Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

CHAPTER II
1624-1625

Richelieu’s aims—The English alliance—The affair of the Valtelline—The Huguenot revolt—The marriage of Madame Henriette—The Duke of Buckingham.

In the brilliant first chapter of Richelieu’s Testament Politique, “Succincte Narration de toutes les grandes Actions du Roi,” written not long before his death, he reminds Louis XIII. of the circumstances under which he took office in 1624; when “the Huguenots shared the State with your Majesty, the great nobles behaved as if they were not your subjects, and the powerful governors of provinces as if they were independent sovereigns.... Foreign alliances were despised, private interests preferred to the public good; in a word, the dignity of the Royal Majesty was lowered to such a degree, through the fault of those who had then the chief management of your affairs, that it had almost ceased to exist.”

“I promised your Majesty,” he continues, “to use all my endeavours and all the authority that you might be pleased to give me, to ruin the Huguenot party, to abase the pride of the nobles, to bring all your subjects back to their duty, and to exalt your name to its proper place among Foreign Nations. I represented that for the attainment of these happy ends, your entire confidence was necessary to me.”

The Cardinal had that confidence, without which indeed he could have done nothing. Experience had taught him that however low “the Royal Majesty” might have fallen, it was and would remain the centre of power, the incarnation of France. He was therefore resolved that his influence with the King should be personal, as well as political. He had long and thoroughly studied the strange, shy, gloomy, conscientious young man of four-and-twenty, on whom his own fate and that of the nation depended. He knew that Louis was quite capable of thinking and judging for himself, and he made full use not only of his personal magnetism, but of all the clever political argument which his genius suggested. Louis was convinced—and the conviction went on deepening with years—that his own honour and the well-being of his kingdom were safe in the hands of the new Minister, so frail, keen, brilliant, and superbly sure of himself. That the King ever came to love Richelieu is hard to believe, considering all the past, in spite of affectionate letters; but he certainly admired and trusted him.

The acceptance of the English marriage for Madame Henriette Marie of France was Richelieu’s first step in the way of return to Henry IV.’s foreign policy. The idea of an English alliance, of course, was not originally his. Long before Henry’s youngest child was born, a marriage had been suggested between one of her elder sisters and Henry, Prince of Wales. At the same time, Louis the Dauphin was to have been betrothed to Princess Elizabeth, James the First’s eldest daughter—a strange destiny for the Protestant heroine, the “Queen of Hearts,” “th’Eclipse and Glory of her kind!” But Henry’s liking for England seems to have cooled considerably as time went on, and his latest political turn, doubtfully and unwillingly made, was in the direction of the Spanish marriages brought about by Marie de Médicis. As for Henriette Marie, only six months old when her father died, he had carelessly promised her hand to the young son of his cousin the Comte de Soissons. He would probably have broken this promise. The Queen-Regent had no scruples in doing so, to the rage and disappointment of Monsieur le Comte.

The present negotiations in their earlier stages were not Richelieu’s work. He was not in power in 1620, when Luynes, a poor diplomatist, tried to turn the mind of the English King towards an alliance with France rather than with Spain; nor in 1623, when the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Buckingham, those two “venturous knights” lingering incognito in Paris on their way to Madrid, witnessed a ballet at the Louvre in which Princess Henriette, now thirteen years old, was dancing. It was afterwards said that Charles fell in love with the graceful little lady on that occasion, so that his failure to capture the Infanta of Spain troubled him little personally. As to Buckingham, who with all his faults and frivolities had some of the ideas of a statesman, he was already inclined to the French alliance, seeing in it the one means of defending the foreign Protestants and balancing the power of Spain. Through the winter of 1623-4, envoys of more or less dignity were passing between London and Paris, and the marriage was talked of openly. All this time, no doubt, Richelieu was in favour of it, and his influence, as the Queen-mother’s chief adviser, set that way; but long delays dragged out the affair, even after the coming of the English Ambassadors Extraordinary, Lord Holland and Lord Carlisle. The chief difficulty, as with Spain, was the religious question. La Vieuville’s weakness as to this, in Richelieu’s opinion, nearly wrecked the negotiations. After he himself became a Minister in April, there was no more danger that France would, in Carlisle’s words, “be ridden with a discreet high hand.” The delays were of Richelieu’s causing, and the “high hand” was that of France. He meant to oppose Spain and the Empire and to assist—with discretion—the German and Dutch Protestants; but he also meant the Catholic Church to be honoured and protected in England and triumphant in France. In August, when he had arrived at supreme power, the English ambassadors found that there was no more dallying and giving way. If they wanted the alliance, they must accept the conditions, and very stringent these were. By the treaty of November 1624, subject to the Pope’s most unwillingly granted dispensation, Madame Henriette was to go to England with an establishment of French Catholics, including a bishop and twenty-eight priests, and was to have a “large chapel” in every one of her residences; while all imprisoned English Catholics were to be released, all confiscations of their property reversed, and safety and toleration assured them for the future. Louis XIII. and Richelieu had to consent that these last articles should be secret, since the King of England declared it impossible to present them to his Parliament.

Another difficult affair that called for Richelieu’s management was that of the Valtelline.

The Val Tellina, rich in vineyards, through which the river Adda, descending from its mountain source near Bormio, runs down its stony bed to fall into the Lake of Como, had long been a bone of contention for the Powers. It belonged to the Grison Leagues, old allies of France, and the first difficulties arose when its Catholic inhabitants rebelled against the oppressions of their Protestant masters. This was in 1620. On a Sunday long remembered the Protestants of the valley were massacred. Then a Spanish army came up from Milan to stand by the Catholics in their struggle with the enraged Grisons. The Thirty Years War was already two years old, and the Val Tellina was of European importance as the best and almost the only passage for armies between the Milanese and the Tyrol. Here the Emperor and the King of Spain could join hands, much to the disadvantage of the Protestant powers and of France. Naturally therefore the Spaniards took possession of the valley and its strongholds, and the Grison Leagues resisted them in vain.

France interfered, but only in the way of diplomacy. By the Treaty of Madrid, in 1621, the new Spanish forts were to be razed and the valley restored to the Grisons, who promised amnesty and toleration. But this treaty was not carried into effect. Louis XIII. was too deeply engaged in fighting his own Protestants to undertake the defence of Protestants in Switzerland, and France held aloof under her weak Ministers while the Archduke Leopold swooped down upon the Grisons and once more deprived them of the Val Tellina, besides forcing them to surrender to Austria the Engadine and other districts.