The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  Richelieu was uneasy. He knew that in his loneliness, Louis might find some new favourite who might oppose the Cardinal. To protect himself, he had introduced the son of an old friend into the royal household—Henri d’ Effiat, Marquis de Cinq Mars, who was appointed Master of the King’s Wardrobe on 27 March 1638. It was the eighteenth birthday of this strikingly handsome young nobleman. The first thing he did was to add to his own wardrobe (which eventually included fifty-two suits). Louis soon took a passionate liking to him. Here was another long-sought friend. In the summer of 1639 he made him Grand Master of the Horse, and henceforward Cinq Mars was known as Monsieur le Grand. The King fawned on his new favourite, loading him with presents.

  A thoroughly shallow creature, Cinq Mars, although intoxicated by his good fortune, was entirely without gratitude. He was bored by Louis, who spent more and more time hunting; digging out foxes and flying sparrowhawks at blackbirds were small consolation to a young man who loved Paris and had a beautiful mistress. He turned sulky and was continually slipping away. There were constant scenes in which Richelieu acted as peacemaker. Sometimes Monsieur le Grand’s hauteurs were so insufferable that the King was unable to sleep from rage. It is often said that the relationship was homosexual, and Louis’s behaviour was certainly abnormal. But there is no evidence whatsoever of homosexual behaviour on his part, even if he undoubtedly admired beauty in both sexes. The only hint of perversion is Tallemant des Réaux’s squalid gossip, which includes a story of the King, wearing a bride’s nightdress, sharing a bed with his favourite and kissing his hands. Tallemant is not noted for reliability. In fact, throughout the association with Cinq Mars, Louis continued to sleep with the Queen—in the late summer of 1640 she gave birth to another son, Philippe (the future ‘Monsieur’). Anne did not show the slightest jealousy of Cinq Mars, though she had resented Mlle de Hautefort. Nor was the King any less assiduous at his devotions. He would hardly have written his pitiful complaints to Richelieu about the favourite’s cruelty if he had thought the relationship a sin. What is particularly significant are the childish certificates which the pair signed after quarrels and sent to the Cardinal, stating that they were on good terms again. Basically the association was an adolescent friendship, even if Louis was twenty years older than Cinq Mars; the King was not perverted but retarded—he had the emotional age of a boy of fifteen.

  While these puerile quarrels were taking place, France was winning victory after victory. In 1640 the French conquered Artois, while across the Alps the Comte d’Harcourt routed the Habsburg armies three times and captured Turin. The Duke of Savoy hastily negotiated for peace with France.

  Yet the French nobility were determined to overthrow Richelieu. The Comte de Soissons gathered a Spanish army at Sedan and began to invade France; luckily he was killed by a stray pistol bullet during the first skirmish. Next year the Duc de Bouillon revived the plan; he intended to invade France with a French army from Italy and raise the Huguenots of the Cévennes, while Gaston was to attack from the north. They were joined by no less a personage than Cinq Mars who signed their treaty with Spain; he hoped that if the plot were successful he might marry Marie de Gonzaga and obtain her fabulous wealth. In his conceit he had come to resent the Cardinal’s admonitions; by now Louis was so irritated by his favourite that on one occasion he shouted ‘Je le vomis!’ But Richelieu’s spies soon discovered the plot.

  In June 1642, at Narbonne, an agent of the Cardinal showed the King documents which gave irrefutable proof of Cinq Mars’s treachery. Louis at once gave orders for his arrest and, after a brief attempt to hide in the back streets of Narbonne, the former favourite was incarcerated in the fortress of Montpelier. In September he was tried at Lyons, hopelessly compromised by the confessions of Gaston and Bouillon. The wretched young man broke down and admitted his guilt; he also incriminated his best friend, François-Auguste de Thou. Arrogant to the last, he protested at sharing a scaffold with de Thou because the latter was a commoner. On the day of Cinq Mars’s execution, the King, who was playing chess, looked up at the clock and said, ‘Aha, this morning at this very moment our dear friend is having a bad time [un mauvais moment].’

  Ill-health—gout, rheumatism and fever striking at a constitution which was now dangerously undermined by pneumo-intestinal tuberculosis—together with the miseries of his private life had brought Louis to the verge of collapse. Unable to hunt, he turned to music, being particularly soothed by the airs de cour composed and sung to the lute by Pierre de Nyert, whom he rewarded by appointing him Premier Valet de la Garde Robe. (He left him a considerable sum of money in his will.)

  Spain was falling apart. In 1641 Portugal, which had been under Spanish rule since 1580, declared itself independent. Catalonia also rebelled, proclaiming Louis as sovereign Count of Barcelona. In 1642 the King added Roussillon and Cerdagne to France, whose frontier now extended along the entire length of the Pyrenees. Although Louis had personally directed the siege of Perpignan, his growing weakness had made it impossible to take much part in the campaign.

  Meanwhile Richelieu lay dying. A skeleton, eaten by ulcers which paralysed him, he had to be carried in a litter; he was rowed up the Rhône in a gilded barge, his cabin hung with gold and crimson velvet. Although in agony as he lay on his bed of violet taffetas, the Cardinal’s mind retained its icy clarity. But by the end of 1642 he was spitting blood, and his physicians diagnosed pleurisy—he offered his resignation. However, Louis answered that Richelieu must die as he had lived, First Minister of France, and came to his bedside to feed him spoonfuls of egg yolk with his own hand. The ‘torment and ornament of his age’ died on 4 December 1642. He had made France the greatest country in Europe; his achievements are the measure of Louis XIII’s judgement. On his advice Louis appointed Mazarin to be his successor, with instructions to continue all the Cardinal’s policies.

  Louis himself was dying. At the end of March 1643 he told his doctor, Bouvard, ‘I see from your silence that I am going to die.’ He added, ‘God knows I never liked life and that I shall be overjoyed to go to Him.’ They brought the Dauphin to see him. When the King asked him his name the little boy replied, ‘Louis XIV, mon Papa.’ His father smiled and answered, ‘Not yet, my son.’ After receiving the Last Sacraments at the end of April, Louis diverted himself by ordering his gentlemen to sing psalms and hymns in which he sometimes joined. He died on 14 May 1643. His last word was ‘Jesus’. He was only forty-one.

  Acting on his instructions, an attendant removed the crucifix, which Louis wore on a cord round his neck, and took it to Soeur Angélique (Mlle de La Fayette) at her convent.

  The day before he died the King had said to the old foe of his childhood, Condé, ‘Monsieur, I know that the enemy is advancing towards our frontiers with a great and powerful army.’ No one in Paris had heard of any enemy invasion. Louis added faintly, ‘Your son will rout it and win a great victory.’ They thought the dying man’s mind was wandering. A week later, a strong Spanish force laid siege to Rocroi, a French fortress in the Ardennes. Condé’s son, the Duc d’Enghien who was only twenty-two, led an army of 20,000 men to its relief. A brilliant, unorthodox commander, he marched straight at the Spaniards, positioning his troops too quickly for the enemy to manœuvre. Next day the Duke routed them with successive charges until only the famous Spanish infantry remained, commanded from a litter by the aged Count Fuentes. Enghien charged them three times until Fuentes was killed. Another final charge destroyed them; 8,000 Spaniards were killed and 7,000 taken prisoner, the cream of their army. It was the end of a military domination of Europe which had lasted since their victory at Pavia in 1525.

  To his contemporaries, Louis XIII seemed a most effective monarch. James Howell,* writing in 1646, regarded him as an inspiration to English royalists: ‘A successful and triumphant King both at home and abroad throughout the whole course of his reign,’ wrote Howell, ‘and that in so constant degree as if Fortune herself had been his companion and Victory his handmaid.’

  Saint-Simo
n outlived his friend and master by fifty years, dying in 1693. He had known Louis XIII better than anyone. It is worth remembering that he and his son—the diarist—never ceased to venerate Louis’s memory. To the end of his life the diarist wore on his finger a miniature of the King set in diamonds, while a lamp burnt perpetually before a bust of Louis in the family chapel. Father and son faithfully attended Mass at Saint-Denis on every anniversary of his death. Few Kings have inspired such gratitude and affection in their favourites.

  ‘The Love of Glory’

  LOUIS XIV (1643–1715)

  _____________

  ‘The love of glory has all the same subtle shades and, may I say, all the same questionings as the tender passions’

  So much has been written about Louis XIV that it is impossible to think of him without prejudice. Many have admired him extravagantly, and as many have detested him no less fervently. It is not easy to distinguish the man from the King. He lived so completely in public that he almost ceased to exist as a private individual.

  Louis ascended the throne in 1643, at the age of four and a half. He was already conscious of his superiority to other mortals; when Cinq Mars had presumptuously picked him up in his nursery, Louis had kicked and screamed till he was set down again. Even as a child he possessed a marked sense of theatre and must have relished his presentation to the Parlement in their red robes and bonnets. Their President, M Omar Talon, went on his knees before the boy to tell him that, to the lawyers, his chair of state represented ‘the throne of the Living God’, and that ‘the realm’s estates pay you honour and duty as they would to a God who can be seen’.

  Anne of Austria swiftly persuaded the Parlement to set aside the late King’s will, which had left her only the title of Regent while giving the substance of power to a council of advisers. Like Marie de Medici, she meant to be all-powerful, and like Marie de Medici, real power lay with an Italian favourite. But there was little resemblance between the Concini and Giulio Mazzarini, better known as Cardinal Mazarin. This low-born adventurer, who was reputed to be the grandson of a Sicilian fisherman, had combined the careers of soldier, diplomat and cleric, first in the Papal service and then in the French, winning the approval of Louis XIII and Richelieu who obtained the Red Hat for him (though he only took minor orders and was never a priest). Where Richelieu had been nervous and harsh, Mazarin was suave and charming. His character was subtler, more accommodating. Never discouraged or depressed, his motto was ‘Time is on my side’. Tall, fair-haired and handsome—Richelieu said he looked like Buckingham—he knew how to please women. Anne of Austria was completely captivated: as Voltaire put it, ‘He had such dominion over her as a clever man may well have over a woman born with sufficient weakness to be ruled and sufficient obstinacy to persist in her choice.’ Even so, the court was taken by surprise when the Regent confirmed him in his post of First Minister.

  No one expected Mazarin to continue in office for very long. The opposition which had plagued Richelieu descended on the court; they had suffered either on behalf of, or with, the Queen and they expected to be rewarded. This Cabale des Importants included the Duc de Vendôme, Henri IV’s son, and Vendôme’s own son, the gallant Duc de Beaufort; the Bishop of Beauvais (whom a fellow prelate described as a ‘mitred beast’); Marie de Hautefort, and, of course, Mme de Chevreuse. The latter shrilly insisted that Anne must return everything which Louis XIII had stolen from the great lords. After four months the Regent grew tired of her former friends, the last straw being a plot to murder Mazarin, and banished them.

  Anne was a strong, vigorous woman, still goodlooking if somewhat full-blown. She ate enormously at all meals, and when angry screamed at those who displeased her. She was unconventional; during the torrid summer of 1646 she and her ladies, accompanied by little Louis, disported themselves in the Seine, clad in grey nightdresses. While the Regent may well have been in love with her First Minister, it is certain that she never lived with him; Anne was a devout Spanish Catholic and it would have been impossible for her to sleep with the Cardinal without her ladies knowing of such a spectacular liaison, as they themselves slept at the foot of her bed every night. None the less, she trusted Mazarin almost as a second husband.

  In the long run it was fortunate for France that she did. Mazarin continued all Richelieu’s policies and abroad the benefits were quickly evident. The Thirty Years War came to an end in 1648 when Sweden, France and the Empire made a peace by which France gained Alsace (even if it was still nominally subject to the Emperor). The negotiations were conducted in French, the beginning of its long sway as the language of diplomacy. France remained at war with Spain, but the latter was now too weak to be of much danger.

  Louis was an attractive little boy, bright, high-spirited and unusually goodlooking, though he lost some of his looks after catching smallpox in 1647. His education was designed to give him an ineradicable sense of the dignity of kingship; he had to copy out texts such as ‘Homage is owed to Kings; they do what they wish’. He was told to model himself on Saint Louis and on his grandfather. Henri IV was now referred to as ‘Henri le Grand’ in official documents, while one of Louis’s tutors, Bishop Péréfixe, compiled a eulogistic life for the young monarch’s edification. Anne is said to have told the boy not to copy his father because ‘People wept at the death of Henri IV, but laughed at that of Louis XIII’. However, Louis always remembered his father with affection.

  Each night the Queen’s valet read him extracts from Eudes de Mezeray’s History of France, though Louis himself much preferred fairy-tales. He was taught riding, fencing and deportment, how to carry himself as a King; he also learnt the lute and the guitar, and how to sing and dance. He could speak good Italian and passable Spanish. Apart from basic arithmetic, he was given little instruction in mathematics and remained more or less ignorant of geography, economics and modern history.

  His tutors were so obsequious that he christened one—Marshal de Villeroy—‘Maréchal Oui-Sire’, but it cannot be said that Louis was spoilt. Although fond of him, his mother regretted not having a daughter and preferred his delicate brother, Philippe, whom she called her little girl. If the King had his own household from the age of seven, his stockings were often in holes, while he never had enough sheets (for the rest of his life he slept with the bed clothes wrapped round his waist, and nothing over his chest and shoulders save a nightshirt). He was so much left to his own devices that once when he fell into the big fountain in the Palais Royal garden, he was not rescued until evening. On state occasions, however, he was paraded in a coat of cloth of gold and a plumed cavalier hat with a diamond buckle. He had toy soldiers of silver and toy cannon of gold, but his favourite possession was a miniature arquebus made by his father. Years later the King told Mme de Maintenon how he and his brother had roamed happily through the Louvre, teasing the maids and stealing omelettes from the kitchens. They used to play with a servant’s little girl—she pretended to be Queen and they acted as her footmen. But in 1648 life assumed an air so menacing that even children could not fail to notice it.

  The Fronde was an expression of general discontent. Years of frustration and irritation had at last reached boiling point. But it was not an attempt at revolution in the contemporary English manner. There was an odd note of frivolity in its name, which meant catapulting—or even pea-shooting. A popular song ran:

  Un vent de Fronde

  S’est levé ce matin

  Je crois qu’il gronde

  Contre le Mazarin.

  The attitude of the Frondeurs may have been negative and unconstructive, but they included the majority of articulate Frenchmen. There were to be two Frondes—the Fronde of the Parlement, and the Fronde of the Princes.

  In five years, Mazarin had made himself even more hated than Richelieu. His financial methods—such as manipulating the Rentes (or government annuities) by withholding interest and then buying them cheap when the price fell—caused widespread bankruptcies among the bourgeois. Taxes were collected with such sav
agery that in 1646 over 20,000 Frenchmen were in prison for fiscal offences. At the same time the Cardinal displayed both avarice and ostentatious luxury—he was famous for his Titians and Correggios, his collection of gems and his exquisite library, notorious for hoarding bullion. Surrounded by a bevy of black-eyed nieces, always fondling some scented marmoset or lap-dog, speaking with a strong Italian accent, and embarrassingly obsequious, Mazarin aroused instinctive dislike in the Frenchmen of his time.

  The office-holding noblesse de la robe was both alarmed and angered by the increasing power of the Intendants throughout the realm, which detracted from their prestige and diminished their influence. The Paris Parlement was finally infuriated beyond endurance by an edict of 1646 which made them pay duty on fruit and vegetables sent up from their country houses. They began to refuse any edicts which increased taxation, winning considerable popularity. In May 1648 they announced their intention of serving the public and rooting out abuses of state. They even developed a presumptuous theory that the will of the King was not law—events across the Channel had not gone unnoticed. Mazarin smelt danger and in July agreed to reforms suggested by the Parlement. Then news came of another triumphant victory by Condé (Enghien, who had now succeeded his father) at Lens, and the Cardinal felt strong enough to arrest the three noisiest lawyers. An attempt to rescue one of them, the demagogue Broussel, turned into a riot and then into a revolt; 200 barricades blocked the narrow streets. A deputation went to the Queen to demand Broussel’s release, and when it returned empty-handed it was nearly murdered by an armed mob. Despite the Queen’s tearful opposition—she threatened to strangle Broussel with her own hands—Mazarin released the lawyers. Shortly after, the Regent signed a Declaration of Reform.