As a young man, the prince enjoyed attending parties and balls in female attire, although it was the notion of flamboyance, no matter the disguise, that most intrigued him. Philippe was as notorious for his shepherdess costume as he was for his exotic regalia as the king of Persia.
Monsieur was raised to defer to his older brother in all things. Although they played together, Philippe was always supposed to lose to Louis. Only through his complete obeisance to the king, who was clearly their mother’s favorite, could Monsieur earn her love. Unlike his athletic brother, he was also averse to any physical exercise. Small wonder, since he was not permitted to outperform Louis on the tennis court or in the saddle. His second wife, Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate (Liselotte), once wrote, “Were it not for war, [Monsieur] never in his life would have mounted a horse.” Philippe’s penchant for cross-dressing and his homosexual affairs did not impact his bravery on the battlefield or his skill as a military strategist. He literally dressed to kill, dripping with diamonds and silken ribbons, his face painted and powdered, and he forswore a hat when he rode into the fray because it would crush his wig. In 1667, Philippe distinguished himself in the War of Devolution, in which Louis’ armies overran those of the Hapsburg-controlled Spanish Netherlands and the Franche-Comté region. Louis claimed a right to those territories on behalf of his queen, because Marie-Thérèse’s renunciation of the Spanish throne prior to their marriage had been contingent upon a dowry that had never been paid.
And in 1677, Philippe would lead an army of thirty thousand to defeat William III of Orange at the Battle of Cassel, proving that he was hardly craven or inept in the field. Although Monsieur had participated in other campaigns, Cassel was the only time Louis permitted his brother to cover himself in military glory; jealous of Philippe’s success, the king kept him home during subsequent expeditions.
Excessively vain and fastidious about his toilette throughout his life, Monsieur would spend hours at his dressing table, deliberating over which rosette or plume should adorn his hat, and he hated to soil his clothes or expose his skin to the sun. Philippe was also fascinated by the details and distinctions of protocol and etiquette, which his brother had transformed from an issue of common courtesy into a political strategy. Louis XIV had learned much from the ramifications of the Fronde and from the reign of his father, whose own relatives committed high treason by fomenting rebellion. Never again would the nobility, let alone the royal family, have the opportunity to stage a coup. If they desired Louis’ favor, they would have to remain at court, where he could keep an eye on them, and they would be too busy arguing over the arcana of Louis’ new protocols to raise an army.
Nevertheless, Philippe always expected special treatment from his older brother. He was primarily dependent upon Louis’ largesse to support his extravagant lifestyle; yet the king didn’t mind footing Philippe’s bills, because he preferred that everyone at court focus all their time and spend all their money on inconsequential pastimes. Monsieur appreciated the subsidy, and enjoyed his untold hours of leisure, but resented his exclusion from matters of state and international diplomacy. Because he feared that history would repeat itself, the monarch never awarded his younger brother a governorship nor permitted him a meaningful role in the military. From Louis’ perspective, Philippe need only look to him for his happiness; and so Monsieur was kept idle, leaving him (and everyone else at the Bourbon court) with plenty of time for his morals to stray into all manner of indulgence. According to Cardinal Mazarin, “Monsieur does nothing [and] knows nothing.”
Scholars of previous generations have posited that Anne and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, deliberately encouraged Philippe’s effeminate tendencies, as if an interest in frippery and diamonds would somehow neutralize him politically, or check any machismo outbursts of sibling rivalry, such as plotting to depose his brother. But this argument fails to acknowledge that until Louis XIV fathered a son—and the king’s marriage would not take place until 1660—Philippe was the heir apparent. Not only that, during Monsieur’s adolescence, he evinced an attraction to certain ladies of the court; in 1658, he even had a mistress. Also, in an era where little boys traditionally wore dresses until they were between the ages of four and six, and where men’s attire was just as elegant as women’s, where males also painted their faces and enjoyed the playful application of mouches or decorative patches to disguise the lingering scars of small pox, the young prince’s passion for fashion would not have been viewed as particularly outré. Until, of course, it did become a subject of discussion—but only because it was connected to his disruptively flamboyant behavior with a clique of gay men at court and it began to affect the success of his marriage.
When his cousin “Mademoiselle,” Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, returned to court in 1657 after an absence of some years, she was shocked to find Monsieur had changed little in the years she’d been gone. While Louis had matured, Philippe was still pranking his mother’s ladies-in-waiting and splashing about in the river with them like one of the girls.
Monsieur’s interest in women’s clothing and accoutrements notwithstanding, the issue of his sexuality became apparent around 1658, when he was seventeen or eighteen years old and had his first homosexual encounter. Rumors spread through the Bourbon court that Cardinal Mazarin had introduced the prince to his own nephew, Jules Mancini, duc de Nevers. Mazarin’s family were native Italians, and in France homosexuality was nicknamed the “Italian vice,” as well as le goût abominable (the abominable preference). Homosexuality was also considered a sin and a crime punishable by death, but because this “vice” was believed to be confined to France’s first two Estates (the clergy and the nobility), whose social privileges were sacrosanct, the death penalty for sodomy was rarely invoked.
Although no hookup between Monsieur and the duc de Nevers can be confirmed, the prince may have had some form of a sexual relationship with the duc de Candale, and he did commence a lifelong attachment in 1658 with an avowed homosexual, Philippe de Lorraine-Armagnac. A member of the House of Guise, the Chevalier de Lorraine held the rank of prince étranger (foreign prince) at the French court, because his cousin was the duc de Lorraine. The chevalier’s lofty status enabled Monsieur to promote him within his household and retain him in his entourage without creating a scandal or offending anyone’s sensibilities regarding the court’s rigid protocol as to who was permitted to wait upon a prince of the blood.
At the Bourbon court, Monsieur became known as “one whose heart could never be won by woman.” Instead he was the queen bee of a coterie of gay and bisexual noblemen that also included Armand de Gramont; the arrogant and Machiavellian comte de Guiche; and the marquis d’Effiat, Antoine Coiffier, who began his service in Philippe’s household as his captain of the chase and remained a cherished member of his entourage until Monsieur’s death in 1701. The marquis d’Effiat was a relation of Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, marquis de Cinq Mars, the mignon who had been Philippe’s father’s favori, and who was executed for treason in 1642. The degree to which Philippe was ruled by his mignons became an embarrassment. The haughty and charismatic comte de Guiche not only palled about with Monsieur, he literally pushed him around, on one occasion shoving him in the middle of a ball, in the presence of the entire court.
In 1658, Monsieur also began indulging in another of his passions: that of home improvement. That year, he purchased the Château de Saint-Cloud, ten kilometers west of Paris. He immediately undertook the transformation of what had been a small villa into the grand palace that would become his favorite residence, eventually employing Mansart and Le Nôtre, two of the geniuses who redesigned the château and gardens of Versailles for his brother.
Until the death in 1660 of his uncle Gaston, Philippe was technically styled as “le Petit Monsieur.” And with no surviving male heirs to inherit the dukedom of Orléans, which was traditionally the birthright of the oldest of the king’s younger brothers, Gaston’s d
emise meant not only that Philippe would henceforth be called Monsieur, but also that he would inherit his uncle’s title as duc d’Orléans. Upon Gaston’s death, Philippe also inherited the subsidiary titles of duc de Valois and duc de Chartres—which during his lifetime would be bestowed upon his sons—as well as the lordship of Montargis. However, the appanage—a title’s real estate and revenues granted by the king—was not customarily awarded until the time of the appanagist’s marriage. Louis was a stickler for etiquette. And Monsieur had no bride on the horizon. No wife, no income, although His Majesty did permit Monsieur to assume their late uncle’s titles before he was formally entitled to acquire Gaston’s appanage.
Philippe was quite the eligible bachelor, but Anne of Austria’s first priority was to marry off his older brother. Henrietta Maria, the exiled queen of England and sister of Louis XIII, who had fled her adopted homeland during the civil war and received sanctuary from the French court, had dropped numerous hints about wedding her youngest child, Henriette-Anne, to Louis XIV, but Louis had never looked upon his cousin as anything more than a scrawny poor relation. The king was then a cocky seventeen-year-old, and was not only uninterested in his skinny, impoverished cousin who could (at the time) offer nothing to France, but he haughtily dismissed her as a little girl. With the six-year age gap, he had a point; she was barely eleven.
In any event, the queen mother had her eye and heart on a Spanish match instead, hoping to unite her son with her own niece, the daughter of Philip IV and Elisabeth of France. On June 9, 1660, the king of France wed his first cousin on both sides, Maria Theresa, the infanta of Spain, a pious flaxen blonde. Marie-Thérèse, as she was called thereafter, would never manage to become proficient in French and would eventually bear Louis six children, only one of whom survived to adulthood.
With Louis successfully married, it was Philippe’s turn to be sacrificed on the altar of matrimony. A match with Gaston’s daughter, his formidable first cousin, styled at court as “Mademoiselle,” was a nonstarter. Several years his senior, the immensely wealthy Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans had initially viewed herself as Louis’ intended bride, when the king was little more than a boy. But she had supported the rebels during the Fronde. On July 6, 1652, she ordered the Bastille’s cannons to be fired upon the army of Turenne (which at that time guarded Paris on behalf of the crown), in order for the rebellious prince de Condé to enter the capital. All hope of wedding the monarch died with the sound of the explosion. Cardinal Mazarin was said to have remarked, “With that cannon, Mademoiselle has shot her husband.”
Even though the Fronde had ended in 1653, why the cardinal and Anne of Austria still believed that Mademoiselle might make a good wife for the queen mother’s younger son defies logic. In any event, Mademoiselle declined the offer, stating that Philippe was too much of a mama’s boy. The more she saw of him, the more she realized he wouldn’t care for anything but his own beauty and his glamorous wardrobe; nor would he ever distinguish himself as a leader of men.
So Anne of Austria went to plan B and approached her sister-in-law. The exiled English queen had failed in her effort to unite her daughter with Louis XIV, but the king’s younger brother would be an excellent consolation prize! And given Henriette-Anne’s background and prospects, Monsieur was likely the best the princess could do.
Fought between 1642 and 1651, the English Civil War pitted the crown and its royalist, or cavalier, sympathizers against the “Roundheads,” or Parliamentarians, who sought to give Parliament control over the sovereign’s administration of the realm. The war had torn apart the English royal family when Henrietta, as she was called then, was only a toddler.
In 1644, shortly after Henrietta’s baptism into the Anglican faith at Exeter Cathedral, leaving her under the care of her governess, Lady Dalkeith, her mother fled to France, receiving sanctuary from her nephew Louis XIV. The following year, when Exeter surrendered to the besieging Roundheads, Lady Dalkeith brought Henrietta to Oatlands Palace in Surrey. They remained there, despite orders from the Commons (as the House of Commons was then known), to bring the little girl to St. James’s Palace in London to join her siblings Henry and Elizabeth.
On July 25, 1646, Lady Dalkeith bravely donned a disguise as a humpbacked ragamuffin. She sneaked her charge (resentfully dressed as an urchin boy named Pierre) out of Oatlands, sailing with little Henrietta for France, so that the princess could be reunited with her mother. The exiled queen of England, a Roman Catholic, became determined to raise little Henriette d’Angleterre, as the French called her, in her own religion. With Charles I then a prisoner of the Scots, he could not prevent it. Soon after her arrival in Paris, the child was also given a middle name. As a compliment to the French king’s mother, Anne of Austria, the English princess would now be known as Henriette-Anne, although nearly everyone who was close to her would call her by the affectionate nickname Minette.
She and her mother still had to contend with deprivations, because the Fronde was sapping the Bourbon treasury as well; Louis XIII’s niece, Mademoiselle, described the hardships that befell even the royal family: lack of bed hangings, linens, clothes, and food.
Nonetheless, Minette was a darling of the French court, charming her Bourbon cousins and their vast entourages when, as a nine-year-old, she made her maiden appearance as Erato, the Muse of Love and Poetry, in a ballet to celebrate the carnival of 1653. Even then, Monsieur, who was four years her senior, enjoyed dressing up as a girl and painting his face with makeup and mouches. At one court ball the pair of them wore identical costumes as paysannes de Bresses, in silver tissue skirts trimmed with rose-colored ribbons, black velvet stomachers, and hats adorned with pink, black, and white plumes.
Already admired for her endearing charm and sweet disposition, by the time Minette came of age, she was also an acknowledged beauty, with a complexion described as roses-and-jasmine, an enviably tall and slender figure, chestnut-colored hair, cornflower-blue eyes, rosy lips, and a dazzling smile that revealed a mouth full of small, straight white teeth in an era of horrendous dentistry. Minette’s perfection was marred only by a slightly long face, and a minor spinal deformity that she was able to conceal with the cut of her garments: one shoulder was higher than the other and she walked with a slight limp.
Her sloped shoulder wasn’t what made Henriette-Anne less marriageable. Her father had been executed by Oliver Cromwell and her oldest brother, Charles, the putative sovereign of England and Scotland, had been on the run for years, living on the Continent in exile and penury and fighting to reclaim his crown, a king without a kingdom.
However, rumors swirled about the French court that there was some interest in wedding Minette, both from the Grand Prince of Tuscany and from Charles Emmanuel, the Duke of Savoy. Nothing came of either prospect, due to her own status as an exile.
Finally, in the spring of 1660, the Convention Parliament proclaimed Charles II England’s lawful monarch dating from the time of his father’s execution on January 30, 1649, and the House of Stuart was restored to the throne. Suddenly, at sixteen, Minette was a very eligible princess.
Louis XIV began to taunt his brother on his haste to “wed the bones of the Holy Innocent,” a reference to their cousin’s extreme thinness. But before Monsieur’s appanage was on the horizon—despite his protests of love for Minette—he had not thought much of her. Two years earlier, after Mazarin scolded him for insulting Henriette-Anne over a matter of royal precedence, Philippe had retorted, “We have come to a fine state of affairs when people like that, who owe their bread to us, go in before us. Why don’t they go live somewhere else?”
On November 22, 1660, Minette was in England visiting her brothers and her sister, Mary, the Princess of Orange, widow of the ruler of the Dutch Republic. Charles had not seen his youngest sister for years and was astonished by her beauty, poise, and sweet solicitousness for his welfare. Charles II fell madly in love with her, and although their relationship never crossed the bor
der into incest, their mutual feelings ran exceptionally deep. As their correspondence reflects, the bond was much stronger than an ordinary fraternal one. Although Charles would never be faithful to his own wife, and would have passionate, and lengthy, extramarital affairs, as well as countless one-night stands, many believe the great love of his life was his sister Minette. She was the woman who understood him best, and whom he most wanted to cherish and protect. Charles openly admitted that he could deny his sister nothing.
Their mother had made the journey to England as well, in an effort to prevent the Duke of York from announcing his marriage to one of Mary’s former ladies-in-waiting, a commoner named Anne Hyde, who was the daughter of Charles’s chancellor. While they were across the Channel, Minette received France’s official request for her hand on behalf of Philippe, duc d’Anjou (Louis XIV would not formally grant Monsieur the title of duc d’Orléans until May 10, 1661).
Anne of Austria was delighted with Monsieur’s choice, declaring that nothing made her happier than to see her younger son wed so well, especially to the sweet, gentle princess she loved like a daughter. Henrietta Maria was thrilled; she had shared every day of Minette’s life since their reunion, and now her child need never leave France.
If his sister was pleased by it, then Charles II was happy about the match, too. But their cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who was also a grandson of England’s James I, proposed a union with the Holy Roman Emperor instead. Tempting, certainly, but Charles believed that a marriage between Minette and Monsieur was the alliance that was in the best interests for both kingdoms.
Inglorious Royal Marriages Page 24