The Bourbon Kings of France (6 page)

Louis intervened angrily. He had never spoken in public before. ‘With so many dangers to face, we march against the most serious and the nearest, which is Normandy. We march now.’ In a wet and windy July he led his little army to Rouen. The rebels were prepared to face Luynes but not the King—they fled. Louis’s advisers were nervous about marching on to Caen, also held by rebels, whereupon the eighteen-year-old monarch, newly courageous, cried,
‘Péril de ça, péril de là! Péril sur terre, péril sur mer. Allons droit à Caen!’
Caen surrendered. Louis then marched south to Anjou with 12,000 men. Marie’s 4,000 followers met him at Ponts-de-Cé, two bridges over the Loire near Angers. Louis behaved just as his father would have done, charging with his men. Seeing the enemy weaken, he led a charge which drove them back to the bridge. After losing 700 men, the rebels broke and the bridge was taken, cutting Marie off from any hope of escape. However, there was another reconciliation and the Queen Mother was allowed to keep Anjou. The settlement was ably negotiated by her adviser, Richelieu.

In 1617 an edict had re-established the Church’s right to its former lands in Protestant Béarn, but commissioners who attempted to enforce the edict were roughly handled. After his triumph at Ponts-de-Cé, Louis and his army paid a swift visit to Béarn and implemented the edict at gun-point before returning to Paris. As a result the Huguenot Assembly met at La Rochelle and swore to support their persecuted co-religionists. They began to raise troops and gather munitions. Condé, now a loyal subject, convinced Luynes that war was inevitable.

The royal army marched south again, occupying Saumur where Louis was cheered so enthusiastically that he shouted back,
‘Vive le peuple’
, and waved his hat to the crowd. (Later he showed his less warm side. Seeing among the throng a certain M d’Arsilemont, who was a famous highwayman, the King cried,
‘Ah! Vous voilà!’
and had him arrested—within three days the man had been tried and broken on the wheel.) Montauban, an important Huguenot stronghold, was besieged in August 1621. A friar prophesied its speedy fall, but Montauban held out. Luynes showed himself to be hopelessly incompetent—in November the approach of a Protestant army under the Duc de Rohan forced him to raise the siege. Louis, by now completely disillusioned with his favourite, returned to Paris. Luynes continued the campaign despite terrible weather. He became depressed, then took to his bed. On 15 December 1621 he died of scarlet fever, abandoned even by his servants.

Louis had no intention of persecuting his Protestant subjects for their religion, but he was not going to tolerate separatism. For by now the Huguenots had set up something very like a republic on the Dutch model and a new state was emerging, which included most of the western seaboard together with a large area of southern France. In the Duc de Rohan and his brother, the Comte de Soubise, it had formidable leaders. The Royal Council tried to dissuade Louis from continuing the campaign but he knew how great was the danger.

He went to war again in April 1622, besieging the Ile de Riez, Soubise’s marshy stronghold on the west coast, which could only be reached at low tide. On 16 April the King rose from his straw pallet and led a midnight attack, riding through the water at the head of his men. Soubise was completely taken by surprise and routed, losing 4,000 troops. Louis spent the following months storming Huguenot towns and blowing up their fortifications; Nègrepelisse was burnt to the ground for having murdered 400 royal soldiers. In October Rohan sued for peace—Protestant France had become a land of famine and corpses, of abandoned villages and ruined châteaux. At the peace of Montpelier the Huguenots gave up all their strongholds save La Rochelle and Montauban.

It had been a gruelling campaign in an exceptionally hot summer. The King had many times spent whole days in the saddle, sleeping in his clothes and dining on bread and cheese. In June, at Toulouse he was struck down by a mysterious fever which attacked him several times, forcing him to travel in a litter. Eventually he recovered and enjoyed himself at Marseilles, attending bull fights and fishing for tuna fish. The fever had been tuberculosis which would eventually kill him. In addition he suffered from a chronic gastric disorder which never left him, and he was further weakened by the ministrations of his doctors (in one year alone he was bled forty-seven times, purged 212 times and endured 215 enemas).

None the less, Louis usually had sufficient energy to hunt, dance and campaign. At twenty, he was a thin young man of medium height, elegant and athletic in build, who sat a horse particularly well. He wore a moustache, but as yet his long, tanned face was beardless. He had mastered his earlier awkwardness, save for stammering when angry, and had acquired a most dignified presence—what Saint-Simon calls
‘l’allure royale’
. He had an intense dislike of luxury. Although on state occasions he wore a white satin suit and a black hat and cloak, he liked best to dress as a soldier and was fond of wearing armour. Indeed, he thoroughly enjoyed military life and spent much time on parades and drilling his troops.

Hunting remained his great passion. He talked of little else and even took his hounds to bed with him. Of all the Bourbons, every one of whom was remarkable for an almost fanatical devotion to the chase, Louis XIII was the greatest huntsman.

In character he was upright to the point of harshness. He had an exalted concept of kingship—Joinville’s life of St Louis was a favourite book—and could be merciless to himself, always ready to sacrifice his own happiness. He once said, ‘I should not be King if I had the feelings of an ordinary man.’ His devotion to business was remarkable, considering that he detested reading and preferred carpentry and gardening (his peas were sold in the Paris market), let alone hunting, to administration. Yet he never missed a Council meeting and impressed ambassadors by his grasp of affairs. Extremely pious, he enjoyed the ceremonies of the Church and was scrupulous in confession. His religion verged on the puritanical; a characteristic remark was ‘Please God, adultery shall never enter into my house’.

In Paris Louis lived at the Louvre and the Tuileries, though he much preferred Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Summer and winter he rose at six am. His rising was divided into the
Petit Lever
and the
Grand Lever
, the latter being shortened, as Louis liked to take long baths. (Unlike most of his contemporaries he was extremely clean in his person; later he cropped his head and wore a long brown wig for the sake of cleanliness.) The day began with a Council meeting, after which the King went to Mass. There followed private and public audiences. Then he paid a formal visit to the Queen, before dining publicly. The afternoon was spent hunting or in military exercises. After supper there was sometimes a concert or a ballet. Louis composed some of these ballets himself and occasionally danced in them.

By 1619 Louis was deeply in love with Anne of Austria, but not physically. Both his confessor, Père Cotton, and Luynes tried to make him sleep with her; the Papal Nuncio urged that Heaven needed an heir to the throne of France; the Spanish ambassador considered the King’s failure to beget a child an insult to Spanish honour. Eventually Luynes forced him to lie with Anne—he was in tears when he went to her bed, but from then on he slept with her regularly for some years.

To govern France a stronger hand was needed than that of a nervous and unsure young man, and Louis knew it. In 1622, much against his will, his mother persuaded him to obtain a Cardinal’s hat for Richelieu. Marie, who had been reconciled yet again with her son after Luynes’s death, owed her return to Paris to Richelieu’s shrewd counsel. Unwillingly Louis recognized that here was a man who could save France, and in January 1624 he was admitted to the Council. La Vieuville, the aged mediocrity who was its President, tried to discredit him but was dismissed and arrested for his pains. On 13 August 1624 Cardinal Richelieu became head of the Council with the title ‘Secretary of State for Commerce and the Marine’. In 1629 the King named him ‘Principal Minister of State’.

Armand du Plessis had been born in 1585, the third son of a family of poor Poitevin nobles. Originally he had intended to become a soldier but his elder brother, for whom the Bishopric of Luçon had been reserved—the appointment was in the gift of the family—died, and Armand entered the Church. In 1608, only twenty-one, he was consecrated Bishop of Luçon where he proved himself an exemplary pastor. He was burningly ambitious but his first step towards power, when Ancres gave him a post, turned out to be a serious setback when the Marshal fell—the King shouted at him, ‘I have escaped your tyranny, Luçon!’ It took him years to vindicate himself, through the unlikely path of acting as adviser to Marie de Medici. His chief ally was the mysterious Capuchin friar, Père Joseph (better known as ‘the Grey Eminence’).

Richelieu’s masterful, fastidious face with its high nose and prominent cheekbones, was the mask of a man who lived on the verge of total nervous breakdown, racked by headaches and indigestion, weakened by bad circulation. The Cardinal was agonizingly prone to depression and discouragement, terrified by bad news and by threats of violence, even by loud noises; he was frequently in tears—on occasion he even hid under his bed from whence he had to be coaxed by his valet. Greedy, avaricious, he was also coldly arrogant and lacked charm. Women in particular disliked him. Yet he was undoubtedly one of the greatest of all Frenchmen; of seventeenth-century Englishmen, only Oliver Cromwell was of the same stature.

Of his aims he later wrote, ‘I promised Your Majesty to use all my industry and all the authority which it pleased you to give me to ruin the Huguenot party, to bring down the pride of the great lords, to bring back all your subjects to their duty, and to restore your name to its rightful place among foreign nations.’ Richelieu’s determination to make his country the leading power of Europe at the expense of the Catholic Habsburgs conflicted in no way with his Catholicism; he believed that a strong France was essential for the health of the Church; that Rome could not be allowed to remain a mere tool of Spain. He quickly made Protestant alliances, with England and the Dutch.

The English alliance was soon jeopardized by the Duke of Buckingham. This magnificent creature visited France in May 1625 to assist at the marriage (by proxy) of Mme Henriette Marie to King Charles at Nôtre-Dame. For a week’s visit he brought twenty-seven suits—one, of white velvet embroidered with diamonds and shedding loosely-sewn pearls as he walked, was valued at £24,000. His beauty and elegance took Paris by storm.

He was soon embroiled in a plot to seduce the Queen of France, by the Duchesse de Chevreuse, Luynes’s widow, who was the evil genius of Louis XIII’s marriage. In 1618 she had become Mistress of the Queen’s Household. Richelieu wrote of her, ‘She was the ruin of the Queen, whose wholesome outlook was corrupted by her example; she swayed the Queen’s heart, ruined her, set her against the King and her duties.’ It was her horseplay in the spring of 1622, when she persuaded the pregnant Queen to run down a gallery, which made Anne lose a Dauphin. Born in 1600, a tiny blonde with a delicate face and unforgettable eyes, Marie de Chevreuse was a woman of innumerable conquests. An enemy described her as the matchmaker behind every court love affair. Startlingly unconventional (in London she swam the Thames, to the horror of the English), she and her antics were a perennial scandal. Next to love affairs she enjoyed political intrigue, and nursed a real hatred of Louis, whom she referred to as ‘that idiot’.

‘La Chevrette’s’ latest lover was Lord Holland, one of Buckingham’s suite. She swiftly enchanted the Duke with the prospect of cuckolding a King. At Amiens, where the court took official leave of the English embassy, Buckingham climbed into a private garden where the Queen was taking an evening walk; he may even have tried to rape her. Anne’s shrieks summoned her attendants. Later, during less private interviews, he wept and spoke with such passion that he terrified her. Louis was so affronted that henceforward he refused to think seriously of an English alliance.

Despite his dealings with Protestant powers abroad, nothing could deflect Richelieu from his determination to break
Messieurs les prétendus réformés
. He wrote, ‘So long as the Protestants in France are a state within a state, the King cannot be master of his realm or achieve great things abroad.’ The capital of French Protestantism was still La Rochelle. In July 1627 an English fleet commanded by Buckingham put in at the Isle of Ré opposite the port. Immediately the Rochellois rose, while throughout the south Rohan raised the Huguenot squirearchy. Luckily the royal garrison on Ré prevented Buckingham from consolidating his position and when they were relieved by Louis in November, the English hastily evacuated the island. La Rochelle was besieged. However, it was still possible for the English to relieve it as the French King did not possess a navy.

Richelieu, who never left the siege and wore a gilded cuirass over his purple soutane, had a solution. A breakwater was built across the mouth of the port, consisting of sunken ships on top of which a stone dyke was constructed; there were forts at each end and floating batteries were moored along it. Frantically, soldiers and peasants worked waist deep in the water. Louis and the Cardinal never left the dyke—the King had to be prevented from taking up a pick himself. On the landward side, the city was isolated by three lines of royal fortifications including thirteen forts. But the Rochellois, commanded by the fiery Duchesse de Rohan and by its mayor, the brave Jean Guiton, supported by eight fanatic pastors, resisted heroically. It was a dreadful winter and the besiegers suffered accordingly. Louis grew bored and went off to hunt. The Cardinal had a nervous collapse, though in March he none the less led an abortive night attack through a sewer.

By the spring the Rochellois were starving. When the English fleet returned, it found the dyke impregnable and sailed home. A second English expedition in September 1628 also turned back. Mme de Rohan boiled her leather armchair to make soup—others ate their shoes. On a single day 400 Rochellois died of hunger. Those who tried to escape were hanged by the besiegers. (However, Louis spared a young lady who had written to an officer saying she would marry him and turn Catholic if he would save her—the royal army celebrated their wedding in splendid style.) On 28 October 1628 La Rochelle surrendered. The King, wearing an armour damascened with golden fleurs-de-lis, rode into the city on All Saints’ Day. He wept when he saw the misery caused by the siege—the unburied corpses and the scarcely less ghastly survivors. (Wagon-loads of food were brought in, whereupon a hundred Rochellois died of over-eating.) A triumphant Richelieu said Mass in the city’s principal church, giving Communion to Louis and his captains. La Rochelle’s fortifications were razed to the ground and every church had to be returned to the Catholics. The Rochellois kept only the right to worship as Protestants.