Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics

by Aldous Huxley

The Emperor and the five Catholic Electors were present in person; the two Protestant Electors had sent only their representatives.

Six years of close association with Richelieu had given him already an international reputation.

Every well-informed person in Europe had heard of the bare-footed friar who had left his convent to become the collaborator of the most astute and, so far as Hapsburg sympathizers were concerned, the most dangerous politician of his century.

Universally known, Father Joseph was almost univer...

At Ratisbon, Father Joseph discovered for the first time what his contemporaries thought of him.

how a Capuchin could reconcile his profession with the framing and execution of policies that resulted, as anyone with eyes in his head could see, in the increase of misery and crime.

Richelieu himself knew very well how important it was for a politician to cover his actions with the prestige of religion and high morality.

Bad men could never do the harm they actually accomplish, unless they were able to induce good men to become, first their dupes, and then their more or less willing, more or less conscious accomplices.

What happens when good men go into power politics in the hope of forcibly shoving humanity into the kingdom of God?

(Sacrilegious are the arms wielded by a sacred hand. When the mitre commands the soldier, it is the soldier who commands the mitre.)

The whole political history of the Church is summed up in those phrases.

Again and again ecclesiastics and pious laymen have become statesmen in the hope of raising politics to their own high moral level, and again and again politics have dragged them down to the low moral level upon which sta...

Father Joseph’s performance at Ratisbon was a miracle of diplomatic virtuosity.

This Father Joseph accomplished more or less successfully by discrediting the people from whom the Emperor had received these warnings.

what His Imperial Majesty was so wisely and benevolently trying to achieve in Germany: the union of a divided country under a single centralized authority.

his heart bled for the unhappy victims of the Emperor’s tyranny.

upstart,

Under the threat of overwhelming force the Electors were no longer free agents; it was the end of that grand old German Constitution, to which His Most Christian Majesty and the Cardinal were so deeply and unshakably attached.

Their only hope lay in acting at once, while the Emperor had need of them to nominate his son King of the Romans.

Let them refuse even to discuss the question so long as Wallenste...

They demanded the dismissal of Wallenstein and a reduction in the size of the imperial army.

A twopenny-halfpenny little princeling at the head of a troop of starving barbarians.

feeling that Wallenstein was a moderate price to pay for his son’s election, Ferdinand consented to dismiss his general. In

Wallenstein accepted the advice, which was in accord with what his horoscopists (Johann Kepler at their head) had discovered in the stars.

and with him were dismissed eighteen thousand cavalry and not less than twice that number of foot soldiers.

Merely by talking, Father Joseph had won the equivalent of a maj...

Now that they had weakened the Emperor, they ought quickly to strike again – strike at the most vulnerable chink in the Hapsburg’s armour: the imperial succession.

they could put the fear of God into those tyrants of Vienna and Madrid.

appeal to His Most Christian Majesty; all the resources of France would be at their disposal. This was the moment for Their Highnesses to assert themselves, to remind these Hapsburgs that they were Emperors, not by hereditary right, but only by the grace of the Electors and the grand old German Constitution.

the Electors voted him down,

Wallenstein and the army had been sacrificed for nothing.

Looking back over the causes of his defeat, Ferdinand perceived, at every turn of the tortuous diplomatic road, a grey-cowled figure, hurrying in silence through the shadows. To his ministers, the Emperor ruefully admi...

Meanwhile, however, the war of negotiation had been going badly for Father Joseph on some of the other diplomatic fronts,

Richelieu’s situation during these last days of September was like that of a man suspended over a precipice by a rope whose fibres, one by one, are snapping under his weight.

If the King died, he was infallibly lost.

Gaston, who would succeed his childless brother as King, detested the Cardinal; so did the Queen-Mother; so did the great magnates whose power he had...

deal with Richelieu as Concini had been dealt with, thirteen years before.

Remembering that eviscerated carcass hanging by the heels from the gibbet of the Pont Neuf, the Cardinal made plans to flee for safety to the papal city of Avignon.

The King was out of immediate danger, but he was still a sick man, and at his bedside sat the Queen-Mother and Anne of Austria.

His secret mission, which was to drive a wedge between the Emperor and the Electors, had been accomplished;

but there was also an ostensible mission, which was to come to terms over the question of Mantua.

It was a policy of delay and evasion, deliberately framed to prolong the struggle between the Hapsburgs and France and her allies.

Such a policy could be pursued only on condition that Richelieu remained sufficiently powerful at home to override popular and aristocratic opposition to the war.

To Father Joseph, at Ratisbon, it seemed clear that the only hope for Richelieu lay in regaining popularity and conciliating the great nobles.

But there was only one way for the Cardinal to regain popularity and conciliate the great nobles, and that was through an immediate reversal of his foreign policy.

acting on his own responsibility, he instructed Brulart to sign a document which provided for a general settlement of Franco-Austrian differences.

Ferdinand gleefully reflected that he had succeeded in pulling out of that grey Franciscan hood political advantages which far outweighed the six electoral bonnets which the friar had so recently stuffed into it.

But the Emperor’s triumph was short-lived.

Next day a copy of the treaty was brought to Richelieu at Roanne. He read it; then angrily tore it up.

The ambassadors had exceeded their instructions, he said; the treaty would not be ratified.