Richelieu took advantage of Montmorency’s revolt to remove all hostile or suspected governors of provinces and replace them by his own friends. He himself had already obtained the government of Brittany and been created duke and peer. He was triumphing everywhere, at home and abroad.
At the beginning of the following year Bassompierre had again great hopes of recovering his liberty. Schomberg sent him word that, on the return of the King from the South, he would be released, and he learned that both Louis XIII and the Cardinal had said as much to several persons. However, he was again doomed to disappointment, the fact that Monsieur, after making his submission, had quitted France again, this time for Flanders, being the pretext for his continued detention.
“In place of liberating me,” writes the poor marshal, “they deprived me of that portion of my salary which had been paid me during the two preceding years, notwithstanding that I was a prisoner, amounting to one-third of what I had been accustomed to draw every year. This made me see plainly that it was intended to keep me eternally in the Bastille.”
On February 25—the same day on which two years before Bassompierre had been sent to the Bastille—Châteauneuf, the Keeper of the Seals, who had foolishly allowed himself to be drawn by Madame de Chevreuse, with whom he was madly in love, into a fresh conspiracy against Richelieu, was arrested at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and conducted to the Château of Angoulême, where he remained in close confinement until the Cardinal’s death, ten years later. At the same time, the gates of the Bastille opened to admit his nephew, the Marquis de Leuville, and several other persons who had been concerned in the affair, including Bassompierre’s old friend, the Chevalier de Jars.
The Cardinal attached great importance to the arrest of Jars, as he believed that he might be induced to reveal the part which Anne of Austria had played in the conspiracy. But the chevalier, if a somewhat feather-brained, was a brave and honourable, man, and, though he was kept in close confinement for nearly a year and subjected to repeated examinations by his Eminence’s myrmidons, he steadfastly refused to make the least admission that might incriminate the Queen or any of her friends. Finally, he was transferred to Troyes, and then brought to trial for high treason before a special commission, at the head of which was the notorious Laffemas, who was known as “the Cardinal’s executioner,” and made it his boast that he could condemn any man, if he had but two lines of his writing. Laffemas bullied and browbeat the prisoner and “did all the mean things that the base soul is capable of suggesting,”[141] but to no purpose, for he could wring nothing from him. Accordingly, the judges proceeded to pass sentence of death on Jars, who was in due course conducted to the scaffold, “where he made his appearance with a demeanour full of courage, smiling at his enemies and prepared to meet death without flinching.”[142] But it was only a grim farce after all, for Richelieu had nothing to gain by the removal of such small fry as the chevalier, and the only object of the trial had been to intimidate him into betraying his accomplices. And so, at the moment when the condemned man was about to lay his head on the block, Laffemas interrupted the proceedings by producing an order from the King which remitted the capital sentence and directed that the chevalier should be conducted back to the Bastille.
At the beginning of 1634 Bassompierre received a promise that his salary as Colonel-General of the Swiss, which had been suspended the previous year, should be paid, but this promise was not kept. In the following September, however, he learned that the King had given orders that he was to receive it, but, pressed by his creditors, who since his imprisonment had given him no rest, and believing that, if he ceased to command the Swiss, one of the chief reasons for his continued detention would be removed, he begged Richelieu, through the governor of the Bastille, to obtain the King’s permission to sell his post. This was granted, and he also obtained permission to offer it to the Marquis de Rochefort, a friend of Du Tremblay. Rochefort, however, would give no more than 400,000 livres, and the marshal, who while at liberty had refused double that sum, declined to sell at this price. Thereupon Rochefort endeavoured to persuade Richelieu to compel Bassompierre to accept his offer; but though the Cardinal would not do this, the order for the payment of the marshal’s salary was cancelled, and “he continued his miserable imprisonment in the Bastille with great inconvenience in his domestic affairs.”
Towards the middle of December, Du Tremblay came to visit the marshal and told him that he was commissioned to make him an offer for his post, which, if he accepted, his liberty was assured. The persons who had empowered him to do this, whose names he was not at liberty to mention at present, would not go beyond 400,000 livres, but they were people of great influence at Court, who could powerfully assist him in obtaining his release. Bassompierre consented, on condition that the arrears of his salary were paid, and Du Tremblay promised that his brother Père Joseph should go to Rueil and speak to the Cardinal about this. A day or two later Du Tremblay informed him that Père Joseph and the two Bouthilliers had undertaken to arrange the matter with Richelieu, and that he thought that he would leave the Bastille before Christmas. And he gave him to understand that the influential persons for whom he was acting were the Baron de Pontchâteau and his son, the Marquis de Coislin, who was married to a daughter of Pierre Séguier, Châteauneuf’s successor in the post of Keeper of the Seals.
At the end of the year Louis XIII gave his consent to the Marquis de Coislin succeeding Bassompierre in the command of the Swiss.
“And then it was divulged that the said Marquis de Coislin would be Colonel-General of the Swiss, and the Keeper of the Seals sent me some compliments on the matter through M. du Tremblay; and the rumour of my release, which six weeks before had been very strong, augmented to such a degree, that a number of persons came every day to the Bastille to see if I were still there; and it was regarded as certain that I should be released at Epiphany.”
Epiphany came and went, and Bassompierre still remained in the Bastille, the population of which was about this time increased by the arrival of several persons who were suspected of being concerned with Puylaurens and Du Fargis, formerly French Ambassador at Madrid, in treasonable relations with Spain. These two were imprisoned at Vincennes, where Puylaurens died some months later.