Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

Europe was amazed: and what of the French nation, flung unconsulted into the struggle with Catholic Europe which might easily have become a fight for its own existence? The three Estates of the realm had each its own separate point of view. The princes and nobles loved war; but the majority, Catholic and hating Richelieu, were rebels at heart. However, each man had his orders: content or malcontent, each governor found himself dispatched to his own province, each commander to his post, while generals dashed hither and thither in pursuit of armies which had to be hired, recruited, disciplined, poured in half-a-dozen directions over the frontier—Germany, Flanders, Lorraine, Switzerland, Italy. Richelieu, the directing brain, at this moment of high energy, moved the members even against their will.

To most of the clergy, again, the war was of the nature of sacrilege; and still more so, later on, the demand of an enormous payment of arrears for lands held under the Crown, which had been suffered to go free for nearly a hundred years. But at a time when the taxes of France had rolled up to more than a hundred million francs a year, a gigantic and as yet unheard-of sum, Richelieu could no longer grant the clergy the privilege of paying no tax but their prayers, which he had himself claimed for them at the States-General of 1613.

“The people give their goods, the nobles their blood, the clergy their prayers.” As ever, the patience of the most heavily taxed seemed almost inexhaustible; and it was not till France was deeply engaged in the war, her middle class and her peasantry crushed by Richelieu’s intendants and financiers under burdens every week more enormous, that in the south and the north populations made some effort to save themselves; made it by rioting, their only resource, and found themselves—Croquants in Guienne, Va-nu-pieds in Normandy—in a last state worse than the first.

In spite of all these discontents there were ways in which Frenchmen now realized the national unity which was Richelieu’s dream. The famous leader, Duke Henry de Rohan, was again in arms, not now as a Huguenot chief, but commanding an army against the Duke of Lorraine, fighting for his duchy with imperial troops behind him. In the spring of 1635, it was to Rohan that Richelieu committed the task of preparing for his designs on Milan by a new occupation of the Valtelline, thus once more playing the old game of blocking the chief military road between Austria and Spain. All went well at first, the Duke proving himself a loyal subject and a good general. The cause that finally discomfited him and drove him at last to throw up his command and to retire to Geneva was the failure of Richelieu’s government to pay a promised indemnity to the Grisons, rightful possessors of the valley, who after two years’ French occupation, secretly encouraged by Spain, rebelled suddenly against Rohan and insisted on the evacuation of their territory. Blamed by Richelieu for a failure which was no fault of his, and broken by severe illness, the Huguenot hero was still ready to bear arms for France. In the spring of 1638 he volunteered to serve under Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar—the great soldier who, if actually fighting for his own hand, nevertheless gave Alsace to France—and died of his wounds after the siege of Rheinfeld, having lived long enough to know with what swift brilliance Bernard had turned defeat into victory.

For many months, as readers of history know, the fortune of war went against Richelieu. The ravages of the French and the Dutch armies in the Netherlands, under the Prince of Orange and the Marshals de Châtillon and de Brézé, did not incline the population to change masters. In Germany, one town after another fell into imperialist hands, and it was only with difficulty that the French held their own in Lorraine. The invasion of the Milanese failed; and later on the deaths of the Dukes of Savoy and of Mantua deprived France of two important allies.

The French fleet, though making a fine show for those days—forty-seven men-of-war—wasted its strength in vainly flourishing about the coast; and owing to the quarrels of its commanders, the Comte d’Harcourt and the Archbishop of Bordeaux, with M. de Vitry, governor of Provence—the slayer of Concini—did not for a long time succeed in even recovering the Isles of Lérins, seized by Spain at the opening of the war.

And then, in July 1636, a terrible disaster threatened France. Imperial troops crossed the frontier, and had taken two strong places in Picardy, La Capelle and Le Catelet, before the French commanders were ready to oppose them. Imperial cavalry crossed the Somme and advanced to the Oise, the Comte de Soissons retreating before them, and spread a very natural terror throughout the country. They were mostly Croats and Hungarians, fierce and savage men, whose road was marked by robbery, fire, and slaughter. Their leader was the Bavarian, John of Werth, a name of fear in the campaigns of his day.

Paris was in a state of terror and fury. The black shadows of the streets, in the sweltering heat of late July and early August, were loud with raging men and women, whose voices taught the Cardinal-Duc his unpopularity. Paris was ill fortified, ill defended, and part of her strong old walls had been destroyed by him for the sake of his Palais-Cardinal. They cried against him because of that; because of his ingratitude to the Queen-mother, his failure, so far, in the war he had undertaken, his alliance with heretics. And Richelieu knew that their fear, if not their hatred, was too well justified. The Comte de Soissons, whose army, camping in the forests and holding the fords of the Oise, protected Paris, was not above suspicion as to his loyalty; the Duc de Chaulnes, governor of Picardy, was lazy and negligent; money and men were lacking for the defence of a divided, discontented, panic-stricken country.

The first news of the invasion found the King and the Cardinal absent from Paris as usual in the heat of summer. They returned at once to the stifling, frantic city.

Then “the great Armand” showed the stuff he was made of. “Remember, I pray you,” he wrote to the Comte de Soissons, “on such occasions as these, moments are worth years.” Paris being always and before all things a Catholic city, he appealed to her religion. All the bishops in the kingdom were commanded to hold processions within and without their cathedrals, with the special devotions of the Forty Hours. From every church in Paris and in the whole of France, with every chapel of convent or monastery, the bells clanged out, calling the faithful to pray for their country. In his own person, the Cardinal vowed to the Paris convent of the Filles du Calvaire, in the Marais, Père Joseph’s favourite foundation, a large sum of money and a silver lamp to burn perpetually before Our Lady’s altar.