The Venetian’s independent and penetrating mind did not mislead him; everywhere in Europe were marks of Richelieu’s handiwork.  “There must be no end to negotiations near and far,” was his saying:  he had found negotiations succeed in France; he extended his views; numerous treaties had already marked the early years of the cardinal’s power; and, after 1630, his activity abroad was redoubled.  Between 1623 and 1642 seventy-four treaties were concluded by Richelieu:  four with England; twelve with the United Provinces; fifteen with the princes of Germany; six with Sweden; twelve with Savoy; six with the republic of Venice; three with the pope; three with the emperor; two with Spain; four with Lorraine; one with the Grey Leagues of Switzerland; one with Portugal; two with the revolters of Catalonia and Roussillon; one with Russia; two with the Emperor of Morocco:  such was the immense network of diplomatic negotiations whereof the cardinal held the threads during nineteen years.

An enumeration of the alliances would serve, without further comment, to prove this:  that the foreign policy of Richelieu was a continuation of that of Henry IV.; it was to Protestant alliances that he looked for their support in order to maintain the struggle against the house of Austria, whether the German or the Spanish branch.  In order to give his views full swing, he waited till he had conquered the Huguenots at home:  nearly all his treaties with Protestant powers are posterior to 1630.  So soon as he was secure that no political discussions in France itself would come to thwart his foreign designs, he marched with a firm step towards that enfeeblement of Spain and that upsetting of the empire of which Nani speaks.  Henry IV. and Queen Elizabeth, pursuing the same end, had sought and found the same allies:  Richelieu had the good fortune, beyond theirs, to meet, for the execution of his designs, with Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.

Richelieu had not yet entered the king’s council (1624), when the breaking off of the long negotiations between England and Spain, on the subject of the marriage of the Prince of Wales with the Infanta, was officially declared to Parliament.  At the very moment when Prince Charles, with the Duke of Buckingham, was going post-haste to Madrid, to see the Infanta Mary Anne of Spain, they were already thinking, at Paris, of marrying him to Henrietta of France, the king’s young sister, scarcely fourteen years of age.  King James I. was at that time obstinately bent upon his plan of alliance with Spain; when it failed, his son and big favorite forced his hand to bring him round to France.  His envoys at Paris, the Earl of Carlisle and Lord Holland, found themselves confronted by Cardinal Richelieu, commissioned, together with some of his colleagues, to negotiate the affair.  M. Guizot, in his Projet de Mariage royal (1 vol. 18mo:  1863; Paris, Hachette et Cie), has said that the marriage of Henry IV.’s daughter with the Prince of Wales was, in Richelieu’s eyes, one of the essential acts of a policy necessary to the greatness of the kingship and of France.  He obtained the best conditions possible for the various interests involved, but without any stickling and without favor for such and such a one of these interests, skilfully adapting words and appearance, but determined upon attaining his end.