Pitiless as an iceberg, he crushed every obstacle to his purpose.

Impartial as fate, with no loves, no hatreds, catholics, protestants, nobles, parliaments, one after another were borne down before his determination to make the king, what he had not been since Charlemagne, supreme in France.
The will of the great minister mowed down like a scythe.

The power of the grandees, that last remnant of feudalism, and a perpetual menace to monarchy, was swept away.

One great noble after another was humiliated and shorn of his privileges, if not of his head.
The Huguenots, being first shaken into submission, saw their political liberties torn from them by the stroke of a pen; and even while the Catholics were making merry over this discomfiture the minister was planning to send Henrietta, sister of the king, across the channel to become queen of Protestant England, as wife of Charles I.

But the act of supreme audacity was to come.