She was an unaffectionate wife, a continent widow and a neglectful and even heartless mother.
(The Dauphin was brought up at Saint-Germain, where Marie seldom troubled to visit him. Indirectly, however, she played a decisive part in his education; for she gave and constantly reiterated the most formal orders that the child should be birched every morning before breakfast for the offences of the previous day. The practice was continued even after Louis had become king of France.) The only person for whom Marie seems genuinely to have cared was the little deformed maid, who had been the companion of her unhappy childhood, Leonora Dori, called the Galigai. This woman was treated by her mistress with a positively imbecile indulgence.
Her husband, the Florentine adventurer, Concini, was made prime minister and a marshal of France, while the Galigai herself dictated the policy of the country, appointed ministers, judges, bishops, ambassadors, governors of provinces (always for a financial consideration) and, by taking bribes and stealing from the government, amassed in a few years a fortune running into millions of crowns.
Corrupt rule by foreign gangsters can hardly be popular, and Marie de Medicis’ government was duly hated by nobles and people alike. It was hated, what is more, without being feared; for to corruption it added inefficiency and weakness. The civil wars of the later sixteenth century had restored to the great French magnates much of the power, the quasi-autonomy that had been theirs in the Middle Ages, before the rise of the absolute monarchy. Strong in the loyalty and approval of the Third Estate, Henri IV had reduced the nobles to obedience. By its ineptitude and corruption, the regency fairly invited them to reassert their independence of the crown. When they rebelled, it was ordinarily Marie de Medicis’ policy to buy them off with enormous gifts of money, land and preferment. The nobles accepted, swore fealty and, a few months later, began again.
It was the Third Estate that suffered from the disorder and that paid the bills. But in spite of this, in spite of the universal detestation inspired by the Queen Mother’s Italian favourites, the people remained unswervingly loyal to the crown-partly from a reasoned belief that the crown would protect them from the intolerable tyrannies of the local magnates, lay and ecclesiastical, partly out of traditional sentiment.
In seventeenth century France, the divine right of kings was a fact of crowd psychology. Thus, it was not only because they were oppressors that the clergy and nobility were disliked; it was also because they were insufficiently respectful to the king.
“O Noblesse, o clergé, les aînés de la France, Puisque l’honneur du roi si mal vous maintenez, Puisque le tiers état en ce point vous devance, II faut que vos cadets deviennent vos aînés”.11
So wrote a popular rhymer of this period, and in 1614, at the meeting of the States-General (the last before 1789), the Third Estate offered a resolution to the effect that ‘there is no power, spiritual or temporal, which has any right over the kingdom.’ It was a declaration of revolutionary royalism, directed against the nobles and the Roman hierarchy.
In 1615 the magnates were at it again. The Prince of Condé, the Dukes of Bouillon, Longueville, Mayenne, Nevers -all of them governors of provinces and possessors of private armies-rose in revolt against the central government. The real motive of their rebellion was the same as ever to increase the power and wealth of the nobility at the expense of the crown. The avowed motive, ironically enough, was to support the Third Estate in its assertion of the divine right of the king to rule without interference. Not, of course, that Condé, the leader of the rebellion, took any interest in the lower classes, or desired the royal power to be strengthened.
If he backed up the resolution of the Third Estate, it was because such an action might win him the support of the people in general and of the Protestants in particular. These last approved of the resolution for the same reason as Marie de Medicis disapproved of it because it was anti-papal. Condé hoped to use the force of religious prejudice to back up his own and his friends’ demand for cash and power.
The rebellion started in the late autumn of 1615. The rebels collected an army, the government collected an army. It looked this time as though there might be real fighting. Then suddenly, out of the blue, Father Joseph made his appearance. The winter was one of the worst in living memory and an epidemic of what seems to have been influenza was killing its thousands in every town and village; but the Provincial of Touraine was carrying out his tours of inspection as usual. At Loudun, he found himself all of a sudden at the very heart of the rebellion.
To serve as peacemaker was one of the duties of a Capuchin. Without waiting for instructions from his superiors, Father Joseph resolved immediately to present himself to Condé. It was not difficult for him to obtain an audience with the prince.
As Provincial, he was a person of some authority; besides, his younger brother, Charles du Tremblay, was one of Condé’s gentlemen in waiting. He was received; he talked with the prince, he sat down to long discussions with the assembled council of magnates. Speaking with the authority of a man of God and with the passionate eloquence of the born preacher, he adjured them to spare their country the horrors of civil war, to return to their obedience to the king. The magnates raised objections, put forward their claims and aired their grievances. At once, the preacher gave way to the diplomatist, Ezechiely to Tenebroso-Cavernoso. With fascinating skill and those perfect manners which he had learnt at M. de Pluvinel’s Academy, he reasoned with them, he cajoled; occasionally, too, he permitted himself an outburst of blunt frankness, such as a gentleman may be excused for giving vent to when speaking to his equals.
Then, all of a sudden, the tone would change again, and he was once more the visionary friar, licensed by his habit to denounce wrong-doing even in the highest place, to give warning even to princes of its fatal consequences in this world and the next. Such, throughout his career, was to be Father Joseph’s method of negotiation. Combining in his own person the oddly assorted characters of Metternich and Savonarola, he could play the diplomatic game with twice the ordinary number of trump cards. It must not be imagined that he acted on these occasions with deliberate insincerity, that he consciously rang the changes on his dual role. No, he actually was both Ezechiely and Tenebroso-Cavernoso; and he was really convinced that the policies pursued so skilfully by the latter were no less in accordance with God’s will than the preaching and teaching which were the life-work of the former.
After spending a week with the insurgents, Father Joseph obtained their leave to present their case to the Queen Mother and her advisers, who were quartered, with their forces, at Tours. He did so, and, on the advice of the papal nuncio, was appointed by Marie de Medicis as her unofficial agent to negotiate terms of settlement.
At Tours he renewed his acquaintance with the Bishop of Luçon. Richelieu had entered public life in the preceding year as a representative of the clergy at the States-General; had ingratiated himself to the Queen Mother by a speech full of the most outrageous flattery; had paid court to Concini and the Galigai and had been rewarded for his pains with the post of almoner to the child queen, Anne of Austria. He was now prowling in the neighbourhood of the court, hungrily on the look out for an opportunity to snatch the smallest morsel of that political power which’ he felt was due to his extraordinary abilities.
Whenever he was forewarned of the friar’s journeyings, Richelieu would drive out in his coach to meet him. For a mere duke or prince of the blood, Father Joseph would not break the rule which forbade him to ride a horse or sit in a carriage. But Richelieu as a bishop had a right to his obedience. His command was a momentary dispensation from pedestrian travel. When the lackeys jumped down and opened the carriage door for him, he could climb in with a good conscience and in the knowledge that his behaviour was, ecclesiastically speaking, perfectly regular.
Seated side by side in the swaying coach, the two men talked at length and confidentially about the current rebellion, about the weakness of the government, about the state of the country at large, about the menacing designs of Spain, about the troubles brewing in the Germanies, about the plight of Rome, caught between its avowed enemies, the Protestants, and its yet more dangerous and sinister friends, the Hapsburgs. On most points the friar and the bishop found themselves in full agreement. Both were convinced that the crying need of France was for a strong central government; that the power of the nobles and the Huguenots must be broken and the king made sole master of his realm. Both wished to see the Gallican church reformed and revivified. Both were convinced that France was one of the chosen instruments of Providence and that the country should be made powerful, to the end that it might play, in the affairs of Christendom, that leading role to which God had unquestionably called it.
But whereas Richelieu was convinced that the
