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...endures today. Abroad, his military and diplomatic machinations helped ensure the continued existence of a weakened, fragmented Europe, soon to be dominated by France. The Cardinal also devised, as Historian O'Connell relates in this clear and remarkably sympathetic study, a code of royal morality to stiffen Louis XIII's spine and soothe his own (in O'Connell's view) active conscience. To protect his subjects, Richelieu lectured Louis, a sovereign must first protect the state. When the state is threatened, the first consideration is not to ensure justice but to remove the threat. Sadly...
...bishopric through family connections, at the age of 21, he used his clerical rank and tiny diocese as a steppingstone to power. He maneuvered for years to become First Minister of France, and in his early days was even party to Marie de Medici in her conspiracies against Louis XIII, who at that time seemed hostile as well as inadequate as a potential ruler of France...
...iron churchman died in 1642, at the age of 57. He reminded Louis XIII, who visited his deathbed, that he was leaving France "in the highest degree of glory and of reputation which it has ever had, and all your enemies beaten and humiliated." Then he asked the King to appoint the Italian papal diplomat Mazarin his successor as First Minister. Louis, O'Connell believes, probably never liked Richelieu. Almost no one did. But the King fed the dying Cardinal two egg yolks with his own hand. A few hours after the Cardinal's death, Louis told Mazarin...
...rector of St. Charles, Patrick Garvey, remembered today as a "stern, quarrelsome but good-looking man," concealed his picture under the bed. The most elaborately composed portrait, that of Monsignor Hugh Henry, shows a genuine figure of strength and integrity, yet strangely mocked by a grinning image of Leo XIII in the background. Conversely, an expression of utmost anguish mitigates the authority suggested by the splendrous vestments of Monsignor James Loughlin...
...seems a storybook prince. Wavy-haired, tall (6 ft. 3 in.) and athletically built at 200 lbs., he is married to a beautiful princess who has borne him three handsome children. Through his veins courses the bluest of Europe's noble blood. He is the grandson of Alfonso XIII, Spain's last ruling king, the great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, and a direct descendant of Louis XVI, France's last Bourbon monarch...