Père Suffren, the Maréchal d’Estrées—formerly known as Marquis de Coenores—and a Secretary of State, M. de la Ville-aux-Clercs, were left behind with the King’s apologies and farewells to his mother, whom he never saw again. They were also entrusted with a letter, begging Her Majesty to retire to Moulins, where she might live in all honour and liberty as governor of the Bourbonnais; it being understood that in her present mind she was no longer welcome at Court. This very unpleasant news was broken to Marie before she left her bed, not by the appointed messengers, but by Queen Anne, her daughter-in-law, who paid her a hurried visit before following the King, and parted from her with embraces and tears. “Both,” says Madame de Motteville, “were deeply moved at finding themselves the victims of the Cardinal de Richelieu, their common enemy. It was the last time they saw each other.”
As to Moulins, Marie would have none of it. She could not openly refuse to obey the King, but her excuses dragged on from day to day: bad roads and wintry weather; an epidemic in the Bourbonnais; the ruinous state of the Château de Moulins; a severe cold which kept her in her room. All the spring royal messengers were galloping between Compiègne and Paris. Sometimes they carried persuasion, sometimes threats. If the Queen-mother disliked the Bourbonnais, would she accept her old abode of Angers, with the government of Anjou? Let her remember that no law in Holy Scripture obliged a son to live always with his mother when of age to govern himself, whereas we are enjoined in divers places to obey the King, as God’s lieutenant on earth. And many more arguments; but in short, her disobedience was insupportable, and would in the end force the King to treat her more rigorously.
It appeared that of her own free will she would never leave Compiègne. In spite of the great courtesy shown her by M. d’Estrées, in command of the guard—every morning he came to her for the pass-word, and every night offered her the keys of the town—she treated herself as a prisoner. As the season advanced, though free of all the country round, she never went beyond the castle walls, hoping thus, says Aubery, to excite general hatred against the Cardinal.
In the meanwhile her friends disappeared one by one. Her physician, Vautier, was flung into the Bastille; the same fate befell the unlucky Bassompierre. The Duc de Guise, intriguing for Monsieur, his stepson-in-law, in his government of Provence, was forced to fly to Italy, a lifelong exile as it proved. The Princesse de Conti, the Duchesse d’Elbeuf (Henriette de Vendôme), the Duchesse de Roannez, the Maréchale d’Ornano, and other great ladies, were ordered to retire to their country houses; and the brilliant Princesse de Conti, sister of Guise, the Queen-mother’s constant friend, adored by Bassompierre, to whom they say she was secretly married, died at Eu of a broken heart on the last day of April.
In June a report reached the Queen-mother at Compiègne that a royal army was to be sent to remove her by force. If this story was invented with the object of driving her out of the kingdom, it served its end. On July 18, at ten o’clock at night, she left Compiègne on foot and almost alone—an easier escape than that from the Château de Blois. A coach and six, with outriders, was waiting in the shadow of the forest. The Queen intended to stop at La Capelle, a small strong place in Picardy, close to the frontier of the Low Countries: the governor, M. de Vardes, had promised to receive her. But this coming to Richelieu’s ears, the father of M. de Vardes, who had formerly commanded at La Capelle, was sent post-haste from Paris to supersede his son, and the gates were shut against the fugitive Queen. She was thus obliged to cross the frontier, which she did, never to return; and was received with great honour at Avesnes in Artois, by the officers of the Archduchess Isabel.
So the great Henry’s Florentine widow removed herself from the path of Cardinal de Richelieu; to his advantage and her own loss and ruin.
This political triumph was followed by new honours and personal dignities. For a year past he had borne, with other Cardinals, the new titles of Eminentissime and Eminence, decreed by Pope Urban VIII., and shared only by the ecclesiastical Electors of the Empire and the Grand Master of Malta. He had added to his worldly goods and to his spiritual power by becoming Coadjutor of the Abbot of Cluny, and the strength of his resolute will for reform was felt by the great religious orders as well as by the secular clergy.
In September 1631 letters patent from the King created him Duc de Richelieu and a peer of France, and he took his seat in Parliament with great state, escorted by the Prince de Condé, the Duc de Montmorency, and a crowd of the first men in France. From that time he bore the singular title of “Cardinal-Duc.” He also became governor of Brittany; and one fortified town after another, throughout the north of France, fell into his hands and were garrisoned by friends of his own. He rewarded the Prince de Condé and the Cardinal de la Valette with the governments of Burgundy and Anjou.
One foreign Power, at least, was not behindhand in paying homage to the man whom the King of France delighted to honour. The Republic of Venice sent him letters of Venetian nobility, to descend to any one of his relations he might choose. “And she sent them with ceremony by an express Gentleman, to whom His Eminence did not forget to present a very fine chain of gold.”
It seemed that Richelieu had little now to fear from open enemies at home, though the secret dread of assassination clung about him with reason to his life’s end. He had already shown a certain sense of security by acts of indulgence or of conciliation: the Duc de Vendôme had been set at liberty and the Duchesse de Chevreuse had been allowed to return to the Court, while her husband was made governor of Picardy. Champagne, the important frontier province, was given as a mark of royal confidence to the Comte de Soissons.