The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

  Cosimo did not like music, except church music; he did not like dancing; he preferred to go to Mass rather than to the theatre; he would rather talk to monks than to girls or courtiers; he went out shooting, but when a bird flew over his head he would murmur, ‘Poverino’ and lower his gun – though afterwards he would eat with relish the birds that others had shot. His father decided that the sooner he was married the better, and that the ideal bride for him would be Marguerite-Louise, daughter of Gaston d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s uncle. This was a match that was also favoured in Paris, where Cardinal Mazarin entertained hopes of becoming Pope and was anxious to obtain the support of the Medici. The prospect, however, of being married to a gloomy, plump Italian with thick lips and droopy eyes, the heir to an impoverished duchy, was not at all pleasing to Marguerite-Louise herself. She was a high-spirited girl, quick, energetic, playful and capricious. Besides, she was in love with her cousin, Prince Charles of Lorraine. She begged her other cousin, King Louis XIV, not to send her to Florence. She knelt before him at the Louvre, imploring him to spare her such a dreadful fate; but he helped her to her feet and told her that it was now too late to break her word. So she was married to Cosimo by proxy in Paris on 17 April 1661. She was fifteen years old. Cosimo, who was in bed with measles at the Pitti Palace, was eighteen.

  The bride left for Florence, ‘crying aloud for everyone to hear’, delaying her departure from every town where they stopped for the night, reaching Marseilles in the pouring rain, pretending to be too ill to leave her cabin in the flower-bedecked galley in which she was rowed to Leghorn. The bridegroom was waiting to meet her at the Villa Ambrogiana, near Empoli.8 He displayed no pleasure when he saw her for the first time, declining to kiss her; while she, for her part, did not attempt to disguise her relief when her doctor said that, although she had already had measles and the Prince was no longer infectious, she ought not yet to share his bed.

  When they did go to bed together, after a magnificent ceremony in the Cathedral, the Prince was not enthusiastic, and was soon asleep. He would be stronger, the bride was assured, when he had fully recovered from his recent illness; but Marguerite-Louise seemed not to care whether he ever got better or not. According to Princess Sophia of Hanover, he never really did recover properly. ‘He sleeps with his wife but once a week,’ she reported years later, ‘and then under supervision of a doctor who has him taken out of bed lest he should impair his health by staying there overlong.’ MargueriteLouise thoroughly disliked him; even his politeness seemed to her a kind of insult.

  On the second night of her marriage she asked him to give her the crown jewels. He replied that they were not his to give, whereupon she lost her temper with him, declaring that she would rather live in the most squalid hut in France than in a palace in Tuscany. The next day she helped herself to several of the jewels anyway and gave them to her French attendants from whom they were only recovered with difficulty. After that she rarely spoke to her husband. By the end of their first month together, so the Bishop of Béziers reported, the Prince had only ‘couched with her three times’. ‘Every time he does not go,’ the Bishop continued, ‘he sends a valet to tell her not to wait up for him. The French ladies…are much embarrassed because she is always sad…She finds the life here very strange.’

  It was hoped that the splendid entertainments which were staged in Florence that summer would dispel her gloom. There were banquets in the Palazzo Vecchio, balls at the Pitti Palace, firework displays over the bridge of Santa Trinità, horse races in the Via Maggio, chariot races in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, processions through the carpeted streets. On St John the Baptist’s Day, the Festa degli Omaggi was held as usual in the Piazza della Signoria. A week later, before an audience of almost twenty thousand people in the amphitheatre in the Boboli gardens, a performance was given of Il Mondo Festeggiante, a fantastic and spectacular combination of masque, tableaux vivants, costume parade, ballet on horseback, musical pageant and phantasmagoria in which Cosimo himself appeared in jewelled armour as Hercules. Ten days after this there was a presentation of Jacopo Melani’s Hercules in Thebes at the theatre in the Via della Pergola. Thereafter Marguerite-Louise was taken on a tour of the villas and gardens of the Medici, from Poggio Imperiale to Poggio a Caiano, from Artimino to Castello and Pratolino. Yet still the Princess only occasionally displayed traces of her former high spirits. Most of the time she was homesick, unhappy, bored and crotchety, finding fault with everything Tuscan because it was not French, rarely going out in public and then always masked. When someone asked her if she liked Florence, she grumpily replied that she would have liked it much better had it been near Paris. She was also extravagant, spending such sums of money on her clothes and her table that the frugal Grand Duke was horrified. Worse than this, she was indiscreet. When Prince Charles of Lorraine visited Florence she made no secret of her love for him, writing passionate letters to him after his departure. His replies were intercepted and there was another row. In August 1663 she gave birth to a son, Ferdinando, and afterwards fell ill with a tumour on her breast. During her convalescence she refused to see anyone other than her French attendants. Blaming them for her petulant behaviour, Cosimo replaced twenty-eight of them with Italians as a result of which Marguerite-Louise became more rebellious than ever.

  ‘She is deaf to protests,’ the Venetian ambassador wrote. ‘She attaches importance to no one. It is her usual conceit to say that she has married beneath her, into a family vastly inferior to her proper merit; and this pricks the family at the most delicate point of their sensibilities.’ She took the most extreme measures to avoid her husband, moving from room to room in the palace so as not to be near him, asking her father-in-law to allow her to live by herself in a country villa. The Grand Duke Ferdinando had been patient, understanding and tolerant for a long time, but eventually he was driven to firmness. He replied that he would have her sent not to a villa but to a convent if she went on behaving like this. Pertly she replied that he would be sorry if he did, for she would soon have all the nuns skipping about like monkeys. She took a malicious delight in piquing Cosimo, in spreading stories of his inadequacy, telling him in public that he would not even make a good groom, let alone a proper husband. The Grand Duke retaliated by having her moved to his brother Mattias’s villa of Lappeggi when the rest of the Court drove off to Artimino for the shooting, and by having her closely watched by attendants who were instructed to follow her wherever she went and to ensure that she received no unauthorized letters. She took her revenge by pretending that the Medici were trying to poison her, and that it was necessary for a steward to taste all her dishes which must be prepared by French cooks. She gave it out that the marriage had been forced upon her, and that she was not therefore legally married to Cosimo. She was living as a concubine; her husband was a fornicator. She would have to enter a convent now – a French convent, of course. When this solution to her problem was put to Louis XIV, he replied that if she returned to France at all it would certainly not be to a convent but to the Bastille, and he followed up this threat by sending an envoy to Tuscany with a letter of remonstrance sternly condemning her ‘capricious’ behaviour and her ‘invincible obstinacy’.

  She refused to mend her ways. Hearing that she was ill, Cosimo went to see her at Poggio a Caiano, whither she had been taken from Lappeggi; but she picked up a bottle from her bedside table, threatening to break his head with it unless he left her alone. On her recovery she resumed her practice of walking very fast up the mountain paths behind the villa, taking pot shots at birds on the way and leaving her exhausted attendants trailing far behind her.

  Suddenly in October 1665, bored with her monotonous, secluded country life, she presented herself at the Pitti Palace requesting the Grand Duke’s permission to return to Court. Ferdinando quickly assured her that he would like nothing better. Cosimo kissed her. Everyone seemed delighted to welcome her back since she was evidently quite prepared to behave more circumspectly. And, for a time, all went well: sh
e was gracious; she was pretty; she danced; she laughed; she made love with Cosimo; and she became pregnant again. Then the troubles began once more. She refused to stop galloping about on her horse; she continued to walk as far and as fast as ever; she resumed her complaints that the Medici were robbing her of her freedom, holding her a prisoner. Despite her violent exercise and an attack of influenza, for which her physicians bled her profusely, she gave birth to a healthy daughter, Anna Maria Luisa, on 11 August 1667. But after that, the abscess on her breast broke out again and she contracted smallpox. As a cure, the doctors not only bled her drastically, but also cut off her hair. In her misery and pain, she railed against Cosimo more virulently than ever. The Grand Duke thought it advisable to send him abroad for a time, first to Germany and the Netherlands and then, since Marguerite-Louise remained unappeasable on his return, to Spain and England.

  XXIII

  COSIMO III AND THE GRAND PRINCE FERDINANDO

  ‘Eighteen years is enough. It will serve out my time’

  COSIMO, AT twenty-six, was just as gloomy as ever but far more self-confident than at the time of his wedding. An inveterate trencherman, he was now excessively fat; but he had a certain charm of manner, and though he was unduly fond of pious interjections, his conversation was wide-ranging and not uninteresting. In England, where he was well received in academic circles owing to his family’s protection of Galileo, he was seen coming out of the Queen’s Chapel by Pepys who described him as a ‘comely, black, fat man, in a morning suit…a very jolly and good comely man’. At the French Court he created a similarly favourable impression. The King wrote to Marguerite-Louise, ‘Consideration for you alone would have obliged me to give my cousin all the favourable treatment he has received from me. But from what I perceived of his personal qualities, I could not have refused them to his peculiar merit.’ In the less reliable words of Mademoiselle, ‘He spoke admirably on every topic. His physique was rather plump for a man of his age. He had a fine head, black and curly hair, a large red mouth, good teeth, a healthy ruddy complexion, abundance of wit, and was agreeable in conversation.’

  Cosimo returned to Florence much taken with the countries of the north. ‘I hope for nothing in this world so ardently as once again to see [that] paradise called England,’ he said soon after his return. ‘I long to embrace again all my old friends there.’ He was equally enthusiastic about France, and evidently prepared to make more allowances for the wayward behaviour of his French wife who, he was pleased to note when he got home, was now on good terms both with his mother and his father. His father, however, was failing fast with dropsy and apoplexy, and suffering agonies from the treatment of his doctors; towards the end, not content with bleeding him, they placed a cauterizing iron on his head and forced polvere capitale up his nose; they also applied to his forehead four live pigeons whose stomachs had been ripped open for the purpose. The Grand Duke Ferdinando II died on 27 May 1670 and was buried with his father and grandfather in the great baroque mausoleum at San Lorenzo.

  Cosimo III entered upon his inheritance with the deepest apprehension. In spite of his father’s personal economy and his rigid and extensive system of taxation, there had been no recent improvement in the finances of Tuscany whose trade was rapidly declining and whose population was being constantly decreased by malaria, plague and food shortages due to a backward agriculture. At first, Cosimo endeavoured to deal effectively with the problems that beset him; but soon, recognizing that they were utterly beyond his ability to control, he withdrew more and more into the soothing darkness of his chapel, leaving his mother and her friends to deal with most affairs of state and even deputing his brother, who was not yet twelve, to receive foreign ambassadors. This pleased his bossy mother well enough, but it certainly did not please his wife who angrily complained about a mere della Rovere presuming to take precedence over a daughter of the royal house of France.

  In the summer of 1671, after Marguerite-Louise had given birth to a second son, christened Gian Gastone after his grandfather, Gaston d’Orléans, relations between Cosimo and his wife deteriorated rapidly. Believing that she had cancer of the breast she asked Louis XIV to send her a French doctor. Louis agreed to do so; but when the doctor arrived, he discovered that the little bump on her bosom was ‘nowise malignant’. However, sympathizing with her urgent desire to return to France, he did suggest to the Grand Duke that her general health might be improved by taking the medicinal waters at Sainte-Reine in Burgundy. Cosimo took leave to disagree, and naturally his objections led to heated protests from his wife. There were further quarrels over the quality of various jewels he gave her, over her extravagance, over her servants, and particularly over a male cook with whom she behaved outrageously in order to punish Cosimo for having dismissed two German grooms and a French dancing-master. ‘Now this cook,’ so it was recorded,

  either dreaded, or pretended to dread, being tickled, and the Duchess, aware of his weakness, delighted in tickling him…He defended himself, shouting and running from one side of the room to the other, which made her laugh excessively.

  When tired of this she would beat the cook over the head with a pillow, and the cook would take shelter under her bed where she went on beating him until, tired out with her exertions, she sank into a chair. As she did so her band of musicians started once more to play the tune they had abandoned when the romp had begun. One night the cook, being very drunk, made so much noise while the Grand Duchess was belabouring him with her pillow that he aroused the Grand Duke who, coming down to see what was happening, ‘instantly condemned the cook to the galleys’ – though he later reprieved him. Eventually the Grand Duchess decided to settle the matter once and for all. She wrote to inform Cosimo that she could bear her situation not a moment longer:

  So I have made a resolution which will not surprise you when you reflect on your base usage of me for nearly twelve years…I am the source of your unhappiness, as you are of mine. I beg you to consent to a separation to set my conscience and yours at rest. I shall send my confessor to discuss it with you.

  The Grand Duke replied,

  I do not know if your unhappiness could have exceeded mine. Although everybody else has done justice to the many signs of respect, consideration and love which I have never tired of showing you for nearly twelve years, you have regarded them with the utmost indifference…I await the father confessor you are sending to learn what he has to say on your behalf…Meanwhile I am giving orders that besides proper attendants and conveniences Your Highness will receive [at Poggio a Caiano] all the respect which is your due.

  Hearing that the marriage had reached this sad pass, Louis XIV sent yet another envoy to Tuscany, this time the Bishop of Marseilles. The Bishop found the Grand Duchess established at Poggio a Caiano with an extremely large household numbering over a hundred and fifty servants and attendants. Her conduct and movements were closely regulated – she was followed everywhere and nobody could visit her without the Grand Duke’s express permission – but, as the Bishop discovered, although full of complaints about her husband, she was far from downcast. Indeed, she was ‘lively and brilliant, bold and enterprising…playful and merry’. It seemed not at all surprising to the Bishop that the Grand Duke, so ‘melancholy and sombre’ himself, should be so continually at variance with her. Yet the Bishop hoped that some sort of reconciliation could nevertheless be patched up. Between the dancing and the dinners, the music and comedies with which the tireless Grand Duchess regaled him, he managed to find out what her principal grievances were. But when the Grand Duke promised to redress them, she was still not satisfied. ‘Having tried in vain for twelve long years to change her feelings, she could not alter them now.’ Besides, she could not continue to live with him ‘without offending God’ for she had been married to him under duress so was not really his wife at all. At length the Bishop was forced to conclude that his mission was hopeless, and in May 1673 he returned to France to report to the King.

  Louis and Cosimo both thought that, i
f a formal separation had to be approved, Marguerite-Louise ought to remain in Tuscany for the sake of appearances. But the Grand Duchess was determined to go home to France, and on 26 December 1674 permission was at last given her to do so. She was to retire to the convent at Montmartre. She saw to it that she did not go empty-handed. As well as a generous pension and lavish expenses for her journey, she was to be allowed to take hangings and beds as well as 10,000 crowns’ worth of silver. In fact, she took a great deal more. She removed several valuable articles from Poggio a Caiano, and gave away so much money before she left that she had to ask for more in case she found herself ‘penniless on the highway’.

  As might be expected, she did not remain long in seclusion at Montmartre. At first she behaved with due piety and resignation, but soon she was off to Versailles, with Louis XIV’s permission. Letters from her demanding more money arrived in Florence by regular posts. She took to gambling, to wearing double layers of patches, thick rouge and a yellow wig. She was as talkative and restless as ever. She was rumoured to be having an affair with the Comte de Louvigny, with an adjutant in the Maréchal de Luxembourg’s guards, as well as with a guardsman in the same regiment. Later she took a fancy to her groom who cracked nuts for her with his teeth, was allowed to win money from her at cards and who helped her to take a bath. She got deeper and deeper in debt, demanding another 20,000 crowns from Cosimo, who exasperated her by the inordinately long time he took in replying to her urgent letters. She created uproar at Montmartre by furiously chasing a young, newly appointed abbess through the convent for having dared to criticize her conduct, brandishing a hatchet in one hand and a pistol in the other. After this escapade she obtained permission to leave Montmartre for the smaller community of Saint-Mandé where she soon took another lover, this time a renegade monk.