In France, meanwhile, as well as in Spain, the question of religion was the rock of offence. Richelieu confined himself to demanding, in a general way, that, in this matter, the King of England should grant, in order to obtain the sister of the King of France, all that he had promised in order to obtain the King of Spain’s. “So much was required,” he said, “by the equality of the two crowns.”
The English negotiators were much embarrassed; the Protestant feelings of Parliament had shown themselves very strongly on the subject of the Spanish marriage. “As to public freedom for the Catholic religion,” says the cardinal, “they would not so much as hear of it, declaring that it was a design, under cover of alliance, to destroy their constitution even to ask such a thing of them.” “You want to conclude the marriage,” said Lord Holland to the queen-mother, “and yet you enter on the same paths that the Spaniards took to break it off; which causes all sorts of doubts and mistrusts, the effect whereof the premier minister of Spain, Count Olivarez, is very careful to aggravate by saying that, if the pope granted a dispensation for the marriage with France, the king his master would march to Rome with an army, and give it up to sack.”
“We will soon stop that,” answered Mary de’ Medici quickly; “we will cut out work for him elsewhere.” At last it was agreed that King James and his son should sign a private engagement, not inserted in the contract of marriage, “securing to the English Catholics more liberty and freedom in all that concerns their religion,” than they would have obtained by virtue of any articles whatsoever accorded by the marriage treaty with Spain, provided that they made sparing use of them, rendering to the King of England the “obedience owed by good and true subjects; the which king, of his benevolence, would not bind them by any oath contrary to their religion.” The promises were vague and the securities anything but substantial; still, the vanity as well as the fears of King James were appeased, and Richelieu had secured, simultaneously with his own ascendency, the policy of France. Nothing remained but to send to Rome for the purpose of obtaining the dispensation. The ordinary ambassador, Count de Bethune, did not suffice for so delicate a negotiation; Richelieu sent Father Berulle. Father Berulle, founder of the brotherhood of the Oratory, patron of the Carmelites, and the intimate friend of Francis de Sales, though devoid of personal ambition, had, been clever enough to keep himself on good terms with Cardinal Richelieu, whose political views he did not share, and with the court of Rome, whose most faithful allies, the Jesuits, he had often thwarted. He was devoted to Queen Mary de’ Medici, and willingly promoted her desires in the matter of her daughter’s marriage. He found the court of Rome in confusion, and much exercised by Spanish intrigue. “This court,” he wrote to the cardinal, “is, in conduct and in principles, very different from what one would suppose before having tried it for one’s self; for my part, I confess to having learned more of it in a few hours, since I have been on the spot, than I knew by all the talk that I have heard. The dial constantly observed in this country is the balance existing between France, Italy, and Spain.” “The king my master,” said Count de Bethune, quite openly, “has obtained from England all he could; it is no use to wait for more ample conditions, or to measure them by the Spanish ell; I have orders against sending off any courier save to give notice of concession of the dispensation: otherwise there would be nothing but asking one thing after another.” “If we determine to act like Spain, we, like her, shall lose everything,” said Father Berulle. Some weeks later, on the 6th of January, 1625, Berulle wrote to the cardinal, “For a month I have been on the point of starting, but we have been obliged to take so much trouble and have so many meetings on the subject of transcripts and missives as well as the kernel of the business . . . I will merely tell you that the dispensation is pure and simple.”
King James I. had died on the 6th of April, 1625; and so it was King Charles I., and not the Prince of Wales, whom the Duke of Chevreuse represented at Paris on the 11th of May, 1625, at the espousals of Princess Henrietta Maria. She set out on the 2d of June for England, escorted by the Duke of Buckingham, who had been sent by the king to fetch her, and who had gladly prolonged his stay in France, smitten as he was by the young Queen Anne of Austria. Charles I. went to Dover to meet his wife, showing himself very amiable and attentive to her. Though she little knew how fatal they would be to her, the king of England’s palaces looked bare and deserted to the new queen, accustomed as she was to French elegance; she, however, appeared contented. “How can your Majesty reconcile yourself to a Huguenot for a husband?” asked one of her suite, indiscreetly. “Why not?” she replied, with spirit. “Was not my father one?”
By this speech Henrietta Maria expressed, undoubtedly without realizing all its grandeur, the idea which had suggested her marriage and been prominent in France during the whole negotiations. It was the policy of Henry IV. that Henry IV.‘s daughter was bringing to a triumphant issue. The marriage between Henrietta Maria and Charles I., negotiated and concluded by Cardinal Richelieu, was the open declaration of the fact that the style of Protestant or Catholic was not the supreme law of policy in Christian Europe, and that the interests of nations should not remain subservient to the religious faith of the reigning or governing personages.
Unhappily the policy of Henry IV., carried on by Cardinal Richelieu, found no Queen Elizabeth any longer on the throne of England to comprehend it and maintain it. Charles I., tossed about between the haughty caprices of his favorite Buckingham and the religious or political passions of his people, did not long remain attached to the great idea which had predominated in the alliance of the two crowns. Proud and timid, imperious and awkward, all at the same time, he did not succeed, in the first instance, in gaining the affections of his young wife, and early infractions of the treaty of marriage; the dismissal of all the queen’s French servants, hostilities between the merchant navies of the two nations, had for some time been paving the way for open war, when the Duke of Buckingham, in the hope of winning back to him the House of Commons (June, 1626), madly attempted the expedition against the Island of Re. What was the success of it, as well as of the two attempts that followed it, has already been shown.
Three years later, on the 24th of April, 1629, the King of England concluded peace with France without making any stipulation in favor of the Reformers whom hope of aid from him had drawn into rebellion. “I declare,” says the Duke of Rohan, “that I would have suffered any sort of extremity rather than be false to the many sacred oaths we had given him not to listen to any treaty without him, who had many times assured us that he would never make peace without including us in it.” The English accepted the peace “as the king had desired, not wanting the King of Great Britain to meddle with his rebellious Huguenot subjects any more than he would want to meddle with his Catholic subjects if they were to rebel against him.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. iv. p. 421.] The subjects of Charles I. were soon to rebel against him: and France kept her word and did not interfere.
The Hollanders, with more prudence and ability than distinguished Buckingham and Charles I., had done better service to the Protestant cause without ever becoming entangled in the quarrels that divided France; natural enemies as they were of Spain and the house of Austria, they readily seconded Richelieu in the struggle he maintained against them; besides, the United Provinces were as yet poor, and the cardinal always managed to find money for his allies; nearly all the treaties he concluded with Holland were treaties of alliance and subsidy; those of 1641 and 1642 secured to them twelve hundred thousand livres a year out of the coffers of France. Once only the Hollanders were faithless to their engagements: it was during the siege of Rochelle, when the national feeling would not admit of war being made on the French Huguenots. All the forces of Protestantism readily united against Spain; Richelieu had but to direct them. She, in fact, was the great enemy, and her humiliation was always the ultimate aim of the cardinal’s foreign policy; the struggle, power to power, between France and Spain, explains, during that period, nearly all the political and military complications in Europe. There was no lack of pretexts for bringing it on. The first was the question of the Valteline, a lovely and fertile valley, which, extending from the Lake of Como to the Tyrol, thus serves as a natural communication between Italy and Germany. Possessed but lately, as it was, by the Grey Leagues of the Protestant Swiss, the Valteline, a Catholic district, had revolted at the instigation of Spain in 1620; the emperor, Savoy, and Spain had wanted to divide the spoil between them; when France, the old ally of the Grisons, had interfered, and, in 1623, the forts of the Valteline had been intrusted on deposit to the pope, Urban VIII. He still retained them in 1624, when the Grison lords, seconded by a French re-enforcement under the orders of the Marquis of Coeuvres, attacked the feeble garrison of the Valteline; in a few days they were masters of all the places in the canton; the pope sent his nephew, Cardinal Barberini, to Paris to complain of French aggression, and with a proposal to take the sovereignty of the Valteline from the Grisons; that was, to give it to Spain. “Besides,” said Cardinal Richelieu, “the precedent and consequences of it would be perilous for kings in whose dominions it hath pleased God to permit diversity of religion.” The legate could obtain nothing. The Assembly of Notables, convoked by Richelieu in 1625, approved of the king’s conduct, and war was resolved upon. The siege of La Rochelle retarded it for two years; Richelieu wanted to have his hands free; he concluded a specious peace with Spain, and the Valteline remained for the time being in the hands of the Grisons, who were one day themselves to drive the French out of it. Whilst the cardinal was holding La Rochelle besieged, the Duke of Mantua had died in Italy, and his natural heir, Charles di Gonzaga, who was settled in France with the title of Duke of Nevers, had hastened to put himself in possession of his dominions. Meanwhile the Duke of Savoy claimed the marquisate of Montferrat; the Spaniards supported him; they entered the-dominions of the Duke of Mantua, and laid siege to Casale. When La Rochelle succumbed, Casale was still holding out; but the Duke of Savoy had already made himself master of the greater part of Montferrat; the Duke of Mantua claimed the assistance of the King of France, whose subject he was; here was a fresh battle-field against Spain; and scarcely had he been victorious over the Rochellese, when the king was on the march for Italy. The Duke of Savoy refused a passage to the royal army, which found the defile of Suza Pass fortified with three barricades.
