she returned into the church of the nuns of Sainte-Claire. The friends of Chalais had managed to have the executioner carried off, so as to retard his execution; but an inferior criminal, to whom pardon had been granted for the performance of this service, cut off the unfortunate culprit’s head in thirty-one strokes. [_Memoires d’un Favori du Duc d’ Orleans (Archives curieuses de l’Histoire de France),_ 2d series, t. iii.] “The sad news was brought to the Duke of Orleans, who was playing abbot; he did not leave the game, and went on as if instead of death he had heard of deliverance.” An example of cruelty which might well have discouraged the friends of the Duke of Orleans “from dying a martyr’s death for him” like the unhappy Chalais.
It has been said that Richelieu was neither meddlesome nor cruel, but that he was stern and pitiless; and he gave proof of that the following year, on an occasion when his personal interests were not in any way at stake. At the outset of his ministry, in 1624, he had obtained from the king a severe ordinance against duels–a fatal custom which was at that time decimating the noblesse.
[Illustration: Double Duel—-188]
Already several noblemen, amongst others M. du Plessis-Praslin, had been deprived of their offices or sent into exile in consequence of their duels, when M. de Bouteville, of the house of Montmorency, who had been previously engaged in twenty-one affairs of honor, came to Paris to fight the Marquis of Beuvron on the _Place Royale_. The Marquis’s second, M. de fussy d’Amboise, was killed by the Count of Chapelles, Bouteville’s second. Beuvron fled to England. M. de Bouteville and his comrade had taken post for Lorraine; they were recognized and arrested at Vitry-le- Brule and brought back to Paris; and the king immediately ordered Parliament to bring them to trial. The crime was flagrant and the defiance of the kings orders undeniable; but the culprit was connected with the greatest houses in the kingdom; he had given striking proofs of bravery in the king’s service; and all the court interceded for him. Parliament, with regret, pronounced condemnation, absolving the memory of Bussy d’Amboise, who was a son of President De Mesmes’s wife, and reducing to one third of their goods the confiscation to which the condemned were sentenced. “Parliament has played the king,” was openly said in the queen’s ante-chamber; “if the things proceed to execution, the king will play Parliament.”
The cardinal was much troubled in spirit,” says he himself it was impossible to have a noble heart and not pity this poor gentleman, whose youth and courage excited so much compassion.” However, whilst expounding, according to his practice, to the king the reasons for and against the execution of the culprits, Richelieu let fall this astounding expression: “It is a question of breaking the neck of duels or of your Majesty’s edicts.”
Louis XIII. did not hesitate: though less stern than his brother, he was, more indifferent, and “the love he bore his kingdom prevailed over his compassion for these two gentlemen.” Both died with courage. “There was no sign of anything weak in their words or mean in their actions. They received the news that they were to die with the same visage as they would have that of pardon,” “in such sort that they who had lived like devils were seen dying like saints, and they who had cared for nothing but to foment duels serving towards the extinction of them.” [_Memoires d’un Favori du Due d’ Orleans (Archives curieuses de l’Histoire de France),_ t. ii.]
The cardinal had got Chalais condemned as a conspirator; he had let Bouteville be executed as a duellist; the greatest lords bent beneath his authority, but the power that depends on a king’s favor is always menaced and tottering. The enemies of Richelieu had not renounced the idea of overthrowing him; their hopes even went on growing, since, for some time past the queen-mother had been waxin jealous of the all powerful minister, and no longer made common cause with him. The king had returned in triumph from the siege of La Rochelle; the queen-mother hoped to retain him by her at court; but the cardinal, ever on the watch over the movements of Spain, prevailed upon Louis XIII. to support his subject, the Duke of Nevers, legitimate heir to Mantua and Montferrat, of which the Spaniards were besieging the capital. The army began to march, but the queen designedly retarded the movements of her son. The cardinal was appointed generalissimo, and the king, who had taken upon himself the occupation of Savoy, was before long obliged by his health to return to Lyons, where he fell seriously ill. The two queens hurried to his bedside; and they were seconded by the keeper of the seals, M. de Marillac, but lately raised to power by Richelieu as a man on whom he could depend, and now completely devoted to the queen-mother’s party.
At the news of the king’s danger, the cardinal quitted St. Jean-de- Maurienne for a precipitate journey to Lyons; but he was soon obliged to return to his army. During the king’s convalescence, the resentment of the queen-mother against the minister, as well as that of Anne of Austria, had free course; and when the royal train took the road slowly back to Paris, in the month of October, the ruin of the cardinal had been resolved upon.
What a trip was that descent of the Loire from Roanne to Briare in the same boat and “at very close quarters between the queen-mother and the cardinal!” says Bassompierre. “She hoped that she would more easily be able to have her will, and crush her servant with the more facility, the less he was on his guard against it; she looked at him with a kindly eye, accepted his dutiful attentions and respects as usual, and spoke to him with as much appearance of confidence as if she had wholly given it him.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. iii. pp. 303-305.]
The king had requested his mother “to put off for six weeks or two months the grand move against the cardinal, for the sake of the affairs of his kingdom, which were then at a crisis in Italy” [_Memoires de Bassompierre,_ t. iii. p. 276], and she had promised him; but Richelieu “suspected something wrong, and discovered more,” and, on the 12th of November, 1630, when mother and son were holding an early conference at the Luxembourg, a fine palace which Mary de’ Medici had just finished, “the cardinal arrived there; finding the door of the chamber closed, he entered the gallery and went and knocked at the door of the cabinet, where he obtained no answer. Tired of waiting, and knowing the ins and outs of the mansion, he entered by the little chapel; whereat the king was somewhat dismayed, and said to the queen in despair, ‘Here he is!’ thinking, no doubt, that he would blaze forth. The cardinal, who perceived this dismay, said to them, ‘I am sure you were speaking about me.’ The queen answered, ‘We were not.’ Whereupon, he having replied, ‘Confess it, madam,’ she said yes, and thereupon conducted herself with great tartness towards him, declaring to the king ‘that she would not put up with the cardinal any longer, or see in her house either him or any of his relatives and friends, to whom she incontinently gave their dismissal, and not to them only, but even down to the pettiest of her officers who had come to her from his hands.'” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. iii. p. 428.]
The struggle was begun. Already the courtiers were flocking to the Luxembourg; the keeper of the seals, Marillac, had gone away to sleep at his country-house at Glatigny, quite close to Versailles, where the king was expected; and he was hoping that Louis XIII. would summon him and put the power in his hands. The king was chatting with his favorite St. Simon, and tapping with his finger-tips on the window-pane. “What do you think of all this?” he asked. “Sir,” was the reply, “I seem to be in another world, but at any rate you are master.” “Yes, I am,” answered the king, “and I will make it felt too.” He sent for Cardinal La Vallette, son of the Duke of Epernon, but devoted to Richelieu. “The cardinal has a good master,” he said: “go and make my compliments to him, and tell him to come to me without delay.” [Memoires de Bassompierre, t. iii. p. 276.]
[Illustration: “Tapping with his Finger-tips on the Window-pane.”—-191]
With all his temper and the hesitations born of his melancholy mind, Louis XIII. could appreciate and discern the great interests of his kingdom and of his power. The queen had supposed that the king would abandon the cardinal, and “that her private authority as mother, and the pious affection and honor the king showed her as her son, would prevail over the public care which he ought, as king, to take of his kingdom and his people. But God, who holds in His hand the hearts of princes, disposed things otherwise: his Majesty resolved to defend his servant against the malice of those who prompted the queen to this wicked design.” [_Memoires de Richelieu._] He conversed a long while with the cardinal, and when the keeper of the seals awoke the next morning, it was to learn that the minister was at Versailles with the king, who had lodged him in a room under his own, that his Majesty demanded the seals back, and that the exons were at his, Marillac’s, door to secure his person.
At the same time was despatched a courier to headquarters at Foglizzo in Piedmont. The three marshals Schomberg, La Force, and Marillac, had all formed a junction there. Marillac, brother of the keeper of the seals, held the command that day; and he was awaiting with patience the news, already announced by his brother, of the cardinal’s disgrace. Marshal Schomberg opened the despatches; and the first words that met his eye were these, written in the king’s own hand: “My dear cousin, you will not fail to arrest Marshal Marillac; it is for the good of my service and for your own exculpation.” The marshal was greatly embarrassed; a great part of the troops had come with Marillac from the army of Champagne and were devoted to him. Schomberg determined, on the advice of Marshal La Force, in full council of captains, to show Marillac the postcript. “Sir,” answered the marshal, “a subject must not murmur against his master, nor say of him that the things he alleges are false. I can protest with truth that I have done nothing contrary to his service. The truth is, that my brother the keeper of the seals and I have always been the servants of the queen-mother; she must have had the worst of it, and Cardinal Richelieu has won the day against her and her servants.” [_Memoires de Puy-Seyur._]
Thus arrested in the very midst of the army he commanded, Marshal