On matters of domestic policy, Father Joseph had always been in accord with the Cardinal; and by 1624 he was coming reluctantly to accept his foreign policy as well. He saw that, if that great crusade was ever to be undertaken, Spain and Austria must be humbled into submission to French leadership. Within a short time the political conversion was complete; Father Joseph had become as determinedly an enemy of the Hapsburgs as Richelieu himself.
In 1624 the Thirty Years’ War was just six years old and had already been the cause of enormous miseries. Bohemia, where the trouble started, was the first to suffer. Then, in 1619, Bethlen Gabor, the Protestant Prince of Transylvania, broke into the imperial domains and pillaged Austria. In 1620 Tilly’s Catholics ravaged Bohemia once more and committed many atrocities against the civil population. To such humanitarian protests as were made, Tilly merely replied ‘that his men were not nuns.’ In 1621 the Protestants re-entered Bohemia under Mansfeld, and the country suffered as atrociously under its defenders as it had suffered in the previous year under its enemies.
When the Protestant army had devoured everything there was to eat in Bohemia, Mansfeld led his men into the Palatinate. Being without money or supplies, he was compelled to subordinate his policy and strategy to the demands of his soldiers’ stomachs. Where there was food there his army must go, regardless of every other consideration. In the Palatinate, Mansfeld was joined by Christian of Brunswick, and between them they succeeded in reducing the people to ruin and despair. Defeated by the imperialists, they were forced to retire into Alsace, and when Alsace had been gnawed to the bone they occupied Lorraine. From Lorraine, the army was invited in 1623 into Holland. Battles were fought on the way in the Spanish Netherlands, and the forces besieging Berg-op-Zoom were defeated.
After which, in 1624, Mansfeld marched his men into East Friesland, which suffered the same fate as Bohemia, the Palatinate, Alsace and Lorraine.
From Paris Richelieu and Father Joseph looked on at what was happening beyond the frontiers and framed a policy expressly intended to prolong the bloody confusion. France had no effective army, and any direct, large-scale attack upon the Hapsburgs was therefore out of the question. But if the war in Germany could be drawn out, Spain and Austria would be drained of their resources that, by the time France had grown strong, they would be exhausted. To this end it was decided in Paris that the embattled Protestants should receive French support, diplomatic and financial. At the same time new allies were to be sought among the non-belligerents, and determined efforts made to lure the Catholic Electors away from the Emperor (whose triumph, it was pointed out, would necessarily be at their expense, no less than at that of the Protestants) and to group them into a middle party under the tutelage of Louis XIII.
These ‘tenebrous-cavernoso’ proceedings were supplemented by a small-scale military operation, skillfully directed at one of the vital nerve-centres of the Hapsburg system-the Valtelline. Along this valley, which comes down from the Alps to the head of Lake Como’ and the only road by which Spain could communicate with Austria. Spanish troops and bullion from Mexico and Peru could be landed at Genoa, could be moved across Spanish-owned territory to Milan, and from Milan through the Valtelline, which was under the protectorate of the Swiss Confederacy of the Grisons, and across the passes into Austria. If that road were cut, the two branches of the House of Austria could communicate only by sea; and with the rise of Dutch naval power, the Channel and the straits of Dover had become to all intents and purposes impassable to Spanish shipping. Intervening nominally on behalf of his Swiss allies, Richelieu swooped down on the strategic valley and, at the end of 1624, garrisoned it with French troops.
It was, among other things, to talk about the Valtelline that Father Joseph went to Rome in the spring of 1625. He remained there for four months and, thanks to the Turciad and his conversational talents, was treated by Urban VIII with signal favour. Twice every week during the whole of his stay the Pope received him in private audience and remained closeted with him for hours at a time. When he trudged home again, it was with the title of Apostolic Commissary of Missions. From this time almost to the day of his death, foreign missions were one of his chief preoccupations. Vicariously, through his organization of devoted Capuchins, he was able to continue the work of evangelization, to which he had been so strongly drawn in his youth. His friars were in every part of the world, from Persia to England, from Abyssinia to Canada.
In the midst of his wearisome and questionable political activities, the thought that he was helping to spread the gospel of Christ must often have been a source of strength and consolation. True, his enemies in Spain and Austria and at the Roman Curia accused him of using his missionaries as French agents and anti-Hapsburg fifth-columnists. And, alas, the charge was not entirely baseless. Just as Cromwell was, in all sincerity, to identify the interests of England with those of the true Protestant faith, so Father Joseph, with no less conviction, identified the interests of true Catholicism with those of France. He knew that trade follows the cross and that an evangelist can be very useful in representing the interests of the nation to which he belongs. Inevitably, his French Capuchins preached the gospel of the Bourbons as well as that of Christ.
Father Joseph’s missions kept him in touch with all kinds of remote, outlandish places; and this awareness of the world overseas, combined with his belief in the providential nature of the French monarchy, made him an imperialist. Dedouvres has convincingly shown that the epoch-making memorandum of colonization and sea power, which in 1626 was presented to the king as the work of another hand, was in fact composed by Father Joseph. The recommendations set forth in this document were followed to the letter first by Richelieu and later by Colbert. ‘In the name of the greatest colonists and sailors of France,’ says Dedouvres, ‘we must salute, in the person of Father Joseph, one of their boldest and most far-sighted precursors on the road of sea power’-a sea power which, as the memorandum insists, must be valuable as an aid, not only to commerce, but also and above all to missionary endeavour. No less than the overthrow of Hapsburg power, the realization of Father Joseph’s dream of sea power and an empire was contingent upon the unification of France; and that work was not to be accomplished easily or very quickly.
Richelieu proceeded first against the nobility. An edict was issued in 1626 ordering the destruction of all fortified castles not needed for the defence of the national frontiers. But it was not by tearing down old walls and towers that he could bring the nobles to obedience; they would remain rebellious until such time as he could strike directly at their privileges and persons. His first opportunity for doing this was given to the Cardinal in the spring of 1626 when the king’s younger brother, Gaston, was induced to head a conspiracy, in which the most active roles were played by the Prince of Condé, two bastard sons of Henri IV, and that indefatigably charming and promiscuous lady, the Duchess of Chevreuse. Among the minor conspirators was the Chevreuse’s lover of the moment, a gay and brilliant young man called the Marquis de Chalais. Entrusted with the task of murdering Richelieu, Chalais was suddenly overcome by conscientious scruples and, going to the Cardinal, confessed his share in the plot.
The Cardinal promised him a reward and went immediately to Gaston; terrified, the heir apparent immediately turned king’s evidence. Louis and his minister thereupon acted decisively and swiftly. The two bastards, Vendome and the Grand Prior, were lured to Paris and there arrested and imprisoned. The prudent Condé forestalled a similar fate by quickly making his peace with the Cardinal. Marie de Medicis, who doted on her worthless Gaston and had been implicated in the conspiracy, was forced to put her signature to a document in which, as usual on these occasions, she solemnly promised loyalty and good behaviour for the future. Nothing was done to Mme de Chevreuse; but for this impunity she had to pay, not long afterwards, by becoming one of the Cardinal’s secret agents in England. As the mistress of Lord Holland and the confidante to whom Buckingham had poured out all the secrets of his love for Anne of Austria, she had sources of information not available to any merely masculine ambassador.
To Richelieu her reports from London were to be of the utmost value. Meanwhile, however, she was still actively his enemy; for now, when all the trouble seemed to have died down, she stirred it once
