The Bourbon Kings of France (9 page)

In 1636 Gaston d’Orléans was involved in yet another plot against Richelieu, who only just escaped assassination. The Comte de Soissons, a Prince of the Blood, who had been connected with the plot, hatched a further conspiracy in which Gaston also joined. Both plots were discovered, but no really harsh measures could be taken against members of the Blood Royal. Gaston was bought off with a large sum of money (part of which paid for the Mansard wing at Blois) and Soissons fled to Sedan.

Louis’s support for the Cardinal in the face of opposition from the entire nobility shows real moral courage. None the less Richelieu was always fearful of losing his favour—he considered the four square feet of the King’s cabinet ‘more difficult to conquer than all the battlefields of Europe’. During Louis’s reign, twenty-six persons were beheaded for plotting against the Cardinal, and more died in prison (they included four Dukes and a Marshal of France). The King gave his support at terrible personal cost. Estrangements with his mother and his brother were inevitable, but surely not with his Queen. When war was declared on Spain, Mme de Chevreuse persuaded Anne to send details of any French military operations which she could discover to her brother, the Cardinal Infante. For four years the Queen of France was a spy for Spain. Eventually in August 1637 one of her messengers, M de La Porte, was intercepted. Marie de Hautefort saved Anne by boldly entering the Bastille, disguised as a man, and smuggling a letter to La Porte so that he was able to make his story tally with that of the Queen. As for Mme de Chevreuse, still youthful and slightly-built, she disguised herself as a page and galloped down lanes and byways until she reached Spain. It is likely that Anne had convinced herself that she was aiding the enemies of the Cardinal and not those of France.

One day in December 1637 Louis left Versailles to stay with Condé at Saint Maur. Passing through Paris, he decided to visit Soeur Angélique (the former Louise de La Fayette) at her convent in the rue Saint-Antoine. Their conversation continued until nightfall, by which time heavy rain was falling; the wind was so violent that it blew out the candles in the lanterns of the royal escort. Their captain, M de Guitaut, who was on familiar terms with the King and who was also devoted to the Queen, said that it would be impossible to reach Saint Maur in such a violent storm; he advised the King to stay at the Louvre. Louis replied that his apartments were not ready, whereupon Guitaut suggested that he stay with the Queen. The night grew blacker than ever, the rain falling in torrents. Reluctantly, the King agreed. He had supper with the Queen and then spent the night in her bed. A little before midday on Sunday 5 September 1638, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Anne of Austria gave birth to a son, Louis Dieudonné—the God-given. Mlle de Hautefort persuaded Louis to go to the Queen’s bedside and kiss her. Te Deums were sung throughout France.

The news was not welcomed by everyone; Gaston was no longer heir to the throne—Richelieu was safe. The Cardinal’s enemies suggested that the King was not the father; indeed it was somewhat surprising that Anne should bear her first child in the twenty-third year of their marriage. But there was no doubt about the birth, which took place in poor Gaston’s presence; to console him the King gave him a large sum of money.

The King continued to sleep with Anne. In his grim way he considered it his duty, though he now neither liked nor trusted her. Flirtatious, still goodlooking if a little plump, with her fair hair in ringlets, Anne was very conscious of her looks. (Mme de Motteville says that her only imperfections were too big a nose and wearing too much rouge.) Her voice was not attractive, a shrill falsetto—she yapped like a terrier. In character she was scatter-brained, lazy, a glutton, everything that Louis was not. He knew very well that she corresponded with Mme de Chevreuse, who was now in England.

Marie de Hautefort—‘the creature’ as Louis calls her in his letters to Richelieu—was not much solace. She had a stinging wit and bullied him unmercifully, demanding places at court for her family. In 1638 he wrote pathetically to the Cardinal,
‘la créature est toujours en mauvaise humeur contre moi.’
He was driven to distraction by her love for a Captain in the Royal Guard, the Marquis de Gesvres, even writing to the young man’s father to tell him how angry he was with his son. In the end she made herself so disagreeable that the King was thoroughly disenchanted with
all
women. Mlle de Hautefort could not believe it when she was finally asked to leave the court in November 1639.

Richelieu was uneasy. He knew that in his loneliness, Louis might find some new favourite who might oppose the Cardinal. To protect himself, he had introduced the son of an old friend into the royal household—Henri d’ Effiat, Marquis de Cinq Mars, who was appointed Master of the King’s Wardrobe on 27 March 1638. It was the eighteenth birthday of this strikingly handsome young nobleman. The first thing he did was to add to his own wardrobe (which eventually included fifty-two suits). Louis soon took a passionate liking to him. Here was another long-sought friend. In the summer of 1639 he made him Grand Master of the Horse, and henceforward Cinq Mars was known as
Monsieur le Grand
. The King fawned on his new favourite, loading him with presents.

A thoroughly shallow creature, Cinq Mars, although intoxicated by his good fortune, was entirely without gratitude. He was bored by Louis, who spent more and more time hunting; digging out foxes and flying sparrowhawks at blackbirds were small consolation to a young man who loved Paris and had a beautiful mistress. He turned sulky and was continually slipping away. There were constant scenes in which Richelieu acted as peacemaker. Sometimes
Monsieur le Grand
’s
hauteurs
were so insufferable that the King was unable to sleep from rage. It is often said that the relationship was homosexual, and Louis’s behaviour was certainly abnormal. But there is no evidence whatsoever of homosexual behaviour on his part, even if he undoubtedly admired beauty in both sexes. The only hint of perversion is Tallemant des Réaux’s squalid gossip, which includes a story of the King, wearing a bride’s nightdress, sharing a bed with his favourite and kissing his hands. Tallemant is not noted for reliability. In fact, throughout the association with Cinq Mars, Louis continued to sleep with the Queen—in the late summer of 1640 she gave birth to another son, Philippe (the future ‘Monsieur’). Anne did not show the slightest jealousy of Cinq Mars, though she had resented Mlle de Hautefort. Nor was the King any less assiduous at his devotions. He would hardly have written his pitiful complaints to Richelieu about the favourite’s cruelty if he had thought the relationship a sin. What is particularly significant are the childish certificates which the pair signed after quarrels and sent to the Cardinal, stating that they were on good terms again. Basically the association was an adolescent friendship, even if Louis was twenty years older than Cinq Mars; the King was not perverted but retarded—he had the emotional age of a boy of fifteen.

While these puerile quarrels were taking place, France was winning victory after victory. In 1640 the French conquered Artois, while across the Alps the Comte d’Harcourt routed the Habsburg armies three times and captured Turin. The Duke of Savoy hastily negotiated for peace with France.

Yet the French nobility were determined to overthrow Richelieu. The Comte de Soissons gathered a Spanish army at Sedan and began to invade France; luckily he was killed by a stray pistol bullet during the first skirmish. Next year the Duc de Bouillon revived the plan; he intended to invade France with a French army from Italy and raise the Huguenots of the Cévennes, while Gaston was to attack from the north. They were joined by no less a personage than Cinq Mars who signed their treaty with Spain; he hoped that if the plot were successful he might marry Marie de Gonzaga and obtain her fabulous wealth. In his conceit he had come to resent the Cardinal’s admonitions; by now Louis was so irritated by his favourite that on one occasion he shouted
‘Je le vomis!’
But Richelieu’s spies soon discovered the plot.

In June 1642, at Narbonne, an agent of the Cardinal showed the King documents which gave irrefutable proof of Cinq Mars’s treachery. Louis at once gave orders for his arrest and, after a brief attempt to hide in the back streets of Narbonne, the former favourite was incarcerated in the fortress of Montpelier. In September he was tried at Lyons, hopelessly compromised by the confessions of Gaston and Bouillon. The wretched young man broke down and admitted his guilt; he also incriminated his best friend, François-Auguste de Thou. Arrogant to the last, he protested at sharing a scaffold with de Thou because the latter was a commoner. On the day of Cinq Mars’s execution, the King, who was playing chess, looked up at the clock and said, ‘Aha, this morning at this very moment our dear friend is having a bad time [
un mauvais moment
].’

Ill-health—gout, rheumatism and fever striking at a constitution which was now dangerously undermined by pneumo-intestinal tuberculosis—together with the miseries of his private life had brought Louis to the verge of collapse. Unable to hunt, he turned to music, being particularly soothed by the
airs de cour
composed and sung to the lute by Pierre de Nyert, whom he rewarded by appointing him
Premier Valet de la Garde Robe
. (He left him a considerable sum of money in his will.)

Spain was falling apart. In 1641 Portugal, which had been under Spanish rule since 1580, declared itself independent. Catalonia also rebelled, proclaiming Louis as sovereign Count of Barcelona. In 1642 the King added Roussillon and Cerdagne to France, whose frontier now extended along the entire length of the Pyrenees. Although Louis had personally directed the siege of Perpignan, his growing weakness had made it impossible to take much part in the campaign.

Meanwhile Richelieu lay dying. A skeleton, eaten by ulcers which paralysed him, he had to be carried in a litter; he was rowed up the Rhône in a gilded barge, his cabin hung with gold and crimson velvet. Although in agony as he lay on his bed of violet taffetas, the Cardinal’s mind retained its icy clarity. But by the end of 1642 he was spitting blood, and his physicians diagnosed pleurisy—he offered his resignation. However, Louis answered that Richelieu must die as he had lived, First Minister of France, and came to his bedside to feed him spoonfuls of egg yolk with his own hand. The ‘torment and ornament of his age’ died on 4 December 1642. He had made France the greatest country in Europe; his achievements are the measure of Louis XIII’s judgement. On his advice Louis appointed Mazarin to be his successor, with instructions to continue all the Cardinal’s policies.

Louis himself was dying. At the end of March 1643 he told his doctor, Bouvard, ‘I see from your silence that I am going to die.’ He added, ‘God knows I never liked life and that I shall be overjoyed to go to Him.’ They brought the Dauphin to see him. When the King asked him his name the little boy replied, ‘Louis XIV,
mon Papa
.’ His father smiled and answered, ‘Not yet, my son.’ After receiving the Last Sacraments at the end of April, Louis diverted himself by ordering his gentlemen to sing psalms and hymns in which he sometimes joined. He died on 14 May 1643. His last word was ‘Jesus’. He was only forty-one.

Acting on his instructions, an attendant removed the crucifix, which Louis wore on a cord round his neck, and took it to Soeur Angélique (Mlle de La Fayette) at her convent.

The day before he died the King had said to the old foe of his childhood, Condé, ‘Monsieur, I know that the enemy is advancing towards our frontiers with a great and powerful army.’ No one in Paris had heard of any enemy invasion. Louis added faintly, ‘Your son will rout it and win a great victory.’ They thought the dying man’s mind was wandering. A week later, a strong Spanish force laid siege to Rocroi, a French fortress in the Ardennes. Condé’s son, the Duc d’Enghien who was only twenty-two, led an army of 20,000 men to its relief. A brilliant, unorthodox commander, he marched straight at the Spaniards, positioning his troops too quickly for the enemy to manœuvre. Next day the Duke routed them with successive charges until only the famous Spanish infantry remained, commanded from a litter by the aged Count Fuentes. Enghien charged them three times until Fuentes was killed. Another final charge destroyed them; 8,000 Spaniards were killed and 7,000 taken prisoner, the cream of their army. It was the end of a military domination of Europe which had lasted since their victory at Pavia in 1525.

To his contemporaries, Louis XIII seemed a most effective monarch. James Howell,
^*
writing in 1646, regarded him as an inspiration to English royalists: ‘A successful and triumphant King both at home and abroad throughout the whole course of his reign,’ wrote Howell, ‘and that in so constant degree as if Fortune herself had been his companion and Victory his handmaid.’

Saint-Simon outlived his friend and master by fifty years, dying in 1693. He had known Louis XIII better than anyone. It is worth remembering that he and his son—the diarist—never ceased to venerate Louis’s memory. To the end of his life the diarist wore on his finger a miniature of the King set in diamonds, while a lamp burnt perpetually before a bust of Louis in the family chapel. Father and son faithfully attended Mass at Saint-Denis on every anniversary of his death. Few Kings have inspired such gratitude and affection in their favourites.

‘The Love of Glory’

LOUIS XIV (1643–1715)

_____________

‘The love of glory has all the same subtle shades and, may I say, all the same questionings as the tender passions’