The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  In any case he detested court life. Probably Louis’s ideal of paradise was the seventeenth century equivalent of a good London club. He tried to create his own world at Versailles—it is ironical that that monstrous edifice should have begun as a sanctuary of the simple life. The place was a small, lonely village outside Paris in a flat landscape of sandy soil and marshes. Its dreariness explained its isolation, an isolation which in turn explains its attraction for Louis. He had first visited Versailles-au-Val-de-Galie when he was a boy of six, on a hawking expedition in 1607. He began to hawk and hunt there again regularly in 1621. The long ride back to Paris irked him, so in 1624 he bought a little estate of hardly more than a hundred acres, and built a hunting-lodge. This first château of Versailles consisted of twenty-six rooms in a centre block with two wings, constructed in red brick and white stone, and roofed with blue slate. The bright colours are the reason for Saint-Simon’s description, ‘a card castle’. By 1636 it had been enlarged by the architect Philibert le Roy and consisted of three blocks around a courtyard, the fourth side being closed by an arcade; there was a small pavilion at each angle. The park and hunting grounds were also extended. None the less a contemporary described it as ‘a house fit for a gentleman with an income of only ten to twelve thousand livres’; Bassompierre even called it ‘the miserable little house of Versailles’.

  Versailles was meant for relaxation. The food, like the furniture, was plain and uncomplicated. Besides hunting the King played cards, billiards, backgammon, chess and spillikins with his boon companions (and also such long forgotten games as renarde, moine, oie, tourniquet and trou-madame). He liked to drill a small company of musketeers in the courtyard. Sometimes in his little carriage he inspected young trees he had planted; at others he lounged in his bedroom in a green velvet dressing-gown lined with squirrel fur. Very occasionally the Queen or the Queen Mother visited Versailles with their ladies, but they never stayed the night. ‘Ce Prince si farouche pour les dames’, as Mme de Motteville terms him, gave it as his opinion that too many women would spoil everything. Versailles was essentially a bachelor paradise.

  The King yearned for friendship. He sought ceaselessly a kindred spirit to whom he could unburden himself, someone who could dispel his overwhelming sense of isolation and desperate loneliness. The poor man was too suspicious and too inarticulate to have much chance of success. Mme de Motteville says of Louis, ‘Among so many sombre mists and weird fancies the tender passion could find no place in his heart. He did not love as other men do, to take pleasure in it. His spirit had grown accustomed to bitterness and he loved only to be hurt.’ Another person who knew the court of Louis XIII, M de Montglat, explains that, ‘The King’s love was not like that of other men, because he loved a girl without any thought of enjoying her favours, behaving to her as he would to a friend; even though it is perfectly possible for a man to have a mistress and a friend in one and the same person, that was not what he wanted, because his mistress was no more than his friend, a confidante to whom he could reveal the secrets of his heart.’

  Louis had several mistresses, but as M de Montglat says, the relationship was invariably platonic. When Mlle de Hautefort coyly dropped a letter into her bosom, the King retrieved it with a pair of tongs. She lasted longest of all his loves, holding sway for nearly a decade. He first met her in 1631 when she was a seventeen-year-old Maid of Honour to the Queen. Nicknamed ‘Aurora’ by the court, Marie de Hautefort was a big, bouncing, Gascon blonde with an aquiline nose. High-spirited, imperious and a little hard, she inflicted upon Louis all the miseries which he expected; their affair was a business of jealous quarrels and grudging reconciliations. He suspected her of making fun of him to the Queen, but loved her in spite of himself. One day he confided his love to Saint-Simon, whereupon that earthy young man suggested that he act as Louis’s ambassador to Marie, hinting that if he did, the King would very soon find himself in bed with her. Louis was horrified. ‘It is quite true that I’m in love with her,’ he admitted, ‘that I look for her everywhere, that I enjoy talking about her and that I dream about her even more. But it is also true that this happens in spite of myself, as I’m a man and weak in that way. Being King makes it no easier for me than for anyone else to indulge my feelings, because I have to be always on my guard against sin and giving scandal.’ The astonished Saint-Simon concluded that Louis’s passion was real enough, but kept in check by religious scruples. Mlle de Hautefort’s influence was not altogether beneficial; as a loyal friend of Anne of Austria she disliked Richelieu and was pro-Spanish. On the other hand, she did her best to bring together the King and Queen, between whom there was now little love. Also, according to la Grande Mademoiselle (Gaston’s daughter), she made the court more agreeable. As a précieuse with literary tastes, Marie complained that the King only talked to her about hounds and hunting (though she occasionally hunted herself). No doubt she preferred the music parties which took place three times a week.

  Louis’s other mistress, Mlle de La Fayette—who interrupted the Hautefort’s tyranny—also tried to reconcile the royal couple. The King first met this timid little Maid of Honour with brown ringlets and blue eyes in the autumn of 1635, when she was only sixteen. A deeply pious girl, she refused and made the Sign of the Cross when Louis paid her the unheard-of compliment of asking her to come and live with him at Versailles. She too hunted with the King and, entirely disinterested, seems to have genuinely loved him for himself. But she also detested Richelieu and his ‘wicked policies’. Ruthlessly, the Cardinal ordered her confessor to encourage her leaning towards the religious life, and in May 1637 Louise de La Fayette entered a Carmelite convent in Paris, in the rue Saint-Antoine. The King was in tears. So was Louise. ‘I shall never see him again,’ she wept. Her confessor told the King that her decision could be postponed, but Louis replied that if he kept her from her vocation he would regret it all his life. For a few months he visited her at her convent, though he was only able to speak to her through a grille (her somewhat worldly abbess said that the King ought to exercise his royal prerogative and come inside, but he was shocked by this suggestion). Marie de Hautefort soon returned, to make his life a torment again.

  During her brief reign, Louise had formed a friendship with Louis’s confessor, a Jesuit called Nicolas Caussin. Potentially it was the most serious opposition which Richelieu ever encountered. Caussin held strict views on the nature of true repentance; he believed that absolution should only be given if the penitent felt real contrition, which included a strict resolve never to commit the sin again. (This was in contrast to the more normal view that attrition, a resolve to try not to sin again, was sufficient.) In addition Caussin believed that any alliance with a Protestant Prince was sacrilegious and a sin. He remonstrated in the confessional with Louis who, always scrupulous and fearful of damnation, began to have grim doubts about his eternal salvation. Finally Caussin actually dared to hector the King outside the confessional, vilifying Richelieu; he also made the terrible mistake of giving his penitent a letter from Marie de Medici. The Cardinal then managed to have Caussin dismissed and banished. He made sure that royal confessors were more tractable in future.

  It is often said that Louis’s favourite companions were grooms. But these grooms were noblemen, even if not of very high rank. Admittedly, Baradas, his favourite of the mid-1620s, was an uncouth brute who grew insufferably arrogant and joined his betters in conspiring against the Cardinal. However, Claude de Rouvroy, Seigneur de Saint-Simon, was a very different type. Richelieu introduced him into the royal household as a page in 1626, when he was only nineteen. Saint-Simon speedily recommended himself by holding a second horse during the hunt in such a way that Louis was able to change mounts without touching the ground. Small, ugly, unlettered, Saint-Simon, apart from an ancient lineage, was not exactly distinguished; he had a wretched, mean appearance; Bassompierre called him ‘the little insect’. He was none the less shrewd and honourable and, during the ten years in which he was the King’s inseparable compan
ion, had the sense to be grateful to Richelieu. So close were Louis and Saint-Simon that they could communicate without speaking—a mere glance between them was sufficient—while they had a secret language which only they could understand. The King appointed his friend Captain of Versailles, First Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Master of the Wolfhounds; in 1630 he made him Governor of Meulan and of Blaye, in 1635 a Duke and Peer of France. But in the end even Saint-Simon grew spoilt; by 1635 Louis was writing to Richelieu to complain of the new Duke’s ‘mauvaises humeurs’ and of how he always seems irritated with the King. Ironically, it was the loyalty and generosity which Louis so valued in him that brought about his downfall in 1636. The King decided to arrest and charge with treason an old friend of Saint-Simon, and Saint-Simon at once warned him. Louis would not tolerate such a betrayal of his confidence and, regardless of his own anguished feelings, banished Saint-Simon to Blaye.

  Probably the Cardinal was Louis’s truest friend. The King’s letters to him are full of curiously intimate little details; how many times he has taken medicine, how many animals his hounds have killed, how cruel his favourites have been. He is also human enough to tell Richelieu not to be depressed because he knows how bad it is for his health.

  The Cardinal did not waver in his determination to bring down the Habsburgs. Nevertheless, during the first decade of the Thirty Years War which convulsed Germany, it seemed that the Emperor Ferdinand II might impose his rule not only on Bohemia but upon all Germany. France was too weak to challenge him openly. The Imperial troops were formidable, while the allied army of Spain was considered to be the best in Europe. As yet French troops were neither sufficiently numerous nor sufficiently disciplined to take on such opponents. Richelieu therefore waged a kind of Cold War, subsidizing the Emperor’s Protestant enemies with French money. This policy proved almost too effective when King Gustav Adolf of Sweden all but destroyed the Imperial army; the ‘Lion of the North’ was a fanatic Lutheran, who aimed at establishing a great Protestant empire in place of that of the Habsburgs. Fortunately King Gustav was slain at Lutzen in 1632.

  Throughout, Louis accepted the dangerous gamble of Richelieu’s brinkmanship. He took a keen interest in expanding his army and in improving its equipment. By the end of his reign Louis possessed a standing army of nearly 200,000 men, compared with 100,000 in 1622. Among new types of cavalry which he introduced were mounted infantry (the Black Musketeers and the Grey Musketeers, destined to be among the Ancien Régime’s most famous regiments). The principal corps remained those of Henri IV—the Guards, with the Regiments of Picardy, Navarre, Champagne and Piedmont. There were also regiments of Swiss, German and Italian mercenaries together with about a hundred small regiments raised by their colonels. The élite troops were excellent, but the rest were still too much of a feudal rabble.

  A navy was also built up. Coastal rights were resumed by the Crown and a Conseil de la Marine was established. Bases were set up at Atlantic ports, and there was a regular programme of shipbuilding (the largest vessel, La Couronne, was 2,000 tons, 500 more than Charles I’s famous Royal Sovereign, and mounting 72 guns). By 1636 there was an Atlantic Fleet and a Mediterranean Fleet. The Archbishop of Bordeaux, Mgr Henri de Sourdis, proved a most capable Admiral of the Atlantic Fleet, who recruited officers from French Knights of Malta and from among merchant captains and privateers.

  In 1635 Richelieu and Louis decided to bring the war into the open. A French herald, wearing his tabard and accompanied by a trumpeter, rode into Brussels to read out a formal declaration of war in the Grande Place. French troops were then sent to aid the Dutch and to invade Milan, but bad organization brought these operations to a halt. An attempt to overrun Franche Comté also failed. The French army seemed hardly adequate for a full-scale war on three fronts.

  The Habsburgs retaliated swiftly. In the summer of 1636, Imperial troops invaded Burgundy while a Spanish army commanded by the Cardinal Infante, Philip IV’s viceroy in the Low Countries, invaded Picardy. He advanced across the Somme, to find only 10,000 French troops between him and Paris. The capital’s walls had been dismantled and there were no troops for its defence; thousands of Parisians had fled. Richelieu, whose bodyguard was being hissed in the street and who was suffering from migraine, lost his nerve badly. At a meeting of the Council he advised the King to abandon Paris. Everyone present agreed with the Cardinal, with the exception of Louis, who for once overruled his great servant. To leave Paris, said the King, would demoralize the entire country. After promulgating a series of edicts tantamount to a general mobilization, Louis rode out to Senlis to join what troops were available. As he rode out, he was cheered. Somehow reinforcements, untrained but sufficient, were brought up. Meanwhile the Cardinal Infante took Corbie, the last fortress before Paris, which was now only eighty miles away; his forward troops reached Pontoise. But the Parisians rose to the occasion in the same way that they did at the battle of the Marne in 1914. Soon Louis had an army of 40,000 men and the Cardinal Infante withdrew, the French regaining Corbie on 14 November. For long afterwards 1636 was known as the Year of Corbie.

  In 1637 France began to win victories, capturing towns on the Flemish frontier. The new navy won a significant triumph in an action with the Spaniards off Lerins; the following year it won its first major battle, off Fuentarrabia, sinking twenty Spanish ships. Also in 1638, France’s Protestant ally, Duke Bernhardt of Saxe-Weimar, smashed the Imperial army at Rheinfelden and conquered most of Alsace; he died unexpectedly in 1639, whereupon the French took over his conquests. Ill-health prevented Louis from playing as active a part as he would have wished in military operations. In any case he had problems at home.

  In 1636 Gaston d’Orléans was involved in yet another plot against Richelieu, who only just escaped assassination. The Comte de Soissons, a Prince of the Blood, who had been connected with the plot, hatched a further conspiracy in which Gaston also joined. Both plots were discovered, but no really harsh measures could be taken against members of the Blood Royal. Gaston was bought off with a large sum of money (part of which paid for the Mansard wing at Blois) and Soissons fled to Sedan.

  Louis’s support for the Cardinal in the face of opposition from the entire nobility shows real moral courage. None the less Richelieu was always fearful of losing his favour—he considered the four square feet of the King’s cabinet ‘more difficult to conquer than all the battlefields of Europe’. During Louis’s reign, twenty-six persons were beheaded for plotting against the Cardinal, and more died in prison (they included four Dukes and a Marshal of France). The King gave his support at terrible personal cost. Estrangements with his mother and his brother were inevitable, but surely not with his Queen. When war was declared on Spain, Mme de Chevreuse persuaded Anne to send details of any French military operations which she could discover to her brother, the Cardinal Infante. For four years the Queen of France was a spy for Spain. Eventually in August 1637 one of her messengers, M de La Porte, was intercepted. Marie de Hautefort saved Anne by boldly entering the Bastille, disguised as a man, and smuggling a letter to La Porte so that he was able to make his story tally with that of the Queen. As for Mme de Chevreuse, still youthful and slightly-built, she disguised herself as a page and galloped down lanes and byways until she reached Spain. It is likely that Anne had convinced herself that she was aiding the enemies of the Cardinal and not those of France.

  One day in December 1637 Louis left Versailles to stay with Condé at Saint Maur. Passing through Paris, he decided to visit Soeur Angélique (the former Louise de La Fayette) at her convent in the rue Saint-Antoine. Their conversation continued until nightfall, by which time heavy rain was falling; the wind was so violent that it blew out the candles in the lanterns of the royal escort. Their captain, M de Guitaut, who was on familiar terms with the King and who was also devoted to the Queen, said that it would be impossible to reach Saint Maur in such a violent storm; he advised the King to stay at the Louvre. Louis replied that his apartments were not ready, whereupon Guitaut sugges
ted that he stay with the Queen. The night grew blacker than ever, the rain falling in torrents. Reluctantly, the King agreed. He had supper with the Queen and then spent the night in her bed. A little before midday on Sunday 5 September 1638, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Anne of Austria gave birth to a son, Louis Dieudonné—the God-given. Mlle de Hautefort persuaded Louis to go to the Queen’s bedside and kiss her. Te Deums were sung throughout France.

  The news was not welcomed by everyone; Gaston was no longer heir to the throne—Richelieu was safe. The Cardinal’s enemies suggested that the King was not the father; indeed it was somewhat surprising that Anne should bear her first child in the twenty-third year of their marriage. But there was no doubt about the birth, which took place in poor Gaston’s presence; to console him the King gave him a large sum of money.

  The King continued to sleep with Anne. In his grim way he considered it his duty, though he now neither liked nor trusted her. Flirtatious, still goodlooking if a little plump, with her fair hair in ringlets, Anne was very conscious of her looks. (Mme de Motteville says that her only imperfections were too big a nose and wearing too much rouge.) Her voice was not attractive, a shrill falsetto—she yapped like a terrier. In character she was scatter-brained, lazy, a glutton, everything that Louis was not. He knew very well that she corresponded with Mme de Chevreuse, who was now in England.

  Marie de Hautefort—‘the creature’ as Louis calls her in his letters to Richelieu—was not much solace. She had a stinging wit and bullied him unmercifully, demanding places at court for her family. In 1638 he wrote pathetically to the Cardinal, ‘la créature est toujours en mauvaise humeur contre moi.’ He was driven to distraction by her love for a Captain in the Royal Guard, the Marquis de Gesvres, even writing to the young man’s father to tell him how angry he was with his son. In the end she made herself so disagreeable that the King was thoroughly disenchanted with all women. Mlle de Hautefort could not believe it when she was finally asked to leave the court in November 1639.