Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

This was the keenest trial of strength that had yet taken place between the Queen-mother and her former protégé. To all her arguments she added those of family affections and old alliance: the Queen of Spain and the future Duchess of Savoy were the King’s sisters; peace with Spain and the Empire had been the chief object of her own policy as Regent. In reply, Richelieu maintained his views: the honour of France was concerned in the Mantuan affair; the Duke’s legitimate right could not be disputed; and if France were to suffer the pretensions of Spain, Savoy, and the Empire, she would be acting a part both cowardly and foolish. Never would Louis XIII.’s Minister consent thus to degrade his King. The Cardinal went on to make a statement of his policy and his intentions, promising that by the month of May Casale would be relieved and the royal army free to deal with the Huguenots in Languedoc. “So that your Majesty will, I hope, return victorious to Paris in the month of August.” In a more personal strain he reproached the King for want of confidence, and frankly pointed out, in Marie’s presence, the faults of character which made him a difficult master to serve. Then once more he alluded to his own weak health, and offered to lay down the burden of office, too heavy, he said, for him to bear.

Marie de Médicis listened, and perhaps, with her eyes fixed on her gloomy and worried son, hoped for an instant that the Cardinal’s career was ended. Nothing of the kind. “When the King had heard all this with as much patience as the humours of the great generally bestow on the most important affairs, he told the Cardinal that he was resolved to profit by what had been said, but would hear no more of his retirement.”

From this conference, says M. Martin, “Richelieu sortit roi.” Our point of view shows this as a fact; but neither the Cardinal himself nor his enemies saw it at the time. The Queen-mother’s hostility was only now becoming open and active; the “Day of Dupes,” when Richelieu ran his greatest risk and reached his zenith of power, was still almost two years distant.

The King left Paris for the south on January 15, 1629, travelling through eastern France, while the army of La Rochelle, under Marshals Schomberg, Bassompierre, and de Créquy, having “refreshed itself” among the mountains of Auvergne, marched to join His Majesty in Dauphiné. Cardinal de Richelieu travelled with the King from Châlons. On his way from Paris he stopped at Les Caves, near Nogent-sur-Seine, a country house belonging to his old friend Claude Bouthillier, then a Secretary of State, afterwards Surintendant des Finances, the father of young Léon Bouthillier, Comte de Chavigny, who became Richelieu’s right hand and was loved by him as a son. At Les Caves the Cardinal met the Prince de Condé, and conferred with him as to the crushing of the Huguenots in Languedoc. But he had room for other thoughts. A letter to M. Bouthillier, written on leaving Les Caves, is attractive in its detachment from the whirlpool of politics and war.

“I cannot leave your house to pursue my way,” he writes, “without thanking you for the good cheer Madame Bouthillier has bestowed on us; which was such, that if you had yourself been here you could have added nothing to it.... Also I must tell you that whereas you described this house as a farm, it may be called a very fine and pretty house, leaving nothing to be desired but the building of a gallery on the left hand of the entrance, in order to match the right wing....” In a postscript, the Cardinal advises M. Bouthillier as to the purchase of a château at Pont-sur-Yonne, where in later years, rich and beneficent, M. le Surintendant and his wife often entertained royalty.

A month later found Louis XIII. and his army at the foot of the Alps, on the frontiers of France and Piedmont. Some negotiations between Richelieu and the Prince of Piedmont, the King’s brother-in-law, having ended in nothing, the French proceeded to invade Savoyard territory. It was not an easy matter, in the first days of March, over mountain paths buried in snow, to reach and to storm the rocky and barricaded gorge which, beyond Mont Genèvre on the French side, led to the fortified town of Susa, the gateway of Piedmont. The whole gorge was commanded by Spanish and Piedmontese troops, firing down on the invaders; the Duke of Savoy himself was in the field.

In the dark hours of early morning, Louis XIII. led his regiments to the attack. Plunging on foot through the snow, “freely hazarding his person,” says Aubery, “and running the same risk as the least soldier in his army,” the story goes that the victory was largely owing to his own resolute courage. The marshals in command, they say, and even the Cardinal, were inclined to hesitate at an adventure that looked so dangerous. The King climbed the mountain and met a goatherd, who showed him a path by which the barricades and their defenders could be out-flanked. While the main body, under the marshals, rushed furiously on the barricades and cleared the gorge at the point of the sword, the royal musketeers scaled the rocks and drove down the enemy, first to the barricades, then along the road to Susa. In the helpless rout of his troops the Duke of Savoy narrowly escaped being taken prisoner.

A few days were enough to reduce the romantic mountain town of Susa, and the relief of Casale followed at once; for the furious energy of the French, acting as one man under the inspiring force of Richelieu, was too much for Charles Emmanuel of Savoy. He sent his daughter-in-law in great magnificence to visit her royal brother at Susa, and hastily made a treaty with France, of which he was not long in repenting; but the immediate and necessary consequence was the retirement from Montferrat of the Spanish general, Don Gonzalez de Cordova. A half-promise that Philip IV. of Spain would induce the Emperor to grant the new Duke of Mantua his desired investiture was not so easy of fulfilment.

There were diplomatie wheels within wheels. While Richelieu’s negotiations with Savoy and Spain were still in progress, Spain was turning a favourable ear to the Duc de Rohan, who proposed to “keep France in a state of war as long as His Catholic Majesty pleased”; undertaking that his party, if successful in establishing a Protestant republic in the south, should assure liberty of conscience and the free exercise of their religion to Catholics, on the condition of a handsome subsidy and pensions for himself and his brother. This agreement was actually signed at Madrid on May 3, when Richelieu was still at Susa, the King and the larger part of the army having already re-crossed the Alps and marched through Dauphiné to the Rhône. So far the prophecy had been fulfilled: the month of May had found the royal forces free to join Condé, Montmorency and d’Épernon, and thus to deal with the rebels in Languedoc.

They were not capable of much resistance. The brothers Rohan and Soubise, with their friends, had no regular army to oppose the King of France and his fifty thousand men. A recent treaty between France and England had deprived them of Charles I.’s possible help, and Richelieu’s movements were far too quick for Spain. By the middle of May the royal armies had poured like a devastating torrent over Languedoc and part of Guienne, destroying the green crops, the growing corn, all the year’s food of the strong little towns and villages, and driving the scattered people to the mountains. Every detail of the campaign was planned by Richelieu, and it was he who arranged that the King himself should escape the early summer heats by crossing the Cévennes to the Tarn country and carrying out there the general scheme of destruction.