Anne of Austria
:
For the queen consort of Sigismund III of Poland, see Anna of Habsburg (1573-1598)Anne of Austria (
September 22,
1601 -
January 20,
1666) was Queen Consort of
France and
Navarre and
Regent for her son,
Louis XIV of France. During her relatively brief Regency, 1643–1651,
Cardinal Mazarin served as France's
chief minister.
She was born in
Valladolid,
Spain and baptised
Ana Maria Mauricia, as the daughter of
Habsburg parents,
Philip III, king of Spain, and
Margaret of Austria. She bore the titles of infanta of Spain and of Portugal, archduchess of Austria, princess of Burgundy and of the Low Countries.
She was affianced at the age of ten, and on
November 24,
1615, at
Burgos she was married by proxy to King
Louis XIII of France (1601-1643), part of the
Bourbon Dynasty, a purely political match
[On the same day, at Bordeaux, Elisabeth of France, sister of Louis XIII married, also by proxy, the infante Philippe, brother of Anne, destined to become Philip IV of Spain. Like hostages, the two princesses were exchanged on the Isle of Pheasants in the river Bidassoa that divides France and Spain, near Hendaye.] that was pressed by the Queen Mother,
Marie de' Medici. They would have two sons, Louis (the
dauphin) born in
1638 and
Philip I, Duke of Orléans born in
1640.
The marriage was not a happy one, filled with mistrust. It started badly with the fourteen-year-old couple forced to consummate the marriage, to forestall any possibility of future anullment, a humiliation that resulted in Louis' refusal to touch his wife for the following several years.
|
Anne of Austria in her widowhood |
Although installed with all propriety in her own suite of apartments in the
Louvre, Anne was thoroughly ignored. Marie de' Medici continued to carry herself as Queen of France, without the least deference to her daughter-in-law, while the timid and private young king appeared profoundly disinterested. As a Spaniard, among her entourage of high-born Spanish ladies-in-waiting, Anne was out of the mainstream of French culture; she continued to live according to Spanish etiquette and failed to improve her stilted French.
In 1617, Louis conspired with
Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes to dispense with the influence of his mother in a virtual palace
coup d'etat, having her favorite
Concino Concini assassinated on April 26 of that year. During the years while he was in the ascendency, the duc de Luynes attempted to remedy the formal distance between Louis and his queen. He sent away the Spanish ladies and replaced them with French ones, notably the princesse de Conti and
Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, his wife, and organized court events that would bring the couple together under aimiable circumstances. Anne began to dress in the French manner, and in 1619 Luynes pressed the King to bed his Queen: some love developed, to the point where it was noted that Louis was distracted during a serious illness of the Queen.
A series of miscarriages disenchanted the King and served to chill their relations. On 14 March 1622, while playing with her ladies, Anne fell in a staircase and suffered her second miscarriage, for which Louis blamed her and found Mme de Luynes unforgivable for having encouraged the Queen in such negligent foolery. Henceforth, the King had less and less tolerance for the influence the duchesse de Luynes had over Anne, and the reciprocal antipathy between the two had serious consequences for the royal pair: the situation deteriorated after the death of Luynes (December 1621); the King's attention was monopolized by his war against the Protestants, while the Queen defended the remarriage of her inseparable companion, center of all court intrigue, to her lover, the duc de Chevreuse, in 1622.
Louis turned now to
Cardinal Richelieu as his advisor; Richelieu's foreign policy of struggle against the
Hapsburgs, who surrounded France on two fronts, could not help create inevitable tension with Anne, who for her part remained childless for fully sixteen years, while Louis depended ever more on Richelieu, who was his first minister from 1624.
Under the malign influence of la Chevreuse, the Queen let herself be drawn into political opposition to Richelieu and became imbroiled in several intrigues against his policies. Vague rumors of betrayal circulated in the court, notably her supposed involvement with the conspiracies of the
comte de Chalais that La Chevreuse organized in 1626, then of the king's traitorous lover,
Cinq-Mars, who had been introduced by Richelieu.
In 1635, France declared war against Spain, placing the Queen in an untenable position. Her secret correspondence with her brother
Philip IV of Spain passed beyond the requirements of fraternal affection. In August 1637, Anne was suspected, with enough cause that Richelieu forced her to sign covenants regarding her correspondence, which was henceforth open to inspection. The duchesse de Chevreuse was exiled and close watch was kept on the Queen.
Surprisingly, in such a climate of distrust, the Queen was soon pregnant once more, a circumstance that contemporary gossip attributed to a single stormy night that prevented Louis from travelling to
Saint-Maur and being obliged to spend the night with the queen
[In fact the couple spent the week of 23 to 30 November 1637 together at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the presumed time of the conception of the Dauphin Louis Dieudonné]. The
Dauphin Louis Dieudonné was born on
5 September,
1638, securing the Bourbon line.
The birth soon afterwards of a second son failed to reestablish confidence between the royal couple. Richelieu made Louis a gift of his palatial hôtel, the Palais Cardinal, north of the Louvre in 1636, but the King never took possession: Anne fled the Louvre to install herself there with her two small sons, and remained as Regent (hence the name
Palais-Royal the structure still carries) Louis tried to prevent Anne from obtaining the regency after his death, which came in 1643, not long after that of Richelieu.
Anne had herself named Regent. With the aid of
Pierre Séguier, Anne had the
Parlement de Paris break the will of the late king, which would have limited her powers. Their four-year-old son was crowned King Louis XIV of France. Anne assumed the regency but to general surprise entrusted the government to the prime minister,
Jules Cardinal Mazarin, who was a protegé of Richelieu and figured among the council of the Regency. Mazarin left the hôtel Tuboeuf to take up residence at the Palais Royal near the queen. Before long he was believed to be her lover, and, it was hinted, even her husband.
With Mazarin's support, Anne overcame the revolt of aristocrats, led by
Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, that is called the
Fronde. In
1651, when her son Louis XIV officially came of age, her regency legally ended. However, she kept much power and influence over her son until the death of Mazarin. In
1659, the war with Spain ended with the
Treaty of the Pyrenees. The following year, peace was cemented by the marriage of the young King Louis to Anne's niece, the Spanish Habsburg princess
Maria Theresa of Spain.
In
1661, on the death of Mazarin, Anne, always a principal patron of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrament, retired to the Compagnie's convent of
Val-de-Grâce where she later died of
breast cancer. Her lady-i-waiting, Madame de Motteville wrote the story of the queen's life in her
Mémoires d'Anne d'Autriche. Many view her as a brilliant and cunning woman and she is one of the central figures in
Alexandre Dumas' novel,
The Three Musketeers.
