Queen-mother, nobles, parliaments, and Protestants must be taught to
obey. The Huguenots at the siege of La Rochelle, lasting fifteen
months, learned their lesson. The punishment for their revolt was the
loss of every military and political privilege. But although there
were to be no more political assemblies, the edict of Nantes was to be
rigidly enforced, and their rights and immunities under it made
inviolable. Louis the King saw his most intimate friend, Cinq Mars,
sent to the scaffold; his brother Gaston, Duke of Orleans, thrown into
the Bastille like a common prisoner; his mother in exile and poverty.
But he also saw himself without the trouble of governing, surrounded by
homage and adulation, towering high above everything else in France,
and was content.
The growing power of Austria and the ascendency of the Hapsburgs was,
as we have seen, the nightmare of Europe at this period. But the
Reformation was tearing the empire almost asunder. A Protestant
Prussia was trying to struggle away from a Catholic Austria. Richelieu
cared nothing for Catholics nor for Protestants. His aim was to weaken
the hands of the Hapsburgs. And if he joined the Protestant leader
Gustavus Adolphus in a religious crusade, it was with this end in view.
The marriage of Louis with the Infanta of Spain, known as Anne of
Austria, was doubtless a part of the same line of policy, and was the
beginning of many attempts to draw the Spanish peninsula under the
control of France.
When the end of all these schemings arrived, on the 4th day of
December, 1642, Richelieu calmly laid down to die in his princely
residence known at that time as the Palais Cardinal. But as it was his
dying gift to the king, the name was changed to the Palais Royal. Upon
the death of Louis XIII., which occurred in 1643, only a few months
after that of his minister, the widowed Queen Anne, with her infant
son, Louis XIV., removed from the Louvre to the Palais Royal, which
continued to be the residence of the Grand Monarch for some time after
his majority.
Anne was appointed regent for her son, not yet five years old, and, to
the surprise of everyone, immediately called to her aid as her adviser
not a Frenchman, as was expected, but an Italian, Cardinal Mazarin. So
the fate of the kingdom was in the hands of two foreigners, a Spanish
queen-regent and an Italian minister.
Richelieu's and Mazarin's methods were the opposite of each other. One
was direct, the other tortuous and indirect. In true Italian fashion
Mazarin overcame by seeming to yield; and what he said was the thing he
did not mean. Intrigue and bribery were his implements and weapons.
The situation awoke distrust. It was a time to recover lost
privileges, and to struggle out of the chains riveted by Richelieu. A
civil war known as the Fronde was the result.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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