Chapter XX: Book V (3)

The unfortunate woman kept apparently on friendly, but not cordial, terms with Mariana, who smilingly let her go her own way without remonstrance; and there was now no check whatever upon her strange vagaries, for the King grew more feeble-minded than ever, and was as clay in her hands. ‘The Queen’s levity approaches light-headedness,’ wrote Montalto in the summer of 1687. ‘She was lately ill with fever, owing to the rubbish she is always eating. Nobody can control her, and she looks consumptive. Those of us who are not much attached to her are not sorry to see her afflicted.’ Utterly reckless in her mode of life the unhappy woman, though still but twenty-five years of age, was already losing her health and beauty. In July Montalto reports that ‘the Queen still continues in her extravagant conduct, and no amendment can now be expected. She is dreadfully thin and languid, and will take no remedies but those prescribed by her own caprice and distrust. As for the King, I say nothing, for I have already said so much, though not half enough.’

And so, through the summer, matters went from bad to worse. There was no guidance from the King, no stability or prudence from the Queen, and Spain drifted helpless towards the whirlpool of civil war that was soon to engulf her. The only care of old Mariana was to watch over the interests of her own kin in their claims to the succession to the Spanish crown, and paralyse the promotion of the French pretensions. Writing from the palace on the 29th August 1687, Montalto says: ‘It is impossible to exaggerate the terrible state of things here. This palace is boiling over with disorder and scandalous stories to such an extent as to be simply a mass of confusion. The Queen is so extravagant in her conduct, and has so strange a character, that I dare not write, even in cypher, what is going on. The King knows, but remedies nothing. It seems as if God had endowed him neither with force nor application for anything; and the same wretched laxity is seen in the government of the realm. He gives no more than a quarter of an hour to business in the day, and the whole of the rest of his time is spent in such trifles as running backwards and forwards through these saloons, and from balcony to balcony, like a child of six, and his conversation would match about the same age. The Queen is dreadfully ill and thin, and has quarrelled with the Queen-Mother.’

Months later, in May 1688, when the war between France and the empire was recommencing, and Spain was once more arming for a conflict not primarily her own, Montalto wrote, in more despondent spirit than ever, of the condition of affairs in Madrid. ‘Yesterday it was my turn for duty at the Retiro. I used to like it, but now I dread the day that takes me there. Of course I know even when I am not there what is going on with our master; but it is very shocking to see it close, and, so to speak, face to face. The neglect everywhere is quite terrible. The King’s great business whilst I was there was to see the matting taken up in the rooms, and to count the pins and other trifles of that sort. The Queen blurts out whatever comes uppermost, and indulges to the full in her craze for riding on horseback, prancing about indecorously over the neighbourhood. She has again had her ladies mounted, knowing that the King hates to see it. She has her way and, dead against his will, she insists upon acting the principal boy’s part in a comedy they are rehearsing. As usual, she will do as she likes. There are constant tourneys and balls because she insists upon them, and there is no influence or reason that can keep her within bounds. The Queen-Mother pays great attention to her, but is cruelly slighted by her.’

A week later, the same writer continues in a similar strain, saying that the Queen had insisted upon the comedy being written specially for her to take the boy’s part: but she had fallen ill and the performance had been postponed. ‘The King is totally opposed to this prank; but of course she has her way. She has had a magnificent theatre constructed at the Retiro, with lavish ornaments, etc., for the ladies, in which she has wasted thousands of ducats, and yet there is not a real for urgent needs. The King is a cypher, and allows things to be done before him of which he entirely disapproves. I positively dread my turn of duty, for I see the King does nothing but run about like an imp, and if he goes into the garden it is only to pick strawberries and count them.’

A week or so later Marie Louise had recovered her health, and the long-prepared comedy was played with great brilliancy. The King went to the full rehearsal two days before the public performance; and although shocked and annoyed by his wife’s caprice in playing a male part, had not strength of will enough to forbid it. When, however, the piece was represented publicly, and all the principal ladies in Madrid, with the gentlemen of the household, were present to praise and applaud, poor, unstable Charles was so charmed with his wife, even on the stage, that he testified his delight at her performance, and the entertainment was repeated again and again during the summer.

Once more at this time there was a belief that the Queen was pregnant, and the hopes of the French party ran high, though they were soon seen to be fallacious as before. Montalto, reporting the matter to Ronquillo, says that the Queen had explained, in answer to an inquiry of her father, the Duke of Orleans, that the reason for her lack of issue was not the impotence of the King but his excessive concupiscence, ‘which,’ says the writer, ‘I do not understand, though the effect is plain.’

In the autumn of 1688 Marie Louise fell ill of smallpox in the palace of Madrid; and in her enfeebled state of health the disease was held to be dangerous. She was a bad patient, self-willed in her rejection of the remedies prescribed to her by the only physician she would receive, a Florentine doctor she had known in Paris in attendance upon the Balbeses. The King was to have started for the Escorial at the time his wife was attacked by the malady, and was obliged to delay his departure, though fear of contagion kept him away from the invalid. Montalto reports, with characteristic ill-nature: ‘The King seems sorry; but he is more sorry at having to postpone his journey to the Escorial. For although his feeling towards his wife appears to be affection, I maintain that it is more fear of her than anything else.’ Before she was fit to be moved the Queen insisted upon being carried in a Sedan chair to the Retiro to pass her period of convalescence there, first visiting the church of the Atocha, whilst Charles departed to spend a month at the Escorial.

Left alone in her solitary convalescence, Marie Louise appears to have developed a more devout spirit than had previously characterised her, and at the same time lost her desire to live. During the period of low vitality which followed her illness one of her ladies begged her to summon a famous saintly man, to pray for her prompt restoration to strength. ‘No, no,’ she replied, ‘I will not do so. It would be folly indeed to ask for life which matters so little.’ When, at this juncture, the representatives of the town of Madrid offered to build a new church as a votive offering for her restoration to health, she was no less emphatic. If the money of the suffering subjects was to be spent upon the building she would not allow it to be done.

She had, indeed, little left to live for. Wedded to the fribble we have described, and with enemies of herself and her dear France everywhere around her, she must have felt powerless to cope with the adverse influences opposed to her. All the love she had to give was given long ago, before she was called upon to make the great renunciation which had been made in vain. So long as youth and sensuous vitality had remained to her she had sought in reckless enjoyment to stifle the horror of the loveless life to which she was condemned: but when the capacity for bodily gratification was gone, Marie Louise lost her desire to live.

Spain was trembling upon the brink of a great war with France, and during the winter succeeding the Queen’s illness Count Rebenac was in Madrid with what amounted to an ultimatum to Spain to abandon the league of Augsburg, formed to crush the ambition of Louis. Rebenac often saw the Queen, and coached by him and by the Countess of Soissons, she endeavoured, now that matters had gone too far, to employ her hold upon her husband in a political direction, and to frustrate the policy of the Queen-Mother in keeping Spain in offensive and defensive alliance with the Emperor. Her influence upon Charles was great, and he began to incline to the side of the French against his mother. Marie Louise pointed out to him the awful condition of destitution in which his country lay, and painted in moving words the horrors of a war in which Spain had all to lose and could not hope to gain. Charles was gentle and tender-hearted, hating to see or hear of suffering, and Rebenac reported early in February 1689 that the efforts of the Queen had been effectual, and that he had great hopes of the success of his mission.[325]

It was a great crisis, for a withdrawal of Spain at this point from the alliance would have meant the predominance of France in Europe thenceforward, and the defeat of the Austrian party in Spain. Mariana and her friends were strong and determined; the King was weak and unstable. Only the life of a languid woman, tired of the struggle, stood between them and victory, and Marie Louise herself seems to have had a prophetic knowledge that such an obstacle would not be allowed to frustrate plans so deeply laid. As usual with Spanish sovereigns, the Queen went every week to worship at the shrine of the Virgin of Atocha, and on Tuesday the 9th February 1689, when she took leave of the prior of the convent church, she told him that she should meet him no more on earth. That night after her light repast of milk and honey the Queen was seized with convulsions, violent pains and vomiting; a colic it was called, which brought her to the lowest extremity of weakness. From the first she knew that she was doomed and made no effort. In the intervals of the burning agony she suffered, her confessor asked her if there was anything that troubled her. ‘I am in peace, Father,’ she replied, ‘and am very glad to die.’ She lingered in pain until the early hours of the 12th February; and then the most beautiful and ill-fated princess of the house of Bourbon breathed her last, a martyr, if ever one lived, upon the altar of her country; but a martyr sacrificed in vain, for she was immolated, not by her own will, but by the will of others.

All that Marie Louise asked of life was love, and that was the one thing denied to her. The Spanish people, who had sometimes been cruel to her because she was a foreigner, were shocked by her untimely death: but before the pompous procession which bore the body of Marie Louise to its last resting-place in the inferior mausoleum in the Escorial reserved for sterile Queens, whispers ran through Spain and France that it was no colic that had cut short the life of Marie Louise, but poison administered in the interests of Mariana and the Austrian faction. No proof has ever been adduced that this was the case, for evidence in such a matter would naturally not be easily obtainable;[326] but the death of the Queen, at the very crisis when, by her aid, the King had been turned to the side of France, seems in all the circumstances to have been too providential to her enemies to have been entirely accidental. At any rate it was effectual in changing the whole aspect of affairs immediately; and before the mourning for Marie Louise had lost its freshness, the French ambassador was on his way home unsuccessful, Spain was again at war with France, and negotiations were being actively carried on to find a German wife for the wretched crétin who wore the crown of Spain.