The clergy in dismay wished to convoke an assembly to determine their conduct; and after a great deal of difficulty it was authorized by the cardinal.  Before long he intimated to the five prelates who were most hostile to him that they must quit the assembly and retire to their dioceses.  “There are,” said the Bishop of Autun, who was entirely devoted to Richelieu, “some who show great delicacy about agreeing to all that the king demands, as if they had a doubt whether all the property of the church belonged to him or not, and whether his Majesty, leaving the ecclesiastics wherewithal to provide for their subsistence and a moderate establishment, could not take all the surplus.”  That sort of doctrine would never do for the clergy; still they consented to pay five millions and a half, the sum to which the minister lowered his pretensions.  “The wants of the state,” said Richelieu, “are real; those of the church are fanciful and arbitrary; if the king’s armies had not repulsed the enemy, the clergy would have suffered far more.”

Whilst the cardinal imposed upon the French clergy the obligations common to all subjects, he defended the kingly power and majesty against the Ultramoutanes, and especially against the Jesuits.  Several of their pamphlets had already been censured by his order when Father Sanctarel published a treatise on heresy and schism, clothed with the pope’s approbation, and containing, amongst other dangerous propositions, the following:  “The pope can depose emperor and kings for their iniquities or for personal incompetence, seeing that he has a sovereign, supreme, and absolute power.”  The work was referred to the Parliament, who ordered it to be burned in Place de Greve; there was talk of nothing less than the banishment of the entire order.

Father Cotton, superior of the French Jesuits, was summoned to appear before the council; he gave up Father Sanctarel unreservedly, making what excuse he best could for the approbation of the pope and of the general of the Jesuits.  The condemnation of the work was demanded, and it was signed by sixteen French fathers.  The Parliament was disposed to push the matter farther, when Richelieu, always as prudent as he was firm in his relations with this celebrated order, represented to the king that there are “certain abuses which are more easily put down by passing them over than by resolving to destroy them openly, and that it was time to take care lest proceedings should be carried to a point which might be as prejudicial to his service as past action had been serviceable to it.”  The Jesuits remained in France, and their college at Clermont was not closed; but they published no more pamphlets against the cardinal.  They even defended him at need.