Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

Richelieu has been accused of deceiving the Grand Prior with false hopes of favour and clemency, thus encouraging him to place his brother and himself in the King’s hands. He might have thought himself justified in doing so, if necessary. On the contrary, if he is to be believed, he tried to guard against any accusation of the kind. He pretended to be aware neither of the anxious terror that had brought the young man to Limours, nor of the “fausse hardiesse” which led him to play this game of bluff for himself and for his brother, acting innocence and a frank readiness to face the King.

“When the Grand Prior told the Cardinal that he was going to fetch his brother, he did not answer him that he was doing either well or ill, because he saw that they could not save themselves, or resist the King’s power, if they remained in Brittany, and he thought it better that His Majesty should take the trouble to fetch them thence, or even take them on their road, than give them a pretext to say” (what they did say) “that they had been attracted by fine words, deceived and caught by false hopes.”

Finding that the Cardinal would give him no clear lead, Alexandre de Vendôme hastened on his way. A few days later, he and his brother, “making a virtue of necessity,” met the King at Blois. The next day, both were arrested and conveyed to the castle of Amboise, from which they were transferred to Vincennes. The Duc de Vendôme’s question—“What about Monsieur? Has he been arrested or no?”—was hardly needed to warn Richelieu, who arrived at Blois that same evening, that the conspiracy was still alive and dangerous.

The Comte de Chalais, unimaginably rash and foolish, was playing a game he could only lose. His escape after the Fleury affair had been narrow enough, and he had then solemnly promised loyalty to the Cardinal, even undertaking to act as his spy, informing him of any evil counsels that might reach Monsieur. But Chalais was not his own master. Madame de Chevreuse drove him into a path where there was no more turning back, and after the arrest of the Vendôme princes he became the active agent and cat’s-paw of a new combination of old rebel forces which swiftly dragged Monsieur into its centre, his vows of loyalty hardly spoken and the ink of his signature not yet dry.

While the King continued his slow progress into Brittany to assure himself of the loyalty of the province, he was actually enveloped in a cloud of conspiracy. Every night, according to Bassompierre, the Comte de Chalais visited Monsieur in his room, and for two or three hours talked and plotted treason: an easy adventure for the Master of the King’s Wardrobe, who had his lodging close to royalty. The plan was that Monsieur should leave the Court and fly either south-west or north-east; either to the Huguenots at La Rochelle, prepared to receive him by the influence of Madame de Chevreuse and Madame de Rohan, or to the Duc d’Épernon and his son at Metz. The Comte de Soissons, whom the King had left behind as governor of Paris, furious at the arrest of his friends the Vendôme princes, was eager not only to help with arms and men towards a civil war, but to seize his own advantage by carrying off Mademoiselle de Montpensier.

This last detail of the plot, it seems, was the first to reach the King’s ears, and he defeated it by sending for the heiress and her mother, the Duchesse de Guise, who immediately followed the Court on its westward journey.

This piece of ill-luck was swiftly followed by others. Monsieur himself was undecided, timid, difficult to move to instant action. Disliking the Huguenot leaders, he was unwilling to place himself in their hands. Metz was his favourite idea; but the Marquis de la Valette would not act independently of his father, and the old Duc d’Épernon, it seems, had had enough of quarrels with the King, for he went so far as to send him the letter that Monsieur had written.

Richelieu seems to have felt a certain scornful pity for the unfortunate Chalais, whose evil report was brought to him by other spies. More than once he had him warned that he was on the road to ruin; yet “the poor gentleman” went on with his desperate schemes. And even the spies had not discovered the extent of these. Chalais was betrayed to his destruction by a friend, the Comte de Louvigny, who quarrelled with him because he would not take his side in some trivial dispute with the Comte de Candale, another son of the Duc d’Épernon. Chalais made it clear that neither he nor his friends could afford to be on ill terms with that family.

This quarrel took place between Saumur and Nantes, as the Court travelled down the Loire in all the fresh beauty of early summer. M. de Bassompierre, who was present, a courtier of long experience, thought nothing of it—a mere matter of an amourette—and it is pretty certain that public opinion was with him in denouncing Louvigny as “ce méchant garçon” for the revenge he took. Having been known as “parfait ami de Chalais,” the confidant of his secrets, he straightway poured them all into the ears of the Cardinal and the King. Bassompierre hints that in his rage and spite he told even more than the truth; but that alone was enough to condemn Chalais.

He was arrested at Nantes on July 8. On the 11th, the Estates of Brittany were opened by the King amid loyal rejoicings, a new governor, the Maréchal de Thémines, taking the place of the Duc de Vendôme. By this appointment Richelieu showed a certain magnanimity; forgetting his own brother’s death at the hands of the Maréchal’s son, he remembered and rewarded the old soldier’s faithfulness in 1616, when by the arrest of Condé he had checked the rebel party and lightened the task of the Richelieu-Barbin ministry.