Flight from France of the Queen-mother and Monsieur—New honours for Cardinal de Richelieu—The fall of the Marillac brothers—The Duc de Montmorency and Monsieur’s ride to Languedoc—Castelnaudary—The death of Montmorency—Illness and recovery of the Cardinal.
A few months were enough to rid Cardinal de Richelieu of his most active enemies. One after another, in the first half of the year 1631, they disappeared from the scene by exile or imprisonment, in some cases ending in death.
After the crushing disappointment of the “Day of Dupes,” Marie de Médicis submitted to a kind of reconciliation with her “former creature” who had so convincingly proved his strength. Gaston d’Orléans too, led by his favourites, M. de Puylaurens and Président Le Coigneux, whom Richelieu thought it worth while to bribe heavily, visited the Cardinal and promised him his friendship. But it was not to be expected that either mother or son should be in earnest. Gaston hardly needed the discontent of his favourites—eager for places and honours which the Cardinal was not in a hurry to give—to throw him once more into violent opposition.
On January 30, attended by a dozen gentlemen, the young Prince appeared at the Petit-Luxembourg. He told the Cardinal “that he had come to retract the promise of friendship which he had given him a few days before; on the contrary, to declare his resentment that a man of his sort should so far have forgotten himself as to set the royal family in a blaze. That, owing his whole fortune and elevation to the Queen his benefactress, instead of proving his gratitude, as a good man and a faithful servant would have done, he had become her chief persecutor, by his artifices continually blackening her in the eyes of the King; and that as to himself, he had treated him not only without respect, but with insolence! And that he would have reproved him sooner, had he not been restrained by his quality as a priest; but that this would not save him in the future from the quite extraordinary treatment deserved by the gravity of his offences against personages of such dignity.”
“This discourse,” continues the chronicler, “was made with so much heat and such threatening gestures of hands and eyes, that the Cardinal made no answer, not knowing whether it was all in earnest or only meant to frighten him.”
The moment was alarming enough, for Monsieur’s people, so fierce were their looks, seemed to be waiting their moment to fall upon their prey. The Prince went down to his coach in a terrible humour, swearing and threatening all the way, while the Cardinal attended him bare-headed and prudently silent. It was not till the blustering company had driven off that he regained his usual composure. None the less, we are assured, he was extremely glad to see the King, who came dashing “à toute bride” to the door, as his champion and protector, not many minutes later.
Monsieur left Paris immediately for Orléans, where he swaggered for some weeks and tried to rouse a civil war by posing as a friend to the populace and a resister of taxation. Since he refused to submit to his brother and to return to Court, Richelieu was prepared to bring him to his senses by armed force. But he preferred self-banishment. In the middle of March he rode across country to Besançon, and then took refuge with the Duke of Lorraine. He was followed into exile by a number of persons of quality, notably his half-brother the Comte de Moret, the Duc d’Elbeuf, brother-in-law of the Duc de Vendôme, the Duc de Bellegarde, governor of Burgundy, and M. and Madame du Fargis, in disgrace at Court because of their intimate friendship with the brothers Marillac.
Each day of that winter and spring brought fresh and painful experience to Marie de Médicis. She saw herself checked in every direction by an enemy who worked with extraordinary prudence, keeping all the outward forms of due respect while he lured her gradually to ruin. No doubt her presence in Paris, her atmosphere of plot and intrigue, was dangerous to him, if not to the State. The question was, how to remove her from the centre of things without a public scandal.
In February the Court went to Compiègne for hunting, and to spend the Carnival. As Richelieu had foreseen, the Queen-mother was not deterred by “the incommodity of the season” from following the King: she would not repeat her mistake of St. Martin’s Day. At Compiègne the King made a last unsuccessful attempt to soften her heart towards the Cardinal. As she firmly refused to listen to any arguments, it was decided that she must be separated from a Court in which her presence was a centre for the factious and the ill-intentioned.
The Château of Compiègne was roused early on the morning of February 23. The King had announced that he would go hunting at dawn; and in fact he and the Cardinal, with a large attendance, rode out of the gates before either of the Queens was awake. Instead of turning into the dim glades of the forest, the royal party rode hard for Paris.