Page:Secret history of the French court under Richelieu and Mazarin/Chapter I/Page 7
a zealous servant of Henri IV., Peer and Master of the Hounds, and Governor of Paris and of the Isle of France, and of his first wife, Madeleine de Lenoncourt, sister of Urbain de Laval, Marshal de Bois-Dauphin. Born almost with the seventeenth century, in December, 1600, she lost her mother at a very early age, and in 1617 espoused that audacious favorite of Louis XIII., who, on the faith of the fickle friendship of a king, dared attempt to overthrow the authority of the queenmother, Marie de Medicis, destroyed the Marshal d'Ancre, combated the Princes and the Protestants at the same time, and attempted against Richelieu himself the system of Richelieu. Let us ask in passing, Is it not unworthy of history to attribute the elevation of Luynes to the caprice of a king, who takes one of his pages, a petty gentleman, for his prime minister, solely because he finds him skilful in the art of training falcons? Such, perhaps, was the beginning of the fortunes of Luynes,— such was not the cause of it. This petty gentleman, son of Captain de Luynes, as he was called, one of the bravest and most intelligent of the officers of Henri IV., was himself a man of talent and courage, who, under the direct inspiration of Louis XIII., honorably restored and sustained while he lived the work of the great king which Richelieu had at first opposed in his character of the favorite of Marie de Medicis, and which he afterwards undertook with great zeal, gradually turning against his old friends and his first protectress, so far as to exile her precisely as De Luynes had done.[1] The young
- ↑ The reader should not be duped by the memoirs of Richelieu, which are designed, like all memoirs, to deceive posterity in favor of the author. Richelieu did not begin his career as he finished it. He commenced as a partisan of the Spanish Alliance to please the queen-mother. There is a production of Richelieu, now very rare, entitled, Harangue prononcée en la salle du Petit Bourbon, le 23 fevrier, 1615, a la clôture des états tenus a Pàris, par révèrend père en Dieu, messire Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, évesque de Luçon. In this, Richelieu congratulates the king, who was of age, on having "restored the reins of this great empire to the hands of the queen, his mother, so that she might have for some time the guidance of his estates." Spain and France "being united, have nothing to fear; while separated, they can only receive injury from each other." Let us add that Luynes, struck with the talents of Richelieu, ended by extricating him from disgrace; that he proposed to restore him to public life, and, to attach him to himself, caused the niece of Richelieu, Mademoiselle du Pont de Courlay, afterwards Duchess de Aiguillon, to espouse his own nephew, Combalet. Richelieu therefore was at that time regarded as serving Luynes in an underhand way, and it is principally to efface and contradict this well-founded rumor, that, uniting all the foibles and weaknesses of vanity to the aspirations and ambition of pride, he attempts in his memoirs to decry the constable, reproaching him with that of which he himself was afterwards guilty. Luynes resolutely attacked and promptly subdued the rebellious princes, and by means of the treaty of Angoulême secured the queen-mother in a necessary exile without useless rigor. When Rohan and Soubise dared to draw the sword, the new Duke de Luynes gained the title of constable by opposing the Protestants, and he undertook the siege of Montauban, the precursor of that of La Rochelle. In 1620, Bearn was definitively incorporated with the crown. This is an abstract of the whole of Richelieu's career.
