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

by Veronica Buckley

  Madame des Ursins was not quite correct: a few French troops were to be left in Spain, after all, a “compromise” force of twenty-five battalions. And His abandoned Catholic Majesty was in fact to do rather better with his own army than he had done with the help of his grandfather’s. But for the moment, the glory belonged to France—not for any battlefield success, but for the outpouring of patriotic stoicism which met Louis’s appeal to his people for a continuation of the war. On June 12 it was sent out to every town in the country, to be posted up in every market square and read out before the sermon at every mass. Every French subject was to know why, after more than seven years of war, no peace had yet been agreed. They were all to understand “the impossible condition of forcing Louis…to make war upon his own grandson.” To provincial governors throughout the land, Louis sent the following:

  The hope of peace has been so widespread in my kingdom that I believe, given the fidelity of my people throughout the course of my reign, that I owe them the consolation of knowing the reasons which prevent their now enjoying the repose which I had sought to procure them…My enemies have made it clear that their intention is to strengthen the neighbouring states of France…so that they may penetrate into the interior of the kingdom whenever in the future it should be in their interests to begin a new war…I say nothing of their demands that I should join my forces to those of the Alliance to dethrone the King my grandson…It is unbelievable that they should even have thought of demanding such a thing…My tenderness for my people is no less than that I feel for my own children; I share all the sufferings which the war has brought upon so faithful a people…All Europe knows that I seek peace for my people, but I am persuaded that they themselves would not accept it under conditions so unjust and so contrary to the honour of the FRENCH name…Had it been a question of my will alone, my people would have rejoiced in a peace, but it can only be achieved through renewed efforts…

  It was an extraordinary appeal, and indeed the very fact of it was extraordinary. An absolute monarch, accountable to no one, with no parlement to constrain him and no threat to his power within the land, a man exceedingly proud of his throne and greatly ambitious for his nation, had circulated what was in effect an explanation of the frightening situation as it stood, and a plea for the support of his people to carry on, in defiance of the extra hardship for themselves which would almost certainly ensue.

  Louis’s representation of himself as, in effect, the father of his people, who loved them as he loved his own children, was a master-stroke of public relations, as was his call to their emerging sense of a common nationality as Frenchmen. In this Churchillian call avant la lettre, Louis identified himself with his people as sharing their sufferings, offering, as it were, his own blood, toil, tears, and sweat. But it was not a cynical call. Louis was as devoted to his people as he was to France and to his throne: he had understood that the three were interdependent, and, arguably, he made no conceptual distinction between them.

  Louis took no blame upon himself—so much could not have been expected—but in his soon legendary appeal of June 12 he revealed that he had at last, and crucially, learned that France could not remain strong and his own throne secure through the obedience of his people alone: he needed their support as well.

  In its own way, Louis’s appeal was a revolutionary document. The very fact of its existence was an admission of the limits of absolutism, an indication that the King had grasped the lesson that James II had failed to learn in England, and that William of Orange had understood only too well—the lesson that, except by force, a people cannot long be governed against its will. In June of 1709, in response to a heartfelt appeal from their King, the people of France—soldiers, peasants, townsfolk—rallied their forces for determined resistance in a moment of great peril. It was to prove their finest hour.

  “Advices from the Hague of the 14th instant say…that the Allies [have] strong Resentments against the late Behaviour of the Court of France; and the French [are] using all possible Endeavours to animate their Men to defend their Country against a victorious and exasperated Enemy.” So Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele circulated the news in their Tatler through the coffee-houses of London in that same June of 1709. After three months of defensive manoeuvres, Villars’s troops finally gave battle to “Marlbrouk” on September 9, at Malplaquet, near Mons, a fortress vital for the defence of France itself. This terrible battle, the bloodiest in the whole of the eighteenth century, was a victory for Marlborough. At the cost of some 20,000 men, twice as many as the French lost, the allies managed to hold the terrain. Maréchal Villars, badly wounded, ceded command to Maréchal Boufflers, Marthe-Marguerite’s rejected suitor. “Nothing is equal to what he achieved,” declared Françoise proudly. After six hours of savage fighting, Boufflers conducted an orderly French retreat, with the allied troops too exhausted to pursue.

  In military terms, it was a defeat for the French, but they had acquitted themselves valiantly, and the national pride was intact, though from court Françoise wrote pitifully of “all the ladies crying out for their husband or their sons.” At Malplaquet, no prisoners had been taken on either side. “The duc de Guiche was wounded in a cannonade. The duchesse…left as soon as she heard. She had her husband and two sons there. The marquis de Coëtquen was wounded in the same cannonade; they have cut off his leg…Madame de Dangeau’s son has had his leg cut off…M. de Pallavicino and M. de Chermerault have been killed…Madam d’Epinoy’s…son is out of danger…”

  France was saved, but in the end, less through the talent of her generals or the strength of her defences or the determination of her people than through the unexpected death in 1711 of the Emperor Joseph, who had succeeded his father’s throne of the Holy Roman Empire in 1705. Joseph, only thirty-two years old, had died of smallpox, leaving two small daughters but no sons: in consequence, his throne devolved to his brother, the Archduke Karl—the same Karl who was fighting to claim the Spanish throne from Louis’s grandson. The massive alliance of European powers, who had until now been supporting Karl, suddenly found themselves in the paradoxical position of fighting to bring about precisely what they had been trying to avoid: the concentration of too much power in too few hands. In October 1711, Karl was elected Holy Roman Emperor; if the war were to conclude in the allies’ favour, he would soon control the vast Spanish Empire as well. Led by the Dutch and English, the allies agreed that the time was ripe for diplomacy. By the end of the year, plans were being drawn up for a peace conference in the Dutch town of Utrecht, and in January 1712 it began.

  “And what about the peace?” wrote Françoise in May of that year to her friend Madame de Dangeau. “Doesn’t M. de Dangeau think it will be agreed, and soon?” There was good reason to believe so, although the fighting was to continue, in ever smaller theatres, for two further years and more. Throughout 1711, the armies of the Alliance had held the advantage, but despite this, the newly elected Tory government in England, land-owning opponents of the pro-war city-based Whigs, had begun negotiations with Louis in “a greedy and treacherous desertion” kept secret from its allies and even from Marlborough, its own (Whig-sympathizing) commander-in-chief; in July 1712, England signed a separate peace with France. Towards the end of the same year, having suffered particularly heavy losses in the campaigns of the autumn, the Dutch agreed to a peace as well; they were quickly followed by the smaller allied powers. With one empire now in his hands, Karl himself might have been expected to be less concerned to win a second; after the death of his brother, in 1711, he had left Barcelona, his last Spanish stronghold, to claim the imperial throne in Vienna. But in fact he proved the most determined of all the Alliance leaders. His imperial armies battled on through 1713, until their final defeat by the French in the first months of the following year.

  The peace was thus more than two years in the making, with concessions and compromises extracted from all parties even as the fighting went on. Karl was obliged to abandon his claim to Spain, but his Holy Roman Emp
ire regained almost all of its German territories, and acquired large areas of Italy as well. Spain itself, which had effectively been waging a civil war over the two contenders for the throne, became, for the first time, a formally united country—once the Catalans had been massacred for their support of the losing side. From his decayed capital in Madrid, the now thirty-year-old Felipe proceeded to impose by force a French-style centralized government on his kingdom, ignoring the greater wealth and vibrancy of provinces other than Castilla. In so doing, he ensured the survival of strong regional resentments which were to cripple the economic and political development of the country for almost three hundred years.

  In return for recognition as the rightful King of Spain and its extensive empire, Felipe had been obliged to renounce his rights to the throne of France. This he had done, and similarly, his brother, the duc de Berry, and his uncle, the duc d’Orléans, had formally abandoned their own right to the Spanish throne, so apparently ensuring that there would be no Bourbon superpower in Europe. Doubts remained of the legality in French law of Felipe’s renunciation, but Louis was in no position now to dictate terms. In London, Queen Anne was dying. “I reckon the City [merchants] will not easily be persuaded to declare a popish French King shall be master of all their riches…” observed her former favourite, Sarah Churchill, wife of the Duke of Marlborough. She was right, and Louis, too, was obliged to accept this truth, making no further protest against the “Protestant Succession” law excluding Catholics from England’s throne.

  The war was over, and “for all this waste of wealth and loss of blood,” France had gained next to nothing. But Louis was now seventy-five years old. The world was to be spared any further ravages inspired by his insagacity. In his final, prolonged battle to extend French influence in Europe and its colonies, he had unwittingly brought to birth a great new power which he had barely considered part of Europe at all: “perfidious Albion,” the real victor of the War of the Spanish Succession.

  England—or rather, Great Britain, since an Act of Union in 1707 had joined that country formally with Scotland—had certainly gained territory from the conflict: a hefty piece of French Canada now became British, as did the Caribbean island of Saint-Christophe (St. Kitts), where an eleven-year-old Françoise had long ago dined on manioc and pineapple at the governor’s residence. Britain also gained two small but strategically important territories from Spain: the island of Minorca in the eastern Mediterranean, and the rocky promontory of Gibraltar to the south. For an adventuring naval power, these were excellent acquisitions, and the British gained further from the Dutch loss of trading rights in the Mediterranean and in South America, which ultimately reduced what had been the greatest of her commercial rivals to “no more than a sloop in the wake of the ship of England.” France was obliged to accept Britain as her own favoured trading nation, and to dismantle the defences at Dunkirk which might have threatened British trade through the Channel. And, vitally, Britain won from Spain the notorious Asiento—an exclusive right to provide slaves, some 20,000 every year, to the many Spanish colonies of South America.

  In the end, the British proved more dangerous as allies than as enemies, particularly to the Dutch, who had also lost territory to the Empire and—thanks to the secret treaty of 1711—a long line of fortifications to the French. The Treaty of Utrecht stripped the British of all credibility with their former friends in the Grand Alliance, but it brought them so much in other respects that they could afford not to care. “England wishes to become master of the world’s trade,” Louis had observed, and indeed, helped substantially if inadvertently by his own actions, through the course of the eighteenth century, England was to become precisely that. The Europeans, meanwhile, after decades of exhausting hegemonic militarism, and with the worrying new power of Peter the Great’s Russia to the east, agreed to settle instead for something closer to a balance of power on the continent. It was to last until the appearance of another expansionist Frenchman, ninety years later, in the person of Napoléon Bonaparte.

  The dauphin is shorter than average, of compact build, with a handsome, full face…His greatest love [is] wolf-hunting…and he is keen to learn about soldiering.” So Spanheim had recorded, more than two decades before. The dauphin was now in his fiftieth year, content in his second, morganatic marriage, still serving in the army, still riding and hunting wolves with a royal passion. Never much interested in politics or strategy, he had had to be prodded towards his expected future duty as sovereign, pushed into council meetings, pressed into taking a stand on the issues of the day. Apart from his lack of interest in government, he had given no other cause for concern other than by persistently overeating—unrepentant even after the alarming evening on which he had lost consciousness after indulging himself with particular enthusiasm. But even his large frame and healthy constitution had proved no match for the ravaging diseases of the age: in April 1711 he had contracted smallpox, and on the fourteenth of the month, he died. “The King has so humbled himself to the will of God, you can’t imagine it,” wrote Liselotte to her half-sister Luise. “He talks so piously, it goes straight to your heart; it made me weep all day yesterday…” The dauphin’s valets had work to make them weep, too, as the duc de Saint-Simon records: the outsized corpse had to be “trampled down” so that it might fit into its coffin.

  The dauphin himself had been the father of three sons, which had boded well for France’s royal succession. All born within four years, they had remained on good terms as they grew to adulthood. The dauphin’s eldest son, the duc de Bourgogne, now became dauphin in his turn: with his lovely wife Marie-Adélaïde, he too had had three sons, and though the eldest of these had died very young, there were still two healthy little boys to inherit the throne in due course.

  On February 5, 1712, Marie-Adélaïde herself had fallen ill with the measles; remorselessly bled and purged by the royal physicians, by the twelth of the month, she was dead. On the eighteenth, Bourgogne, the new dauphin, afflicted with the same malady and subjected to the same treatment, died, too. “You will understand the excess of my grief,” the King wrote to his grandson in Spain, “when you learn that the dauphin has died. Within only a few days it has pleased God to make two terrible trials of my submission to His will. I pray that He keep Your Majesty safe for me, and that He grant us consolation in these miseries…”

  On March 7, Marie-Adélaïde’s eldest son, the third dauphin, just five years old, fell ill with measles in his turn. Bled by the relentless physicians, he died the next day. His two-year-old brother, the duc d’Anjou, now the fourth dauphin, had also fallen ill. “Misfortune…overwhelms us,” wrote Liselotte. The child was cured, ironically, through lack of medical care. His sensible governess, outraged by the physicians’ treatment of the rest of his family and blaming them roundly for three unnecessary deaths, spirited the little boy away and cared for him herself in the homeliest way, without recourse to medicines or purgatives or bleedings.

  Two years later, in May 1714, Louis’s youngest grandson, the duc de Berry, fell from his horse while hunting, and died soon afterwards from internal injuries, “vomiting violently…green stuff, then black…It was found to be blood clots…They thought him out of danger…” said Liselotte, with Françoise, now seventy-eight, writing, “I feel lethargic in the extreme and I think I’m going to die of it. I feel exhausted in a way that I’ve never felt before…”

  A handful of years earlier, Louis had been able to rejoice in an apparently secure succession: a son, three grandsons, and four great-grandsons—the King of Spain and Marie-Louise already had two little boys of their own. Now, given the terms of the peace, the Spanish princes could not inherit the throne of France: defiance of this agreement would almost certainly mean a resumption of war. And of the French princes, all but one were dead, with the future of the fleur-de-lys throne of the Bourbons now resting on the tiny, orphaned shoulders of the four-year-old dauphin Louis.

  They were not strong enough to ensure Louis’s peace of mind, and
his fears persuaded him now towards a step of doubtful legality. After the duc de Berry’s death, he signed a royal edict declaring that in default of legitimate male heirs, his legitimized sons could inherit the throne. The edict was hugely controversial, prompting Chancellor Pontchartrain, Colbert’s distant successor, to resign in protest. Ignoring rumours that all the young princes had been poisoned by Liselotte’s son, the duc d’Orléans, Louis proceeded with his own undignified work, “violating the constitution [and] trying to change the fundamental laws governing the succession.”

  Françoise no doubt knew this, too, but nonetheless she welcomed the edict. It placed her beloved Mignon fourth in line to the throne, after Liselotte’s son, the duc d’Orléans, and his own eleven-year-old Louis, duc de Chartres. Liselotte herself was not so indignant about this affront to untainted blood as she would once have been. As she explained, “Since the sister of the duc du Maine and the comte de Toulouse married my son, and she became part of our family, I’ve preferred to see them raised up rather than set lower.” By now, the duc d’Orléans and his wife, Athénaïs’s hotheaded daughter, had six living children, and as Liselotte pointed out, “du Maine and Toulouse are their uncles, just the same…”