Duke of Orleans lieutenant-general, in case of his demise, but adjoining to them a council, composed of the Prince of Condé, the chancellor, Mazarin, Chavigny, and Bouthilliers, who were to decide each question by plurality of votes. As he supposed the whole five to entertain Richelieu's opinions, this would, in fact, have been the queen's nominal regency, overruled by the friends and disciples of the defunct cardinal. Instead of demurring to the king's arrangement, Monsieur brought the document to parliament to have it registered as a legal ordonnance. The queen, by Mazarin's secret advice, accepted it. It was every thing, he said, that she should have the title of regent, and be chief in the council; with this it would be easy to assert and assume the plenitude of power. This arrangement, which took place towards the close of April, was followed by the baptism of the heir to the throne. By the king's appointment Mazarin was the godfather, a significant honour; the Princess of Condé, the late cardinal's niece, was the godmother. The king's predilections were political. Personal friendships Louis, indeed, had not left himself; he had sacrificed them all. When the little prince was brought to the king after his christening, the latter asked the child what was his name? "Louis Quatorze,” was the precocious reply. "Not yet, my boy," observed his parent. The ceremony took place at St. Germains, where the king occupied the new château on the brink of the descent, and where he was immediately after taken with severe illness. He was worn to a skeleton, his body covered with white spots, often at the last extreme of inanition, and then rallying to sing psalms or string mushrooms. "He was very ill served in his last illness," says De Pontis, "and could not even get his soup warm. It was painful to see a king, surrounded by a multitude of officers, worse attended than the CHAP. XXIX. CHAP. commonest citizen of Paris."* Most of those around him, indeed, wished him dead, so that his days of convalescence were marked by the sadness of the domestics, and those on which he suffered most by their cheerfulness. The queen inhabited the old château, and could with difficulty restrain the turbulence of her expectants' ambition. The Duke of Vendôme and Marshal Meilleraye, the Duke of Beaufort and the Prince of Condé, still cardinalists or non-cardinalists, anticipated the future struggle for authority. Anne brought her Swiss regiment to guard her, and, when obliged to go to the king in the new château, left her children in the old to the guardianship of the Duke of Beaufort. On the 14th of May Louis expired. The querulous, but not inglorious, despotism which two valetudinarians had exercised over France for twenty years, was at an end. It is difficult to separate the characters of Louis the Thirteenth and of his great minister, the policy, which was pursued throughout the reign, being the result of the will, the opinions, and the passions of both. Without Richelieu, Louis, indeed, would have been but a cipher. Under no other king than Louis could Richelieu have governed. The peculiar merit of the king was his persistence in upholding a minister, who was displeasing to himself and to everyone else, by his imperious habits, his sickly and jealous temper, and who had but one virtue, that of political capacity. It was something in a monarch to have appreciated this, even in times when Richelieu's efforts wanted success, as they eminently did in his great league for driving the Spaniards from North Italy. Richelieu, on the other hand, to please his master, adopted sentiments and policy not his own. He was no bigot, no monk, no crusader. As his enemies reproach him, he always put first the interests of the state, and those of * Richelieu says the same in his Testament. the church after (mettait l'état en selle et la religion en croupe). Louis, on the contrary, had all the bigotry and intolerance of the priests, to whom his father committed him. And Richelieu was compelled to undertake his first great act, the reduction of the Huguenots, by the exigence of the king and of the Papal party, which flattered him. Having achieved this great desire of Rome, Richelieu's subsequent policy was directed against it. In Northern Europe he supported the Protestant cause, subsidising Swedes and Dutch, and mainly contributed to that partition of Germany between the two religious influences, which forms still the most effectual barrier against Rome upon the continent. The first ordonnance drawn up under his influence, the Code Michaud, was eminently Gallican, repressive of the sacerdotal and ultramontane spirit. As he subsequently experienced more hostility on the part of the legists than on that of the clergy, he shrank from giving preference to the former, but continued to mulct the church and to use largely its revenues and wealth in the support of war and of a policy the very reverse of what churchmen preferred. In abatement of the glory of the cardinal, it may be urged that he came to rule the French monarchy at the very time when its power and its resources were attaining their greatest development after a quarter of a century's repose. And with these he attacked the House of Austria, when the resources of Spain were exhausted and its vigour on the decline, whilst those of Germany were neutralised by civil war. To the latter result, however, Richelieu himself largely contributed. If Olivarez frittered away Spanish finances, whilst Richelieu made the most of French, all merit be to the latter. It might not be that the cardinal won the greatest advantages in the sphere or direction whither his ambition especially pointed, but he made up for failure there by success elsewhere. Italian conquest was CHAP. XXIX. XXIX. CHAP. his first aim. Glory and influence beyond the Alps fascinated him more than victories in any other sphere. In this he departed from the wise convictions of Henry the Fourth and Catherine de Medicis. He did no more than hold his ground at the foot of the Alps, all his schemes for the subjugation of North Italy failing; whilst his support of Sweden and the Protestant powers of the North, more to neutralise and occupy the House of Austria than aught else, gave him the country between Champagne and the Rhine, and added one third to the breadth of France. Richelieu had equally large projects for the conquest or partition of the Low Countries, to which he had the fairer opening from the power of England being paralysed. Yet the acquisition of Artois was all that he accomplished. His glory is to have fixed the frontier of France, Louis the Fourteenth having been able to add little* to what Richelieu had achieved under a world of obstacles and difficulties at home and abroad. What appeared to Richelieu himself, and still appears to his countrymen, the great merit of his domestic administration, was that he overcame all these difficulties, that he crushed the Huguenots, broke the power of the aristocracy, sent their chiefs to the scaffold, and transformed the provinces from so many different states into the obedient parts of one centralised and absolute kingdom. To what did all this centralisation of power serve, except to render Louis the Fourteenth a magnificent idol, but at the same time himself and his descendants wretched rulers, the curse of themselves and their people, both incapable of improvement or prosperity or even permanence, simply because that freedom, which is the only real life of a people, had been squeezed out of them by Richelieu. We have, recorded by himself, that great minister's ideas of domestic policy. And certainly more lament * Little, indeed, one may say, save Lille and Strasburg. able testimony of ignorance and barbarism never survived. "All are agreed," writes Richelieu, "that if the people were too much at their ease, there would be no keeping them within the bounds of duty. They may be compared to mules," &c. So much for the people. Instead of regarding the noblesse as those who hereditarily possessed the chief wealth of the kingdom, and who had consequent rights and an interest in the state, he considered them as merely possessors of courage, in consequence of their birth, which courage they were bound to employ in its service. "The noblesse," he says, "which does not serve in war, is useless and a mere burden to the state, and ought to be reduced to the rank of the people." Richelieu, in fact, had no idea of a great country but as a machine of war, in which respect his policy completely resembled and anticipated that of Napoleon. His aim was to concentrate France, its wide territory and its large population, so as to make it a compact iron ball, to break into pieces all that came in contact with it, without considering that the country, thus reduced to a rude and ready instrument of violence, becomes itself degraded into a mere mass of matter, deprived of will, of liberty, of intellect, or of any other than of that concrete existence, in which all individuality is lost. There are too many amongst the countrymen of Richelieu who still think this absolutism as the perfection of government and the highest pitch of political wisdom. Whilst in the eyes of such nations and such minds as the English, it appears the mere infancy of political science, that implicit obedience to the authority of one which was natural enough in the pastoral age of the world upon the wide plains of Asia, and at epochs anterior to knowledge of any kind. To transplant such barbarism into our day and pass it off for wisdom, is about the same as if we were to preach the worship of the stars, and carry men back to the political regimen of Babylon. СНАР. XXIX. |