And what a host of things there were to be prayed for. Let them pray, for example, for the success of Father Joseph’s pet plan for entering the town by night through an underground sewer and taking the garrisont by surprise; (it failed). For the conversion of the Protestant Duke of La Tremoille; (it came off). For an amelioration in the behaviour of the king’s brother, Gaston; (his conduct was to remain as base and despicable as it had always been). For the defeat of the second English expedition; (Lord Denbigh’s fleet came, tacked about for a few days within sight of the town, then sailed away again). And so on. In common usage, the word ‘precarious’ carries the idea of riskiness and uncertainty; etymologically, it means ‘contingent upon the answer to prayer.’
In view of his mystical training, it seems surprising that Father Joseph should have laid such stress on petitionary prayer. Petitionary prayer is appropriate enough in men and women whose religion is anthropocentric; in the life of those who have learnt, not only to think, but to feel and live, theocentrically, it is obviously out of place. The theocentric position finds its most emphatic statement in the writings of Meister Eckhart. ‘I tell you by the eternal truth, so long as you have wills to fulfil God’s will, and so long as you have any longing for eternal life and God, for just so long you are not truly poor in spirit. For he alone is poor, who wishes nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.’ Here is total annihilation, passive in contemplation, active in the affairs of daily life annihilation such as Benet of Canfield taught and such as Father Joseph himself strenuously tried to practise.
But Father Joseph was now in politics, and the nature of politics is such that even the most devout and spiritual politician must constantly be exercising the personal will, either on behalf of himself or of some social organization. But when the personal will is exercised by one who is religious, petitionary prayers for success are felt to be entirely natural and in order. Hence the anomalous nature of Father Joseph’s spiritual life, one side of it centred in God, the other in all too human cravings; hence those communities of pure contemplatives, whom he so lovingly instructed in the art of meditation and at the same time treated as praying machines for the materialization of concrete benefits.
Meanwhile, within the city, the people were slowly starving. The horses, the cats, the dogs -all had been killed and devoured; even the supply of rats was running low. From splendid silver dishes the old Duchess of Rohan was eating mice and drinkihg a bouillon prepared from the harness in her stables. The poor were boiling ‘their old boots and their leather hats. But still, under the leadership of Jean Guiton, its indomitable mayor, the city held out. Through his secret agents, Father Joseph worked away at the morale of the defenders. Broadsheets were printed, smuggled into the town and distributed.
In these, the mayor and his abettors were denounced for their tyranny -a tyranny doubly odious, because it infringed the ancient constitution of La Rochelle, and because it could result only in the exhaustion of the king’s clemency and an appalling punishment for all within the city walls, innocent and guilty alike. Other leaflets accused the rich of food hoarding and profiteering. This propaganda had its effects. Several attempts were made on Guiton’s life; suspected profiteers were mobbed many deserters slipped out of the town at night in the hope of obtaining food, pardon and safety. It was a vain hope, for those who were caught were promptly hanged.
For purposes of negotiation with the city authorities, Father Joseph made use of his cousin, Fuquieres, a man of some importance in the royal service, who had been captured in a skirmish outside the walls and was held by the Huguenots as a prisoner of war. (It is worth recording that, during the whole of his captivity, Feuquieres’ dinner was brought to him every day from the royal table. Roast ducklings, dishes of green peas and strawberries, pastries, copious helpings of beef and lamb and venison were carried through the lines under a flag of truce and delivered to his gaolers, who passed them on unfailingly to the Marquis.
All this, at a time when the Rochellois were dying inch-meal of hunger. To us, the whole episode seems almost unthinkably odd; but in the seventeenth century, we must remember, it was axiomatic that a person of quality was different in kind from ordinary people and must be treated accordingly.) Through Feuquieres, Father Joseph tried to persuade the rebel leaders to throw themselves on the king’s mercy; but faith in their Calvinist God and the hope of English succour made them deaf to all talk of surrender. The siege went on. By the end of the summer, most of the old in La Rochelle and most of the very young were already dead, and the men and women in their prime were dying every day by scores and, as the autumn advanced, hundreds.
Fasting, penances and unremitting labour had lowered Father Joseph’s resistance and, in August, he caught a fever and fell very seriously ill. His condition was aggravated by his obstinate refusal to take the rest he needed. From his bed, he continued to write memoranda on policy and to direct the secret service. As it turned out, this last activity was almost the death of him. Coming, as they were forced to do, at night, the spies kept the sick man from sleep. The fever mounted and, in spite of all his desperate efforts to remain lucid and concentrated, external reality slipped away from him and was merged in the phantasmagoria of delirium. For days he fluctuated between life and death; then gradually and painfully re-emerged into the light. When the third and final English expedition came and failed, he was beginning to recover, and three weeks later, when the town at last surrendered, he was well enough to follow the victorious troops and to assist the Cardinal at the solemn mass, now celebrated for the first time for more than fifty years, in the Cathedral. Immediately afterwards, La Rochelle was proclaimed the see of a new Catholic diocese, and to Father Joseph, in recognition of his services during the siege, the king offered the honour of becoming the town’s first bishop. The Capuchin declined. Nothing, he said, could induce him to divest the habit of St. Francis or give up his blessed rule of poverty and humility. Nevertheless he was deeply sensible of the king’s kindness and, to express his gratitude, he dashed off a pamphlet entitled ‘The King Victorious, dedicated to the Queen Mother.’
It was a rousing piece of eloquence that concluded with the reflection that, now that La Rochelle had fallen, His Majesty would be free to turn his arms against another enemy of holy Church-the abominable Turk. In the eleventh year of the Thirty Years’ War this was, as of course Father Joseph knew only too well, merely a piece of wishful thinking. But what of that? He loved his Crusade, with a love that was
“of a birth as rare
As ‘twas, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.”
Loving thus, he claimed the right to strew an occasional verbal tribute on the grave in which the object of his passion was now so deeply buried.
With the fall of La Rochelle, the political power of the Huguenots in France was at an end. Protestant strongholds, it was true, still held out in Languedoc and the Cevennes; but their reduction would be an easy matter, for they were far from the sea and could hope for no assistance from a foreign enemy. At the beginning of the siege, La Rochelle had counted twenty-five thousand inhabitants; five thousand remained alive when the city was surrendered. Such, however, was the violence of theological hatred that there were many among the Catholic party who clamoured for further and yet more frightful punishment. To his everlasting credit, the Cardinal would not hear of reprisals. The surviving Rochellois were pardoned, confirmed in the enjoyment of their property and granted freedom of worship. His reward was the Protestants’ unswerving loyalty to the crown.
Half a century later, Louis XIV reversed the Cardinal’s policy, persecuted the Huguenots and finally revoked the Edict of Nantes. His reward was the loss to France, by emigration, of a large number of its most productive citizens. In matters of religious policy, Father Joseph, as I have already had occasion to mention, was completely in accord with the Cardinal. He knew that an orthodoxy accepted under duress will save no souls, and
