and mature his purposes, and wean him from the counterallurements to which he now lies too much open, it will be well. The day may come when he shall gain in concentration without losing in energy. He will then consolidate the floating impulses that now spend themselves in nothings, and rise into a greater man than any of the mailed and plumed ideals of his present fancy. CHAPTER III. POLITICAL. "Consider, that What his high hatred would effect, wants not King Henry VIII. THE veteran courtier had not forewarned his son without reason. Troublous times had already begun in Paris; and, like the sullen mutterings and flashes of a thunder-cloud, foreboded the near outburst of a more sweeping storm. The power of the French parliament had for some time been growing formidable to those whose interests were pledged to restrain it within existing limits. On the one hand, the increasing importance of a sturdy middle class, and on the other, the well-deserved unpopularity of the great body of hereditary nobles, immersed in pleasure and neglectful of their dependants, combined to throw the balance of power more towards the base of the social column than was relished by those who formed the gay and graceful capital that crowned the summit. Discontents among the yet inferior classes, the sons of petty commerce and toil, and a haughty jealousy on the part of the aristocracy, gave tokens of some decisive struggle, that would ere long decide this controversy by the final overthrow of one of the antagonist forces. It was becoming evident, moreover, that not a clashing of accidental parties merely, but deep and abiding principles of action were engaged in the issue; principles that had long been gathering strength on either side, and whose adherents might be broken, but would never bend. In the life of nations (it is an old remark) certain cycles seem traceable, by whose law a more developed formation and power is given now to one element of a constitution, now to another. Thus the earlier patriarchal monarchy, and, next, the strong coercion laid by the chief of an invading horde upon his rude warriors and the subjects of his conquest, had yielded, each in turn, to the feudal system of the middle ages. That system, whatever its defects, however obvious the tendencies to oppression which unfolded themselves in the course of its working, proceeded at least upon a theory of mutually balanced relations between lord and vassal, of common interests, offensive and defensive, of wellrecognised duties and restraints to lawless violence. And so, through cloud and sunshine, chequered by eminent virtues and great crimes, it had its day, and set. The Later, again, to a voyager on that advancing tide of events that lingers through no portion of its channel, a new vista in the annals of royalty opens soon after the dawn of the seventeenth century. What remains of the feudal growth yet existed in France were then demolished by the assaults of one vigorous unsparing hand. genius and energy of Richelieu were almost concentrated on this sole enterprise. He aimed at exalting the throne of his master to a height hitherto unknown; but it was on the ruins of most other existing interests: it was after clearing away the accumulated traditions, usages, and unwritten sanctions of ages, and by setting arbitrary limitations to the fundamental laws of the kingdom, that he laid the basis of that new authority. He thus effected what has been well described as a revolt of the crown against its subjects. The internal balance of power, that should have made France united and happy in herself, and formidable to her hereditary foes, was as effectually destroyed by this despotic change as by any revolutionary movement from * M. de St. Aulaire, Histoire de la Fronde. below. In this kind of rebellion, no less than in its opposite, force was enlisted against right in the perpetration of a great civil crime. And as in the world's moral government great outrages and wrongs sooner or later bring great revenges in their train, so, while we look along the afterfield of history, the eye is arrested by one tremendous counter-action, whereby the subject classes paid back with interest all such previous insults and encroachments of the crown. Richelieu established a Reign of Terror in his day, and quitted the scene before that word had been appropriated by the opposite party. But could he have seen, in the glass of the future, the powers that were one day to rise and pass over the stage, even his determined spirit might have quailed before the phantom of a retribution in store, towards which the murdered liberties of the people pointed in vengeful triumph. The problem was indeed long in working itself out, and justice seemed slow of foot. But justice came at last, in her sternest mood, and was recognised; though she came not with upright sword and evenly-poised balance, but in the guise of her sisters the furies, with torch and snaky scourge. Neither did the lesson lose any of its impressiveness because a century and a half elapsed before it was read to mankind. Richelieu's immediate policy, however, was less concerned with the masses of the people, who were afterwards to become so dangerous to the social order, and whom he may be said rather to have left out of reckoning than to have oppressed by overt act. The condition of the serfs and minor vassals was perhaps the last particular of the feudal system he would have been active to disturb. His mark was a higher, and in that day at least a far more important one; for the importance of the inferior ranks to the well-being and safety of a kingdom was not then a fact so recognised as later events declared it. He was the avowed enemy of the nobility of France, so far as their rights or pretensions limited the expansion of the royal power. Nor was he without reason, on his own view of the political balance, in employing all the resources at his command to humble and weaken this haughty class. The governors to whom the provinces and fortified towns of the kingdom had been intrusted, men of wealth and high alliance, and frequently of talents equalling their ambition, had assumed rather the aspect of independent princes than of vassals to the crown, and exercised not unfrequently the privilege of levying both imposts and men-at-arms without any reference to the royal authority. Against this dominant class, therefore, the genius and determination of the cardinal concentrated themselves. It was one chief object of his political existence to humble the nobility under the footstool of his sovereign. This being effected, he next turned his energies to undermine the influence of the magistracy throughout the provinces of France. Both these purposes were greatly advanced by separating judicial causes from those of mere administration. Over the heads of a countless crowd of officials and placeholders, many of whose functions had been purchased from the crown under the earlier kings, and had become hereditary and permanent, Richelieu erected a simpler and more efficient organisation, by creating a staff of commissioners or intendants. These were distributed throughout the provinces, with jurisdiction over all matters of justice, police, and finance. They were appointed absolutely by the minister, they held their offices at his nod, and from their decisions there lay no appeal but to himself. Greater proof could scarcely be afforded of the power acquired by this extraordinary man than the fact of his being able, in the face of public opinion, and by the perpetration of a vast and glaring act of injustice toward existing rights, to annihilate by a blow the vested interests of no less (it is said) than forty thousand families, possessed of the great mass of commercial wealth in France, and united among themselves by an esprit de corps much more tenacious than had been that of the ancient barons. Yet this numerous and well-organised body, extending through nearly every rank of the community, from the merest underling to the great officers of the cours souveraines, had no other resource, on being thus superseded, than unavailing protestations against the hopeless bankruptcy to which the policy of that one man had reduced them. By these consecutive acts the constitution of France became simplified, and assumed something that might be termed organisation. The metropolitan and provincial courts, in whose ill-constituted system various departments, judicial, financial, administrative, were mingled together, and in which the rankest abuses had flourished for generations, were at once reduced to order by the cardinal's sweeping reforms. Happy would it have been for his country, for his successors in office, and for the very throne to whose interests he lent his great powers, if this cleansing of the Augean stable of public corruption had tended to adjust the claims of the various classes and offices existing in France, and to establish over all an equitable and enlightened sway. But Richelieu never lost sight of his one object. In levelling arrogant pretensions, and clearing away from the constitution the abuses by which it was encumbered, he was but the more surely paving a royal road for the establishment of a pure despotism, of which he himself necessarily became the right hand. Such bold successful strokes had changed the whole aspect of French politics, when, about six years before the commencement of our story, this most able minister, and the earthly sovereign whom perhaps (like a second Wolsey) he had served more faithfully than the Supreme Master of all, both went to their account within a short interval one of the other. Richelieu, in dropping the reins of government from his dying hand, left a task of no slight hazard to the successor whose grasp of them should be less firm and commanding than his own. Nor was Mazarin, to whom the widowed regent soon gave all her confidence, the man to step in effectively at such a crisis. He had neither resolution to pursue the unbending course traced out by his predecessor, and to consolidate the monarchy of Louis XIV. on the basis of Richelieu's ideal; nor the still nobler courage freely and generously to restore the plundered rights upon whose ruins that ideal had been raised. A great and spirit-stirring occasion it was, certainly, that offered itself on the concurrent deaths of Louis XIII. and his minister. The times seemed to demand a man commensurate with them, and to shape themselves in expectation of his advent. It was the dawn of a new and C |