Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  Until that year, the king had managed to retain a sense of perspective where his crushes were concerned; he never gave them too much power when they were still adolescents. However, the last of Louis’ mignons, Henri Coiffier de Ruzé—the handsome marquis de Cinq Mars who didn’t have a brain in his curly golden-haired head—bit the hand that fed him harder than anyone could have imagined.

  It was Cardinal Richelieu who had first become captivated by the fifteen-year-old son of his deceased colleague Marshal Effiat. When war with Spain erupted that year, Louis made Henri d’Effiat, marquis de Cinq Mars, the commander of one of his new companies of bodyguards. Over the next four years Cinq Mars, who had been made grand equerry, the master of the royal stables, assumed a seat on Louis’ council. He rose through the military ranks, fighting alongside the king in 1639 at the northeastern front. By the end of the year, the thirty-eight-year-old monarch admitted to Marie de Hautefort that his heart now belonged to the nineteen-year-old marquis.

  During the period between the births of the sovereigns’ two sons, while Cinq Mars set the fashions at court, and Louis (as well as all the women) fawned over the oh-so-handsome nobleman with the melodious singing voice, Anne resided at St. Germain with the dauphin. She preferred to be alone with her much-cherished son, rather than face daily humiliation at her husband’s court.

  Louis saw in Cinq Mars what he wanted to see: the youth’s handsome face and long, blond, perfumed curls, rather than his arrogance, ostentation, and promiscuity. Courtiers who had so recently witnessed their sovereign utterly moonstruck over young Marie de Hautefort, as well as his very public attractions to other ladies in his wife’s retinue, were astonished at Louis’ passionate volte-face for a young man, although the monarch’s infatuation with Cinq Mars in fact marked a return to his preference during the mid-1620s for male favoris. One of Gaston’s servants claimed that the king loved Cinq Mars “ardemment”—ardently. In his Historiettes, Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux wrote that Louis “l’aimait esperdument,” meaning that Louis loved him to distraction. Although none of his stories were confirmed, Tallemant wrote extensively about the king’s ardor for Cinq Mars, mentioning a lovers’ tryst between the pair, stating that one day someone interrupted the king’s mignon in the act of rubbing jasmine oil all over his body, and a moment later, His Majesty appeared at the door. Tallemant refers to another incident where the marquis arrived for a rendezvous with the monarch “adorned like a wife”—whatever that means—and Louis, his garments in disarray, “started kissing his hands almost before this minion got [in bed with him].”

  Unless Tallemant de Réaux’s statement was pure gossip, it would appear that, at least with Cinq Mars (if not possibly with Barradat several years earlier in 1624), Louis’ flirtations may have finally crossed the line into adultery. Otherwise, the king appears to have been faithful to Anne, in body, if not in his heart.

  Tallemant was a bourgeois who “married up,” wedding his wealthy cousin Elisabeth de Rambouillet. Elizabeth fed him many scurrilous stories of the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII. However, she was no fan of either king. Consequently, her husband’s anecdotes are most likely little more than spurious invention, but they have enough of a whiff of truth about them that they were given credit at the time—perhaps because so many of Louis’ private letters to Richelieu, as well as the king’s diaries, are extant. In them, the monarch complains of the poor treatment he has received from his favorite, every “dirty look” Cinq Mars gives him, every act of arrogance and haughtiness, until His Majesty is beside himself with misery. Louis and his favori bickered like an old married couple, much to the embarrassment of the court. And whatever Cinq Mars’s pleasure, the sovereign granted it.

  In the early spring of 1642, after the dauphin burst into tears one evening at the strange and unfamiliar sight of the king in his funny-looking nightcap—which the toddler must have found somewhat frightening—Louis made the decision to separate Anne from their sons, claiming that she was raising them to hate their father. He forbade her to leave St. Germain during his absence, even for her customary visits to the convents of the Carmelites and Val-de-Grâce. The queen was humiliated enough by these restrictions, but was completely devastated by the loss of her children.

  That June, Richelieu anonymously received a draft copy of a treaty with the Spanish, revealing Cinq Mars’s participation in a plot to conspire with Gaston and a handful of prominent courtiers to assassinate the cardinal-minister, laying the groundwork for their own regime by opening negotiations with Anne’s brother. The cardinal shared the information with Louis, who promptly ordered Cinq Mars’s arrest. Because the treaty was with the Spanish, the king also suspected Anne of being involved, although she vehemently denied it. She may in fact have been in her husband’s corner, as the anonymous source who forwarded the duplicitous treaty to Richelieu. It has been speculated that Anne may have done so because she desperately wanted her sons returned to her, and recognized that the proper conduit for these negotiations would be the all-powerful cardinal-minister. Neither Gaston nor Cinq Mars ever suspected Anne of betraying them to the crown, if indeed she had done so.

  Cinq Mars begged the king’s pardon, but Louis’ heart had hardened against him. When the request reached the king, he had been boiling sugar and treacle in a pan. Louis took the pan from the fire, rolled the contents about, and showed the caramelized sugar and molasses to the messenger, declaring that Cinq Mars’s soul was as black as the bottom of the pan. From then on, Louis openly averred that he had never liked the marquis, calling Cinq Mars an irreligious boy who had never said a pater in his life and whose idleness made him vomit.

  Found guilty of treason, on September 12, 1642, the marquis de Cinq Mars was beheaded. Although the king had made a fool of himself over the young man, he displayed no emotion over the marquis’ execution, remarking instead that he would have liked to have seen the grimace Cinq Mars made on the scaffold.

  In February 1643, Louis fell ill while he was staying at his boyhood residence of St. Germain. He never recovered, instead growing steadily worse throughout the winter and spring. His intestines were ulcerated and inflamed, he had lost control of his bowels, and his body was racked with tuberculosis, which by then had spread to his lungs. A popular anecdote about Louis XIII’s final hours has been handed down through the centuries, published by generations of biographers as fact, although the story has been revealed to be apocryphal. When the king was on his deathbed suffering from complications due to intestinal tuberculosis, the queen brought the dauphin to see his papa for the last time. Asking his heir if he knew who he was, the four-year-old child replied that he was Louis the Fourteenth.

  Still clinging to life, the forty-one-year-old monarch is said to have responded, “Pas encore, mon fils, pas encore!”—“Not yet, my son, not yet!”

  He appointed Anne as regent for their son, and Gaston lieutenant general of the kingdom, but the pair of them were to be assisted by an entire council of nobles who had the real authority when it came to governing. Anne’s role was merely nominal; Louis had not permitted her a scintilla of power. And yet, while she saw her husband slip away, remaining by his bedside day and night—even as she quietly, if not covertly, prepared for her future—she was surprised by the intensity of her grief. According to the memoirs of Madame de Motteville, whose mother was Anne’s private secretary, and who herself became a courtier, the queen had often admitted after Louis passed that as she’d watched him dying she’d felt as though her heart were being torn from her body.

  Louis XIII died on May 14, 1643, the thirty-third anniversary of the assassination of his father. Ever parsimonious when it came to his own expenses, his request for a minimal amount of extravagance at his funeral was heeded. Louis’ embalmed body was encased in a lead casket covered with a velvet drape embellished only with a white satin cross and his coats of arms embroidered in golden thread. A team of six horses conveyed his hearse to his sepulcher at Saint Denis. The
funeral procession was so long, it took a full day to arrive there.

  During his reign Louis earned the sobriquet “the Just”—not because he was a fair and wise ruler, but because he firmly believed in justice being served, dispensing it when he thought the punishment fit the crime. Louis XIII presided over more judicial murders than any other French monarch, starting in April 1617 when his mother’s pet minister Concini was executed because he had become too powerful and posed a potential threat to the king’s authority. Nor did he hesitate to behead his own favorite, the marquis de Cinq Mars.

  Contrary to the fictional depictions, Louis XIII was hardly a weakling who lacked courage; in 1617, he expelled his mother from the court, and he destroyed the Huguenot Protestant “state within the state” that culminated with his successful siege at La Rochelle in 1629; a few months later, he led an army of thirty-five thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry across the Alps in the dead of winter to combat the combined forces of Savoy, the German emperor, and Spain, and he eventually declared war on Spain, his wife’s homeland.

  Louis consistently placed principle above his personal feelings. He permitted the Huguenots to worship in peace as long as they did not attempt to revolt—but showed no mercy when they did, waging nearly annual military campaigns against them from 1620 to 1629, which effectively plunged the kingdom into civil war. These were his own policies, as was his desire to curb the growing power of the Hapsburgs, whose territory bordered that of France, so that his kingdom would not become one of their satellites.

  Although Louis placed no personal stamp on France’s science, art, and culture as his son, the Sun King, would do, his reign marked the dawn of France’s golden age and did boast luminaries such as René Descartes, and the great dramatist Corneille.

  Cardinal Richelieu, who had died of lung disease in September 1642, made a gift to Louis of his opulent mansion, the Palais Cardinal, in 1636, but the king had never resided there. After her husband’s death, Anne of Austria installed herself in the château with her two sons, renaming it the Palais Royal. Thwarting the late Louis’ plans to deny her the regency because he always considered her a Spaniard at heart, Anne connived to have the Parlement of Paris, the capital’s judicial body, revoke his will. Louis XIV affixed his signature to the document awarding his mother the regency, attesting that it was executed with his full consent.

  Anne then filled the position of chief minister with the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin, turning over the reins of government to him. She’d first met Mazarin in 1634, when he was a protégé of Cardinal Richelieu. Her nemesis introduced the pair of them with the sly and indiscreet remark, “He will please you, Madame, he is much like Buckingham.”

  Fast-forward to her widowhood, and before long tongues were wagging, suggesting that Mazarin and the queen mother were lovers. Some believed that they had secretly wed. The cardinal was not an ordained priest and therefore could have married within the Church, although his role as Louis XIV’s godfather made him off-limits by canonical law; a union with Anne would have been considered incest. However, Anne confided to her friend Madame de Brienne that the kind of love she bore for Mazarin was a spiritual and not a sexual one. Later in their relationship the pair would exchange coded correspondence that could be interpreted as highly romantic or sentimental, but there is no conclusive proof of any formal union between Mazarin and the dowager queen.

  Anne of Austria became as formidable a regent for her son as Marie de Medici had been before her. During Louis XIV’s minority, with the aid of Cardinal Mazarin, Anne fended off the two-pronged civil revolt known as the Fronde. During the Fronde, both Anne and Mazarin were savaged by her son’s subjects in vicious, bawdy poems known as Mazarinades that quite graphically accused the pair of fornication.

  For some reason, during Louis XIV’s upbringing, Anne deliberately suppressed any mention of his father’s methods of governance, so he grew up mistakenly believing that Richelieu had ruled not only France but had controlled Louis XIII as well. Anne’s regency formally ended when the young king came of age in 1651, although she retained considerable power and influence until Mazarin’s death a decade later.

  France’s protracted war with Spain had finally ended in 1659; the following year, Anne celebrated her son’s wedding to her niece, the infanta Maria Theresa of Spain. Unlike his parents, Louis XIV and his bride, whose name had been francofied to Marie-Thérèse, didn’t dawdle when it came to consummating their marriage. Anne’s first grandchild, a boy, Louis de France, was born in November 1661. That March 31, the bisexual Philippe, duc d’Orléans, had married his first cousin Henriette-Anne, the daughter of his aunt Henrietta Maria and Charles I of England.

  In the spring of 1663, soon after the Easter celebrations, Anne fell ill. Her arms became weak, and she developed a fever, nausea, and pain in her legs. The queen mother was bled so often that she fainted from the loss of it. She eventually recovered after a slow convalescence, but in May 1664, she began to feel pain in her left breast. Anne had detected a nodule, but told no one of it and was determined to endure the agony. When her family noticed how ill she looked and insisted that the royal physicians be consulted, the doctors confirmed the worst. Seventeenth-century French surgeons knew little about cancer; they did not cut into the tissue. Instead, Anne was treated with bloodletting, emetics, and topical ointments. Obviously these remedies were useless.

  In September of 1665, Anne of Austria was transported to the convent of Val-de-Grâce, built on land she had acquired for the nuns of Valprofond on May 7, 1621. She had wanted to die in peace there, but both the king and her doctors found the location too inconvenient for them to properly care for her. Louis XIV personally fetched his mother from Val-de-Grâce and brought her back to the Louvre, where she died of breast cancer on January 20, 1666, with her son Philippe at her bedside. Her body reposes in the Basilica of Saint Denis, the final resting place for France’s monarchs. After so many decades of celibacy within their marriage, the oft-neglected Anne of Austria and the suspicious and insensitive Louis XIII now sleep together for all eternity.

  PHILIPPE OF FRANCE, DUC d’ORLÉANS

  AND

  HENRIETTE-ANNE OF ENGLAND

  MARRIED: 1661–1670

  AND

  ELISABETH CHARLOTTE von der PFALZ, PRINCESS PALATINE

  MARRIED: 1671–1701

  Everyone loved “Minette,” except her own husband. What a waste! is probably the first phrase that sprang to mind regarding the mismatched union between the younger son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, and his first cousin—the eighth and last child of Charles I of England and Philippe’s aunt Henrietta Maria.

  Perhaps they were too much alike—both so fine boned and physically beautiful, so enamored of sumptuous fashion and lavish jewels. Both of them outrageous flirts. And both so attractive—and attracted—to men.

  Anne of Austria learned a valuable lesson during her husband’s reign: Louis XIII’s younger brother Gaston had attempted more than one coup d’état. Consequently, she was determined to raise her own younger son in a way that would present no threat to his elder brother Louis XIV’s government or throne. Like seventeenth-century royal daughters, “Monsieur” (as a king’s next-youngest brother was styled) received lessons in decorum, music, and dancing, but he was deliberately not taught the skills necessary to rule France. This tactic seems absurd, given the high infant mortality rate and the likelihood of Monsieur inheriting the throne himself, but Philippe was consciously denied any education in statecraft, history, or the humanities. Moreover, he possessed only the rudimentary fundamentals of grammar and spelling in his own tongue, and was unskilled in other languages as well—a far cry from Renaissance-era princes. Monsieur’s penmanship remained so poor throughout his life that he could barely decipher it himself.

  Given the title of duc d’Anjou at his birth, Philippe spent his earliest years in his mother’s household among her attendants. He performed
many of the activities that a daughter would have done under the same circumstances, such as accompanying the queen mother on her visits to convents—where the nuns made as much of a fuss over him as did her ladies-in-waiting. Anne often referred to him as “my little girl.” Always petite and dainty, a delicate boy with dark eyes, a profusion of long brown curls, and the same swarthy complexion as his older brother, Philippe was the darling of Anne’s entourage. He became fascinated at a tender age by their colorful, extravagant gowns and accessories, and particularly by their makeup and jewelry. If it glittered, Philippe loved it. According to Madame de Motteville, whose mother was the private secretary to Anne of Austria, and whose own memoirs paint an indelible picture of the Bourbon court, Monsieur enjoyed the company of women and girls and loved to style them—delighting in dressing their hair, and offering makeup tips. When Philippe did play with other little boys, his usual companion was François-Timoléon de Choisy, the future abbé (and transsexual), whose mother was raising him as a girl. François-Timoléon had pierced ears, was dotted with decorative mouches, and dripping with diamonds, and when Monsieur came over to hang out, the children played dress-up in women’s clothes.