“At this,” he says, “the others who had come to felicitate him were dumfounded, but I said to them aloud: ‘Do not be astonished, gentlemen, at the cordiality with which the new Keeper of the Seals has received me; for I am the cause of the King having given them to him to-day.’ ‘I was not aware, Monsieur,’ said he, ‘that I was under this obligation to you; I beg you to tell me why.’ ‘Monsieur,’ I answered, ‘but for me, you would not have had them to-day, but a year ago.’ Whereat he began to laugh and told me that it was true, but that I had done my duty; for, since I had not been solicited by him, with whom I was hardly acquainted, I was obliged to use my influence on behalf of my friend M. de Caumartin. Then he told me that he begged me to love him, and that he would swear before these gentlemen to be faithfully my servant and friend, as he had assuredly shown himself to be on every occasion that has arisen.”
But if Bassompierre had nothing to fear from the good-natured d’Aligre, he had everything to apprehend from the jealous and unscrupulous La Vieuville.
“By this means [the disgrace of the Brûlarts] La Vieuville was in supreme favour, and from that time worked openly for my ruin, since he had not been able to compel me to abandon my friends and to bind myself to him in a close alliance, as he had begged me earnestly to do before Christmas.”
However, the marshal did not allow any fear of approaching ruin to interfere with his enjoyment of the Fair of Saint-Germain and the other gaieties of that winter, during which the negotiations for the marriage of the Prince of Wales (afterwards Charles I.) with the Infanta Maria Anna, sister of Philip IV, having been definitely broken off, the Earl of Holland arrived in Paris to sound the French Court on the question of an alliance between the prince and Henriette-Marie. The King and Queen each organised a grand ballet. In his Majesty’s, which was entitled les Voleurs, Louis XIII represented a Dutch captain, M. de la Roche-Guyon a Dutch lady, and the Ducs de Chevreuse and de Luxembourg and the Maréchaux de Créquy and de Bassompierre impersonated pirates. Bassompierre had to recite the following verses:—
“Enfin malgré les flots me voici de retour,
La mer se promettait de noyer mon amour,
Dont la constance luy fait honte;
Mais elle est bien loin de son compte:
Caliste, vos appas ont rompu son dessein,
Les flots où je me perds sont dedans vostre sein.”
At the beginning of March, La Vieuville complained to the King that, with the connivance of Puisieux, when he had been Secretary of State for War, Bassompierre had been drawing every year for the maintenance of the Swiss 24,000 livres more than he was entitled to. The marshal, on learning of this, angrily denied that he had received a sol more than was justly due, and proceeded to prove his statement in the presence of the King, when high words passed between him and the Minister. Nevertheless, his accounts were not passed, and the matter remained in abeyance.
La Vieuville, with all his faults, showed both energy and ability; and he was the first to reverse the disastrous Spanish policy of the Court. He recalled the Commandeur de Sillery, the French Ambassador to Rome, where he had shown himself as feeble and undecided as his relatives in Paris; sent the Marquis de Cœuvres, a good soldier and a skilful diplomatist, as Ambassador to Switzerland, to urge the Cantons, both Protestant and Catholic, to go to the assistance of the Grisons; concluded offensive and defensive alliances with the Dutch, which assured to them a subsidy for the next two years; and warmly supported the English marriage-project. But he made many enemies besides Bassompierre, and feeling the need of conciliating the Queen-Mother, who for some weeks had absented herself from Court, as a protest against the treatment of Richelieu, he promised to obtain for her favourite admission to the Council.
This was no easy task, for the mediocrities who had so long surrounded Louis XIII had succeeded in inspiring him with their own dread of this great man, and the King was, in consequence, very unwilling to entrust him with office, added to which he still associated him with the followers of Concini, all of whom he held in aversion. “There is a man who would like to be of my Council,” he observed one day to Praslin, as Richelieu passed by; “but I cannot bring myself to this step, after all he has done against me.” “I know him better than you do,” he said on another occasion to Marie de’ Medici, when she had been urging the Cardinal’s claims upon him; “he is a man of unmeasured ambition.” Now, however, he did not withstand the request of his Minister, reinforced by the solicitations of the Queen-Mother, and on April 29, 1624, Richelieu re-entered the Council.
Meanwhile, La Vieuville had resumed hostilities against Bassompierre, whose intimacy with the King he appears to have regarded as the chief obstacle in the path of his ambition. This time he launched a far more serious charge against the marshal than that of drawing more money on account of the Swiss than he was entitled to, and accused him of being a pensioner of Spain.
It is difficult to say with any degree of certainty on what grounds this charge was based, since Bassompierre himself throws no light upon the subject. But it would appear from a manuscript of Dupuy in the Bibliothèque Nationale that, during the marshal’s embassy to Madrid, the Spanish Government had proposed to him a commercial treaty between France and Spain, and that in 1623 Bassompierre had presented a memorial to Louis XIII in favour of this project. In the margin of his copy of this memorial Dupuy gives his own opinion of the proposed treaty, and while praising the ability with which Bassompierre has stated the case in its favour, he foresees several objections, and among them, the following:—