Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics

by Aldous Huxley

By the end of the summer, most of the old in La Rochelle and most of the very young were already dead, and the men and women in their prime were dying every day by scores and, as the autumn advanced, hundreds.

merged in the phantasmagoria of delirium.

when the town at last surrendered,

he was well enough to follow the victorious troops and to assist the Cardinal at the solemn mass, now celebrated for the first time for more than fifty years, in the Cathedral.

the king offered the honour of becoming the town’s first bishop.

The Capuchin declined.

the abominable Turk.

His reward was the loss to France, by emigration, of a large number of its most productive citizens.

He knew that an orthodoxy accepted under duress will save no souls, and he was therefore opposed to forced conversions.

The true faith, he believed, should be propagated by missionaries, not dragoons.

Evil is contagious;

the Civil War, Charles’s execution and Cromwell’s tyranny were due, at least in part, to an infection brought over from war-fevered Germany.

To the Emperor Ferdinand, the situation seemed threatening – so threatening that, in order to meet it, he was induced to give Wallenstein authority to raise and command a great imperial army.

In this way a new instrument of tyranny and oppression was forged, an instrument that was destined to inflict incalculable miseries upon the German people.

The result, as time was to show, was that Richelieu’s position was greatly improved, while that of the Hapsburgs was correspondingly weakened.

The victory at La Rochelle united France and closed a breach through which hostile powers might intervene in the country’s internal affairs;

the defeat at Stralsund left the Baltic coast open to invasio...

but at the same time it had come near enough to victory to frighten the Northern Protestants into a more determined resistance to the...

he issued the Edict of Restitution, which claimed for the Roman Church all lands which had been ecclesiastical property before 1552.

The prospect of losing more than a hundred and fifty rich bishoprics united the Protestant princes of the North, while the prospect of being persecuted by the Jesuits united their peoples in a stand against what they regarded as naked religious and political aggression.

leaving a will by which he bequeathed his duchy to Father Joseph’s old friend, Charles Palaeologus Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers.

We may wish sincerely to avoid the crimes and follies of past generations; but at the same time we wish to live that natural life which (along with its quota of goodness and beauty) produces the very crimes and follies we wish to avoid. That is why, to all but the saints, who anyhow have no need of them, the lessons of history are totally unavailing.

spring and summer of 1629 crushing out the political power of the Huguenots of Provence and Languedoc.

was a savage campaign, with much slaughtering of the inhabitants of captured cities, much hanging of rebels, much condemning of men to slavery in the galleys.

Mainly because of her personal grudge against the Cardinal, but also because she believed in a specifically Catholic foreign policy, a policy of collaboration with the Hapsburgs in the extermination of heresy,

the three great Catholic powers, France, Spain and Austria.

seeing the disastrous consequences of his good intentions,

for both had proposed the employment of means, whose consequences could never be the improvement of the existing state of things.

Between his mother and the Cardinal, Louis XIII vacillated in an agony of uncertainty.

rancorous and obstinately stupid.

Ever since his unhappy childhood, the King hated and feared her, but always with a guilty sense that he ought to love her and listen to what she said.

whether to accompany his armies into Italy, or to stay at home.

Richelieu had to set forth, yet once more, his reasons for going on with the war in Italy.

instead of collaborating with France, England had gone to war on behalf of the Huguenots.

Having thus secured his flank, Gustavus was now free to invade Germany

a plan which he had long been meditating, partly for religious reasons (for he was an ardent Protestant who regarded the Hapsburgs’ Counter-Reformation as diabolic), and partly because he was ambitious to transform the Baltic into a Swedish lake.

invade Germany, beat the imperialists, but respect the rights of the Catholic princes.

Gustavus, who had no wish to respect Catholics, rejected the offer;

knowing very well that the Swedish King would sooner or later be forced by mere poverty to accept his terms.

Ferdinand had summoned an imperial Diet to meet at Ratisbon.

His intention was to persuade the seven Electors of the Empire to appoint his son King of the Romans, a title which would officially consecrate him as his...

but in fact to make trouble between the Emperor and the Electors.

but the real representative of France, as everyone knew, was the humble Capuchin who accompanied him on his mission.

to discuss the delicate and, for seventeenth-century noblemen, infinitely important question of precedence;

In the background, meanwhile, conspicuously grey and tattered in the midst of so much crimson velvet, so much lace and jewellery, stands the Capuchin, his bare horny feet sunk in the dust.

Wallenstein was as keen to smash the infidels as St Louis had been, albeit, as Father Joseph came little by little to discover, not for quite the same reasons.

Crusading, for Wallenstein, was merely an excuse for the Drang nach Osten. That he talked of his vast projects in terms of the Cross and Crescent was merely a historical accident and a matter of convenience.

Such an empire could be ruled either by the Hapsburgs, with himself, Albrecht von Wallenstein, as their generalissimo and mayor of the palace,

by Albrecht von Wallenstein himself, ruling in his own name,

and with the same astonishing frankness Wallenstein declared himself entirely opposed to the Hapsburg policy in Italy.