The cardinal, in fact, took it patiently, revising and then confirming the treaty with Spain, and imposing on the Huguenots a peace so hard, that they would never have accepted it but for the hope of obtaining at a later period some assuagements, with the help of England, which refused formally to help them to carry on the war. At the first parleys the king had said, “I am disposed enough towards peace; I am willing to grant it to Languedoc and the other provinces. As for La Rochelle, that is another thing.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. iii.] It was ultimately La Rochelle that paid the expenses of the war, biding the time when the proud city, which had resisted eight kings in succession, would have to succumb before Louis XIII. and his all-powerful minister. Already her independence was threatened on all sides; the bastions and new fortifications had to be demolished; no armed vessel of war might be stationed in her harbor. “The way was at last open,” said the cardinal, “to the extermination of the Huguenot party, which, for a hundred years past, had divided the kingdom.” [_Memoires de Richelieu,_ t. iii. p. 17.] [Illustration: Demolishing the Fortifications----244] The peace of 1626, then, was but a preliminary to war. Richelieu was preparing for it by land and sea; vessels of war were being built, troops were being levied; and the temper of England furnished a pretext for commencing the struggle. King Charles I., at the instigation of his favorite the Duke of Buckingham, had suddenly and unfeelingly dismissed the French servants of the queen his wife, without giving her even time to say good by to them, insomuch that “the poor princess, hearing their voices in the court-yard, dashed to the window, and, breaking the glass with her head, clung with her hands to the bars to show herself to her women and take the last look at them. The king indignantly dragged her back with so great an effort that he tore her hands right away.” Louis XIII. had sent Marshal Bassompierre to England to complain of the insult done to his sister; the Duke of Buckingham wished to go in person to France to arrange the difference, but the cardinal refused. “Has Buckingham ever undertaken any foreign commission without going away dissatisfied and offended with the princes to whom he was sent?” said Cardinal Richelieu to the king. So the favorite of Charles I. resolved to go to France “in other style and with other attendants than he had as yet done; having determined to win back the good graces of the Parliament and the people of England by the succor he was about to carry to the oppressed Protestant churches,” he pledged his property; he sold the trading-vessels captured on the coasts of France; and on the 17th of July, 1627, he set sail with a hundred and twenty vessels, heading for La Rochelle. Soubise was on board his ship; and the Duke of Rohan, notified of the enterprise, had promised to declare himself the moment the English set foot in France.