The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon

by Veronica Buckley

  As Philippe knew perfectly well, “this trouble Madame de Caylus is giving me” had been brought about by Françoise’s long-standing and too-confident assumption that she could do better for Marthe-Marguerite than he and his wife could do for her themselves. To his credit, Philippe made no accusations now, but set to, with all the reliability and thoroughness of which he was capable, to help his daughter out of her wretched situation. He proved no more successful than his cousin had been, and in the end, Françoise was obliged to appeal to the King. The comte de Caylus was packed off to the army, to remain permanently “on campaign”—that is, away from the court. “He was perfectly happy on the frontiers, anyway, provided he could keep drinking.” And Françoise’s ill-served, erring niece was sent to calm down at Saint-Germain, with toothy Madame de Montchevreuil as her chaperone, and, as Marthe-Marguerite herself remarked, “you can imagine how much fun that was.”

  Seventeen

  Crusaders

  Far to the west, across the Channel, at the gigantic palace of Whitehall, the English court had been enduring troubles of its own, greater by far than any homosexual scandal or outbreak of haemorrhoids. At the base of it, however, was another ill-considered marriage, the 1673 match between James, then Duke of York, brother of Charles II, and the Italian princess Maria Beatrice d’Este, known to the English as Mary of Modena. Aged not quite fifteen, Mary had had no wish to be married off to the unknown, widowed, forty-year-old James in England. Though brought up in a fiercely unindulgent manner, she had, by her own admission, spent her last two days and nights in Italy “screaming and yelling” that she would not go.

  She had gone, nonetheless, and though her louche royal husband had found her very much to his taste, in the country at large she had not been welcome. Young, talented, dazzlingly beautiful, Mary might have made a perfect consort but for her one unacceptable defect: she was Catholic. English Protestants high and low had ostracized and slandered her, declaring her a spy for the Pope, and even his natural daughter. In 1685, the discreetly Catholic Charles II had died, leaving a healthy brood of fourteen illegitimate children, but not a single one by his Queen. His brother James, staunchly and overtly Catholic despite being formally head of the Protestant Church of England, had ascended the throne. Of the five children born to Mary in the twenty years and more of her marriage, none had survived, but in June 1688 she had been safely delivered of a son, and the Protestant English had been obliged to confront the likelihood of a Catholic succession.

  It was more than they could accept. By the end of the same month, on the initiative of the “immortal seven,” a group of seven English nobles, the Protestant Prince Willem of Orange had been invited to capture the throne for himself. Willem was the husband of James’s daughter Mary by his first wife; like her sister Anne, Mary was Protestant. In November 1688, Willem landed with a large mercenary force in what proved to be the first successful invasion of England since William the Conqueror’s arrival in 1066. A month later, James and his Mary left the country, she in secret flight—“That flight will make a novel one day,” observed Madame de Sévigné—and he firmly escorted out, to seek refuge with his cousin Louis at his safely Catholic court. The English and Scottish parliaments declared James’s departure tantamount to abdication; a “Glorious Revolution” was announced, and James’s daughter and her husband ascended the throne together, to reign jointly, if briefly, as William and Mary.

  On the feast of the Epiphany, “the day of the Kings,” January 6, 1689, James and Mary were installed at the château of Saint-Germain with their infant son James—the “Old Pretender,” father of Bonnie Prince Charlie—still in his swaddling clothes. “And today it really is la fête des Rois,” wrote Madame de Sévigné to her cousin, “a very satisfying one for the King who’s providing asylum, and a very sad one for the King who needs it. Subjects and objects aplenty to reflect upon and talk about. The political people are having lots to say”—as, indeed, were the apolitical: “I’ve put a question to the Lord,” Madame’s friend Corbinelli added in a postscript to her letter. “I asked Him whether He’s abandoning the Catholic religion, allowing the Prince of Orange, protector of Protestants, to prosper like this, and then I lowered my eyes…”

  With two royal houses to consider, each accustomed to a different protocol, there was some to-ing and fro-ing over precedence. King James was formally presented to the dauphin and dauphine, then to Louis’s brother, Monsieur, and Liselotte, but not to the humble dame d’atour, Françoise. The presentations to Queen Mary proved rather fraught, with the usual entitlements to armchairs and curtsys debated fiercely and at length—for four whole days, in fact, after which Louis’s daughters and nieces agreed to wait upon Her Majesty. Françoise, being neither princesse nor duchesse, was again overlooked.

  Even at the newly dévot French court, Queen Mary was swiftly declared to be far too pious, owing to her fussy Italianate devotions—“an infinity of petty little practices, useless anywhere, and surely particularly out of place in England,” was the sage observation of eighteen-year-old Marthe-Marguerite, still in exile at Saint-Germain, which, with the arrival of the English couple, had turned quite suddenly from dreary royal outpost to the centre of all court interest. Mary was generally felt to be rather haughty as well as overly devout, “but she was intelligent and she did have good qualities, and that drew Madame de Maintenon to her…”

  Liselotte was also an admirer of the beautiful thirty-year-old Mary, all the more so, perhaps, since Louis was clearly one, too, which occasionally appears to have rather piqued fifty-three-year-old Françoise. “You could say she had all the royal virtues,” wrote Liselotte of Mary in later years. “Her only defect (no one’s perfect) was to have pushed her piety to the extreme, but she paid dearly for that, since it was the cause of all her misfortunes.”

  James himself attracted less admiration than sympathy, and even amusement. He was an absolutist, which Louis naturally appreciated, and an exceptionally keen hunter, which the dauphin enjoyed as well. “Off he’d go to the chase, boldly, like a man of twenty without a care in the world,” said Madame de La Fayette. And to the astonishment of the unintellectual Louis, James was able to quiz the royal astronomers at the famed Paris observatory, the first in the world: “The King possesses a naturally limited mind,” the diplomat Spanheim observed coolly of Louis. But in the salons and appartements James cut a more equivocal figure, ceaselessly complaining of England’s disloyalty in his uncontrollable stammer, every bit as bad in English as in his “very poor” French. “He’d thrown the seals of the kingdom [for authorizing royal documents] into the sea,” Madame continued, “and we all had a good laugh about that, though it’s true it did create some difficulty, because of their laws there…The Archbishop of Reims, Monsieur Louvois’s brother, made fun of him coming out of church: There’s a fine fellow, he said. He’s given up three kingdoms for the sake of a mass. Very pretty words from the mouth of an archbishop!”

  “The more you see of King James,” concluded Liselotte, “the more you take the Prince of Orange’s side.”

  Though the people of the lost three kingdoms, including “almost all the grandees,” had generally reached the same conclusion, James and Mary had by no means given up hope of regaining the throne, and annoyed their French friends constantly with their apparent political indiscretions. “Every last plan for their reestablishment was known in England as soon as it was dreamed of at Versailles,” said Marthe-Marguerite, a self-confessed “Jacobite” supporter of James, “but it wasn’t really their fault. They were surrounded by people who betrayed them, even one of the Queen’s own ladies…She would take letters from the King and Madame de Maintenon out of the Queen’s pockets while Her Majesty was sleeping, and she would copy them, and send them to England.” In February 1689, Françoise herself relayed to Père Gobelin King James’s hopes of overturning the Protestant revolution in England through the back door of Catholic Ireland. “Le milord Tyrconnell is asking for arms and munitions. They’re going to be
sent. May God protect religion and our two kings; their piety has caused them plenty of trouble”—more, indeed, than her own had been causing her, given her recent neglect of the devotions prescribed by the reverend Père. “I couldn’t make them,” she insisted unconvincingly. “I had toothache.”

  In March 1689, only two months after his arrival in France, James set sail once again, not for England, however, but for Ireland, to join Tyrconnell and his “poorly disciplined and poorly armed militias,” some of whom had taken advantage of the uprising to murder the families of their detested Protestant landlords. With his own best troops already on campaign in the Rhineland and half the powers of Europe arming against him, Louis’s assistance to James had been small: four thousand men, since no more could be spared, “and officers of an exceedingly mediocre capacity,” as Madame de La Fayette had noted. To no one’s surprise, the Irish Jacobites met defeat a year or so later, in July 1690, at the Battle of the Boyne, whereupon James flew back to France. In Scotland, a Protestant victory at Cromdale in the same year was capped by the treacherous and soon legendary massacre of Glencoe, where Lowlands men of the English-backed Campbell clan murdered their Highland hosts of the Catholic clan Macdonald, marking “the onset of a war to the death between Lowlands and Highlands.” It was to last half a century, until the Jacobites’ final defeat in 1746, at the Battle of Culloden Moor.

  Though William’s staunch Protestantism had ensured him a genuine welcome in England, his Dutch bones had at first stuck in some English throats, prompting abusive pamphlets complaining about “foreigners” overrunning the “sceptr’d isle.” His rescue had appeared in the unlikely person of a slender little Londoner, not five feet tall, with a hooked nose and a sharp chin, who pointed out that after the Romans and Vikings and Normans and Scots and everyone else, there was hardly any such thing as a “true-born Englishman” at all:

  From a mixture of all kinds began,

  That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman…

  A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,

  In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

  A metaphor invented to express

  A man a-kin to all the universe…

  Since scarce one family is left alive,

  Which does not from some foreigner derive.

  The English, far from taking offence, had been hugely amused by this jab at their own mixed origins. The poem had become immensely popular and, as well as ensuring William’s final acceptance, had made the name of its opportunistic author, the hack journalist, ex-convict, and thenceforth man of fame and fortune, Daniel Defoe.

  William’s capture of the English throne, in itself a triumph, was doubly valuable to him as a strengthening of arms in his ongoing battle with France. Since the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678, he had been intermittently roused, as indeed had the English, by French incursions into other European territories. But though England’s pro-French Kings had been crossed by their anti-French parliament, the parliament itself, ever mindful of Dutch commercial competition, had not always stood reliably behind William. Now, as its King, he was far better placed to secure its support, though, unlike Louis, he could by no means take it for granted. Since the execution of Charles I in 1649, the authority of England’s kings had been sharply circumscribed. And in fact, with the ousting of James and the assertion of a new “English ideology,” the parliament in London had gained even greater power. No longer merely a rein on its King’s wishes, it had itself assumed the despotic power of an absolute sovereign. With no countervailing force in the land, its wish, or its majority vote, had become the nation’s command.

  Fortunately for William, the wish of the English parliament now was to contest the power of Catholic France, and it was happy to vote the sums required for its new King’s latest military venture against Louis. In May 1689, England joined William’s great League of Augsburg, a coalition of mostly Protestant powers founded three years earlier to oppose and contain France; the League was renamed the Grand Alliance. Undeterred by the doubtful successes of his 1670s Dutch campaigns, in 1688 Louis had taken advantage of the vacant electoral throne of the Rhineland Palatinate to claim the territory for himself. The Elector of the Palatinate, Liselotte’s brother, Karl Ludwig, had died leaving no heir; the territory lay on France’s northeastern border; and Liselotte herself, or rather her marriage to Louis’s brother and her own tenuous dynastic claim to the Palatinate, had provided the excuse for a French invasion. Ironically, Liselotte’s marriage, eighteen years before, had been arranged as a form of security against possible French attack; now, to her grief, it had served as the pretext for the devastation of her homeland. Hearing the news of her brother’s death, as Liselotte herself had relayed to her Aunt Sophie in November 1688, “I wept twice twenty-four hours without stopping…And, to add to my unhappiness, I have to listen all day to their plans to burn and bombard the good city of Mannheim, which my late father built up with so much care; it makes my heart bleed. And here they’re offended that I should be upset about it.”

  “The King has given orders that Mannheim is to be razed,” the marquis de Dangeau recorded, “not just the fortifications, but even all the houses in the town as well as in the fortress, to stop the Germans from using this [strategic] place…” “What distresses me above all,” wrote Liselotte the following week, “is that they’re using my name to justify all this destruction…and that the King waited precisely until I had begged him to spare Mannheim and Heidelberg before he went ahead and destroyed everything.” Liselotte had mistaken Louis’s pitiless determination for personal spite, but there was no rationale, in any case, that might have comforted her. While French soldiers rampaged and burned their way through the towns and cities she had loved, their supposed living justification passed a summer of melancholy days and sleepless nights, “thinking of how it was there in my day, and what it must be like now, imagining everything they’ve blown up…”

  To the west, in Flanders, 35,000 others were also passing listless days and nights “imagining everything they’ve blown up” in the Palatinate, but with envy rather than distress. “Monseigneur’s army is very well occupied in Germany while we rot in idleness here,” wrote the duc du Maine to Françoise in the summer of 1689. Her “Mignon,” now nineteen years old, had been appointed colonel-général of the King’s Swiss Guards, a post which had brought him an extra 100,000 livres a year. Under the overall command of the popular Maréchal d’Humières and the detested Maréchal de Luxembourg (Primi Visconti’s “deceitful little hunchback”), the army in Flanders lay waiting to engage the troops of the Grand Alliance.

  With time on his hands, Mignon was able to write to Françoise every few days, relaying the boredom of camp life and his hopes for his professional and personal future: “It’s the same thing every day…I’m eating well, getting fatter even as you watch, and not drinking much…I still want to be made a brigadier, and I’m doing everything I can to learn what’s necessary…I have learned something about the cavalry…I really want to be worth something…I’m willing to trade my post as General of Galleys for a cavalry command…Do please remember the Maréchal d’Humières. He and I both believe that if you support his advancement, it will happen in no time…I presume you were joking when you said you’d seen the object of my passion…I’ve no idea who you mean…I suppose though I’m not doing much here, it’s more than I would be doing at court, where I do nothing but bumble about in front of people, getting on everyone’s nerves…” In a measure which Françoise no doubt approved but the chase-loving King may have found unnecessary, an earnest Mignon decided to rein in his expenses as active young prince of the realm: “In time of war, of course, hunting is no more than an amusement for three or four months of the year, so I’ve decided, for my reputation before the King and the public, to reduce my hunting staff to one overseer, two lancers, two bloodhound keepers, five grooms, and seven dog-keepers.”

  At the beginning of July 1690, Colonel-Général Mignon wrote excitedly, and touchingly, to François
e: “I’m thrilled, Madame. I’ve seen a battle. I’m so happy. I’m perfectly all right…I do hope the King will be satisfied with the services of this cripple…” Mignon’s battle was in fact the famous Battle of Fleury, commanded by the “little womelette” Maréchal de Luxembourg, in which the French suffered 6,000 casualties and the army of the Grand Alliance 20,000—“carried off in wagons and carts.” Mignon had gained his wish of a cavalry command, and had led several charges himself. Though his horse was killed beneath him and two of his aides-de-camp died at his side, he himself, “your poor puppet-leg,” came through unscathed. “I’m embarrassed by all the congratulations I’ve been receiving,” he wrote modestly. “What will people think of the French, when they praise a man to the skies for simply having done his duty!…You ask am I ambitious? I’m desperately ambitious!…Here I ask only to sacrifice myself for the service of the King and the State, but at Versailles, you must be another me, and look after my interests there. Put yourself to work for your dear child…I can’t wait to embrace you and to see the joy on the King’s majestic face!”