Louis the King saw his most intimate friend, Cinq Mars, sent to the scaffold; his brother Gaston, Duke of Orleans, thrown into the Bastille like a common prisoner; his mother in exile and poverty.
But he also saw himself without the trouble of governing, surrounded by homage and adulation, towering high above everything else in France, and was content.
The growing power of Austria and the ascendency of the Hapsburgs was, as we have seen, the nightmare of Europe at this period.

But the Reformation was tearing the empire almost asunder.

A Protestant Prussia was trying to struggle away from a Catholic Austria.

Richelieu cared nothing for Catholics nor for Protestants.

His aim was to weaken the hands of the Hapsburgs.