The Bourbon Kings of France (7 page)

The Duc de Rohan still held out in Languedoc, so in the spring of 1629 Louis launched a final campaign. Whole towns were demolished—in some places the King’s officers hanged all males or sent them to the galleys. Eventually Rohan surrendered and was banished. The Huguenots were ordered to summon their Assembly for Louis to dictate his terms. Peace was signed at Alais in June 1629; the Protestants lost their
places de sûretés
but the Edict of Nantes was confirmed. Even though a Huguenot rising took place as late as 1752, Alais was the end of the Wars of Religion.

There was another focus of rebellion, in the person of the heir to the throne, ‘Monsieur’. Born in 1608, Gaston, Duc d’Anjou, was not quite so useless as he has been painted; his fat face and bulging eyes give a misleading impression. He was both kind-natured and intelligent, a patron of the arts who collected paintings and gem stones. But he was also weak, and easily influenced. When in 1626 Richelieu wanted him to marry a Bourbon cousin, Mlle de Montpensier who was the richest heiress in France, Mme de Chevreuse put it into Monsieur’s head that he did not want the marriage. A confused plot emerged in which the chief schemers were Gaston’s bastard half-brothers, the Duc de Vendôme and the Grand Prior, his tutor the Marshal d’Ornano, and of course Mme de Chevreuse and her latest lover, the Comte de Chalais. Undoubtedly there was talk of murdering Richelieu and possibly Louis too—Gaston was to be made King and married to Anne of Austria. (Louis always thought that Anne had been in the conspiracy and never quite forgave her, saying on his deathbed, ‘In my condition I have to forgive her but I don’t have to believe her.’) The plot came to light when Chalais lost his nerve and nade a partial confession to Richelieu. The Vendôme brothers were sent to prison where the Grand Prior died. Chalais paid with his life; his execution was so bungled that it took thirty-four blows to sever his head. Mme de Chevreuse was banished to Poitou but escaped to Lorraine. Gaston confessed everything with gusto, implicating everybody, and then tamely married Mlle de Montpensier—the ceremony was performed by Richelieu. As a reward Gaston was made Duke of Orleans.

The Cardinal was determined to show the nobility that they were not above the law. A royal edict was therefore issued which forbade duelling under pain of death. In 1627 the Comte des Chapelles and the Comte de Bouteville fought a duel in the Place Royale, ignoring the edict. Bouteville had taken part in no less than twenty-two affairs of honour. Within a month they had been arrested, tried, condemned and beheaded in the Place de Grève. It was well known that the Cardinal persuaded Louis that the executions were necessary. Richelieu attacked the nobility in other ways too. In 1628 he was responsible for an edict ordering the demolition of fortified châteaux, and for another which abolished the offices of Constable and Grand Admiral. By 1634 a tribunal in Poitiers was condemning over 200 noblemen for robbery and other crimes. In 1635 he instituted the office of
Intendant
—a royal representative in each province who kept an eye on the governor and on any other source of opposition. Such measures earned the Cardinal much hatred. One can only wonder at his courage; Gaston remained heir to the throne until 1638, and in the event of Louis’s death Richelieu would probably have lost not only his place but his life as well.

Sometimes even Louis found Richelieu irritating. There is a story that on one occasion the King growled at him, ‘You go first, since you are the real King.’ Richelieu replied smoothly, ‘Only to light the way,’ and, picking up a torch, preceded Louis like a lackey. In reality the King seems to have been fond of the Cardinal rather than otherwise. His letters to him were often almost excessively affectionate; he could write, ‘Be assured that I shall love you until my last breath’, signing himself
‘Louis de très bon coeur’
. Richelieu took care to let the King know exactly what he was doing. Besides a daily correspondence, the two men spent long hours together, discussing plans and projects. Louis once said of Richelieu, ‘He is the greatest servant that France has ever had.’ The Cardinal wrote gratefully, ‘The capacity to permit his ministers to serve him is not the least of qualities in a great King.’

In the autumn of 1630 Louis fell so ill that he was not expected to live; he received the Last Sacraments, asking pardon for any wrong he might have done. The doctors thought he was suffering from dysentery but in fact he had an internal abscess: fortunately it burst, and he made a slow recovery, during which he was nursed by his wife and by his mother. The latter had now turned against the Cardinal. When Louis was at his weakest they insisted that he must dismiss Richelieu. Rumours of the Cardinal’s imminent disgrace circulated, and appeared to be confirmed by Louis’s curious coldness when Richelieu visited him. On his return to Paris, the King stayed with his mother at her new palace of the Luxembourg. On 10 November Marie took Louis into her chamber and again demanded that he dismiss the Cardinal. As she was speaking, Richelieu, who had been warned, burst into her room through a back door, to be met with a torrent of abuse from the Queen Mother. He knelt before the King begging for mercy, at which Marie screamed at Louis, ‘Do you prefer a lackey to your own mother?’ The King, who must have found the scene intolerable, told Richelieu to rise, bowed to his mother and left for his hunting-lodge at Versailles. Marie thought she had won: courtiers flocked to her, including the Marshal de Marillac and his brother, the Garde des Sceaux, as well as Bassompierre.

Richelieu made preparations for flight. Suddenly one of the King’s young cronies, Claude de Saint-Simon, appeared with a message from Louis summoning him to Versailles. There he again knelt before the King, and in an emotional scene Louis told him, ‘I have in you the most faithful, the most affectionate servant in the world. I have seen the respect and the attention which you have always paid the Queen my mother. If you had failed in your duty to her I would have cast you off. But she has no cause whatever to complain of you. She has let herself be prejudiced by a cabal whom I know very well how to destroy. Serve me as you have so far served me and I will defend you against every enemy.’ The Marshal de Marillac was arrested at the head of his troops, accused of embezzlement and beheaded; his brother, the Garde des Sceaux, died in prison; Bassompierre was sent to the Bastille, where he spent twelve years. Louis, not the Cardinal, was responsible for these measures. The Queen Mother was confined at Compiègne, from where in 1631 she fled to the Spanish Netherlands, dying in exile a decade later. Her attempt to overthrow Richelieu is known as ‘The Day of Dupes’.

Gaston too left France. From Lorraine he appealed to all Frenchmen to revolt against the Cardinal. He won a valuable recruit in the rich and popular Duc de Montmorency, who was angry at not being given the great office of Constable which his father and grandfather had held. In autumn 1632 Gaston invaded France and was joined by Montmorency, but their little army was easily defeated at Castelnaudry. Monsieur fled at the first charge. Poor Montmorency, a paragon of knightly virtue, was beheaded at Toulouse. Gaston swore to relinquish evil companions and be ‘especially fond of his cousin the Cardinal de Richelieu’. He soon fled again, to join his mother.

Louis was busy abroad, with the war of the Mantuan Succession, which broke out in 1629. (Mantua was important because it controlled one of the roads between Spanish Italy and the Empire.) The Duke of Mantua, a Gonzaga but also a Frenchman, defended his Ducal throne to the point of selling his Titians and Mantegnas. In the campaign’s early stages Richelieu took the King’s place, clad as a cavalier in clothes of
‘feuille morte’
edged with gold, wearing a cuirass of polished steel, white jackboots, a plumed hat and a rapier. In March 1630 Louis stormed the Savoyard fortress of Pignerolo, having first forced the pass of Susa where he smashed his way through three lines of fortifications. The old Duke of Savoy knelt in the snow to kiss Louis’s boots in token of submission, the war ending in April 1631 with the peace of Cherasco. Savoy ceded Pignerolo to France—with it went control of a pass over the Alps which guaranteed France access to Italy.

An incident during the campaign shows Louis’s fatalism. The mistress of the house where he lodged fell ill with the plague. His staff were terrified but Louis, dismissing them, said simply, ‘Withdraw and pray God that your own hostesses are not stricken, but first draw my bed curtains. I shall try to get some sleep and then we will leave to-morrow morning, early and without panic.’

During Gaston’s revolt, the Parlement of Paris had refused to ratify a royal edict condemning the rebellion. Louis soon forced them into a humiliating ratification. For the Parlement were not exempt from the revolution in government, their functions and privileges being constantly under attack. In 1641 Louis savagely told the senior President of the Paris Parlement, ‘You have been created only to judge between Maître Pierre and Maître Jean and if you continue your plots I will clip your claws so close that your flesh will suffer.’

Culturally, the later years of Louis XIII’s reign were a period of some distinction. In 1636 Corneille’s
Le Cid
was triumphantly performed for the first time. Next year Descartes’s
Discours de la Méthode
was published. The Academie Française was set up, charged with producing a dictionary which would preserve the purity of the French language. A natural history museum, the Jardin des Plantes, was founded for the instruction of medical students. In the
chambre bleue
of her hôtel near the Louvre, Mme de Rambouillet created the salon, holding receptions at which great lords and bourgeois intellectuals could meet on equal terms. Life was becoming altogether more graceful; the forerunners of the
boulevardiers
learnt to stroll through the elegant arcades of the Place Royale as well as to strut and bow at court. There were many new buildings in which they were able to parade, notably Louis’s extension of the west wing of the Louvre and Richelieu’s Palais Cardinal. Most of the hôtels of the Marais date from this period. At Fontainebleau and at Saint-Germain the King employed Simon Vouet, one of the best painters of the day; he also commissioned Philippe de Champaigne to paint an allegory of the royal triumph over heresy at La Rochelle. However, though Louis enjoyed plays, he had no deep interest in the arts and cancelled all literary pensions when Richelieu died.

A field in which Louis and Richelieu were less than successful was finance. Their government lived from hand to mouth, selling offices or confiscating the property of rebellious noblemen. The Cardinal increased taxes, but unlike Sully, relied on tax farmers. There were riots in Paris, peasant risings in Guyenne and Normandy—tax collectors were murdered and châteaux sacked until troops had to be sent in to restore order. One concrete achievement was a standard gold coinage, the famous
Louis d’or
, which made its appearance in 1640, bearing a most impressive portrait of the King.

In 1631 Théophraste Renaudot, a Paris doctor, published his
Gazette
, and was immediately given a royal pension. His journal, the first modern newspaper, was made to print royal edicts. It also published news bulletins which gave details of military campaigns—when they were successful—and of attempts to lighten taxes. Some of these bulletins were written by Louis himself, who had at once grasped their importance as a means of shaping public opinion.

Fully mature and bearded, the King had lost none of his neuroses. Scrupulously correct and owing something to fashionable Stoicism (he had probably read Epictetus), he still gave way to moods of hysterical depression during which he was quite unapproachable. Though an introvert, he was fond of such extrovert amusements as cards and parade grounds. His tastes were eccentric in their simplicity. When the axle of his carriage broke, the King, taking an axe, walked into the forest and returned with a sapling which he had trimmed. On campaign he could be found in a kitchen morosely cooking his supper. Like most Bourbons he had little time for intellectuals; Mme de Rambouillet’s
précieuses
were not much in evidence at the court of Louis XIII.