ABSTRACT
Serving a master who would be lauded in proportion to the gifts and favours he distributed, in an aristocratic society which prized the ideal of générosité 1 the seventeenth-century statesman did not usually expect to live frugally or to die poor. If he did, it might be because of some principle strong enough to counter the human instinct to acquire goods and endow a family. Religious zeal, republican virtue, perhaps domestic preference, might direct a Cromwell or a de Witt. 2 Such men were exceptional. The cases of Buckingham, Liechtenstein, 3 Lerma 4 or Oxenstierna, were more typical. The only prominent French ministers of this period who failed to leave a fortune were those, notably Concini and Fouquet, whose careers were prematurely ended by death or disgrace. Their fate underlines one reason for the amassing of spectacular fortunes by those in the best position to do so: political office was precarious – and so was life. Neither Richelieu nor Mazarin was an old man when he died. Calculations about careers were undoubtedly tinged by the awareness that death could come suddenly at any time. Anyone who reached sixty would know that most of his contemporaries had not. No view of the febrile quality of so much of life, with the tendency to extremes, in the spiritual as much as in the secular spheres, can omit that consideration.
