When the Emperor formally asked for the title of King of the Romans for his son, the Electors voted him down, Wallenstein and the army had been sacrificed for nothing. Looking back over the causes of his defeat, Ferdinand perceived, at every turn of the tortuous diplomatic road, a grey-cowled figure, hurrying in silence through the shadows. To his ministers, the Emperor ruefully admitted that ‘a poor Capuchin had beaten them with his rosary, and that, narrow as was the friar’s hood, he had contrived to stuff into it six electoral bonnets.’
Meanwhile, however, the war of negotiation had been going badly for Father Joseph on some of the other diplomatic fronts, where events in France had placed him in an inextricably difficult and precarious situation. Vacillating between his mother and the Cardinal, Louis XIII had sunk through neurasthenia into physical sickness.
On September 22nd, at Lyons, he fell ill of a fever so violent that, a week later, his condition was despaired of and the last rites of the Church were administered. Then, on the first of October, the physicians reported that an abscess in the King’s body had burst; the fever dropped; it seemed possible that Louis would recover. Richelieu’s situation during these last days of September was like that of a man suspended over a precipice by a rope whose fibres, one by one, are snapping under his weight.
If the King died, he was infallibly lost. Gaston, who would succeed his childless brother as King, detested the Cardinal; so did the Queen Mother; so did the great magnates whose power he had sought to curb; so did the common people, who knew him only as the ruthless tax-gatherer, the instigator of this gratuitous and incomprehensible war, which might at any moment spread from Italy to every corner of Europe and even into France itself. As soon as the King’s condition became serious, a group of nobles secretly met and decided, if he died, to deal with Richelieu as Concini had been dealt with, thirteen years before. Remembering that eviscerated carcase hanging by the heels from the gibbet of the Pont Neuf, the Cardinal made plans to flee for safety to the papal city of Avignon. It would be a race between the murderers and their victim. Then, at the very moment when the race was timed to start, the King began to recover. For Richelieu it was a respite from his mortal apprehensions-but only a respite, not yet definitive and enduring liberation. The King was out of immediate danger, but he was still a sick man, and at his bedside sat the Queen Mother and Anne of Austria.
As Louis emerged again into convalescence, the two women prolonged and intensified their persuasions. They were all devotion, all sweetness, all love and forgiveness; but they were determined to badger the unhappy man into doing what they and their political friends desired. Day and night, relaying one another, like a pair of examining magistrates putting a recalcitrant prisoner through the third degree, they pressed the young King to make the decisive move-dismiss his minister, stop the war, reverse his policy. Louis had no strength to argue with them; but he was able at last to summon up enough will power to say, quite definitely, that he would make no decision till he was well again and back in Paris. The Cardinal’s respite had been prolonged for a few more weeks.
Receiving word of what was happening at Lyons, Father Joseph found himself in a most painful predicament. His secret mission, which was to drive a wedge between the Emperor and the Electors, had been accomplished; but there was also an ostensible mission, which was to come to terms over the question of Mantua. The Emperor, as had been foreseen, was pressing for a general settlement of all outstanding differences between France and Austria; but as Richelieu’s campaign against the Hapsburgs had only just begun, such a general settlement would be premature and must therefore be avoided.
Hitherto Father Joseph had succeeded in parrying all the Emperor’s attempts to link up Mantua with the European situation as a whole. It was a policy of delay and evasion, deliberately framed to prolong the struggle between the Hapsburgs and France and her allies. Such a policy could be pursued only on condition that Richelieu remained sufficiently powerful at home to override popular and aristocratic opposition to the war. But now Richelieu was in danger of dismissal, even of death; the prime condition of France’s anti-Hapsburg policy -the Cardinal’s absolute power-was ceasing to exist. To Father Joseph, at Ratisbon, it seemed clear that the only hope for Richelieu lay in regaining popularity and conciliating the great nobles. But there was only one way for the Cardinal to regain popularity and conciliate the great nobles, and that was through an immediate reversal of his foreign policy. To take such a step was a very serious matter, and, before doing so, he had written urgently for precise instructions. Owing partly to the Cardinal’s procrastination, partly to bad weather which had held up the courier, no answering dispatch had been received; and, on October 13th, acting on his own responsibility, he instructed Brulart to sign a document which provided for a general settlement of Franco-Austrian differences.
As a mere observer, he declined at first to append his own signature to the treaty; but the Emperor insisted on it, and in the end he had to give way.
As he looked on at the ceremony, Ferdinand gleefully reflected that he had succeeded in pulling out of that grey Franciscan hood political advantages which far outweighed the six electoral bonnets which the friar had so recently stuffed into it. But the Emperor’s triumph was short-lived. News that an agreement had been signed was brought to Richelieu on October 19th, as he and the convalescent King were returning to Paris. Meanwhile, the full text of the treaty had been sent to the Court at Lyons, where it obtained the approval of all who read it.
The news that the war was over and that there would be no more foreign adventures spread like wild-fire across the country, causing, as Father Joseph had foreseen, universal rejoicing. Next day a copy of the treaty was brought to Richelieu at Roanne. He read it; then angrily tore it up. The ambassadors had exceeded their instructions, he said; the treaty would not be ratified. It was an act on his part of quite extraordinary courage. By repudiating the treaty, Richelieu invited the hatred of the masses and made more implacable the hostility of the Queen Mother and the nobles. He had been given a chance to save his neck, and he had refused it. If the King were to fail him now -and, at court, the betting was ten to one in favour of the Queen Mother-he was infallibly done for.
Events were to justify Richelieu in taking the risks he did.
Three weeks after his refusal to ratify Father Joseph’s treaty, there took place that decisive interview between Louis and his mother-the interview from which Marie de Medicis confidently expected to emerge victorious over the Cardinal. Stealing through an unbolted back door, Richelieu broke in upon this interview, and at the sight of him the Queen Mother lost her self-control and began to scream at him, like a fishwife. Her vulgarity was her undoing. The seventeenth-century absolute monarch was a sacred person, in whose presence all, even his closest intimates, were expected to behave with the restraint of a stoic philosopher, a positively Confucian decorum. His mother’s proletarian outburst was an insult to the royal dignity.
Outraged and revolted, Louis extricated himself from the distasteful situation as quickly as he could, and retired to Versailles. Marie was left in the exultant illusion that she had triumphed. That evening, Louis sent for the Cardinal and confirmed him in his position.
Marillac was arrested and, at the news, Gaston of Orleans, who had been closeted with his mother, hastened to Versailles to assure the King of his loyalty and the Cardinal of his henceforth unwavering affection. For Marie, this ‘Day of Dupes’ marked a decisive defeat. After giving trouble for a few months more, she was skillfully manoeuvred by the Cardinal into making an irretrievable mistake; she fled the country. From this voluntary exile Louis never allowed her to return, and the Queen Mother spent the last twelve years of her life wandering from court to court, an ever less welcome guest, chronically short of money, and dependent upon the humiliating charity of the man who had once been her obsequious protege and was now the master of France and the arbiter of all Europe.
Returning to Paris shortly after the ‘Day of Dupes,’ Father Joseph was welcomed by his chief with the utmost cordiality. Richelieu bore him no grudge for having exceeded
