The Siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré was the first major military crisis in the campaign that led toward the Siege of La Rochelle. It began when the Duke of Buckingham arrived unexpectedly at the Île de Ré with ninety vessels and nearly twenty thousand men, surprised the French commander Comte de Toiras, and secured a landing after a bloody engagement. The operation transformed a private rivalry connected with Anne of Austria into an international confrontation involving France, England, Protestant resistance, and the competing designs of Buckingham and Cardinal Richelieu.

Causes and Strategic Background

The immediate setting was the larger struggle over La Rochelle, the last important stronghold left to the French Calvinists after the other fortified cities granted security by Henry IV had fallen away. Richelieu regarded La Rochelle as the remaining bulwark of Calvinism and as a center where civil revolt, foreign intervention, and religious opposition could converge. Its harbor also remained the last port in the French kingdom open to England, so closing it would both weaken the French Calvinists and restrict English access to the French coast.

The conflict was therefore never merely local. Spaniards, Englishmen, Italian malcontents, adventurers, and soldiers of fortune from many nations gathered under the Protestant standard, forming a loose association whose connections extended across Europe. Against this international network stood the French monarchy and the military-political authority of Cardinal Richelieu. The siege of Saint-Martin became the first concrete test of whether Buckingham could turn foreign support and naval power into a durable foothold on French territory.

Private motives intensified these public aims. Buckingham presented his intervention as a defense of England’s honor, but the narrative also identifies a personal vengeance behind his policy. He could not enter France as an ambassador and therefore wished to enter as a conqueror. The enormous strategic stakes of the two kingdoms were thus entangled with the desire of two powerful men to obtain a favorable look from Anne of Austria. The campaign’s official language concerned religion, national honor, and military security; beneath it ran the volatile pressure of love, jealousy, and rivalry.

Buckingham’s Landing and the French Position

Buckingham gained the first advantage by appearing unexpectedly before the Île de Ré with ninety vessels and almost twenty thousand troops. The scale and surprise of the expedition allowed him to overcome the initial French resistance and land after a bloody conflict. The landing demonstrated the power of an expeditionary force supported by a fleet, while also showing how rapidly an apparently contained royal operation could become an international war.

Comte de Toiras withdrew into the citadel of Saint-Martin with his garrison. He also sent a hundred men into the smaller fort of La Prée, preserving a secondary defensive position while the principal garrison held the citadel. The French response was therefore not an immediate open-field victory but a strategic withdrawal into fortified points, buying time until the monarchy could organize a larger intervention.

The English advance accelerated Richelieu’s decisions. Until Louis XIII and the cardinal could assume command of the projected Siege of La Rochelle, Monsieur was sent to direct the first operations, and every available French troop was ordered toward the theater of war. d’Artagnan, who was still serving simply in the Guards, formed part of this vanguard. Because Louis XIII later halted when fever forced him to stop at Villeroy, the Musketeers halted with him, leaving d’Artagnan temporarily separated from Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. The military movement thus altered the personal structure of the narrative as well as the strategic situation.

Logistics, Weather, and the Reversal

The French advantage grew from conditions that had little to do with a single heroic assault. The English troops were suffering from poor provisions: they were eating salt meat and bad biscuit, and many men had become invalids. At the same time, rough seas along the coast destroyed small vessels day after day. The shore between the point of l’Aiguillon and the trenches was covered at every tide with the wreckage of pinnaces, roberges, and feluccas. A force that had arrived in overwhelming strength was therefore being weakened by hunger, sickness, and the sea.

These conditions made Buckingham’s position increasingly precarious. Even if the French troops remained quiet in their camp, it appeared likely that he would eventually have to raise the siege. Yet reports from Comte de Toiras indicated that the English were preparing a fresh assault. Louis XIII consequently judged that waiting was no longer the safest course and ordered a decisive action.

The French expedition succeeded. The English were repulsed step by step, defeated in every encounter described by the narrator, and beaten during the passage of the Île de Loie. They were forced to re-embark, abandoning the field to the French. The losses were severe: two thousand Englishmen were left dead, including five colonels, three lieutenant colonels, two hundred and fifty captains, and twenty gentlemen of rank. The French also captured four cannon and sixty flags, which Claude de St. Simon carried to Paris and displayed with great ceremony beneath the arches of Notre Dame.

The victory produced an immediate public response. Te Deums were sung in the camp and afterward throughout France, while the king was astonished and Richelieu received the glory. With the English removed from the Île de Ré, the cardinal was temporarily free to continue the Siege of La Rochelle without fearing an immediate English intervention. The value of the victory lay not only in the battlefield result but in the removal of the maritime pressure that had threatened to relieve the besieged city.

Political and Narrative Consequences

The success was only temporary in its wider political effect. An envoy of Buckingham named Montague was captured, and evidence emerged of a league directed against France that joined the German Empire, Spain, England, and Lorraine. Papers discovered in Buckingham’s abandoned lodging confirmed the alliance and, according to Richelieu’s memoirs, seriously implicated Mme. de Chevreuse and consequently the queen. The defeat of the English expedition therefore generated a new intelligence crisis: military victory gave way to the discovery of a broader diplomatic conspiracy.

The episode also sharpened the collision between institutional power and personal adventure that governs the novel’s world. France and England moved fleets, armies, supplies, and agents across the sea, while individual figures pursued private objectives through the same channels. The Duke of Buckingham’s expedition was simultaneously a national intervention, a Protestant military effort, and an extension of his rivalry over Anne of Austria. Richelieu’s response likewise combined state strategy with the protection of royal power and the pursuit of political enemies.

The narrative repeatedly places this campaign beside the smaller but equally dangerous movements of its protagonists. d’Artagnan crosses from France to England by ship, reaches Dover at daybreak, and rides onward with Planchet toward London; later, Milady arrives in England contemplating the destruction of Buckingham’s preparations as a solitary agent facing an army and a fleet. These parallel journeys make the sea a conduit for armies, letters, gold, intelligence, and revenge rather than a boundary separating national plots.

Significance

The Siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré marks the campaign’s first decisive reversal. Buckingham begins with surprise, overwhelming numbers, and naval mobility; France prevails through fortified resistance, military concentration, deteriorating English logistics, and a timely counterattack. The event therefore presents war as a contest among matériel, terrain, weather, food, disease, intelligence, and political timing, not simply a test of courage.

Its significance also lies in the way it exposes the unstable boundary between public war and private desire. The operation helps protect France from English relief, advances Richelieu’s authority, and clears the way for the Siege of La Rochelle, yet its deeper motive is linked to Buckingham’s personal pursuit of Anne of Austria. The same conflict that produces flags in Notre Dame and hymns in the French camp also produces intercepted envoys, compromising papers, and renewed danger for the queen. Saint-Martin is consequently both a military engagement and a hinge in the novel’s larger machinery of international conspiracy, where the movement of armies changes the fortunes of lovers, spies, soldiers, and statesmen alike.