the Concinis deeply displeased part of the French nobility. Stirring up xenophobic passion, the nobility designated the Italian immigrants favored by Marie as responsible for all the wrongs of the kingdom. They are getting richer, they said, at our expense. Taking advantage of the clear weakness of the Regency, the princes of the blood under the leadership of Henri II, Prince of Condé, rebelled against Marie. In application of the Treaty of Sainte-Menehould (15 May 1614), the Queen-Regent convened the Estates General in Paris. The Prince of Condé failed to structure his opposition to royal power. However, Marie undertook to cement the alliance with Spain and to ensure respect for the theses of the Council of Trent. The reforms of the paulette and the taille remained a dead letter. The clergy played the role of arbiter between the Third Estate and the nobility who did not manage to get along: Civil lieutenant Henri de Mesmes declared that "all the Estates were brothers and children of a common mother, France", while one of the representatives of the nobility replied that he refused to be the brother of a child of a shoemaker or cobbler. This antagonism benefited the court, which soon pronounced the closure of the Estates General. The Regency was officially ended following the Lit de justice of 2 October 1614, which declared that Louis XIII had attained his legal majority of age, but Marie then became head of the Conseil du Roi and retained all her control over the government. One year after the end of the Estates General, a new rebellion of the Prince of Condé allowed his entry into the Conseil du Roi by the Treaty of Loudun (3 May 1616), which also granted him the sum of 1,500,000 livres and the government of Guyenne. During this time, the Protestants obtained a reprieve of six years to the return of their places of safety to the royal power. In 1616, the requirements of the Prince of Condé became so important that Marie had him arrested on 1 September and imprisoned him in the Bastille. The Duke of Nevers then took the leadership of the nobility in revolt against the Queen. Nevertheless, Marie's rule was strengthened by the appointment of Armand Jean du Plessis (later Cardinal Richelieu)—who had come to prominence at the meetings of the Estates General—as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs on 5 November 1616.