A wretched financier, an incapable administrator, prompt to demand the obedience of the people whom he governed, and careless of their happiness, without one spark of sympathy, without one touch of weakness, Richelieu stands before us as the embodiment of intellect and of will. His business was with _la haute politique_. That he understood. To that he devoted all his energies. In that he shone supreme. With unerring quickness of intellectual judgment he singled out at once the true obstacles to the greatness of France. He found them in the national disintegration brought about by the civil wars, and largely fostered by the Huguenots, and in the anarchical tendencies of the higher nobility. With true political insight he saw that with a professional army at his back and the sentiments of loyalty and national unity to support him, there was nothing which could stop the ultimate victory of the Crown, save the weakness of the Crown itself. For some years the struggle was intense, but his indomitable will in the end gained the day. When he had once won the confidence of the cautious and suspicious king the contest was practically over, and he was free to turn his attention almost wholly to foreign affairs. By a policy eminently skilful, if morally unjustifiable, he contrived to hide the scars of civil dissension by the lustre of military glory, and to provide a more congenial and patriotic sphere for the energies of a nobility whom he had deprived of political influence, by summoning them to win for France the victories which were to make her king the leader of Europe. [Sidenote: =Character of Louis XIII.=]