Though the terror and excitement in Paris were much greater than Bouthillier reported, France, as a whole, seems to have kept its head at this tragical time, the provinces remaining quiet. This may have been due to the fact that the news, as it travelled down with rolling wheels, galloping hoofs, running feet, into the depths of the country, caused more grief than surprise. It had long been prophesied that Henry would die a violent death, and such prophecies, no doubt, sometimes bring their own fulfilment. For the last four or five years, every natural marvel or disaster had been counted as an evil omen for the King. “Heaven and earth,” says Péréfixe, “had given only too many prognostications of what happened to him. A very great eclipse of the sun, which came to pass in the year 1608; a terrible comet, which appeared in the preceding year; quakings of the earth; monstrous births in divers parts of France; a rain of blood, which fell in several places; a great plague, which afflicted Paris in the year 1606; apparitions of phantoms, and many other prodigies, held men in dread of some horrible event.”
The King’s death was actually reported in Italy, Spain, and even Flanders, some time before it took place; written predictions were found in churches, and bells tolled of themselves; women, especially nuns, had frightful dreams and visions of murder; it was even known that Ravaillac, the melancholy madman of the Angoumois, was consulting his conscience as to whether a King who contemplated war with Catholic Spain ought to live or die. This tale reached the Queen, through an unlucky woman, the Dame d’Escoman, whose reward for having meddled in the matter was imprisonment for life. That Marie de Médicis, supported by her Concini favourites, secretly wished and plotted for Henry’s death, is probably one of the most cruel slanders ever invented by the enemies of a queen.
The prophecies and portents were not unknown to the King, and although he was certainly neither timid nor credulous, they depressed his gay spirit. During those last months he appeared, says Péréfixe, “as if he were condemned to death.” A heavy presentiment weighed upon him. He dreaded the Queen’s coronation—“ce maudit sacre”—and told Sully that he knew he would die in a coach. Indeed he, so daring in war, had long been curiously nervous when driving in the Paris streets; and on the fatal day, though he wished to visit the Arsenal, where his friend and Minister lay ill, he doubted and hesitated before leaving the Louvre. “Shall I go? Shall I not go?” he said several times to the Queen. Alarmed at his strange dejection, Marie begged him to stay; but he kissed her affectionately, bade her adieu, and went straight to his death in the Rue de la Ferronnerie.
Thus the Bishop of Luçon was deprived of the royal patron from whom he had hoped so much. But he seems to have wasted very little time in mourning his own and the country’s loss. His first thought was to bring himself before the Queen, to gain a footing in the new Court, different in many ways from the old. And this did not appear to be a difficult task for a young and quick-witted man. The day of old men, old soldiers, old courtiers and friends of “le Béarnais,” was over.
The Bishop of Luçon had already friends and supporters in the Regent’s intimate circle. His brother and brother-in-law, Henry de Richelieu and René de Vignerot, Seigneur du Pont-de-Courlay, were among her most favoured courtiers. The Marquise de Guercheville, her lady of honour, accustomed to courts since the days of Catherine de Médicis, was a connection on the Du Plessis side; and two at least of the young maids of honour bore familiar family names—Pont-de-Courlay, Meilleraye. At this time, too, the Père de Bérulle, Richelieu’s personal friend, had great influence with the Queen, and the same might be said of the Père Cotton, the late King’s confessor. The Jesuits did not yet regard Richelieu as an enemy.
It was not till after long delays, however, that the Bishop of Luçon reached the Queen-Regent’s distinguished favour and the front of affairs. His first step was a hurried and an unlucky one. On the 22nd of May he wrote out a curious document, a kind of oath of allegiance and declaration of loyalty to the young King and his mother, from himself as Bishop and Baron, his dean, canons, and clergy. He sent this paper to his brother in Paris, begging him to deliver it into the Queen’s own hands. Henry de Richelieu’s worldly wisdom at once refused this favour. Such zeal was quite out of place, he said: Cela ne se fait pas: nobody else in the kingdom had done anything of the sort, and he, an experienced courtier, would not allow his forward brother to push himself by such means. Bouthillier was employed to send this discouraging reply to the Bishop, whose restless eagerness it hardly served to check.
It convinced him, indeed, that nothing was to be done from a distance, and that the best of relations and friends would not help a man who was not on the spot to help himself. Early in June we find him writing to Madame de Bourges about a permanent lodging in Paris. As he intends to spend some time there every year, he wants advice as to situation and cost, also as to furniture, tapestry, plate, wine, etc. Poor as ever in purse, he is no less determined to make a good show in the capital: “C’est grande pitié que de pauvre noblesse, mais il n’y a remède: contre fortune bon cœur.”
He went to Paris, and remained there for some months; but it was an unhappy and a disappointing visit. During these early days of her regency, Marie de Médicis had neither power nor leisure to make new friends. Concini, Maréchal d’Ancre, and his wife Leonora, reigned at the Louvre, though hardly yet outside it. The peace of the kingdom, according to Richelieu’s own Memoirs, depended on the princes—Condé, Soissons, d’Épernon, Guise, and their like. In these first months they kept it unbroken, and all, Parliament, nobles, statesmen, churchmen, municipalities, governors of provinces, were ready “to serve the King under the guidance of the Queen.” The Huguenots were pacified, for the moment, by the renewal of the Edict of Nantes. But the “grands de la cour” did not give their allegiance for nothing. Henry’s old Ministers, holding on to power with many searchings of heart, were forced to consent to the enormous bribes demanded by everybody. These “gratifications extraordinaires” were scattered with open hand among greedy nobles and courtiers, and, added to the Queen’s own personal extravagance, were likely soon to empty Henry’s precious coffers, so painfully filled. As to the Duc de Sully, whose rough temper, bad manners and comparative honesty had long made him unpopular at Court, a conspiracy among the nobles forced on his retirement in the winter of 1610. All these warring interests and anxieties, with visits from special foreign embassies, with the young King’s coronation at Rheims, with the question of war or peace beyond the frontiers, made a social whirlpool of Paris and the Court.
The young provincial Bishop, without money or claims, whose few personal friends were naturally more interested in their own affairs than in his, found himself left behind in the race for power and fortune. His old enemy, fever, seized on him again and laid him low: Paris proved more unhealthy than even the marshes of Luçon. Terribly depressed by illness, he was irritated and annoyed by letters from his Cathedral chapter, complaining of disorders in the diocese, and he wrote sharply in answer, following his letters early in the year 1611. There was no advantage to be gained by staying in Paris, neglected and obscure.
Through all the first half of this year, Richelieu was in a Slough of Despond both mental and physical, brooding over difficulties and disappointments, and constantly ill with fever. It seems that in these dark days Père Joseph was his good angel.