On August 9, 1668, Charles II sent his sister a letter by private courier, stating, “I thinke you have taken a very good resolution not to live so with [Lorraine], but that, when there offers a good occasion, you may ease your selfe of such a rival, and by the carracter I have of him, there is hopes he will find out the occasion himselfe, which, for Mr’s sake, I wish may be quickly.” Minette was in the process of obtaining her husband’s compromising correspondence with the chevalier. In the autumn of 1669, she would ultimately present the letters to Louis with the hope of discrediting Monsieur in his brother’s eyes.
Minette and Philippe’s last child, Anne Marie, was born on August 23, 1669, and baptized the following year. Yet each pregnancy, the miscarriages as well as those the duchesse was able to carry to term, took a tremendous toll on Madame’s health. Her figure was always as delicate as a doll’s, but she was now growing even thinner and becoming frail. And since 1667, Minette had complained of an intermittent, intense pain on her left side. Her emotional well-being plummeted in the late summer of 1669, after her mother was found dead on September 10 at the Château de Colombes, her residence since Henriette-Anne’s wedding to Monsieur. Henrietta Maria had been suffering from a fever and insomnia for several weeks, but that was not what killed her. Instead, it was the treatment offered to her by her physicians, who insisted she ingest what turned out to be an overdose of opiates. As if Minette didn’t need enough reasons to resent her husband, Philippe immediately rushed to claim Henrietta Maria’s possessions under French law. Thanks to the intervention of Charles II, he received nothing.
In January 1670, the duchesse d’Orléans was finally able to prevail upon Louis XIV to imprison the greatest thorn in her side, Philippe’s grasping and manipulative lover. Monsieur had cajoled Louis for too many favors on Lorraine’s behalf. He even had the nerve to ask his brother to grant the chevalier the rents from a pair of abbeys that had fallen vacant. On January 30, the king had his captain of the guards burst into Monsieur’s apartments in the palace of Saint-Germain, seize the Chevalier de Lorraine, and escort him to the prison of Pierre-Encise near Lyons. Livid over Louis’ mistreatment of his mignon, Monsieur vented his wrath on Madame, publicly cursing her out, and vindictively hauling her off to his country estate at Villers-Cotterêts. During their twenty-five-day enforced exile from court, Philippe continued to berate his wife, especially after he learned that Louis had asked Minette what she intended to do about her untenable situation. To Monsieur, his brother’s question sounded like encouragement to neglect her marital responsibilities, a suggestion perhaps to abandon Philippe because even an estrangement would be preferable to a living hell.
The chevalier’s absence created a new source of marital tension between the battling Orléans spouses. According to Mademoiselle, they had daily rows over it. She was so appalled at the violence of Monsieur’s rage that she was compelled to remind her cousin that these vicious arguments were detrimental to his children.
Insisting that the chevalier had always been devoted to Louis, Monsieur refused to return to court until the Sun King permitted Lorraine to brighten his doorstep again. Instead, the king dispatched the chevalier to a more impenetrable location, the infamous Château d’If, a Mediterranean island-fortress (where Dumas would later imprison his fictional Count of Monte Cristo), forbidding him to communicate with Monsieur. Louis finally banished the chevalier to Rome, after he boasted that he could convince his lover to divorce Madame.
The rupture between the two Bourbon brothers over Philippe’s favorite became a subject of international gossip. Madame was viewed with universal sympathy as the injured party. After an especially painful scene where Monsieur dredged up Minette’s previous indiscretions, she told her friend Madame de Saint-Chaumont, “So if in the past I made some mistake, why did he not go ahead and strangle me then when he claimed I was deceiving him? To suffer like this now, and for nothing, I cannot stand it.” She confided that Monsieur continued to blame her for the chevalier’s banishment, and remained petulant over the king’s refusal to grant Lorraine the pensions he’d sought for him.
Louis temporarily reconciled the battling spouses, but then Monsieur eventually found another way to disrupt his wife’s happiness.
Henriette-Anne had always been a cultured woman, numbering some of France’s finest literary minds—La Fontaine, Voltaire, Racine—among her correspondents. Racine, who dedicated his play Andromaque to Minette, complimented her intelligence and thanked her for patronizing the arts, stating, “The court regards you as the arbiter of all that is delightful.”
Madame also wrote often to her brother, and communicated as well with several high-ranking members of Charles’s court, including the Earl of Arlington and the Villiers cousins, Charles’s mistress Barbara Palmer and the 2nd Duke of Buckingham—the son of the 1st duke, George Villiers, who had become so passionately attached to Minette’s mother-in-law, Anne of Austria. Although Henriette-Anne was born an English princess, she was raised in France and was barely able to read and write in her native tongue, communicating instead in fluent French. Many of Madame’s letters, especially those to her brother and to the English ambassador Ralph Montagu, complain of her husband’s preference for the Chevalier de Lorraine, whom she describes as “the man who is the cause of all my sorrows, past and present.” She enumerates Philippe’s cruel treatment of her, and his frequent humiliations of her in public. In 1669, Montagu confided to a colleague that Monsieur “takes pleasure in crossing his wife in everything.”
That wife was a “woman of parts,” as it was said then of intelligent, multitalented females. For years, her brother had hoped to broker an alliance with France, a kingdom that had so often been England’s great nemesis. Charles acknowledged that Minette, whom Louis XIV also appreciated and loved for her brains as well as her beauty, was a better ambassador for both sides than any minister from either country.
Not only were the two kings first cousins, but Charles viewed the French as natural allies against one of England’s other enemies—the Dutch. Of course, at the time, many of the European royals were interrelated. The provinces within the Dutch Republic known as the Spanish Netherlands (corresponding to present-day Belgium and Luxembourg) were ruled by Hapsburgs. Louis XIV’s mother, Anne of Austria, who died in 1666, had been a Hapsburg. Charles and Minette’s sister, Mary, who died of smallpox in 1660, had married the Protestant William II of Orange, the stadtholder, or ruling prince, of the Netherlands.
Nevertheless, economics was always thicker than blood. The Sun King viewed the Dutch as less of a threat than the English to his ambitions in the Spanish Netherlands, so he’d signed a defensive treaty with them in 1662.
The amity between Louis and Charles had cooled over issues of money, protocol, and sovereignty in the waters known as the narrow seas or Straits of Dover. And when Louis was obliged by the terms of this 1662 treaty to declare war on England, Charles went to war against the Dutch in 1665. Three years later, feeling no allegiance to Louis, even though their enemy had become his enemy, the Dutch signed the Triple Alliance. This 1668 pact between Holland, England, and Sweden was designed to limit French gains in the Spanish Netherlands. Louis was furious, but felt personally betrayed by Charles, because the English sovereign had pledged to conclude no treaties within the next twelve months without first informing him of his plans. So when Charles expressed an interest that same year to form an alliance with Louis, the French monarch was reluctant to trust him.
Enter Madame, the perfect minister without portfolio. Beginning in the autumn of 1668, brother and sister had begun to correspond, often in cipher. They kept the details of a prospective treaty between England and France such a secret that neither Colbert de Croissy, who was assigned to a special diplomatic mission at the Court of Saint James’s, nor Ralph Montagu, the English envoy in Paris, was informed of them.
The initial bargaining chips that formed the basis for the treaty were thus: In exchange for helping
Louis conquer the Dutch Republic, which the Sun King wished to claim for his Spanish Hapsburg queen as part of her unpaid dowry, Charles would abandon the Triple Alliance he had signed in 1668. If Louis’ conquest was successful, Charles was to receive in return a number of profitable seaports that lay along one of Holland’s major rivers.
Charles would also convert to Roman Catholicism—at a later, unspecified date—and would return his entire realm to the papal fold. The due date was characterized only with the spectacularly vague phrase “as soon as the welfare of the kingdom will permit,” but the treaty did specify that the conversion would be done in exchange for two million crowns from Louis, a sum that would enable Charles to defray his military expenses and pay off some of his debts. The English monarch got the better end of this clause, receiving a huge payment from the French up front without having to name a specific date for his religious conversion.
Minette saw the treaty as a way to unite her brother and brother-in-law. And in the spring of 1670, when the sovereigns’ negotiations reached a sticking point as to which would come first—Charles’s announcement of his conversion to popery or Louis’ declaration of war against the Dutch—the Sun King proposed that the surest way to settle things was for Madame to appeal to Charles in person.
At this, Monsieur threw a violent tantrum, asserting all the rights of a husband by refusing to allow Minette to travel to England without his permission. He was also peeved because he had not been made privy—nor would he be—to the diplomatic secrets between his wife and their respective sovereign brothers. Louis must have exerted a considerable amount of pressure on Philippe, because he finally relented—to a point. He insisted somewhat spitefully that she could go only as far as Dover—and limited the duration of her visit to no more than a few days. It was pure retaliation for Madame’s insistence on the Chevalier de Lorraine’s banishment.
Meanwhile, even as he endeavored to forestall her journey to London, Philippe insisted on a quid pro quo from his wife, urging her to request favors from Louis on the chevalier’s behalf. By this point, Madame was complaining to one of her confidantes that “Monsieur now refuses to come near me, and hardly ever speaks to me, which, in all the quarrels we have had, has never happened before.” Minette added that only Louis’ gift of some additional revenues was able to mollify her husband’s choler. She had begged the king never to permit the Chevalier de Lorraine to return to France, because things would only become worse for her.
In Lorraine’s absence, Monsieur had begun to surround himself with a new coterie of vicious young mignons, even as he kept up the pressure on his brother and his wife to restore the chevalier to him. In April of 1670, Minette wrote to one of her frequent correspondents, Madame de Saint-Chaumont, that Monsieur even had the temerity to suggest that he “cannot love me, unless his favourite is allowed to form a third in our union. Since then, I have made him understand that, however much I might desire the Chevalier’s return, it would be impossible to obtain it, and he has given up the idea, but, by making a noise about my journey to England, he hopes to show that he is master, and can treat me as ill in the Chevalier’s absence as in his presence. This being his policy, he began to speak openly of our quarrels, refused to enter my room, and pretended to show that he could revenge himself for having been left in ignorance of these affairs, and make me suffer for what he calls the faults of the two Kings.”
In an effort to make up for Philippe’s hellacious behavior, including his efforts to prevent Madame from traveling to see her brother, Louis gave Minette a massive sum of money for her household’s travel expenses. Monsieur then insisted on accompanying her, although the French royal family journeyed with Minette no farther than Lille, but along the way he verbally abused his wife every chance they got, transforming their carriage rides into nightmares. On one occasion, during a conversation on astrology, Philippe declared viciously, “I have been told that I should have several wives; and given the condition Madame is in, I can well believe it.”
On May 16, 1670, Henriette-Anne arrived on the English seacoast. Acting as France’s emissary, on June 1 she formally completed the terms of what would come to be known as the Treaty of Dover (or the Secret Treaty of Dover—as the details of this pact were not revealed until long after the death of all parties involved). It was signed by Croissy, the French diplomat, and, on England’s behalf, lords Arundel, Arlington, and Clifford, as well as Sir Richard Bellings.
The Secret Treaty contained details that enabled Charles II to remain, theoretically, faithful to the Triple Alliance, and also allowed him to retain his fidelity to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle that he had recently signed with Spain, which more or less permitted him to have his cake and eat it, too. However, a second, very similarly worded treaty was negotiated as well—by the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, through traditional diplomatic channels. The later treaty, and not the one with which Minette was involved, was the instrument that would be made public. The second treaty, signed in December 1670, was a cover-up, a phony deal negotiated with France that specified the terms of the Anglo-French alliance against the Dutch, down to the number of ships and soldiers to be supplied by each side. Aware that this capitulation would infuriate his subjects, the lords deliberately omitted any mention of Charles’s eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism from this document.
After the formalities of the Secret Treaty of Dover were concluded in May of 1670, Charles took the opportunity to squeeze as many celebrations as possible (including that of his fortieth birthday) into what remained of his sister’s holiday. Minette finally had the opportunity to meet Charles’s queen, the diminutive Catherine of Braganza, whose infertility issues her brother had chronicled in his letters across the Channel. Describing her sister-in-law to Mademoiselle, Minette found her “a very good woman, not handsome, but so kind and excellent that it was impossible not to love her.”
At the end of her visit, Charles was loath to say farewell to his beloved sibling. Visibly weeping at her departure, he loaded her down with gifts, and flirtatiously begged one little jewel from her in exchange, angling for the person of Henriette-Anne’s maid of honor Louise de Kéroualle, a doe-eyed virgin with a complexion like milk and a halo of dark curls. But Minette knew her brother was a rake and had promised Louise’s family that she would look after their daughter. Pimping her out to the king of England was not what the Kéroualles had in mind.
(Or was it? After Minette’s death, Louise would indeed end up at Charles’s court—and, after much wrangling, in his bed—sent as a gift from Louis XIV, who all but planted the girl at Whitehall with the seventeenth-century equivalent of a wiretapping device between her legs. If the Secret Treaty of Dover couldn’t compel King Charles to become a Catholic, Louise was the last weapon in France’s arsenal. Many of the Francophobic English were certain that Louise de Kéroualle was a French spy. They were right. But whatever she learned at Charles’s court had no impact on English foreign or domestic policy. He eventually made her Duchess of Portsmouth and ennobled their bastard son, creating him Duke of Richmond and Lennox in 1675.)
Although she’d tried to conceal her ailments from her brother, Minette had not been well during her sojourn in England. In April 1670, she’d begun to suffer from digestive problems that were so severe she could ingest nothing but milk. Right after her return to France, on June 26, she and Monsieur went to Saint-Cloud, where she complained of stomach pains and an ache in her side. The following day, she wrote her first letter in English to Thomas Clifford, the “C” in Charles II’s C.A.B.A.L. of advisers, apologizing for her dreadful spelling and syntax. It was also the last letter she would pen in her native language. For the next few days Minette was ailing and so restless she took moonlit baths in the river to help her sleep.
On June 29, after drinking a glass of iced chicory water, Henriette-Anne suffered a sharp pain in her side. She cried out in anguish, immediately assuming that she must have been poisoned by her husband’s lovers, the Chevalie
r de Lorraine and the marquis d’Effiat. She demanded an antidote for poison and asked that the chicory water be examined. The doctors treated her with their remedies for colic and poison (probably purgatives), but to no avail. They bled her from the foot, a traditional remedy for just about everything in those days, but that only made her worse.
As soon as the royal family heard the news of Madame’s collapse, they rushed to her bedside at Saint-Cloud. Bishop Bossuet administered the last rites. On her deathbed, Henriette-Anne was said to have told her husband, “Alas! Monsieur, it is long since you have loved me; but that is unjust: I have never been unfaithful to you,” while she assured Louis as they embraced, both weeping, “You are losing the truest servant you ever had.”
According to Ralph Montagu, the English ambassador, Minette’s final thoughts were of her brother, as she whispered to the envoy, “I have loved him better than life itself and now my only regret in dying is to be leaving him.”
Only twenty-six years old, Henriette-Anne died between the hours of two and three in the morning on June 30, 1670. To dispel the myriad rumors that she had been poisoned, Louis XIV ordered her autopsy to be performed in public by a team of French and English physicians in the presence of at least a hundred onlookers. The doctors’ formal report stated that the cause of death was “cholera morbus [gastroenteritis] caused by heated bile,” the autopsy having revealed an abscess on her liver. Her stomach cavity was filled with “fermented bile,” and her vital organs were gangrenous. Modern medical forensics suggest that the duchesse d’Orléans was felled by an acute infection causing peritonitis, following the perforation of a duodenal ulcer. Her lungs were also diseased, suggesting tuberculosis, the illness that killed her brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, in 1660.
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