Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Anna’s strategy for advancement under the new regime was reasonably straightforward: promote herself and her family through a series of advantageous marriages that allied Louis XIV’s interests with her own. On December 11, 1663, she scored her first real coup by wedding her second daughter, Anne, to Henri-Julius de Bourbon, prince de Condé. The prince de Condé was the first prince of the blood, descended from the same line as Henri IV, former head of the Huguenot faction who had famously succeeded to the throne the previous century by embracing Catholicism. Henri-Julius was as high up the French nobility as it was possible to get without actually marrying into the immediate royal family. By this alliance, the Princess Palatine, as Anna was known in France, vaulted herself and her relations several rungs up the social ladder.* Even Louisa found herself the beneficiary of this prestigious connection; being the aunt of the new princess de Condé meant that she suddenly outranked all the other nuns at Maubuisson. As a result she, who had been a Catholic less than five years, was appointed abbess in 1664.

  It must have been very strange for her, especially in the beginning. But her conversion was obviously sincere. Like William Penn, Louise Hollandine had experienced a spiritual call that she could not deny. She had rejected court life, as he had, and been humiliated and dishonored by scandalous rumors for it. She had displeased her mother as he had his father. She had been cast out by friends and separated from those she loved in order to pursue this path, which she believed brought her closer to God, just as Penn had sacrificed every worldly advantage to be a Quaker for the salvation of his soul. They were two sides of the same coin.

  She wore a habit, slept on a hard bed, gave up meat, and awakened at midnight and then again in the early-morning hours every day to pray. And through it all, she continued to paint.

  LOUISA HAD BEEN ABBESS for only three years when Louis XIV launched phase one of his world-domination campaign. Having earlier married the daughter of the Spanish king, Louis now masterfully used her to justify his landgrab. Pretending that he was merely recovering what was legitimately due her, in May of 1667 he proclaimed the “War of the Queen’s Rights” and then proceeded to roll into Belgium and Flanders at the head of an army of 125,000 men and 1,600 cannons. He took Charleroi, Tournay, Douai, Courtrai, and Lille away from an unprepared Spain in a matter of months, and then, after a short break for the holidays, marched south and in February 1668 took all of Franche-Comté, on the border with Switzerland, in three weeks. He made no secret of the fact that Holland and the rest of Belgium and the Netherlands were next, and actively sought allies in Germany to help marshal soldiers or at least to remain neutral in the coming conflict.

  The ever-alert Anna de Gonzaga, whose new son-in-law the prince de Condé had distinguished himself in the action in Flanders and kept her abreast of developments, saw her opportunity. Reflecting that her husband’s youngest sister, Sophia, had conveniently wedded a German duke whose two elder brothers were still bachelors, she targeted the middle brother, Duke John Frederick. John Frederick was the natural choice for a French ally, as he alone among his siblings had refrained from carousing on one of the regular family jaunts to Italy and instead had fallen under the sway of Rome and converted to Catholicism. To Sophia’s great chagrin (for it threatened her children’s inheritance), it turned out that her husband’s brother was not, after all, too fat to wed, as had been stipulated in her marriage contract. On November 30, 1668, Anna de Gonzaga again proved her usefulness to Louis XIV by marrying her youngest daughter, sixteen-year-old Bénédicte, to the forty-three-year-old Duke John Frederick, thereby bringing yet another German heavyweight into the French sphere of influence.

  But the sacrifice of Bénédicte turned out to be only the setup for the main event. Less than two years later, Anna de Gonzaga hit the jackpot when Henrietta Stuart, youngest sister of Charles II and wife of Louis XIV’s younger brother, Philippe, duke of Orléans, whom Louis had been using to conduct secret negotiations with England, suddenly collapsed and died under extremely suspicious circumstances.*

  Duke John Frederick and his bride, Bénédicte

  Anna was on her way back to Paris after visiting Bénédicte in Germany when she got wind of the tragedy, and the alacrity with which she launched into action is impressive. Poor Henrietta perished on June 30, 1670, and on July 12, less than two weeks later, Anna was already writing to Karl Ludwig, plotting out strategy. “As I reached this town, I heard of the death of the Duchesse d’Orléans,” she informed him. “This unfortunate accident will cause many changes in several ways… I own that this death greatly affects me, and being what I am to Monsieur [the honorific by which the French distinguished a male member of the immediate royal family, in this case Philippe, duke of Orléans, the grieving husband] I should have wished to be in France at the time of this strange misfortune.” But Anna didn’t hurry off to Paris to comfort Monsieur. Instead, in the same letter, she offered to come to see Karl Ludwig in Heidelberg, hinting mysteriously that she would like to take his “orders on all matters.” Two days later she wrote a follow-up letter, and this time she was more explicit. “Those who think that Monsieur would be a very desirable match already write to me,” she warned him bluntly. “I shall do all I can to have the honor of seeing you on my way back [to Paris]… we might, perhaps, under existing circumstances find plenty of things to discuss,” she concluded firmly.

  The object of these confidential discussions was none other than Liselotte, Karl Ludwig’s daughter by his first wife, Charlotte, the little girl who had been raised by her beloved aunt Sophia during the somewhat stressful period when her father brought his new wife to live in the family castle before the old one had been induced to vacate it. Although now of marriageable age, by no reasonable measure should the spirited but (by her own admission) not particularly attractive Liselotte, the daughter of a minor Protestant German elector, have been considered a suitable candidate for an alliance with the French royal family. And in fact, Louis XIV resisted this idea for over a year. But Anna de Gonzaga managed to win him over—“Her peculiar characteristic was to conciliate opposite interests… to discover the secret point of junction and knot, as it were, by which they might be united,” an acquaintance once observed—and Anna was able to write triumphantly to Karl Ludwig on August 7, 1671, that “the marriage of Liselotte with the Duc d’Orléans is an accomplished fact, if you desire it. Monsieur wishes for it, and the King of France has given his full consent… the only obstacle is religion.” Anna was even able to assure the future father-in-law that he need not worry about the dowry, as Monsieur was willing to accept a small token sum, so keen was Louis XIV for this union.

  The willingness to forgo a substantial dowry, which was the customary way to compensate for a bride’s inequality in rank, should have set off alarm bells in Heidelberg. But for the notoriously cheap Karl Ludwig, not having to come up with hard cash only made the deal more attractive. He arranged (surreptitiously, of course; as a leader of the Protestant faction in Germany, he had to pretend he didn’t know anything about it) to have his daughter abjure the family religion and receive training in Catholicism instead. A proxy wedding was celebrated at Metz on November 16, 1671, with the bride’s portion settled at a measly 32,000 florins, to be paid at some unspecified point in the future. “My marriage contract was drawn up as miserably as if I had been the daughter of a burgher,” Liselotte pointed out.

  Thus did Anna de Gonzaga’s niece become Madame, duchess of Orléans, sister-in-law to Louis XIV, as high up the French social hierarchy as it was possible to achieve. Distressed at having to change her religion and wretched at leaving her family, nineteen-year-old Liselotte sobbed all night on her wedding journey from Strasbourg to Châlons. And she hadn’t even met the groom yet.

  LISELOTTE’S NEW HUSBAND, MONSIEUR, duke of Orléans, was thirty-one years old, addicted to fashionable society, and, although capable of sleeping with women, on the whole much preferred men. “He was a little round man who seemed mounted on stilts so high were his heels,
always decked out like a woman, covered with rings, bracelets, with jewels everywhere, and a long wig brought forward and powdered, and ribbons wherever they could be placed, highly perfumed, and, in all things scrupulously clean,” wrote a courtier who knew him well. “He was accused of putting on very little rouge. The nose was very long, eyes and mouth fine; the face full but very long.” In keeping with his overall aesthetic, as part of the marriage contract, Monsieur had generously given his new wife 150,000 livres’ worth of “jewels, rings, and precious stones”—on the condition that he be allowed to wear them.

  Liselotte as a young married woman

  He seems to have been somewhat unprepared for his earthy German bride. His cousin described Liselotte’s first introduction to her husband in France: “It was cold; she wore no mask; she had eaten pomegranates which had made her lips violet,” the cousin reported. “She seemed to us quite comely, but Monsieur was not of that opinion and was a little astonished… The following day we visited Madame, who was not seen at as great advantage by day as by torchlight,” the cousin admitted.

  In fact, a more incongruous couple would be difficult to imagine. Liselotte, having grown up romping through the German countryside, was forthright, athletic, and unaffected; her husband was as ornate and artificial as his brother’s vaunted Hall of Mirrors. Ironically, their very different perspectives seem to have helped them negotiate the more mundane demands of married life, at least in the beginning. “All my life, since my earliest youth, I have considered myself so ugly that I have never been tempted to use much ornamentation,” Liselotte explained. “Jewels and dress only attract attention to the wearer. It was a good thing that I felt like this because Monsieur, who was extremely fond of dressing up, would have had hundreds of quarrels with me as to which of us should wear the most beautiful diamonds. I never used to dress up without his choosing my entire outfit,” she noted. The couple dutifully reproduced—a boy and a girl survived—after which, by mutual assent, they gave up all pretense of intimacy. “I was very glad when… Monsieur, after the birth of his daughter, betook himself to a separate bed, because I never liked the occupation of producing babies,” Liselotte confided. “It was very trying to have to sleep with Monsieur. He couldn’t endure being disturbed when he was asleep, so I used to have to lie so near the edge of the bed, that sometimes I fell out like a sack. I was therefore very glad when Monsieur, in a friendly manner and with no ill-feeling, proposed that we should sleep each in our separate rooms.”

  But it was still all very strange and disconcerting, and one of the few solaces of Liselotte’s new life was meeting her aunt Louisa. “One cannot believe how pleasant and playful the Princess of Maubuisson was,” Liselotte exclaimed. “I always visited her with pleasure, no moment could seem tedious in her company. I was in greater favor with her than her other nieces [Edward’s daughters] because I could converse with her about everything she had gone through in her life, which the others could not. She often talked with me in German, which she spoke very well. She told me her comical tales. I asked her how she had been able to habituate herself to a stupid cloister life. She laughed, and said: ‘I never speak to the nuns, except to communicate my orders.’ She said she had always liked a country life, and fancied she lived like a country girl. I said: ‘But to get up in the middle of the night and to go to church!’ She answered, laughing, that I knew well what painters were; they like to see dark places and the shadows caused by lights, and this gave her every day fresh taste for painting. She could turn everything in this way, that it should not seem dull,” Liselotte concluded in admiration.

  Sophia, who came for a visit in 1679, also found her older sister, whom she had not seen in thirty years, as merry and jesting as ever. “Her happy temper is not in the least changed,” Sophia assured Karl Ludwig in a letter written after staying at the abbey of Maubuisson. “I found her very content, for she lives in a very beautiful place; her garden is very large and most pleasant… I only see the nuns of this convent, who have more virtue than learning, and I find them very happy, as also Madame the Abbess, who observes the Rule with great regularity, and passes for a saint. I could be very happy in such a life if I had not a husband and children,” Sophia remarked. “The convent is large, clean, and commodious, and the gardens of such extent that one is quite tired with walking round them.”

  However, while it seems clear that Louisa had found both a spiritual and artistic haven at Maubuisson, seeing Sophia again touched off strong emotions. “Since I have been a nun professed, I have never shed so many tears as I have done at my parting with my sister,” she confessed in a letter to one of her German relations, who had accompanied Sophia on her trip. “Since then I feel as if a stone laid on my heart, the dead weight of which oppresses me, and I know not how to cast my eyes round this place where I saw her last without sadness. All of which proves to me that I am yet too much attached to these creatures who are good enough to testify friendship for me, and that it was for my spiritual good that God has separated me from a sister so amiable… La Mere Gabrielle is going fast—she cannot utter another word through weakness; but the last she said to me was a fervent prayer for the conversion of my sister… If such prayers are heard, I shall be content; for, if never more to see my dear sister in this world, I should see her in a better—I should meet her in Paradise,” she finished poignantly.

  This desire to see Sophia in heaven would grow with time and motivate the abbess of Maubuisson to actively pursue her sister’s conversion in her later years. But first she had to help the hapless Liselotte survive the machinations of the French court.

  BY THE TIME SOPHIA visited her sister and niece in 1679, Louis XIV’s military achievements had made France the dominant—and most dangerous—power in Europe. Building on his earlier successes in Flanders and the Netherlands, the king had made further inroads into Belgium and nearly triumphed over Holland itself. Only by opening the dikes and unleashing a flood that “ruined and destroyed their country and their subjects… and exposed themselves to the danger of being drowned,” according to the French ambassador to the States, had the Dutch prevented Louis’s armies from occupying Amsterdam and overrunning the rest of the country. Similarly, France had begun invading territory on its eastern border, along the Rhine, burning villages all the way to Friedrichsburg, on the edge of the Palatinate. Too late, Karl Ludwig recognized his in-law’s ambitions and made a defensive treaty with the emperor, but by that time the French war machine was all but unstoppable, a reality the elector was forced to acknowledge. In a letter to the commander of the enemy forces responsible for the destruction of his subjects, Karl Ludwig somewhat ludicrously suggested that the issue be settled by a duel. “Do not look upon my demand as an idle or romantic caprice,” the paunchy, gray-haired would-be champion warned. “I wish to avenge my country, and as I cannot do this at the head of an army equal to yours, and that no way, save the one I point out, seems left to draw down punishment on your head, I choose what puts you within the reach of my own avenging arm.” As might be expected, the French general declined to accept the chivalric challenge proposed by the duchess of Orléans’s ailing father.

  It didn’t matter anyway, as Karl Ludwig died soon after of cancer on August 28, 1680, at the age of sixty-three, just six months after his sister Princess Elizabeth, abbess of Herford, had also succumbed to the disease. “I have wept so much that my eyes hurt,” Liselotte wrote to Sophia when she heard the news. “What is worrying me so much is the fear that papa died of grief and disappointment, and that if the Great Man [Louis XIV] and his ministers had not tormented him so greatly we should have had him with us for a long time yet… Monsieur [her husband] suggested to the Queen that she should make a vow to Saint Ovid so that her son may regain his health [he was ill]. I told him that it would be more fitting to propose to the King that he should take a vow… to stop helping himself to other people’s property. If he were to do that, doubtless his son would recover,” she concluded bitterly.

  For Liselotte
, the death of her father was simply one more sorrow in a series of trials that emphasized her unhappiness with her marriage and the French court. After a brief period of harmony, her relations with her husband had deteriorated rapidly. Once he had sired a family, Monsieur felt he had satisfied his marital responsibilities and had publicly resumed his affair with the burning love of his life, the chevalier de Lorraine. The chevalier found his boyfriend’s wife to be something of an obstruction to his designs and worked against her whenever he could. “Unfortunately the Chevalier and his satellites always succeed in their wicked schemes,” Liselotte complained in a letter to her aunt Sophia. “It would be a thousand times better for me to live in a place that was peopled with ghouls and evil spirits, for the good Lord would not let such things have dominion over me, but the Chevalier’s accursed friends have far too much power over my affairs… The King and Monsieur allow them to practice every imaginable sort of villainy,” she fumed.

  One of the chevalier de Lorraine’s more vicious acts was to spread a rumor that Liselotte was having an affair with another courtier, a preposterous charge she stoutly denied, to no avail. The scandal escalated when her husband, at the behest of his illicit lover, summarily dismissed her favorite lady-in-waiting on the grounds that the woman had carried compromising letters to the courtier for his wife, an accusation for which there was no evidence at all.

  Shattered, Liselotte turned to her aunt Louisa. “I became so melancholic that I resolved to go and end my days with my aunt at Maubuisson,” she confessed. “I spoke to her about it… but I could not make her understand that it was a well-considered desire. She thought that I was only vexed.” Still, Liselotte persisted. “You can judge whether I have good reason to be sad,” Liselotte wrote to Sophia on September 19, 1682, recounting a conversation she had had with Louis XIV. “I begged the King to let me go and finish my days at Maubuisson, saying that I could not find any help anywhere against the attacks of my enemies… for in truth I can no longer live in the midst of these cruel enemies, watching the pleasure they take in the sorrow and distress they cause me. Be assured that I retire from the world with no regret.”