Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  The real story begins with Louis’ unusual upbringing. He was the eldest of six children born to the first Bourbon king of France, Henri IV, and the Florentine Marie de Medici. Louis XIII’s maternal grandfather was Francesco I de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Francesco was the brother of both Isabella Romola de Medici, who died at her husband Paolo d’Orsini’s hands, and Pietro de Medici, who murdered his wife, Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo.

  In his lifetime, Louis XIII would come to be known both as Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Both nicknames were apt, though not necessarily compliments.

  From his infancy, Louis’ personal physician Jean Héroard kept an anally detailed log of his charge’s every waking moment, chronicling everything from the boy’s bowel movements and urinations (or any notable lack thereof) to each and every accomplishment and conversation. From this journal a picture emerges of a child who by twenty-first-century standards would be considered sexually abused—diddled by his own father, by his nurse, and by the king’s mistress, among others—all in an effort to instill the infant with a healthy sexual appetite and pride of penis, as well as a fearlessness to consummate his eventual royal marriage. It didn’t work.

  Told from the cradle that he would marry his distant cousin, the Infanta of Spain, Louis was quizzed by Héroard as if it were a catechism: “Where is the infanta’s darling?” According to the physician’s journals, the fourteen-month-old baby “puts his hand on his cock.” At the age of three, Louis lay in bed, “crosses his legs, asking, ‘Will the infanta do this?’” A lady-in-waiting answered him, “Sir, when you go to bed together she will put her legs in that position.” Louis replied “promptly and cheerfully, ‘And I, I will put them like that!’ spreading his legs apart with his hands.”

  At least the birds and the bees had been explained to the boy, albeit somewhat early on. Some biographers believe that Louis had witnessed adults having sex when he was barely a toddler. One day he informed Héroard that the infanta “will sleep with me and I’ll make a little baby for her.” Of course, he was also repeating the information his parents had given him from the time he was old enough to sit up.

  “Sir, how will you do that?” his doctor inquired.

  “With my cock,” the little prince replied shyly.

  “Sir, will you kiss her a lot?”

  “Yes, like that,” he told Héroard, and flung his body on top of the bolster with wild abandon.

  Suiting the word to the deed would be decades away, however.

  Louis XIII’s twentieth-century biographer Elizabeth Wirth Marvick puts her subject on the couch, tracing his crippling stutter and his charmless, quick-tempered, impatient, backbiting, vengeful, and suspicious personality to the sex games his father would play with him when he was barely old enough to walk. She places Louis in bed with his infant sister, noting that the servants were allowed to frighten him into behaving well by telling him that if he didn’t do so, his penis would be chopped off. The child was also encouraged to treat adult women as sex objects, suckling and spanking them and making overt references to their genitalia, which he was inappropriately permitted to observe. The notions of sexuality and pain were introduced to the boy simultaneously, with unsurprisingly unhealthy results. Beginning when Louis was two years old, if he misbehaved, the king permitted certain persons at court to take a switch made of twigs to his bottom, a punishment the dauphin began to anticipate with a perverse sort of pleasure, referring to it as “my darling.”

  The court of Henri IV was a spectacularly dysfunctional place to raise an emotionally stable heir. No wonder Louis XIII’s eventual marriage was wildly unsuccessful. The king shamelessly impregnated the queen and his mistress-of-the-moment during the same time period. Louis found himself competing for his mother’s attention, and the court’s respect and recognition, with his own father and his bastard half siblings, who had been raised within the royal household, as well as with Marie de Medici’s favorite child, Gaston, Louis’ younger brother by nearly seven years. This could explain his jealousy of anyone he thought might be taking something that he believed was rightfully his. He even hated the name Louis, wishing he had been named after his father, or else for his grandfather Gaston, a favorite, ancestral name that was instead bestowed on his baby brother.

  Portraits of Louis as a youth depict him with a heart-shaped face and a mass of curly dark hair. But he had two congenital impediments that made it taxing for him to speak. According to the English ambassador to Paris, Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, who presented his credentials to Louis in 1619, “. . . his words were never many, as being so extream [sic] a stutterer that he wou’d sometimes hold his tongue out of his mouth a good while before he cou’d speak so much as one word; he had besides a double row of teeth, and was observed seldom or never to spit or blow his nose, or to sweat much, ’tho he were very laborious, and almost indefatigable in his exercises of hunting and hawking, to which he was much addicted. . . .”

  Héroard described Louis as a muscular, large-boned, and well-proportioned boy, with brown eyes, small lips that turned up, and large hands and feet. Oil portraits of an older Louis do depict his chubby cheeks, but already reveal elements of his psyche: a suspicious cast to his eyes, and narrow, pursed lips. As an adult, he sported the mustache and Vandyke beard of the cavaliers.

  According to his physician, Louis was a stubborn child, prone to temperamental outbursts. He alternately worshiped his father and was insanely jealous of him. Louis was also compelled to grow up too fast, learning far too much at an age when he was too young to process it. His father would brag about his sexual prowess, pointing out a beautiful woman to his young son, then boasting that he had made a baby with her. And who wouldn’t love the king? Despite his rampant philandering, Henri was seductive, popular, charming, affable, and moreover, a courageous and visionary ruler who had earned the admiration and respect of his subjects, including the poorest among them.

  And then Louis lost him. On May 14, 1610, while Henri IV was enjoying an afternoon carriage ride near the Louvre, François Ravillac hopped onto the coach and stabbed the “tyrant” king in the chest three times, assassinating the monarch for trying to wage war on fellow Catholics, as Henri had been involved in military conflicts with Spain and Italy. Eight-and-a-half-year-old Louis was now king of France. After a period of mourning for his father—whose tragic death had immediately martyred Henri in the eyes of his former subjects—Louis XIII was crowned at Reims on October 17.

  Upon Louis’ accession, because he was a minor, his mother acted as his regent in concert with a number of advisers, some of whom had been his father’s ministers. One of the most pressing issues facing France was that the kingdom was fractured along religious lines; however, the matter was far more complex than the traditional tension between Catholics and Huguenots, the French Protestants whose freedom of worship Henri IV had protected through his Edict of Nantes. Within the Catholics were ultramontanist factions that wanted to look over the mountains to the pope for guidance in all things. On the other side were the bon Français, or Gallican elements, who were often more secular and might nowadays be viewed as jingoist: These latter factions were Frenchmen first, last, and always, and never wanted their government’s policies to be directed or dictated by His Holiness in Rome. The concept that a French king ruled by divine right, raised during the 1614–1615 meeting of the Estates General (a convocation of the three orders of France’s society—the clergy, nobility, and bourgeoisie), was France’s clever way of declaring that their sovereign was not now, nor ever would be, beholden to the pope.

  Added to the religious friction Louis inherited was the anxiety of the Huguenots, in large part because his coronation ritual included an oath to extirpate Protestantism from his realm. So they began amassing a military defense. Their aim was to transform France into a Protestant pseudo-republic modeled on the Dutch Netherlands, which was enemy Hapsburg territory.

  Louis for
mally came of age on his thirteenth birthday, but his mother continued to act as his regent while the young king developed crushes on handsome male courtiers and continued to practice his childhood pursuits. He built mechanical devices like clocks and working models of toy cannons and miniature forts, shod horses, and whipped up omelets and fancy desserts, becoming quite the respected little chef.

  However, as time went on, Marie de Medici began to surround herself with Italian-born men, who were vastly disliked by the populace because they were foreigners. Louis developed a favorite of his own, the court’s gentle, middle-aged falconer, Charles d’Albert. As Marie’s fortunes fell at court, d’Albert’s star rose until he became the monarch’s chief adviser.

  Despite his innate prejudice against Spaniards (for one thing, they were “papa’s enemies”), Louis XIII had been betrothed since the age of eleven to the eldest daughter of Philip III of Spain, the Hapsburg princess Anne of Austria, who was just five days Louis’ junior. There had been protests against the match from within the Bourbon family, most notably from the prince de Condé, who argued that not only were the two kingdoms inveterate enemies, but that such an alliance was a reversal of Henri IV’s anti-Spanish foreign policy, and therefore any union between the French and their neighbors to the south was, ipso facto, inglorious. A Franco-Spanish marriage had been proposed for Louis during Henri’s lifetime, but the monarch had dismissed the notion as “. . . a step impolitic, and likely totally to alienate the crowns; for, as the grandeur of France is the humiliation of Spain, no concord is possible. . . .”

  However, the Louis-Anne match continued a tradition of political alliances between France and Spain that had begun with the marriage of King Philip II to Elisabeth of Valois, the daughter of Henri II of France and Catherine de Medici. Born in the Escorial in Madrid, the pretty, blond Anne was raised according to her parents’ strict religious beliefs. Her mother was Margaret of Austria, so although Anne was the infanta of Spain and Portugal as well as an archduchess of Austria, her title derived from her mother’s lineage and the House of Hapsburg.

  Philip III provided his daughter with a dowry of half a million gold écus, augmented by numerous jewels worth fifty thousand écus. Anne’s fiancé and his mother also promised her a twenty-thousand-écu annuity. Yet the fear that Louis might die young prompted the Spanish court to negotiate France’s return of Anne’s dowry, wardrobe, and jewelry upon her eventual widowhood. Prior to her marriage Anne also had to renounce all succession rights to Spain, not only for herself but for her descendants by Louis, in order to prevent France from making any claims to the Spanish throne. However, should Louis leave Anne a childless widow, by the terms of the marriage contract her rights of Spanish succession would be restored.

  Anne carried more into France than a load of cash and jewelry, enough silver in her trousseau to equip several households, and a massive wardrobe that included fine batiste underpinnings, ruffs and other collars, and lavishly embroidered and embellished gowns, sleeves, bodices, and skirts of watered silk, taffeta, satin, and velvet, in every conceivable hue. Many of her garments were richly studded with gold and silver spangles, pearls, and other gems. Anne also had the weight of her father’s expectations on her shoulders, his hope that she would be able to influence Louis’ foreign policy.

  She traveled from Spain with a vast entourage that would become a subject of contention long before she reached the altar; it was too small by Spanish standards and too large for the French, who had wanted her to enter the kingdom with a retinue of only fifty-three. Although more than two hundred attendants departed Spain with Anne, only half that number crossed the border into France.

  The final weeks of November 1615 saw the proxy marriages and the formal nuptials of Anne and Louis, both only fourteen years old, as well as the union of their respective siblings. Anne’s brother, Philip IV of Spain, only ten, was married by proxy in Bordeaux to Louis’ thirteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth.

  As Anne neared Bordeaux on November 21, in the manner of courtly lovers Louis approached her carriage incognito, in order to glimpse her before their wedding day. What he saw was an adolescent girl with full cheeks, a slightly fleshy nose, and a somewhat prominent lower lip. In a mash-up of their native tongues, Louis loudly cried out from the window of his coach, “Yo son incognito, yo son incognito! Touche, cocher, touche!”

  The next few days were filled with festivities leading up to their nuptials. The court was enchanted by the couple’s gestures of affection: On November 22, Louis personally visited the royal kitchens to order Anne’s breakfast, and then called on her when she was making her toilette. When she indicated that she needed a feather for her headdress, he gallantly offered the queen a plume from his cap and asked for one of her hair bows in return.

  Anne and Louis’ two-hour wedding ceremony in the cathedral of Bordeaux took place on November 25, 1615, Saint Catherine’s Day. Anne was clothed in a flowing gown of royal purple velvet trimmed with ermine and embellished with gold fleurs-de-lis. The crown was so heavy she had to steady it with her hand to keep it balanced atop her head.

  Louis wore white satin brocade embroidered with gold and embellished with precious gems; a huge ruff encircled his neck. The adolescent bride, described by one of the Spanish onlookers as more beautiful than an angel, was “weighted down with robes and diamonds” and visibly dripping enormous drops of sweat, but she managed to smile at her groom throughout the ceremony. Their nearly identical looks were much remarked upon, although Louis had tousled dark hair and Anne was blond.

  After the nuptial Mass, the newlyweds dined separately and Marie de Medici undertook the ritual of preparing the marital bed for her son and daughter-in-law. During Louis’ supper, his courtiers entertained him with bawdy stories to put him in the mood for love before his mother arrived to escort him to Anne’s chamber. The marriage bed was blessed and the curtains drawn about the teens, leaving them to follow nature’s course.

  Hours later, Louis brashly confided the details to Héroard, and when his physician inquired whether the queen had enjoyed herself, Louis boasted, “She liked it; I did it twice.” It was a lie. The king had returned to his own bedchamber at about eleven that evening, as much a virgin as he had been the night before.

  However, something had happened on his wedding night: a good deal of effort. Louis retired to his own bed with, in Héroard’s words, a glande rouge. The young king had rubbed himself sore attempting to do his duty. Unfortunately, all that grinding or masturbation wasn’t going to result in an heir, leaving both teenage spouses frustrated and Louis’ failure on the linens.

  Yet the official lie had to be that the marriage had been consummated, in order to prevent naysayers like the prince de Condé from seeking a reason to annul it. Marie de Medici had the nerve to display the dirty bedsheets the following morning. Louis was humiliated. Although he continued to pay ritual visits to Anne during the day, just as he called upon his mother, and bade the queen a brief good night before turning in, it would be six months before he ate dinner with Anne again, and four long years before they repeated the effort to consummate their marriage. Modern biographers attribute this difficulty to the damage Héroard caused to Louis’ psyche by publicly chronicling and analyzing his every bodily function from the time the youth was born.

  While fourteen was not a particularly unusual age for royalty to wed in this era, it was considered unhealthy for a couple that young to regularly cohabitate as man and wife, because they were physically and emotionally too undeveloped. Louis himself admitted to his confessor that he felt he was too immature for sexual intercourse, and feared he might suffer physical harm from engaging in it.

  And yet France expected an heir from their barely adolescent sovereigns. Nowadays, kids that young qualify as jailbait, and forcing them to play house together would constitute child abuse.

  At the outset of the royal marriage there was widespread enthusiasm for its success—which really meant
a future dauphin. Soon after the wedding, a popular pamphlet, dripping with hope and hyperbole, made the rounds:

  Rejoice, France, for after this happy night, so much desired by these two lovers and all their people, heaven and this princess promise you a succession of kings and princes and you shall see her as fertile as a vine, bearing fruit in abundance and in all seasons.

  During the queen’s official entry into Paris on May 16, the provost of the merchants greeted her on his knees with a panegyric larded with erotic double-entendre. “May we thus, Madame, see the lilies of France flower in the golden fleece of Spain in a happy lineage, for which we implore Heaven.”

  If only it had been so. Although they shared a few of the same hobbies, such as hunting, Louis otherwise demonstrated little interest in his bride. Anne of Austria was queen of France and yet her husband had reduced her to a mere cipher at court. Her mother-in-law, the formidable dowager queen Marie de Medici, was given precedence on public occasions and had more actual power and authority. True, Marie had the benefits of age and experience, but Anne should have been treated with the appropriate deference as queen consort.

  Undoubtedly homesick at first, Anne surrounded herself with her Spanish ladies-in-waiting, taking refuge in the familiar. She continued to abide by her native court etiquette rather than trying to assimilate into her adopted homeland, and by continuing to converse with the members of her satellite court in their own tongue, she did not improve her French.

  A coded message from the Venetian ambassador to France noted the froideur between the spouses. “No great inclination toward his wife is shown by him, and he abhors all those close to her who belong to the Spanish nation,” the envoy wrote of Louis. “While during earlier months they tried to keep him from making himself his wife’s slave in everything [there is no proof of this in Héroard’s diaries], now they have to work at preventing him from showing how little he cares about her.” The next month, the Venetian ambassador reported an incident where Louis had spitefully locked up Anne’s Spanish ladies-in-waiting for having taken the keys to some chests from his nurse’s daughter. Although Louis began to mature as a monarch, as a person he remained emotionally stunted, hampered by his embarrassing stammer, repressing his feelings, obsessed with minutiae no matter the subject and, even at the age of eighteen, building miniature toys.