The Duke of Rohan left France and retired to Venice, where his wife and daughter were awaiting him. He had been appointed by the Venetian senate generalissimo of the forces of the republic, when the cardinal, who had no doubt preserved some regard for his military talents, sent him an offer of the command of the king’s troops in the Valteline. There he for several years maintained the honor of France, being at one time abandoned and at another supported by the cardinal, who ultimately left him to bear the odium of the last reverse. Meeting with no response from the court, cut off from every resource, he brought back into the district of Gex the French troops driven out by the Grisons themselves, and then retired to Geneva. Being threatened with the king’s wrath, he set out for the camp of his friend Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar; and it was whilst fighting at his side against the imperialists that he received the wound of which he died in Switzerland, on the 16th of April, 1638. His body was removed to Geneva amidst public mourning. A man of distinguished mind and noble character, often wild in his views and hopes, and so deeply absorbed in the interests of his party and of his church, that he had sometimes the misfortune to forget those of his country.
Meanwhile the king had set out for Paris, and the cardinal was marching on Montauban. Being obliged to halt at Pezenas because he had a fever, he there received a deputation from Montauban, asking to have its fortifications preserved. On the minister’s formal refusal, supported by a movement in advance on the part of Marshal Bassompierre with the army, the town submitted unreservedly. “Knowing that the cardinal had made up his mind to enter in force, they found this so bitter a pill that they could scarcely swallow it;” they, nevertheless, offered the dais to the minister, as they had been accustomed to do to the governor, but he refused it, and would not suffer the consuls to walk on foot beside his horse. Bassompierre set guards at the doors of the meeting-house, that things might be done without interruption or scandal; it was ascertained that the Parliament of Toulouse, “habitually intractable in all that concerned religion,” had enregistered the edict without difficulty; the gentlemen of the neighborhood came up in crowds, the Reformers to make their submission and the Catholics to congratulate the cardinal; on the day of his departure the pickaxe was laid to the fortifications of Montauban; those of Castres were already beginning to fall; and the Huguenot party in France was dead. Deprived of the political guarantees which had been granted them by Henry IV., the Reformers had nothing for it but to retire into private life. This was the commencement of their material prosperity; they henceforth transferred to commerce and, industry all the intelligence, courage, and spirit of enterprise that they had but lately displayed in the service of their cause, on the battle-field or in the cabinets of kings.
“From that time,” says Cardinal Richelieu, “difference in religion never prevented me from rendering the Huguenots all sorts of good offices, and I made no distinction between Frenchmen but in respect of fidelity.” A grand assertion, true at bottom, in spite of the frequent grievances that the Reformers had often to make the best of; the cardinal was more tolerant than his age and his servants; what he had wanted to destroy was the political party; he did not want to drive the Reformers to extremity, nor force them to fly the country; happy had it been if Louis XIV. could have listened to and borne in mind the instructions given by Richelieu to Count de Sault, commissioned to see after the application in Dauphiny of the edicts of pacification: “I hold that, as there is no need to extend in favor of them of the religion styled Reformed that which is provided by the edicts, so there is no ground for cutting down the favors granted them thereby; even now, when, by the grace of God, peace is so firmly established in the kingdom, too much precaution cannot be used for the prevention of all these discontents amongst the people. I do assure you that the king’s veritable intention is to have all his subjects living peaceably in the observation of his edicts, and that those who have authority in the provinces will do him service by conforming thereto.” The era of liberty passed away with Henry IV.; that of tolerance, for the Reformers, began with Richelieu, pending the advent with Louis XIV. of the day of persecution.
CHAPTER XLI.
LOUIS XIII., CARDINAL RICHELIEU, AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
France was reduced to submission; six years of power had sufficed for Richelieu to obtain the mastery; from that moment he directed his ceaseless energy towards Europe. “He feared the repose of peace,” said the ambassador Nani in his letters to Venice; “and thinking himself more safe amidst the bustle of arms, he was the originator of so many wars, and of such long-continued and heavy calamities, he caused so much blood and so many tears to flow within and without the kingdom, that there is nothing to be astonished at, if many people have represented him as faithless, atrocious in his hatred, and inflexible in his vengeance. But no one, nevertheless, can deny him the gifts that this world is accustomed to attribute to its greatest men; and his most determined enemies are forced to confess that he had so many and such great ones, that he would have carried with him power and prosperity wherever he might have had the direction of affairs. We may say that, having brought back unity to divided France, having succored Italy, upset the empire, confounded England, and enfeebled Spain, he was the instrument chosen by divine Providence to direct the great events of Europe.”
The Venetian’s independent and penetrating mind did not mislead him; everywhere in Europe were marks of Richelieu’s handiwork. “There must be no end to negotiations near and far,” was his saying: he had found negotiations succeed in France; he extended his views; numerous treaties had already marked the early years of the cardinal’s power; and, after 1630, his activity abroad was redoubled. Between 1623 and 1642 seventy-four treaties were concluded by Richelieu: four with England; twelve with the United Provinces; fifteen with the princes of Germany; six with Sweden; twelve with Savoy; six with the republic of Venice; three with the pope; three with the emperor; two with Spain; four with Lorraine; one with the Grey Leagues of Switzerland; one with Portugal; two with the revolters of Catalonia and Roussillon; one with Russia; two with the Emperor of Morocco: such was the immense network of diplomatic negotiations whereof the cardinal held the threads during nineteen years.
An enumeration of the alliances would serve, without further comment, to prove this: that the foreign policy of Richelieu was a continuation of that of Henry IV.; it was to Protestant alliances that he looked for their support in order to maintain the struggle against the house of Austria, whether the German or the Spanish branch. In order to give his views full swing, he waited till he had conquered the Huguenots at home: nearly all his treaties with Protestant powers are posterior to 1630. So soon as he was secure that no political discussions in France itself would come to thwart his foreign designs, he marched with a firm step towards that enfeeblement of Spain and that upsetting of the empire of which Nani speaks. Henry IV. and Queen Elizabeth, pursuing the same end, had sought and found the same allies: Richelieu had the good fortune, beyond theirs, to meet, for the execution of his designs, with Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.
Richelieu had not yet entered the king’s council (1624), when the breaking off of the long negotiations between England and Spain, on the subject of the marriage of the Prince of Wales with the Infanta, was officially declared to Parliament. At the very moment when Prince Charles, with the Duke of Buckingham, was going post-haste to Madrid, to see the Infanta Mary Anne of Spain, they were already thinking, at Paris, of marrying him to Henrietta of France, the king’s young sister, scarcely fourteen years of age. King James I. was at that time obstinately bent upon his plan of alliance with Spain; when it failed, his son and big favorite forced his hand to bring him round to France. His envoys at Paris, the Earl of Carlisle and Lord Holland, found themselves confronted by Cardinal Richelieu, commissioned, together with some of his colleagues, to negotiate the affair. M. Guizot, in his Projet de Mariage royal (1 vol. 18mo: 1863; Paris, Hachette et Cie), has said that the marriage of Henry IV.‘s daughter with the Prince of Wales was, in Richelieu’s eyes, one of the essential acts of a policy necessary to the greatness of the kingship and of France. He obtained the best conditions possible for the various interests involved, but without any stickling and without favor for such and such a one of these interests, skilfully adapting words and appearance, but determined upon attaining his end.
The tarryings and miscarriages of Spanish policy had warned Richelieu to make haste. “In less than nine moons,” says James I.‘s private secretary, James Howell, “this great matter was proposed, prosecuted, and accomplished; whereas the sun might, for as many years, have run his course from one extremity of the zodiac to the other, before the court of Spain would have arrived at any resolution and conclusion. That gives a good idea of the difference between the two nations—the leaden step of the one and the quicksilver movements of the other. It also shows that the Frenchman is more noble in his proceedings, less full of scruple, reserve, and distrust, and that he acts more chivalrously.”