Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

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

PORTE DE CHÂTELLERAULT: RICHELIEU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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