Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

At this very time, in the spring of 1626, the discontent he had already caused in high quarters began to show its teeth, and the first of many conspiracies was formed against him.

He had very few sincere friends except in his own family, and among the men who worked with him, and whom he entirely trusted. Marie de Médicis, indeed, had not yet actually broken with him; they were apparently on the same terms as before. But in actual fact the distance between them was widening every day. Influenced by Bérulle, the Queen-mother had become more dévote; she disapproved of the long delay in making peace with Rome and Spain, and of the treaty with the Huguenots, helped on by the intervention of heretic England. She was angry with England for other reasons: the presumption of Buckingham, the treatment of the young Queen’s French household. All these things were turning her mind against Richelieu’s policy. And he was not very diplomatic with regard to his patroness. He showed too plainly perhaps that her friendship was no longer of the highest importance to him. He had gained what he wanted; he was the first man in France, indispensable to the King. Ill, impatient, overworked, straining every nerve to keep his hold on affairs and his influence with his royal master, it was hardly strange that he should fail a little in grateful attention to a stupid elderly woman, even though he owed her everything.

But Marie de Médicis was not responsible for this first great “storm,” as the Cardinal calls it in his Memoirs. The clouds rolled up round the King’s young brother, Monsieur, Duc d’Anjou, and were brought to a head by Richelieu’s decision that he should marry Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the only child of the last lord of Champigny and the present possessor of his enormous wealth.

GASTON DE FRANCE, DUC D’ORLÉANS

The plan of this match was nothing new. Henry IV. and Marie de Médicis had betrothed the heiress to their son Nicolas, Duc d’Orléans, when both were infants. After the boy’s early death it was proposed that he should be replaced by his younger brother, Gaston, but there was no formal contract. The Queen had never renounced the idea, specially welcome to her because of her friendship with the girl’s mother, the Duchesse de Montpensier, afterwards Duchesse de Guise, and of the warm affection she had always felt for Mademoiselle de Montpensier herself, who was now twenty-one, three years older than Gaston, and of a singularly sweet character.

As to Monsieur, he has been described often enough. Handsome, intelligent, weak, foolish, restless, impressionable, gay and agreeable, false and cowardly, he inherited little of Henry IV. but his vices and frivolities. He had been ill-trained by his governor, Colonel—now Maréchal—d’Ornano, the Corsican officer who had won his post by devotion to Luynes at the time of Concini’s death. Since those days d’Ornano had owed some gratitude to Cardinal de Richelieu, and he was now superintendent of his former pupil’s household. The Cardinal had lately displeased him by refusing to admit him, with Monsieur, to the royal Council; and disappointed personal ambition was the chief cause of his throwing in his lot with those who were bent on making Monsieur the head of an opposing party in the State. On the whole, d’Ornano was probably more foolish than dangerous. Great ladies did what they pleased with him; and he seems to have confided his dreams of power, both for his young master and for himself, to no less a person than Père Joseph, the actual ear of Richelieu.

But the centre of the cyclone was not in Monsieur’s own household: it was in the heart of the young childless Queen. Long afterwards Anne of Austria told Madame de Motteville that she had done all she could to prevent Monsieur’s marriage with Mademoiselle de Montpensier, believing that marriage to be entirely against her own interests. Already she was neglected enough, unhappy enough. Louis XIII., if not the worst of husbands, was sulky, suspicious, resentful. The Queen and her intimate friends lived in an atmosphere of gloom, almost of persecution, under the shadow of the King and his Minister. Louis hated Madame de Chevreuse, and with some reason if it is true that her wild spirits had led Anne into romping games which more than once cost France a Dauphin.

But it seemed to the Queen that Gaston’s proposed marriage made her position hopeless. If he had children, heirs to the crown, his wife would certainly be regarded as the first woman in France, and the prospect filled Anne with jealous misery. Personally, of course, she could do little in opposition, and the extent of her share in the great conspiracy was much exaggerated by scandalous tongues and pens. But Madame de Chevreuse threw herself into her mistress’s cause with all the more energy because she hated both Richelieu and the King. The Maréchal d’Ornano’s discontent found a hearty ally in her, loveliest and most daring of intrigantes, and also in the Princesse de Condé, who had her own reasons for disliking the Montpensier marriage. That younger branch of the Bourbons would thus be exalted above the branch of Bourbon-Condé, now next in succession to the crown. If Monsieur must marry—a troublesome necessity—the Condés wished for a match between him and their daughter Anne-Geneviève, now seven years old. The delay would please the Queen; in the meantime the Prince de Condé was ready to back Maréchal d’Ornano in demanding honours and appanages for Monsieur and even a share in the government. The alternative to the Condé marriage was one with a foreign princess; in either case the young prince would be independent of his brother, his mother and Cardinal de Richelieu. He was as popular, lively and good-natured as the King was unsociable and forbidding; and under the circumstances such a “cabale,” as Richelieu calls it, was likely to spread far.

The Cardinal saw his danger. The greater among the conspirators were rather scornful of caution and secrecy. If Richelieu’s knowledge of their objects was at first vague, hardly a rebel name escaped him. From the Prince de Condé, still holding aloof from the Court, and the young Comte de Soissons, who intended himself to marry Mademoiselle de Montpensier, to César, Duc de Vendôme, governor of Brittany, who was prepared to make his province the head-quarters of an insurrection, and his brother Alexandre, the Grand Prior, with many others of less high descent but yet among les grands—Richelieu knew them all. Behind them loomed shadows of foreign Powers: the Dutch, indignant at the coldness of their ally and at her treaty with Spain; the English, “from faithlessness alone”; the Spaniards, from natural enmity and interested ambition; the Duke of Savoy, to avenge his wounded pride; and then, of course, the Huguenot party in France—past experience teaching them, Richelieu says bitterly, that they always profited by the troubles of the State.