Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  However, because the cousins were related within the proscribed degree of consanguinity, Henriette-Anne and Philippe had to wait for the necessary papal dispensation. Consequently, they did not sign their marriage contract until March 30, 1661, formalizing the document at the Palais Royal, which would become their primary residence as a married couple, with Philippe’s beloved Saint-Cloud as their countryside retreat. Charles II promised his sister an enormous dowry of eight hundred and forty thousand pounds, plus an additional twenty thousand pounds for wedding expenses. The princess was also awarded an annuity of forty thousand livres from Louis XIV, plus the Château de Montargis for use as a private residence. For a girl who had relied upon the charity of her Bourbon cousins for much of her childhood, her marriage might not have guaranteed her happiness, but it gave her three homes.

  The royal wedding took place at noon inside Henrietta Maria’s chapel at the Palais Royal on March 31, 1661. It was an intimate affair; only select members of the Bourbon court witnessed the cousins exchange their marriage vows as sixteen-year-old Henriette d’Angleterre became Madame, la duchesse d’Orléans. The modest ceremony was hardly the flamboyant spectacle one might have expected from the twenty-year-old bridegroom. That evening, the newlyweds dined with the sovereigns and their respective mothers. The wedding was announced to the public with the usual hyperbole in poetry and song, uniting the lilies of France with England’s rose. The noted fabulist Jean de La Fontaine penned a paean to the nuptial couple, expressing the hope that the marriage would be blissful and last forever. The poem would turn out to be as fanciful as “The Grasshopper and the Ant.”

  When Philippe was younger, Anne of Austria had worried about his dissolute friends, avowed homosexuals or bisexuals, led by his vain and manipulative boon companion, Guy Armand de Gramont, the comte de Guiche. These mignons had the malleable Philippe wrapped around their fingers, certain that if he ever rose to power, they would be able to dominate him for personal, financial, and material gain. Concerned that the relationship between her son and de Guiche was bound to end in scandal, the queen mother ordered that under no circumstances was Monsieur permitted to give the comte a private audience. But issuing a directive to her son’s household and enforcing it were two different things. The two men continued to enjoy a liaison.

  Anne had hoped that marriage to a beautiful, high-spirited young wife would cure Philippe of his homosexual proclivities. But what neither Monsieur nor his mother could have imagined was that it was Henriette-Anne who would eventually embark upon an extramarital flirtation with the devilishly handsome de Guiche! Even before Minette’s marriage, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham had prophesied that the comte would fall in love with her, although for the longest time she remained utterly clueless, despite de Guiche’s hints, that she was the woman for whom he hopelessly pined in secret. Gallant, brave, studly, and supremely confident, the comte was one of the Bourbon court’s greatest playboys—among the most licentious bees within a hive of promiscuity.

  To the relief of their mothers, the royal marriage between Henriette-Anne and Philippe started out fairly well. The couple did share common interests. They were both passionate about fine art, amassing an impressive and prestigious collection of paintings. Both the duc and duchesse enjoyed designing formal gardens; Philippe oversaw Le Nôtre’s improvements at Saint-Cloud, and Minette created a water garden at the Palais Royal. During the early weeks of their marriage, their satellite court became known as the place to have a good time without restraint—at banquets, supper parties, musical entertainments, gambling, and balls. At first, Monsieur was proud of the way everyone at court admired his wife for her beauty, wit, discriminating taste, and sparkling conversation.

  His former childhood playmate, the abbé de Choisy, rhapsodized, “Never was there a Princess so fascinating, and so ready to please all who approached her. . . . Her whole person seemed full of charm. You felt interested in her, you loved her without being able to help yourself. . . . She had all the wit necessary to make a woman charming, and . . . all the talent necessary for conducting important affairs. . . . But at the Court of our young King in those days, pleasure was the order of the day, and to be charming was enough.”

  During the early 1660s, Louis XIV’s court was filled with glamorous and giddy young people who had little to do but have fun, partaking in the lavish entertainments, and indulging in flirtations and sexual intrigues. Some of these liaisons were harmless—little more than gallantries, or courtly role-playing. Other seductions were high-stakes extramarital flings, involving the biggest player in the realm: the Sun King himself.

  No one could have guessed this kind of trouble was brewing from watching Louis and Minette interact in years past. In fact, years earlier, Louis had publicly insulted Minette, refusing to lead her out for the first dance at a ball, and stubbornly insisting that he didn’t dance with little girls. To the mortification of the respective queen mothers, the king chose instead to dance with one of Cardinal Mazarin’s beautiful nieces.

  Fast-forward several years from that embarrassing evening. During the summer of 1661, just a few months after the wedding of Philippe and Henriette-Anne, while the court was at Fontainebleau, the duchesse d’Orléans commenced a flirtation with her own brother-in-law. At the time, Louis’ queen, Marie-Thérèse, was pregnant, shunning the delights of the court—which she had never really participated in to begin with. Conservative, devoutly religious, and not fluent in French, Marie-Thérèse always preferred to remain in her rooms praying or playing cards with her dwarves, attendants in her Spanish retinue who had amused her since childhood, and with whom she was more comfortable than the frankly sexual French courtiers. Now that Her Majesty was carrying the hopes of France within her womb, there was no thought of her dancing till dawn, or partaking of jouncing carriage rides, or joining her husband’s hunting excursions.

  Consequently, Minette, being the second-highest lady in the kingdom, became the ranking woman at court functions. Madame’s natural beauty, her grace and enthusiasm, and her love of dancing, music, theater, and adventure made her the ideal person to lead the gaiety.

  Flattered by all the attention she received, the vivacious Henriette-Anne was often surrounded by the queen’s ladies-in-waiting as well as her own attendants—known as her “flower garden”—attracting a swarm of gallant cavaliers. Madame was soon collecting hearts like trophies.

  And the most fascinated man of all was the king. He became smitten with his teenage cousin/sister-in-law. Louis’ partiality for Minette was abundantly clear: He visited her daily, he invited her to lead the dances with him at formal balls, and soon they were taking long walks together and enjoying lengthy nocturnal carriage rides in his vast park. A fearless equestrienne, Minette shared the king’s hunts. She sat beside him during moonlit gondola rides on the canal, accompanied only by the sweet strains of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s violin serenades. They planned and costarred in fetes, balls, and masquerades. Louis and his sister-in-law exchanged meaningful looks, furtive whispers, and indiscreet notes. Courtiers shook their heads in regret that His Majesty hadn’t noticed that Minette had blossomed before fettering himself to the Spanish infanta, with whom he shared so little in common. He and Minette might both have been spared far from perfect marriages.

  The attraction was not only mutual, it could not be concealed from their respective spouses. Monsieur was openly insulted by what looked like Madame’s public cuckoldry of him, but his reprimands fell on deaf ears. Minette was simply enjoying herself, just like everyone else at court was doing, including Monsieur. She was young, beautiful, and popular. Marie-Thérèse was especially wounded by the king’s flirtation with Minette. Sadly, the queen was in love with her husband, even though her affection was not returned. And the duchesse d’Orléans was too naive or self-absorbed or unhappy in her own marriage to empathize with her sister- in-law.

  Both Marie-Thérèse and Philippe complained to Anne of Austria about the relationship bet
ween the king and Minette. Had it blossomed from flirtation into indiscretion? Whether or not the pair had taken the leap into adultery was almost beside the point, because their friendship had the appearance of impropriety, and their behavior had already hurt, humiliated, and angered their spouses. And in the seventeenth century, when someone married into a family, their sibling-in-law was called brother or sister; the notion of enjoying a full-blown extramarital affair with them was considered as incestuous as sleeping with their own blood sister or brother. If Louis and Minette had crossed the line, it would become an unfathomable scandal.

  Within four months of their wedding ceremony, the Orléans marriage was in a shambles. Minette’s affaire du coeur with the comte de Guiche, which she began later in 1661, after the king lost interest in her and she was smarting from the rebuff, was carried out in full view of the court. Her liaison with Louis was just as indiscreet, intensifying Monsieur’s jealousy of the king, and tipping his bisexuality further onto the homosexual spectrum. Was his overtly flamboyant behavior an act of revenge on his wife and his brother, or was Philippe merely seeking solace in the arms of his manipulative mignons?

  The queen mother postponed her thoughts of retiring to the convent of Val-de-Grâce. For the sake of the queen and the duc d’Orléans, someone had to keep a watchful eye on Louis and Minette. At first Anne of Austria had not taken Marie-Thérèse’s complaints too seriously, but when Anne herself began to fear that the king had become intimate with his sister-in-law, or was about to, she scolded the pair of them, warning of the scandal that would come crashing down upon the entire family if they allowed their hormones to do the thinking.

  Neither Louis nor Minette heeded Anne’s warning to stop behaving as though they were lovers. The cousins were having too much fun and adored each other’s company. Louis arrogantly reminded his mother that as he was king in his majority, he no longer needed to obey her. Madame ignored her mother-in-law’s urging to modify her conduct. Anne even raised the matter with Minette’s mother, asking Henrietta Maria to talk some sense into the girl.

  The last thing Anne of Austria needed was for her niece the queen to write to her father, the king of Spain, complaining about her husband’s insensitivity and potentially adulterous conduct. Finally, Anne changed tack. If she couldn’t compel Louis and Minette to nip their blossoming romance in the bud, she could at least attempt to screen it. From then on, Louis’ visits to Madame would be made in the guise of paying court to one of her maids of honor, a lovely, sixteen-year-old blond naïf, Louise de La Vallière.

  The plan worked better than the queen mother had hoped. Sort of. Louis fell madly in love with little Louise within days of meeting her, and in 1661, he made her his first maîtresse en titre, or official royal mistress, a formal position at the French court. Having been thrown over for Louise, and jealous of her own maid to the point of vindictiveness, Madame now understood what it felt like to wear the queen’s shoes; both she and Marie-Thérèse were brokenhearted by the king’s new infatuation. And yet, Her Majesty naively continued to believe that her sister-in-law was her true rival, unaware that the king’s dalliance with Minette of only a few months’ duration had been overtaken by his passion for Louise.

  When she matched Minette with Philippe, Anne of Austria had been right about one thing: At least Henriette-Anne was stylish and attractive enough to encourage her younger son to perform his marital duty, even if he was also sleeping with his mignons. In March 1662, Madame bore the first of four children, a girl who was baptized Marie Louise. In the pain of childbirth, sorely disappointed by the baby’s gender, Minette is said to have exclaimed, “[T]hrow her into the river!” Marie Louise would always be her papa’s favorite, despite the rumors swirling about the court that the duc d’Orléans could not possibly have fathered the child—and that Marie Louise’s paternity was a result of the efforts of either the comte de Guiche or the king himself. However, not only was the infatuation between Minette and the king long over and her flirtation with de Guiche probably never consummated, but Philippe never disavowed Marie Louise.

  That summer, Monsieur and Madame, with his retinue of a thousand and hers of only forty-three, moved from the Tuileries to their permanent residence at the vast Palais Royal, which from then on would be the seat of the Orléans dynasty. Philippe’s popularity in the capital made Louis—who distrusted the Parisians—nervous.

  With the queen enceinte once more and in voluntary seclusion from the social whirl, Madame resumed her place as the cynosure of the court; parties, excursions, dances—everyone yearned to be in Minette’s orbit. Too pleased with herself and by the admiration she excited among courtiers of both sexes (incurring Monsieur’s extreme jealousy), she formed a clique of mean girls (and guys) who skewered the queen and queen mother with their disrespect. Where was the sweet-tempered girl who had captivated her own brother Charles only three years earlier? Anne of Austria expressed her regrets to her niece, Mademoiselle, about wedding Philippe to such a flibbertigibbet as Minette. If only Mlle. de Montpensier had agreed to marry Monsieur instead, “[Y]ou would have lived on better terms with me, and my son would have been only too fortunate to have a wife as sensible as you are.”

  As the months and years wore on, Philippe sought to punish his wayward wife for her perceived infidelities, especially with the AC/DC de Guiche, who previously had been Monsieur’s bosom buddy. After the king began to indulge his passion for Louise de La Vallière in the summer of 1661, the flirtation between Madame and the comte de Guiche heated up. He once disguised himself as a fortune-teller in order to be able to visit Minette’s sickbed without being turned away. She was immensely entertained, and all the more amused when she realized that she was the only one who was clever enough to penetrate his disguise. Unfortunately for Madame’s reputation and Monsieur’s ego, Minette and de Guiche’s names were linked in popular songs and satires that spread well beyond the walls of the court. It didn’t matter to people whether the pair had really committed adultery; their mutual infatuation was indiscreet enough to warrant speculation.

  Despite his behaving even more indiscreetly with handsome young courtiers, Monsieur retaliated for his wife’s flirtation with the comte de Guiche. One by one, Philippe began depriving Minette of her confidantes until she became horribly lonely. He visited her bed infrequently, but often enough to impregnate her eight times in nine years. She suffered a number of miscarriages but bore a son in July 1664, who was given the title of duc de Valois. Tragically for the famille Orléans, the little duc succumbed to convulsions in 1666, just hours after his baptism. The court was already in mourning for Anne of Austria, who had died that January, but Henriette-Anne was completely devastated by her son’s death. It must have stung when Philippe’s greatest lament over the demise of his heir was the loss of the hundred-and-fifty-thousand-livre allowance the child had received from the king, a sum that Monsieur was eager to maintain.

  Monsieur’s biographer Nancy Nichols Barker mentions that both parents appeared to have recovered from their son’s death with remarkable velocity, as their own court soon resumed its whirlwind of entertainments. But they should not be condemned too quickly. During the seventeenth century, the philosophy regarding the deaths of young children was different. With the prevalence of disease and poor hygienic conditions, survival was the exception, and it was always hoped that more children would be conceived to replace those who had died too soon. Additionally, Louis XIV forbade death to hang over his court. Only immediate members of the royal family were permitted to expire within its precincts, and afterward, the usual amusements were to resume as quickly as possible.

  Throughout the first half of the 1660s, the Orléans spouses continued to practice their separate infidelities. De Guiche’s liaison with Minette lasted for the better part of four years, ending only when the comte was banished from the court in 1665 for offending the king. Even so, the following year, a pamphlet titled Amours de Madame et du comte de Guiche was disseminated
in Holland. Daniel de Cosnac, bishop of Valence and a member of Madame’s household, endeavored to buy up every copy, but Monsieur somehow managed to see one anyway, and the predictable marital fireworks erupted.

  Meanwhile, Philippe hypocritically indulged in his own adulterous betrayals, mortifying Minette with his flamboyant passion for the penniless Chevalier de Lorraine, the younger son of the former grand écuyer of France, an office equivalent to England’s master of the horse. A contemporary described the chevalier, a confirmed bachelor who became formally attached to the Orléans household in 1666, as “Séduisant, brutal et dénué de scrupules”—“seductive, brutal, and devoid of scruples.” The duc was growing increasingly self-indulgent in every aspect of his life. Despite his victorious campaigns, Monsieur eventually grew bored with soldiering and sieges and became more interested in decorating his tent. While he was away on a military campaign, Henriette-Anne suffered a miscarriage at Saint-Cloud that nearly killed her. Hearing how ill she was, Philippe sped to her side and remained with her until she recuperated. Once Minette was safely out of danger, he returned to the front, where he cast off his malaise and proved his merit at the Siege of Lille in the summer of 1667.

  Although Philippe’s solicitousness for Henriette-Anne was admirable, to her chagrin he resumed his extramarital relations with the Chevalier de Lorraine. Lorraine preferred women sexually, but had no qualms about gratifying any of Monsieur’s pleasures in exchange for influence and largesse.

  The Palais Royal became the scene of two warring camps, with each spouse intent upon inflicting the maximum embarrassment on the other. Monsieur dressed in full drag during Mardi Gras balls and offered the chevalier his hand to lead him onto the parquet. When the dance was over, he took his seat with the ladies of the court. Philippe had become the stereotype painted by the eighteenth-century courtier and diarist, the duc de Saint-Simon, of “[a] little man propped up on heels like stilts; gotten up like a woman with rings, bracelets, and jewels; a long wig, black and powdered, spread out before; ribbons wherever he could put them; and exuding perfumes of all kinds.”