Henry VIII. had advised François to cut off Bourbon's head simply
because he was over-powerful for a subject. Richelieu, as it has been
said, was putting down hundreds of petty tyrannies to make one
great one. The nobles of France had lost much power during the
wars of Religion, and a hard strong hand kept them down. Mean-
time, the King left everything to the minister, and amused his weary
hours as best he could. He had set up a friendship with Marie de
Hautefort, a perfectly innocent one, which began when she was only
fourteen, and the King, seeing her looking tired at a sermon, sent her
his own velvet cushion, which she would not accept. They had in-
terminable conversations, sometimes quarrels, and then the King spent
his time in writing out all that had passed till their reconciliation.
Marie was a good and upright woman, beloved by the Queen as well
as the King, and not a breath of scandal ever touched her fair fame,
nor would she surrender herself to be merely an instrument of Richelieu's
influence, but preserved her independence. The King was, according
to his own ideas, and those of the time a religious man, and the
Cardinal had a great man's views of the duties of the Church.
It was
a time, too, when the revival of religion in the Roman Church, which
is known as the anti-reformation, was in full force, and was bearing
fruit of a noble kind. Vincent de Paul, born in 1576, was bred up as
a peasant priest in Gascony, and was then beginning his great works. He
had been in his youth made prisoner by the Barbary pirates, and sold
as a slave. While working in the garden, the Psalms he sung gained
the attention of his mistress, and then of her husband, a renegade.
Vincent brought him back to the faith, and they fled back to France
together.

After serving as a village priest, Vincent was recommended by Cardinal de Berulle as tutor to the sons of the Count de Joigny, of the Gondi family, who had been brought to France by Catherine de Medici, and among the cadets of whose house the Archbishopric of Paris was almost hereditary. The head of the family was "Général des Galères," thus having the disposal of all the hosts of convicts who were employed in the dockyards and vessels of France to supply the moving force now given by steam. Many of those were no criminals, but Huguenot ministers, or persons involved in political offences. Vincent, going with the Count to visit a dockyard, conversed with some of these, and, on hearing the history of one, actually assumed his place, changing clothes with him, putting on his chain, and quietly doing his work, till the family discovered the absence of their tutor, and released him.

The Gondis were good people, and Vincent stirred them to higher views of duty and charity. He found that the poor were terribly neglected, both bodily and spiritually, and he was the first deviser, under stress of circumstances, of most valuable and enduring institutions. The necessity for the want of care of the sick and of orphans he found in the institution of a band of women, taken from all ranks, vowed for

St. Vincent de Paul.

five years at a time to all that was required of nuns except the being CAMEO XX. cloistered. These Sœurs de Charité, or as the original order is now called, Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, began with three poor girls at Châtillon en Bresse, and spread into thirty country places, before they were, through the agency of a rich and excellent widow, Madame Legras, brought to Paris, where the need was terrible.

Louis XIII. took great interest in these Sisters. It is said that their peculiar cap was his device. He was having an interview with some of the Sisters and hearing their plans, when, pointing to one who was remarkably pretty, he said, "But you can never go about like that. You should wear this." And twisting up his napkin into a hood, he threw it at her, and thus originated the headdress under which so many kind faces have looked on suffering ever since.

The Archbishop of Paris-a Gondi-likewise sanctioned the foundation of a college of priests, whence parties might be sent out to hold missions and stir up people and clergy to greater devotion. It seems that it was a common custom to have whole companies of boys and girls together, and dictate their confession in the most formal way before their first Communion. Instruction was a mere form, the priests were often almost as ignorant as the peasants, and there was less opportunity than heretofore of clerical training, since many monasteries had dwindled to nothing, and were mere empty houses with lands which served to give title and income to many an idle abbé about Court. There were, of course, few of the monastic schools that once abounded, and special clerical training was almost unknown, until in 1631 Vincent succeeded in the foundation of the College de Bons Enfans, at Paris, where a band of clergy lived, and gave instruction to ordination candidates on the duties of their office. Afterwards an old hospital for lepers, called the Priory de St. Lazare, was given for this purpose, and became a centre of spiritual blessing to France. Thence clergy were despatched at the request of bishops or priests to hold missions in places where the need was felt; thither priests might resort for retreats, and for special instruction; and every Tuesday conferences were held for the special purpose of enhancing the spirituality and the godliness of the priesthood: and thence there went out every year a great number of young men, freshly ordained, with far higher and stricter ideas of their office than ever before. Other seminaries sprang up in the provinces, and there is no doubt that the French clerical order thus became almost regenerated and with lasting effect. It was true that there continued to be a noxious race of clergy who took Church preferment as an appanage of their rank or the reward of services to the Crown, political or otherwise; but the lower working priesthood was in general devout and excellent, and so continued amid many trials, and among the higher clergy there were a large number of devout and devoted persons. The doors of St. Lazare were further opened to retreats and instruction for laymen

CAMEO XX.

Charities at

Paris.

as well as clergy, and about eight hundred a year came and were aided to fulfil the duties of their several stations as the true servants of God. There really was an appreciable effect upon society, and although terrible scandals existed, especially among the higher nobility, yet many excellent and conscientious persons were thus trained in holiness.

To the professed Sisters of Charity was added, an outer association of Dames de Charité, ladies who, living in their homes and in society, worked in combination with the Sœurs in the care of the poor. Their special business was to attend on the sick in the great hospital of the Hotel Dieu, going in rotation to attend some to their necessities, some to their religious instruction. Many of these Dames de Charité were of the highest rank, Richelieu's favourite niece, Madame de Combalet, being among them. The revival was felt everywhere. It has been mentioned how Mère Angelique, daughter of the great lawyer Antoine Arnauld, had reformed her convent. It was so populous that the house of Port Royal aux Champs thus became perilously crowded, and being in a low, marshy place, illnesses and deaths became so frequent that, through the influence of the Arnauld family, the convent was transferred to a house in the Faubourg St. Jacques, thenceforth known as Port Royal de Paris. It was the place of retreat and edification of one half of the religiously-minded ladies of Paris, as the Convents of the Visitation were of the other half. Perhaps, as became the Cistercian discipline, the Port Royal tone was the more severe. We are told that Mère Angelique objected to a highly decorated ritual as both distracting and irreverent. There was a diamond cross over the high altar, and Mère Angelique found a lady letting her child stand on the altar itself to admire it. She had it sold for the benefit of the poor, and supplied its place with a plain one. Stern asceticism was the spirit of the convent; and when St. François de Sales told her that he thought her rule of life too strict, she replied that she believed so too, and would not have drawn it up for herself, but that, being pledged thereto, she could only carry it out to the best of her ability. There was, as yet, no special theological bias connected with Port Royal, and its vigorous piety and severe obedience were only the outcome of the general stirring of the Church.

His

As it had been with Alexander and with Henry V., when Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden fell by his own rash valour on the field of Lützen, the ring of monarchy lay on a well-nigh empty throne. little daughter, Christina, who was one day to astonish Europe with her vagaries, was not yet seven years old. The Chancellor Oxenstjerna immediately made it known that the same policy was to be observed by Sweden, nor was there any doubt that the victory at Lützen had been complete so far as that the enemy were turned back from Thuringia.

Yet the loss of Gustavus was in itself equivalent to a defeat. Wallenstein called it a victory, and sent the king's elk-skin coat and gold chain to Vienna, where it is said that Ferdinand shed tears at the sight, as he thought of the gallant prince, cut off in his prime, and, according to the narrowest Romanist views, doomed to perdition. A Te Deum was, however, sung at Vienna, and at Madrid there were twelve days of rejoicings, and such an expenditure of wood in bonfires that fuel became so scarce as to call for the interference of the alguazils to check the waste, and an English gentleman had to keep up his fire with the carved and gilt remnants of old coaches, which he bought from the carriage builder who broke them up.

Elizabeth of Bohemia seems to have felt for a little while as if her friendship was as fatal as that of her grandmother; but rallying her spirits she wrote to beg her brother to continue the subsidy paid (or promised) to Gustavus, to her husband, and to use his influence to get Frederick set at the head of the Protestant armies. Charles gratified her by making the proposal to put forward that very incapable person,

САМЕО
XXI.

Death of Frederick. 1632.

who was, moreover, such a Calvinist as to be sure to fall out with the Lutherans. But already Frederick was lying sick unto death at Mentz. He had left Gustavus shortly after the dispute as to the toleration of Lutheranism, he had surveyed part of his ruined domains, and had since visited the Duke of Zweibrucken, in whose lands the plague was raging. Feeling unwell, he returned to Mentz, and there met the news of the death of the King of Sweden. In his despondency he fretted over the stipulations for free worship for the Lutherans, his fever increased, symptoms of the plague showed themselves, and he died on the 23rd of November, 1632, leaving ten surviving of his thirteen children, the eldest living son, Charles Louis, aged fourteen, the youngest, called after the great Gustavus, an infant. Elizabeth, whose tender affection for him had been most warmly returned, was utterly stricken down. She hardly spoke or moved for three days, she long suffered from an intermitting fever, and she never put off the deepest mourning. King Charles wished her to bring her whole family to England, and actually selected ships to bring them over, but she thought she could better look after her son's interests at the Hague. Charles also wished to send Sir Henry Vane to Vienna to request that the young Prince might receive investiture of the County Palatine of the Rhine; but Elizabeth's spirit was too high for this. She said her son's inheritance had been won back by the sword, and she would not have it committed to negotiation. The administration of it was committed to the boy's other uncle, Louis, Duke of Simmeren.

Wallenstein punished his troops for their defeat by hanging seventeen colonels for cowardice, and fastening the names of fifty more officers to the gallows. "Good people," said one of the victims, "here I am about to die for having run away in company with my generalissimo." The Duke likewise deprived his troopers of their carbines, saying that they only fired them and galloped away.

These executions took place at Leipsic, and then he marched off to Bohemia, and spent the winter in recruiting his army, and likewise in an attempt to break up the Protestant League. Bernhard of Saxe Weimar was known to be proposing to make a duchy of Franconia for himself, out of the Bishoprics of Bamberg and Wurtzburg, and this was likely to awaken the jealousy of the Elector of Saxony, always half hearted.

Wallenstein proposed to do away with the Edict of Restitution, to restore part of the Palatinate to young Charles Louis, and to buy off the Swedes by the cession of a few places on the Baltic; but Ferdinand, under the influence of his confessor, Father Lamormati, considered it his duty to yield nothing to the heretics. The Protestant princes therefore met at Heilbronn in April, 1633, and signed a League, drawn up chiefly by Oxenstjerna, by which the circles of Swabia, Franconia, and the Upper and Lower Rhine, united with Sweden, while the friendship of Denmark was secured by the hopes of the hand of the little orphaned Queen for the Crown Prince.