The feeble King Louis XIII. manifested wisdom in at least one thing.  He permitted this greatest statesman of his time, and one of the greatest perhaps of all time, to have a free hand in managing his kingdom.  And whatever the pressure from the queen-mother, from cabals and intriguing nobles, he never yielded the point, but kept his great minister in his service as long as they both lived.  This was especially commendable in Louis because they were personally antagonistic, and also because the queen-mother constantly used her powerful influence over her son for his downfall.

Marie had been permitted to return to Paris, where her son, perhaps to console her for the loss of the Concinis, had built for her the Palais de Luxembourg, intended as a reminiscence of her dear Italy, with its Medicean architecture and Italian gardens and fountains.  Here she held her little court in great splendor, and here she wove her ineffectual webs for Richelieu’s defeat and downfall.  It is said that at one time Louis at her instigation had actually taken the pen in hand to sign the order for his minister’s disgrace, when that vigilant and omniscient being, perfectly aware of what was occurring, appeared from behind the curtains.  And Louis, quailing before the superior will of a master, sent his vicious, intriguing mother into perpetual banishment.  And we are told that Marie, the subject of those immortal canvases now at the Louvre, was actually sheltered and fed by the great painter at his own home in the day of her disgrace and poverty.

It is not strange that Peter the Great pronounced Richelieu the model statesman!  Their ideals were the same.  The minister intended that everything in France should lie helpless at the feet of royalty; that kingship should absorb into itself every source of power.  While Cromwell was tearing down a throne in England and leading a king to a scaffold, Richelieu, facing every class, current, and force, was making the throne impregnable in France, and preparing a magnificent inheritance for the infant Louis XIV., then in his cradle.

Queen-mother, nobles, parliaments, and Protestants must be taught to obey.  The Huguenots at the siege of La Rochelle, lasting fifteen months, learned their lesson.  The punishment for their revolt was the loss of every military and political privilege.  But although there were to be no more political assemblies, the edict of Nantes was to be rigidly enforced, and their rights and immunities under it made inviolable.  Louis the King saw his most intimate friend, Cinq Mars, sent to the scaffold; his brother Gaston, Duke of Orleans, thrown into the Bastille like a common prisoner; his mother in exile and poverty.  But he also saw himself without the trouble of governing, surrounded by homage and adulation, towering high above everything else in France, and was content.

The growing power of Austria and the ascendency of the Hapsburgs was, as we have seen, the nightmare of Europe at this period.  But the Reformation was tearing the empire almost asunder.  A Protestant Prussia was trying to struggle away from a Catholic Austria.  Richelieu cared nothing for Catholics nor for Protestants.  His aim was to weaken the hands of the Hapsburgs.  And if he joined the Protestant leader Gustavus Adolphus in a religious crusade, it was with this end in view.