1628

1628 is the historical and narrative pressure point at which the political, military, and private conflicts of the novel converge. In this year, the French campaign against La Rochelle is prolonged by the city's resistance and by the failure of English relief, while the rivalry between Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu is expressed through competing military institutions, legal authority, and the management of political danger. The year also gives public war a private motive: Buckingham's expedition against France is connected to his concealed love for Anne of Austria, even as Richelieu uses the international crisis to strengthen royal power.

War and Political Setting

In the world surrounding 1628, conflict is not exceptional but habitual. Citizens of Meung are accustomed to wars among nobles, the king's struggle with the cardinal, Spain's hostility toward the king, and violence involving robbers, Huguenots, wolves, and other enemies. This atmosphere explains why armed force is so readily taken up and why political allegiance is uneven: citizens may resist thieves or nobles, yet hesitate to oppose the cardinal or Spain. The year therefore belongs to a society in which private courage and public disorder are already intertwined.

The institutional rivalry between Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu gives this disorder a more organized form. Louis XIII appoints M. de Treville captain of the King's Musketeers, a body chosen for devotion and fighting ability; Richelieu establishes his own Cardinal's Guards in response. Although both rulers condemn duels and brawls in principle, they secretly encourage competition between their men and take pride in victories won by their respective combatants. The prohibition against fighting remains an edict, but political power repeatedly bends its application. When Treville defends d'Artagnan and the three Musketeers after their encounter with five of the cardinal's Guardsmen, Louis XIII acknowledges that the incident was an exceptional brawl rather than an ordinary duel, yet still insists that the law exists. In 1628, authority is thus shown as both legal command and selective intervention.

La Rochelle and the Logic of Famine

The central public crisis of 1628 is the siege of La Rochelle. The city is the last major refuge left to the French Huguenots after the other fortified places surrendered under Henry IV. Richelieu regards its destruction as necessary because Calvinist resistance is connected with civil revolt, foreign intervention, and the possibility of continued war. La Rochelle is also the last French port open to the English, so closing it would deprive England of a foothold in France and complete a long strategic project associated with Joan of Arc and the Duc de Guise.

The siege is therefore more than a local military operation. Spaniards, Englishmen, Italian malcontents, adventurers, and soldiers of fortune from different countries gather beneath the Protestant standard, making La Rochelle a crossroads of international opposition. The city's importance has grown precisely because other Calvinist strongholds have fallen. Its survival threatens the political consolidation sought by Richelieu; its port gives England access to the French coast; and its resistance turns the conflict into a contest over whether a besieged minority can remain a political power.

The military balance changes through material conditions rather than courage alone. Buckingham reaches the Isle of Ré with ninety vessels and nearly twenty thousand men, surprises the Comte de Toiras, and lands after a bloody engagement. Toiras withdraws into the citadel of Saint-Martin, while a hundred men occupy the smaller fort of La Prée. Yet the English position deteriorates. Their soldiers live on salt meat and poor biscuit, illness spreads through the camp, and rough seas destroy vessels daily. The shore becomes covered with the wrecks of pinnacles, roberges, and feluccas. These failures of food, health, shipping, and weather make prolonged operations increasingly impossible, even before the final French assault.

By the later phase of the siege, the dyke blocks vessels from entering La Rochelle, and the city remains invested despite the appearance of eventual French success. The Rochellais endure with extraordinary determination. A mutiny in favor of surrender is suppressed when the mayor hangs the mutineers, after which the population resolves to die of hunger rather than submit. Messages between the city and Buckingham are intercepted; spies and messengers are summarily condemned. The last captured letter states that if relief does not arrive within fifteen days, the inhabitants will already be dead from hunger. La Rochelle's hope therefore rests on Buckingham, while Richelieu waits anxiously for proof that English assistance will fail.

Buckingham, Anne of Austria, and Private Motive

Buckingham's participation in the crisis is presented as both national policy and personal vengeance. He cannot enter France openly as an ambassador and wishes to arrive as a conqueror. His military enterprise consequently carries the force of a political gesture: victory would restore English honor while satisfying a private desire to overcome the country that excludes him. The deeper stake is an emotional one, since the rivalry between the two kingdoms is described as being played out for a favorable look from Anne of Austria.

The connection between romance and military strategy is made explicit in Anne of Austria's letter to Buckingham. She urges him to cancel the armaments being prepared against France and to end a war publicly attributed to religion but privately whispered to arise from his love for her. She warns that the war may bring catastrophe upon England and France and places his life at risk. The letter therefore treats the international conflict as a danger produced by the transformation of private feeling into military action.

Buckingham's personal boldness is consistent with this mixture of love and danger. After discovering that the forged message which brought him to Paris was a trap, he refuses simply to return to England and insists on seeing Anne of Austria. When Madame Bonacieux is abducted while charged with conducting him to the Louvre, the planned meeting is delayed for two days. Once she is free and reaches Laporte, the mission resumes. Buckingham is taken through hidden passages of the Louvre and locked in an apartment, yet he feels no fear: his character is defined by a taste for adventure, rash enterprise, and romantic danger. His conduct in Paris and his campaign against France belong to the same pattern of treating peril as an opportunity to pursue desire.

Richelieu's Strategy and the Limits of Violence

Richelieu's policy in 1628 is governed by a contradiction. He seeks to destroy the last stronghold of Calvinism, but he does not simply choose the bloodiest means available. Assaulting La Rochelle is repeatedly debated and rejected because the city appears nearly impregnable and because a massacre of French Huguenots would resemble the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572. Even though Louis XIII, as a committed Catholic, is not wholly repelled by extreme action, the generals insist that La Rochelle can be conquered only by famine. The siege therefore presents starvation as a politically usable alternative to direct slaughter.

This preference does not make the campaign humane. The city is deliberately reduced through blockade, hunger, interception, and the exhaustion of hope. Richelieu's restraint concerns the form and political consequences of violence rather than the suffering it produces. By choosing famine over assault, the state avoids a spectacular massacre while subjecting the population to a slower and less visible destruction. The siege thus reveals how modernizing political calculation can contain brutality without eliminating it.

Richelieu's authority also depends on managing conflicts inside the royal camp. He must address the quarrel between M. de Bassompierre and the Duc d'Angouleme, while Monsieur, who began the siege, leaves him the task of finishing it. The siege is consequently a theater of command as well as a battle against La Rochelle. Its duration exposes rivalries among the king, Monsieur, Bassompierre, the Duc d'Angouleme, and other commanders, making military success a means by which Richelieu can consolidate his reputation and outmaneuver competitors.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The eventual French operation succeeds to the astonishment of Louis XIII and to Richelieu's great glory. The English are driven from the Isle of Ré, beaten in successive encounters and in the passage of the Isle of Loie, and forced to re-embark. They leave two thousand men on the field, including five colonels, three lieutenant colonels, two hundred and fifty captains, and twenty gentlemen of rank, together with four cannon and sixty flags. The captured flags are carried to Paris and suspended with ceremony in the arches of Notre Dame. The concrete inventory of losses converts the siege into public spectacle and turns military defeat into political theater.

The year also exposes the dependence of large political events on small movements of information, disguise, and captivity. Buckingham enters the Louvre after Madame Bonacieux's abduction interrupts the original plan; a letter determines the emotional and strategic meaning of his war; spies and messengers determine whether La Rochelle can continue to hope; and the cardinal's calculations depend on news from England. The same narrative world that treats an edict as binding still allows secret missions, hidden corridors, intercepted correspondence, and exceptional protections for favored soldiers.

By 1628, d'Artagnan has become a decisive counterforce to Milady the English spy. He deceives her by appearing as the Comte de Wardes, humiliates her pride, frustrates her ambition, deprives her of liberty, and threatens her life. He also exposes the secret she has sworn to conceal and takes from her the carte blanche obtained from Richelieu for revenge. Her defeat demonstrates the year’s larger pattern: individuals who manipulate international and court politics are themselves vulnerable to information, impersonation, and reversal. The military year is therefore also a year of collapsing masks, in which the great siege outside the city parallels the private siege of dangerous figures within the plot.