“You know how the Huguenots have cut out work for us, sending ships to sea and seizing the Isle of Ré.... Never was so bad an action as this of the Antichrist brothers, who, seeing the King at war for the interests and dignity of the Crown, take up arms to trouble the feast.”
To the French ambassador at Rome—M. de Marquemont, Archbishop of Lyons and afterwards Cardinal—Richelieu writes on January 27:
“The news you have heard of the Huguenots is only too true: incited by the devil or others equally bad, they have shown their evil will by a surprise entry into the Port of Blavet, landing with cannon, with which they battered the fort for two days.... The King has news that, the whole province hurrying against them, they have already re-embarked in order to escape, and are carrying off two or three ships of M. de Nevers, which were in the harbour.”
The “frères antichristi” were Henry Duc de Rohan and his brother Benjamin, Duc de Soubise. They were the two actively distinguished leaders who remained to the Huguenot party: Le Plessis-Mornay was dead; the Duc de Lesdiguières had changed his religion and become Constable of France; the Marquis de la Force, a brave and very provincial old soldier, and Gaspard de Coligny, Duc de Châtillon, held loyally to the Peace of Montpellier, and each accepted a Marshal’s bâton from the King; the new Duc de Bouillon was content to watch events from his north-eastern citadel of Sedan.
Thus the interior peace of France was largely in the hands of the brothers Rohan, of whom the younger was a firebrand, an adventurer, never happy unless employed in some foolhardy enterprise, though capable, on occasion, of running away; one of those restless spirits to whom religion meant opposition to law and authority; the very type of the fighting Huguenot, robber on land and pirate by sea. Such men, to whom nothing was sacred, were indeed to be found under both religious banners, one and all the opponents of royalty and of Richelieu.
Henry, first Duc de Rohan, was a different kind of person. A sincere Protestant, he carried out in his life the stern morality of his creed. He had a genius for war, wrote brilliantly on tactics, but was a diplomat as well as a soldier, and those who knew him best saw in that thoughtful character as much personal ambition as religious conscience. Both brothers were influenced by their ancestry. They were descended from the old Kings of Navarre through Isabeau, daughter of Jean d’Albret; and if the sons of Henry IV. died childless, which seemed not unlikely, Henry de Rohan was the next heir to the kingdom of Navarre. He had been acknowledged as such, in his youth, by Henry IV. What the Spaniards had left of that kingdom was now united to the crown of France. Thus the Duke may very well have seen in himself a possible pretender, a rival to Condé and the Bourbons, at a dreamed-of moment when the strongest would win.
And his mother, Catherine de Parthenay-Soubise, was not the woman to discourage such lifelong fancies in her sons. Fairy blood, that of the Lusignans, ran in her veins; “grande rêveuse,” her absence of mind and many oddities were the talk of Paris; her favourite vision was that of the Duc de Nevers and Père Joseph, a crusade against the Turks. We are told that she was not pleased when Henry IV., whom she disliked, made her eldest son a Duke, her husband being the eleventh Viscount of his name. According to the proud old family motto, that name alone made its bearer a King’s equal.
Madame de Rohan had more reason to be discontented at her son’s marriage, arranged by Henry, with Marguerite de Béthune, daughter of the Duc de Sully, then a mere child. They were married in the Protestant temple at Charenton, and the story goes that the famous and waggish minister Du Moulin asked aloud, when the little girl in her white frock was led up to him—“Do you present this child to be baptised?” The white robe of innocence did not long suit the Duchesse de Rohan, and never had a good man a worse wife. Very pretty, attractive and clever, she led a life worthier of the Valois Court than of the fine old Huguenot houses of Sully and Rohan. Not even Madame de Chevreuse, herself a Rohan by birth, was more free of moral restraint. The Duc de Rohan, concerned with greater matters, seemed superbly unconscious of his wife’s love-affairs, and turned away coolly from the shocked pastors who tried to enlighten him. In a political sense, they were one. Whenever her husband needed her help, Madame de Rohan sent her lovers to the right-about, plotted for him, followed him in his campaigns. In the winter of 1625, when the Duc de Rohan was trying to support his brother’s naval raid by a revolt in Languedoc, Aubery describes how “the Duchesse de Rohan his wife acted with no less vigour, and, as if it were her design to throw terror into vulgar minds, travelled often by night with torches, in a mourning coach drawn by eight black horses.”
“Suscités par le diable ou quelques autres qui ne valent pas mieux.” No doubt the Cardinal had accurate knowledge of the influences, diabolical or other, which had brought about the Huguenot rising at this awkward moment. It was partly the work of the angry people of La Rochelle, who saw their town perpetually threatened by royal forts on land and their harbour watched by royal ships at sea. They counted on the help of the Protestant powers, England and Holland, to make a favourable bargain with the King’s government, already entangled in the Swiss and Genoese campaigns. And they were backed up in a quarter which might well have been unexpected. The money that provided Soubise with ships came from Spain. Rohan and he, more than once treating secretly with the enemies of France, may not have deserved Richelieu’s epithet of “Antichristi,” but were certainly anti-patriotic.
As the Cardinal wrote to the ambassadors, the Duc de Soubise, not content with seizing the Isle of Ré and thus commanding La Rochelle, had sailed north and pounced on the harbour of Blavet, on the Brittany coast, at the mouth of the river below Hennebon. The harbour had been fortified by Louis XIII. in the former civil wars, and was known as Port Louis. Six battleships were now lying there, five of which did not belong to the King, but had been lent him by the Duc de Nevers. Soubise took the town and the ships—including the famous great Vierge, of eighty guns—and attacked the castle, which held out long enough for the Duc de Vendôme, governor of Brittany, to come to the rescue. Soubise then escaped to sea, but with difficulty, carrying four of his prizes with him; and sailing like a bold pirate southward, taking the island of Oléron as a base for his operations, became a terror to vessels of war or merchandise all along the coast. Later on he stormed up the Gironde in support of the Duc de Rohan, who had already set Guienne and Languedoc in a blaze.