the year after Henry's assassination, the Protestants, in terror of
their enemies, now that Henry was gone and the Spaniards seemed to grow
in favor, formed themselves into a great republican league--a state
within the state--regularly organized; in peace, for political effort,
and in war, for military effort, with a Protestant clerical caste which
ruled always with pride, and often with menace.
Against such a theocratic republic war must come sooner or later, and in
1617 the struggle began. Army was pitted against army; Protestant Duke
of Rohan against Catholic Duke of Luynes. Meanwhile Austria and the
foreign enemies of France, Condé and the domestic enemies of France
fished in the troubled waters, and made rich gains every day. So France
plunged into sorrows ever deeper and blacker. But in 1624 Marie de'
Medici, having been reconciled to her son, urged him to recall
Richelieu.
The dislike which Louis bore Richelieu was strong, but the dislike he
bore toward compromises had become stronger. Into his poor brain at last
began to gleam the truth that a serf-mastering caste, after a
compromise, only whines more steadily and snarls more loudly; that at
last, compromising becomes worse than fighting, Richelieu was called and
set at work.
Fortunately for our studies of the great statesman's policy, he left at
his death a _Political Testament_, which floods with light his steadiest
aims and boldest acts. In that _Testament_ he wrote this message:
"When your majesty resolved to give me entrance into your councils and a
great share of your confidence, I can declare with truth that the
Huguenots divided the authority with your majesty, that the great nobles
acted not at all as subjects, that the governors of the provinces took
on themselves the airs of sovereigns, and that the foreign alliances of
France were despised. I promised your majesty to use all my industry,
all the authority you gave me, to ruin the Huguenot party, to abase the
pride of the high nobles, and to raise your name among foreign nations
to the place where it ought to be."
Such were the plans of Richelieu at the outset. Let us see how he
wrought out their fulfilment.
First of all, he performed daring surgery and cautery about the very
heart of the court. In a short time he had cut out from that living
centre of French power a number of unworthy ministers and favorites, and
replaced them by men on whom he could rely. Then he began his vast work.
His policy embraced three great objects: First, the overthrow of the
Huguenot power; secondly, the subjugation of the great nobles; thirdly,
the destruction of the undue might of Austria.
First, then, after some preliminary negotiations with foreign powers, he
attacked the great politico-religious party of the Huguenots. These
held, as their great centre and stronghold, the famous seaport of La
Rochelle. He who but glances at the map shall see how strong was this
position; he shall see two islands lying just off the west coast at that
point, controlled by La Rochelle, yet affording to any foreign allies,
whom the Huguenots might admit there, facilities for stinging France
during centuries. The position of the Huguenots seemed impregnable. The
city was well fortressed, garrisoned by the bravest of men, mistress of
a noble harbor open at all times to supplies from foreign ports, and in
that harbor rode a fleet, belonging to the city, greater than the navy
of France. Richelieu saw well that here was the head of the rebellion.
Here, then, he must strike it.
Strange as it may seem, his diplomacy was so skilful that he obtained
ships to attack the Protestants in La Rochelle from the two great
Protestant powers--England and Holland. With these he was successful. He
attacked the city fleet, ruined it, and cleared the harbor.
But now came a terrible check. Richelieu had aroused the hate of that
incarnation of all that was and is offensive in English politics--the
Duke of Buckingham. Scandal-mongers were wont to say that both were in
love with the Queen, and that the Cardinal, though unsuccessful in his
suit, outwitted the Duke and sent him out of the kingdom; and that the
Duke swore a great oath that if he could not enter France in one way, he
would enter in another; and that he brought about a war and came himself
as a commander. Of this scandal believe what you will, but--be the
causes what they may--the English policy changed, and Charles I sent
Buckingham with ninety ships to aid La Rochelle.
But Buckingham was flippant and careless; Richelieu careful when there
was need, and daring when there was need. Buckingham's heavy blows were
foiled by Richelieu's keen thrusts, and then, in his confusion,
Buckingham blundered so foolishly and Richelieu profited by his blunders
so shrewdly that the fleet returned to England without any
accomplishment of its purpose. The English were also driven from that
vexing position in the Isle of Ré.
Having thus sent the English home, for a time at least, he led King and
nobles and armies to La Rochelle, and commenced the siege in full force.
Difficulties met him at every turn; but the difficulty of all was that
arising from the spirit of the nobility.
No one could charge the nobles of France with lack of bravery. The only
charge was that their bravery was almost sure to shun every useful form,
and to take every noxious form. The bravery which finds outlet in duels
they showed constantly; the bravery which finds outlets in street fights
they had shown from the day when the Duke of Orleans perished in a
brawl, to the days when the "Mignons" of Henry III fought at sight every
noble whose beard was not cut to suit them. The pride fostered by
lording it over serfs, in the country, and by lording it over men who
did not own serfs, in the capital, aroused bravery of this sort and
plenty of it. But that bravery which serves a great good cause, which
must be backed by steadiness and watchfulness, was not so plentiful. So
Richelieu found that the nobles who had conducted the siege before he
took command had, through their brawling propensities and lazy
propensities, allowed the besieged to garner in the crops from the
surrounding country, and master all the best points of attack.
But Richelieu pressed on. First he built an immense wall and earthwork,
nine miles long, surrounding the city, and to protect this he raised
eleven great forts and eighteen redoubts. Still the harbor was open, and
into this the English fleet might return and succor the city at any
time. His plan was soon made. In the midst of that great harbor of La
Rochelle he sank sixty hulks of vessels filled with stone; then, across
the harbor--nearly a mile wide and, in places, more than eight hundred
feet deep--he began building over these sunken ships a great dike and
wall; thoroughly fortified, carefully engineered, faced with sloping
layers of hewn stone.
His own men scolded at the magnitude of the work; the men in La Rochelle
laughed at it. Worse than that, the ocean sometimes laughed and scolded
at it. Sometimes the waves, sweeping in from that fierce Bay of Biscay,
destroyed in an hour the work of a week. The carelessness of a
subordinate once destroyed in a moment the work of three months.
Yet it is but fair to admit that there was one storm which did not beat
against Richelieu's dike. There set in against it no storm of hypocrisy
from neighboring nations. Keen works for and against Richelieu were put
forth in his day: works calm and strong for and against him have been
issuing from the presses of France and England and Germany ever since;
but not one of the old school of keen writers, or of the new school of
calm writers, is known to have ever hinted that this complete sealing of
the only entrance to a leading European harbor was unjust to the world
at large or unfair to the besieged themselves.
But all other obstacles Richelieu had to break through or cut through
constantly. He was his own engineer, general, admiral, prime minister.
While he urged on the army to work upon the dike, he organized a French
navy, and in due time brought it around to that coast and anchored it so
as to guard the dike and to be guarded by it. Yet daring as all this
work was, it was but the smallest part of his work. Richelieu found that
his officers were cheating his soldiers in their pay and disheartening
them; in the face of the enemy he had to reorganize the army and to
create a new military system. He made the army twice as effective and
supported it at two-thirds less cost than before. It was his boast in
his _Testament_ that, from a mob, the army became "like a well-ordered
convent."
He found also that his subordinates were plundering the surrounding
country, and thus rendering it disaffected; he at once ordered that what
had been taken should be paid for, and that persons trespassing
thereafter should be severely punished. He found also the great nobles
who commanded in the army half-hearted and almost traitorous from
sympathy with those of their own caste on the other side of the walls
of La Rochelle, and from their fear of his increased power should he
gain a victory. It was their common saying that they were fools to help
him do it. But he saw the true point at once. He placed in the most
responsible positions of his army men who felt for their cause, whose
hearts and souls were in it--men not of the Dalgetty stamp, but of the
Cromwell stamp. He found also--as he afterward said--that he had to
conquer not only the kings of England and Spain, but also the King of
France. At the most critical moment of the siege Louis defeated him,
went back to Paris, allowed courtiers to fill him with suspicions. Not
only Richelieu's place, but his life, was in danger, and he well knew
it; yet he never left his dike and siege-works, but wrought on steadily
until they were done; and then the King, of his own will, in very shame
broke away from his courtiers and went back to his master.
And now a royal herald summoned the people of La Rochelle to surrender.
But they were not yet half conquered. Even when they had seen two
English fleets, sent to aid them, driven back from Richelieu's dike,
they still held out manfully. The Duchess of Rohan, the Mayor Guiton,
and the minister Salbert, by noble sacrifices and burning words, kept
the will of the besieged firm as steel. They were reduced to feed on
their horses; then on bits of filthy shellfish; then on stewed leather.
They died in multitudes.
Guiton, the mayor, kept a dagger on the city council-table to stab any
man who should speak of surrender; some, who spoke of yielding, he
ordered to execution as seditious. When a friend showed him a person
dying of hunger, he said: "Does that astonish you? Both you and I must
come to that!" When another told him that multitudes were perishing he
said, "Provided one remains to hold the city gate, I ask nothing more."
But at last even Guiton had to yield. After the siege had lasted more
than a year, after five thousand were found remaining out of fifteen
thousand, after a mother had been seen to feed her child with her own
blood, the Cardinal's policy became too strong for him. The people
yielded and Richelieu entered the city as master.
And now the victorious statesman showed a greatness of soul to which all
the rest of his life was as nothing. He was a Catholic cardinal; the
Rochellois were Protestants; he was a stern ruler; they were rebellious
subjects who had long worried and almost impoverished him; all Europe,
therefore, looked for a retribution more terrible than any in history.
Richelieu allowed nothing of the sort. He destroyed the old franchises
of the city, for they were incompatible with that royal authority which
he so earnestly strove to build. But this was all. He took no vengeance;
he allowed the Protestants to worship as before; he took many of them
into the public service, and to Guiton he showed marks of respect. He
stretched forth that strong arm of his over the city and warded off all
harm. He kept back greedy soldiers from pillage; he kept back bigot
priests from persecution.
Years before this he had said, "The diversity of religions may indeed
create a division in the other world, but not in this." At another time
he wrote, "Violent remedies only aggravate spiritual diseases." And he
was now so tested that these expressions were found to embody not merely
an idea, but a belief. For when the Protestants in La Rochelle, though
thus owing tolerance--and even existence--to a Catholic, vexed Catholics
in a spirit most intolerant, even that could not force him to abridge
the religious liberties he had given.
He saw beyond his time, not only beyond Catholics, but beyond
Protestants. Two years after that great example of toleration in La
Rochelle, Nicholas Antoine was executed for apostasy from Calvinism at
Geneva. And for his leniency Richelieu received the titles of "Pope of
the Protestants" and "Patriarch of the Atheists." But he had gained the
first great object of his policy, and he would not abuse it: he had
crushed the political power of the Huguenots forever.
Let us turn now to the second great object of his policy. He must break
the power of the nobility: on that condition alone could France have
strength and order, and here he showed his daring at the outset. "It is
iniquitous," he was wont to tell the King, "to try to make an example by
punishing the lesser offenders; they are but trees which cast no shade:
it is the great nobles who must be disciplined."
It was not long before he had to begin this work--and with the
highest--with no less a personage than Gaston, Duke of Orléans,
favorite son of Mary, brother of the King. He who thinks shall come to a
higher idea of Richelieu's boldness when he remembers that for many
years after this Louis was childless and sickly, and that during all
those years Richelieu might awake any morning to find Gaston--king.
In 1626 Gaston, with the Duke of Vendôme, half-brother of the King, the
Duchess of Chevreuse, confidential friend of the Queen, the Count of
Chalais, and the Marshal Ornano, formed a conspiracy after the old
fashion. Richelieu had his hand at their lofty throats in a moment.
Gaston, who was used only as a makeweight, he forced into the most
humble apology and the most binding pledges; Ornano he sent to die in
the Bastille; the Duke of Vendôme and the Duchess of Chevreuse he
banished; Chalais he sent to the scaffold.
The next year he gave the grandees another lesson. The serf-owning
spirit had fostered in France, through many years, a rage for duelling.
Richelieu determined that this should stop. He gave notice that the law
against duelling was revived, and that he would enforce it. It was soon
broken by two of the loftiest nobles in France--by the Count of
Bouteville Montmorency and the Count des Chapelles. They laughed at the
law: they fought defiantly in broad daylight. Nobody dreamed that the
law would be carried out against them. The Cardinal would, they thought,
deal with them as rulers have dealt with serf-mastering lawbreakers from
those days to these--invent some quibble and screen them with it. But
his method was sharper and shorter. He seized both, and executed both on
the Place de la Grève--the place of execution for the vilest
malefactors.
No doubt that under the present domineering of the pettifogger caste
there are hosts of men whose minds run in such small old grooves that
they hold legal forms not a means, but an end; these will cry out
against this proceeding as tyrannical. No doubt, too, that under the
present palaver of the "sensationist" caste, the old ladies of both
sexes have come to regard crime as mere misfortune: these will lament
this proceeding as cruel. But for this act, if for no other, an earnest
man's heart ought in these times to warm toward the great statesman. The
man had a spine. To his mind crime was not mere misfortune: crime was
_crime_.
Crime was strong; it would pay him well to screen it: it might cost him
dear to fight it. But he was not a modern "smart" lawyer to seek
popularity by screening criminals; nor a modern soft juryman, to suffer
his eyes to be blinded by quirks and quibbles to the great purposes of
law; nor a modern bland governor, who lets a murderer loose out of
politeness to the murderer's mistress. He hated crime; he whipped the
criminal; no petty forms and no petty men of forms could stand between
him and a rascal. He had the sense to see that this course was not
cruel, but merciful. In the eighteen years before Richelieu's
administration, four thousand men perished in duels; in the ten years
after Richelieu's death nearly a thousand thus perished; but during his
whole administration, duelling was checked completely. Which policy was
tyrannical? Which policy was cruel?
The hatred of the serf-mastering caste toward their new ruler grew
blacker and blacker, but he never flinched. The two brothers Marillac,
proud of birth, high in office, endeavored to stir revolt as in their
good days of old. The first, who was keeper of the seals, Richelieu
threw into prison; with the second, who was a marshal of France,
Richelieu took another course. For this marshal had added to revolt
things more vile and more insidiously hurtful: he had defrauded the
government in army contracts. Richelieu tore him from his army and put
him on trial. The Queen-Mother, whose pet he was, insisted on his
liberation. Marillac himself blubbered that it "was all about a little
straw and hay, a matter for which a master would not whip a lackey."
Marshal Marillac was executed. So, when statesmen rule, fare all who
take advantage of the agonies of a nation to pilfer a nation's treasure.
To crown all, the Queen-Mother began now to plot against Richelieu
because he would not be her puppet, and he banished her from France
forever.
The high nobles were now exasperated. Gaston fled the country, first
issuing against Richelieu a threatening manifesto. Now awoke the Duke of
Montmorency. By birth he stood next the King's family: by office, as
constable of France, he stood next the King himself. Montmorency was
defeated and taken. The nobles supplicated for him lustily: they looked
on crimes of nobles resulting in deaths of plebeians as lightly as the
English House of Lords afterward looked on Lord Mohun's murder of Will
Mountfort, or as another body of lords looked on Matt Ward's murder of
Professor Butler: but Montmorency was executed. Says Richelieu in his
_Memoirs_, "Many murmured at this act, and called it severe; but others,
more wise, praised the justice of the King, who preferred the good of
the state to the vain reputation of a hurtful clemency."
Nor did the great minister grow indolent as he grew old. The Duke of
Épernon, who seems to have had more direct power of the old feudal sort
than any other man in France, and who had been so turbulent under the
regency, him Richelieu humbled completely. The Duke of Valette disobeyed
orders in the army, and was executed as a common soldier would have been
for the same offence. The Count of Soissons tried to see if he could not
revive the good old turbulent times, and raised a rebel army; but
Richelieu hunted him down like a wild beast. Then certain court
nobles--pets of the King--Cinq-Mars and De Thou, wove a new plot, and,
to strengthen it, made a secret treaty with Spain; but the Cardinal,
though dying, obtained a copy of the treaty, through his agent, and the
traitors expiated their treason with their blood.
But this was not all. The Parliament of Paris--a court of
justice--filled with the idea that law is not a means, but an end, tried
to interpose forms between the master of France and the vermin he was
exterminating. That Parisian court might, years before, have done
something. They might have insisted that the petty quibbles set forth by
the lawyers of Paris should not defeat the eternal laws of retribution
set forth by the Lawgiver of the Universe. That they had not done, and
the time for legal forms had gone by. The Paris Parliament would not see
this, and Richelieu crushed the Parliament. Then the court of aids
refused to grant supplies, and he crushed that court. In all this the
nation upheld him. Woe to the courts of a nation when they have forced
the great body of plain men to regard legality as injustice! Woe to the
councils of a nation when they have forced the great body of plain men
to regard legislation as traffic! Woe thrice repeated to gentlemen of
small pettifogging sort when they have brought such times, and God has
brought a man to fit them!
There was now in France no man who could stand against the statesman's
purpose. And so, having hewn through all that anarchy and bigotry and
selfishness a way for the people, he called them to the work. In 1626 he
summoned an assembly to carry out reforms. It was essentially a people's
assembly. That anarchical States-General, domineered by great nobles, he
would not call; but he called an "Assembly of Notables." In this was not
one prince or duke, and two-thirds of the members came directly from the
people. Into this body he thrust some of his own energy. Measures were
taken for the creation of a navy. An idea was now carried into effect
which many suppose to have sprung from the French Revolution; for the
army was made more effective by opening its high grades to the commons.
A reform was also made in taxation, and shrewd measures were taken to
spread commerce and industry by calling the nobility into them.
Thus did France, under his guidance, secure order and progress. Calmly
he destroyed all the useless feudal castles which had so long overawed
the people and defied the monarchy. He abolished also the military
titles of grand admiral and high constable, which had hitherto given the
army and navy into the hands of leading noble families. He destroyed
some troublesome remnants of feudal courts, and created royal courts; in
one year, that of Poitiers alone, punished for exactions and violence
against the people, more than two hundred nobles. Greatest step of all,
he deposed the hereditary noble governors, and placed in their stead
governors taken from the people--"Intendants"--responsible to the
central authority alone.
We are brought now to the third great object of Richelieu's policy. He
saw from the beginning that Austria and her satellite Spain must be
humbled if France was to take her rightful place in Europe.
Hardly, then, had he entered the council, when he negotiated a marriage
of the King's sister with the son of James I of England; next he signed
an alliance with Holland; next he sent ten thousand soldiers to drive
the troops of the Pope and Spain out of the Valtelline district of the
Alps, and thus secured an alliance with the Swiss. We are to note here
that fact, which Buckle wields so well, that, though Richelieu was a
cardinal of the Roman Church, all these alliances were with Protestant
powers against Catholics. Austria and Spain intrigued against him,
sowing money in the mountain districts of South France which brought
forth those crops of armed men who defended La Rochelle. But he beat
them at their own game. He set loose Count Mansfeld, who revived the
Thirty Years' War by raising a rebellion in Bohemia; and when one great
man, Wallenstein, stood between Austria and ruin, Richelieu sent his
monkish diplomatist, Father Joseph, to the German Assembly of Electors,
and persuaded them to dismiss Wallenstein and to disgrace him.
But the great Frenchman's masterstroke was his treaty with Gustavus
Adolphus. With that keen glance of his he saw and knew Gustavus while
yet the world knew him not--while he was battling afar off in the wilds
of Poland. Richelieu's plan was formed at once. He brought about a
treaty between Gustavus and Poland; then he filled Gustavus' mind with
pictures of the wrongs inflicted by Austria on German Protestants,
hinted to him probably of a new realm, filled his treasury, and finally
hurled against Austria the man who destroyed Tilly, who conquered
Wallenstein, who annihilated Austrian supremacy at the battle of Lutzen,
who, though in his grave, wrenched Protestant rights from Austria at the
treaty of Westphalia, who pierced the Austrian monarchy with the most
terrible sorrows it ever saw before the time of Napoleon.