After Luynes’ unsuccessful siege of Montauban, in 1621, the king and the Protestants had signed a treaty of peace. But this treaty, as everyone knew very well, was only a temporary and provisional agreement -so temporary and provisional that neither side took the trouble to observe its terms. Whenever an opportunity for scoring an advantage arose, it was taken regardless of what might happen to be written on that scrap of paper. Sooner or later, this long-drawn and indecisive conflict between the king and his two million Protestant subjects would have to be settled, once and for all. Neither party believed that it could be settled except by force of arms; both therefore made their preparations.
The first serious breach of the peace was committed in 1627 by a Protestant, the Duke of Soubise. In command of a small squadron of fighting ships, he occupied one of the strategically placed islands off La Rochelle, raided royalist ports and carried off, along with other booty, the five handsome vessels which the last of the Palaeologi had had constructed, at great expense, for the transport of Father Joseph’s crusaders. When things became too hot for him in his home waters, Soubise set sail, with his prizes, for England, where the common people immediately took him to their hearts as a Protestant hero. Observing this, Buckingham decided that he would be a Protestant hero too.
By leading a combined naval and military expedition to the aid of La Rochelle he hoped to kill two birds with one stone to recover the popularity which he had lost as the result of the unlucky expedition in aid of the Elector Palatine and of the king’s marriage to a Catholic princess; and to take vengeance on Richelieu for having outmanoeuvred him in negotiation and, worse still, thwarted his amorous designs on Anne of Austria. In the summer of 1627 he set sail with a great fleet and seven thousand men. After a brisk fight, he made a landing on the island of Ré, near La Rochelle, and proceeded to lay siege to the strong fort of Saint-Martin. Weeks lengthened into months. The French garrison was starved to the very brink of surrender; then, almost miraculously, supplies were smuggled through from the mainland. The defenders revived, and the siege went on.
Direct assaults were tried, and failed. The weather grew worse; the English troops began to sicken. Finally, in November, Buckingham was forced to raise the siege and sail home. He had lost four thousand men and achieved absolutely nothing. Hostility between the king’s forces and the city of La Rochelle broke out in September 1637. A month later, the king arrived with fresh troops from Paris. With him came the Cardinal, dressed in Roman purple, but wearing a breast-plate and a plumed hat, and behind the Cardinal, bare-footed in the mud, trudged Father Joseph.
La Rochelle was too well fortified to be taken by storm, and in the salt marshes around the city the royal army sat down for a long siege. Father Joseph was offered quarters in the house occupied by the Cardinal; but he declined this comfortable honour in favour of a deserted summerhouse standing beside a broad ditch at the end of the garden. The fabric was old and leaky, and when the wind blew hard from offshore and the tides were high, the ditch overflowed, ankle deep, into the friar’s bedroom. But to make up for these slight defects, the building possessed one inestimable advantage; it was private. By going to bed very late and getting up very early, Father Joseph was able to make time each day for at least two hours of mental prayer. In the damp and windy solitude of his gazebo he could meditate in peace.
These periods of recollection, of wordless converse with God and the crucified Saviour, were more than ever necessary to him at this time. Of his life under the walls of La Rochelle, he wrote, in a letter to one of his Calvarian nuns, that it was ‘worse than hell ‘; worse, not because of its discomforts and dangers (on the contrary, these must rather have endeared it to a man of Father Joseph’s temper), but, because the strain and anxiety of his multiple activities made it so peculiarly difficult for him to make the mystical approach to God. In hell, according to the theologians, the principal torment of the damned consists in their being for ever and totally deprived of God’s presence. When Father Joseph said that public life, particularly public life in war conditions, was worse than hell, he was not using a mere picturesque figure of speech.
In terms of the philosophy he had accepted, he was making a precise and sober statement about his psychological condition. In the past he had advanced at least to the outskirts of the kingdom of God, had had at least a partial experience of ultimate reality. Now, the dust and smoke of the Cardinal’s kingdom was obscuring his vision. Having known heaven, he now found himself excluded from the light. In affirming that such a state was ‘worse than hell,’ he did not exaggerate. Father Joseph could find some slight consolation in the thought that the obstacle between himself and the light of God was his own strenuous performance of God’s exterior will, and that, if he tried hard enough, he might one day learn, with God’s grace, to ‘annihilate,’ in a continuous awareness of the divine presence, even such a life as he was now leading.
Father Joseph’s activities during the long months of the siege were varied and enormous. To begin with -and this was certainly the work he found most congenial -he was responsible for the moral, spiritual and, to some extent, also the physical welfare of the army. Under his command he had a whole troop of Capuchins, whom he kept incessantly busy. Services were held for the troops, sermons preached, confessions heard. Collaborating with the surgeons, the friars organized hospitals and attended to the needs of the sick and wounded. When there was any fighting, they were in the thick of it, acting as stretcher-bearers, assisting the dying to prepare themselves for eternity. Their courage and devotion were profoundly impressive. To the preaching of such men even soldiers were prepared to listen. Contemporary observers found the results nothing less than astounding. Nobody had ever seen or heard of so well behaved an army.
Unfortunately for Father Joseph, this missionary work among the troops was only the least of his activities. He was still the Cardinal’s right-hand man. Foreign affairs was peculiarly ticklish at this time of domestic conflict-had to be discussed, decisions taken, despatches written.
Court intrigues had to be checkmated ; quarrelling magnates conciliated. The friar was constantly being called upon to use his infinite dexterity with the nobility. These were the sort of things he had been doing ever since Richelieu came into power. At La Rochelle he was given or took upon himself a number of new responsibilities. Thus, he attended the councils of war, and gave advice on matters of strategy and tactics. Imaginative and ingenious, he was for ever propounding the most brilliant schemes. Some of these were actually tried; but on each occasion, bad staff work resulted in failure. The fault was not the friar’s; but his reputation suffered, and he came to be regarded as a rather absurd, clerical White Knight, full of crack-brained notions which were made to seem even more ridiculous than they actually were by his ‘ habit of guaranteeing them as divine revelations. These revelations came to Father Joseph at the end of long nights, during which, in his own words, he had ‘redoubled his prayers that God might give him some light’ on the best way of taking the town by méprise. His method was to consider all the available information, work out a number of appropriate plans and then offer the whole in an act of petition, begging for divine guidance in framing a choice. When the guidance came, he took the chosen plan to Richelieu and the council of war.
The information on which the Lord was asked to decide came to Father Joseph mainly from spies in the enemy’s camp; for, as in Paris, so Here before La Rochelle, the friar acted as chief of Richelieu’s secret service. To the Tenebroso-Cavernoso side of him this singularly uninviting role seemed to come quite
