07] Despicable, indeed, were such alleged
terrors from the lips of the Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu--the first
minister of one of the first sovereigns of Europe. What had he to fear
from a powerless and impoverished Princess, whose misfortunes had
already endured a sufficient time to outweary her foreign protectors; to
subdue the hopes, and to exhaust the energies of her former adherents;
and to reduce her to an insignificance of which, as her present measures
sufficiently evinced, she had herself become despairingly conscious?
Even had Louis XIII at this moment been possessed of sufficient right
feeling and moral energy to remember that it was the dignity of a mother
which he had so long sacrificed to the ambition of a minister--that it
was the widow of the great monarch who had bequeathed to him a crown
whom he ruthlesssly persecuted in order to further the fortunes of an
ambitious ingrate--all these trivial hindrances might have been thrust
aside at once; but the egotistical and timid temperament of the French
King deadened the finer impulses of honour and of nature; and he still
suffered himself to be governed, where he should have asserted his
highest and his holiest prerogative.

It is impossible to contemplate without astonishment so extraordinary an
anomaly as that which was presented by the King, the Queen-mother, and
the Cardinal de Richelieu at this particular period. An obscure priest,
elevated by the favour of a powerful Princess to the highest offices in
the realm, after having reduced his benefactress to the necessity of
humbling herself before him, and so unreservedly acknowledging his
supremacy as to ask, as the only condition of his forgiveness, that he
would do her the favour to believe in the sincerity of her
professions.--The widow of Henry the Great, the mother of the King of
France, and of the Queens of Spain and England, in danger of wearing out
her age in exile, because Armand Jean du Plessis, the younger son of a
petty noble of Poitou, who once considered himself the most fortunate of
mortals in obtaining the bishopric of Lucon, feared that his
unprecedented power might be shaken should his first friend and
patroness be once more united to her son, and restored to the privileges
of her rank.--And, finally, a sovereign, who, while in his better
moments he felt all the enormity of his conduct towards the author of
his being, now fast sinking under the combined weight of years and
suffering, was yet