Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King
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ANJOU, Louis Duc d': Third son of the Duc and Duchesse de Bourgogne; later Louis XV
ANJOU, Philippe Duc d': see Philip V
ANNE Queen of France: Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain, wife of Louis XIII of France
ANNE-MARIE Duchess of Savoy: Daughter of Monsieur and his first wife Henriette-Anne, wife of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy
ANNE-MARIE-LOUISE: see the Grande Mademoiselle
ATHÉNAÏS: Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart-Mortemart, Marquise de Montespan
BÉNÉDICTE Duchesse du Maine: Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, daughter of the Prince de Condé, wife of the Duc du Maine
BERRY, Duc de: Third son of the Dauphin and Marianne-Victoire, grandson of Louis XIV, married Marie-Élisabeth d'Orléans
BOURBON, Mademoiselle de: Daughter of the Duc de Bourbon and Madame la Duchesse (Louise-Françoise, daughter of Louis XIV and Athénaïs)
BOURGOGNE, Duc de: Eldest son of the Dauphin and Marianne-Victoire of Bavaria, grandson of Louis XIV, husband of Adelaide
CARLOS II King of Spain: Son of Philip IV of Spain and his second wife Maria Anna, half-brother of Marie-Thérèse, Queen of France
CHARLES II King of England: Eldest son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, brother of Henriette-Anne d'Orléans
CHARTRES, Louis Duc de: Only son of Philippe Duc d'Orléans and Françoise-Marie
CHARTRES, Philippe Duc de: see Philippe Duc d'Orléans
CHRISTINE Duchess of Savoy: Princess of France, sister of Louis XIII, wife of Victor Amadeus I, Duke of Savoy
DAUPHIN: Louis de France, only surviving child of Louis XIV and Queen Marie-Thérèse, also known as ‘Monseigneur'
DAUPHINE: see Marianne-Victoire
ÉLISABETH-CHARLOTTE: Daughter of Monsieur by his second marriage to Liselotte, wife of the Duke of Lorraine
FRANÇOISE: Françoise d'Aubigné, wife of Paul Scarron, later Madame (and Marquise) de Maintenon
FRANÇOISE-CHARLOTTE d'Aubigné: Niece of Madame de Maintenon, wife of Duc de Noailles
FRANÇOISE-MARIE Duchesse de Chartres then Duchesse d'Orléans: Mademoiselle de Blois II, illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV and Athénaïs, wife of Philippe Duc de Chartres, then Duc d'Orléans
GASTON Duc d'Orléans: Only brother of Louis XIII, uncle of Louis XIV, father of the Grande Mademoiselle
GRANDE MADEMOISELLE: Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier, daughter of Gaston Duc d'Orléans by his first marriage, first cousin of Louis XIV
HENRIETTA MARIA Queen of England: Princess of France, wife of Charles I, mother of Charles II and Henriette-Anne
HENRIETTE-ANNE Duchesse d'Orléans: Daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, first wife of Monsieur, known as ‘Madame'
JAMES: Duke of York, brother of Charles II, later King James II
JAMES EDWARD: Son of James II and Mary Beatrice, Prince of Wales, later ‘the Pretender' to the British throne/James III
LISELOTTE Duchesse d'Orléans: Élisabeth-Charlotte, Princess of the Palatine, second wife of Monsieur, known as ‘Madame'
LOUIS: King Louis XIV
LOUISA MARIA: Daughter of James II and his second wife Mary Beatrice
LOUISE: Louise de La Vallière, later Duchesse de La Vallière
LOUISE-FRANÇOISE: Daughter of Athénaïs and Louis XIV, wife of the Duc de Bourbon, see Madame la Duchesse
LOUISON: see Maria Luisa
MADAME: see Henriette-Anne and Liselotte
MADAME LA DUCHESSE: Louise-Françoise, Mademoiselle de Nantes, daughter of Louise XIV and Athénaïs, wife of the Duc de Bourbon known as ‘Monsieur le Duc'
MADAME ROYALE: Jeanne-Baptiste de Savoie-Nemours. Duchess of Savoy, second wife of Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, mother of Victor Amadeus of Savoy, grandmother of Adelaide
MAINE, Duc du: Son of Louis XIV and Athénaïs, married Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé
MAINTENON, Madame de: see Françoise
MANCINI, Marie: Niece of Cardinal Mazarin, early love of Louis XIV, wife of Prince Colonna
MARGARITA TERESA: Half-sister of Marie-Thérèse, daughter of Philip IV by his second marriage, wife of the Emperor Leopold I
MARGUERITE de Caylus: Marthe-Marguerite de Villette, cousin of Madame de Maintenon, wife of the Comte de Caylus
MARGUERITE-LOUISE: Daughter of Gaston d'Orléans by his second marriage, later Duchess of Tuscany
MARGUERITE-YOLANDE: Princess of Savoy, daughter of Christine de France and the Duke of Savoy
MARIA ANNA Queen of Spain: Daughter of the Duke of Neubourg. Second wife of Carlos II
MARIA LUISA Queen of Spain: Daughter of Victor Amadeus of Savoy, nickname Louison, sister of Adelaide, wife of Philip V of Spain
MARIA TERESA Infanta of Spain: see Marie-Thérèse
MARIANNA Queen of Spain: Daughter of the Emperor Charles X, second wife of Philippe IV, mother of Carlos II
MARIANNE-VICTOIRE, Dauphine: Princess of Bavaria, wife of the Dauphin
MARIE-ANNE Princesse de Conti: Mademoiselle de Blois I, illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV and Louise de La Vallière, wife, then widow, of the Prince de Conti
MARIE-ÉLISABETH Duchesse de Berry: Marie-Louise-Élisabeth, daughter of Philippe Duc d'Orléans and Françoise-Marie, wife of the Duc de Berry
MARIE-LOUISE Queen of Spain: Daughter of Monsieur and his first wife, Henriette-Anne of England, wife of Carlos II of Spain
MARIE-THÉRÈSE Queen of France: Daughter of Philip III and Elisabeth de France, wife of Louis XIV
MARY BEATRICE Queen of England: Wife of James II, daughter of the Duke of Modena and Laura Martinozzi
MONSIEUR: Philippe Duc d'Orléans, only brother of Louis XIV, married first Henriette-Anne, secondly Liselotte.
PETITE MADAME: Marie-Thérèse, infant daughter of Louis XIV and Queen Marie-Thérèse, died young
PHILIP v King of Spain: Formerly Philippe Duc d'Anjou, second son of the Dauphin, grandson of Louis XIV
PHILIPPE Duc d'Orléans: Duc de Chartres then Duc d'Orléans, only son of Monsieur and Liselotte, husband of Françoise-Marie, later Regent
SOPHIA: Electress of Hanover, mother of George I, aunt of Liselotte
VICTOR AMADEUS Duke of Savoy: Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, son of Charles Emmanuel and Jeanne-Baptiste, father of Adelaide and Maria Luisa
PART ONE
Spring
CHAPTER 1
Gift from Heaven
They saw in the arms of this princess whom they had watched suffer great persecutions with so much staunchness, their child-King, like a gift given by Heaven in answer to their prayers.
– Madame de Motteville, Mémoires
T he first woman in the life of Louis XIV – and probably the most important – was his mother, Anne of Austria. When Louis, her first child, was born on 5 September 1638 the Spanish-born Queen of France was just short of her thirty-seventh birthday.* This was an age at which a royal princess might well expect to be a grandmother (Anne herself had been married at fourteen). The Queen had on the contrary endured twenty-two years of childless union. Anne, as she told a confidante, had even feared the annulment of her marriage, since childlessness was one possible ground for repudiation according to the Catholic Church.1 In which case the former Spanish Princess, daughter of Philip III, would either have been returned to her native country or possibly dispatched to govern the so-called ‘Spanish' Netherlands (approximately modern Belgium), as other princesses of her royal house had done, most recently her pious aunt, Isabella Clara Eugenia.
The birth of a child, and that child a son – females could not inherit in France under the fourteenth-century Salic Law – meant that the whole position of his royal mother was transformed. It was not only the obvious delight of a woman confronted with ‘a marvel when it was least expected', as the official newspaper Gazette de France put it.2 It was also the traditionally strong position of any Queen of France who had produced a Dauphin, an interesting paradox in the land of the Salic Law. This strength derived from the claim of
such a Queen to act as Regent should her husband die during the minority of her son; a rule which had applied to Louis XIII's mother when Henri IV had died, and the dominating Catherine de Médicis in the previous century.
It was a situation that had already been envisaged at the time of Anne of Austria's betrothal in 1612. In poetical language the future Queen was described as the moon to her husband's sun: ‘Just as the moon borrows its light from the sun …’ the monarch's death means that ‘the setting sun gives way to the moon and confers on it the power of shedding light in its absence.’3 (The potential bride and bridegroom were then both ten years old.) A quarter of a century later, the reality was less poetical. Louis XIII was not in good health and a Regency in the next thirteen years – the age at which a French King reached his majority – was more likely than not. How long would it be before Anne, like Catherine de Médicis, was promoting herself as an image of revered maternality at the heart of government?
Furthermore the dynastic map of Europe was transformed. The heir presumptive to the throne of France, the King's younger brother Gaston Duc d'Orléans, on being shown ‘physical proofs' of the baby's masculinity, had to accept that his rising hopes of accession had been fatally dashed.4 But Gaston himself had only daughters. Next in line were the French Princes of the Blood, notably the Prince de Condé and his two sons the Duc d'Enghien and the Prince de Conti; their hopes were similarly blighted.
On the other hand the birth of a prince not only cut off hopes but also instigated ambitious thoughts of his eventual marriage to a princess. Gaston's daughter by his first marriage, Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier, was the richest heiress in France from the fortune of her mother who had died at her birth. She did not allow an eleven-year gap in age to prevent her dallying with thoughts of the Dauphin as ‘my little husband'. Even more significant for the future was another equally august birth in Spain. Five days after the ecstatic Queen Anne gave birth to Louis, her sister-in-law, wife of Philip IV, gave birth to a princess.
These two high-born babies were in fact double first cousins (with identical grandparents), since a brother and a sister of France had married a brother and a sister of Spain. Unlike France, however, Spain allowed females to succeed: Anne of Austria had had to renounce her own rights on her marriage. There was at least a theoretical possibility that the Infanta Maria Teresa would one day succeed to the throne of Spain – or her children would. Another theoretical possibility, always present in the mind of Queen Anne, was that Maria Teresa might one day make a bride for Louis.
Under the circumstances, it is easy to understand how the infant Louis was described as ‘Dieudonné’ or ‘Deodatus’: Godgiven. And even as the years passed, the apparently miraculous nature of his conception and birth was never forgotten. One German diplomat would refer to the King's ‘quite extraordinary birth' over forty years after the event.5
How miraculous was this birth, so unexpected and so awe-inspiring for the mother? Certainly a great deal of prayer had been applied to the subject as the years passed. There were pilgrimages to shrines, as befitted a Queen who throughout her life liked nothing so much as to visit convents and holy places. Saint Leonard was invoked against sterility; a hermit who was believed to have founded a monastery near Limoges in the sixth century, his inter-cession was held responsible for many miracles.6 (He was otherwise the patron saint of prisoners – and after all the Queen was in the prison of her infertility.)
The Queen was fast approaching the age at which child-bearing itself was felt to be unlikely. This was a period when women were generally held to age faster than men, losing their bloom early – ‘no woman is beautiful after twenty-two' was a popular saying – going further downhill after thirty.7 Certainly, by the time of the Queen's thirty-sixth birthday on 22 September 1637 – and thirty-five was often seen as a cut-off point – her relationship with her husband, and also with her adopted country of France, had already had a long and troubled history.
The marriage of the two royal teenagers took place on the feast of St Catherine – 25 November – 1615. It was, it seems, consummated immediately, and after that there was a gap of more than three years. The twenty-fifth of January 1619 was the auspicious date on which the further completion of the royal union was announced in the gazette Mercure Français (it was after all a matter of state, just as the marriage had been). There were certainly rumours of royal pregnancies throughout the 1620s, and Louis XIII himself told the Venetian Ambassador later that his Queen had had four ‘wretched miscarriages'.8
If the marriage was not egregiously unhappy by royal standards – notoriously low – it was certainly unhappy enough. Anne was an extremely attractive, even beautiful woman with her full, voluptuous figure, her thick bright chestnut hair, her luminous pale skin and her dark eyes with the green glints which gave them a special sparkle. She had her share of feminine vanity and was especially proud of her much-admired white hands, which seemed made ‘to hold a sceptre'. As for her character, that was made up of contradictions. Anne was certainly pleasure-loving – she adored the theatre and gambling – but at the same time she was extremely pious.
Her piety did not stop Queen Anne from being a romantic, and it was not difficult for men to fall in love with her: ‘her smile won a thousand hearts,' wrote Madame de Motteville, her lady-in-waiting. She was also galante in the crucial French term of the time which shimmers with different meanings throughout this period. In the case of the Queen, it meant flirtatious in the courtly, essentially innocent manner of the well-chaperoned Spanish Infanta she had once been. When the handsome Duke of Buckingham, who was gallant in every sense of the word, had ‘the audacity’ to court her in a famous scene in a garden, the Queen recoiled in horror. Nevertheless, in the opinion of Madame de Motteville, an important source for Anne's intimate feelings because she understood the Spanish world, ‘if a respectable woman could love a man other than her husband, it would have been Buckingham who appealed to her'. The Princesse de Conti had a more cynical view: she would vouch for the Queen's virtue from the waist down, but not from the waist up.9
The sexuality of the husband of this romantic and unfulfilled woman was what would now be called troubled. Louis XIII formed lugubrious attachments to both men and women: late in his life, the Marquis de Cinq-Mars became his favourite. But at one point Louis fell yearningly in love with Marie d'Hautefort (his conjugal visits to Anne were said to have increased in consequence). However, when his friend the Duc de Saint-Simon* offered to act as a go-between, the King was shocked: ‘the more my rank as king gives me the facility to satisfy myself,' he said, ‘the more I must guard against sin and scandal.’10 Low-spirited and willingly dominated by his great minister Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII was one half of an incompatible pair.
Furthermore, if the marriage did not provide a Bourbon– Habsburg heir, it did not bring about peace between Bourbon and Habsburg kingdoms either. Not long after Anne came to France, the slow strangulation of Europe in that long and complicated conflict known later as the Thirty Years War began. In this conflict, at the instigation of Cardinal Richelieu, the French and Spanish found themselves on different sides. Anne rejected the idea that she remained at heart a Spanish princess. Her tastes might be Spanish, from a predilection for late hours to a yearning for Spanish iced drinks and Spanish chocolate, but she prided herself on having become a Frenchwoman. Louis XIII on the other hand was pervaded with suspicions of his wife's disloyalty and over the course of their marriage remained convinced that she ‘had a great passion for the interests of Spain.’11
It was a situation which perennially threatened the daughters of great monarchs married off abroad to further their country's interests. One can therefore appreciate the wise comment of Erasmus on the subject in the sixteenth century. In his Education of a Christian Prince, he pointed out the incongruity of such matches, which never actually did lead to international peace, and advised kings and princes to marry one of their own subjects instead.12
Various opposition movements
in the country tended to implicate the King's brother – and of course heir presumptive for many years – Gaston d'Orléans. Anne was also suspected of joining with him, and in the ultimate alleged conspiracy before her fortunate transformation into the mother of a son, she was accused of plotting to marry Gaston after the King's death. And for all her French heart, she still wielded a Spanish pen, corresponding with her brother Philip IV, King of Spain. This was a matter which, when discovered, led to her disgrace in the summer of 1637. In Duc course her enemy Cardinal Richelieu secured from Anne a humiliating recantation, signed on 17 August. In the process, one of Anne's servants – her cloak-bearer Pierre de La Porte – was arrested and tortured but refused to implicate his mistress further. It was understandable therefore that La Porte in his memoirs would refer wryly to Louis as being ‘as much the son of my silence, as of the prayers of the Queen and the pious vows of all France.’13 It is certainly true that under these unpropitious circumstances some kind of miracle was generally felt to be necessary.
Of course there were, as there always would be, wags who suggested that the miracle had a more human origin. The aggrieved younger brother Gaston d'Orléans said that he was quite prepared to believe Louis Given by God had come out of the Queen's body, but he did not know who the devil had put him there. As to that, popular scandal was quite prepared to supply the name of the King's minister Cardinal Richelieu, simply because of his political power (a ludicrous misreading of the relationship between Anne and the Cardinal), with rhymes suggesting that the King had prayed ‘to the saints, men and women' every day and Richelieu had prayed too but ‘he succeeded much better.’14*
The religious of all sorts who prayed for the Queen's fertility were many of them, like rainmakers, ready to claim a successful result. A nun, a former favourite of Louis XIII named Louise Angélique de La Fayette, was said to have asked her priest to choose a great feast of the Church – presumably the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December – to remind her platonic admirer of his conjugal duties: the result was the immediate conception of a more earthly sort.16