Arthur Thomas Malkin - The Gallery of Portraits (Vol. 1-7)

Richelieu in his wars was one of those scientific combatants who seek to weary out an enemy, and who husband their strength in order not to crush at once, but to ruin in the end. Such at least were the tactics by which he came triumphant out of the struggle with Spain. He made no conquests at first, gained no striking victories; but he compensated for his apparent want of success by perseverance, by taking advantage of defeat to improve the army, and by labouring to transfer to the crown the financial and other resources which had been previously absorbed by the aristocracy. Thus the war, though little brilliant at first, produced at last these very important results. Arras in the north, Turin in the south, Alsace in the east, fell into the hands of the French; Rousillon was annexed to the monarchy; and Catalonia revolted from Spain. Richelieu might boast that he had achieved the great purposes of Henry IV., not so gloriously indeed as that heroic prince might have done, but no less effectually. This was effected not so much by arms as by administration. The foundation was laid for that martial preeminence which Louis XIV. long enjoyed; and which he might have retained, had the virtue of moderation been known to him.

It was not without incurring great personal perils, with proportionate address and good fortune, that Cardinal Richelieu arrived at such great results. The rebellion of the Comte de Soissons, the same whose project of assassination had failed, menaced the Minister seriously. In a battle against the royal army, the Count was completely victorious, an event that might have caused a revolution in the government, had not fortune neutralized it by his death. He fell by a pistol-shot, whilst contemplating the scene of victory. His friends asserted that he was murdered by an emissary of the Cardinal: according to others, the bullet was accidentally discharged from his own pistol.

But the most remarkable plot which assailed Richelieu, was that of Cinq-Mars, a young nobleman selected to be the King’s favourite, on account of his presumed frivolity. But he was capable of deep thoughts and passions; and wearied by the solitude in which the monarch lived, and to which he was reduced by the Minister’s monopoly of all power, he dared to plot the Cardinal’s overthrow. This bold attempt was sanctioned by the King himself, who at intervals complained of the yoke put upon him.

Great interests were at stake, for Richelieu, reckoning upon the monarch’s weak health, meditated procuring the regency for himself. Anne of Austria, aware of this intention, approved of the project of Cinq-Mars, which of course implied the assassination of the Cardinal. No other mode of defying his power and talent could have been contemplated. But Richelieu was on the watch. The Court was then in the south of France, engaged in the conquest of Roussillon, a situation favourable for the relation of the conspirators with Spain. The Minister surprised one of the emissaries, had the fortune to seize a treaty concluded between them and the enemies of France; and with this flagrant proof of their treason, he repaired to Louis, and forced from him an order for their arrest. It was tantamount to their condemnation. Cinq-Mars and his friends perished on the scaffold; Anne of Austria was again humbled; and every enemy of the Cardinal shrunk in awe and submission before his ascendency. Amongst them was the King himself, whom Richelieu looked upon as an equal in dignity, an inferior in mind and in power. The guards of the Cardinal were numerous as the Monarch’s, and independent of any authority save that of their immediate master. A treaty was even drawn up between king and minister, as between two potentates. But the power and the pride of Richelieu reached at once their height and their termination. A mortal illness seized him in the latter days of 1642, a few months after the execution of Cinq-Mars. No remorse for his cruelty or abatement of his pride marked his last moments. He summoned the monarch like a servant to his couch, instructed him what policy to follow, and appointed the minister who was to be his own successor. Even in the last religious duties, the same character and the same spirit were observable. As his cardinal’s robe was a covering and excuse for all crimes in life, he seemed to think that it exempted him from the common lot of mortals after death.

Such was the career of this supereminent statesman, who, although in the position of Damocles all his life, with the sword of the assassin suspended over his head, surrounded with enemies, and with insecure and treacherous support even from the monarch whom he served, still not only maintained his own station, but possessed time and zeal to frame and execute gigantic projects for the advancement of his country and of his age. It makes no small part of Henry IV.’s glory that he conceived a plan for diminishing the power of the House of Austria. Richelieu, without either the security or the advantages of the king and the warrior, achieved it. Not only this, but he dared to enter upon the war at the very same time when he was humbling that aristocracy which had hitherto composed the martial force of the country.

The effects of his domestic policy were indeed more durable than those of what he most prided himself upon, his foreign policy. The latter was his end, the former his means; but the means were the more important of the two. For half a century previous, kings had been acquiring a sacro-sanctity, a power founded on respect, which equalled that of Asiatic despots; whilst at the same time their real sources of power remained in the hands of the aristocracy. From this contradiction, this want of harmony betwixt the theoretic and the real power of monarchs, proceeded a state of licence liable at all times to produce the most serious convulsions. To this state of things Richelieu put an end for ever. He crushed the power of the great nobility, as Henry VII., by very different means, had done before him in England. He made Louis a sovereign in the most absolute sense; he reformed and changed the whole system of administration, destroyed all local authorities, and centralized them, as the term is, in the capital and the court. We see, accordingly, that it was only the capital which could oppose Mazarin; all provincial force was destroyed by Richelieu. He it was, in fact, who founded the French monarchy, such as it existed until near the end of the eighteenth century, a grand, indeed, rather than a happy result. He was a man of penetrating and commanding intellect, who visibly influenced the fortunes of Europe to an extent which few princes or ministers have equalled. Unscrupulous in his purposes, he was no less so in the means by which he effected them. But so long as men are honoured, not for their moral excellences, but for the great things which they have done for themselves, or their country, the name of Richelieu will be recollected with respect, as that of one of the most successful statesmen that ever lived.

His measures with respect to commerce were very remarkable. He proposed to render the French marine as formidable as the French armies, and chose the wisest means in favouring colonization and commercial companies for the purpose. The chief part of their successful settlements in the east and west the French owe to Richelieu. In financial measures he showed least sagacity, and the disordered state in which he left this branch of the administration was the principal cause of the difficulties of his successor.

As a patron of letters, Richelieu has acquired a reputation almost rivalling that of his statesmanship. His first and earliest success in life had been as a scholar supporting his theses; and, as it is continually observed that great men form very erroneous judgments of their own excellences, he ever prided himself especially in his powers as a penman: it was a complete mistake on his part. He has left a considerable quantity of theological tracts of trifling merit.