620

The Peace of the Pyrenees

[1658-61 support of Spain, and had joined the League which was formed to maintain the independence of the Princes of the Empire as secured by the Treaty of Westphalia. Deprived of the assistance which the Austrian House had been supplying, the position of Spain was becoming more and more desperate. A proposal to marry Louis to the daughter of the Duke of Savoy was perhaps intended as a lure; at any rate towards the end of 1658 Spain offered peace and the Infanta Maria Teresa. An armistice was concluded in May, 1659; but the infatuation of Louis for Marie Mancini, one of the Cardinal's nieces, threatened to ruin the plan. This obstacle was, however, removed, and negotiations proceeded with goodwill on both sides from August to November, when the Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed. France retained Gravelines but surrendered all her other Flemish conquests except Bourbourg and Saint-Venant. Between Bourbourg and Saint-Venant Spain kept Saint-Omer and Aire, but abandoned the rest of Artois. In Hainault France acquired Landrecies and Le Quesnoy: between Sambre and Meuse, Avesnes, Philippeville, and Marienbourg: in Luxemburg, Montmédy, Damvillers, and Thionville. The county of Charolais and a few French conquests in Franche Comté were given back to Spain. The Spanish King resigned all his rights in Elsass. The last forts in Catalonia were evacuated by France; and the Pyrenees became the frontier between France and Spain on this side. The King of France promised to give no aid to Portugal; the Dukes of Savoy and Modena were to be restored to the positions which they held before the war. To Condé the possession of all his rights was secured, together with his office of Grand Maître, and his government of Burgundy. In return he ceded his remaining fortresses, Rocroi, Le Catelet, Linchamp, to Louis XIV. Maria Teresa abjured all rights in the succession to the Spanish Crown; but a clause stipulating the payment of her dowry as a condition of this renunciation left a loophole for dispute hereafter. The peace contained clauses in favour of the Duke of Lorraine; but he refused the terms offered, and made his own peace in February, 1661. Bar was then restored to him on condition of homage; France received Moyenvic, Clermont, Jametz, Stenay, Sierck, Pfalzburg, Saarburg. The fortifications of Nancy were rased, and France retained the right of passage through Lorraine from Metz to Elsass. On these hard conditions his duchy was restored to him.

The last years of Mazarin saw other questions settled. The restoration of Charles II in 1660 took place without much assistance from France; Hyde's party, then in favour with the English King, resented Mazarin's caution, maliciously advertised such surreptitious aid as he provided, and did their best to counteract the influence of Henrietta Maria. In 1660 Gaston of Orleans died, Louis visited, and finally pacified Provence; and his marriage was celebrated at Fuenterrabia (June). The rash enterprises of Sweden, which Mazarin had viewed with alarm, were terminated by the death of Charles Gustavus; and

1646-61]

Condition of France. Nicolas Fouquet

621

peace was restored in the north-east of Europe by the Treaties of Oliva (May 3, 1660) and Copenhagen (June 6, 1660) under the influence of France. Henrietta of England was married in March, 1661, to the Duke of Orleans, brother of the French King; and France set on foot the scheme for the marriage of Charles II with the Portuguese Princess, Catharine of Braganza. When Mazarin died (March 9, 1661) he might claim that he left all in order, except the administration and the finances of France.

Even before the Fronde, war had ravaged the frontier provinces, and taxation had devastated the interior of France; Lorraine, especially, was a desert. In 1646 it is said that 23,000 persons were in prison for failure to pay the tailles. The gabelle furnished a third of the convicts. Troops protected the tax-collector, and the usurers gave him his orders. In January, 1648, Omer Talon said, "The country has been ruined for ten years"; and his testimony is supported by the sober judgment of Matthieu Molé. The Fronde brought war and the pillage of unpaid troops to almost every part of France. The environs of Paris and Bordeaux suffered most; but few regions escaped, except perhaps Britanny, the Lyonnais, and Dauphiné, on which the taxes fell with added weight. The Croats and other horsemen under Johann von Werth, the mercenaries of Charles of Lorraine, made destruction a fine art; but even among French troops discipline was impossible without pay. The charity of SaintVincent de Paul and of the votaries of Port Royal, hardly touched the fringe of the distress, which continued long after the Fronde had ceased. The Mediterranean was given up to pirates; plague followed on famine; hard winters and inundations aggravated the misery; and 1658 and 1660 were years of more than usual scarcity. The cessation of civil war revived the rule of the usurers.

Mazarin owed much to the Fouquets. Basile Fouquet (the Abbé) was his chief of secret police, both during and after the Fronde. Nicolas was useful in the Parlement as procureur-général. Their services were awarded by the instalment of Nicolas at the head of the finances in 1653. Servien, nominally his colleague, became a cipher. Fouquet, charged with the receipt of revenue, had funds to meet such expenditure as he favoured, and none when payment did not suit his purpose. His influence with the financiers, in whose illicit gains he shared, made him useful to Mazarin, who shut his eyes to his defalcations, and perhaps had a part of his gains. The enormous fortune (thirty millions) left by Mazarin must have been almost entirely accumulated after the Fronde. Fouquet rendered no exact account of receipts, and bought up old claims at a low figure, which he then paid in full. On the death of Servien (1659), Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who managed Mazarin's private fortune, denounced Fouquet's transactions to his master, but Mazarin contented himself with a warning. Fouquet bought everyone who was worth buying. The money, which he made by fraud, he spent like a prince.

622

Mazarin and Richelieu

[1642-61

Of men of letters he was the magnificent patron. At the death of Mazarin he was the most powerful man in France, and prepared, if necessary, to assert his power by civil war. The story of his fall must be reserved for a later volume.

It is said that Mazarin on his death-bed left Colbert as a legacy to his master, with the advice to rule in person and without a Chief Minister, two gifts that were more valuable than all the Cardinal's fortune. Both Richelieu and Mazarin possessed transcendent gifts, but the task of universal government must always be beyond one man's power, especially when complicated by the necessity of preserving a precarious ascendancy and defeating incessant intrigue. Neither Minister attempted to establish, perhaps neither dared to establish, machinery to supplement his individual deficiencies. Only a King can delegate power without impairing his authority. The inordinate ambition of Louis XIV laid arduous burdens on his people; but his personal rule was at least free from the gravest defects that disfigure the brilliant record of the two Cardinals.

The personality of Mazarin fills his period no less than that of Richelieu the previous eighteen years. In both periods all serious public action in France was directed by or against the Chief Minister. But whereas Richelieu gave a new form to the polity of France, the energies of Mazarin were devoted to working out in his own way the formulas provided by his predecessor. In foreign policy he garnered where Richelieu had sown. At home he perpetuated Richelieu's errors and supplied none of his omissions. The second period seems to repeat the first; only the means of action are different. While Richelieu relied mainly on force for the accomplishment of his ends, Mazarin trusted to subtlety, adroitness, diplomacy, and tact. Forces which Richelieu would have crushed, at the risk of perishing in the attempt, Mazarin allowed to grow and work till they became dangerous; he then eluded, diverted, managed them, until their energy was exhausted. The brilliant victories of France, and the disorders of the Fronde, may alike be attributed to this more elastic policy; but in the result Mazarin, though always the central point of all observation, seems rather to follow than to direct the course of affairs. By adopting in every crisis the less detrimental of alternatives presented, he secured in the end successes more complete and substantial than his predecessor; but he added no new idea to the repertory of statesmen; the ends which he reached had already been indicated before his coming; a consummate opportunist, he left no distinctive and individual mark on the State or policy of France.

CHAPTER XXII

SPAIN AND SPANISH ITALY UNDER PHILIP III AND IV

AFTER forty-five years of wasting warfare against the Dutch Protestants Spain had been forced by sheer exhaustion to accept the humiliating truce of 1609, by which for twelve years the principles upon which she had staked her position as a great Power were to remain in abeyance. To all men unblinded by the spiritual pride that had dazzled Spaniards to their undoing, it was a confession that the nation was unequal to the mighty mission bequeathed to it by the Emperor: that of imposing religious unity upon Christendom under the hegemony of the House of Habsburg. Misery and famine stalked unhindered through the land, whilst the luxurious and the idle squandered lavishly the national resources wrung by corruption from a ruined people. All classes but the poorest evaded their national obligations, and sought to justify the hollow boast of boundless public wealth by endeavouring to live without work upon the private plunder of the State. The high hopes fostered in the first years of the reign by the golden showers of Lerma's prodigality had been succeeded by a cynical desire to enjoy the passing hour whilst it lasted, and to prolong it as much as possible by insisting more loudly than ever upon the invincible power of Spain and the inexhaustible wealth of her King. But for this determination of the Court and the people as a whole to shut their eyes obstinately to facts, and to treat the great task in which they had failed as being still incumbent upon them, a policy of retrenchment and close concentration of national effort upon domestic amelioration might yet have been adopted and have saved Spain from the slough of ruin into which she was sinking. But the spirit of pompous exaggeration and arrogance had entered into the heart of the nation, and, exhausted though the country was, not a jot of the proud claims of old was abated. The King, who was really a foolish trifler, spending all his time in alternate prayer and pastime, was "the greatest prince that the world ever saw"; and Lerma, whose abilities hardly reached mediocrity, was adulated like a demigod. Each Castilian Cortes as it met after the usual three years' interval was told in the speech from the throne that supplies must be voted

624

Designs against Spain

[1609-10 bountifully, in order that the King might "defend our holy Catholic faith and secure obedience to the Roman Church"; and the deputies, bribed to a man with pensions, places, and grants, broke their self-denying oath, and in return for their personal aggrandisement voted whatever they were asked, while their formal petitions for the relief of the suffering people were ignominiously rejected or contemptuously disregarded by the King. The expulsion of the Moriscos, though economically disastrous, raised to a higher pitch than ever the self-satisfied vanity of the majority of Spaniards; and a chorus of praise convinced Lerma and the King that they were heaven-sent statesmen in thus utilising the first year of relief from foreign war afforded by the truce by pursuing Spain's sacred mission of Christian unification within the borders of the realm itself.

While Spaniards were living in this fool's paradise and accepting the semblance for the reality of things, their rivals with clearer vision were preparing to challenge claims that appeared incapable of enforcement. Archduke Leopold of Austria, on behalf of the Emperor, had in August, 1609, obtained possession by strategy of the fortress of Jülich. Henry IV had warned Archduke Albert in Flanders that any such aggression would be resented by him, but depending, as usual, upon ultimate support from Spain, the Emperor Rudolf disregarded the warning. The heroics of Lerma and the patent weakness of Spain, combined with this and other public and private sources of irritation, convinced Henry IV and Sully that the time had come for dealing a heavy blow for the liberation of religion in Europe from Habsburg dictation. The Hollanders were as ready as Henry to resent the Catholic occupation of Jülich-Cleves, and Protestant England sympathised with them. Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, that unquiet son-in-law of Philip II, chafed under the yoke of his Spanish kinsman, who had used him for the ends of Spain alone, and had cheated him out of the guerdon for which he had hoped in Italy. But for the puling Philip III, Charles Emmanuel's own son would have been heir to the Spanish Crown, and bitter resentment filled the Savoyard's heart against those who had made him a mere catspaw of Spanish ambition. Probably the only confederate who was really in earnest about fighting besides Henry himself was Charles Emmanuel, who hoped to grasp Lombardy with the title of King: but when the French forces stood ready to cross respectively the Rhine and the Pyrenees, and to help Savoy to sweep the Spaniards from Lombardy, the knife of Ravaillac changed the whole current of European history (May 15, 1610).

There is no proof whatever that the mad fanatic who stabbed the King of France was paid or inspired by Spain; but his crime prevented what might have been the inevitable triumph of the cause of religious independence in Europe, and gave to the Spanish nation, whose corrupt and decadent condition we have reviewed, another half-century of fallacious importance in the councils of Europe. The