Marie brought to the Council the arguments with which Richelieu had furnished her on the grave situation of external affairs. The House of Austria, she pointed out, was everywhere aggressive and everywhere successful. In Germany, the Empire had reduced Bohemia to submission. The unfortunate Elector Palatine, deprived of the Upper Palatinate by Maximilian of Bavaria, and of the Lower Palatinate by Tilly, General of the Catholic League, and Gonzalvo de Cordoba, commander of the Spanish forces, had been obliged to take refuge in Holland. Philip IV, on the expiration of the twelve years’ truce with Holland in 1621, had called upon the Dutch to acknowledge his supremacy, and, on their refusal, had attacked them. The Spaniards mocked at the Treaty of Madrid, and, so far from evacuating the Valtellina, as they had engaged to do, had invaded the country of the Grisons, in concert with the Archduke Leopold, and obliged them to submit to a humiliating treaty which deprived them of the suzerainty of the Valtellina. Prompted by Richelieu, Marie urged upon the Council the imperative necessity of pacifying France, in order to be in a position to intervene in the affairs of Europe and arrest the alarming progress which the House of Austria was making. “To enter into a civil war,” said she, “is not the road to arrive at it, as was manifest during the siege of Montauban, when, in place of executing the Treaty of Madrid, they [the Spaniards] pushed their armies further and advanced by much their design to arrive at the monarchy of Europe. Although assuredly it is better to perish rather than abate anything of the royal dignity, it seems that it [the dignity] is preserved, if peace and the pardon of their crimes is given to them [the Huguenots], without restoring to them any of the places of which they have been deprived.” Condé and his allies pretended, on the contrary, that it was necessary before everything, and at all costs, to subdue the internal enemy and to check the audacity of the Huguenots, immensely encouraged by the successful resistance of Montauban. La Force and his sons had resumed hostilities in Guienne, and many places in that province which had submitted to the King had revolted anew. In Lower Languedoc, masters of Nîmes, Montpellier, Uzès, Privas, and a number of smaller towns, the assembly of the “circle,” had ordered or, at any rate, authorised, the most disgraceful excesses, and between thirty and forty churches, amongst which were some of the finest monuments of the Middle Ages, had been ruined. In the West, the Rochellois were masters of the sea; Saint-Luc, who had vainly endeavoured to make head against them, was blockaded in the port of Brouage; and a multitude of privateers preyed upon the commerce of the Atlantic coast.