Cardinal Richelieu: Musée des Beaux Arts, Tours.
Cardinal Richelieu: Musée des Beaux Arts, Tours.
Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu better known as Cardinal Richelieu, was Louis XIII ’s right hand man for the eighteen years prior to the Cardinal’s death. He was sixteen years older than the King.
Not many Courtiers outshined the monarch but Richelieu did. What springs to mind about Louis XIII? Not much.
In 1560, in Amboise, hundreds, some sources say fifteen hundred, Protestants were hanged, drawn and quartered, executed or drowned in the Loire. From that time on, France was a divided nation. Roman Catholics v. Protestants.
It was still a fractured country sixty years later when the infamous Cardinal Richelieu hit the ground running. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. His stated mission was ‘to make the royal power supreme in France and France supreme in Europe’.
He set about creating an absolute monarchy and imposed a strict political system to unify France and establish a French National Identity with the King at its head.
Before Richelieu, powerful nobles wielded a wide variety of laws in different regions. They raised private armies and allied themselves with foreign powers. Richelieu centralised power in the person of the King.
He fought enemies on all fronts, the Queen Mother, Marie de Medicis, the King’s brother Gaston of Orléans, the Nobility, the Habsburgs and the Protestants.
After the massacre at Amboise, when the French royal family abandoned the Château, it was used as a prison for members of the nobility who had fallen from grace.
1624. 29 April. Richelieu, the new kid on the block, was appointed to the royal council of Ministers. Contemptuous of the King’s Chief Minister, Charles, marquis de la Vieuville, he paid pamphleteers to ruin his reputation. It took him just three months to bring him down.
1624. 12 August. Vieuville was charged for corruption and taken to Château Amboise.
1624. 13 August. Richelieu took his place as Chief Minister.
1624. The new Chief Minister declared that 'There is no nation on earth so little suited to war than our own' and set about forming a Royal Navy and reforming the military.
1626. The duke of Vendôme and his brother Alexandre, the King’s half-brothers, plotted against Richelieu. They ended up in the Château Amboise.
1627. New France (now Canada) had a hundred French inhabitants. To grow the colony, Richelieu encouraged intermarriage with indigenous Indians. Twenty years after his death, the population was over three thousand.
1628. Richelieu built The Cardinal’s Palace near the Louvre.
1631. Richelieu re-built Chateau Richelieu where he grew up.
He amassed one of the greatest art collections in Europe. Among his three hundred paintings was Virgin and Child with Saint Anne which Leonardo da Vinci brought with him from Italy when he moved to Amboise. Another was The Family of the Virgin by Andrea del Sarto, Court Painter to Francis I and masterpieces by Poussin, Veronese, Titian, Rubens, Michelangelo, Dürer, Mantegna and Perugino.
Place Richelieu, Amboise.
Although he employed two thousand workers, his Château was still unfinished when he died.
1632. Richelieu, ruthless in suppressing opposition, ordered the execution of Henry, duke Montmorency.
1634. He had his outspoken critic, Urbain Grandier, burned at the stake.
1637. Revolted by fellow diners who used sharp pointed knives to pick food from their rotting teeth, he stipulated that all knives on his dining table have their tips rounded. Hence today’s table knife.
1642. The nobles hated him because he stripped them of power. The poor hated him because he taxed them to the hilt. Hated by just about everyone, huge bonfires were lit all over France to celebrate Richelieu’s death. The King, who actually never liked him, died a few months later.
Still. His cats probably missed him.
He adored cats, especially Persians. Credited with being among the first to keep cats as pets, he always had one of his darlings on his lap while he worked. Their names were Racan (poet) Gazette (indiscreet), Rubis sur l' Ongle (scratchy), Pyramus & Thisbe (lovers who slept with paws entwined), Serpolet (loved sunning himself), Félimare (tiger-striped), Soumise (submissive), Lucifer (jet black), Ludovic le Cruel (rat-killer), Ludoviska (rat-killer’s Polish mistress), Mimi-Paillon (straw angora), Mounard le Fougueux (quarrelsome), Perruque (Racan’s wig) and Gavroche (gastro-angora).
Many eminent French politicians have been forgotten in the mists of time but not Richelieu. Everyone knows Richelieu. Why is this?
Statue in Place Richelieu, Amboise.
Odds are the good folk of Amboise who pause in front of his statue in Place Richelieu remember Vincent Price playing him as a villain nursing cats in the 1948 film The Three Musketeers; Charlton Heston played Richelieu in the 1973 film of that name; Monty Python's Flying Circus hilarious ‘Court Scene with Cardinal Richelieu’ played by Michael Palin.
The Flying Circus Gang summed Richelieu up in a nutshell.
Cardinal, would it be fair to say that you not only built up the centralized monarchy in France but also perpetuated the religious schism in Europe?
CARDINAL: (modesty) That's what they say.
Did you persecute the Huguenots?
CARDINAL: Oui.
And did you take even sterner measures against the great Catholic nobles who made common cause with foreign foes in defence of their feudal independence?
CARDINAL: I sure did that thing.
Richelieu’s biggest fear was to be forgotten. Thanks to pop culture he won’t be. The Internet Movie Database lists almost a hundred Films and TV programmes featuring him.
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art), Photography by Mark.
Pamela-Shields.com
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