Increasing trials of the exiled Queen--Her property is seized on the frontier--She determines to conciliate the Cardinal--Richelieu remains implacable--Far-reaching ambition of the minister--Weakness of Louis XIII--Insidious arguments of Richelieu--Marie de Medicis is again urged to abandon her adherents--Cowardly policy of Monsieur--He signs a treaty with Spain--The Queen-mother refuses to join in the conspiracy--Puylaurens induces Monsieur to accept the proffered terms of Richelieu--He escapes secretly from Brussels---Gaston pledges himself to the King to "love the Cardinal"--Gaston again refuses to repudiate his wife--Puylaurens obtains the hand of a relative of the minister and becomes Duc de Puylaurens--Monsieur retires to Blois.
The early months of the year 1634 were passed by Marie de Medicis in perpetual mortification and anxiety. The passport which she had obtained for the free transport of such articles of necessity as she might deem it expedient to procure from France was disregarded, and her packages were subjected to a rigorous examination on the frontier; an insult of which she complained bitterly to Louis, declaring that if the Cardinal sought by such means to reduce her to a more pitiable condition than that in which she had already found herself, and thus to bend her to his will, the attempt would prove fruitless; as no amount of indignity should induce her to humble herself before him.
The unhappy Princess little imagined that in a few short weeks she should become a suppliant for his favour! Meanwhile[204] the struggle for pre-eminence continued unabated between Puylaurens and Chanteloupe; and the life of the former having been on one occasion attempted, the faction of Monsieur did not hesitate to attribute the contemplated assassination to the adherents of the Queen-mother; whence arose continual conflicts between the two pigmy Courts, which rendered unavailing all the efforts of the Marquis d'Ayetona to reconcile the royal relatives. Moreover, Marie was indignant that the Marquis constantly evinced towards her son a consideration in which he sometimes failed towards herself; and, finding her position becoming daily more onerous, she at length resolved to accomplish a reconciliation, not only with the King, but even with the minister, on any terms which she could obtain. In pursuance of this determination she gave instructions to M. Le Rebours de Laleu, her equerry, to proceed to Paris with her despatches, which consisted of three letters, one addressed to the sovereign, another to the Cardinal, and the third to M. de Bouthillier,[205] all of which severally contained earnest assurances of her intention to comply with the will and pleasure of the King in all things, and to obey his commands by foregoing for the future all emnity towards Richelieu. In that which she wrote to the minister himself she carefully eschewed every vestige of her former haughtiness, and threw herself completely on his generosity. "Cousin"--thus ran the letter of the once-powerful widow of Henri IV to her implacable enemy--"the Sieur Bouthillier having assured me in your name that my sorrows have deeply affected you, and that, regretting you should for so long a time have deprived me of the honour of seeing the King, your greatest satisfaction would now be to use your influence to obtain for me this happiness, I have considered myself bound to express to you through the Sieur Laleu, whom I despatch to the King, how agreeable your goodwill has been to me. Place confidence in him, and believe, Cousin, that I will ever truly be, etc. etc."
In addition to this humiliation, the heart-broken Queen at the same time gave instructions to her messenger to declare to the King that, "having learned that his Majesty could not be persuaded of her affection for his own person so long as she refused to extend it to the Cardinal, he was empowered to assure his Majesty that the Queen-mother, from consideration for the King her son, would thenceforward bestow her regard upon his minister, and dismiss all resentment for the past."
Both the verbal and written declarations addressed to Louis on this occasion were, as will at once be evident, a mere matter of form, and observance of the necessary etiquette. It was not the monarch of France whom Marie de Medicis sought to conciliate, but the Cardinal-Duke, who, as she was conscious, held her fate in his hands. It was before him, consequently, that she bowed down; it was to his sovereign pleasure that she thus humbly deferred; for she felt that the long-enduring struggle which she had hitherto sustained against him was at once impotent and hopeless. Alas! she had, as she was fated ere long to experience, as little to anticipate from the abject concession which she now made, bitter as were the tears that it had cost her. The most annoying impediments were thrown in the way of her messenger when he solicited an audience of the sovereign, nor was he slow in arriving at the conviction that his mission would prove abortive. Nevertheless, as the command of Marie de Medicis had been that he should also deliver the letter to Richelieu in person, and, as he had already done in the case of the King, add to its written assurances his own corroborative declarations in her name, and even communicate to him the offer of Chanteloupe to retire to a monastery for the remainder of his life in the event of his exclusion from the treaty, he was bound to pursue his task to its termination, hopeless as it might be.[206]
When the envoy of the Queen-mother had delivered his despatches, and fulfilled the duty with which he had been entrusted, the embarrassment of the Cardinal became extreme. That the haughty Marie de Medicis should ever have compelled herself to such humiliation was an event so totally unexpected on his part that he had made no arrangements to meet it; and it appeared impossible even to him that, under the circumstances, the King could venture to refuse her immediate return to France. The crisis was a formidable one to Richelieu, who, judging both his injured benefactress and himself from the past, placed no faith in her professions of forgiveness; for, on his side, he felt that he should resent even to his dying hour much that had passed before she fled the kingdom, as well as the libels against him which she had sanctioned during her residence in Flanders. He had, moreover, as he asserted, on several occasions received information that Chanteloupe meditated some design upon his life; and that the Jesuit had stated in writing that he could never induce the Queen-mother to consent to separate herself from him, although he had entreated of her to leave him in the Low Countries when she returned to France.[207] Despicable, indeed, were such alleged terrors from the lips of the Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu--the first minister of one of the first sovereigns of Europe. What had he to fear from a powerless and impoverished Princess, whose misfortunes had already endured a sufficient time to outweary her foreign protectors; to subdue the hopes, and to exhaust the energies of her former adherents; and to reduce her to an insignificance of which, as her present measures sufficiently evinced, she had herself become despairingly conscious? Even had Louis XIII at this moment been possessed of sufficient right feeling and moral energy to remember that it was the dignity of a mother which he had so long sacrificed to the ambition of a minister--that it was the widow of the great monarch who had bequeathed to him a crown whom he ruthlesssly persecuted in order to further the fortunes of an ambitious ingrate--all these trivial hindrances might have been thrust aside at once; but the egotistical and timid temperament of the French King deadened the finer impulses of honour and of nature; and he still suffered himself to be governed, where he should have asserted his highest and his holiest prerogative.
It is impossible to contemplate without astonishment so extraordinary an anomaly as that which was presented by the King, the Queen-mother, and the Cardinal de Richelieu at this particular period. An obscure priest, elevated by the favour of a powerful Princess to the highest offices in the realm, after having reduced his benefactress to the necessity of humbling herself before him, and so unreservedly acknowledging his supremacy as to ask, as the only condition of his forgiveness, that he would do her the favour to believe in the sincerity of her professions.--The widow of Henry the Great, the mother of the King of France, and of the Queens of Spain and England, in danger of wearing out her age in exile, because Armand Jean du Plessis, the younger son of a petty noble of Poitou, who once considered himself the most fortunate of mortals in obtaining the bishopric of Luçon, feared that his unprecedented power might be shaken should his first friend and patroness be once more united to her son, and restored to the privileges of her rank.--And, finally, a sovereign, who, while in his better moments he felt all the enormity of his conduct towards the author of his being, now fast sinking under the combined weight of years and suffering, was yet deficient in the energy necessary to do justice alike to her and to himself.
Such, however, was the actual position of the several individuals; and the fate of Marie de Medicis was decided.
A desire of repose, consequent upon his failing health, self-gratulation at his triumph over an inimical and powerful faction, and a desire to exculpate himself from the charge of ingratitude, would have led the Cardinal to accede to a reconciliation with his long-estranged benefactress; but he soon silenced these natural impulses to dwell only upon the dangers of her reappearance in France, which could not, as he believed, fail to circumscribe his own absolute power--a power to which he had laboriously attained not more by genius than by crime--which had been cemented by blood, and heralded by groans. Nor was this the only consideration by which Richelieu was swayed when he resolved that the Queen-mother should never again, so long as he had life, set foot upon the soil of France. His high-soaring ambition had, within the last few weeks, grasped at a greatness to which even she had not yet attained. For a time, as is asserted by contemporary historians, he indulged visions of royalty in his own person, and had in imagination already fitted the crown of one of the first nations in Europe to his own brow; but the dream had been brief, and he had latterly resolved to transfer to one of his relatives the ermined purple in which he was not permitted to enfold himself. That relative was his niece and favourite, Madame de Comballet, whose hand he had offered to the Cardinal-Duc François de Lorraine, when that Prince succeeded to the sovereignty of the duchy on the abdication of his unfortunate brother Charles; but to avoid this alliance the new Duke had contracted a secret marriage with his cousin the Princesse Claude; a disappointment which the minister of Louis XIII was desirous of repairing by causing the dissolution of the marriage of Gaston d'Orléans with Marguerite de Lorraine, and making Monsieur's union with his own beautiful and unprincipled niece the condition of his restoration to favour.