Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

The ends of the conspiracy revealed themselves with a certain slowness, reaching the Cardinal through one spy and another. All through the spring of 1626 the air was full of dark and threatening rumours. Opposition to the Montpensier marriage was a mere starting-point. Monsieur was little but the figure-head of a faction opposed to the whole of Richelieu’s policy and bent on forcing his fall. The refusal of Monsieur’s demands was to be the signal for open revolt, in which the Huguenots would make common cause with the princes and half the great nobles of the kingdom. The boldest conspirators talked of killing the Cardinal, “the dragon who watched unceasingly over his master’s safety”; of throwing the King into prison, and in case of his death of marrying Monsieur to the Queen. It seems certain that Anne herself was unjustly accused of being even aware of such desperate schemes as these; but she was never quite cleared from the injurious suspicion.

Early in May, when the Court was at Fontainebleau, Richelieu decided to strike; he had evidence enough to convince the King that his brother’s attitude was dangerous. M. d’Ornano came to wait on His Majesty. Louis received him graciously. The same night he was arrested, and the next night found him a prisoner at the castle of Vincennes. His brothers and intimate friends were thrown into the Bastille. “My husband is dead,” said Madame d’Ornano when she heard of his capture; and the words were spoken but a few months too soon.

Monsieur was furiously angry. He remonstrated loudly with the King, who merely answered that he had acted on the advice of his Council. The Prince then attacked M. d’Aligre, the Chancellor, a timid personage, who humbly excused himself, declaring that he had given no advice of the kind. Gaston went blustering to Richelieu, from whom he met with a different reception and a different reply. The Cardinal not only acknowledged that the King had asked his advice; he added that he had given it strongly in favour of the arrest of M. d’Ornano, which he considered absolutely necessary for the good of the State and of Monsieur himself. Gaston replied with insulting language and flung away.

“The Cardinal hated Monsieur,” says a writer of the time, and we can well believe it—with the scornful hatred of a proud and brilliant man bearing the whole burden of the State on his shoulders, and finding himself constantly thwarted and threatened by an insolent, privileged boy. He hated him more because of the reconciliations he had to arrange, the flatteries he had to use, the fatherly yet respectful manner in which the King’s brother must be treated by the King’s First Minister—conscious, for the next dozen years, that his sickly master might die childless and be succeeded by this young fellow whose will and power for mischief were only balanced by his weakness of character. Until the birth of a Dauphin, in 1638, destroyed Gaston’s political importance, he was to be the chief obstacle in Richelieu’s career, the chief thorn in his side.

The arrest of the Maréchal d’Ornano had all the effect that Richelieu intended; but if it warned and terrified the more prudent conspirators, it infuriated the bolder, younger spirits of Monsieur’s faction. Madame de Chevreuse and a few young men, led by the Grand Prieur de Vendôme and Henry de Talleyrand-Périgord, Comte de Chalais, decided that Richelieu must die. They planned that Monsieur should invite himself and a party of his friends to dine with the Cardinal at Fleury, his country-house near Fontainebleau. This gracious act might be supposed to mean that the Prince forgave his friend’s arrest. But the real intention was that the Cardinal’s guests should murder him. In the confusion that would follow, Monsieur’s party meant to do as they pleased with the King and the government.

Richelieu was saved by the weakness of one of the chief conspirators. The Comte de Chalais, Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe, a young man of twenty-eight, was at this time the favoured lover of Madame de Chevreuse. He would have killed a dozen cardinals to please her, and he was ready to stab her enemy with his own hand. For all that, he ruined the enterprise. On the eve of the great day he confided the plan to Commander de Valençay, a loyal courtier, though a friend of his own.

M. de Bassompierre may tell the story, for he was at Fontainebleau at the time.

“The said Commander reproached him for his treachery, that being the King’s servant he should dare to undertake this against his First Minister; saying that he must give him warning, and that in case he refused to do this he would do it himself: to which Chalais, being intimidated, consented; and they both went in that same hour to Fleury, in order to warn M. le Cardinal, who thanked them, and begged them to go and inform the King of the same: which they did; and the King, at eleven o’clock in the evening, sent to order thirty of his gendarmes and thirty light horse to go immediately to Fleury. The Queen-mother also dispatched thither the nobles of her household. It happened as Chalais had said: towards three o’clock in the morning Monsieur’s officers arrived at Fleury, sent to prepare his dinner. M. le Cardinal left them in the house, came to Fontainebleau, and went straight to the bed-chamber of Monsieur, who was getting up, and was sufficiently amazed to see him. He reproached Monsieur for not having honoured him with his commands to provide dinner, which he would have done as best he could, and said that he had left the house in possession of his people. After this, having handed Monsieur his shirt, he went away to the King, and afterwards to the Queen-mother” ... leaving Gaston effectually frightened by his terrible coolness.

So ended the Fleury plot. The friends of M. de Chalais were completely puzzled as to how the information could have reached Richelieu, until, the Court having returned to Paris, he made his confession to Madame de Chevreuse, promising more faithfulness in future.

For a moment a kind of paralysis seems to have seized both parties in the game. Ill in body and troubled in mind, realising that his public life must be one long struggle against deadly foes at home and abroad, Richelieu actually offered his resignation to the King. It was plain, he said, that he alone was the cause of divisions in the State. His enemies were so many that he lived at Court in continual peril of assassination. If it were the King’s will that in spite of danger he should continue to serve him, he was ready to do so, but he knew that his departure would be for the peace of the realm. Writing also to the Queen-mother, he begged her to take his part with the King, adding that unless he could be more careful of his health in future his career as a statesman would of necessity be short.