28 October 1628

The surrender of La Rochelle on 28 October 1628 ended a year-long siege that was the decisive military and political event of Cardinal Richelieu's early ministry, destroying the last Huguenot stronghold in France and completing the centralization of royal power. The capitulation followed the failure of English relief under the Duke of Buckingham, whose assassination in Portsmouth a month earlier had sealed the city's fate. For the four friends—d'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—the fall of La Rochelle closed the campaign that had tested their courage, loyalty, and private griefs, and it set the stage for their separate futures.

Background and the Siege

La Rochelle was the last of the fortified cities granted to the Huguenots by Henry IV as places of safety, and its reduction was essential to Richelieu's policy of destroying Calvinism as a political force. The city's port was the final French harbor open to the English, and closing it to England—France's eternal enemy—completed the work of Joan of Arc and the Duc de Guise. The siege began in earnest after Buckingham's landing on the Isle of Re with ninety vessels and nearly twenty thousand men, an expedition that the cardinal understood as both a military threat and a personal vengeance against his rival for the queen's favor. The royal army invested La Rochelle, and the cardinal ordered the construction of a famous dyke to starve the city into submission. The blockade lasted a year, during which the Rochellais endured famine and executed their own mayor for attempting to negotiate a surrender.

The Fall of the City

By October 1628, the city's resistance had been broken. The English fleet, upon which the Rochellais had pinned their hopes, never arrived; Buckingham had been assassinated on 23 August at Portsmouth by John Felton, a Puritan fanatic whom Milady had seduced and manipulated into the act. Without relief, the city could hold out no longer. On 28 October 1628, the capitulation was signed. The king made his entrance into Paris on 23 December of the same year, received in triumph as if he came from conquering an enemy and not Frenchmen, entering by the Faubourg St. Jacques under verdant arches.

Consequences and Aftermath

The surrender of La Rochelle had profound consequences for France and for the novel's characters. It destroyed the last bastion of Huguenot military power, paving the way for the later revocation of the Edict of Nantes. For Cardinal Richelieu, it was a personal and political triumph, consolidating his authority over both the king and the realm. For the four friends, the end of the siege marked a turning point. D'Artagnan took possession of his lieutenant's commission in the Musketeers, a promotion he had earned through his service and the cardinal's grudging favor. Porthos left the service and married Madame Coquenard, inheriting a coffer of eight hundred thousand livres. Aramis, yielding to his vocation, retired into a convent, disappearing from his friends' lives. Athos remained a Musketeer under d'Artagnan's command until 1633, when he too quit the service after inheriting a small property in Roussillon. The siege thus closed the adventurous youth of the four inseparables and opened the quieter, more settled phase of their lives.