The King and His Minister: Louis XIV
“Glory” and “good sense” were the watchwords adopted by Louis XIV for his reign, writes J.H. Salmon, and “good sense” on the whole prevailed so long as Colbert was the King's chief Minister.
Two days before his death on March 9th, 1661, Cardinal Mazarin summoned the leading Ministers of state, Michel le Tellier, Hugues de Lionne and Nicolas Foucquet, to commend them to the young King in whose name he had ruled for nearly eighteen years. Although Louis XIV was not known to repose in any one of them the kind of confidence that his father had bestowed on Richelieu or his mother, Anne of Austria, on Mazarin, the appointment of a new first Minister was expected.
The King appeared destined to be a roi fainéant. He had shown few signs of self-assertion in his boyhood. He had preferred his pleasures to his books, and listened to the cynical political maxims of Mazarin without enthusiasm. His one independent action had been a wilful flirtation with a niece of the Cardinal’s, Marie Mancini, and even in this he had been persuaded to subordinate his own desires to the need to confirm the Peace of the Pyrenees with a Spanish marriage.
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