Louis XIII, the Just

4. ROYAL MARRIAGE AND COUP D'ETAT

ROYAL MARRIAGE AND COUP D'ETAT y 1615, Louis XIII was marked for life as a highly emotional person with strong principles. He also had a worrisome tendency to seek out someone to lean on. And he had difficulty expressing differences with others, resorting instead to studied silence and occasional, sharply worded retorts. This royal teenager was not ideally equipped to handle his ambiguous position as a formal head of state who was under the control of a strong-willed mother. There was bound to be inner torment and eventually an open explosion as the king approached manhood. Nevertheless, Louis's rites of passage to personal and royal adulthood were more hair-raising than any novelist could invent: a wedding-night humiliation on 28 November 1615; and hesitant plotting with friends that sent his mother's Italian favorite to a violent death on 24 April 1617 and herself into political exile shortly after. The former event set the tone for an unhappy life, torn between personal inadequacy and the principle of doing right. The latter experience inaugurated a public reign of principled severity, so violent that we recoil in disbelief; yet ironically, the exile and murder made the king's reputation as Louis the Just. For those readers raised on Alexandre Dumas's picture of an adult Louis XIII bereft of will and wit, it will take some persuasion to show how the teenage king, however principled, could challenge his mother and her favorite before he was sixteen years of age. Even for those specialists of the reign who know Louis XIII had both wit 79 4 B 80 Louis the ]ust Comes of Age and will, there remains some mystery in that act, for what fifteenyear -old in any age or place has done such a thing? To show how it came to pass, we need to look first at the king's life during his early majority years, then examine the unfolding of the nuptial experience , and finally turn to the setting for the events of 1617. At the conclusion of the Estates General in February 1615, the youthful monarch told his subjects that "he was a major in relationship to everyone and everything except the queen, his mother."1 Marie, misled by her son's external behavior and her own desire to wield power, believed him. The boy had crushes on the most unassuming males at court, surely not the sign of a great future ruler. And he carried his childhood preoccupation with mechanical trades into his teens: making omelets (they became famous), devising special desserts, casting toy cannon, shoeing horses, and building miniature forts. These activities seemed the mark of someone who felt secure only in foolproof and trivial pursuits. Even the Venetian envoy, hopeful of anti-Habsburg and antipapal tendencies in the king, wrote resignedly: "He would promise much ifonly his education had been better, and his mind more inclined to serious things."2 But the royal pursuits were not so trivial, and Louis's commitments were serious. This was true especially of his friendships. Conde feared that the king would become the tool of a nonentity or coquette, but it did not enter his head that the monarch could use the crutch of a friendship to realize his own political goals. Marie was even less astute, reportedly devising the strategy of surrounding him with persons of "mediocre capacity and little spirit."3 Among these was the man who would help Louis overthrow his mother and her favorite. His name was Charles d'Albert, sieur de Luynes. (See plate 6.) Stories circulated that Luynes and his two younger brothers shared the same best suit, and that a hare could quickly jump across their family lands. Yet they were of the same lesser nobility that had predominated at the Estates General. Henry TV's friendship for Luynes's father, a soldier of fortune, caused him to place the younger Luynes among the dauphin Louis's noble comrades. The gentilhomme began to look after the heir's birds of prey; and the young boy's fondness for the gentle, handsome, and supportive .middle-aged man grew.4 By the end of 1614, Louis's attachment was so strong that it bothered Queen Mother Marie, her Italian favorite, Concini, and the Royal Marriage and Coup d'Etat 81 king's former governor, Souvre. YetLuynes remained in Louis's favor and his brothers also gained easy access...