CHAP. of the blow he was about to deal to the Spanish XXIX. monarchy. Its late kings, Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second, had crushed the independence and annulled the privileges of the great provinces, Catalonia escaping from its general loyalty, as well as from its being considered a mere dependency upon Aragon. Catalonia retained its fueros less from the generosity than from the neglect of these monarchs. Their descendant found it necessary to repair to Barcelona to take an oath to respect the privileges of the province, and on this occasion he experienced a sturdy sort of obedience very different from that of the other Spanish provinces. In 1626 the King of Spain was obliged to fly from the turbulence of the Barcelonese. The Minister Olivarez especially was indignant at such frowardness, and only sought an opportunity to repress it. This was afforded by the attack of the French upon Roussillon, considered, though north of the Pyrenees, a part of Catalonia. The people of the province, however, responded loyally to the call of their monarch and sent 20,000 men to oppose the French at Salces. Not more than 8000 of this army returned to their homes. Instead of showing gratitude, the Spanish government quartered an army on the Catalonians, which was altogether a breach of their fueros, and proceeded to levy a tax for supporting it. The Catalonians remonstrated and murmured; the general in command, Santa Colonna, represented that the tax was greater than the Catalonians could pay. The royal reply was, that he should enforce it, which could easily be done by making the soldiers in each district more numerous than the inhabitants. The result was an insurrection, which broke out in Barcelona on the 7th of June, 1640, and in which the whole province joined. joined. The viceroy was slain in the tumult. And whilst the court of Madrid ordered the captain-general of Aragon, Los Velez, to march to put down the insurgents, they sent a deputa tion to Richelieu to take them under his protection. Los Velez had at first some success, and reduced Tortoso. Cambrils also fell into his hands, its garrison being unpitiably handed over to the executioner. Tarragona was then seized by the captain-general, who marched upon Barcelona. He was here, however, met by the troops and general which Richelieu had sent to its assistance, and the capital was saved. In their gratitude, the Catalonians transferred their allegiance to Louis the Thirteenth. Richelieu had recommended them to form a republic like the Dutch, thinking this would excite the energies of the people to suffice for their own defence. But Spaniards were not Hollanders; and Louis the Thirteenth, September 1641, accepted the title and power of Count of Barcelona, promising at the same time to respect the fueros of the province. In the following year the French followed up their successes in this quarter. The king himself came to Roussillon, the capital of which, Perpignan, surrendered in September, 1642. In the same month La Mothe Houdancourt, who commanded the French south of the Pyrenees, defeated the Spanish general Leganez, and maintained his position as Viceroy of Catalonia in despite of all the efforts of the court of Madrid.* The arrogant rule of Olivarez drove Portugal into rebellion at the same time as Catalonia. The Spanish minister was indeed the counterpart of Richelieu, and had all the tyrannical principles of the French cardinal without his sagacity and prudence. In the same month and year in which the Catalonians transferred their allegiance to Louis the Thirteenth, the Portuguese rehoisted their national banner under the Duke of Braganza, whom they chose for king. Thus was all the power of the Spanish monarchy required and * Mémoires de Montglat, of Richelieu, Correspondance de Sourdis, Mercure Français, xxiii. XXIX. ' CHAP. exerted at home, opening to Richelieu greater facilities for fulfilling those schemes of conquest which he had long meditated. Not only had he secured Alsace and Lorraine the latter province was, indeed, nominally restored to its duke, who repaired to Paris and made his submission-but he bound himself to serve France exclusively; and the possession of his fortresses enabled the French king to keep him to his agreement. Lorraine became, in fact, virtually French. In 1641 Richelieu completed this conquest by that of Artois, which was, indeed, a necessary acquisition; whilst the French frontier stretched for hundreds of leagues east, south, and west of Paris, Artois lying between Calais and Picardy, brought the hostile frontier close to the Somme, within a few hours of Abbeville and Amiens, and within two marches of the capital. The campaign of 1637 showed all the danger. In the summer of 1641, therefore, Richelieu, despatching two armies with the apparent design of attacking different places in the north, brought them together suddenly and unexpectedly before Arras, the principal town of Artois, on the 13th of June, 1640. The cardinal infant mustered an army of 20,000 men to relieve it, whilst O'Neil, who commanded the garrison, prepared for a stubborn defence. Like most sieges of the period, it was an affair of time and provisions. The Spaniards did not dare attack the entrenched camp of the united French armies; but they cut off the convoys, and on more than one occasion went near to reduce the besiegers to a greater degree of famine than the besieged. All the efforts of the cardinal infant were, however, in vain. The king and Richelieu from Amiens directed fresh supplies of provisions and of men; calling up even the army of Lorraine to secure the important capture. Arras was thus not only pressed by famine, but its ramparts being undermined, and the garrison incapable of resisting the assault that must follow the explosion, the capital of Artois opened its gates on the CHAP. 9th of August. This was the most important of the conquests of Richelieu. Artois, Lorraine, Alsace, and Roussillon were words sufficient to inscribe upon his tomb in order to entitle him to the claim of gratitude from the monarch, and admiration from the French themselves. In the acquisition of these provinces are comprised all the benefits which his reign-for it was no less-conferred on France. All other results, except in so far as they aided in these conquests, display nothing to either admire or approve. Second to his conquests, that which is the great theme of panegyric with his countrymen, is the destruction of the upper aristocracy, and his depriving all, who pretended to the name, of political influence. But the great defect and abuse at the commencement of the seventeenth century in France was not so much the possession of privileges and power by divers classes, as the arbitrary and forcible use of them. Governors were absolute in their provinces, the Huguenots in their towns, parliaments in their jurisdictions, the clergy in their vast domains. The desires, the tendency, and admission of the age went to abate all this exorbitance, and reduce it to what was legal and just. The estates, and even the nobles when assembling, could, as was felt even by those in 1561, easily have been brought to concur in and accomplish such a task. But Richelieu's sceptre was his sword; he could only correct with the searing-iron, and his temper was incapable of stopping short of an extreme. Rude, overbearing, insolent, ill-tempered, he suffered no equal and tolerated no inferior, except of the most servile nature. A prince or high noble could not exist in the precincts of the court; and even female superiority was as insufferable to him as male. The man who refused his benefit, or the woman who spurned his addresses, were at once enemies of the state, and XXIX. XXIX. CHAP. exile, imprisonment, or the block, became, in his opinion, their due. The middle ages never produced a tyrant more ruthless or more sanguinary; and one cannot but think that a character so fit for the fifteenth century must have been inflicted by mistake upon the seventeenth. One does not see, indeed, how such ferocity was required, even for his great aims. The sagacious cardinal might have governed the king, one should think, without exiling his mother, humiliating his wife, driving the princes his relatives to desperation by depriving them, not only of all power, but of all free action, within their own households. Nobles, great and small, might surely have been brought to serve the state, obey the king, and be contented with legal rights and fair emoluments, instead of being driven, one after the other, to conspiracy and the scaffold, by the jealousy, the trickery, and redoubled caprice of the king and of his minister. Tyranny, if it crushes one class, has generally the advantage of favouring another, and the rulers whose sceptre has humbled the noble, are represented as raising in proportion the classes beneath them. But the leaden tyranny of Richelieu weighed upon all classes. His severity to the noble did not make him less intolerant of the municipal rights of the citizen, and did not render the yoke of his combined tax and police system less onerous to the people. A word of Richelieu might have declared all classes subject alike to the taille; but no, he left the nobles all their fiscal privileges, precisely those of which they might in strict justice have been deprived; and such was the severity of his exactions, that every province was up in arms. Under the name of croquants in the south, vas-nu-pieds in Normandy, and other names elsewhere, the labouring class was in universal revolt. Their grievance was the rule of solidité, which exposed any peasant, after he had paid his own taxes, to be imprisoned for his neighbour in default: and could the |