But Charles did not show his kingly firmness only on this occasion: it did not forsake him when the French Marshal Bassompierre was instantly sent over to awe the king; Charles sternly offered the alternative of war, rather than permit a French faction to trouble an English court. Bassompierre makes a curious observation in a letter to the French Bishop of Mende, he who had been just sent away from England; and which serves as the most positive evidence of the firm refusal of Charles the First. The French marshal, after stating the total failure of his mission, exclaims, "See, sir, to what we are reduced! and imagine my grief, that the Queen of Great Britain has the pain of viewing my departure without being of any service to her; but if you consider that I was sent here to make a contract of marriage observed, and to maintain the Catholic religion in a country from which they formerly banished it to make a contract of marriage, you will assist in excusing me of this failure." The French marshal has also preserved the same distinctive feature of the nation, as well as of the monarch, who, surely to his honour as King of England, felt and acted on this occasion as a true Briton. "I have found," says the Gaul, "humility among Spaniards, civility and courtesy among the Swiss, in the embassies I had the honour to perform for the king; but the English would not in the least abate of their natural pride and arrogance. The king is so resolute not to re-establish any French about the queen, his consort, and was so stern (rude) in speaking to me, that it is impossible to have been more so." In a word, the French marshal, with all his vaunts and his threats, discovered that Charles the First was the true representative of his subjects, and that the king had the same feelings with the people: this indeed was not always the case! This transaction took place in 1626, and when, four years afterwards, it was attempted again to introduce certain French persons, a bishop and a physician, about the queen, the king absolutely refused even a French physician, who had come over with the intention of being chosen the queen's, under the sanction of the queen mother. This little circumstance appears in a manuscript letter from Lord Dorchester to M. de Vic, one of the king's agents at Paris. After an account of the arrival of this French physician, his lordship proceeds to notice the former determinations of the king; "yet this man," he adds, "hath been addressed to the ambassador to introduce him into the court, and the queen persuaded in cleare and plaine terms to speak to the king to admit him as domestique. His majesty expressed his dislike of this proceeding, but contented himself to let the ambassador know that this doctor may return as he is come, with intimation that he should do it speedily; the French ambassador, willing to help the matter, spake to the king that the said doctor might be admitted to kiss the queen's hand, and to carrie the news into France of her safe delivery: which the king excused by a civil answer, and has since commanded me to let the ambassador understand, that he had heard him as Monsieur de Fontenay in this particular, but, if he should persist and press him as ambassador, he should be forced to say that which would displease him." Lord Dorchester adds, that he informs M. de Vic of these particulars, that he should not want for the information should the matter be revived by the French court, otherwise he need not notice it.[[216]]
By this narrative of secret history, Charles the First does not appear so weak a slave to his queen as our writers echo from each other; and those who make Henrietta so important a personage in the cabinet, appear to have been imperfectly acquainted with her real talents. Charles, indeed, was deeply enamoured of the queen, for he was inclined to strong personal attachments;[[217]] and "the temperance of his youth, by which he had lived so free from personal vice," as May, the parliamentary historian expresses it, even the gay levity of Buckingham seems never, in approaching the king, to have violated. Charles admired in Henrietta all those personal graces which he himself wanted; her vivacity in conversation enlivened his own seriousness, and her gay volubility the defective utterance of his own; while the versatility of her manners relieved his own formal habits. Doubtless the queen exercised the same power over this monarch which vivacious females are privileged by nature to possess over their husbands; she was often listened to, and her suggestions were sometimes approved; but the fixed and systematic principles of the character and the government of this monarch must not be imputed to the intrigues of a mere lively and volatile woman; we must trace them to a higher source; to his own inherited conceptions of the regal rights, if we would seek for truth, and read the history of human nature in the history of Charles the First.
Long after this article was published, the subject has been more critically developed in my "Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First."
THE MINISTER—THE CARDINAL DUKE OF RICHELIEU.
Richelieu was the greatest of statesmen, if he who maintains himself by the greatest power is necessarily the greatest minister. He was called "the King of the King." After having long tormented himself and France, he left a great name and a great empire—both alike the victims of splendid ambition! Neither this great minister nor this great nation tasted of happiness under his mighty administration. He had, indeed, a heartlessness in his conduct which obstructed by no relentings those remorseless decisions which made him terrible. But, while he trode down the princes of the blood and the nobles, and drove his patroness, the queen-mother, into a miserable exile, and contrived that the king should fear and hate his brother, and all the cardinal-duke chose, Richelieu was grinding the face of the poor by exorbitant taxation, and converted every town in France into a garrison; it was said of him, that he never liked to be in any place where he was not the strongest. "The commissioners of the exchequer and the commanders of the army believe themselves called to a golden harvest; and in the interim the cardinal is charged with the sins of all the world, and is even afraid of his life." Thus Grotius speaks, in one of his letters, of the miserable situation of this great minister, in his account of the court of France in 1635, when he resided there as Swedish ambassador. Yet such is the delusion of these great politicians, who consider what they term state-interests as paramount to all other duties, human or divine, that while their whole life is a series of oppression, of troubles, of deceit, and of cruelty, their state-conscience finds nothing to reproach itself with. Of any other conscience it seems absolutely necessary that they should be divested. Richelieu, on his death-bed, made a solemn protestation, appealing to the last judge of man, who was about to pronounce his sentence, that he never proposed anything but for the good of religion and the state; that is, the Catholic religion and his own administration. When Louis the Thirteenth, who visited him in his last moments, took from the hand of an attendant a plate with two yolks of eggs, that the King of France might himself serve his expiring minister, Richelieu died in all the self-delusion of a great minister.
The sinister means he practised, and the political deceptions he contrived, do not yield in subtilty to the dark grandeur of his ministerial character. It appears that, at a critical moment, when he felt the king's favour was wavering, he secretly ordered a battle to be lost by the French, to determine the king at once not to give up a minister who, he knew, was the only man who could extricate him out of this new difficulty. In our great civil war, this minister pretended to Charles the First that he was attempting to win the parliament over to him, while he was backing their most secret projects against Charles. When a French ambassador addressed the parliament as an independent power, after the king had broken with it, Charles, sensibly affected, remonstrated with the French court; the minister disavowed the whole proceeding, and instantly recalled the ambassador, while at the very moment his secret agents were, to their best, embroiling the affairs of both parties.[[218]] The object of Richelieu was to weaken the English monarchy, so as to busy itself at home, and prevent its fleets and its armies thwarting his projects on the Continent, lest England, jealous of the greatness of France, should declare itself for Spain the moment it had recovered its own tranquillity. This is a stratagem too ordinary with great ministers, those plagues of the earth, who, with their state-reasons, are for cutting as many throats as God pleases among every other nation.[[219]]
A fragment of the secret history of this great minister may be gathered from that of some of his confidential agents. One exposes an invention of this minister's to shorten his cabinet labours, and to have at hand a screen, when that useful contrivance was requisite; the other, the terrific effects of an agent setting up to be a politician on his own account, against that of his master.
Richelieu's confessor was one Father Joseph; but this man was designed to be employed rather in state-affairs, than in those which concerned his conscience. This minister, who was never a penitent, could have none. Father Joseph had a turn for political negotiation, otherwise he had not been the cardinal's confessor; but this turn was of that sort, said the nuncio Spada, which was adapted to follow up to the utmost the views and notions of the minister, rather than to draw the cardinal to his, or to induce him to change a tittle of his designs. The truth is, that Father Joseph preferred going about in his chariot on ministerial missions, rather than walking solitarily to his convent, after listening to the unmeaning confessions of Cardinal Richelieu. He made himself so intimately acquainted with the plans and the will of this great minister, that he could venture at a pinch to act without orders: and foreign affairs were particularly consigned to his management. Grotius, when Swedish ambassador, knew them both. Father Joseph, he tells us, was employed by Cardinal Richelieu to open negotiations, and put them in a way to succeed to his mind, and then the cardinal would step in, and undertake the finishing himself. Joseph took businesses in hand when they were green, and, after ripening them, he handed them over to the cardinal. In a conference which Grotius held with the parties, Joseph began the treaty, and bore the brunt of the first contest. After a warm debate, the cardinal interposed as arbitrator: "A middle way will reconcile you," said the minister, "and as you and Joseph can never agree, I will now make you friends."[[220]]