Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  In 1684, Anne Marie, Minette and Monsieur’s younger daughter, married Victor Amadeus II, the Duke of Savoy, and became queen of Sardinia upon the death of her father-in-law. She and her husband had eight children. In 1697, the oldest, Princess Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, wed her cousin, Louis XIV’s grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, and became the mother of Louis XV of France. Anne Marie also died at the age of twenty-six.

  Élisabeth Charlotte, the daughter of Philippe and Liselotte, married Leopold, duc de Lorraine. They had five children, one of whom, Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, would become the founder of the Hapsburg-Lorraine dynasty and the father of sixteen children, including Marie Antoinette and her older sister Maria Carolina, the future queen of Naples.

  In 1692, Philippe and Liselotte’s son, the duc de Chartres, married his first cousin, Françoise Marie de Bourbon, the legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and his mistress Madame de Montespan. Liselotte had been vehemently against the match from the start, viewing the bride as no better than the parvenue daughter of a prostitute, despite the fact that Montespan was herself the daughter of a duke and came from a tremendously wealthy and established family of nobles. After Liselotte discovered that her son had, at the king’s insistence, agreed to the match, she slapped the duc’s face in front of the entire court. She later admitted in her memoirs that she would willingly have shed her own blood to prevent the marriage. The union between the duc de Chartres and Mademoiselle de Blois signified a formal rupture in Monsieur and Madame’s own marriage. Liselotte refused to forgive her husband, even after he admitted his regret at consenting to the match.

  In October 1793, the Bourbon tombs housing the bodies of Minette and her mother were desecrated by a mob of French Revolutionaries. Their remains were tossed along with those of their ancestors and descendants into what the rebels called the cemetery of the Valois, a trench on the north side of the Basilica of Saint Denis. Not until the restoration of the monarchy was Minette permitted to rest again in peace. On the night of January 20, 1817, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI, in the presence of the French royal family, Henriette-Anne, her mother, and the ashes of their relations were reinterred in the vault beneath the church. A black marble tablet inscribed with their names marks the consecrated ground where the young woman beloved of two superpower sovereigns lies. Monsieur’s tomb was also among those that were desecrated when the basilica was ransacked.

  As the son of one seventeenth-century king and the younger brother of another, a few breaths away from the throne of France himself, Monsieur had been duty-bound to produce an heir, not only for the sake of the Orléans branch of the Bourbon dynasty, but for the kingdom. He finally did so, but with his second wife, a woman who was his complete opposite—who strode through the court in tall boots, wielding a riding crop, while he minced about in high heels, fluttering a fan. Ironically, Amazonian or tomboyish caricature that she was, it was Liselotte who was the natural mother, the nurturer that Minette never was, not only for her own three children, but for her predecessor’s daughters as well.

  Tragically for her marriage, and for Louis XIV’s union as well, Henriette-Anne, the queen of hearts at the French court, married the wrong brother. With her personality and attributes, her glamour and good taste, her sense and sensibilities, and her tremendous rapport with Louis, she might have made a terrific queen of France, while Marie-Thérèse, the woman who did become the king’s consort, and who never really left Spain behind, would have been happier as queen of her own homeland. But none of that was going to happen. Louis rejected the notion of wedding Minette when he had the chance; he had no idea she’d grow up to be such a beauty, and so sympatique. By that time, an alliance with Spain was more politically advantageous than one with England, and his mother was pushing him to marry into her side of the family. Who knows—perhaps if they had wed, Louis never would have been tempted to stray from Minette’s bed. Then again, she was always sickly, and would have died young anyway. If she hadn’t given Louis a son or two, whom might he have married after her demise?

  Minette also had no prospects as a little girl, a half orphan with a father assassinated by the will of his people, a mother residing at the French court on charity, and her eldest brother living in exile and fighting for the throne he might never gain. There was nothing she could bring to the table, and royal marriages were not love matches; they were treaties. The timing was always off for Minette and Louis, and so she had to settle for second-best—his younger brother, Philippe. Mutual happiness might have been too much to expect from their marriage, but Minette and Monsieur never seemed to have enjoyed so much as mutual contentment or respect for more than the first few weeks of their union.

  The man Henriette-Anne admired head and shoulders above all others was the one who literally stood that tall. But he was also the one man she could never, ever wed, despite an affection bordering on true love: her brother Charles.

  CHARLES II

  AND

  CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA

  MARRIED: 1662–1685

  By the time Charles II was restored to the throne, triumphantly entering London on his thirtieth birthday, May 29, 1660, perhaps he felt he’d earned a measure of merriment before settling down to matrimony.

  After joining his father on campaign during the 1640s, and later leading his own forces, he had witnessed Charles I’s defeat and eventual execution at Whitehall on January 30, 1649—the climax of England’s civil war between the Royalists and the Roundheads, or Parliamentarians. This judicial murder severed England from its monarchy and ushered in the puritanical era known as the Interregnum, in which Oliver Cromwell, and for a brief period his son Richard, governed the realm as Lord Protector.

  The eldest surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria (a sister of France’s Louis XIII), Charles II spent the Interregnum fighting to regain the English throne. Although Scotland had proclaimed him king, Charles was outnumbered by Cromwell’s forces and suffered resounding defeats. From the Continent, where he lived in impoverished exile, he raised armies and funds, suffering a major setback when the Dutch Republic reversed its acknowledgment of his sovereignty to recognize Cromwell’s Protectorate instead. Not until both Oliver and Richard Cromwell had died did a new Parliament re-form itself and invite Charles to return to England as king.

  It was as though the sunlight finally emerged after more than a decade of darkness. Charles, a bachelor, who was nicknamed the Black Boy for his swarthy looks, sailed back to England with a glamorous mistress—a tempestuous (and married) brunette named Barbara Palmer. The kingdom cast off the pall of Cromwellian puritanism and began to party like it was 1639—in the days before the civil war. Charles reopened the theaters that the protector had shuttered, and for the first time actresses were permitted to tread the boards, playing the roles that had previously been performed by boys too young to shave and grown men dressed en travesti. The new king lavished gifts upon his favorites—those who had loyally stood by him during his exile and fought alongside him to retake his throne.

  But England was broke. And she had enemies—namely Holland and Spain—with formidable navies that jeopardized her economic security by posing threats to international trade. Sooner or later Parliament was bound to urge Charles to do something about it. The solution to both problems could be found in one word: marriage.

  The right bride was needed to make the perfect political alliance. She also had to bring a massive dowry that would replenish England’s coffers. Last but not least, the ideal bride would bear a passel of children to secure the succession of the Stuart dynasty.

  The third requirement was particularly important, because people didn’t like the heir presumptive, Charles’s brother James, the Duke of York, with his sour disposition and his papist proclivities. Charles needed to make babies. Well, on one hand Charles made babies just fine. In 1649, while he was living in exile in The Hague, Lucy Walter, aka Lucy Barlow, a Welsh-born courtesan, bore hi
m a son, James Scott. But James didn’t count. Charles needed legitimate sons.

  At one point during their continental exile, Charles’s mother hoped to unite him with Louis XIII’s niece, styled at the Bourbon court as Mademoiselle. But Charles’s imperious cousin had little use for an impoverished youth with no crown.

  Another potential bride during these dismal years turned out to be a nonstarter as well. Charles had a fling with Hortense Mancini, Cardinal Mazarin’s gorgeous and exceptionally wealthy niece. He would have been delighted to wed her, but Mazarin refused to waste Europe’s greatest heiress on a kid with no future.

  As soon as Charles was invited by England’s Parliament to reclaim his crown in 1660, both Mazarin and Mademoiselle were kicking themselves, mightily regretting their respective mistakes. Both sought to reopen marriage negotiations with the new king, but Charles had no interest in wedding anyone who had snubbed him in his adversity.

  Charles II wished to emulate his parents’ marriage, which had been a model of conjugal fidelity and set a high moral tone. But he was not his father, and women found him irresistible long before he could claim that it was his power that was the aphrodisiac. “Odd’s fish, I am an ugly fellow,” he would later remark with self-deprecation to court painter Peter Lely. Of course, being a king, in addition to being charming, fun-loving, curious, and exciting, he hardly had a problem attracting women. Yet, tall, dark, and handsome Charles’s saturnine looks and luxurious black hair, which (to hide the strands of gray) he covered with a wig by the time he was thirty-three, were actually not his era’s beau ideal, which still favored fair-skinned blonds. Nor was his height, well above average at six-two or six-three. And his very large feet sparked Charles’s lifelong passion for shoes.

  At his April 23, 1660, coronation, Charles wore golden sandals with high heels and a suit of crimson satin. Even his hose were crimson. His royal mantles were fashioned from crimson velvet trimmed and lined with ermine. Charles’s horse was no less ostentatiously caparisoned. The saddle was embroidered with gold and pearls, crowned by an enormous oriental ruby; the stirrups and bosses were studded with an additional twelve thousand stones.

  During the Restoration, a person’s rank was demonstrated by his or her outward appearance. Wealth was flaunted on one’s person—in clothes, jewels, and, well, shoes. Charles had begun spending lavishly on the trappings of kingship as soon as he ascended the throne, and his expenditures quickly outpaced the income voted to him by Parliament.

  With a reign that began in need of money, his search for a bride was guided by the size of her dowry. Despite England’s fear of Catholic monarchs, all things considered, the most strategically beneficial alliance was with Portugal.

  Seven years Charles’s junior, Catarina Henriqueta de Brangança was the eldest child of João (John), Duke of Braganza, as the English spelled it, and his wife, Luiza Maria, daughter of the 8th Duke of Medina Sidonia. In 1640, when the Portuguese established their independence from Spain, the duke had led the rebellion. It was therefore no surprise that the family of Braganza claimed the Portuguese throne. Aware that an Anglo-Portuguese alliance would create a formidable nemesis for Spain, João had suggested a marriage between Catherine and Charles II when his daughter was only seven years old and the Prince of Wales just fourteen, but nothing came of it. João died in 1656, and Catherine’s mother was appointed regent for their son Afonso. Meanwhile, raising her daughter like a nun instead of a princess, Luiza Maria kept Catherine immured in a convent throughout her youth. Courtiers recalled seeing the infanta no more than ten times inside the royal palace in Lisbon. How would such a sheltered upbringing prepare Catherine to eventually become queen of a foreign land?

  After a year of international negotiations—with the Spanish vehemently opposed to a match between Catherine and Charles II, and the French supporting it—at the opening of Parliament on May 8, 1661, Charles announced his intention to wed the Portuguese infanta. The Spanish felt betrayed; Philip IV, the brother of Anne of Austria, claimed that the union violated a previous Anglo-Spanish agreement and hastily proposed alternative candidates. Charles rejected the two wealthy Hapsburg princesses of Parma after hearing that they were both exceedingly homely, then conveyed the message to Philip of Spain that he would wed whoever he bloody well pleased, doubting that his selection of a Portuguese bride would bring England and Spain to the brink of war. Sucking on the proverbial sour grapes, the Spanish ambassador quipped that the Portuguese infanta was barren anyway. Although his comment was uttered in spite, it would prove prophetic.

  No one could quibble at the size and scope of Catherine’s dowry: a massive two million cruzados (approximately three hundred and sixty thousand pounds), the trading ports of Tangier on the Barbary Coast in North Africa, and Bombay in India, the license to trade freely in the East Indies and Brazil, and costly goods in kind—sugar and Brazilian wood. In return, England pledged military assistance to help protect Portugal from Spain and to give Catherine an income of thirty thousand pounds. Most important to the bride, she would be permitted to worship freely as a Catholic, practicing her religion in a private chapel at any palace where she might reside. Part of Catherine’s dowry was to be paid on the day she departed her homeland, and the rest would be remitted in installments.

  The Earl of Clarendon, England’s Lord Chancellor (and the father-in-law of Charles’s brother, James), assured the Portuguese ambassador that the king had chosen Catherine for her “piety, virtue and comeliness.” Charles had yet to see her in person, although he had been sent a miniature, in which the infanta appeared to be an attractive brunette with meltingly soft eyes.

  The fiancés began to correspond in Spanish. Although Charles continued to spend his nights in the arms of the luscious Barbara Palmer, who bore their first child, a daughter, that February, his love letters to Catherine were signed by “[t]he very faithful husband of Your Majesty, whose hand he kisses.” Sadly, not only was Charles unfaithful even as he penned his billets-doux, but he would remain so throughout their twenty-three-year marriage. Yet his letters assured Catherine that she could make him wondrously content. By the time she learned of his deprivations during the civil war, her empathetic heart was already in love with him.

  As early as September 1661, eight months before she set foot on English soil, Catherine’s dowry was already being pledged as security for loans. And when the payments weren’t made quickly enough, the man in charge of administering them, a converso named Eduarte Da Silva, was sent to the Tower of London.

  The pope had refused to recognized Portugal’s independence from Spain; therefore, if Catherine were to have the customary proxy wedding in her own country before leaving for England, His Holiness would have considered her merely the daughter of a duke, rather than the progeny of the king of Portugal. Consequently, the House of Braganza requested no proxy ceremony from Rome, and Catherine would not be officially wed until she reached Charles’s homeland, although she was styled as queen of England while she remained in Lisbon waiting to depart.

  Catherine had no idea that her mother had committed an amount to her dowry that was more than the Portuguese treasury held, having spent the money raising troops against the threat of Spanish invasion. She also didn’t know that the English had discovered the dowry they were being given was only half the sum originally promised, and that instead of its being paid in gold, it was being sent in other commodities—spices, sugar, and jewels.

  The Earl of Sandwich, admiral of the British fleet, who had come to escort Catherine to her new homeland, was in a quandary: Should he accept Charles’s bride with less than what had been agreed upon—which would be an embarrassment to England—or should he just leave the infanta in Lisbon for failure to provide her full dowry? As none of this situation was of Catherine’s making, and as the English had already taken possession of Tangier and begun to garrison the port, the earl continued with the original plan.

  On May 13, 1662, Catherine’s ship f
inally dropped anchor in Portsmouth. But Charles was not there to welcome her. His mistress, whose husband he had ennobled with an Irish earldom in December 1661, making Barbara Countess of Castlemaine, threw a temper tantrum. She insisted on being relocated to a house in Richmond, where she could create the maximum amount of trouble for Charles during his honeymoon at the nearby palace of Hampton Court. Enduring a difficult pregnancy with their second child, she threatened to kill herself if Charles left her. The king tended to be sympathetic to a woman in physical distress, and Barbara easily twisted him about her finger. He succumbed to Barbara’s emotional blackmail and chose his mistress over his wife. It wouldn’t be the last time he would make that decision.

  A week after Catherine landed at Portsmouth, Charles finally arrived there and was greeted with the news that his spouse was ailing. Although still bedridden, she was recuperating. He sat by her side, trying to get a good look at his queen above the profusion of bedclothes. The portrait he had been sent hadn’t lied about Catherine’s expressive eyes, nor her mass of dark curls framing a tiny face. As for the rest of his bride, all he could see was a delicate, slender hand.

  One of the first things Catherine had done upon setting foot in England was to request a cup of tea, a very popular beverage among the nobility in Portugal. It would become one of the most important things she ever did. Tea drinking was rare in England at the time, their brew of choice being ale; however, a glass of hops was hardly what Catherine had craved. A “cuppa” is now an Englishman or -woman’s quintessential remedy for everything from the common cold to a broken heart, but Catherine of Braganza was responsible for reshaping their culture into a nation of tea drinkers, thanks to her popularization of the beverage during the reign of Charles II. In 1680, the poet Edmund Waller would praise “the best of queens” and “the best of herbs,” writing,