The Frontier

(September 9, 1642)

Richelieu, the Cardinal, was growing old, his work was nearly accomplished. It was the recovery of the frontiers, and on the south those limits were the Pyrenees.

The long process of the hotch-potch of popular movement and feeling over fifteen hundred years had blurred the outline of Gaul. It was his business to restore an exact shape and a true wall to the inheritance of the kings—“The Square Field.”

To the east the thing had never been possible, and perhaps never will be. The Rhine stood clearly before all eyes. The Rhine could be reached, but never made a final decision. Reached, it must be crossed; but reached at one point it could not be reached in all. There would ever be a struggle in those march lands. It is a struggle woefully present to us to-day. Elsewhere the sea, the Alps, made definite boundaries. There remained the Pyrenees.

But until this time the Pyrenees had not been attained. The tide of Gallic power had overflowed them, and again had ebbed; and those confused and noble valleys held races which overspread the crest, and none of which had felt themselves at heart to be either of the northern or of the southern land; neither of the pastures and the rivers and the woods of Gascony, nor of the hard and burnt Iberian rock and dust. Richelieu desired that crest and those limits, and that long mountain boundary against the sky.

Where that singular straight line of division, the most unbroken wall in Europe, reaches the Mediterranean, the Catalonian people and their language held all the passes and spread to the north and to the south, one nation—or at least one race. These, so early as Charlemagne, had been the march of the Ebro, and Barcelona, the great port, had remained the capital of one countryside. But in the darkness after the death of Charlemagne no man could tell you whether its fate would fall to the north or to the south. It acquired an independence which at first was feudal, and might later well have been national, as that of Portugal became, as that which little Andorra still holds in its fantastic isolated cup. Through the Middle Ages the thing had swung now to the French, now to the Spaniards, but still was Catalan: one thing. The genius of Richelieu, to the disadvantage of that entity, to the advantage of his sovereign, was to divide it by the crest of the Pyrenees, and to push the writ of Paris up to that sombre line where the peaks go down in lessening but rugged summits, and lose themselves in the salt—diminishing to mere rocks at last. For Richelieu had determined, not that all the Catalonian land, but only this province—this northern province of it, the Roussillon, hither of the Pyrenees—should be French; the rest he would leave to Spain.

He played for the furtherance of this end upon a spirit which he flattered and nourished, but did not fulfil—the spirit of Catalan independence.

The great Spanish monarchy, almost the master of the world, had, in the century before, firmly established itself over the whole Peninsula, suppressing local liberties, centralizing, despotic. Against that awful monarchy, against its symbol, the angry Catalans had risen; and, supporting that rising in the enormous duel between the house of Spain and the house of France, Richelieu had permitted the rebels to elect his master their Count.

On January 23, 1641, following upon treaties of alliance between the Catalan rebels and the French Crown, Louis XIII. was admitted Count of Barcelona, monarch of all that country on either side of the hills. But the game which Richelieu played had not Barcelona for its stakes; he was gambling for the Roussillon only, and for Perpignan.

All the strength of Castille, all the men Spain could spare from the universal war, were poured into the defence of Perpignan, and La Rena was sent as governor to hold that northern bastion, and prevent the French advance to the Pyrenees.

The town lies sloping downwards westward from its citadel. It stands in a sheet of vineyards; a plain having to the east, solemnly dominating it, all the huge mass of the Canigou. La Rena held it strongly. He would quarter his soldiers upon the townsmen. They resisted. He turned his guns from the citadel upon the burghers, and they surrendered, but not before nearly six hundred of their houses had been ruined by the fire. They had attempted a truce; the bishop had gone up to the citadel with the Sacrament in a procession. They obtained no truce; goods were looted, gallows were raised in the market-place, and Olivares, the great minister of the Spanish king, was supreme.

So Perpignan was held in that summer of 1641 for Spain.

The plain around was flooded with the French. South, north, east, west of the city their eight thousand infantry, their two regiments of cavalry, garrisoned the villages and towns, until at last, by the end of the year, Perpignan itself was blockaded, and before any siege lines were formed a famine had begun. In that winter, in the January of 1642, the struggle opened between the two powers. Brézé, coming to Catalonia as the Viceroy of Louis XIII., sat down before Perpignan; but he could not quite cut off relief—some wheat got in before the end of the month. From Castille no further troops could come in relief. Still the French flooded on, La Meilleraye at their head; and with him, second in command, a name that was to be more than famous—Turenne.

By April the last of the small desperate Spanish garrisons in the neighbourhood of Collioure had surrendered, but Perpignan still held.

All France seemed to be pressing on to that one point. The Cardinal himself took the long journey, fell ill, and stopped at Narbonne. His master, the king, Louis XIII., went forward, and on the 23rd May took up his station in the farm which used to be called the Mas of John Pauques, which is still known to-day as the King’s Farm; near St. Stevens, looking upon the city.

By this time all Europe looked on.

The cavalry of the guard was there: Enghien, Polignac, Cinq-Mars, Schomberg—all the great names; and the musketeers of the Cardinal were there as well. Nearly thirty thousand men stood thus before the walls, which had become the test of whether the government of Paris should or should not come up to the Pyrenees.

Behind those walls, unsuccoured, the last veterans of the Thirty Years’ War—not three thousand of them, and of these but a nucleus Castillian—still held. They were the men whom all Europe had learnt to regard as masters, but the odds were too great. They could stand one to ten, even famished, behind a formidable trench and wall, but as they stood they died of the fever and of the famine.

As the heat grew, and as the grapes began to show their first clusters in the great sweep of vineyards under that mound which watched the drama from the west, the two captains, Avila and Cavabro, refused to treat. The citizens had been made their slaves. The citadel was their vantage ground, and from it a ceaseless pillage ruined the town. If ever the moral force of civilians counts in war, it was here accumulated against the fierce and terrible captains of Castille, as strong as iron in pride, but now doomed.

Every animal in the place was eaten. The citizens were thrown back upon the rooks and the rats; the wounded in the hospital ate the straw of their beds, and men were seen in the streets of the city gathering the weeds of the wayside.

The captains of Philip IV. still held.

He made a desperate effort at relief. He drove the French from Barcelona; but he could not find more men, harassed as he was all over Europe, for that one essential point of Perpignan. A little body came up under Torrecusa; La Mothe-Houdancourt held it off beyond the hills.

It was the height of summer, and under the burning sun the ill fortune of the Spanish star saw to it that, as a last resort, a fleet attempting a diversion by the coast should have a tempest raised against it and should fly to the Balearics.

Then it was at last that Avila despaired. But even then he could not sign a capitulation. He signed only a document by which he pledged himself to surrender if no help should come before a date which was discussed by the starving men and fixed at last upon the 9th of September. The 9th of September came; no succour had arrived. The gates were opened, the keys delivered, and the play was done.

The Castillians had demanded and obtained the honours of war. The French in two ranks saw passing between them the haggard remnant of all this heroism, still attempting some severity of demeanour. A generous instinct had moved the French command to see that none of the Catalans, none of the town folk in their hatred of the Spanish garrison, should be seen. It was the northern soldiers of Louis XIII. who held them back as the tiny garrison marched out, concealing its weakness under a mask of order and of discipline.

Their officers saluted the French flag, and at their head Avila rode one of the last horses. The ceremony was over; the Castillians, not prisoners, were outside the lines.

Avila dismounted, knelt upon the ground, looked south towards Spain and to the arms of Spain upon the gate. His eyes were full of tears. As he knelt he raised his right hand towards the town, and made a great sign of the Cross against the sky, so bidding it farewell for ever.

It was by the Canet Gate that these few heroes went forth after the last effort for their king. It was by the Gate of Elne that there marched in at the same moment the fresh, the well-fed, strong-bodied northern Frenchmen, six thousand strong, and behind them an immense train of wagons, filled with wheat, barley, oats, bread ready-baked, bacon and fresh meat—food for a year.

In the Cathedral of St. John the Archbishop of Narbonne and the Bishops of Nîmes and Albi, crowded around by the enthusiastic men of the Catalans, sang the Te Deum. But far off in the Escorial, Olivares, having heard the news, leant for the moment against the stone wall, and the palm of his left hand pressed upon it, and then moved towards the little room where the king was still reading and signing his papers.

He fell upon his knees and wept, and said that it was time that he, Olivares, should, by his own wish, die; and even so, he dared not say the words that would give the reason of his despair. He waited until his master spoke and asked him what so moved him.

“Sire,” said that strong man, sobbing, and still upon his knees, “you have lost Perpignan!”

Then Philip answered in a low voice, but gravely: “We must submit to the will of God.”