Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

All this trouble, arising at such an unwelcome moment, caused terrible agitation among the King’s councillors. Most of them, says Richelieu, were “si éperdus,” that they saw no choice but between immediate peace with Spain and submission to all the Huguenot demands. He himself would have no such craven yielding to the storm. With little slackening of energy in the Swiss and Genoese campaigns, he set to work to crush the revolt at home, acting on the medical maxim that a small internal injury is more to be feared than one greater and more painful, but external only.

His understanding with England and Holland now bore some fruit. Their statesmen, less consistent than their populations, did not refuse to support him against his rebels, in spite of their religion. England, already on the edge of war with Spain, sent eight ships to the help of the French Government; the Dutch fleet was diverted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and twenty French ships made up a fleet of fifty or sixty sail, commanded in chief by Duke Henry de Montmorency, High Admiral of France. Richelieu had not much faith in this young man, the late Constable’s only son and the Princesse de Condé’s brother—one of the handsomest and boldest of the fierce order that the Cardinal meant to subdue. But as far as Montmorency was concerned the time of vengeance was not yet. He and the Dutch Admiral, after a long fight with Soubise on the sea, scattered his fleet, took the islands of Ré and Oléron, and came very near to capture La Rochelle itself.

Here Richelieu held his hand. He was not yet ready for that great siege, or for the final crushing of the Protestant power in France.

On May 11, when the Huguenot revolt was in full swing, Princess Henriette, low of stature, with lovely black eyes and obstinate mouth, was married by proxy at Notre Dame to the new King of England. A high stage was set up outside the west doors of the cathedral, and on this the ceremony was performed, after the pattern of the wedding of Henry IV. and Marguerite de Valois: a Protestant prince could not be married within the walls. Here may have lain some foretaste of sadness for her who was to be known as la Reine Malheureuse, though she was ready, with strong religious faith, to accept the almost missionary character of Queen of a heretic country, an Esther for her own people. But the tones of warning were silent that day. She had not even received the letter in which Marie de Médicis, inspired by the Père de Bérulle—not by Richelieu, though he claims that credit in his Memoirs—laid down in eloquent sentences the duties of her new life. For the bride of fifteen all was joy and festival. King Charles’s proxy was Claude, Duc de Chevreuse, of royal blood, a younger son of Henry le Balafré and brother of Charles, Duc de Guise. He was one of the handsomest and most splendid of Louis XIII.’s courtiers, and his famous wife, the widow of Luynes, Queen Anne’s favourite lady, possessed all the magnificent confiscated jewellery of the unlucky Maréchale d’Ancre. This gorgeous pair were to escort the young Queen to England.

After the ceremony, at which the Duc de Chevreuse acted his part of a Protestant prince to admiration, a royal banquet was held in the hall of the Archbishop’s palace, then close to the cathedral.

“There were bonfires in all the streets of Paris,” writes Richelieu, “and lights in the windows, which turned night into brilliant day. The Cardinal, who with such pains and prudence had brought this alliance to a happy end, feeling obliged to show his contentment, which exceeded that of all others, presented their Majesties and the Court with a supper and fireworks which were worthy of the magnificence of France.”

The Cardinal’s high contentment did not last long. At the moment there were reasons for it: slight hopes, which soon faded, of a swift end to the revolt; the arrival of the Pope’s nephew and legate, Cardinal Barberini, to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Valtelline affair. Then all was upset, in Richelieu’s view, by the descent on Paris of the Duke of Buckingham.

Ostensibly, that great personage came as his master’s special representative, to fetch home Charles’s Queen. In Paris “his Person and Presence was wonderfully admired and esteemed” ... “he out-shined,” as Lord Clarendon tells us, “all the bravery that Court could dress itself in, and over-acted the whole Nation in their own most peculiar Vanities.”

Cardinal de Richelieu’s “pains and prudence” had not been in order to the satisfying of this gentleman, who unluckily ruled both fashion and politics in England, and he was by no means disposed to make peace or war at Buckingham’s bidding. For the Duke’s visit was far from being one of mere courtesy. He had two political ends in view: first, to defeat the Pope’s legate and to keep France at war with Spain; second, to make so close an alliance with France that she would be bound to fight for the restoration of the Elector Palatine to his dominions. Richelieu would have none of this state of bondage. Louis XIII., led by him, stood firm and independent. He would accept peace with Spain when he judged it advisable, and he would not throw himself into the war in Germany, except by allowing Count Mansfeldt, on the Protestant side, to be reinforced by a couple of thousand French horse at the expense of those who employed them. This concession, which does not sound great, was made with the view of keeping England in a good temper, at least so long as the King of France had his Huguenot rebels to contend with.

Buckingham pressed for peace in that direction, but was answered, with sufficient haughtiness, that in the interest of the King his master he ought to be silent. “For no prince,” said Richelieu, “should assist, even by words, the rebellious subjects of another.”