Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (7 page)

Mother and son had been escorted to the Sainte-Chapelle by a panoply of guards and courtiers, with soldiers lining the road from the palace of the Louvre. There they were received by four Presidents of the Parlement de Paris and heard Mass. The seating at the
lit de justice
was carefully arranged by the Queen. On her right she placed her brother-in-law Gaston, beside him the Prince de Condé, whose warrior son had been involved in another great victory at Nördlingen. Dukes and marshals of France were in their appointed places, as were Cardinal Mazarin and various princes of the Church. The Chancellor of France was there and other senior officials, while on the other side were royal ladies such as Condé's wife, the first Princess of the Blood, and the Queen's attendants. The only concession to the King's tender age was the presence of his governess Madame de Sénéce, one of Anne's supporters whom she had appointed on her husband's death; she stood at his side throughout the ceremony.

The grace with which the young King spoke at his mother's signal – everyone saw him glancing at her for approval before he began – caused a surge of prolonged applause. He made the same short introductory speech as he had made in 1643. What followed was a good deal less anodyne. The Chancellor, in ‘an eloquent discourse', proceeded to set forth the needs of the state: the campaign against the Spanish must be pursued more strongly than ever, despite a series of splendid victories and despite the Queen Regent's understandable desire for peace.

The best way to secure this peace however was to impress the enemy by conquest. And for conquest, money was needed. At this the First President, Mathieu Molé, responded with lavish praise of the Queen, before holding forth on the needs of the suffering people of France. The Advocate-General Omer Talon also spoke of their tribulations in even more emphatic terms.

Later the Queen Regent, closeted as usual with Mazarin, asked Madame de Motteville whether the King had not done well – had she noted the tender way he turned towards her? – before furrowing her brow over the Advocate-General's speech. She herself cared very deeply for the common people, but all the same perhaps he had said a little too much … The Queen then returned to discussing the question of peace with Mazarin, accepting his contention that peace, as so often, could only be secured by further fighting.

From the point of view of a boy of seven, such an appearance, such criticisms of his mother's (and Mazarin's) regime, such needs for money, meant that the apparently rock-like security of his home life was crumbling. Was there perhaps an unpleasant lesson to be learned from the presence at the French court of certain close relations who were in effect political refugees? The troubles of Charles I with his own Parliament – which had begun with resistance to taxation – had driven his wife, the former French princess Henrietta Maria, back to her native country. She arrived in the summer of 1644, destitute except for French charity, and was housed in the old quarters at Saint-Germain.

Two years later her youngest child, baptised Henrietta in July 1644 in Exeter Cathedral, was smuggled out of England by a faithful lady-in-waiting. It was symbolic of these unhappy royals' dependence on the French crown that the name of Anne was immediately added to that of Henrietta as a tribute to her aunt the Regent. The two-year-old princess became in the French fashion Henriette-Anne, appropriately enough since French would be her first language, and her first cousins Louis and Monsieur the stars of her childish firmament.
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And she was also brought up a Catholic despite that Protestant baptism.

The arrival of Henriette-Anne's sixteen-year-old brother Charles Prince of Wales in June 1646 presented a more acute political problem than his helpless mother and baby sister. He was a tall, swarthy, gangling youth who met his difficulties with the only weapon at his disposal, a sense of humour – ‘wit rather more than became a prince, wrote Halifax disapprovingly later.
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Charles now attempted to solve his own financial problems by courting his first cousin Anne-Marie-Louise de Montpensier, the celebrated heiress. It was doubtful whether the wary Mazarin would have allowed such a vast fortune to leave France for the sake of solving the difficulties of the English King (Charles I was currently held by the Scots and would be handed over to Parliament in January 1647). In any case Anne-Marie-Louise herself was too conscious of her own position to waste herself on a penniless Protestant who might not even have a throne to offer in the future. Sentimentally she was more inclined to dwell on a future with her little husband, as she had laughingly designated Louis in childhood.

With Mazarin ambivalent about aiding the English King with French troops, it was not until mid-August 1646 that Charles was formally received by Louis XIV, half his age. He rode in a coach on his cousin's right hand: ‘no point of honour being forgotten and nothing omitted that could testify the close ties of consanguinity'. After that it was back to Saint-Germain, and from Charles's point of view a hateful dependency on his mother's meagre financial allowance. Unfortunately Anne of Austria, deeply charitable as she might be towards her sister-in-law and little Henriette-Anne, was far more interested by the news of the death of her nephew Philip IV's only son than by events in England. This death meant that in November 1646 the eight-year-old Infanta Maria Teresa became heiress to the throne of Spain (with interesting possibilities for her future husband and children). Looking at the Spanish succession from another angle, Anne's ambitions were also aroused on behalf of Monsieur, half-Spanish by birth and now a possible candidate for the Spanish throne in his own right.

As it happened, the implementation of these hopes – or were they snares? – lay far ahead. What the Regent and the Cardinal had to deal with immediately was protest from the Parlement de Paris against the burden of taxation, something that the pretty speeches of the puppet-King could no longer curb.
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In August 1648 the Grand Condé secured another brilliant victory at Lens, northwest of Arras, against the invading Austro-Spanish army. So the interminable shifting hostilities which had become the Thirty Years War ended for the most part with the Peace of Westphalia. That is to say, France settled its accounts with the Austrian Empire although remaining at war with Spain. In theory the French forces not occupied against Spain were now freed to deal with dissension at home. In practice the Queen's ineptitude (against the advice of Mazarin) in ordering the arrest of three popular members of the Parlement, led by the distinguished elder Pierre Broussel, resulted in widespread rioting. The Queen and her children were forced to take refuge in the Palais-Royal, none too secure a place compared with the fortress of the Louvre, while barricades were put up all around them.

Worse was to follow. On 13 September 1648, a week after his tenth birthday, Louis had to be taken away from Paris itself by his mother. The Queen's coolly resolute behaviour in the midst of many challenges to her authority impressed observers: she certainly justified her own pride in her descent from great rulers. The little family, with Monsieur recovering from smallpox, went first to Rueil and then to Saint-Germain. When members of the Parlement followed her in protest, Anne blandly explained that the Palais-Royal needed a thorough cleaning (not quite such a feeble excuse as it might sound, since royal palaces were generally vacated so that cleaning could take place). Besides the boy King wanted to enjoy the last of the summer in the fresh country air.

An accord with the Parlement, negotiated by Gaston d'Orléans in Paris, was signed by Anne at the end of October, and the Queen brought her children back to the capital. But this agreement, although signed by Anne on Mazarin's advice, outraged her sense of royal authority with its concessions, while in the event solving nothing. The next stage was from Louis's point of view still more alarming. The Queen and Mazarin were determined not to allow the young King to become the hostage of the Parlement. In an incident very far removed from the glorious circumstances of his birth, Louis and his brother with the Queen and a few trusted attendants were smuggled out of the Palais-Royal on the night of 5–6 January. They were taken to Saint-Germain once more, but this time the château was ill-prepared to receive them, since for secrecy's sake the news of their arrival could not be spread abroad, nor could any baggage accompany them. The first flight might have been presented to Louis, as to the Parlement, as a perfectly reasonable expedition; four months later it was impossible to put any such cosy gloss on what was clearly a desperate measure.

Yet it was still the Queen's high spirits in the face of danger which struck those present. At Christmas the satires against the Queen pinned up on the Pont Neuf had caused her much pain: she found the iniquity of the content deeply distressing and the credulity of the people in believing them horrifying. Now that there was need for action, Anne could not have been happier ‘if she had won a battle, taken Paris, and hanged everyone who had crossed her'. Thus she celebrated the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany in traditional style with cakes and little games, laughing heartily when she was the one to be crowned ‘queen of the bean’.
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The King and his brother were duly put to bed. It was only when all was silence and darkness that they were awakened, taken to a wicket gate, placed in a closed coach and transported away out of Paris. Whatever the trauma of the occasion for Louis, there were lessons to be learned from his mother's behaviour: the need, not only for calm in the face of danger but also for utter secrecy when a bold plan was to be carried out.

This first stage of the many-stranded revolt later known as the Fronde (from the French word for catapult, weapon of choice for the Frondeur mob) was settled at the Peace of Rueil in March 1649, with compromise on the subject of taxation. Two months earlier Charles I had been executed in Whitehall, and the exiled Prince of Wales, greeted with the faltering words from his attendants, ‘Your Majesty', had understood that he was now King. Thus the little French Queen of England, cowering in the old quarters of Saint-Germain, had become a widow, the four-year-old half-French Princess an orphan with little to commend her as a marriage prospect except her rank. As Madame de Motteville observed, 1648 had not been a good year for kings: it seemed that ‘divine justice menaced’ them all across Europe.
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Much of the popular venom now focused on the Cardinal, in a series of pamphlets or ‘Mazarinades' which mixed scurrility with violent protest. The second stage of the Fronde consisted of serious armed uprisings in the provinces, notably Normandy, Guyenne and Provence, whose effect was to devastate the countryside. An appalling harvest led to soaring grain prices and only exacerbated the sufferings of the people. Then there was the popular hero, the Grand Condé, whose personal courage (courage attended by a series of victories) made him the ideal leader of noble dissent, coupled with the wealth and vast properties which gave him an enormous clientele. At first Mazarin had dealings with Condé which enabled the court party to defeat the Frondeurs. But Condé's personal arrogance infuriated the Queen. In January 1650, with his brother the Prince de Conti and brother-in-law the Duc de Longueville, Condé was committed to prison for a year.

As an expedient, once again it did not work. Condé had to be released, Duc to fierce agitation, and it was Mazarin who temporarily withdrew to Brühl, near Cologne. He left an agonised Queen, who poured out her suffering heart in that correspondence ending in coded symbols of affection to which allusion has already been made.

In the intricate pavane of changing alliances – and multiplying challenges to the royal authority – Gaston d'Orléans now moved across to the Frondeurs, and in a dramatic incident his defiant eldest daughter, the Grande Mademoiselle,
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heroic as she stood at the head of her men, ordered them to fire from the Bastille. For brave, foolish Anne-Marie-Louise this was a defining moment in which she deployed all those great qualities she felt to be within herself, daughter (actually granddaughter) of kings: she satisfied her sense of her own glory. Later the Grande Mademoiselle tried to justify her disobedience to her sovereign by citing the superior patriarchal claims of her own father.
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Unfortunately the incident was also a defining moment for her young cousin Louis. The Grande Mademoiselle had robbed herself of her little husband, said Mazarin coarsely. That was probably true: in the scales in which her wealth was neatly balanced against the eleven-year gap in their ages, the Grande Mademoiselle's Frondeur stand certainly weighed against her heavily. She would pay for it by five years of exile from the court, just as her father was dispatched to his château at Blois with his wife, his three younger daughters and their attendants.

And there was more to it than that. In his adulthood, Louis evinced a pronounced dislike of ‘political' women. He went on record on the subject: ‘the beauty who dominates our pleasures has never had the liberty to talk to us of our affairs.'
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(Whether it was always true is another matter: Louis believed it was true.) The distasteful heroics of his older cousin, in virago-like opposition to Louis himself, set him on this course: women were undesirable elements in politics. There was one honourable exception: his own mother. In his praise for Queen Anne after her death, Louis made the point: ‘The vigour with which this princess sustained my crown during the years when I could not yet act for myself, was for me a sign of her affection and her virtue.
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In short, total public and private support was acceptable, public defiance definitely not.

September 1651 marked a significant date: it was the young King's thirteenth birthday and, by the royal rules, his majority. The occasion was marked by a great procession through the heart of Paris. It was witnessed by the English diarist John Evelyn, who had fled the ‘unhandsome' troubles of his native country, and he watched it from the balcony of another exile, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Evelyn noted ‘the whole equipage and glorious cavalcade' including the Swiss Guards, led by two cavaliers in scarlet satin. Most glorious of all was the King himself, ‘like a young Apollo' in a suit so richly covered in embroidery that nothing could be seen of the stuff beneath it: ‘he went almost the whole way with his hat in his hand saluting the ladies and ambassadors, who had filled the windows with their beauty, and the air with
Vive le Roi’.
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