Thus assailed by the attack of the two hitherto exclusively privileged orders, the legists and functionaries of the tiers, replied to both. The complaint of the nobles they met by supplicating the crown to abolish pensions which the grandees received for doing nothing, and which amounted to fully as great a sum as that of the public salaries; to diminish the number of governors of provinces, marshals, and other useless dignities, enjoyed by the noblesse. To recall all grants of the royal domains, to limit the right of corvée, and of feudal exactions, and especially to make it law that all who entered into leagues, or levied troops without the order of his majesty, should be adjudged and punished as guilty of high treason.

To the clergy the commons dealt the severe blow of accusing them indirectly of the death of the late king,

their proclaiming that monarchs might be denounced and dethroned for purely spiritual crimes. And they proposed the passing of a solemn declaration, that no foreign potentate or pope had any power in the kingdom, over the person of its sovereign, or over the fidelity and obedience of his subjects, and that the doctrine, preached by so many ecclesiastics, that they had the power to depose kings or kill them was impious and execrable. Instead of accepting this proposition the clergy were arrogant enough to dispute it, and maintain the power of deposing monarchs and dispensing subjects from their fidelity. The language of Cardinal de Perron was as extravagant and pretentious as that of a prelate of the fifteenth century. But though the dispute was acrimoniously carried on by both sides, the regent succeeded in quieting it, by assuring the tiers that the king would consider their request, and that there was no necessity to insert it amongst their formal demands.

It was upon such idle and verbal disputes as these that even the Commons of France expended their

CHAP.

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CHAP. energies and time. In their quarrel for precedence and patronage with the noblesse, and for politico-religious dogma with the clergy, they forgot, or treated as an inferior consideration, the finances of the country.* A statement of these has been deferred to the present epoch of 1614, being the last meeting of the old representative assembly of the nation previous to 1789, and thus offering a fit opportunity of showing in what state the absolute monarchy of the Louises received the public

revenue.

The principal support of the French revenue was the taille and its accessories, levied on the produce of the land, in the south directly, without distinction of persons, but in the north and centre on the cultivators of the soil exclusively. The amount of the taille would be difficult to state, as the greater portion of it, raised in the Pays aux Etats, that is, Burgundy, Dauphiné, Provence, Languedoc, and Britanny, were absorbed in the administrative and local expenses, and did not reach the treasury.t

Sully says, twenty millions of livres were raised by way of taille. He regularised the levy, cut down the expenses, did away with the extortion of the collectors, remitted twenty millions of arrears, and fixed the taille first at sixteen and in the last years of Henry's reign at fourteen millions. But either he did not take into consideration the local expenses of the northern and central provinces, or else these after the death of Henry, came to imitate the south, and pay their expenditure directly out of the revenue, for in the accounts of 1614 the whole taille yielded but seven and a quarter million of taxes to the epargne, or Paris treasury.‡

The indirect and multifarious taxes such as the salt

* Etats-Généraux and Relation de Rapine.

Singular to say, in the Pays aux Etats, the Tiers were not

called to vote the taxes.

Traité du Revenu. Etats-Généraux, tom. xvii. p. 201. Forbonnais.

tax, the aides or consumption duties, the customs gave CHAP. nine millions of net revenue; this with four millions XXVIII. coming from the domain, gave twenty millions for the court and central government, besides sixteen millions swallowed up in provincial expenditure. This income which had enabled Sully and Henry the Fourth to pay off a debt of an hundred millions, and to lay by some seventeen millions of crowns in the Bastille, did not suffice for the prodigal government of Marie de Medicis, who in four years had spent almost all the fruits of Sully's economy, and was obliged to ask of the estates to raise the king's revenue to the amount of his probable expenditure.

Voluminous as were the cahiers or supplications of the several orders-that of the clergy fills a volumethe finances occupied a small portion even of that of the tiers. Far from meeting the queen's recommendations for raising money, they besought diminution of the taille, and the withdrawal of the host of bursal edicts in progress. They at the same time prayed for the stoppage of pensions and the suspension of grants, to which request the favourite, D'Ancre, paid very marked contempt. One of the demands of the commons, worthy of being noted, was that all custom houses between province and province should be removed, and such taxes only levied on the frontier. The final cahiers or supplications of the several orders were presented to the king on the 23rd of February, 1615.

The most remarkable circumstance connected with the ceremony was, that the spokesman of the clergy on that occasion was a young prelate, Armand Duplessis de Richelieu, Bishop of Luçon. He was the grandson of that Richelieu who had the command of the king's guard in the time of the first Guise, and who was called Le Moine, the monk, from derision, having been one, and making his life a contrast to a monk's humility. He was not only famed for his licentiousness, but his

XXVIII.

CHAP. cruelty, which he practised to every excess on the Huguenots of the Loire. He became rich, however, and was the founder of his family-the bishopric of Luçon being almost ever since his death held by a younger member of it. An elder brother having resigned it and become a monk in 1605, Armand, though but twenty-two years of age, besought Henry the Fourth to procure it for him. This he accomplished through the Cardinal Du Perron, though Richelieu was obliged to go to Rome in the course of his suit. In his letters he represents Luçon as the most villanous and dirty bishopric of France. Yet, scant as were its revenues, we find him expending five or six hundred crowns to purchase two dozen of silver plates. He paid constant visits to Paris; preached frequently before the court, and commanded its attention for the space of an hour on the present occasion as orator of the clergy.*

In his harangue the Bishop of Luçon went the whole length for his order, which, he said, had far better claim to occupy political place than laymen. He attacked the magistrature, and demanded that their hereditary right to office by purchase should be abolished, because it wronged the church and the noblesse, the latter being obliged to prey upon ecclesiastical property and benefices, all other means of livelihood being closed to them. The promulgation of the Council of Trent as valid in France, and the completion of the Spanish marriages, as the seal of Catholicism, were the chief points upon which Richelieu insisted. The queen in her reply to the states, promised to curtail pensions, and abolish the hereditary right of the magistrates. But as the former would have provoked princely enmity, and the latter swept away a source of revenue, both were soon forgotten.

One of the effects of the right of the judges of parlia

* Letters and Papers of Richelieu, edited by Avenel.

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ment to transmit or vend their offices, was to advance СНАР. young men to their posts, who, rich and independent, assumed the aristocratic ideas of a young noblesse. The Prince of Condé, who had failed to make any use of the estates, or to win influence among its members, fell back upon the parliament, and made partisans amongst its younger members, especially of one judge named Le Jay. He proposed that the parliament should assume those duties which the estates had abdicated, of discussing and framing propositions "for the king's service, the advantage of his subjects, and the good of the state." This revival of the pretensions of the parliament of the Ligue, and anticipation of the resistance of the Fronde, considerably but needlessly alarmed the court. The opposition contemplated, required some right in such claims, a patent object and a puissant support. The Paris parliament was without any. Hostilely viewed by noblesse and clergy, and with no hold upon the people, even the young king had but to command and speak menacingly in order to compel the judicial body to submit.

The Prince of Condé and his brother malcontents, De Bouillon and Nevers, wanting that support which the Guises had found in the capital, repaired to their strongholds, raised troops, and prepared for resistance. The queen mother mustered an army also, but more to keep them at bay than to reduce them: contented with which, Marie de Medicis proceeded southward and accomplished the exchange of her eldest daughter for the infanta. This decisive attainment of the great aim of the queen's policy and administration-for it was her own will which chiefly effected it-together with the ultra-Catholic demands of the clergy and nobles of the estates, alarmed and exasperated the Huguenots to the utmost. When the Prince of Condé crossed the Loire and offered himself as their leader, supported as he was by many of the grandees, they