English occupation and siege of the Île de Ré

English occupation and siege of the Île de Ré marks the moment when the political and romantic tensions surrounding Duke of Buckingham, Anne of Austria, Cardinal Richelieu, and Louis XIII became an open military contest. Buckingham’s expedition was presented as an English challenge to France, but the campaign also served his private vengeance and his determination to enter France as a conqueror rather than as an ambassador. Its immediate result was the occupation of the island and the isolation of the French forces defending Saint-Martin and Fort La Prée; its larger consequence was to accelerate the French response and help turn the crisis into the Siege of La Rochelle.

Strategic and Political Background

The operation belonged to a conflict larger than the island itself. La Rochelle was the last major stronghold remaining to the French Calvinists after the other cities granted security by Henry IV had been lost. Cardinal Richelieu regarded its survival as a continuing danger because religious dissent could mingle with civil revolt and foreign war. The city’s harbor was also the last port in France open to England, so closing it would weaken English access to the French coast and consolidate royal authority. The island therefore formed part of a strategic system linking religion, maritime access, domestic rebellion, and the rivalry between France and England.

The Protestant cause had an international character. Spaniards, Englishmen, Italian malcontents, adventurers, and soldiers of fortune from different confessions gathered under its standard, forming a network whose branches extended across Europe. The defense of La Rochelle was thus not merely a local resistance, and the English expedition was not merely a raid. Control of the Île de Ré could provide an external power with a base from which to support the besieged city, while French control of the coast could sever that support.

Private motives sharpened the public contest. Buckingham claimed to defend the honor of England, yet he was also pursuing vengeance and seeking access to Anne of Austria. The narrative makes the irony explicit: two powerful kingdoms were drawn into a contest whose immediate personal stake was a favorable look from the queen. Buckingham’s military action therefore carries two simultaneous meanings. It is an international intervention undertaken with ships, troops, and siege operations, and it is the armed extension of a personal rivalry.

Buckingham’s Landing and the French Retreat

Buckingham gained the first advantage by appearing unexpectedly before the Île de Ré with ninety vessels and nearly twenty thousand men. The scale of the force gave the expedition the character of a major invasion rather than a symbolic demonstration. The English surprised the Comte de Toiras, who commanded for Louis XIII on the island, and after a bloody conflict succeeded in landing. The initial value shift was decisive: the island’s security changed from French possession to English control, while the French defenders were forced from the open ground into fortified positions.

The Comte de Toiras withdrew with his garrison into the citadel of Saint-Martin. He also placed one hundred men in the smaller Fort La Prée. These two positions became the remaining French points of resistance within the occupied island. Buckingham’s success was therefore substantial but incomplete. The English controlled the island and had established the conditions for an assault, yet the principal fortified sites had not fallen. The occupation created a siege rather than ending the contest.

The landing also carried a human cost that the larger strategic narrative momentarily obscures. The Baron de Chantal died in the fighting, leaving an eighteen-month-old orphan girl who would later become Madame de Sévigné. This detail connects the campaign’s public scale with an individual consequence: fleets and armies alter political geography, but they also leave behind bereavement and disrupted lives.

French Mobilization and the Siege Front

The English success hastened Cardinal Richelieu’s decisions. Before Louis XIII and Richelieu could personally take command of the projected Siege of La Rochelle, Monsieur was sent to direct the first operations, and troops available to the crown were ordered toward the theater of war. D’Artagnan formed part of this advance detachment. His presence places the island operation within the military route that carries a personal adventurer into the machinery of royal war.

The king’s illness complicated the movement. After his Bed of Justice on June 28, Louis XIII was attacked by fever and had to stop at Villeroy, although he wished to continue toward the front. The Musketeers halted whenever the king halted, which separated d’Artagnan, still serving in the Guards and not yet admitted to the Musketeers, from Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. The military chain of command thus produces a personal separation at the same time that the campaign is assembling its forces. D’Artagnan eventually reached the camp before La Rochelle on September 10, 1627.

By then, the English still held the Île de Ré and continued, without success, to besiege Saint-Martin and Fort La Prée. Hostilities against La Rochelle had also begun near a fort constructed by the Duc d’Angoulême. The island and the mainland city formed connected fronts: Buckingham’s forces threatened the French position from the sea, while the French royal army prepared to contain the island and reduce La Rochelle. D’Artagnan arrived in a camp where the public crisis was advancing even as his private affairs remained stalled by the disappearance of Madame Bonacieux and his hostility toward Richelieu.

Logistics, Weather, and the Collapse of the Occupation

The English position deteriorated through material conditions as much as through direct combat. Their soldiers suffered from poor provisions, eating salt meat and bad biscuit, and many became invalids. Rough seas destroyed small vessels along the coast, while the shore between the point of l’Aiguillon and the trenches was repeatedly covered with the wreckage of pinnacles, roberges, and feluccas. An army dependent on maritime access could not treat weather, food, and shipping as secondary concerns. The island occupation became progressively harder to sustain even before the decisive French action.

The French command recognized this vulnerability. Although the English position was already weakening and Buckingham’s obstinacy was keeping him on the island, a report from the Comte de Toiras indicated that the enemy was preparing a fresh assault. Louis XIII therefore ordered a decisive action rather than waiting indefinitely for hunger, disease, and the sea to complete the work. French forces drove the English back foot by foot, defeated them in successive encounters, and overcame them at the passage of the Isle of Loie.

The English were forced to re-embark, leaving two thousand men on the field, including five colonels, three lieutenant colonels, two hundred and fifty captains, and twenty gentlemen of rank. The French also captured four pieces of cannon and sixty flags, which Claude de St. Simon carried to Paris and displayed with ceremony beneath the arches of Notre Dame. Te Deums were sung in the camp and afterward throughout France. The occupation and siege therefore ended in a clear reversal: the English had begun with a surprise landing and numerical strength, but the French converted logistical weakness and coordinated military pressure into expulsion.

Aftermath and Wider Consequences

The English withdrawal freed Richelieu to continue the Siege of La Rochelle without an immediate English intervention. In that sense, the French victory on the island did not itself complete the larger campaign; it removed the external force that might have relieved the city and allowed the cardinal to concentrate on the remaining stronghold of French Calvinism. The operation changed the strategic balance from a two-front danger into a more manageable siege of La Rochelle.

The victory also revealed that the danger had not disappeared. An envoy of Buckingham named Montague was captured, and evidence emerged of a league joining the German Empire, Spain, England, and Lorraine against France. Papers abandoned in Buckingham’s lodging confirmed the alliance and, in Richelieu’s account, seriously implicated Madame de Chevreuse and consequently Anne of Austria. The island campaign thus produced intelligence with consequences beyond its battlefield: a failed expedition exposed diplomatic connections and intensified suspicion at the French court.

The English occupation is also part of the novel’s recurring movement between maritime warfare and private adventure. D’Artagnan reaches England by ship and then travels from Dover to London in pursuit of Buckingham, while later Milady arrives by sea to confront the English preparations that she has been sent to destroy. Letters, fleets, armaments, prisoners, and political accusations cross the Channel together. The island is consequently more than a military setting: it is a hinge between the continental court, English power, Protestant resistance, and the personal schemes that repeatedly convert affection and hatred into state action.

The episode’s governing irony is that a campaign undertaken in the language of national honor is sustained by private passions and undone by ordinary physical realities. Buckingham’s fleet and army briefly impose English power, but inadequate food, sickness, wrecked vessels, fortified French positions, and determined counterattack reverse the result. The occupation’s failure strengthens Richelieu, isolates La Rochelle, and confirms the novel’s larger pattern in which political systems absorb personal rivalries while war exposes the limits of both ambition and spectacle.