In that contest he was induced, by the hope of partitioning Montferrat with the Spaniards, to unite with them against the new duke of Mantua and the French his supporters; and he suffered heavily in this alliance. When Louis XIII, at the head of a gallant army, forced the strong pass of Susa against the duke and his troops, and overran all Piedmont, Charles Emmanuel was compelled to purchase the deliverance of his states by signing a separate peace, and leaving the fortress of Susa as a pledge in the hands of the conquerors. They insisted further that he should act offensively against his former allies; but Louis XIII and his great minister Richelieu were no sooner recalled into France by the war against the Protestants, than the versatile duke, resenting their tyranny, immediately resumed his league with Spain.
The possession of Susa rendered the French masters of the gates of the Savoyard dominions; and as soon as Richelieu had triumphantly concluded the war against the Huguenots, he returned to the Alps. He was invested by his master with a supreme military command, which disgraced his priestly functions; and he poured the forces of France again into Piedmont. All Savoy was conquered by the French king in person; and above half of Piedmont was seized by his forces under the warlike cardinal. Amidst so many cruel reverses, oppressed by the overwhelming strength of his enemies, and abandoned by his Spanish allies, who made no vigorous efforts to arrest the progress of the French, Charles Emmanuel suddenly breathed his last, after a reign of fifty years (1630).
Victor Amadeus I, his eldest son and successor, was the husband of Christina, daughter of Henry IV of France, and therefore disposed to ally himself with her country. Almost immediately after his accession to the ducal crown, he entered into negotiations with Richelieu, which terminated in a truce. In the following year, the general peace, which concluded the war of the Mantuan succession, was signed at Cherasco (1631). By this treaty, the new duke of Savoy recovered all his dominions except Pinerolo (Pignerol), which he was compelled to cede to the French; who, although Richelieu restored Susa to Victor Amadeus, thus retained possession of the passes of the Alps by Briançon and the valley of Exilles. Victor Amadeus was not inferior to his father either in courage or abilities; but he was not equally restless and intriguing. Submitting to circumstances beyond his control, he endured the ascendency which France had acquired over his states, and the yet more galling pride of Richelieu, with temper and prudence. To the close of his short reign he maintained with good faith a close alliance with Louis XIII, which indeed it was scarcely optional with him to have rejected, and which, in 1634, involved him, as an auxiliary, in a new war undertaken by Richelieu against the house of Austria.
[1634-1657 A.D.]
The death of Victor Amadeus in 1637, while this contest was yet raging, was the prelude to still heavier calamities for his house and his subjects than either had known for nearly a century. He left two infant sons, the eldest of whom dying almost immediately after him, the succession devolved upon the other, Charles Emmanuel II, a boy of four years of age. By his testament, Victor Amadeus committed the regency of his states, and the care of his children, to his duchess Christina. The government of that princess was in the outset assailed by the secret machinations of Richelieu, and by the open hostility of the brothers of her late husband. Richelieu designed to imprison the sister, and to despoil the nephew of his own master; and he would have annexed their states to the French monarchy, under the plea that the care of the young prince and the regency of his duchy belonged of right to Louis XIII, as his maternal uncle. When the vigilance of Christina defeated the intention of the cardinal to surprise her at Vercelli, the sister of Louis XIII had still to endure all the despotic influence of her brother’s minister. The conduct of her husband’s relations left her however no alternative but to purchase the aid of the French against them.
Both the brothers of Victor Amadeus, the cardinal Maurice, and Prince Thomas (founder of the branch of Savoy-Carignano), had quarrelled with the late duke, and withdrawn from his court to embrace the party of his enemies; the one entered the service of the emperor, the other that of the king of Spain in the Low Countries. On the death of Victor Amadeus, they returned to Piedmont only to trouble the administration of Christina by themselves laying claim to the regency; and at length, on her resisting their pretensions, they openly asserted them in arms. The two princes were supported by the house of Austria; the duchess-regent was protected by France; and the whole country of Savoy and Piedmont was at once plunged into the aggravated horrors of foreign and civil war. In the first year of this unhappy contest, the capital was delivered into the hands of Prince Thomas by his partisans; and the regent, escaping with difficulty on this surprise into the citadel of Turin, was compelled to consign the defence of that fortress to the French, who treacherously retained the deposit for eighteen years. In like manner, they acquired possession of several important places; the Spaniards on their part became masters of others; and while the regent and her brothers-in-law were contending for the government of Piedmont, they were betrayed by the ill faith and ambition of their respective protectors.
A reconciliation in the ducal family was at length effected by the tardy discovery that mutual injuries could terminate only in common ruin. The two princes deserted the party of Spain, and succeeded in recovering for their house most of the fortresses which they had aided the Spaniards in reducing. The duchess-mother retained the regency; and the princes were gratified with the same appanages by which she had originally offered to purchase their friendship. Still the French remained all powerful in Piedmont; and if death had not interrupted the projects of Richelieu, it is probable that the ducal house of Savoy would have been utterly sacrificed to his skilful and unprincipled policy, and that its dominions would have been permanently annexed to the monarchy of France. Even under the government of his more pacific successor, Mazarin, it was not until the year 1657 that the French garrison was withdrawn from the citadel of Turin; and this act of justice was only extorted from that minister as the price of his niece’s marriage into the ducal family of Savoy. The exhaustion of Spain and the internal troubles of France had totally prevented the active prosecution in northern Italy of the long war between those powers. But the embers of hostility were not wholly extinguished in Piedmont until the Peace of the Pyrenees, by which Charles Emmanuel II recovered all his duchy except Pinerolo and its Alpine passes, and these the French still retained (1659).
[1657-1692 A.D.]
The termination of the minority of Charles Emmanuel II, in 1648, had put an end to the intrigues of his uncles. But the duke continued to submit to the ambitious and able control of his mother until her death; and his subsequent reign was in no respect brilliant. His states, however, after the Treaty of the Pyrenees, enjoyed a long interval of repose; and though the early close of his life in 1675 subjected them to another minority, it proved neither turbulent nor calamitous, as his own had done. His son, the celebrated Victor Amadeus II, was only nine years old when he nominally commenced his reign under the regency of his mother. The princess, a daughter of the French house of Nemours, had all the ambition without the talents which had distinguished the duchess Christina. Surrounded by French favourites and by the partisans of that nation, she was wholly subservient to the will of Louis XIV; and Victor Amadeus, on attaining the age of manhood, gave the first indications of the consummate political ability for which he became afterwards so famous, by his decent address in dispossessing his reluctant parent and her faction of all influence in public affairs, without having recourse to actual violence.
The policy of the duke soon excited the suspicion of Louis XIV; and after exhausting all the resources of negotiation and intrigue for some years, to gain him over to his purpose of wresting Milan from the Spaniards, the French monarch resolved to disarm him. But Victor Amadeus penetrated his designs, and anticipated their execution. He was too good a politician, and too sensible of his own weakness, not to discover that, if he consented to open a free passage to Louis XIV through his dominions, and to aid him in effecting the conquest of Lombardy, he should speedily be despoiled in his turn, and reduced to the rank of a vassal of the French crown. He therefore acceded to the league of Augsburg between the empire, England, Spain, and Holland; and his subjects eagerly seconded him in his resolution rather to encounter the dangers of a contest with the gigantic power of France, than to submit without a struggle to the imperious and humiliating demands of Louis.