Montpensier, Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de, 1627-1693
Mademoiselle's anxieties and hopes were fed alternately. To add to
her distress, a Spaniard was caught on French soil and cast into the
Bastille. Mademoiselle grieved bitterly over his fate; she supposed
that the prisoner had been sent by the Spanish King to negotiate
the marriage; it was her belief that Mazarin's spies had warned him
(Mazarin) of the arrival of the envoy, and that the Cardinal had
ordered the arrest to prevent the envoy from delivering his despatches;
the interpretation was chimerical. Our knowledge is confined to the
fact that nothing more was said of Mademoiselle's marriage, and that
when the King was ready to marry he married an Austrian.
The troubles of England provided Mademoiselle with a more serious
suitor. Queen Henriette, the daughter of Henry of Navarre, had fled to
France, and France, in the person of the Regent, had installed her in
the Louvre. Before that time Anne of Austria had moved from the Louvre
to the Palais Royal, which was a more commodious residence, well fitted
to the prevailing taste. Queen Henriette was ambitious, and she began
to form projects for an alliance with France before she recovered from
the fatigue of her journey.
Mademoiselle was a spirited Princess, very handsome, witty, and
an ardent partisan. Such a wife would be a credit to any king, and
the Montpensier estates were needed by the throne of England. Queen
Henriette was sanguine; she ignored the fact that her son's future
was dark and threatening. She made proposals to Mademoiselle and
Mademoiselle received them coldly. Her ideas of propriety were shocked
by the thought of such an alliance. The Queen of England was a refugee,
dependent upon the bounty of France. There could be no honour or profit
in marriage to her son!
Queen Henriette was the first of a series of exiled monarchs to whom
France gave hospitality, and it must be said that her manner of opening
a series was not a happy one. The sovereigns of former times were not
familiar with revolutions, and their ignorance made them fearless; they
despised precautions; they were improvident, they saved nothing for
a rainy day; they scorned foreign stocks; they avoided business, and
looked with contempt upon foreign bankers. If they lost their thrones
they fled to foreign countries and sought refuge in the kingdoms of
their friends, and there their comfort and their respectability were
matters of chance; their friends might be in easy circumstances, and
they might be on the verge of bankruptcy; a king's crown was not always
accompanied by a full purse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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