hless to
their engagements: it was during the siege of Rochelle, when the national
feeling would not admit of war being made on the French Huguenots. All
the forces of Protestantism readily united against Spain; Richelieu had
but to direct them. She, in fact, was the great enemy, and her
humiliation was always the ultimate aim of the cardinal's foreign policy;
the struggle, power to power, between France and Spain, explains, during
that period, nearly all the political and military complications in
Europe. There was no lack of pretexts for bringing it on. The first was
the question of the Valteline, a lovely and fertile valley, which,
extending from the Lake of Como to the Tyrol, thus serves as a natural
communication between Italy and Germany. Possessed but lately, as it
was, by the Grey Leagues of the Protestant Swiss, the Valteline, a
Catholic district, had revolted at the instigation of Spain in 1620; the
emperor, Savoy, and Spain had wanted to divide the spoil between them;
when France, the old ally of the Grisons, had interfered, and, in 1623,
the forts of the Valteline had been intrusted on deposit to the pope,
Urban VIII. He still retained them in 1624, when the Grison lords,
seconded by a French re-enforcement under the orders of the Marquis of
Ceeuvres, attacked the feeble garrison of the Valteline; in a few days
they were masters of all the places in the canton; the pope sent his
nephew, Cardinal Barberini, to Paris to complain of French aggression,
and with a proposal to take the sovereignty of the Valteline from the
Grisons; that was, to give it to Spain. "Besides," said Cardinal
Richelieu, "the precedent and consequences of it would be perilous for
kings in whose dominions it hath pleased God to permit diversity of
religion." The legate could obtain nothing. The Assembly of Notables,
convoked by Richelieu in 1625, approved of the king's conduct, and war
was resolved upon. The siege of La Rochelle retarded it for two years;
Richelieu wanted to have his hands free; he concluded a specious peace
with Spain, and the Valteline remained for the time being in the hands of
the Grisons, who were one day themselves to drive the French out of it.
Whilst the cardinal was holding La Rochelle besieged, the Duke of Mantua
had died in Italy, and his natural heir, Charles di Gonzaga, who was
settled in France with the title of Duke of Nevers, had hastened to put
himself in possession of his dominions. Meanwhile th