erests_ as paramount to all other duties, human or divine,
that while their whole life is a series of oppression, of troubles, of
deceit, and of cruelty, their _state-conscience_ finds nothing to
reproach itself with. Of any other conscience it seems absolutely
necessary that they should be divested. Richelieu, on his death-bed,
made a solemn protestation, appealing to the last judge of man, who was
about to pronounce his sentence, that he never proposed anything but for
the good of religion and the state; that is, the Catholic religion and
his own administration. When Louis the Thirteenth, who visited him in
his last moments, took from the hand of an attendant a plate with two
yolks of eggs, that the King of France might himself serve his expiring
minister, Richelieu died in all the self-delusion of a great minister.

The sinister means he practised, and the political deceptions he
contrived, do not yield in subtilty to the dark grandeur of his
ministerial character. It appears that, at a critical moment, when he
felt the king's favour was wavering, he secretly ordered a battle to be
lost by the French, to determine the king at once not to give up a
minister who, he knew, was the only man who could extricate him out of
this new difficulty. In our great civil war, this minister pretended to
Charles the First that he was attempting to win the parliament over to
him, while he was backing their most secret projects against Charles.
When a French ambassador addressed the parliament as an independent
power, after the king had broken with it, Charles, sensibly affected,
remonstrated with the French court; the minister disavowed the whole
proceeding, and instantly recalled the ambassador, while at the very
moment his secret agents were, to their best, embroiling the affairs of
both parties.[218] The object of Richelieu was to weaken the English
monarchy, so as to busy itself at home, and prevent its fleets and its
armies thwarting his projects on the Continent, lest England, jealous of
the greatness of France, should declare itself for Spain the moment it
had recovered its own tranquillity. This is a stratagem too ordinary
with great ministers, those plagues of the earth, who, with their
state-reasons, are for cutting as many throats as God pleases among
every other nation.[219]

A fragment of the secret history of this great minister may be gathered
from that of some of his confidential agents. One exposes an invention
of th