Louis XIII

Louis XIII (born September 27, 1601, Fontainebleau, France—died May 14, 1643, Saint-Germain-en-Laye) was the king of France from 1610 to 1643, who cooperated closely with his chief minister, the Cardinal de Richelieu, to make France a leading European power.

The eldest son of King Henry IV and Marie de Médicis, Louis succeeded to the throne upon the assassination of his father in May 1610. The queen mother was regent until Louis came of age in 1614, but she continued to govern for three years thereafter. As part of her policy of allying France with Spain, she arranged the marriage (November 1615) between Louis and Anne of Austria, daughter of the Spanish king Philip III. By 1617 the king, resentful at being excluded from power, had taken as his favourite the ambitious Charles d’Albert de Luynes, who soon became the dominant figure in the government. Louis exiled his mother to Blois, and in 1619–20 she raised two unsuccessful rebellions. Although Richelieu (not yet a cardinal), her principal adviser, reconciled her to Louis in August 1620, the relationship between the king and his mother remained one of thinly disguised hostility.

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At the time of Luynes’s death (December 1621) Louis was faced with a Huguenot rebellion in southern France. He took to the field in the spring of 1622 and captured several Huguenot strongholds before concluding a truce with the insurgents in October. Meanwhile, in September Richelieu had become a cardinal. Louis still distrusted Richelieu for his past association with Marie de Médicis, but he began to rely on the cardinal’s political judgment. In 1624 he made Richelieu his principal minister.

Although Louis had displayed courage on the battlefield, his mental instability and chronic ill health undermined his capacity for sustained concentration on affairs of state. Hence Richelieu quickly became the dominant influence in the government, seeking to consolidate royal authority in France and break the hegemony of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. Immediately after the capture of the Huguenot rebel stronghold of La Rochelle in October 1628, Richelieu convinced the king to lead an army into Italy (1629); but his campaign increased tensions between France and the Habsburgs, who were fighting the Protestant powers in the Thirty Years’ War. Soon the pro-Spanish Catholic zealots led by Marie de Médicis began appealing to Louis to reject Richelieu’s policy of supporting the Protestant states. During the dramatic episode known as the Day of the Dupes (November 10–12, 1630), the queen mother demanded that Louis dismiss Richelieu. After some hesitation, the king decided to stand by his minister; Marie de Médicis and Gaston, duc d’Orléans, Louis’s rebellious brother, withdrew into exile. Thereafter Louis adopted the cardinal’s merciless methods in dealing with dissident nobles.

In May 1635 France declared war on Spain; and by August 1636 Spanish forces were advancing on Paris. Richelieu recommended evacuation of the city; but Louis, in a surprising display of boldness, overruled him. The king rallied his troops and drove back the invaders. Late in 1638 he suffered a crisis of conscience over his alliances with the Protestant powers, but Richelieu managed to overcome his doubts. Meanwhile, Anne of Austria, who had long been treated with disdain by her husband, had given birth (September 1638) to their first child, the dauphin Louis (the future Louis XIV).

In 1642 Louis’s young favourite, the marquis de Cinq-Mars, instigated the last major conspiracy of the reign by plotting with the Spanish court to overthrow Richelieu; revelation of Cinq-Mars’s treason made Louis more dependent than ever on the cardinal. By the time Richelieu died in December 1642, substantial victories had been won in the war against the Spaniards, and Louis was respected as one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe. The king succumbed to tuberculosis five months later. He was succeeded by his son Louis XIV.