Stray Pearls | Page 2

to secure greater
equality of burthens. On the meeting of the States-General--the only
popular assembly possessed by France--Louis XIII., however, after
hearing the complaints, and promising to consider them, shut the doors
against the deputies, made no further answer, and dismissed them to
their houses without the slightest redress. The Assembly was never to
meet again till the day of reckoning for all, a hundred and seventy years
later.

Under the mighty hand of Cardinal Richelieu the nobles were still more
effectually crushed, and the great course of foreign war begun, which
lasted, with short intervals, for a century. The great man died, and so
did his feeble master; and his policy, both at home and abroad, was
inherited by his pupil Giulio Mazarini, while the regency for the child,
Louis XIV., devolved on his mother, Anne of Austria--a pious and
well-meaning, but proud and ignorant, Spanish Princess--who pinned
her faith upon Mazarin with helpless and exclusive devotion, believing
him the only pilot who could steer her vessel through troublous waters.
But what France had ill brooked from the high-handed son of her
ancient nobility was intolerable from a low-born Italian, of graceful but
insinuating manners. Moreover, the war increased the burthens of the
country, and, in the minority of the King, a stand was made at last.
The last semblance of popular institutions existed in the Parliaments of
this was the old feudal Council of the Counts of Paris, consisting of the
temporal and spiritual peers of the original county, who had the right to
advise with their chief, and to try the causes concerning themselves.
The immediate vassals of the King had a right to sit there, and were
called Paris De France, in distinction from the other nobles who only
had seats in the Parliament in whose province their lands might lie. To
these St. Louis, in his anxiety to repress lawlessness, had added a
certain number of trained lawyers and magistrates; and these were the
working members of these Parliaments, which were in general merely
courts of justice for civil and criminal causes. The nobles only attended
on occasions of unusual interest. Moreover, a law or edict of the King
became valid on being registered by a Parliament. It was a moot
question whether the Parliament had the power to baffle the King by
refusing to register an edict, and Henry IV. had avoided a refusal from
the Parliament of Paris, by getting his edict of toleration for the
Huguenots registered at Nantes.
The peculiarly oppressive house-tax, with four more imposts proposed
in 1648, gave the Parliament of Paris the opportunity of trying to make
an effectual resistance by refusing the registration. They were backed
by the municipal government of the city at the Hotel de Ville, and
encouraged by the Coadjutor of the infirm old Archbishop of Paris,
namely, his nephew, Paul de Gondi, titular Bishop of Corinth in
partibus infidelium, a younger son of the Duke of Retz, an Italian

family introduced by Catherince de Medici. There seemed to be a hope
that the nobility, angered at their own systematic depression, and by
Mazarin's ascendency, might make common cause with the Parliament
and establish some effectual check to the advances of the Crown. This
was the origin of the party called the Fronde, because the speakers
launched their speeches at one another as boys fling stones from a sling
(fronde) in the streets.
The Queen-Regent was enraged through all her despotic Spanish
haughtiness at such resistance. She tried to step in by the arrest of the
foremost members of the Opposition, but failed, and only provoked
violent tumults. The young Prince of Conde, coming home from
Germany flushed with victory, hated Mazarin extremely, but his pride
as a Prince of the Blood, and his private animosities impelled him to
take up the cause of the Queen. She conveyed her son secretly from
Paris, and the city was in a state of siege for several months. However,
the execution of Charles I. in England alarmed the Queen on the one
hand, and the Parliament on the other as to the consequences of a
rebellion, provisions began to run short, and a vague hollow peace was
made in the March of 1649.
Conde now became intolerably overbearing, insulted every one, and so
much offended the Queen and Mazarin that they caused him, his
brother, and the Duke of Bouillon, to be arrested and imprisoned at
Vincennes. His wife, though a cruelly-neglected woman whom he had
never loved, did her utmost to deliver him, repaired to Bordeaux, and
gained over the Parliament there, so that she held out four months
against the Queen. Turenne, brother to Bouillon, and as great a general
as Conde, obtained the aid of Spaniards, and the Coadjutor prevailed on
the King's uncle, Gaston, Duke