To most of the clergy, again, the war was of the nature of sacrilege; and still more so, later on, the demand of an enormous payment of arrears for lands held under the Crown, which had been suffered to go free for nearly a hundred years. But at a time when the taxes of France had rolled up to more than a hundred million francs a year, a gigantic and as yet unheard-of sum, Richelieu could no longer grant the clergy the privilege of paying no tax but their prayers, which he had himself claimed for them at the States-General of 1613. “The people give their goods, the nobles their blood, the clergy their prayers.” As ever, the patience of the most heavily taxed seemed almost inexhaustible; and it was not till France was deeply engaged in the war, her middle class and her peasantry crushed by Richelieu’s intendants and financiers under burdens every week more enormous, that in the south and the north populations made some effort to save themselves; made it by rioting, their only resource, and found themselves--_Croquants_ in Guienne, _Va-nu-pieds_ in Normandy--in a last state worse than the first. In spite of all these discontents there were ways in which Frenchmen now realized the national unity which was Richelieu’s dream. The famous leader, Duke Henry de Rohan, was again in arms, not now as a Huguenot chief, but commanding an army against the Duke of Lorraine, fighting for his duchy with imperial troops behind him. In the spring of 1635, it was to Rohan that Richelieu committed the task of preparing for his designs on Milan by a new occupation of the Valtelline, thus once more playing the old game of blocking the chief military road between Austria and Spain. All went well at first, the Duke proving himself a loyal subject and a good general. The cause that finally discomfited him and drove him at last to throw up his command and to retire to Geneva was the failure of Richelieu’s government to pay a promised indemnity to the Grisons, rightful possessors of the valley, who after two years’ French occupation, secretly encouraged by Spain, rebelled suddenly against Rohan and insisted on the evacuation of their territory. Blamed by Richelieu for a failure which was no fault of his, and broken by severe illness, the Huguenot hero was still ready to bear arms for France. In the spring of 1638 he volunteered to serve under Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar--the great soldier who, if actually fighting for his own hand, nevertheless gave Alsace to France--and died of his wounds after the siege of Rheinfeld, having lived long enough to know with what swift brilliance Bernard had turned defeat into victory.