The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  The States General—140 clergy, 132 nobles and 192 bourgeois—met in the old Hôtel de Bourbon (opposite the Louvre) in October 1614. It was to be their last formal meeting until the fateful year of 1789. King Louis, who was now twelve, presided, a sulky, pale-faced little figure in white satin. The three estates squabbled furiously. The clergy imperiously demanded the implementation of the Council of Trent. The bourgeois countered—by urging that the French Church be reformed; they also asked for an end to pensions paid to great lords, the suppression of high military offices and the prohibition of duelling. As for the nobles, they did not want ‘the children of cordwainers and soap-boilers to call them brother’, demanding that anyone who called a bourgeois ‘Monsieur’ should be fined. The assembly, having achieved nothing, dispersed in March 1615 when royal officials summarily closed the hall where it met. However preposterous Marie’s regime may have been, seventeenth-century France had no practicable alternative to absolute monarchy.

  During the assembly, the loyal address by the spokesman of the clergy had been a brilliant analysis of the problems confronting the state, couched in graceful terms which complimented the Regent. The spokesman was the twenty-eight-year-old Bishop of Luçon, Armand du Plessis de Richelieu. Marie, delighted by such flattery, marked out the fascinating young prelate for preferment.

  In autumn 1615, just as the Regent and her son were setting out for Bordeaux, Condé rose again. The Duc de Rohan formed an alliance with him, leading the Huguenots into revolt. It was a return to the bad days of the Valois; even worse, for now Catholics and Protestants were banding together against the Crown. Fortunately Condé lost his nerve, allowing himself to be bought off once more, in May 1616. He received a million and a half livres—he had already had four and a half million—while a further six million was divided among his followers.

  In October 1615 Louis was married at Bordeaux to Anne of Austria, an ash-blonde, pink-faced Infanta of Spain. The new Spanish alliance was doubly cemented by the marriage of Madame Elisabeth, Enfant de France, to the Infante Don Philip (the future Philip IV). The new Queen of France was only thirteen. However, in November Louis consummated the marriage—probably his mother told him that it was his duty. The experience proved disastrous and gave the King a lifelong aversion to physical love.

  Marie intended to remain Regent for as long as possible. When Louis was fifteen she slapped his face in front of the entire court; he tried to attend a meeting of the Royal Council, whereupon she took him by the shoulders and threw him out of the chamber. Saint-Simon says that according to his father, a friend of Louis, ‘The Regent wanted a son who was only King in name and who would not interfere with her favourites. He was therefore brought up in a way as harmful as possible for his character. He was left completely idle, receiving no education whatsoever. He frequently complained about it to my father, and in later years often referred to the fact that he had not even been taught to read.’ (Louis may have been indulging in a certain amount of self-pity; not only could he write elegant and economical French, but he spoke excellent Italian and Spanish.)

  By now Louis was a very strange boy indeed, nervous and awkward, a King who stammered when he spoke, who was frequently tongue-tied. Yet he was not without kindly impulses. From an early age he disliked any derogatory remarks about his Huguenot subjects. As a boy of eleven he intervened passionately in a case where a girl was unjustly accused of murdering her baby.

  His chief delight was falconry. His other favourite diversion was hunting—mainly stag, fox and wolf. He killed his first stag when he was only twelve. If possible he hawked or hunted every day and he is said to have ridden horses to death. He certainly achieved the notable feat of killing six wolves in one day. When it was too wet to go out, he flew hawks at tame finches which he kept in his room, chasing them all over the Louvre. Sometimes the solitary boy made teams of dogs run through the palace dragging cannon. At other times he cooked omelettes and made sweets in the palace kitchens. He had his own smithy. Another amusement was a little carriage—a kind of dog-cart—which he drove himself. He did not have a single friend, until the emergence of Charles d’Albert de Luynes, a rather dim falconer.

  Voltaire says that Luynes ingratiated himself by teaching grey shrikes to fly at sparrows. In fact Luynes’s job was to fly falcons at red kites, the most prized of all quarry. He was a big tall man, goodlooking rather than handsome, with curly hair and a pleasant expression. In his late thirties, he was the son of a Provençal hedge squire who farmed with his own hands the family’s manor near Marseilles. A gentle, unselfconfident soul, he was far from aggressive—once when challenged to a duel he sent his brother.

  While hunting he frequently found himself alone in the forest with the King. The lonely, stuttering boy began to confide in this big man with the reassuring manner. Luynes was a very limited personality but he had the gift of sympathy. For the first time in his life the young King had met a human being whom he trusted: he became so dependent on his falconer that in his sleep he was heard to mutter ‘Luynes! Luynes!’ Marie, informed, thought of dismissing the man; she decided on bribery instead, making him Captain of the Tuileries and then Governor of Amboise with its great château.

  Ancres, who had dismissed all Henri IV’s old ministers, was only too aware of the hatred which his ignoble government inspired. Condé was cheered in the Paris taverns and in his cups spoke of seizing the throne. Everywhere obscene songs about the Regent were sung with enthusiasm. So frightened was Ancres that he and Leonora considered flying to Italy in disguise. But he would not leave his treasure. In September 1616 he managed to arrest Condé, besides sending troops into the provinces to cow les Grands. His regime acquired a most useful new servant when the Bishop of Luçon was given a post equivalent to Foreign Minister. The Marshal did not suspect that his greatest danger was the King whom he treated with the utmost contempt; he remained seated in his presence without doffing his hat; sometimes he even ignored him. The tongue-tied boy felt an overpowering sense of injustice—about this time he suffered a nervous fit of such violence that doctors suspected epilepsy.

  It was Luynes of all people who organized the plot which brought Ancres down. When one of the conspirators asked the young King what they should do if the Marshal resisted arrest, Louis remained silent. Someone said, ‘The King wishes that he should be killed’—Louis still kept silence.

  On the morning of 24 April 1617 the Marshal d’Ancres strutted across the drawbridge of the Louvre. He stopped in the courtyard to read a petition. Suddenly the captain of the royal guard, the Marquis de Vitry, accompanied by twenty-five guardsmen, pushed through the crowd and, seizing him by the arm, shouted ‘In the King’s name!’ Ancres shrieked in Italian ‘A me!’ and tried to draw his sword. Vitry’s men drew pistols from beneath their cloaks—the Marshal fell to the ground, shot three times in the face. Kicking the body, Vitry cried, ‘Vive le Roi!’

  Louis was waiting for the news with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other. Climbing on to a billiard table he cried, ‘Merci! Grand merci à vous! A cette heure je suis roi!’

  His mother was given the news by a lady-in-waiting. ‘All I can hope for is a crown in heaven,’ screamed the Regent, who ran up and down her chamber, wringing her hands. When asked who would tell Mme la Maréchale that her husband had been killed, Marie shrieked, ‘I have myself to think about, leave me alone! if you don’t want to tell her, sing it to her! Don’t speak to me about them—I warned them long ago that they ought to escape to Italy.’ Ignoring frantic appeals to see him, Louis sent word to his mother to stay in her chamber and not to meddle with affairs of state.

  Ancres’s body was secretly buried in the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, but the mob dug it up, hung it on the Pont Neuf and then tore it to shreds. Royal guards burst into Leonora’s room. Pulling her out of bed they found that she had already hidden some of her treasures beneath her mattress—it was rumoured that Crown jewels were among them. She was imprisoned in the Bastille, accused of plottin
g against the state and of black magic. Torture did not break her spirit. Asked at her trial what spells she had used to bewitch the Queen, she replied, ‘Only the power of a strong mind over a weak one.’ She was burnt at the stake in the Place de Grève.

  The new ruler of France was Luynes, however much Louis might proclaim himself King. His government was scarcely more effective than Ancres’s. The petty noble set about transforming himself into a great lord; he became the Duc de Luynes, Constable of France and Governor of Picardy. He also acquired a Rohan heiress for his bride. His two brothers, equally amiable and undistinguished, became Duc de Chaulnes and Duc de Piney-Luxemburg; they too were provided with heiresses.

  What might be called the opposition was based on Blois, where the indignant Marie de Medici had been confined. In February 1619, aided by the Duc d’Epernon, she escaped from Blois after being lowered from the château by ropes. Dissatisfied nobles gathered round her at Angers and it looked as though the entire south would rise. Louis wanted to attack at once, but Luynes preferred to negotiate. In May 1619 Marie was given the government of Anjou, with three strongholds garrisoned by her supporters. There was a public reconciliation between mother and son—both wept, while continuing to loathe each other. But in the summer of 1620 rebel armies again began to gather, one at Rouen, the other at Poitiers. When the Royal Council met, Luynes had no idea how to deal with the crisis.

  Louis intervened angrily. He had never spoken in public before. ‘With so many dangers to face, we march against the most serious and the nearest, which is Normandy. We march now.’ In a wet and windy July he led his little army to Rouen. The rebels were prepared to face Luynes but not the King—they fled. Louis’s advisers were nervous about marching on to Caen, also held by rebels, whereupon the eighteen-year-old monarch, newly courageous, cried, ‘Péril de ça, péril de là! Péril sur terre, péril sur mer. Allons droit à Caen!’ Caen surrendered. Louis then marched south to Anjou with 12,000 men. Marie’s 4,000 followers met him at Ponts-de-Cé, two bridges over the Loire near Angers. Louis behaved just as his father would have done, charging with his men. Seeing the enemy weaken, he led a charge which drove them back to the bridge. After losing 700 men, the rebels broke and the bridge was taken, cutting Marie off from any hope of escape. However, there was another reconciliation and the Queen Mother was allowed to keep Anjou. The settlement was ably negotiated by her adviser, Richelieu.

  In 1617 an edict had re-established the Church’s right to its former lands in Protestant Béarn, but commissioners who attempted to enforce the edict were roughly handled. After his triumph at Ponts-de-Cé, Louis and his army paid a swift visit to Béarn and implemented the edict at gun-point before returning to Paris. As a result the Huguenot Assembly met at La Rochelle and swore to support their persecuted co-religionists. They began to raise troops and gather munitions. Condé, now a loyal subject, convinced Luynes that war was inevitable.

  The royal army marched south again, occupying Saumur where Louis was cheered so enthusiastically that he shouted back, ‘Vive le peuple’, and waved his hat to the crowd. (Later he showed his less warm side. Seeing among the throng a certain M d’Arsilemont, who was a famous highwayman, the King cried, ‘Ah! Vous voilà!’ and had him arrested—within three days the man had been tried and broken on the wheel.) Montauban, an important Huguenot stronghold, was besieged in August 1621. A friar prophesied its speedy fall, but Montauban held out. Luynes showed himself to be hopelessly incompetent—in November the approach of a Protestant army under the Duc de Rohan forced him to raise the siege. Louis, by now completely disillusioned with his favourite, returned to Paris. Luynes continued the campaign despite terrible weather. He became depressed, then took to his bed. On 15 December 1621 he died of scarlet fever, abandoned even by his servants.

  Louis had no intention of persecuting his Protestant subjects for their religion, but he was not going to tolerate separatism. For by now the Huguenots had set up something very like a republic on the Dutch model and a new state was emerging, which included most of the western seaboard together with a large area of southern France. In the Duc de Rohan and his brother, the Comte de Soubise, it had formidable leaders. The Royal Council tried to dissuade Louis from continuing the campaign but he knew how great was the danger.

  He went to war again in April 1622, besieging the Ile de Riez, Soubise’s marshy stronghold on the west coast, which could only be reached at low tide. On 16 April the King rose from his straw pallet and led a midnight attack, riding through the water at the head of his men. Soubise was completely taken by surprise and routed, losing 4,000 troops. Louis spent the following months storming Huguenot towns and blowing up their fortifications; Nègrepelisse was burnt to the ground for having murdered 400 royal soldiers. In October Rohan sued for peace—Protestant France had become a land of famine and corpses, of abandoned villages and ruined châteaux. At the peace of Montpelier the Huguenots gave up all their strongholds save La Rochelle and Montauban.

  It had been a gruelling campaign in an exceptionally hot summer. The King had many times spent whole days in the saddle, sleeping in his clothes and dining on bread and cheese. In June, at Toulouse he was struck down by a mysterious fever which attacked him several times, forcing him to travel in a litter. Eventually he recovered and enjoyed himself at Marseilles, attending bull fights and fishing for tuna fish. The fever had been tuberculosis which would eventually kill him. In addition he suffered from a chronic gastric disorder which never left him, and he was further weakened by the ministrations of his doctors (in one year alone he was bled forty-seven times, purged 212 times and endured 215 enemas).

  None the less, Louis usually had sufficient energy to hunt, dance and campaign. At twenty, he was a thin young man of medium height, elegant and athletic in build, who sat a horse particularly well. He wore a moustache, but as yet his long, tanned face was beardless. He had mastered his earlier awkwardness, save for stammering when angry, and had acquired a most dignified presence—what Saint-Simon calls ‘l’allure royale’. He had an intense dislike of luxury. Although on state occasions he wore a white satin suit and a black hat and cloak, he liked best to dress as a soldier and was fond of wearing armour. Indeed, he thoroughly enjoyed military life and spent much time on parades and drilling his troops.

  Hunting remained his great passion. He talked of little else and even took his hounds to bed with him. Of all the Bourbons, every one of whom was remarkable for an almost fanatical devotion to the chase, Louis XIII was the greatest huntsman.

  In character he was upright to the point of harshness. He had an exalted concept of kingship—Joinville’s life of St Louis was a favourite book—and could be merciless to himself, always ready to sacrifice his own happiness. He once said, ‘I should not be King if I had the feelings of an ordinary man.’ His devotion to business was remarkable, considering that he detested reading and preferred carpentry and gardening (his peas were sold in the Paris market), let alone hunting, to administration. Yet he never missed a Council meeting and impressed ambassadors by his grasp of affairs. Extremely pious, he enjoyed the ceremonies of the Church and was scrupulous in confession. His religion verged on the puritanical; a characteristic remark was ‘Please God, adultery shall never enter into my house’.

  In Paris Louis lived at the Louvre and the Tuileries, though he much preferred Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Summer and winter he rose at six am. His rising was divided into the Petit Lever and the Grand Lever, the latter being shortened, as Louis liked to take long baths. (Unlike most of his contemporaries he was extremely clean in his person; later he cropped his head and wore a long brown wig for the sake of cleanliness.) The day began with a Council meeting, after which the King went to Mass. There followed private and public audiences. Then he paid a formal visit to the Queen, before dining publicly. The afternoon was spent hunting or in military exercises. After supper there was sometimes a concert or a ballet. Louis composed some of these ballets himself and occasionally danced in them.

  By 1619 Lou
is was deeply in love with Anne of Austria, but not physically. Both his confessor, Père Cotton, and Luynes tried to make him sleep with her; the Papal Nuncio urged that Heaven needed an heir to the throne of France; the Spanish ambassador considered the King’s failure to beget a child an insult to Spanish honour. Eventually Luynes forced him to lie with Anne—he was in tears when he went to her bed, but from then on he slept with her regularly for some years.

  To govern France a stronger hand was needed than that of a nervous and unsure young man, and Louis knew it. In 1622, much against his will, his mother persuaded him to obtain a Cardinal’s hat for Richelieu. Marie, who had been reconciled yet again with her son after Luynes’s death, owed her return to Paris to Richelieu’s shrewd counsel. Unwillingly Louis recognized that here was a man who could save France, and in January 1624 he was admitted to the Council. La Vieuville, the aged mediocrity who was its President, tried to discredit him but was dismissed and arrested for his pains. On 13 August 1624 Cardinal Richelieu became head of the Council with the title ‘Secretary of State for Commerce and the Marine’. In 1629 the King named him ‘Principal Minister of State’.

  Armand du Plessis had been born in 1585, the third son of a family of poor Poitevin nobles. Originally he had intended to become a soldier but his elder brother, for whom the Bishopric of Luçon had been reserved—the appointment was in the gift of the family—died, and Armand entered the Church. In 1608, only twenty-one, he was consecrated Bishop of Luçon where he proved himself an exemplary pastor. He was burningly ambitious but his first step towards power, when Ancres gave him a post, turned out to be a serious setback when the Marshal fell—the King shouted at him, ‘I have escaped your tyranny, Luçon!’ It took him years to vindicate himself, through the unlikely path of acting as adviser to Marie de Medici. His chief ally was the mysterious Capuchin friar, Père Joseph (better known as ‘the Grey Eminence’).