been serving. He now assured Stanhope that the mutual design of Austria and Spain was nothing loss than the utter extirpation of protestantism, and that the king of Spain had declared that for that object he would willingly sell his last shirt.
All the time that this contemptible man was making these revelations, which no doubt were as much exaggerated as his former ones, he presented the most singular contrast to his former haughty pomposity. He was now all creeping humility, and continually burst into tears.
It was not likely that the Spanish government would allow the fallen minister, especially having discovered the falseness of his nature, to remain long in the house of the English ambassador. They sent to demand him of Stanhope, but he refused to give him up, and warned them to beware how they violated in his person the rights of an ambassador and the law of nations. After some further expostulation, however, an alcalde de corle, accompanied by an armed force, came and took him away. Stanhope protested against the act, and sent home Mr. Keene, the consul, with a report of it, and of Ripperda's revelations. Ripperda himself was commited close prisoner to the castle of Segovia.
A revolution of a similar character took place in France within a month of the fall of Ripperda in Spain. The duke of Bourbon had exhibited a gross incapacity for governing France under the young king. He was wholly in the hands of Madame de Prie and her creature, Paris Duverney. At the same time he displayed the most unconquerable jealousy of the proximity of any abler mind. Such a mind, however, was and had long been on the spot, and silently preparing the way for its ascendancy. Bishop—afterwards cardinal—Fleury had, under the regency, been the preceptor to the young monarch, and had by his virtues and amiability excited a powerful attachment towards him in the mind of his pupil. Louis XIV. had made him bishop of Frejus; but Fleury, conscious of his diplomatic powers, received the gift as a sentence of exile, and once signed a jocose letter to cardinal Quirini, "Fleury, bishop of Frejus, by divine indignation." Still, he had conscientiously discharged his duties there, and had won such a general admiration and regard by his wise and benevolent conduct, as pointed him out to the dying monarch as the most fitting preceptor to his grandson and successor. During the regency Fleury conducted himself with such tact and sagacity as to draw no envious observation of his talents from the regent or Dubois. Such was the ascendancy which he had during this time acquired over the mind of his pupil, that when Bourbon came into power, he would always insist that Fleury, too, attended at the conferences. This excited the jealousy of Bourbon and his clique, and he managed to draw over the young queen to his party, and through her made a request to the king that Fleury might be excused attending at the business conferences. Fleury, made aware of this cabal, raised no opposition, but knowing well his influence, addressed a letter to the king in the mildest terms, expressing his desire to occasion no inconvenience, and withdrew to his country seat at Issy. The effect was precisely what Fleury had anticipated. The king was thrown into the greatest concern at his retirement, and commanded Bourbon himself to invite him back to court, which the mortified minister did with many feigned expressions of friendship and wonder at his sudden withdrawal. But this did not last long. Bourbon again commenced his cabals against him, and this time Fleury turned upon him, and, by a candid declaration of the true state of the case to Louis XV., he procured the instant dismissal of Bourbon, and his banishment to Chantilly.
Here then commenced the celebrated and peaceful administration of Fleury, so well described in the words of Voltaire:—"If ever there was any one happy on earth, it was Fleury. He was considered one of the most amiable and social men till seventy-three, and at that usual age of retirement came to be respected as one of the wisest. From 1726 to 1742 everything throve in his hands; and, till almost a nonogenarian, his mind continued clear, discerning, and fit for business."
During the whole of Fleury's administration he continued the same simple, unostentatious life. There were those who deemed him even penurious from his inexpensive mode of existence; but the same avoidance of extravagance was exerted by him for the state as well as in his own affairs. He disliked war as much as French ministers in general have been fond of it; and it has been well observed that the monuments of national glory which he left were not of brass or marble, but of general prosperity and popular happiness. If he did not possess the highest class of genius, he made a wise and beneficent use of his talents; and lady Mary Wortley Montagu, travelling in France thirteen years after, bore this testimony to the changes which he had produced:—"France is so much improved that it would not be known to be the same country that we passed through twenty years ago. Everything I see speaks in praise of cardinal Fleury. The roads are all mended, and such good care taken against robbers, that you may cross the country with your purse in your hand. The French are more changed than their roads. Instead of pale, yellow faces wrapped up in blankets, as we saw them, the villages are all filled with fresh-coloured, lusty peasants, in good clothes and clean linen. It is incredible what an air of plenty and content is over the whole country."
The English ambassador, Horace Walpole, brother of the minister, a man, according to his nephew, the celebrated lord Orford, who "knew something of everything but how to hold his tongue, or how to apply his knowledge," and who was "a dead weight" to his brother's ministry rather than a help, at first despised Fleury as a mighty bigot, and not very able in foreign affairs; but he soon came to see that he was a man that would direct by his influence the affairs of France, and he made assiduous court to him. He made a most effectual hit in securing the good will of Fleury, for a man who had the reputation of being a dead weight, by hastening to visit Fleury, at the time he was under a passing cloud, at Issy. The future cardinal felt the act as a proof of disinterested respect rather than a deep stroke of policy, as it probably was, and ever after was a firm adherent of the Walpole administration. Thus Fleury's accession to power only strengthened the English alliance with France. As for Spain, notwithstanding the fall of Ripperda, Philip continued the same course of policy—clinging firmly to the emperor, and employing Palm, the envoy of the emperor in
