Although he has been blamed for meanness, for harshness … for too much arrogance with foreigners in the days of his success, for his weakness regarding several women … for wars lightly undertaken, for ravaging the Palatinate with fire, for persecuting the Protestants, nevertheless his great qualities and achievements are preponderant over his faults. Time, which ripens men’s judgements, has put its seal upon his reputation.
Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV
WAS THE NEW King of France always to be a child? Certainly it seemed so. Louis XIV came to the throne at the age of four, and was to be king for the next seventy-two years – the longest reign of any monarch in European history.* When he was still only five his mother, Anne, brought him before the Parlement to request the annulment of his father’s will. The action was typical of her. Louis XIII had agreed that Anne should be regent, but had carefully provided for a regency council of former Richelieu cronies who would severely limit her powers – an arrangement that she, proud Spaniard that she was, refused to tolerate. The Parlement was only too pleased to oblige. It willingly declared that ‘the restrictions placed on the Regent were derogatory of the principles and the unity of the monarchy’, leaving Anne unfettered. She had always detested Richelieu, and it was now generally expected that she would turn away from all those who had been connected with him, but no: in fact she chose as her chief minister one of his most trusted associates, Giulio Mazarini, better known as Mazarin.
With both his parents members of the lesser Italian nobility, his father Sicilian, his mother from Umbria, Mazarin had studied at the Jesuit College in Rome, though he had never joined the Order. He had served briefly as a captain of infantry and then, having through a fortunate friendship become canon at Rome without ever having been ordained, was made Papal Nuncio to France. It was not long before he came to the notice of Richelieu, from whom he differed in every possible respect. The cardinal had been imperious, harsh and unbending; his successor was gentle, flexible and dangerously persuasive, and in 1636 entered the service of France, carrying out several delicate missions with outstanding success. These diplomatic skills, however, he combined with a passion for gambling; and on one lucky evening his winnings were so great that a crowd gathered round the table to watch the stacks of golden écus building up before him. Soon the queen appeared. As she watched, Mazarin staked his whole pile on a single throw of the dice – and won. Like the superb courtier that he was, he attributed his success to her presence at his elbow and offered her a commission of 50,000 écus on the spot. She politely demurred – but later changed her mind.
It was the wisest investment Mazarin ever made; thenceforth he was one of the queen’s closest advisers, on such intimate terms that it was widely rumoured the two were secretly married and he was the true father of the dauphin. In 1641, on Louis XIII’s recommendation, he was made a cardinal; and on the king’s death two years later his position – and his future – were assured. Until his own death in 1661, first during the regency and later after the young king had attained his majority, he was effectively the co-ruler of France – and a very necessary one too. Anne, a devout believer in the divine right of kings, tended to overreact whenever she felt her authority threatened. Anyone who challenged her will, be he aristocrat, minister or member of the Parlement, she tended to send straight to prison; had it not been for the moderating influence of Mazarin, the coming troubles would have begun a good deal earlier than they did and raged a lot more fiercely.
Louis’s early years in power were largely taken up with peace negotiations. The Thirty Years’ War was at last drawing to its close, with the defeat of the Empire and its predominantly Catholic allies. The peace conference, which was to settle the future of Europe for a long time to come, began in 1644, though it did not end till 1648, with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia. This left France as strong as she had ever been, while Germany was quite literally in tatters – reduced to some three hundred and fifty independent states whose collective decisions had to be unanimous, which meant that they took no decisions at all. The overriding principle was that of cujus regio, ejus religio, that every man must adopt the religion of his sovereign; if he refused, he must emigrate.
Of all this, the chief architect was Mazarin. Clearly, he had deserved well of his country; yet strangely enough his country did not think so. In that same year of 1648, Paris rose up against its government. The people, it seemed, resented being governed by a Spaniard and an Italian; they were fed up with cardinals; they were disgusted by the amount of money that France had spent on the war, and the taxes which had increased in consequence. Besides, rebellion was in the air: in 1647 the Neapolitans, under the fisherman Masaniello, had overthrown their king; the English were about to decapitate theirs. In France the result was the fronde, as it was called – the French for a sling – in essence a succession of extremely unpleasant but ultimately unsuccessful uprisings that occurred between 1648 and 1653 and could be seen as sinister forerunners to the events of the following century.
One of the difficulties in understanding the fronde was its curious lack of direction. It was not only the people who were rising up against the government; it was also some of the nobility, of the haute bourgeoisie and even of the Church; one of its principal leaders, Jean François de Gondi, was to be yet another cardinal, Cardinal de Retz. There were two main phases: first came the fronde parlementaire, which was precipitated by a tax levied on the judicial officers of the Paris Parlement. They refused to pay, at which Mazarin, on the queen’s insistence, arrested certain members – including their leader, Pierre Broussel – in a show of force. This led to rioting in the streets, so vociferous that Broussel had to be freed before worse befell. That was the moment when a mob of angry Parisians burst into the royal palace and demanded to see their young king. They were led into Louis’s bedchamber, where the terrified child – he was still only ten – pretended to be asleep. The sight of him seemed to settle them, and they quietly took their leave; but the incident had left everyone badly shaken, and the court moved for safety to Rueil – then a village, now a western suburb of Paris. At this point the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia allowed the Duke of Enghien – later known as the Grand Condé – to return to the capital, where he immediately agreed to help Anne to restore the king’s authority. Fortunately he still had his army with him. He attacked the rebels, and after a few skirmishes the two sides reached an agreement. The Peace of Rueil was signed and the court returned with relief to Paris.
Condé, however, was not satisfied with his victory. An intensely proud man who had just led a victorious army in a major war, he was now determined to control France – and the first step was to get rid of Mazarin, whom he hated. Anne, who sympathised with neither of these two objectives, ordered his arrest; but the opposition fought back, and created an aristocratic coalition strong enough to unseat and exile Mazarin, liberate the prince and, for a short time, put Anne under effective house arrest. Clearly such a situation could not last, and after not unfriendly negotiations a modus vivendi was reached which saved face on both sides; but far more important was the effect that all these events had on the young king – bringing his childhood to a sudden and painful end. No wonder he was to develop his deep dislike of Paris, and his profound distrust of the high aristocracy. No wonder he decided to move out of the capital as soon as he could – and to keep them out of it too.
But the nightmare was not yet over. In 1650 came what was known as the fronde des princes. By this time the frondeurs seem to have forgotten the first, constitutional phases of the rising; now the nobility took centre stage in the scramble for power, united only in a hatred of Mazarin: the king’s uncle the Duke of Orléans, the great generals Condé and Turenne, and the duke’s daughter, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, known as the Grande Mademoiselle. She it was who in 1651 – Mazarin having wisely absented himself for a time – took charge of an army, dressed herself in armour, and opened the gates of Paris to the forces of Condé. When the mob rose up again and the Hôtel de Ville was in flames, she ordered the guns of the Bastille to fire on the royal troops in order to cover Condé’s retreat.* The court hastily returned to Rueil.
But it was by now perfectly obvious that the fronde was going nowhere. Everyone was growing tired: tired of anarchy and disgusted by the conduct of the princes, several of whom seemed almost to have forgotten what they were fighting for. The merchants in particular, for whom the last five years had been disastrous, sent delegations to Rueil imploring the king to return; and in October 1652 he did so, in considerable state. Mazarin joined him four months later, to be welcomed with open arms by those who had been hurling insults at him for years. The fronde was over. It had failed because it deserved to fail: it had had no fixed principles. The king was once again seen as standing for order and responsible government – and the way was cleared for the absolutism for which he was to be famous. He had learned several valuable lessons. He had seen for himself the mob surging through the royal palace, and had understood all too well the potential dangers of an unpopular and over-powerful minister. In future he would govern by himself. He kept Mazarin on out of deep friendship and gratitude; but the cardinal’s sails had been quietly and drastically trimmed.
Louis XIV was crowned on 7 June 1654. He was soon to be sixteen and was henceforth his own man, determined to govern France as he wished. He worked hard, for at least six hours a day, often for far longer. He may not have been exceptionally intelligent (the Duc de Saint-Simon, who disliked him, said that he was born with a mind below the mediocre, though this is certainly untrue) but he was never inflexible, always ready to listen to the advice of others and, if he thought it desirable, to act on it. Everyone remarked on the perfection of his manners. He was never offensive, seldom raised his voice and never failed to lift his hat on passing a woman – including the palace chambermaids. He was patient, and he was kind; and if he was famously susceptible to flattery, preferably laid on with a trowel – well, there are many worse faults than that.
He remained, however – and let this never be forgotten – an absolute despot. When he remarked that he was the State – ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’ – he spoke no more than the truth. Ultimate decisions were taken by him, and by him alone. At the beginning of his reign the Treasury was in the hands of the Superintendent of Finance, Nicolas Fouquet, a highly intelligent and cultivated man and one of France’s principal patrons of the arts, a close friend of Madame de Sévigné (the greatest letter-writer of her day) and of the fabulist Jean de la Fontaine; alas, he was his own worst enemy. He had recently built a splendid château for himself at Vaux-le-Vicomte, some thirty miles south-east of Paris. Here he gave magnificent receptions and entertainments – to which on one occasion he invited the king. This proved a mistake, first of all because it suggested that he was putting himself on a par with His Majesty, and second because people began asking themselves where all his money had come from – and since the subject of their curiosity was the Superintendent of Finance the conclusion was not difficult to draw. When he went even further by buying – and fortifying – the remote island of Belle-Ile off the coast of Brittany, he was charged with embezzlement, given no means of defending himself, found guilty and condemned to exile – a sentence which the king ‘commuted’ to imprisonment for life. He was sent to the fortress of Pignerol (Pinerolo) in Piedmont, where he was to remain until his death sixteen years later.
The way was now clear for his successor, a young official from Reims named Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Colbert’s job was a permanent challenge: it was not easy to control the finances of an absolute monarch. ‘I entreat Your Majesty’, he wrote to the king, ‘to allow me to say that in war and in peace Your Majesty has never consulted his finances to determine his expenditures.’ One can only wonder what suffering he was caused by his master’s passion for warfare – or indeed by the building of the Château de Versailles.
There was in fact a small country house in the village already, built by his father; and Louis had adopted the habit of making quite frequent visits there to see a mistress or two. He loved the place above all because of the privacy it afforded. At the Louvre he was never alone; people went in and out as they wished. To enjoy a good love affair in such surroundings was virtually impossible. He slipped off to Versailles more and more often, throwing out wings here and extensions there; until finally in 1682 he made the palace (as it had now become) his principal residence – and, very soon afterwards, that of most of the aristocracy of France. Within a year or two some 5,000 people were living there, more often than not in conditions of considerable squalor – the building was totally without sanitation – but they had no choice. Unlike their British counterparts, who apart from occasional visits to the House of Lords had no reason to leave their country estates, these French noblemen lost all connection with the lands from which they came; if they failed to live at court, they found themselves virtually disowned by the king, deprived of all lucrative positions and benefices. Life at Versailles was ruinously expensive, but that again was deliberate: past experience of what the aristocracy could do had taught Louis to keep their wings severely clipped. For them, everything depended on the king’s favour. With the flicker of an eyelash he could grant them a pension or accord them some valuable privilege: with a single word he could raise a man to distinction or dash him to the dust. Another institution that struck fear into the hearts of the nobility – and the bourgeoisie too for that matter – was the lettre de cachet. Such a document, sealed with the royal seal and countersigned by a Secretary of State, could send any of the king’s subjects, without appeal, to the Bastille for an indefinite period. Louis himself used this weapon sparingly – sometimes even mercifully, to spare a family the shame and notoriety of the law courts; but even the threat of it was usually enough to keep an overambitious nobleman in his place.
Louis XIV, as we know, liked to think of himself as the sun – the dazzling light that irradiated all around him. Light there may have been; but there was very little warmth. Let no one imagine that life at Versailles was fun; it was for the most part bitterly cold, desperately uncomfortable, poisonously unhealthy, and of a tedium probably unparalleled. The most prevalent emotion was fear: fear of the king himself, fear of his absolute power, fear of the single thoughtless word or gesture that might destroy one’s career or even one’s life. And what was one’s life anyway? A ceaseless round of empty ceremonial leading absolutely nowhere, offering the occasional mild amusement but no real pleasure; as for happiness, it was not even to be thought of. Of course there were lavish entertainments – balls, masques, operas – how else was morale to be maintained? But absentees were noted at once, and the reasons for their absence made the subject of exhaustive enquiries. Social death – or worse – could easily result.
It was Louis’s great misfortune that he never found a queen worthy of the title, or of himself. In 1660 he married Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. She was just about able to get through a royal ceremony when she had to; but she had the mentality of a fifteen-year-old; she liked to play with her little lapdogs and never read a book. According to Nancy Mitford,
she was not attractive; she had short legs and black teeth from eating too much chocolate and garlic. The King was fond of her and treated her in a fatherly way … one kind look from him made her happy all day.
He made love with her at least twice a month. Everybody knew when this had happened because she went to Communion the next day. She also liked to be teased about it, and would rub her little hands and wink with her large blue eyes.
Poor Maria Theresa was not even particularly successful as a mother: her only son, the dauphin, died at fifty, four years before his father. It was no wonder, then, that the king turned his attention elsewhere – in the first instance to Louise de la Vallière. Louise was a maid of honour to the Duchess of Orléans, the daughter of Charles I of England who had married Monsieur, as he was always called, the king’s openly homosexual brother Philip.* It was to divert attention from the obvious flirtation that was going on between her and Louis that the duchess deliberately selected three beautiful girls to ‘set in his path’, of whom the seventeen-year-old Louise was one. The Abbé de Choisy reported that she ‘had an exquisite complexion, blonde hair, blue eyes … and an expression at once tender and modest’. It was a little unfortunate that one of her legs was shorter than the other, but her specially made shoes concealed the fact and the king cared not a bit: she was a gentle, innocent girl – ‘a little violet hiding beneath the grass and ashamed to be a mistress, to be a mother, to be a duchess’, as Madame de Sévigné described her – quite uninterested in money or titles, who sought nothing from the relationship but his love, and who bore Louis five children. Perhaps inevitably, the affair came to an end; from 1667 on, she found herself replaced in the king’s affections by the Marquise de Montespan, as proud and dominating as she herself was quiet and timid. Overcome by remorse at her sinful life, in 1674 Louise retired to a convent, where she was to spend the next thirty-six years until her death.
At the end of July 1683 Queen Maria Theresa returned to Versailles. She had been with her husband on campaign, a duty she hated because of the long, exhausting days in coaches or on horseback, but upon which he insisted. Clearly unwell, she complained of an abscess under her arm, which was treated by the court doctor, Fagon, first with bleeding and then with a powerful emetic. Suddenly, his attendants saw the king, tears streaming down his face, running to the chapel to fetch the sacraments. Within an hour the queen was dead; she was forty-five. ‘Pauvre femme,’ Louis is said to have murmured, ‘c’est le premier déplaisir qu’elle m’ait fait.’* It was probably true enough in its way; but the poor, silly queen had never been a patch on the immensely intelligent and extremely witty Montespan and she knew it.
Françoise-Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan, began her career like Louise de la Vallière, as maid of honour to Madame.† Her affair with the king began in 1667 when she was already twenty-five, a married woman with two children. She was to give Louis seven more, the upbringing of whom was entrusted to one of her friends, a widow named Françoise Scarron. The relationship lasted for ten years, coming to a dramatic end with what became known as l’affaire des poisons when, in 1677, there was a major witchcraft scare. The Paris authorities rounded up a number of fortune tellers and alchemists, accusing them of selling poisons, aphrodisiacs and other potions. Some confessed under torture and revealed lists of their clients, which included several members of the aristocracy, Madame de Montespan among them. Rumours quickly spread; there was talk of black Masses, human sacrifices, even the discovery of the bones of 2,500 babies in the garden of ‘La Voisin’ (sic), one of the principal accused. La Voisin was burned at the stake, and before the enquiry was over thirty-four people had been sentenced to death on similar charges. Meanwhile the king’s eye had strayed to another of the court’s beauties, the Duchess of Fontanges, who was to die in mildly mysterious circumstances in 1681; thanks entirely to her alleged implication in the affaire, the Montespan fell under suspicion. By now it was plain that her relationship with the king must end. They continued to see each other, platonically, for a few more years simply because her undoubted brilliance, humour and charm never failed to delight him, despite her occasional bad temper. But in 1691 she too retired to a convent. She died in 1707, aged sixty-six.
And who should succeed her in the king’s bed? None other than her children’s guardian Madame Scarron – to whom, some years before, he had granted the title of Marquise de Maintenon. She always maintained that she had resisted for a long time before yielding to his advances; but there is no doubt that by the late 1670s the two were seeing a lot of each other, and after the death of Maria Theresa Louis secretly made her his wife. Since their marriage was morganatic she had no official position as queen and consequently played little part in the social life of Versailles; unlike her two predecessors on the other hand, she was to acquire very considerable political influence; indeed after 1700 she acted as her husband’s chief minister. Deeply religious, she fought hard against the profligacy of the court. The king no longer flirted openly with the ladies; comedies and masques were henceforth banned during Lent. Madame de Maintenon is no longer suspected, however, of having been chiefly responsible for what was certainly the greatest mistake of Louis’s long reign, and the most indelible stain on his international reputation: the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Edict had been signed by Henry IV in 1598 and granted substantial rights to the Huguenots, offering freedom of conscience to individuals and effectively putting an end to the religious wars which had poisoned the second half of the sixteenth century. Its observance had fluctuated; the Huguenots certainly continued to see themselves as second-class citizens. But now, in October 1685, Louis categorically renounced the edict and, with the new Edict of Fontainebleau, simply declared Protestantism illegal. Protestant ministers were given two weeks to leave the country unless they immediately converted to Catholicism. All Protestant churches and religious buildings were to be demolished. The result was a mass exodus of some four hundred thousand French men and women, most of whom fled to England, Switzerland, Prussia and the Dutch Republic. Not only did this irrevocably damage the reputation of Louis abroad; more serious still, it dealt the national economy a serious blow by depriving France of many of her most skilled craftsmen. Freedom of worship and civil rights for non-Catholics were to be restored only in 1787, two months before the end of the ancien régime.
In 1688 William of Orange and his queen, Mary Stuart – daughter of James II of England – jointly succeeded to the English throne. In all Europe Louis had no greater enemy than William, who had no difficulty in forming an alliance against him – it was known as the League of Augsburg – consisting of England and Holland, the Empire, Spain and Sweden. The war that followed was to last nine years, on land and sea, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Peace came at last in 1697 at Ryswick, when Louis agreed to return Lorraine to its duke and undertook to recognise William as King of England.
But peace, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, never lasted for long. On Friday 1 November 1700, King Charles II of Spain died in his palace in Madrid. Weak in body as in mind, he had come to the throne at the age of four on the death of his father, Philip IV, and one glance at the luckless child had been enough to convince the court of his total inadequacy for the life that lay ahead of him. He was always ill, to the point where many suspected witchcraft; few of his subjects believed for an instant that he would grow up to assume power over his immense dominions. But grow up he did, and after a ten-year regency he took over, at least in theory, the reins of government. Thus, from the day of his accession in 1665 and for the next thirty-five years Spain was effectively a great monarchy without a monarch.
It came as no surprise that Charles, despite two marriages, had failed to produce any offspring, and as the century drew to its close the question of who should succeed him grew steadily in importance. The Spanish crown was coveted – and indeed claimed – by the two mightiest dynasties of Europe. Of Philip IV’s two sisters – Charles’s aunts – the elder, Anne, had been married to Louis XIII of France; the younger, Maria, to Emperor Ferdinand III of Austria. Anne had in due course given birth to Louis XIV, Maria to the Emperor Leopold I. Louis might have been thought to have a secondary claim through Maria Theresa, who was Charles II’s elder sister; unfortunately she had been obliged on her marriage to renounce all her hereditary rights in the Spanish dominions.
Charles’s younger sister Margaret, on the other hand, had made no such renunciation when she had married Emperor Leopold; her small grandson Joseph Ferdinand was consequently the Habsburg claimant, but in February 1699 he unexpectedly died. Once again, intricate diplomatic negotiations began – not only among the three powers directly concerned, but also with the participation of England and Holland. These two maritime countries both carried on immensely profitable trade with Spain, and both now shared a common concern: to keep out the French. If Spain were to pass from the hands of the weakest monarch in Europe into those of the strongest, what chance was there that trade would be allowed to continue?
But poor hopeless Charles had a surprise up his sleeve. By the autumn of 1700 it was plain that he had not long to live, and on 3 October he put his tremulous signature to a new will, by the terms of which he left all his dominions without exception to Louis XIV’s seventeen-year-old grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou. A month later he was dead. What caused this sudden change of heart in favour of France? Above all, the Church. The Inquisition, and indeed the whole hierarchy of Spain, had long favoured a French solution, and Pope Innocent XII had himself written to him recommending Philip of Anjou. With the consciousness of approaching death and the voice of his father confessor whispering in his ear, Charles had no strength to argue.
As for King Louis, he – or at least his grandson – had been offered on a plate far more than he could ever have hoped for. Well aware that the Emperor Leopold would not accept this new dispensation without protest, he lost no time in packing Philip off to Madrid to assume his throne, with a bevy of French officials to take over all the key posts of government. Surprisingly, perhaps, Philip was readily accepted in his new kingdom – only Catalonia proving hostile – but the rest of Europe felt very differently. If Louis had only agreed to remove him from the French line of succession he might have avoided a long and desperate war, but this he refused. He could hardly have suspected what a price he would have to pay for his grandson’s throne.
On 7 September 1701 at The Hague, representatives of England, Holland and the Empire signed what was to become known as the Grand Alliance. In certain areas its terms were left deliberately vague, but its principal objectives for the coming war – the imminence of which could no longer be in doubt – were plain enough. The imperial aims were frankly political: Leopold was out to recover for the Empire all the Spanish possessions in Italy. Those of England and Holland, on the other hand, were above all to preserve the balance of power in Europe: to prevent Louis from uniting the forces of France and Spain, conceivably under a single monarch. If they could also secure the future of their navigation and trade, so much the better. Then, just nine days after the signature, the exiled Catholic King James II of England died; and Louis, in a deliberately provocative gesture, immediately recognised his son as James III. The English were furious. Now they had yet another reason to stop the King of France in his tracks.
But seven months before, in February of that same year, Philip of Anjou had entered Madrid as Philip V of Spain, and French troops had reoccupied the Spanish Netherlands, effectively the buffer zone between France and the Dutch Republic. The War of the Spanish Succession had already begun.
*
When the king was not with his army in the field, life at Versailles continued much as it always had. It rotated around Louis’s invariable schedule, with his morning lever, his evening coucher and his débotter at sundown when he changed after hunting. Mass, with the queen and the whole court, was celebrated at twelve thirty. There followed a brief time alone with Madame de Montespan before two o’clock lunch, which he took formally with the queen. His appetite was prodigious: we read of ‘four plates of different soups, a whole pheasant and a whole partridge or chicken or duck stuffed with truffles, a huge quantity of salad, some mutton, two good slices of ham, a dish of pastry, raw fruit, compotes and preserves’. He would then hunt throughout the afternoon before returning to Madame de Montespan, with whom he spent the entire evening apart from a brief supper with the queen.
He was at this time by far the most powerful monarch in Europe. His army, including foreign regiments, amounted to close on a quarter of a million men, while the English, the Dutch and the Empire together could muster little over 104,000; and even though his navy, consisting of 108 ships of the line, was no match for their combined fleets – the English with 127, the Dutch 83, the Empire none – it was already clear that in this new war, as in its predecessors, the bulk of the fighting would be on land. Louis naturally assumed the supreme command, assisted by a small group of trusted advisers of whom the most important was his Foreign Minister, the Marquis de Torcy. As the war progressed and Louis began to age, Torcy came to dominate the Council of State. In the field, the principal general was Louis Joseph, Duc de Vendôme. Vendôme was a seasoned soldier of long experience; unfortunately, as his fellow-commander but technically his superior, the king had appointed his own grandson, Louis, Duke of Burgundy (and later Dauphin of France). The appointment was to prove a disaster: the two were constantly quarrelling over which of them should give the orders. Again and again decisions had to be referred to the king, and the continued indecision allowed the allies to take the initiative.
On their side, the Dutch and the Empire readily accepted John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough – he was made a duke in December 1702 – as commander-in-chief. Alongside him was Prince Eugene of Savoy with whom, in marked contrast to their French opposites, he got on superbly well. Born in Paris, Eugene had spent his early youth around the French court; but after a scandal involving his mother* he had been rejected by the king and had transferred his loyalty to the Empire. Since then he had been almost constantly at war, and was in fact a good deal more experienced a general than Marlborough. The two fought together at Blenheim in 1704, when they foiled Louis’s attempt to seize Vienna and knocked his ally Bavaria out of the war; again in 1708 at Oudenarde, where Burgundy’s continued hesitations and misjudgements were largely responsible for the allied victory; and in 1709 at Malplaquet, the bloodiest encounter of the whole war, when the French army under Marshal de Villars cut the Dutch infantry to pieces before Marlborough was able to force his way through and claim the final victory. The fact remained that the allied armies had lost over 21,000 men – almost twice as many as the French. Few victories have been more pyrrhic. As Villars himself, nursing a badly wounded knee, wrote to the king: ‘If it please God to give Your Majesty’s enemies another such victory, they are ruined.’
The triumphs of the Duke of Marlborough were however only one small part of the war. Apart from the Low Countries, the Rhine and the Danube, there was heavy fighting in Alsace and Lorraine, in Italy, Piedmont and Savoy, in Spain and Portugal – where, in one of the most important naval encounters of the war, the allied navies destroyed the Spanish treasure fleet and its French escorts in Vigo Bay. In the Mediterranean, the year 1704 saw the capture of Gibraltar. The fighting even spread to North America, where the British colonists feared encirclement by the French in Quebec and in Louisiana.† Regular troops were drafted from Flanders for the proposed Quebec operation, but the English naval expedition against the fortress ended in disaster and the campaign never amounted to more than a sideline.
This book is not, however, a history of the War of the Spanish Succession. It is concerned with France, which is why we now leap to the year 1711 when, on 17 April, the Emperor Joseph I died of smallpox in Vienna at the age of thirty-three, leaving no male heir – and the entire European political scene was transformed overnight. Joseph had continued the war against France in an attempt to gain the crown of Spain for his younger brother Charles; if Louis XIV were to be defeated, King Philip would be forced to abdicate and Charles would, in Leopold’s view at least, be the rightful heir. But Charles was now the obvious successor to his brother on the imperial throne. The Grand Alliance had been formed only in order to prevent a single family, the Bourbons, from becoming too powerful; if Charles were to succeed to the Empire – as he did, being elected in the following year – the Habsburgs threatened to be more powerful than the Bourbons had ever been, with all their dominions once more united as in the days of his great-great-great-great-uncle Charles V. The balance of power would be turned upside down and Spain would be back in the Low Countries – everything in fact that England feared most. The British government did not hesitate: it made a separate peace with France. Inevitably, many months were to pass before the European powers were able to come to terms with the new situation; it was not until New Year’s Day 1712 that negotiations began between the allies and France in the Dutch city of Utrecht.
What is generally known as the Treaty of Utrecht was in fact a whole series of treaties in which, after a European upheaval that had lasted for eleven years, France and Spain attempted once again to regulate their relations with their neighbours. The treaty recognised Philip V as king, but in return Philip was obliged to renounce for himself and his descendants any right to the French throne. France retained, more or less, her present European frontiers, but across the Atlantic lost Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. The Emperor Charles fought on until 1714, and the final peace had to be signed without him. It was essentially on his behalf that the great struggle had continued for the past twelve years, and by distancing himself from the peacemakers he did his Empire a lasting disservice. His interests were not altogether ignored during the long negotiations at Utrecht, but since they were fundamentally opposed to those of France, Bourbon Spain and the United Provinces – as the Dutch now called themselves – while England remained largely indifferent, it was inevitable that they should have been to some degree neglected. He was forced, for example, to give up Spain. Nevertheless, when the negotiators returned to their homes, Charles found himself master not only of the body of his empire but also of the Catholic Netherlands, Milan, Naples and Sardinia. He was hardly in a position to complain, but with a modicum of diplomatic finesse he could probably have done better still.
As for the throne of Spain, this was of course the most important question of all, the original casus belli, the reason for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men across two continents. Of course Philip kept it; King Charles had left it to him. His kingdom had been drastically amputated – though he would certainly not regret the Low Countries, which had long been a millstone around the Spanish neck. Anyway, there were compensations. He kept Spanish America and all the wealth that it brought him, and he was – thenceforth and for the next thirty years – to rule uncontested.
Louis XIV, who was almost certainly diabetic in the last years of his reign, died of gangrene at Versailles on 1 September 1715, four days before his seventy-seventh birthday.* It was the end of an epoch: there can have been few people in France who remembered the reign of his father. It was also, from the cultural point of view, a Golden Age: the age of France’s greatest playwrights, Corneille, Racine and Molière; of philosophers like Pascal and moralists like La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère; of diarists like Saint-Simon and letter-writers like Madame de Sévigné; of painters like Poussin and Claude, of architects like Mansart, of gardeners like Le Nôtre. But there was a downside too: even Louis’s younger contemporary the Duc de Saint-Simon wrote that when he died ‘the provinces, in despair at their own ruin and prostration, trembled with joy. The people, bankrupt, overwhelmed, disconsolate, thanked God with scandalous rejoicing for a release for which it had forsworn all hope’, and a popular prayer went into circulation: ‘Our Father who art in Versailles, thy name is no longer hallowed; thy kingdom is diminished; thy will is no longer done on earth or on the waves. Give us our bread, which is lacking …’ By the time Voltaire wrote Le Siècle de Louis XIV* in 1751, few historians had a good word to say about the Sun King. Even Versailles itself had been a dangerous mistake: the emasculation of the nobility by bringing it wholesale to the palace and reducing it to impotence had dealt what was almost a death blow to local government in the provinces. Moreover the king’s incurable extravagance had twice – for the first time in 1690 and then again in 1709 – reduced his kingdom to the point where he himself had to watch while his gold and silver, his plate and even his throne were melted down into bullion.
But civilisation must, in the long run, be more important than economics; and the civilisation of France in the age of Louis XIV is among the most brilliant that the world has ever known. No civilisation, obviously, can be ascribed to a single man, or even to a single cause; but the fact that France’s two highest points to date coincided with its two most dazzling rulers, Francis I and Louis XIV, surely suggests that there may be some connection: that the effulgence of a great monarch may somehow fertilise and irradiate the genius of his subjects. Louis, who owes his fame exclusively to his position, cannot possibly be accounted a great man; neither, however, can there be any doubt that his force of character, his energy and his unshakeable self-confidence made him a great king. He set his stamp on his country in a way that no monarch had ever done before. In all its history Europe had never seen such majesty, such splendour; nor would it ever be seen again.
* Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne on 6 February 1952.
* ‘That cannon shot killed her a husband,’ said Mazarin later. She never married or, probably, wanted to.
* Despite his proclivities, Philip had two wives, a mistress and six legitimate children. He was in fact the founder of the House of Orléans, a cadet branch of the House of Bourbon, and the direct ancestor of King Louis-Philippe, to whom we shall be coming later.
* ‘Poor woman, it’s the first time she has displeased me.’
† Henrietta Anne, the wife of the Duc d’Orlèans (Monsieur). She was the sister of Charles II of England.
* Olympia, Countess of Soissons was accused of having plotted to poison the king’s mistress, Louise de la Vallière, her own husband and Queen Maria Luisa of Spain. It was all part of l’affaire des poisons, described more fully later in this chapter.
† Louisiana was a lot bigger then than it is today. It covered all the land claimed by France south of the Great Lakes, between the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains.
* His heart was removed, as was the custom with the French kings, but was somehow lost during the Revolution. It eventually turned up, preserved in a silver casket, at Nuneham House in Oxfordshire where, according to Augustus Hare, it was eaten by the quite literally omnivorous Dr William Buckland. But Dr Buckland – who may be pursued on Google – is another story.
* The Century of Louis XIV.