From Italy, Father Joseph followed the royal armies back to France, where they spent the spring and summer of 1629 crushing out the political power of the Huguenots of Provence and Languedoc. It was a savage campaign, with much slaughtering of the inhabitants of captured cities, much hanging of rebels, much condemning of men to slavery in the galleys. Father Joseph did his best to mitigate these horrors; but the King and, above all, Condé, who was in command of part of the forces, were ruthless. By the end of July the royal arms were completely victorious, and the Cardinal was able to ride from city to Protestant city, making triumphal entries, receiving the submission of the magistrates, appointing royal intendants to govern in the King’s name, supervising the demolition of walls and towers. Returning to Paris to cope with the ever more menacing intrigues of Marie de Medicis, he left Father Joseph in southern France, with the difficult task of initiating the reconversion of the people to Catholicism. Of the methods he sometimes used to accomplish this end I have already spoken. They were a bit shady, to say the least of it; but then it was a matter of performing God’s exterior will as rapidly and efficiently as possible.
Early in 1630, trouble broke out again in Italy. Disregarding the terms of the peace treaty he had signed the year before, Charles Emanuel once more threw in his lot with the Spaniards. Spanish power was a menace to all the princes of Italy; but for the present at least, Madrid had an interest in preserving Savoy as a buffer state between France and its own possessions in Lombardy. The French attitude towards Savoy was uncertain and equivocal. Better a known than an unknown evil. Besides, Charles Emanuel wanted his slice of Monferrato. Once more a Spanish army sat down to the siege of Casale. It was commanded by Ambrose Spinola, the Genoese soldier who survives for us in Velasquez’s ‘Surrender of Breda’-a great master of siege-craft, who had served the Spanish crown not only in the field, but also by the sacrifice (in order to keep his unpaid troops from mutiny) of his entire personal fortune, only to be treated in the last years of his life with the most shameless ingratitude. The injuries and insults heaped upon him by Olivares during this campaign so preyed upon his mind that in September of 1630 he fell sick and died at his post before the walls of Casale.
To relieve Casale was necessary in 1630 as it had been in 1629 ; but this time Richelieu found himself paralysed by opposition within the royal family and the ranks of his own cabinet. Mainly because of her personal grudge against the Cardinal, but also because she believed in a specifically Catholic foreign policy, a policy of collaboration with the Hapsburgs in the extermination of heresy, Marie de Medicis was firmly set against the Italian campaign. The young Queen, Anne of Austria, had been a Spanish Infanta and, on this point at least, was in accord with her mother-in-law. Their strongest supporter in the Council of State was Marillac, the Keeper of the Great Seal. Another supporter had been Cardinal Berulle, who, until his death in 1629, had used all the authority conferred upon him by his position and the extraordinary sanctity of his life to back up the Queen Mother in her opposition to Richelieu.
His talk was of the seamless robe of Christ, of a western world purged of heresy and reunited under the three great Catholic powers, France, Spain and Austria. One wonder if he ever used his fancy to trace out in pictorial terms the implications of his metaphor. His aim was to transform a seamy robe into a seamless one. To achieve this end, he proposed that Bourbons and Hapsburgs should unite, their forces for the purpose of gashing and cauterizing the body within the robe. At some point in the proceedings the seams were automatically to disappear, and all Christendom would find itself united. For Berulle’s own sake, one can only be thankful that he died when he did. Had he lived on, had his policy been adopted, he would have become, like his old schoolfellow, Father Joseph, more and more deeply involved in large-scale iniquity, would have known the bitterness of seeing the disastrous consequences of his good intentions, would at last have realized that between his policy and Richelieu’s there was little or nothing to choose; for both had proposed the employment of means, whose consequences could never be the improvement of the existing state of things.
Between his mother and the Cardinal, Louis XIII vacillated in an agony of uncertainty. He disliked Richelieu and felt himself humiliated by the man’s superiority; but at the same time he recognized his ability, he was grateful to him for all he had done for the glory of the monarchy, he knew that there was nobody who could take his place. Over against Richelieu stood Marie de Medicis, florid and fairly bulging with female energy, vulgar, loud-voiced, rancorous and obstinately stupid. Ever since his unhappy childhood, the King hated and feared her, but always with a guilty sense that he ought to love her and listen to what she said. What she said now was that the war must be stopped at once and the Cardinal dismissed.
And though he felt sure that Richelieu was right, that he would go on doing great things for the house of Bourbon, Louis listened to his mother’s words, and was half persuaded. The spring and summer of 1630 were wasted, from a military point of view, because the King was unable to make up his mind whether to prosecute the war or to make peace, whether to accompany his armies into Italy, or to stay at home. Always sickly and delicate, he had several sharp attacks of illness, which the treatment prescribed by his physicians-daily purgings and weekly bleedings threatened to make chronic. Away from the court, a soldier among his soldiers, he always felt stronger for a time; but sooner or later his mother’s letters would bring back the old neurasthenia, and he would insist on taking the Cardinal back from the frontier to where the two queens were quartered, at Lyons. There, in the council chamber, Richelieu had to set forth, yet once more, his reasons for going on with the war in Italy. The council gave him a vote of confidence, and Louis was reassured. Three times this proceeding was repeated; and meanwhile time was passing, plague had broken out in the army and thousands of soldiers were deserting. At Casale, however, Thoiras still held out.
In this predicament Richelieu did his best to compensate for his enforced inactivity in the field by redoubling his efforts on the diplomatic front. His first system of Protestant alliances had failed him. It was in vain that Louis XIII had given his sister in marriage to Charles I; instead of collaborating with France, England had gone to war on behalf of the Huguenots. Meanwhile Denmark had been decisively defeated by the imperialists.
Holland was too weak to do anything effective on land. There remained only Sweden. In the autumn of Richelieu had sent an agent to Gustavus Adolphus, offering French mediation between the king and his cousin, Sigismund of Poland, with whom he had for years been at war. Peace was quickly restored between the two sovereigns, who agreed to a six-years’ truce. Having thus secured his flank, Gustavus was now free to invade Germany : a plan which he had long been meditating, partly for religious reasons (for he was an ardent Protestant who regarded the Hapsburgs’ Counter-Reformation as diabolic), and partly because he was ambitious to transform the Baltic into a Swedish lake.
But Sweden was a poor country and, though Gustavus had the best army in Europe, he lacked the sinews of war. Richelieu now offered him a subsidy of six hundred thousand livres -less than one-eighth of his own income- on condition that Gustavus should invade Germany, beat the imperialists, but respect the rights of the Catholic princes. Gustavus, who had no wish to respect Catholics, rejected the offer; and in the summer of 1630 boldly invaded Pomerania, without a subsidy. Richelieu bided his time and continued to dangle the golden bait, knowing very well that the Swedish King would sooner or later be forced by mere poverty to accept his terms.
Meanwhile, at the other end of Germany, Ferdinand had summoned an imperial Diet to meet at Ratisbon. His intention was to persuade the seven Electors of the Empire to appoint his son King of the Romans, a title which would officially consecrate him as his father’s successor to the imperial throne. For this favour he expected to have to pay-in what way and precisely how much would be settled by a long-drawn process of haggling at the Diet. The summoning of the Diet gave Richelieu an excuse for sending a special embassy to Ratisbon nominally to discuss the question of the Mantuan succession, but in fact to make
