The first step in the campaign was the decisive one, and cost more to both sides than all the rest. Privas on its high ridge, the gallant little stronghold of the Vivarais, seventeen years earlier the seat of a general Protestant Synod, was now called upon literally to give its life for the cause. After a fortnight’s fighting siege, during which many lives were lost, the inhabitants and the garrison insisted that their brave commander, St. André de Montbrun, should make terms with the King. These were refused, and the surrender had to be unconditional. Town and people were treated with terrible severity. Both besiegers and besieged have been blamed for a furious fire which broke out as the royal troops were entering the fortress; in the awful night of confusion and massacre that followed, Privas was sacked and burnt to the ground with every circumstance of savagery.
At such times Louis XIII. was hard and inflexible. He would have hanged St. André, had not the Cardinal intervened to save him. Indeed, on this occasion and others, Richelieu showed a humanity for which most writers have given him little credit. Towards political offenders he was indeed “the Iron Cardinal”—no mercy for those who came in the way of his great designs; but he had pity on the helpless fugitives of Privas.
He was ill in bed on the fatal night of May 29. “But in spite of his illness,” writes Aubery, “having mounted his horse with two hundred gentlemen, he went himself to meet the crowd of inhabitants who had forsaken their homes and their goods; and among others he saved twelve young girls from sixteen to eighteen years old, caused them to be led in safety to the Château d’Autremont, and recommended them with much charity to the Lady of that place, who took great care of them. Afterwards one brought to him an infant of seven months, found in the arms of his dead mother; and having praised and rewarded the soldier for saving from among the dead him who had but begun to live, he gave the child a nurse, and commanded that he should be well brought up and should be called Fortunat de Privas....”
That such actions should be remembered as exceptional, only proves what was then the usual fate of wretched non-combatants. The well-known horrors of the Thirty Years War, then raging in Germany, soon to be shared in by France, are witness enough. Compared with Tilly and Mansfeldt in their campaigns of mercenary ravage and slaughter, Richelieu’s dealings with the Huguenot faction appear, considering all things, actually gentle.
After the taking of Privas, the royal armies swept the south with little difficulty. One after another the towns and fortified villages opened their gates and laid down their arms, and when the King made his triumphal entry into Nîmes, early in July, Richelieu had attained the first great end of his policy; the Huguenot “state within the State” had practically ceased to exist.
The Duc de Rohan and the Protestants of the south, once conquered, were treated with moderation. A general amnesty was offered: Rohan retired to Venice, a free man. Liberty of conscience was assured by the confirmation of the Edict of Nantes. The one severe condition was the razing of all the Huguenot fortifications throughout the provinces. This had to be accepted and carried out, sorely against the will of the many proud little towns and village strongholds scattered through the mountains and valleys of that stern country, which now found themselves tame and defenceless under the power of the Crown. Only one town, Montauban of fighting memory, stood out and refused to destroy the walls and towers that were her glory and pride. She refused so obstinately that the King, tired of his hot campaign, began his journey back to Paris on July 15, leaving the Cardinal, himself ill of fever, to bring her to reason.
This he did with such success, after two or three weeks of argument, the Montauban deputies following him from town to town, that they at last consented to swallow the bitter pill of complete submission. In the middle of August he entered Montauban peaceably with a strong force, and was received with almost royal honours and specially harangued by the Protestant ministers. After lingering a few days to see the destruction of the ramparts well begun, “il retourna triomphant à Paris, au grand crève-cœur de ses ennemis.”
But those enemies were increasing in number, strength, and confidence. The chances seemed far more even to lookers-on of that day than to us, who possess the balances of history. The reigning Queen, the Queen-mother, Monsieur, all the princes of the blood except Condé—Alexandre de Vendôme had died at Vincennes in the early spring of 1629, and his family held Richelieu responsible—most of the great nobles and ladies of the Court; statesmen such as Michel de Marillac; Marshals of France such as his brother Louis, lately promoted to that rank, Bassompierre, and others; ecclesiastics such as the Cardinal de Bérulle—all these, openly or secretly, for personal or political reasons, were opposed to Richelieu. He had his hearty adherents, the followers of his star, but they were few and rather clever than powerful. His only real support was the King. And Louis XIII. showed considerable strength of character in standing by his Minister against such odds, social and religious.
Arriving victorious at Fontainebleau, Richelieu was received with angry coldness by Marie de Médicis. He had not only carried out the policy she hated as to Mantua, Spain, and Savoy, but he had shown the rebel Huguenots what seemed to her a scandalous toleration. A furious jealousy of his influence with the King was so evident a motive of her rage, that the Cardinal found it politic to bow before the storm.
Once more he solemnly offered his resignation to the King; once more Louis, torn between the claims of his mother and his Minister, having spent a day in tears, refused to receive it. On the contrary, he heaped fresh honours on the Cardinal. By letters patent he became “chief Minister of State,” the first time in French history that such an appointment had been formally made. A kind of peace was patched up with the Queen-mother. She and her friends only bided their time; the death of Cardinal de Bérulle, a few days after Richelieu’s return from the south, removed one of the best of her counsellors and left her more completely in the hands of a violent faction.