by Emily Hahn
Now at last Affonso dreamed longingly of doing what Castel-Melhor had begged him to do before—steal out of the palace and make his way to Alcántara, there to rally his loyal troops and attack the would-be usurper. He even tried to get out of the city by night, but Pedro’s men were already on guard at every road and bridge. It was too late.
The Infant’s faction may have been dubious, after all, about the temper of the Cortes when it came to the test. Marie Françoise, at any rate, did not wait. Her Jesuit confessor probably advised her that she would look less of a rat if she leaped from the ship before it began to sink. So she leaped the moment she deemed it safe, when she saw the white sails of a French fleet sailing up the Tagus to anchor. This meant that Louis XIV was backing her up in her proposed action. Determined to keep the war going between Spain and Portugal, he had decided that Pedro was the man he needed in charge of the country, for Affonso, according to Marie Françoise’s latest report, planned to make peace. The fleet was his answer.
It was the twenty-first of November 1667, still more than a month before the Cortes was to convene. Quietly Marie Françoise moved out.
By prearrangement she went straight to the convent of Esperança. Once she was secure behind locked gates she sent a letter to the King. She had been so discreet that until that moment he had suspected nothing of her intentions. Beyond a vague jealousy he had no idea that she was capable of leaving him, or of making the allegations she now wrote. He was dumbfounded when he read them:
“Tell his Majesty that my conscience will not longer permit me to cohabit with him, being neither his wife, nor he my husband; that both God and his Majesty himself know, that the condition I came to him in hath not been altered; and therefore I desire the restitution of my portion, that I may return back again to my native country.”
Here were shock and grievous insult combined! Affonso flew into a red fury. He took horse and rode to the convent, and there, finding the door locked, he battered wildly against it.
He had not stormed very long before the watchful Infant overtook him and began to reason with him. Affonso’s rage abruptly calmed. He listened to the words “sanctuary” and “sacrilege”; he allowed himself to be led back to the palace. There he maintained dazed silence for a space. Suddenly he announced that they had all been wasting time. From that moment on, he decreed, they would speak no more of the Frenchwoman. With the air of a man who turns from trifles to important matters, he questioned his attendants about his bulls. Had they been fed? Were they being properly looked after?
Two days later the Infant’s men took the final step. The King was persuaded—by what means is not on record—to sign a declaration which handed over the government to the Infant as regent, and to his heirs as sovereigns of Portugal. The meeting of the Cortes had not been necessary.
Marie Françoise, immured in her convent, waited for developments. She had entered a suit for annulment of her marriage at the same time she sent her letter to Affonso. Now, it seemed, proceedings were being held up by a mere technicality, but when she learned the nature of the technicality she grew agitated. The factotums of the Church had been busily reading their ecclesiastical law, and they had discovered that in cases like this the woman who claimed annulment on the grounds of non-consummation must submit to a physical examination. The very idea of such a thing prostrated Marie Françoise; she was overcome with maidenly horror. It was, she said, an impossible condition.
We can make whatever guesses we like as to why she was so determined. She may have been lying when she alleged Affonso was impotent; she may have had an affair with Pedro; she may not have been a virgin when she came to Portugal. Or, of course, she may really have been too modest to face such an ordeal. Anything is possible. All we know is that she refused.
The authorities, having discussed the grave question at some length, then came forward with an alternative suggestion. The formality of examination could be waived if Affonso would sign a statement that Marie Françoise was still a virgin. The question was, would Affonso sign such a declaration? The answer was, he would not. Affonso drove away the Queen’s messengers with vigorous contumely. Affonso denied heatedly that his wife was a virgin. For some time he continued to deny it.
Followed a peculiar performance, a hearing of witnesses to prove or disprove, as the case might be, Marie Françoise’s assertions as to Affonso’s deficiencies. These witnesses were for the most part women who had been lodged in the palace before the King’s marriage. There were thirteen of these, and other women too were dragged into the case from bordellos of the town. The stories of all of them depended with remarkable uniformity on whether they were called on behalf of Marie Françoise or Affonso. Marie Françoise’s witnesses swore the King was impotent and given to unnatural practices. Affonso’s champions insisted he was a perfectly normal man, capable of begetting children. Sometimes a Queen’s witness convinced the judges; then some other unfortunate drab was produced and her pro-King story swayed judgment again. All this time Affonso refused to declare what his wife wished him to declare, and all this time she in turn refused to be examined.
Finally the Infant’s men lost patience and convinced the King, somehow, that his memories of his relations with his wife were at fault. Possibly they promised him freedom, or deceived him in some other way. Whatever they did, Affonso signed the declaration, as follows:
“To relieve the Queen Maria Francisca Isabel of Saboya, to whom until now I have been ostensibly married, of the inconvenience of going to law with the cause of her withdrawal to the Convent of Esperança, therefrom to appeal for nullity of the marriage, and for relief of my conscience, I declare that I did not consummate the marriage with her, because she is a virgin. Thus I swear it on the holy Evangelists, that this declaration may have all the force and vigour necessary for the marriage which we celebrated to be judged annulled. Lisbon 2 Dec. 1667.”
That settled things, as far as the Church was concerned. The ecclesiastics of Lisbon pronounced the marriage null, and so did Cardinal Louis de Vendôme in Paris, who as Bishop of Laon had married his niece to King Affonso. Marie Françoise’s relatives approved the annulment. Of course it was unusual, but really scarcely surprising when one recalled the stories one had heard in the old days about that man.
Now then, said the gossips of Lisbon, would Pedro marry the girl? Some nobles were ungallant enough to doubt it. But Pedro could hardly back out of the contract after all this, even if he had wanted to. There was the dowry to consider; it was an awkward sum of money to refund if the bride went home, and she could easily go home, too, for the French fleet was still there in the Tagus. Besides, he was probably still very much in love with Marie Françoise.
Louis XIV was the only member of our cast, apart from the forgotten King Affonso, who had cause for complaint. After all the help he had given his cousin of Savoy, after all the arranging he had done on her behalf, he was cheated of his reward. Dom Pedro, immediately after he came into power, let Louis down and made peace with Spain. To be quite fair to Pedro it must be admitted he could do nothing else; the Portuguese simply would not fight any more. Twenty-eight years, they said, was long enough for any war. Moreover, Charles II was putting on pressure as well.
So Mademoiselle d’Aumale became a bride again, only two years after the first wedding. Again she was married by proxy; again she wed the ruler of Portugal. Otherwise there was no similarity between the marriages. This time no seasickness interfered with the honeymoon. In time she bore a daughter, their only child.
Marie Françoise was reasonably happy with her second husband. She knew she had been lucky; not every princess finds satisfaction in the bed allocated to her. It is true nothing is perfect, not even for determined women like Marie Françoise who go after what they want. Pedro was a very unfaithful husband. Such a failing, however, could not have surprised or grieved overmuch a girl of Marie Françoise’s background, and apart from it he was a devoted family man.
The chief vexation in Marie Françoise’s seco
nd marriage was not that Dom Pedro strayed from time to time, but that she had gone down in the world. She was no longer a queen, only a princess, consort of a mere prince regent. When she urged her husband to arrogate the title as well as the powers of a king, the silly man retorted that the public would not like it. As if that ought to have anything to do with it! Still, if he felt like that there was no help for it. To be Queen of Portugal again, Marie Françoise had to wait until Affonso died, and the poor shattered creature was an unconscionable time doing that.
First they sent him to Terceira in the Azores, where he lived contentedly for nearly five years, busy with his favorite pursuits. But then there was a political upset on the island, and it was thought better to transfer him back to Portugal. Affonso spent many years thereafter in close confinement at Cintra, in the little room the guide showed me. He became dropsical and immensely fat. Also, not unnaturally, he grew more and more eccentric. He paced the floor of the room up and down, up and down, until he wore a groove in the stone. Still he went on living, and still Marie Françoise waited.
Affonso died at last, at the age of forty. Dom Pedro wept at his funeral, but Marie Françoise did not.
The Königsmarks
1. KARL JOHANN
The barrack-like house of Longleat stands in Wiltshire, and you may visit it, possibly under the guidance of one of the Thynne family, for half a crown. Looking down at it from the rim of the valley, or walking through the great rooms, it is impossible not to think of the past; and at Longleat you have a good deal of past from which to choose a subject for such musings. You may decide to think about Queen Elizabeth, whose cupidity and curiosity were aroused when she heard the house was being built. Or there was Bishop Ken, who left his library at Longleat: it is still there. Or Mrs. Delany of the eighteenth century, who lived there as a girl. But the outstanding tale of Longleat and the Thynne family is the murder of its seventeenth-century owner, Tom of Ten Thousand, and that is not a Wiltshire story at all. It takes us to London, where the killing took place, and to Holland, and Malta, and Hanover, and Sweden, and Venice, until we find ourselves at last in a small German church, where the wife of George I of England has been put away to rot in calculated obscurity.
Thynne, an actor in this wide-flung drama, was killed in the first act; his was not the chief name on the billboards. It is altogether a strange play, for the lead was taken, not by one person, but a whole family, the Königsmarks. They were a Swedish-German clan whose comprehensive history, still unwritten, would furnish a magnificent picture of Europe as she was for a century and a half.
The generation with which we are concerned included four people, two brothers and two sisters. They grew up in Stockholm. Grandfather, father, and uncle of these four had all toiled industriously in their own peculiar fashion to maintain the traditional role of the Königsmarks, that of very upper-class mercenary soldiering, or as they probably preferred to think of it, knight-errantry. The father, Count Kurt Christoph, was killed fighting for the Dutch in 1673, when his eldest child, Karl Johann, was fifteen.
Kurt Christoph’s widow and children were not by any means destitute. They owned large estates and a comfortable fortune, but all these possessions were in Sweden, and Königsmarks seem never to have been satisfied to stay quietly in Stockholm. They had relatives on both sides of the house in various German states, and so there was always a good deal of visiting back and forth between the branches of the families in North Europe. Also, they liked to wander just for the sake of wandering. It was not only the men of the family who would not stay at home; the girls, especially Marie Aurora, traveled as well. But the men, of course, had better excuses, for as famous fighters they were offered commissions in the army of many a neighboring country. In the last quarter of that century there was always some war or other going on, and plenty of monarchs and courts to make welcome a gallant officer.
Karl Johann did not wait long after his father’s death to start out on his hereditary career. Relations between Sweden and England were friendly, and so, though he aimed ultimately to visit Paris, where his uncle held the post of Swedish ambassador, he decided to look first at what London had to offer a young man on the Grand Tour. He liked the court of Charles II, and the King and court liked him in turn. Charles was always fond of a young man of spirit, remembering his own days of exile on the Continent, whereas the ladies found the Swedish count attractive in another way. Karl was stocky rather than graceful, with luxuriant golden hair which he was vain of and would not cut, nor hide under a wig as was the fashion. “He was a fine person of a man,” wrote someone who saw him at his trial, “and I think his hair was the longest for a man’s that I ever saw, for it came below his waist. He was very quick of parts.”
The result of all this mutual admiration was a resolve on the part of Karl to return to London when he had seen more of the world. Probably he decided thus early to choose his bride in England, ultimately. He approved so much of English life and training that he made up his mind to bring his younger brother Philipp over from where he then was, in Germany, as soon as he was old enough, and put him to school in London.
Karl Johann went on his way to Paris, there to stay with his uncle Otto Wilhelm, who, though he must have complained that being an ambassador was too sedentary an occupation for a Königsmark, managed to enjoy himself thoroughly. The boy stayed long enough in France to grow up. He gained a degree of needed polish at the court of the Sun King, and then once again he was beset by the wandering itch of his breed, and traveled on his way, looking for trouble. He was, of course, a born soldier. Soon word of his daring exploits came trickling back, first from Italy and then Spain, to his friends in Paris and London. The young man distinguished himself noticeably in service with the Knights of Malta against Turkish pirates who had been harrying the islands and coast of Italy. Why he should have been with the Knights of Malta at all, as they were Catholic and he Protestant, was a matter no one investigated too closely. Any war, even a Roman crusade, was enough to attract him.
The chief anecdote from this phase of Count Karl’s progress deals with a sea battle during which he attempted to leap from one of the great Maltese galleys onto the deck of a Turkish corsair’s smaller vessel. He fell short in his leap, into the sea, and was automatically given up for lost by his side, since men in seventeenth-century armor did not usually float on the waves. Karl, however, was a husky youth and he had no intention of drowning. He swam, in spite of his armor, to the stern of the corsair’s ship, and pulled himself aboard.
At sight of him the pirates leaped to the natural conclusion that they were being boarded by a strong force which had somehow sneaked around to their rear. They promptly surrendered, and discovered too late, when reinforcements arrived, that they had been captured single-handed.
The saga does not end there, for later in the battle this prize of Count Karl’s was blown up, and he was thrown again into the sea. This ducking, too, he survived. Whereupon, in a flush of admiration for his exploits, the Knights of Malta impulsively broke one of their fundamental laws and took him into the knighthood, in spite of his religion.
Fame continued to spring up in Karl’s footsteps. From Italy he went to Spain, and at Madrid covered himself with glory, and, what is more, with Spanish glory, at a bull baiting. A bull baiting was a performance which had something in common with today’s bullfights, but the ring was more crowded, the slaughter bloodier, and the whole thing more brutal. A number of bulls were turned loose in the ring all at once; a number of caballeros met them on horseback, and there were attendants all around to help the men. Karl took his place among the caballeros and picked out his bull, a strong, fierce specimen. The bull badly wounded his horse and the count had to dismount. At this point nobody would have blamed him for going out of the ring; most foreign courtiers, who were naturally inexperienced at this form of sport, would have been sensible and done so. But not so Karl Johann. Amid the wild plaudits of the onlookers, one of whom, inevitably, was his fair Spanish lady of the mo
ment, he stood his ground on foot and dealt his adversary a great sword wound.
No doubt about it, everyone considered Karl Johann Königsmark a hero in the best tradition of his hard-living, hard-fighting time. That he did not develop a Boy Scout sense of honor at the same time that he developed his muscles should perhaps be considered an accident of birth and class rather than an example of sheer wickedness. Yet there were principles of honor in the seventeenth century not unlike ours, and he did outrage them. Count Karl was to outlive his popularity.
At twenty-three, having finished his tour and taken the cream off such wars as he came across, the count remembered England and resolved to revisit it. His little brother Philipp was now installed in an English school just as Karl had planned. Faubert’s Academy in the Haymarket was not much of a scholar’s retreat; the young gentlemen there concentrated on riding, fencing, and hunting rather than books, but after all that was what young gentlemen were supposed to know about. Philipp lived with a tutor named Frederick Hanson. Karl wished to see how the boy was getting on, the Königsmark siblings all possessing the amiable quality of family affection to a high degree. It may have been in his mind, too, that he should marry now and settle down somewhere on an estate. He did not want to do all this anywhere near Stockholm; Stockholm did not interest him, but London did.
Like almost any other young spark of his world, the count did not confuse the frivolous pleasures of romance with marriage, which was a serious matter. Marriage was one method of acquiring fortune and stability, and a man chose a bride first of all for her dowry. Health, youth, good temper, and good looks were also useful qualities, but they were not so important as fortune. Karl Johann took the conventional view, because for all his wild courage he was a conventional young man. (Philipp Christoph was to prove himself more like his sister Aurora; they were romantics.) Yet Karl was extravagantly courageous and ambitious even in his right, proper desire to become a Benedict, and instead of aiming at an easy mark, he chose the widowed Lady Elizabeth Ogle. Of course there was no harm in trying—London was full of other men making the same attempt—but he had certainly picked out a difficult proposition.