While the king was incapable of connecting with his wife physically or emotionally, when Anne arrived in France at the age of fourteen, she, too, had been derided for her perceived emotional immaturity, viewed by some as flighty and frivolous. The insult is absurd. How sober and staid could she have been at that age? Anne had a refreshing candor and zest for life. But she also had an innate pride and stubbornness that she had to work on in order not to sound too pro-Spanish. In an effort to please her husband she finally began to assimilate, learning Louis’ language and ditching her native silhouettes for French fashions, insisting that her Iberian entourage do the same. But that gesture made no impact on Louis; he dismissed Anne’s Spanish ladies-in-waiting for being too strong an influence on her.
Consequently, Anne had no friends at court. Her mother-in-law, who had been acting as Louis’ regent ever since the death of his father in 1610, treated her as a supernumerary rather than as the new queen of France, and behaved as though she were still Henri’s queen consort.
In November 1616, a member of the petty nobility, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Seigneur de Richelieu, the former bishop of Luçon, became secretary of state for foreign affairs. He was bright, energetic, and ambitious, and his rise to prominence at court was swift. The king soon came to rely upon Richelieu, and time and time again he would choose the cardinal’s advice over that of his domineering mother.
At the age of fifteen, Louis finally kicked Marie de Medici to the curb after her continued meddling in state affairs threatened to subvert his own authority. In 1617, the king conspired with Charles d’Albert, the Grand Falconer of France, who had become his favorite and chief confidant, to stage a palace coup. Marie de Medici was exiled to Blois. The man she had elevated to the titles of Marshal and Marquis of Ancre, the Italian Concino Concini, her arrogant chief adviser and possible lover—according to numerous scurrilous pamphlets—was judicially assassinated. Concini’s wife, caught in the metaphorical cross fire, was charged with witchcraft. To reward d’Albert, Louis created him the first duc de Luynes. In the French court, which had a rigid hierarchy, one’s place in the social order, and his or her degree of proximity to the sovereign, was of paramount importance, because it was directly related to his sphere of influence. Charles de Luynes soon became the most unpopular man in France, perceived as monopolizing and controlling the king to the same degree Marshal Ancre had once controlled Marie de Medici’s government. Soon the former falconer had the important role of sealing state documents.
It is a hallmark of Louis’ reign that he perpetually sought someone strong to lean on, usually an older man, whether it was de Luynes or Richelieu. It’s hardly surprising that the king was looking for another father figure, having been only eight years old when he lost his biological parent. During his preadolescent years, however, the king had relied primarily upon his mother, despite their dysfunctional relationship.
Marie de Medici effected a dramatic flight from Blois on February 22, 1619, escaping from the château via a swinging ladder suspended along the façade. She quickly assembled a cadre of malcontents and began spreading propaganda about her own son’s governance, sparking what would come to be known as the “Wars of the Mother and Son.” No shots were fired in these battles, despite Marie’s efforts to stage a coup.
Meanwhile, the royal spouses weren’t getting along any better, as Louis continued to avoid Anne’s bed. In 1619, his younger sister Christine was engaged to the Duke of Savoy, and his illegitimate half sister Catherine Henriette de Bourbon, known as Mademoiselle de Vendôme, wed Charles de Lorraine, duc d’Elbeuf. Louis became sexually aroused while he witnessed the consummation of the latter couple’s nuptials—not as a voyeur, but as part of the court ritual!
Hopping out of bed, the freshly postcoital new duchesse announced to the king, “Sire! You do the same thing with the queen, and you will do well.” By this time, the court was fully aware that the royal marriage was celibate, but no one was considering an annulment. An heir had to be conceived for the sake of the realm—and the sooner the better.
The following week, on January 25, 1619, the duc de Luynes physically grabbed his boss as the king was on his way to his own bedchamber and force-marched the sobbing monarch into his wife’s boudoir, depositing him onto Anne’s bed. Leaving a servant in the room to verify the couple’s activities, Luynes departed, locking the door behind him. The following day, Héroard reported the consummation of the royal marriage—at long last—in his journal. The Mercure Français also published the good news, and the foreign ambassadors disseminated the intelligence to their respective sovereigns.
Louis awoke and swore his undying love and fidelity to Anne, then informed the Spanish ambassador that he loved her more than anything in the world, a sentiment the king began to share with anyone he encountered.
The discovery of sex was a revelation to the sovereigns. After four years of celibacy, suddenly they experienced a honeymoon of sorts. Anne was no longer queen in name only. The normally suspicious-looking Louis appeared radiant. Naturally, Héroard chronicled the monarchs’ nocturnal comings and goings in his journals, inventing a system of symbols to refer to when and how often the pair made love. For example the letter “r” or “n” to the second power or degree would indicate copulation twice in one night. Louis became so delighted with this whole lovemaking thing that he began to linger for hours in Anne’s bedchamber every night and started to forgo his habit of rising early in the morning. Fretting that the king might literally wear himself out, his household urged him to take breaks of a fortnight between his connubial exertions with the queen.
Unfortunately, despite all that sex, Anne was unable to bear a child. Toward the end of 1619, she suffered a miscarriage, becoming so ill and weak that the court despaired for her life. Louis devotedly remained by her side during her illness, agreeing with the doctors, who felt it would be dangerous to bleed her any further.
Although there was no dauphin, Anne did at least earn Louis’ devotion. Written in 1620 from his army camp, one of his notes to the queen survives, containing the romantic declaration: “I passionately want to see you.” He took her with him on his summer military campaigns, left her in charge of the government when she stayed home (although Anne was not expected to make any major decisions on her own), and vowed never to touch another woman. While there were periods of ardent crushes on young ladies of the court, Louis never did commit adultery with them.
The sovereigns’ honeymoon lasted all the way through 1621. But in 1622, Anne chose to stay behind, because she was two months pregnant. However, on March 22, encouraged by two of her ladies, Anne playfully raced through the halls of the Louvre, tripped, and tumbled down a staircase. Two days later, she miscarried.
Louis learned of the incident a week later, and from that moment his attitude toward Anne shifted. The little love notes ceased. Not only had she lost his baby, she had also lost his trust, and so had the duchesse de Chevreuse (the now-remarried widow of the duc de Luynes), who had not just urged her to dash along the corridors, but had been feeding Anne a steady diet of libertine love poems, which the king believed were far too provocative for his wife to be reading. From then on, Louis would visit Anne’s bedchamber solely out of duty, most often during a time of political crisis, or when he had the queen in his complete control and she was utterly subservient to his will.
Anne’s father died on March 31, 1621. When the news reached France, she was inconsolable. She felt even lonelier without a family of her own to comfort her.
The Spanish delegation at the Bourbon court blamed Louis for Anne’s continued failure to produce an heir, but one of them reported to their new sovereign, Anne’s brother Philip IV, “The king comes seldom or never to sleep with the queen since her illness, and it is believed [he thinks] if he has sons, however young they are, they will be the cause of civil war in his kingdom. Whenever the queen is thought to be pregnant he shows much regret. It is to be feared that the inte
rests of the queen are in danger from this disposition of the king.”
The prudish Louis was never amused by sexually suggestive jokes; Anne, on the other hand, enjoyed a bit of risqué humor, even when it hit close to home. An epigram published in Le Cabinet satyrique, a bawdy magazine that the duchesse de Luynes often encouraged her to read, suggested:
Get married, it’s an honorable thing to do,
I shall never be sorry to see it:
But don’t ever be so foolish
As to marry your husband.
To punish Anne for enjoying herself at the expense of the realm, Louis dismissed Marie de Rohan, Madame de Luynes. He refused to entertain his wife’s pleas to restore her entourage and to hear her side of the story regarding the events surrounding her miscarriage. The king still blamed her for the tragedy, but he would not even speak to her face-to-face. For weeks, communications flew back and forth as the monarch insisted that his orders had been issued for Anne’s own good.
The year before Anne’s accident on the staircase, Louis and Marie de Medici were formally reconciled. But during a military campaign to crush a rebellion fomented by the Huguenots, the duc de Luynes had succumbed to an epidemic of camp fever, ending his influence and opening the door for Richelieu to put his stamp on the government.
Louis’ reign would continue to be marked by conflicts with family members: His younger—and only legitimate—brother, Gaston, attempted more than one coup; plus the king had to contend with France’s two primary nemeses—the Protestant Huguenots on the domestic front and the Catholic Hapsburgs on the foreign one. Louis was often in the position of reassuring his subjects that he was not undermining France’s Catholic interests by going to war against other Catholic rulers. During his reign, France was surrounded on all sides by Hapsburg territory: Hapsburg rulers included the king of Spain, and the Holy Roman Emperor, who controlled central Europe as well as Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, Northern Italy, and what is now the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Being a Hapsburg herself, it had to have been extremely difficult for Anne of Austria to hear her family derided as the enemy and to know that her husband was contemplating a declaration of war. After all, their marriage, and that of her brother to Louis’ sister, had really been peace treaties designed to preserve amity between the Spanish Hapsburgs and the French. When Louis was conflicted about aiding the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II of Germany, a Catholic Hapsburg, because it would strengthen Ferdinand’s secular power, Anne went to bat for her family. But Louis curtly put the kibosh on his wife’s lobbying with the tart remark, “Madame, be satisfied with being Queen of France.”
Anne had been trying her damnedest to be a good queen of France. She had already suffered three miscarriages, in December 1619, March 1622, and in 1626, and would endure the trauma of a fourth spontaneous abortion in April 1631. Unfortunately, the queen’s continued barrenness further increased the tension between the monarchs.
By 1623, Anne’s lady-in-waiting, the fun-loving duchesse de Chevreuse, had returned to court, although Louis refused to reinstate her in the queen’s household. At the time, the duchesse’s lover was Lord Holland, the English ambassador to Paris, and the pair of them decided that the poor unloved queen was in need of a handsome man to appreciate her. Holland was close to the tall, charming, bisexual George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, whose reputation preceded him as both the favorite of James I and one of England’s greatest rakes. The ambassador sang Anne’s praises to the duke, while Madame de Chevreuse rhapsodized about Buckingham to the queen and importuned her to receive him cordially when he arrived in France, hinting that Villiers was already a little bit in love with her.
Louis had not been keen on entertaining Villiers at his court because of the duke’s reputation as a hothead. Buckingham and Charles, Prince of Wales, the son of James I of England, arrived in France in 1623, pausing at the Bourbon court on their way to Spain to discuss the possibility of a marriage between Prince Charles and the infanta. Those hopes were dashed, so they returned to France to negotiate a marriage between Charles and Louis’ sister Henrietta Maria. While they were there, the French king feared that Buckingham might do or say something rude that would ruin the deal.
During his first visit to France in 1623, onlookers noticed the mutual attraction between Buckingham and the queen, and the pair fell into an easy rapport. But Anne failed to recognize that the Englishman’s discourse went beyond the limits of courtly flirtation; his passion was in earnest. And she was a virtuous woman who, while flattered, had no intention of breaking her marriage vows.
Accompanied by an extravagantly equipped and attired entourage, in 1625, the duke returned to Paris to escort Charles’s bride, Henrietta Maria, to the English Channel. Once again, Anne permitted herself to be flattered by his attentions, tremendously fascinated by the most dashing, charming, and witty of England’s cavaliers, if the princesse de Conti is to be believed when she stated that she could vouch for Anne’s fidelity from the waist down, but could not say as much for the part from the waist up.
At the time, Anne was considered to be at the height of her beauty and voluptuousness. According to her cloak bearer, La Porte, the blond Duke of Buckingham, who was then in his mid-thirties, was “the best built and the best looking man in the world.” It’s no surprise that the unhappily married Anne was susceptible to his skilled, smooth flirtation. And although she may not have committed adultery, the queen did behave indiscreetly.
The royal family comprised a small party to accompany Henrietta Maria to Calais. Anne had been eager to be among the delegation that would see her sister-in-law safely escorted to the seacoast by Buckingham. The journey was filled with parties, entertainments, and dances. In Louis’ absence, Anne and the duke enjoyed a romantic interlude, although, evidently, they had different ideas about their relationship.
En route to Calais the delegation stopped in Amiens, where Anne was lodged in a house with a large garden facing the banks of the Somme. One evening, Buckingham spied the queen walking alone in her garden and purportedly tried to press his attentions upon her. Anne shrieked and her entourage came running before anything could happen. On another occasion, the duke managed to slip away from the English delegation. He insisted upon seeing Anne, but she had retired early and instructed her attendants to deny him admittance to her rooms. The duke persisted. Finally Anne sent a message to her mother-in-law, asking her how to handle the situation. Marie de Medici advised the queen to receive Buckingham from her bed, since she had done the same thing in her day. Bursting into Anne’s bedchamber, in the presence of her ladies, Villiers fell to his knees and declared his love for her: She was his ideal woman—never mind that they were both married. Shocked, the queen had him ejected from her rooms.
As a consequence of this nocturnal hullabaloo, a furious, jealous, and scandalized Louis declared that Anne was no longer permitted to entertain any man in her quarters unless he himself was present. Although Marie de Medici argued on her daughter-in-law’s behalf, insisting that good women were not responsible for the ardor they inspired in men, and admitting that she had admirers in her youth as well, Louis would not hear reason. He dismissed the ladies-in-waiting who permitted the bedchamber event to transpire, as well as Anne’s cloak bearer, La Porte. But he tactlessly chose to give Anne the news while she was recovering from an epileptic seizure, and did not even deliver the message himself: He sent his mother to scold her. Louis’ secretary wrote in his private journal that he was appalled the king lacked the kindness to speak to Anne gently about the new protocol. Instead, Louis’ efforts to micromanage his wife’s life, and his insistence on dictating any changes in her household staff and on keeping a tight rein on her purse strings, were insults that served only to widen the rift between them.
Yet Anne’s purported betrayal was not limited to her behavior with the Duke of Buckingham. Louis also believed that his queen, along with Madame de Chevreuse, who was something of an intrigante,
had acted in concert with his brother Gaston to overthrow him. In the wake of the prince’s failed coup of 1626, the conspirators claimed that according to their plot, after Louis was removed from the throne, Anne was to wed Gaston.
Anne was questioned as to what she knew of Gaston’s plans and whether she indeed harbored intentions to marry her brother-in-law, enduring the humiliation of an interrogation before the royal council without being offered the chair that should have been given to a woman of her rank. Fighting to retain her dignity in the face of such an insult, the queen denied all knowledge of the plot to dethrone her husband and replied that she “would have gained too little from the exchange to wish to blacken herself by such a crime for so paltry stakes.”
Despite Anne’s vehement disavowal of any involvement in the conspiracy or any desire to wed her brother-in-law after the overthrow of Louis, documents stored in the Archivo General de Simancas (AGS), an official state archive located within the castle of Simancas in Valladolid, Spain, reveal a different story: that Anne had full knowledge of the complete plot, and had assented to it. Throughout her reign, Anne maintained a correspondence with her brother, and whatever she may have written to Philip IV on the subject of Gaston’s conspiracy would have been classified as a state document and filed accordingly. Yet if Anne was complicit in Gaston’s conspiracy, her reasons for it are unclear. True, she would not have gained much by swapping one Bourbon brother for the other. Had she been hoping that Gaston and his cohorts, Louis’ illegitimate brothers, promised a strong Franco-Spanish foreign policy?
Inglorious Royal Marriages Page 21