Richelieu

His Rise to Power

Prof. Carl J. Burckhardt, Edwin & Willa Muir

• Editorial: Borodino Books
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787206328
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: French History

First published in English in 1940, this fascinating memoir details Cardinal Richelieu's rise to power from bishop to cardinal and King Louis XIII's chief minister.Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu and Fronsac (9 September 1585 - 4 December 1642), commonly referred to as Cardinal Richelieu, was a French clergyman, nobleman, and statesman. He was consecrated as a bishop in 1607 and was appointed Foreign Secretary in 1616. Richelieu soon rose in both the Catholic Church and the French government, becoming a cardinal in 1622, and King Louis XIII's chief minister in 1624. He remained in office until his death in 1642; he was succeeded by Cardinal Mazarin, whose career he had fostered."To the reader of this biography, Richelieu becomes one of the most cunning, far-seeing, and resourceful of statesmen. One sees how the cardinal, bent upon getting behind the wheel of state, overcomes powerful opposition and finally reaches his objective. This is a work by a skilled artist....His book reads like a novel of adventure."—Franklin C. Palm, Journal of Modern History"Professor Burckhardt has wrought brilliantly. Himself a statesman, he is particularly felicitous in his lucid analysis of complicated diplomatic tangles and his intuitive understanding of political psychology.—Arthur M. Wilson, American Historical Review"A brilliant and profound study."—Carl J. Friedrich in The Age of the Baroque, 1619-1660

CHAPTER I — The Young Richelieu

WHEREVER THE KINGS of France turned at the end of the sixteenth century the power of the Hapsburgs confronted them, the greatest power of that time encircling the boundaries of their distracted realm. There were many weak, undefended and open places in the body of the French territories, with their still indeterminate frontiers, and the inner structure of the country was still far from stable. The idea of national unity was only then emerging into consciousness. The great feudal nobles, grown too powerful, played at high treason; the petty nobles sold themselves to the highest bidder; the Protestants were an even greater danger: a State within the State. The King of France had to maintain himself against the Hapsburgs in Madrid and Vienna, their empire worldwide, and at the same time against the nobles and sectarians of his own country, who leagued themselves with foreign powers whenever they felt it expedient.

France in the sixteenth century had reached the same state of misery which Germany attained in the seventeenth during the Thirty Years’ War: laid waste, torn into factions, reeling from plague to plague and from famine to famine. The realm staggered under a monstrous load of debt; law and order were quite in abeyance; the kingship as an institution was questioned; tyrannicide was not only tolerated as a legitimate means, but actually advocated. A series of religious and civil wars had come and gone; complete anarchy, confusion and exhaustion prevailed everywhere.

Late in the sixteenth century Henry IV, backed by the burghers and others, began the political rehabilitation of France. The mighty and resolute rise of France to unity was to last for the whole of the seventeenth century, yet it did not proceed undisturbed. Men’s spirits had emerged still burning from the conflagration of the unexampled sixteenth century, and a long time was to pass before they cooled. In the sixteenth century individuals had grown too strong in a State that was too feeble; now they had to be disciplined out of their endless misery and embroilments. They had to be pieced together into a unity; a closely-knit ruling class had to be devised; a new and strict regime, a new authority had to be set up. The task was hard and unremitting to the point of desperation, involving setbacks all the time and risking collapse at every moment.

How great was the task for which these men had to nerve themselves! How vastly still loomed the power of their dangerous neighbor, Spain! Spain: that meant all the Iberian peninsula, now including Portugal; a great part of Italy (Milan and the Kingdom of Naples) with Sicily and Sardinia; and, from the Burgundian patrimony, the Netherlands and Franche-Comté. To its enormous American colonies it had added those of Portugal, scattered round Africa and about the Indian Ocean. A Spanish chronicler of the time asserted that the domain of his King exceeded twenty times the territory of the ancient Roman Empire. All Europe knew the saying: “When Spain stirs the earth tremble.” The huge fabric of this worldwide State rested on an army that was world-famous, the infantry tercios in particular, in whose ranks the noblest and bravest were enlisted, while at sea even the destruction of the Invincible Armada in 1588 had not permanently damaged the naval prestige of Spain.

Against this mighty power France held its own and eventually overcame it. Eventually: after long and hard endurance and a still longer preliminary period of lying in wait. The task of France was to spy out the vulnerable spots in the greatest power in Europe, to estimate in Madrid and Vienna the weaknesses of the Hapsburgs, to search for the Empire’s hidden, self-generating poisons, of which the most violent would be found in the struggle for German liberties.

After the premature death of Henry IV it was Cardinal Richelieu who beyond all others succeeded in detecting the frailties of the enemy; more than anyone else this political genius knew how to split the power of his opponent, how to rally new enemies against it, to stir up all that was most dangerous in it as a force for self-destruction, to encompass its downfall methodically and unremittingly through the encouragement he gave to the canker which long before had begun to invade the huge body of the Spanish Empire.

Richelieu was born in Paris on September 9, 1585, in the reign of the last Valois, Henry III, soon (in 1589) to fall by a murderer’s hand, like the great king he named on his deathbed as his successor, Henry IV. That extraordinary genius ascended the throne when Richelieu was four years old. For twenty-one years his rule lasted, with its infallible gift for brilliant improvisation, which made a virtue of every necessity and created out of every glaring anomaly a workable compromise leading to some future solution. A statesman of rare quality, Sully, stood by Henry IV as Richelieu was destined one day to stand by his son and successor, Louis XIII; but if in the first generation the ruler was greater than the servant, in the second the opposite was to be the case.

“The scandalous bloodbath,” as the Emperor Maximilian called the crime of St. Bartholomew’s Night, showed the fearful tension that existed between Catholic and Protestant in France. It is quite clear that in a State not yet grown to maturity and ringed round with enemies, the continuance of such a schism was bound to bring destruction: thoughtful observers of France’s destiny recognized this and acted upon it, sometimes against their deepest personal convictions. Henry IV, the greatest of them, should be mentioned first.

He had a stern struggle to conquer his kingdom. The Catholic party united against him under the “League” and in alliance with Spain. When the League began to split over the Spaniards Henry informed the Archbishop of Bourges that he was prepared to become a Catholic in order to save the unity and independence of the country, to preserve France for the dynasty and the dynasty for France. On July 23, 1593, he abjured the Protestant faith and received the sacraments, and in 1594 entered Paris as the King of France. Philip II, who had been fighting in France merely as the ally of the League, now waged war on his own account, but victory evaded him. Henry IV struck back vigorously, and battle succeeded battle until both sides were exhausted. But while the King of France was heading this desperate struggle his Calvinist subjects stood aside in hostile activity because of his conversion to the Catholic Church. So destructive, so blindly paralyzing, was the effect of religious division.

At last in 1598 the peace treaty of Vervins was signed between Spain and France. Neither had conquered. A month before the signing of the treaty Henry had succeeded, after difficult negotiations, in winning over the Huguenots by the Edict of Nantes. This Edict guaranteed the Protestants freedom of conscience in the entire kingdom and freedom of worship wherever Protestant services had been customary before 1597, as well as one church in each parish, either in a village or a suburb. Complete equality of rights with the Catholics was guaranteed, and eligibility for any and every profession. Several courts of justice were set up in which Protestants were to have equal representation, involving the appointment of Protestant as well as Catholic judges. More than that, the Edict empowered Protestants to assemble in provincial or national synods, and for the duration of eight years Henry left some hundred fortified places at their disposal. The danger of this particular concession was yet to be painfully demonstrated.

When Henry IV’s labors were crowned in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes and the peace with Spain, Richelieu was thirteen: at that time his father had been dead for eight years. Who was his father? From what stock did the great Cardinal spring? Under what conditions did he spend his youth?

The du Plessis de Richelieus were rather poor country gentry from Poitou. The social rise of the family resulted from the marriage of the Cardinal’s grandfather, Louis du Plessis, sieur de Richelieu, with Françoise de Rochechouart, the last representative of one of the greatest names in France. She is said to have been past her youth, poor and embittered, living as a companion to a relative, Anne de Polignac. Yet pride and assurance are powers, for good or for evil; and at that time such a family alliance was decisive because of both its actual influence and what it stood for, not only because of the new and extensive family connections it brought, all of them gravitating round the Court, but for its assured tradition of self-confidence which gave it specific weight.

Louis du Plessis de Richelieu secured advancement at Court through the influence of his father-in-law; he became chamberlain and cup-bearer to the King; he fought in many battles and died young, leaving five small children. Years of war followed, of impoverishment, of hardship, but the pride, the passion, the faith of the family did not decay. Among smoking, plundered villages, neglected fields, roads that were year in and year out a highway for fugitives, assassins, bandits, and troops of soldiery, again and again in a state of siege, often without food, two generations grew to manhood, that of Richelieu’s father and that of the Cardinal himself, fatherless orphans brought up by women. But the sacred fastness of the family, that ultimate, integral cell in the general chaos, did not give way; not one right of self-assertion or prestige was abandoned by the Richelieus.

The eldest son of Françoise de Rochechouart, Louis du Plessis, grew up to serve as Lieutenant in the company of the Duc de Montpensier. He came home on leave. Half a mile from Château Richelieu lay the strong castle of the Maussons, who had been the Richelieus’ rivals from time immemorial, occasional marriages between the two families having only exacerbated the situation. A dispute between Louis du Plessis and Monsieur de Mausson concerning a question of precedence at church flamed up into a quarrel; Mausson lay in ambush for du Plessis, surprised him, and killed him.

At this time the second son, François, was a page at the Court of Charles IX. His mother summoned him back to the paternal castle and fostered within him plans of revenge. As he grew to manhood, his neighbor began to take alarm and never left his castle except by an underground passage, which led to a ford on the road to Champigny. And so young Richelieu lay in wait for him at the ford. As Mausson’s horse picked its way through the foaming shallows, Richelieu bowled a cartwheel at its forelegs so that it reared and fell, bringing down its rider. François and his confederates flung themselves upon the fallen man and did by him as he had done by the other.

Then a hurried farewell to his stern mother and a flight by way of England and Germany to Poland, where the French candidate for the Polish throne, the Duke of Anjou, later to be Henry III, had assembled many Frenchmen. François de Richelieu distinguished himself in the retinue of that subtle, ingenious, and very unsatisfactory Prince; he was employed on difficult missions; he was the first to inform Anjou of the death of Charles IX; he accompanied him on his adventurous flight from Poland and, securely in favor with the new King, reached France, where he achieved a career of increasing eminence, becoming Grand Prévôt of France and Knight of the Order of the Holy Ghost.

This vendetta murderer seems to have retained a character of his own even in the effeminate court of Henry III with its serenades and its mignons. He is described as a strict and pious Catholic, a mild and respected administrator of his estates, a man of clear and quick intellect. At the same time the deed to which he had been incited in his youth by his mother seems to have weighed heavily upon him; his melancholy temper made him a solitary; people called him “Tristan the Hermit.” This man was the father of the great Cardinal.

To one principle François remained constant through every vicissitude: the principle of kingship. He did battle for Henry III wherever and whenever there was need for it; it was he who arrested Jacques Clément, the King’s murderer, and conducted the exemplary and penetrating interrogation of the criminal which has been preserved for us. But after that, the position became somewhat difficult for Catholic paladins of the defunct monarch; were they to serve the heretic, Henry of Navarre? Richelieu’s father did so; he stuck to the King of France; whether Catholic or Calvinist, no matter, he was the King. And Henry IV rewarded him; he confirmed him in his office and dignities, and made him his companion-in-arms in the subjugation of his kingdom. Together they besieged Paris and fought the Spaniard. Richelieu’s reputation and influence went on increasing until on July 10, 1590, a violent fever cut him off from his forceful activities in the thirty-second year of his life.

When he was eighteen François had married Suzanne de la Porte, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a member of the Parlement of Paris. His elder brother, who had to uphold the rank of the family, was then still alive, and as the younger brother he could allow himself more freedom in the choice of a wife. He seems to have made his choice out of inclination, but the connection opened a path for him into the influential sphere of the Paris Parlement, while the prospect of a rich inheritance must have been tempting to her. An apparent prospect only—for disappointment soon followed. When François de Richelieu died his family found themselves in such severe though temporary embarrassment that they had to sell the chain of his Order so that he might be given a burial befitting his rank. They were not exactly poor, but the deceased had been speculating, there were many houses to be kept up, some of the estates were mortgaged, and the King had always to intervene with ample gifts of money when affairs grew too complicated.

The lot of the young widow was a hard one; winter and summer she had to live with her stern mother-in-law in one of those tense and constricting relationships that are based upon mutual interest, together with her five children, of whom the eldest, a son, was ten, and the youngest a daughter of three. Neglected estates, enormous debts, an uncertain income, perpetual danger, and daily and hourly that haughty old woman with the sharp, contemptuous, inquisitorial eye. A situation that recurs time and again in the works of French writers, who have divined the intense force and toughness of passionate natures constrained by the petty makeshifts of a narrow daily round, a force which often breaks out later to direct great affairs in the outer world. Richelieu’s mother has been described for us by contemporaries as a woman of clear understanding and tranquil but iron will, who inflexibly set her whole energies on the reclamation and increase of the family resources and the careers of her children; yet a poet who knew her compared her to a dove, praising her gentleness, kindness, and purity, qualities for which the uncanny Cardinal deeply reverenced her all her life. Indeed, his feelings towards her always showed that deep, warm, intimate affection, betraying an inner tenderness of which Bismarck, born in similar social circumstances, was later to say that only those who had been tenderest in their youth could be fashioned into real hardness by life.

Richelieu was a sickly child; as an infant he was not expected to survive; he nearly cost his mother her life and health; and throughout his life he himself was never free from the fits of fever which afflicted him from birth. Mother and son were bound to each other in a strange and secret way: by sickness, and the peril of death. Illness and the sense of brief mortality were to be driving forces in nerving the Cardinal to effort, while the constant dangers of the time were to steel him. Not a year of his early life was passed in peace; the waves of war and plague broke right against the frowning walls of the family castle, and to the hardships of daily existence was added the strain of the silent, implacable struggle between mother and grandmother. Richelieu was haunted by violent headaches, and nervous disturbances of an epileptic nature appeared after periods in which his faculties were heightened to the utmost pitch. One of his sisters died insane, one of his brothers thought for some time that he was God the Father.

Intellectually, the young Armand Richelieu was able to grasp whatever was presented to him with effortless and febrile rapidity. He was educated at home until he was nine; then he was sent to the Collège de Navarre in Paris, that school for princes on whose benches Henry IV had sat; later he attended an Academy. The first school was neither religious nor military in its system, the second was governed somewhat in the spirit of the present-day English public school, with ideals of self-control and fair play, with a comprehensive curriculum embracing all provinces of knowledge and an emphasis on sport and military science, its aim being to train its pupils for leadership in the King’s service. It was a seminary at which one learned the principles of honor, of style in living, and of elegance. Its director, Monsieur de Pluvinel, Chief Equerry to the King, had very decided views on all forms of address, including the gestures which were proper to a nobleman, the height of his hat, the style of his feathers, the length of his cloak, the manner in which his ruffles should be starched. No doubt the physical courage, the natural daring which distinguished Richelieu were developed during these years.

Henry III had bestowed on Richelieu’s father, as a reward for his services, the right to dispose of the Bishopric of Luçon. Jacques du Plessis, a great-uncle of the Cardinal, had been the first member of the family to hold it. Though it was a poor diocese, the poorest in France, some people said, still, something could always be made of a bishopric. During his lifetime François du Plessis de Richelieu received the small consistorial income; after his death it fell to his widow. Titular representatives, men of straw set up by the family, wore the mitre in the name of M. de Richelieu and his heirs, and for many years the diocese was simply farmed out. The prebendaries of Luçon chafed under this state of affairs. They would rather have done without a bishop, for the diocese had to pay all its taxes regularly without receiving even the most necessary services. So they went to law about it. Suzanne Richelieu, alarmed, set herself hastily to defend her rightful property; she tried to improve the bishopric situation, and finally promised that her second son, Alphonse, should hurry through his studies and become Bishop as soon as possible. To clinch the matter, Alphonse was expressly appointed Bishop by the King in 1595. The boy was not yet twelve, but from that date he bore the title. Yet they had reckoned without him; his was a serious, brooding, inwardly tormented, burdened nature, with a painful sense of responsibility; he alternated between periods when he thought himself God the Father and periods of complete self-abnegation. On the day of the investiture in 2602 he refused to have the miter set upon his head. He fled where no explanation could be required of him; he became a Carthusian monk.

All Suzanne Richelieus precautions were nullified; the diocese, it seemed, would be lost to her. Or should she withdraw her third son from the martial career for which his fiery spirit was suited, but not his weak constitution? Should he be denied worldly ambitions? Would an ecclesiastical career satisfy him? He was adroit, quick, resolute, without sentimentality, ready for anything. In the family council the matter was debated passionately, exhaustively, ruthlessly. Armand Richelieu himself turned the scale by signifying that he was willing to accept.

He was seventeen at the time. At once he flung himself into the study of theology. To attend public courses would mean only a waste...

Índice

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• CHAPTER I - The Young Richelieu
• CHAPTER II - Richelieu Gains a Patron
• CHAPTER III - Uncertain Ascent
• CHAPTER IV - Richelieu’s First Term of Office
• CHAPTER V - Exile
• CHAPTER VI - Richelieu and the Rebels
• CHAPTER VII - Richelieu Comes to Power
• CHAPTER VIII - The Chalais Conspiracy
• CHAPTER XX - The Huguenots
• CHAPTER X - La Rochelle and the Isle of Ré
• CHAPTER XI - Victory at La Rochelle
• CHAPTER XII - The European Background
• CHAPTER XIII - Richelieu and the German War
• CHAPTER XIV - Mantua
• CHAPTER XV - The Defeat of the Huguenot State
• CHAPTER XVI - Italy Again
• CHAPTER XVII - The Day of Dupes
• CHAPTER XVIII - Richelieu Triumphant
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER