The Pope refused to issue bulls for the appointment of French bishops so long as the French Government held on its present course. Richelieu was prepared to do without them. The King refused to receive the Nuncio, or to recognize his authority. The Pope absolutely refused to confirm Richelieu’s own election as Abbot-General of the Orders of Cîteaux and Prémontré, or to countenance his project of advanced reform in his own Order of Cluny. A private quarrel in Rome made matters worse; one of the French Ambassador’s gentlemen was killed, and the ambassador’s wrath irritated the Pope into forbidding any funeral honours to be paid in Rome to Richelieu’s lieutenant, the soldier-Cardinal de la Valette, who died at Rivoli in the midst of his Savoyard campaign of 1639.
The quarrel was at last made up: for the French Church, as for the government, it was really a question of money, and both agreed to a compromise. Richelieu’s Finance Secretaries withdrew some part of their immense demands; the clergy, very unwillingly, granted the rest; Urban VIII. was appeased, and Mazarin became a Cardinal.
If Richelieu opposed the Pope, the friend of the Hapsburgs, and asserted the liberty of the Gallican Church in such matters, for instance, as the annulling of Monsieur’s marriage, he was neither unorthodox, nor unfriendly to different forms of religious effort. The great charities of the seventeenth century grew and flourished under his shadow. The spirit of St. François de Sales lived on in the Order of the Visitation, devoted to the sick and the poor. Vincent de Paul, with his Mission of Lazarist Fathers and his Sisters of Charity, bringing light into dark places and helping the miserable, both in Paris and in the deserts of the country, was a familiar and beautiful figure through most of Richelieu’s reign. Monsieur Vincent’s great Mission work, the training of the younger clergy, also nobly carried on by the congregations of the Oratory, of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet and of Saint-Sulpice, had lain very near Richelieu’s own heart in his young days.
The Cardinal extended his powerful protection to the teaching Orders, Jesuits, Ursulines, and others; and the reformed Benedictines of Saint-Maur, so famous for ecclesiastical and historical learning, owed their distinction largely to him. He did very much, indeed, towards the reform and discipline of the regular clergy, and with a longer life he might have removed many of the abuses which spoiled their religious ideal. But his chief and immediate object was to nationalize the Orders, and to bring them under the same authority with France as a whole.
“A central and supreme authority”; absolutism; obedience: these were the root-principles of Richelieu’s rule. He hated original, independent thought or action, in Church or State; it was of the nature of rebellion. Personal quite as much as political, this imperious, dominating temper was the chief secret of his triumph in matters where reason and equity have in the long run decided against him; for instance, the many cases in which he appointed his own judges and tribunals to try his prisoners, the slower and often fairer proceedings of the parliamentary law-courts being found unbearable by his impatient and positive mind.
The same dominating spirit explains Richelieu’s treatment of his old friend the Abbé de Saint-Cyran. He could be tolerant of Protestants: their private heresies mattered little, as long as their public conduct was loyal. But the advance of Jansenist opinions within the French Church was another thing. In the case of M. de Saint-Cyran, as strong-willed a personage as the Cardinal himself, it meant a very powerful spiritual influence not quite strictly orthodox, with a stiff morality and an independence of mind which judged and condemned much of the Cardinal’s own theory and practice. He did his best to win Saint-Cyran, whose learning and high character were of European fame. But bishoprics would not tempt the man who did not choose to range himself among the Cardinal’s slaves, who, though none too loyal to the Pope, declared openly that the Church could not annul Monsieur’s marriage, and who agreed with Jansenius in denouncing the alliance of France with heretics.
The great director and glory of Port-Royal was imprisoned at Vincennes in 1638, and remained there till after the death of Richelieu. The Eminentissime could not afford to tolerate a man the watchwords of whose spirit were independence, boldness, and truth. “He is more dangerous,” he said, “than half a dozen armies.”
CHAPTER XI
1639-1642
Victories abroad—The death of the Comte de Soissons—Social triumphs—Marriage of the Duc d’Enghien—The revolt against the taxes—The conspiracy of Cinq-Mars—The Cardinal’s dangerous illness—He makes his will—The ruin of his enemies—His return to Paris.
For the last three or four years of Cardinal de Richelieu’s life his figure stands out against a horizon glowing with the fires of victory.