Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (21 page)

CHAPTER 7
Marriages Like Death

Marriages are like death. The time and season are marked, you can't escape.

– Liselotte, Duchesse d'Orléans

N
eptune, God of the Sea, and Apollo, God of the Sun, were the last two roles Louis XIV danced in a Court Ballet. The occasion, once again a joint effort of Molière and Lully, was entitled
The Magnificent Lovers;
it was held at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 7 February 1670. Appropriately enough, in view of the ballet's title, it was Athénaïs who had made the choice of Molière; she could not however dance herself, given that she was nearly eight months pregnant. Two men were needed to take over Louis's parts: a week later Neptune was danced by the Comte d'Armagnac and Apollo by the Marquis de Villeroi.
¹

The King had been dancing with much-praised skill for twenty-odd years. What prompted his decision? There was a rumour that some lines in Racine's
Britannicus,
first staged a few months earlier, had irked him. In the play the Emperor Nero, in a hostile portrait, was accused of ‘wasting his life on the theatre’. But Racine was a jovial courtier in his approach to the King, rather than a critical artist; it was a distinction made with approval by Saint-Simon: ‘There was nothing of the poet in his conversation and all of the civilised man’.
²
He remained popular with Louis, who made him one of his two Historiographers Royal.

More to the point was the King's own sense of
gravitas.
He was now in his thirty-second year, and one remembers the emphasis that had been put on his thirtieth birthday as marking the end to gallantry. Even if that had not been the case, the art of the Court Ballet was an increasingly complex one: it demanded more of him in public than love-making did in private. And there were his responsibilities of government, the pursuit of martial glory in the cause of national security: that perennial formula which has enabled nations to invade their neighbours throughout history. For the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, it became evident, was merely a truce in France's struggle (as she saw it) to improve her boundaries with the Spanish Netherlands.

One should realise that this patriotic militarism was a development which aroused much admiration at the time in Europe: pacifism was not after all a common emotion among kings – or peoples. Samuel Pepys for example spoke at a dinner in late 1668 of ‘the greatness of the King of France and of his being fallen into the right way of making the Kingdom great, which none of his Ancestors ever did before’. A few years later there began to be a nostalgia for Cromwell in England, at the expense of Charles II; it was expressed in lines written by Andrew Marvell: ‘Though his [Cromwell's] government did a tyrant resemble / He made England great and his enemies tremble.’
³

At the end of April, the entire court – or so it seemed – set out at the King's behest to Flanders. As before, the cortége was more majestic than ‘warlike’; the public reaction of bafflement to the royal relationships may be judged by the fact that even Athénaïs got some cheers. The ostensible reason was that the Queen needed to display herself to those new subjects gained by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; the presence of her eight-year-old son the Dauphin, heir to her own rights, gave plausibility to the idea. The real plan was to provide cover for an important diplomatic mission on the part of Henriette-Anne to her native England.

The past years had not dealt gently with the charming, pleasure-loving girl who had enchanted Louis XIV that summer of 1661. An idyllic scene inscribed on a fan showed Henriette-Anne with the brown-and-white spaniel Mimi she adored which had been given to her by Charles II (she even danced a Court Ballet with Mimi in her arms). There was a boy musician in attendance, as Madame had her hair dressed.
⁴
The reality was not so happy. Not yet twenty-six, Henriette-Anne already showed upsetting signs of ill health. Repeated pregnancies, eight in nine years, had not helped.

There were several miscarriages; her only son died as a child and she was left with two daughters, Marie-Louise born in 1662 and Anne-Marie born on 27 August 1669. The death of Madame's mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, three days later brought another little princess to her household: this was her niece Anne Stuart, daughter of James Duke of York and his wife Anne Hyde.
*
Anne had spent the previous year in France with Henrietta Maria to consult French doctors about her chronically weak eyesight; at the age of four and a half she moved over to her Orléans first cousins. Little Anne loved France, retaining a French Huguenot servant for the rest of her life; she also preserved feelings of closeness for these particular Catholic cousins.

Unlike the robust Athénaïs, Henriette-Anne never felt well during pregnancy, and needed various pain-killing remedies including opium. But the real cause of her melancholy and distress was the unkindness of her husband. This cruelty was the repeated theme of her letters, either to her brother Charles, or to her old governess, Madame de Chaumont. It was not imaginary. The English Ambassador, Ralph Montagu, wrote to a colleague at the end of 1669 that if Madame had married an English country gentleman with five thousand a year, she would have led a better life than she did in France, for Monsieur ‘takes pleasure in crossing his wife in every-thing’.
⁵
Compared with this malevolence, often taking the form of public rudeness, her husband's sexual preference hardly upset her. There had to be a certain kind of philosophic acceptance of such matters in an arranged royal marriage (especially as he performed his marital duties regularly with the aim of begetting an heir).

Under the circumstances, Charles, although not seen for nearly ten years, became the lodestar of her existence and the idea of Franco-British friendship, of which she would be the private conduit, immensely important to her. All this suited Louis XIV perfectly. The carousel of European alliances was on the move again. Louis was anxious to detach England from its defensive alliance with Holland – the so-called Triple Alliance including Sweden – on the grounds that sooner or later he would have to attack the Dutch. Charles II was equally anxious to move closer to France having made peace with Spain and Portugal in 1668. Who better than Madame, the beloved younger sister, to promote a secret treaty, and by her presence with a large entourage provide cover for the signing? In theory against women's interference in politics, in practice Louis was happy to be the beneficiary.

There was only one flaw in all this: Monsieur's spitefulness towards his wife was expressed in his determination that she should not visit England, since that was what she so passionately wished to do. Her last pregnancy, ending with the birth of Anne-Marie, had effectively grounded Henriette-Anne and Monsieur was quite prepared to use the same biological ploy again. It all came down to Monsieur's slavish love for the courtier his wife described as ‘the man who is the cause of all my sorrows, past and present'. This was Philippe de Lorraine-Armagnac, a minor member of the Guise family, generally known as the Chevalier de Lorraine. The Chevalier was about three years older than Monsieur and in the contemporary
cliché
‘beautiful as an angel’. He was also intelligent, very amusing and utterly unscrupulous. Everything had to be done according to his wishes, Monsieur even going so far as to suggest to Madame that he could not love her ‘unless his favourite is allowed to form a third in our union’.
⁶

Fortunately the Chevalier de Lorraine, rather like the Marquis de Montespan, overreached himself in a way that enabled Louis XIV to take action. The King absolutely refused to allow the Chevalier to take over the income from some bishoprics theoretically in Monsieur's gift, on the grounds that his dissolute private life made him unsuitable. The furious Chevalier made a feature of denouncing the King, and as a result was speedily imprisoned on Louis's orders on 30 January 1670. Public criticism of the monarch could not be tolerated; it provided the King with an excellent excuse to defend Henriette-Anne without appearing to do so. The incident was the equivalent of the King Condémning Montespan for his words about the Dauphin's governor when he could not protect Athénaïs outright from her husband's violence.

In a passion of anger and loss, Monsieur withdrew to his distant property of Villers-Cotterets, dragging his wife with him. ‘We go today,’ she wrote miserably on 31 January, ‘to return I know not when,’ and Henriette-Anne spoke further of ‘the fear I feel that the King may forget me'. This departure again Louis could not stop outright – the rights of the husband were paramount – but he certainly showed no sign of forgetting his sister-in-law. He bombarded the exile with presents from some mythical Court Lottery: caskets full of cash, jewelled garters, perfumes and glove, even some country walking shoes with lavishly expensive silver buckles.
⁷

In the end there was a compromise. The Chevalier was allowed out of his prison on parole and vanished for a while to Italy. Monsieur's restlessness with the delights of provincial Villers-Cotterets provoked him into returning to court and granting, albeit sulkily, permission for Henriette-Anne to make a brief visit to England. As for her, when the King asked her whether she had been very bored, she replied, with a flash of her old spirit, that she had spent her exile learning Italian but was glad she had not had to stay at Villers-Cotterets long enough to learn Latin.

To outsiders, the great caravan of Louis XIV which set out for Flanders in 1670 might appear awesome. Jean Nocret, a painter who specialised in allegorical compositions, painted the entire royal family this year at the request of Monsieur.
⁸
There they all were as gods and goddesses, ineffably dignified and handsome in their robes: from Louis and Marie-Thérèse, blonde locks flowing, patting the head of an equally golden-haired Dauphin, Monsieur and Henriette-Anne, the Grande Mademoiselle as Diana with a crescent moon in her hair, down to the half-naked children with their lyres and wreaths. The reality was rather different and had its absurd side. On rolled the vagabond court including the Queen, the Duchesse de La Vallière, the Marquise de Montespan, the Grande Mademoiselle, and of course the Duc and Duchesse d'Orléans. Molière and Lully went too so that civilisation should not be altogether abandoned, and Racine was present in his role of Historiographer Royal. There were thirty thousand others when all the soldiers were included. But none of this travelling majesty was proof against the weather.

Waterlogged roads impeded progress. On one occasion the river Sambre, a tributary of the Meuse, had so far overflowed its banks that the royal party could not pass. Marie-Thérèse screamed out in terror at the rising water and Henriette-Anne, who felt so ill that she could swallow nothing but milk, fainted. Refuge had to be taken in a primitive farmhouse at Landrecies. The Grande Mademoiselle got stuck in the mud carrying the Queen's train. The food was uneatable. There was only one room and everyone had to share it. ‘Sleeping all together is dreadful!' cried the indignant Queen. Only Athénaïs's sister Gabrielle retained her equilibrium and, with that sweet Mortemart wit, said that hearing the noise of cattle lowing outside the window, with straw inside, made her think of the birth of Christ.

All in all Henriette-Anne cannot have been sad to part from the court at Lille before travelling to Dunkirk, where a British squadron awaited her for the journey to England. She had a long interview with Louis before departure and he clasped her hand tightly and tenderly in farewell. The disagreeable mood of Monsieur had not lifted: referring to his wife's marked pallor, he chose to meditate on the message of an astrologer who had predicted that he would marry several times … He duly made a last-ditch attempt to block the expedition, and made no affectionate sign of farewell.

Henriette-Anne arrived at the cliffs of Dover at dawn on 26 May.
*
She got an ecstatic reception not only from her brothers King Charles and James Duke of York with his wife Anne (whose little Anne was currently in her household in France) but also from James Duke of Monmouth, Charles's handsome, twenty-one-year-old illegitimate son. To the annoyance of Monsieur, Henriette-Anne had had one of her light-hearted flirtations, an exercise in gallantry, with Monmouth at the French court.

Jollifications, many of them by sea, where the ‘fearless and bold' Henriette-Anne walked on ‘the edge of ships', covered the diplomatic negotiations considered vital by both kings.
⁹
The way had been well prepared in advance and accord was reached by 1 June. And joy of joys, Louis XIV (not Monsieur) had agreed to an extension of her visit, so that Henriette-Anne actually remained in England until 12 June.

The Secret Treaty of Dover, as it became known much later, was literally a secret from all but Charles's closest advisers. For all the lip-service paid to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle concluded by France with Spain, Charles agreed to support Louis's further claims to his wife's alleged possessions in Flanders. England's theoretical fidelity to the recently signed Triple Alliance was equally ignored: the two Kings agreed to attack the Dutch together. Linked to this notional aggression was however a crucial clause in which Charles, being convinced of the truth of Catholicism, was resolved to reconcile himself publicly with the Church of Rome
‘as soon as the welfare of the kingdom will permit’
(italics added). In return he was to receive generous financial subsidies from his French cousin.
¹⁰

It will be obvious that the italicised clause, although sometimes held to prove Charles's determination to turn Britain Papist, in fact did no such thing; the timing was left to him to decide in the future, the money came at once from Louis.
*
Was this secret religious clause put in to please Henriette-Anne? Raised a Catholic in France (after her Protestant baptism in England), she was however not a noticeably ardent one. Although it remains in the realm of conjecture, it seems more likely that Louis XIV, an ardent Catholic if an ardent sinner as well, supported the clause as putting him on the side of the (Catholic) angels.