There were also darker rumors that she had participated in satanic rites and black masses to liquidate her rivals. Buckley sets out to reconstruct her complex and elusive personality and to understand her often contradictory behavior against the political, cultural, and religious background of the society in which she moved up, step by careful step. Maria Theresa was very fortunate to have found a friend at court in her mother-in-law, unlike many princesses in foreign lands. As another distinguished scholar, Gérarde Ferreyrolles, has specified, moreover. At the same time she became a close friend of Ninon de Lenclos, a refined, cultivated courtesan who had scandalized proper society. With the exception of widows who governed as regents in the names of their underaged sons, queens had no power in the French monarchy of the ancien régime. On 9 June the marriage took place in Saint-Jean-de-Luz at the recently rebuilt church of Saint Jean the Baptist. Louis XIV (Louis-Dieudonné) (September 5, 1638 – September 1, 1715) ruled as King of France and of Navarre from May 14 1643 until his death just prior to his seventy-seventh birthday. As a member of the House of Austria, Maria Theresa was entitled to use the title Archduchess of Austria. After the queen's death, Maintenon would become the king's second, although officially secret, wife. Reprimanded by Louis XIV for involvement in what he took to be unorthodox and possibly seditious ideas, Françoise quickly returned to strict Catholic observance. Françoise d’Aubigné was born on the 27th of November 1635 in France. Certainly, however, Louis XIV's marriage to Françoise coincided with his premature physical decline as well as with the beginning of the downward turn of his reign. Nor did it help her confront the vanity of her ambitions. Maria Theresa and the French king were double first cousins: Louis XIV's father was Louis XIII of France, who was the brother of Maria Theresa's mother, while her father was brother to Anne of Austria, Louis XIV's mother. Maria Theresa of Spain, Louis XIV’s wife The King, much distraught, realized that the "Affair of the Poisons" would not have come about without the complicity of a profoundly amoral society, and that he himself--at least insofar as his own sexual appetites were concerned--had set the example. But Buckley detests the Sun King too much to content herself with these explanations. Birthplace: Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France Location of death: Versailles, France Cause of death: unspecified Rema. Needless-to-say, this has given rise to a number of salacious rumours. The king left her to her own devices, yet reprimanded Madame de Montespan when her behaviour at court too flagrantly disrespected the queen's position. She was known in Spain as María Teresa de Austria and in France as Marie-Thérèse d'Autriche. [2]See Anne Somerset, The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (St. Martin's, 2003). Spanish procrastination led to a scheme in which France's prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, pretended to seek a marriage for his master with Margaret Yolande of Savoy. Eager to prevent a union of the two countries or crowns, especially one in which Spain would be subservient to France, the diplomats sought to include a renunciation clause that would deprive Maria Theresa and her children of any rights to the Spanish succession. Later, the first building campaign (1664–1668) commenced with the Plaisirs de l’Île enchantée of 1664, a week-long celebration at Versailles ostensibly held in honour of France's two queens, Louis XIV's mother and wife, but exposed Louise de La Vallière's role as the king's maîtresse-en-titre. XII Honoré Champion, ed. I felt in love with her and we were together for several years, until I had to marry Marie-Therese of Austria. She maintains that Louis wanted deliberately to mortify the pride of the woman he loved because he harbored an inferiority complex toward her. If her reserve toward men protected her from slander, her apparent suppression of sexuality was also in keeping with the idea of "preciousness" then spreading through the salons of the capital. By that time, moreover, she had fallen in love with their father, and after a protracted struggle with her conscience yielded to his advances, probably in November 1674. His first love was Maria Mancini. Françoise's years with the Neuillants were unhappy and full of humiliations. Anne confessed to her participation of in some of the plots around the throne and of communicating with her brother the king of Spain. Not content with supervising the education of her own relations and that of her royal consort's legitimate and illegitimate descendants, Mme de Maintenon founded, with Louis XIV's official support, the Royal Institute of Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr in 1686. Unlike France, the kingdom of Spain had no Salic Law, so it was possible for a female to assume the throne. Ninon generously turned over to Françoise one of her own lovers, the handsome marquis de Villarceaux. ©2021 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more at the New York Review of Books website. Lynn Nottage, author of the play Las Meninas, writes about the spark for the play, read an essay about the African presence in royal families. Learn more about Louis … As time passed, Maria Theresa also came to tolerate her husband's prolonged infidelity with Françoise-Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan. When he was abruptly widowed in July 1683, the King, who had grown accustomed to Françoise's support, decided to assuage his conscience and secretly married her that October. But it was these very qualities, along with her apprenticeship in honnêteté, that earned her the "fine reputation" to which she had so fervently aspired and made it possible for her to start afresh when she was widowed at age twenty-four. Mme de Montespan, Louis XIV's mistress since the summer of 1667, asked Françoise to take charge, in the utmost secrecy, of the children she bore to the King. Upon her death, Louis XIV said: "This is the first chagrin she has ever given me. In 1658, as war with France began to wind down, a union between the royal families of Spain and France was proposed as a means to secure peace. My first love was Maria Mancini. "I want my life to be an enigma," she is reported to have said when she burned all their correspondence. The funeral prayer was by Bossuet. Without any political influence in the French court or government (except briefly in 1672, when she was named regent during her husband's absence during the Franco-Dutch War),[1] she died at the early age of 44 from complications from an abscess on her arm. Quietism held that prayer should be as silent and passive as possible while one awaited illumination by the Holy Spirit. This could well be forgiven as a simple oversight about one of the many characters populating this highly enjoyable biography of more than four hundred pages, except that Buckley continues undaunted. We made it easy for you to exercise your right to vote. Maria Theresa played little part in political affairs except for the years 1667, 1672, and 1678, during which she acted as regent while her husband was away on campaigns on the frontier. This was the longest recorded rule of any European monarch.He is often seen as the typical example of absolutism.He was the older of two brothers the other being Philippe. 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