The savage little Maréchal de Luxembourg had died at sixty-seven, having been living “the life of a twenty-five-year-old.” His confrère in brutality, the marquis de Louvois, Minister of War, had also died, aged just fifty, from poisoning, it was rumoured, or suffocation, though no one really cared. An autopsy revealed that his lungs were full of blood, and his heart empty of it. Louvois’s death prompted a nasty outburst from Liselotte, and not because of his destruction of her Palatinate homeland: “As far as I’m concerned,” she declared, “I’d rather have seen a certain old turd finished off instead of him; she’ll be more powerful than ever now.”
Françoise’s nephew, Henri-Benjamin de Villette, was dead, killed in battle at the age of twenty-four. And her old friend, lanky, loyal Madame de Montchevreuil was dead as well. “I know better than anyone how distressed you will be by her loss,” wrote Mignon, who had himself been quite fond of the fussy and pious but good-hearted marquise. “Console yourself by reflecting on the virtue of our late friend: though death grieves the unbelieving, it must console good Christians: the death of a saint is precious to God…I beg you not to allow your grief to undermine your health.” “Madame de Maintenon was dreadfully upset by the death of Madame de Montchevreuil,” noted the duc de Saint-Simon, “and lots of other people pretended to be, too.”
And lovely Madame de Sévigné was dead, at a perfectly elegant three score years and ten, despite the earlier plea of her adoring cousin, the comte de Bussy-Rabutin: “You are one of those people who should never die,” he had written. “Madame de Sévigné [was] so amiable and such excellent company,” wrote the duc de Saint-Simon with unusual generosity, before reverting to nasty form: “She died at Grignan at the house of her daughter, whom she idolized, and who didn’t really deserve it.”
There had been one major false alarm. Pseudo-news of King William’s death had roused the people of Paris in the middle of the night, with officials shouting instructions to them to start celebratory bonfires, and wine being distributed freely to encourage dancing and singing outdoors. Discovered to be still alive, William was simultaneously discovered, at least by Liselotte, to be homosexual. “He changes favourites all the time,” she wrote to her half-sister. “They say he’s got another one now. It’s not surprising that the Queen his wife had no rivals while she was alive. Men with that sort of taste make fools of plenty of women. I’ve learned so much about that in France, I could write books on it…”
Following his wife’s death, the dauphin Louis had married his mistress, and like his father, morganatically. The new secret royal bride was Marie-Émilie de Choin, maid of honour to, and stealer of lovers from, the princesse de Conti. She was “a fat girl, squat, a brunette, ugly, with a flat nose,” at least according to the duc de Saint-Simon. He allowed her to be intelligent, before condemning her directly afterwards for her “intriguing and manipulating mind.” Even Françoise’s niece, Marthe-Marguerite, described La Choin as a girl “of remarkable ugliness.” But she was a keen hunter and evidently possessed a good appetite, two traits which were probably enough in themselves to endear her to the dauphin, blundering in from his wolf-hunting only to faint from overindulgence at his supper.
Françoise’s niece, Charles’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Françoise-Charlotte-Amable, had made a brilliant match with the illustrious young duc de Noailles, nephew of the Archbishop, with the King himself providing a dowry of 800,000 livres for her. Mignon was married, too, to his first cousin once removed, the high-spirited granddaughter of le Grand Condé, already showing signs of her family’s notoriously troublemaking blood.
The young duc de Bourgogne, Louis’s grandson and heir, had married his own exquisitely charming cousin, eleven-year-old princesse Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy. Louis was immediately besotted by this granddaughter of his own illicit early love—his brother’s first wife, the famously beautiful English princess Henrietta Stuart. Little Marie-Adélaïde was given into Françoise’s care until the marriage could be consummated, after she turned fourteen, to Françoise’s own overflowing delight: “She is perfect in every way,” she rhapsodized to the girl’s parents. “Madame [Liselotte] will tell you all of this, but I can’t resist saying it myself. She’s a prodigy. She’ll be the glory of the age.” Madame, however, had had other things to say about Marie-Adélaïde: “She hardly took any notice of her grandfather or me,” she noted sulkily, “but she was all smiles for Madame de Maintenon…She’s a real little Italian, as politically astute as a thirty-year-old. Her mouth and chin are Austrian, though”—a reference to the famously jutting Habsburg jaw.
Liselotte’s bitterest complaint, all the same, had been for her own son, Philippe, duc de Chartres, who had been married to the fourteen-year-old Françoise-Marie, Mademoiselle de Blois, youngest daughter of Louis and Athénaïs, and, of course, illegitimate, the despised fruit, in Liselotte’s eyes, of a disgraceful double adultery. Even a fabulous dowry of two million livres, provided by the King, had failed to cheer her. “My eyes are so thick and swollen that I can hardly see out of them,” she wrote to her aunt. “I’ve spent the whole night weeping…Monsieur came to me yesterday at half past three and said, Madame, I have a message for you from the King which you won’t be very pleased to hear…” Normally feisty Liselotte had acquiesced without a murmur, indicating the awe that Louis could inspire, even in his straightforward sister-in-law. “The King commanded me to come at eight o’clock and asked me what I thought about it,” she continued. “I said, When Your Majesty and Monsieur speak as my masters, as you have done, I can only obey…The whole court came in to congratulate me on the wonderful event. I felt sick.” Liselotte had gone home with a pounding headache, to pass another woeful night, consoled only by the reflection that at least “the limping bastard” (Mignon) had not been foisted on her daughter, as she had feared, and by the satisfaction of having given her son a good sound slap across the face in the presence of the entire court.
Across the Channel, there had been one particularly important beginning: in July 1694, the government in London had borrowed a million pounds from Scotsman William Paterson and a group of wealthy subscribers, together recently incorporated as “The Governor and Company of the Bank of England.” And nearer to hand, in Paris, there had been one particularly important ending: the gentlemen of the Académie Française had at last presented their great Dictionnaire, the first in the French language, begun fifty-five years before. In August 1694, it was presented to the King by Jacques Tourreil, famed translator of Demosthenes and possessor of Armchair Number 40 in the Académie. Inspired by the presence of his sovereign and the historic nature of the occasion, Monsieur Tourreil gave no fewer than thirty speeches before finally handing over the volumes. “Messieurs,” Louis is said to have responded, “we have been looking forward to the completion of this for a long time…”
Eighteen
Castles in Spain
“It had been more than twenty years since a kindly and unjoking Liselotte had deposited her stepdaughter on the southward road, “weeping and wailing” over her forthcoming marriage to the ghastly, disfigured King of Spain. Ten years later, obese and profoundly depressed, the twenty-seven-year-old Queen had died, and now, at the end of the 1690s, though not yet forty, Carlos II too was approaching death. A second marriage with a German princess had proved no more successful than his first, and the lack of an heir to the Spanish Empire had become an issue of major importance throughout the courts of Europe. The long-standing rivalry between France and the Austrian Habsburgs, only recently calmed at the Peace of Rijswijk, looked ready to flare up again, and Louis had been attempting to forestall it by an arrangement with the Austrians’ recent ally, King William of England, formerly his own fiercest enemy. “That prince,” the abbé de Choisy had written, “had tried all sorts of ways to get the friendship of [our] King, and failing that, he took the opposite path, saying At least I’ll have his respect.”
“I think…the King of Spain will outlive all those who are now carving up his kingdom
,” observed Liselotte in mid-July 1700. But as it turned out, she was mistaken: despite, or perhaps because of, the copious amounts of champagne administered to sustain him, Carlos died on November 1, 1700, leaving behind him a relieved widow, a vast empire in desperate straits, and a disastrously contentious will.
“We’ll soon be hearing news of the King of Spain’s death,” Françoise wrote to the Cardinal de Noailles on Monday, November 8. “We’ve already heard he’s in his last agony. Here’s a great matter to be getting into.” The news of Carlos’s death in Madrid, and of his will, arrived at Versailles the following day. Louis was in the middle of a meeting of his finance council. He cancelled his scheduled afternoon hunt, and at three o’clock in the afternoon his High Council met in Françoise’s apartments to discuss the vital new question. The dauphin had just arrived back from a morning’s wolf-hunting. Though thirty-nine years of age, he was not formally a member of the Council, largely because of his own lack of interest in all things political. But, belatedly concerned about his son’s future ability to rule effectively, Louis had recently begun encouraging him to take more part in affairs of state, and he was included in the meeting now. And as well, “Madame String-puller,” as Liselotte observed peevishly, “was led in quite publicly by the King.”
Louis had been the Spanish King’s cousin and brother-in-law (Marie-Thérèse had been Carlos’s half-sister), and in consequence Carlos had bequeathed his throne to Louis’s younger grandsons. However, if the French princes were unable or unwilling to claim it, under the terms of the will, it was to be offered to the younger son of Carlos’s Austrian Habsburg cousin, Leopold I of the Holy Roman Empire, and, failing him, to the infant son of the duc of Savoy, the small but strategic duchy on the southern border of France, homeland of Françoise’s latest little protégée, future “glory of the age,” Marie-Adélaïde. The feebleminded Carlos had hardly concluded the terms of the will himself: rather, it simply reflected the strength of the pro-French faction at his disordered court.
Each party had a good claim to the throne, since for generations everyone had been related to everyone else. But apart from the French, no one in Europe wanted to see the huge Spanish Empire combined with already too-powerful France, and apart from the Austrians, no one wanted to see it reunited with the Austrian Habsburgs, to dominate the continent as they had done during the sixteenth century. Vienna’s dream was Versailles’s nightmare, and vice versa. “Your Majesty’s ministers have made your name hated, and the whole French nation intolerable to our neighbours,” Fénelon’s pamphlet had warned. If Louis accepted the will, the Spanish throne would pass to the dauphin’s second son, the seventeen-year-old duc d’Anjou, whose elder brother, the duc de Bourgogne, was obliged to remain in France as his own country’s heir. If Louis declined, it would pass to the fifteen-year-old Archduke Karl in Vienna, second son of the Emperor. Both parties wanted the throne, but after nine years of fighting during the 1690s, neither wanted to provoke a war over it now.
The meeting of the High Council on Tuesday, November 9, lasted four hours, until seven in the evening. There it was resolved that the terms of the will should be accepted. On Friday the twelfth, Louis met with the Spanish ambassador to inform him of the decision, and on Tuesday the sixteenth it was formally announced at court. “Gentlemen,” said Louis, bringing forward the young duc d’Anjou, “I give you the King of Spain.” “The Pyrenees have melted!” declared the ambassador, kneeling at the young man’s feet, and kissing his hand after the Spanish custom. “And then he made him quite a long speech in Spanish,” recorded the marquis de Dangeau in his journal of court life, “and when he’d finished, the King said to him, He doesn’t understand Spanish yet.” The new King embraced his two brothers, the ducs of Bourgogne and Berry, whereupon “all three of them burst into tears.” The dauphin, overjoyed, pointed out delightedly that he was “the only man I know of who can say, My father the King, and My son the King as well!”
“The duc d’Anjou will make a perfect King of Spain,” wrote Liselotte. “He hardly ever laughs and he has always an air of gravity about him…It’s going to be a bit awkward, though, given our King’s treaty with England and Holland.” “Everyone here seems thrilled about our new King of Spain,” wrote Françoise to Cardinal de Noailles. “Lots of well informed people are saying that there won’t be war at all now, whereas if we’d kept to the treaty [to partition the Spanish Empire], we would have been forced into a long and ruinous one. And the Emperor in Vienna has just confirmed that we have made the right decision, because he’s refused to sign the treaty, anyway…The new King is taking three or four cooks along with him to Madrid, so that he can continue to eat in the French style…It will take them more than forty days to get there…”
Despite the anticipated length of his formal progress to Madrid, the new King Felipe V remained for the following three weeks at the French court, passing his days hunting and his evenings, “playing hide-and-seek in my room. I wish he’d gone already, and if I had any say in it,” continued Françoise, “he’d have been off post-haste to take possession of so fine a throne…The King has asked me who I think should go to Madrid as his confessor, but I said I’d rather not say anything, since you’re not here to advise me.” He set off finally on December 4, accompanied by his lively former wet-nurse, his two brothers, and “any of the other young people who wanted to go along on the journey”—in fact, a retinue of more than a thousand—and armed with two provocative gifts from his grandfather: a collection of thirty-three articles, destined to guide him as King of Spain, and the assurance that regardless of the terms of Carlos’s will and in defiance of all the European powers, he had not lost his right to succeed to the throne of France as well. “Be a good Spaniard,” Louis told him, “but remember you’re a Frenchman, too…That’s the way to maintain a union between the two nations, and to keep the peace in Europe.”
Maintaining a union between France and Spain, however, as Louis ought to have realized, was precisely not the way to keep the peace in Europe. France and Spain together were too powerful a bloc, and with Spain in chaos and the new King barely into manhood, the expansionist French King was clearly going to have the upper hand. In effect, Louis was still holding to a time when a single great power, richer and better-armed than all others, could dominate the whole of Europe. But since the terrible Thirty Years War of his childhood, since his incursions into Dutch territory and the inconclusive and costly Nine Years War which he himself had set in train, it was becoming gradually clearer that no one great power would ever have sufficient means to dictate terms across the entire continent, and that instead some balance of power would have to be reached among the premier nations.
Louis’s vision, however, of Europe and power and kingship, was quintessentially backward-looking. “His passion for glory dominates him,” wrote Spanheim. “He possesses it to excess, and it is the principal reason for the fatal events of our times…He has gradually grown used to flattery and eulogy, and now he believes he deserves it.” In contrast to himself, King William of England, the former Prince of Orange, was not of male royal blood—reason enough, in Louis’s view, for his claim to the English throne to remain illegitimate. In January 1701, Louis similarly refused to recognize the newly crowned Friedrich I as King of Prussia: to him, Friedrich was not a king at all, but simply the Elector of Brandenburg, regardless of what clever diplomatic and financial arrangements he had made in order to have his powerful Prussian state declared a kingdom—a kingdom destined to play a perilous role in the history of Louis’s own France. Louis’s intractably static, unpragmatic views had seduced him into thinking that his Bourbon grandson could sit safely on the Spanish imperial throne. By his hasty acceptance of Carlos’s disastrous will, he engendered an appalling conflict which would last for thirteen years, and splinter France’s glory for almost a century.
Within six weeks of his grandson’s departure from France, Louis had acknowledged that war could not be avoided. The other European powers, great and sma
ll, would not accept a Bourbon superpower stretching from the English Channel to Gibraltar, across Italy and the richest parts of the Netherlands, and controlling half the world’s trade as well. Louis struck pre-emptively, giving orders for the raising of militias, pouncing on the Dutch garrisons to the west, and sending a hefty fleet out into the Channel.
In September 1701, the deposed King James II died at Saint-Germain. Louis, perhaps moved by his cousin’s death, perhaps determined to avenge him, at once recognized his thirteen-year-old son as James III of England. It was an unwise and provocative act, and it revealed a sentimentality in Louis’s judgement which would have been anathema to Colbert or Louvois—arch-pragmatists both who would not have thought for a second of favouring sentiment above self-interest. At the end of the month, representatives of the Grand Alliance (England, the Holy Roman Empire, and the United Dutch Provinces) reconvened in The Hague to sign a collective defence treaty against France, carving strategic pieces for themselves out of the territories of Louis’s ally, Spain.
Though Louis had persuaded himself that he could recognize James without breaking the Treaty of Rijswijk, which had ended the Nine Years War, the Alliance had taken a different view. In England, earlier in the same year, the English parliament had restated its position concerning James by establishing a law of succession excluding all Catholics from the English throne, “and preventing English subjects themselves from practising the religion which has dominated England since the days of Queen Elizabeth,” noted the abbé de Choisy indignantly, and not quite correctly. Consequently, William had been able to use Louis’s recognition of James to persuade his unwilling parliament to vote him the money for a renewed war against France. The question of the Spanish succession, he had insisted, was a question of the English succession as well. Amid a public burst of Protestant patriotism, the parliament had accepted his argument, and preparations for the campaign had begun, only to be interrupted in early March 1702 by William’s sudden death. Like Louis just after the death of Marie-Thérèse, William had taken a bad fall from his horse, breaking his collarbone. Unlike Louis, however, he did not escape the complications of the accident, only too serious in terms of the medical knowledge of the day: William died swiftly of pneumonia, at the age of just fifty-one. As his wife, Mary, had predeceased him, he was succeeded by his sister-in-law Anne—or rather, by Anne’s clever and controlling favourite, Lady Sarah Churchill, whose husband John, Earl (later Duke) of Marlborough, now took command of the English armies—most of them, in fact, German mercenaries. In May 1702, Queen Anne declared war on France, by which time an imperial army was already doing battle, indecisively, against Spanish forces in Italy.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 43