Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

In May and June 1620 the governors of provinces were openly showing their discontent. The Duc de Vendôme could dispose of Brittany, the Duc de Longueville of Normandy, the Duc de Mayenne of Guyenne; and these three, with many others, left the Court and retired to their governments, where they began to prepare for civil war. The Duc de Rohan, in the name of the Protestant party, went so far as to advise the Queen-mother to leave Angers for Bordeaux and to assemble an army in the South. One of the chief malcontents, the Comtesse de Soissons, furious at the release of her cousin and enemy, the Prince de Condé, left Paris with her young son and came to Angers. As the summer advanced, the Queen having decided to hold her own in the west, many of les grands followed Madame la Comtesse, and Marie was surrounded by a crowd of restless, warlike nobles and princes, who were held back with difficulty from declaring open and instant war upon the King. Half France, apparently, was on her side—princes, populations, Catholics, Huguenots, and men of law: at one moment a successful campaign against the King and Luynes seemed a certainty, and Angers was the centre of enthusiastic military preparations.

But Richelieu was there—a power behind all the discontented swaggerers of Her Majesty’s Court. A small, strong party, including the Queen herself, believed in him. He had taken care that his friends should hold the places nearest to her: Claude Bouthillier, brother of his faithful Sébastien, was at this time her secretary. The clergy, who always influenced Marie de Médicis, were with him to a man.

He did not intend that the misunderstandings between the Queen-mother and the King, hardly mended by the passing reconciliation at Couzières, should come to actual war. It was he who prevented the move to the South; he who, through all these months at Angers, carried on negotiations with Luynes. Now, as always, he resented the domination of the princes and nobles, remaining convinced that the King must, in the last resort, be the chief authority in the kingdom. He deeply distrusted Luynes, and not altogether for personal reasons of disappointed ambition. In a sense he stood between the two parties; he did not cease to be something of a mediator; his advice to Marie de Médicis was never that of a political firebrand. Still, surrounded by firebrands—Vendôme and his like—it was difficult for the wisest counsels to prevail, and Richelieu seems to have accepted the inevitable, hoping that the warlike show made by the Queen’s friends might so far impress the King as to incline him to listen to the serious complaints poured into his ears by her and by them.

The effect was not precisely this, but Richelieu was in one way content: it was not the Queen-mother who declared war. Louis XIII. himself, egged on, not by Luynes, who doubted and hesitated, but by the Prince de Condé, decided suddenly to march into Normandy and to crush his enemies by armed force.

“I will not stay in Paris,” he said, “to see my kingdom made a prey and my faithful servants oppressed.... My conscience accuses me of no want of piety with regard to the Queen my mother, justice with regard to my people, kind deeds with regard to the nobles of my kingdom. Therefore, allons!”

The words had a ring of Henry IV., and they were justified by the event. With a small army the King swept Normandy. Rouen and Caen made no resistance; the Duc de Longueville and the Grand Prieur de Vendôme fled before their royal master. The first week in August found the King on Angevin soil; on the 7th he was within two miles of Angers, on high ground commanding the road between the city and the Loire. Angers was to his right; the village and bridges of the Ponts-de-Cé to his left.

For a month, ever since the King left Paris, confusion had reigned at Angers. Negotiations had gone on furiously, for neither Louis XIII. nor Luynes wished to come to actual blows with the Queen-mother. Richelieu, in public and private, had done his best; in July, preaching before the Queen and her Court, he warned her that no faithful subject could advise her to rebel against her son, and begged her to consider that no arms could triumph over an angel-guarded King. But all this was of no avail. With hurry and rashness inconceivable, considering that neither d’Épernon, Rohan, nor Mayenne had marched to join them, the warlike party at Angers prepared for resistance.

Marie had a poor set of officers. The Comte de Soissons, supposed to be in command, was a boy of eighteen; he had courage in plenty, but no experience. The Duc de Vendôme was a clever, blustering coward; the Duc de Nemours a courageous fool; the Maréchal de Bois-Dauphin was too old for fighting. Louis de Marillac, afterwards a Marshal of France with a tragic history, did more than any of them; but he also talked more, and his plan for the defence was a foolish one. He and Vendôme attempted to fortify the whole length of the road, about two miles, between Angers and the Ponts-de-Cé, by an entrenchment which, according to Richelieu, would have needed twenty thousand men to defend it. He gave his opinion freely, but soldiers were not going to be advised by a churchman, and “nothing could divert them from their enterprise.”

The sketchy fortification was not even finished, when the King’s troops swooped down to the attack. His infantry fought in the flat meadows, under cover of the lines of hedgerow trees; his cavalry plunged into the Loire, a shorter way of reaching the bridges and the little old castle that defended them. Once the passage of the Loire was in the King’s hands, the Queen-mother’s retreat would be cut off and she would be separated from her partisans in the south country: this was why the King, advised by Condé, did not make a direct attack on the town.

The battle had hardly begun when the Duc de Retz, one of the Queen’s commanders, seized with the idea that some treacherous negotiations were going on in the background, threw up her cause and rode off the field with 1500 men. The rest of the little army, about 2500 men against 14,000, kept up an uncertain struggle along the road and the bridges through some sweltering hours of the August day. A few hundred lives were lost, and it was not till evening that the royal army found itself in possession of the river branches and the little town of Ponts-de-Cé. Even then the wounded governor of the castle, M. de Bethancourt, held out there till the next morning with a garrison of ten men.