Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

The Bishop of Luçon, writing strong remonstrances on his mother’s and his own behalf to the commanders, was also painfully interested in the negotiations which began after the Court had reached Verteuil. He would have been glad to be actively employed, but his time was not quite come, and he could only look on, trusting to his friends—especially Claude Barbin, an old acquaintance, the trusted financial secretary of Marie de Médicis—to push his name and fortunes.

Both parties were tired of the struggle. The Court did not wish for eternal war: the princes and their followers saw that, the Spanish marriages once carried through, their wisest line of action was to make a good bargain for themselves while posing as disappointed patriots. The treaty of Loudun satisfied them for the time. Several of the King’s older Ministers were sacrificed, notably Chancellor Sillery. The Maréchal d’Ancre had to give up his command in Picardy, with the strong city of Amiens, to the Duc de Longueville, but was consoled with the military government of Normandy. A general amnesty was published: President Le Jay was set at liberty, and the Comte d’Auvergne was freed from his long confinement in the Bastille; the rights already granted to the Huguenots were confirmed; Condé’s war expenses were paid, amounting to 1,500,000 livres. Decidedly a good bargain; the best he had ever made. “This time, it is true,” says M. Henri Martin, “Condé’s soldiers had well earned their money: they had pillaged, burnt, ravaged France with great zeal, from the banks of the Somme to those of the Garonne.”

The other princes were also magnificently paid: their rebellion cost the country, “according to Richelieu, more than twenty millions”; and in the matter of places and governments, they had what they chose to demand. In addition, Condé claimed the right of signing the decrees of the Royal Council. The Duc de Villeroy, a clever old politician, advised the Queen to grant this also. It was better, he said, to bind Monsieur le Prince to the Court than to let him fortify himself in the provinces. “Do not fear,” he said, “to put a pen in a man’s hand while you are holding his arm.”

So ended the demonstration against the Spanish marriages. Marie de Médicis gained her point: the princes found effectual consolation; and the poor people of France, as usual, paid the bill. The salt tax, which had been reduced, was raised to its former level, and new river tolls were established.

The Court lingered at Tours and at Blois until the whole business of the treaty was concluded, and made its triumphal entry into Paris on May 16, 1616—an unlucky conjunction of numbers, according to astrologers. The young Queen, a pretty and attractive girl in her indolent Spanish way—somewhat petulant, and no wonder, considering the miseries of the journey not to be escaped even by queens, and the cool neglect of her boy-husband—sat in an open litter carried by mules, for the better view of the citizens of Paris. The noise in the streets was so great—bells, drums and trumpets, the clatter of arms (for the city bands were all on foot and firing off their muskets)—that Her Majesty’s mules pranced with terror, and she was obliged to take refuge in her coach. But the welcome of Paris was undoubtedly hearty, and if the Spanish marriage still caused discontent, it did not appear openly. Indeed the Spanish embassy and their young Princess had only to complain of the fact that the opposite party had gained most of its ends in the treaty of Loudun, and that their enemy, the Prince de Condé, with certain Huguenot magnates, his allies, appeared for the moment to rule both Court and Council.

The Bishop of Luçon had preceded the Court to Paris. He had taken a house in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the quarter of the markets; an old street which still existed in the early nineteenth century, but has since been swept away. Here he was within easy reach of his Court duties at the Louvre.

Under the high roofs of the palace, in the old round towers and new pavilions and galleries, crowded in a labyrinth of rooms and staircases, walled courts and gardens, surrounded by a confused noise of building, especially towards the river, where the long gallery, joining the Louvre to the Tuileries, was not yet finished, blocked to the west, on the site of the Place du Carrousel, by narrow streets of great hôtels and mean houses, churches, chapels, hospitals—lived the young King and Queen with their households, and the Queen-Mother, herself lodged in a low, dark, but richly furnished entresol, with as many of her ladies, attendants, favourites, servants, as could find room in the old rabbit-warren of so many and such ghostly memories.

At the moment, though her personal rule was not to last long, Marie de Médicis, the Florentine, the “fat banker,” as Madame de Verneuil disrespectfully called her, was the centre of power and the fountain of promotion. It was therefore especially to her that the courtiers, Richelieu among them, paid their devoted duty.

Marie de Médicis was at this time a handsome, heavy-looking woman of forty-three; cold of temperament, grave and haughty in manner, yet without real dignity; obstinate, yet weak; nervous, irritable, subject to fits of violent anger with floods of tears; never affectionate or caressing, even to her own children; fond of amusement, of animals, dwarfs, freaks of nature; passionately eager for power and magnificence; a lover of beautiful things, a generous but ignorant patron of art; especially curious of precious metals and stones, jewellery, bric-à-brac of all kinds; interested in architecture, building and gardening. She laid the first stone of her palace of “Luxembourg” in 1615, and in this very year 1616 she planted the stately avenue of elms, known as the Cours-la-Reine, along the river-bank beyond the gardens of the Tuileries. Splendid in her gifts, she was wildly extravagant, as soon as it became possible, with the money of the State. She was superstitious and religious, even dévote, after her fashion, and the Church in France owed her much: if not refined by nature or training, she was yet always on the side of decency and moral reform. This is something to say for a woman who was forced for years to live in a Court and a society so openly and coarsely immoral, and to treat La Reine Margot as a friend and a sister.

At the time when Richelieu became attached to the Court, that eccentric princess was no longer living in her palace opposite the Louvre. She died in the spring of 1615, shortly after the closing of the States-General. In his memoirs the Cardinal devotes several pages to that “greatest princess of her time,” her talents and her charities.