After writing about the formidable lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, King of England in late Middle Ages, it has crossed our minds the next topic to be discussed about. That we have come across of Élisabeth-Charlotte, the Princess of Palatinate who was related to many European royals and abroad was not stimulated by nothing else if not curiosity.
When looking at the portraits as those selected above, we come to see some sense of duty, seriouness and most of all self consciousness of who she was displayed in her features. Those apparent characteristics set in us that curiosity which often motivate us to write on this blog. And as research have been made, another characteristic that came to our eyes, by primary sources or not, was that Élisabeth-Charlotte, also known as Madame and Liselotte, was mostly regarded as ugly not only by herself but by her contemporaries and how peculiar was her personality if compared to what was expected for someone of such a position at the court of the king of France, Louis XIV.
And why was she was held in this regard during those days? What can be inferred from a foreigner who was obliged to leave her homeland to a different country with different culture, habits to marry a man she never knew until the moment she was not merely the princess of the Palatinate, but Madame, the Duchess of Orléans? Instigated by these questions, we attempt not only to give them some answer but to enlight this overshadowed figure who is not often discussed within royalty subject.
Princess Élisabeth-Charlotte (German: Pfalzprinzessin Elisabeth Charlotte) was born on 27 May 1652 in Heidelberg Castle. She received this name after her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Stuart (also another topic of this blog), known as the Winter Queen and who was the only surviving daughter of James VI of Scotland and I of England; and Charlotte was after her mother, Landgravine Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel. Charlotte was married to Charles-Louis, Elector of the Palatinate, with whom she had an unhappy marriage, which in turn has constituted a complicated background to Liselotte, an affectionate nickname by which she would become known throughtout her life, grow.
"Her father, Charles-Louis, was that Elector of the Palatinate who was restored to his States by the Peace of Westphalia. From childhood Elisabeth-Charlotte was noted for her lively mind, and her frank, open, vigorous nature. Domestic peace had never reigned about the hearth of the Elector-Palatine; he had a mistress, whom he married by the left hand, and the mother of Elisabeth-Charlotte is accused of having caused the separation by her crabbed temper."
That way, by age five Elisabeth-Charlotte was sent to the household of her paternal aunt, Sophia, Electress of Hanover (mother of the King George I of Great Britain, about whom we have already discussed on this very same blog). Even in France, Liselotte was devoted to her aunt, writing long correspondences that can be found nowadays and which illustrate the court of Louis XIV. At her aunt's court, Liselotte developed a friendship with the future king of England, William III of Orange. In fact, as they grew and became fond of each other, it was Sophia herself who suggested the match. Charles-Louis (in German: Karl-Ludwig) refused, however, so Sophia had to look out for others. It is said that she was hoping to make Liselotte queen of England, but nothing would come of it until Liselotte was eighteen.
History tells us that, after some pretenders, it was her aunt, Princess Anne Gonzaga (who was married to Sophia and Charles-Louis's brother and resided in France; she was also an intimate friend to the duke of Orléans, Philippe, styled Monsieur at French court) who came up with the idea of marrying the brother of Louis XIV of France, recently widowed (Henriette Anne of England and Scotland, youngest daughter of Charles I, who had lost his head in the English Civil War, had been raised in France and was married to her first cousin; however, the first Madame, for unknown causes, died and Louis XIV made clear that such position was vacant; in other words, that Philippe had to remarry. His deceased wife was also first cousin to Charles-Louis, once Elizabeth Stuart and King Charles had been siblings). But it was not until Liselotte was 19 years of age that she was told of the marriage. One of the main reasons for this to happen was that the princess of Palatinate had to convert to Catholicism, something she did so, although we will see that her Protestant education would not leave her even older. On that way, the princess was married to Philippe by proxy in 1671 and it was Anne of Gonzaga who presented the new duchess of Orléans to France.
"All that part of the life and youth of Madame would be curious and very useful to recover. 'I was too old', she says, 'when I came to France to change my character; the foundations were laid'. While subjecting herself with courage and resolution to the duties of her new position she kept her German tastes; she confesses them and proclaims them before all Versailles and all Marly; and the Court, then the arbiter of Europe, to which it set the tone, would certainly have been shocked if it had not preferred to smile."
It must be remembered, however, that Liselotte was a foreigner within a country whose perspectives of habits, culture and behaviour clearly differed from her home. She held a degree of liberty throughout all of her childhood and part of her youth, and we know that when she recollects the days where she used to eat her favourite fruits at early in the morning! She had a free spirit and enjoyed a life with few restrictions, to put that in words. This perspective is presented in the following paragraphs:
"The brisk air of Heidelberg is with her after fifty years' absence; and she speaks of it a few months before her death to the half-sister Louise, to whom she writes: 'There is not in all the world a better air than that of Heidelberg; above all, about the chateau where my apartment is; nothing better can be found.
In Germany, on the banks of [...] the Rhine, Elisabeth-Charlotte enjoyed the picturesque sites, her rambles through the forest, Nature left to herself, and also the spots of bougeois plenty amid the wilder environment.
"I love trees and fields more than the finest palaces, in a word, all that is natural is infinitely more to my taste than works or art or magnificence; the latter only please at first sight; as soon as one is accostomed to them they fatigue, and we care no more about them."
Hence why the difficulties of Liselotte in inserting herself according to the padrons already determined at the French court. It must be considered, as we have mentioned previously, that she was a foreign in a stranger place for her. That is why she holds dear until her last days memories of her childhood. Even after marriage, she continued to make comparisons between old and new habits, tastes, food and behaviour.
According to a more sociologically approach, such actions are explained due to the difficulty of a foreigner in settling according to another society's padrons. The need for the outsider to translate that society's culture, social rules and behaviour to their own language, society's standards is an instrument to smooth all the obstacles present to be included amongst the society of which the foreigner is seen as outsider. There are expectations from both sides when this happens, for the "other side", in which can be seen as Louis XIV's court, expects the outsider, here in the figure of Liselotte, to have learned all that is needed to be learned (as language, costumes, etc) in order to form a social relationship. Had Liselotte not been able to keep up with the court, despite the difficulties she still found in her French life (she disliked coffee, tea and chocolate, not rarely criticizing the court for doing so), it was likely she would not have even managed to conquer the king himself's affection and laterwards that of her husband's. The estrangement is a process of which the outsider goes through before naturalizing the rules of a society they expect to be soon a member. With Liselotte, this was not different.
Finally, we procceed with her marriage to Philippe I, duke of Orléans as we see it in the following quote:
"On 16 November 1671, she was married by proxy at Metz to Philippe I, Duke of Orléans. By prearrangement, after leaving her father's realm but prior to arriving in France, she formally converted to Roman Catholicism. The arranged marriage was conceived by the bride's aunt, Anna Gonzaga, a close friend of her future husband and his deceased first wife, who negotiated the marriage contract, including the secret Catholic instruction and subsequent public conversion of the fiancée. At the French court, her husband Philippe was known by the traditional honorific of Monsieur.
As his wife, Elisabeth Charlotte assumed the style of Madame. Elisabeth Charlotte was very close to her two stepdaughters Marie Louise and Anne Marie. When Marie Louise left France to marry Charles II of Spain in 1679, Liselotte accompanied her to Orléans."
Her relationship with Philippe is difficult to explain. She did not seem to mind Philippe's preferences over male companies. She in fact lacked a certain vanity that was once so characteristic in her predecessor, which apparently made easier to deal with his feminility in wearing her jewels, even though it's said that he was the one to dress her in certain occasions.
Whatever were their thoughts about their marriage (it has been suggested that Philippe claimed "How am I supposed to share a bed with her?" when he first lied his eyes on Liselotte), the fact is that they did not neglect their duties and managed to produce three children, of whom only two survived childhood. Those would be Philippe II, duke of Orléans, and Elisabeth Charlotte, duchess of Lorraine. Philippe II, his father's heir, would become regent on behalf of Louis XV and his sister would be the mother of Holy Roman Emperor Franz I, father of the next French Queen Marie Antoinette. It was after Elisabeth Charlotte's birth that Liselotte and Philippe agreed in more bedding.
Apparently, Philippe's mignons saw in Liselotte a figure of rivalry and the Chevalier, his most famous associated lover, not rarely credited the duchess for things she did not do. It took a few years before they made peace and Philippe take notice of the truth. In fact, Liselotte claimed that their last years had been good and that she was growing accostumed to be happy when the Lord took Monsieur away. However complicated their relationship might have been, Philippe's second marriage is seen by most historians and specialists as his most successful relationship (at least if compared to the former madame, the British princess Henriette Anne Stuart).
Expanding her relations to another sphere, we come to wonder what was Liselotte's relationship with the court? As an attempt to comprehend it better, here's a quote of "The Correspondence Of Madame, Princess Palatine, Mother Of The Regent; Marie-Adelaide De Savoie, Duchesse De Bourgogne And Of Madame De Maintenon, In Relation To Saint-Eve", written by Katherine Prescott Wormeley:
"In France she was particularly fond of residing at Saint-Cloud, where she enjoyed Nature with greater liberty. At Fontainebleau she often walked out on foot and went a league through the forest. On her arrival in France and first appearance at Court, she told her physician when presented to her that "she did not need him; she had never been bled or purged, and when she did not feel well she always walked six miles on foot, which cured her." Mme de Sévigné, who relates this, seems to conclude, with the majority of the Court, that the new Madame was overcome with her grandeur and spoke like a person who is not accostumed to such surroundings. Mme de Sevigné is mistaken; Madame was in no degree overcome by her greatness. She felt herself born for the high rank of Monsieur's wife and would have felt in her right place, if higher still".
This sentiment of which she acknowledges herself fit for the role of duchess of Orléans, if not, as the author has mentioned, a higher rank, is likely explained by her education in Germany under supervision of her aunt, Sophia, Electress of Hannover. Therefore, by the time Madame de Maintenon comes to court as second wife of the King is a shock to this woman full of passions, sincere, gentle but also with prejudices where hierarchies are concerned. The nature of this rivalry, which contains a particularly amusing story where Madame de Maintenon discovers a letter which was written by Liselotte to her aunt Sophia calling Françoise d'Aubigné all names possible and how the latter showed the former this correspondence written by her own hand resulting in an awkward situation for Liselotte, (which was, naturally, taken with horror by the proud Madame, who afterwards apologized and attempted to form a closer relationship to Maintenon for the sake of her own relationship with her brother-in-law, but this never came to nothing and the two women were rivals once more), is seen on the paragraph below:
"Madame, natural, frank, letting her feelings willingly escape her, liking to pour them out, often in excess beyond themselves and observing no caution, could not away with the cold procedure, prudent, cautious, mysterious, polite and unassailable, of a person whom she attributed a thousand schemes blacker and deeper than those of hell.
She disliked her [Mme de Maintenon] for little things and disliked her for great ones. She supposed that it was Mme de Maintenon who, in concert with Père de La Chaise, had plotted and carried through the persecution of the Reformers; in this she was not only human, but she found herself once more a little of a Calvinist or a Lutheran with a touch of the old leaven; she thought close at hand what the refugees in Holland were writing from afar.
She believed she saw in Mme de Maintenon a Tartuffe in a sage-coloured gown. And besides--another grievance almost as serious!--if there was no longer any etiquette at Court, if ranks were no longer preserved and defined, Mme de Maintenon was the cause of it.
'There is no longer a Court in France', she writes, 'and it is the fault of the Maintenon, who, finding that the king would not declare her queen, was determined there should be no more great functions, and has persuaded the young dauphine [the Duchesse de Bourgogne] to stay in her, Mme de Maintenon's rooms, where there is no distinction of rank or dignity. Under pretext of its being a game, the old woman has induced the dauphine and the princesses to wait upon her at her toilet and meals; she has even persuaded them to hand her the dishes, change her plates, and pour what she drank. Everything is topsy-turvy, and none of them know their right place nor what they are. I have never mixed myself up in all that: when I go to see the lady I place myself close to her niche in an armchair, and I never help her either at her meals or her toilet. Some persons have advided me to do as the dauphone and the princesses do, but I answer: 'I was never brought up to do servile things, and I am too old to play childish games'. Since then no one has has said anything more about it.'
This last account written decades later after Monsieur's death leaves us some reflection upon what was her role within the court. Despite her rivalry with Maintenon, she still held some friends dear to her that Monsieur had dismissed, but that once she was a widow, they returned to meet. It is important to notice that, even after the initial difficulties in setting at Louis XIV's court, she was now a part of it. And this is clear by her relationship with him, since she was the one, as written in her letters, that he trusted to speak that to others he could not voice out loud. After all, Liselotte was not mindful in speaking her own thoughts.
"The role that Madame conceived for herself in France was that of preserving her native country from the horrors of war, and of being useful to it in the different schemes which agitated the Court of France and might in the end overthrow it. In this she failed; and the failure was to her a poignant grief. She was even made the innocent cause of fresh disasters to the land she loved when, on the death of her father and her brother (who left no children), Louis XIV set up a claim to the Palatinate on her account.
Instead of bringing pledges and guarantees of peace, she found herself a pretext and a means of war. The devastation and the too famous incendiarism of the Palatinate which the struggles of ambition brought about caused her inexpressible grief."
In her letters to her half-sisters, Liselotte mentions her sorrow about her incapacity in preventing her homeland, whose memories she cherishes with the most affection, to be plagued by the ambitions of the crown. She was no fool, though she cared much about Louis XIV, Liselotte in her letters writes how aware she is with his actions, that, for example, religion is merely an excuse for politicals doings. This she makes more clear during the polemic of Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, an act done by his grandfather Henri IV (and the first of the House of Bourbon) to grant peace to Catholics and Protestants after the turbulent wars of religion.
Despite these differences, however, she had become, as we have mentioned, a part of the court. After all, "when she arrived in France at the age of nineteen no one expected all this. The Court was filled with memories and regrets for the late Madame, the amiable Henrietta, snatched away in the bloom of her charm and grace."
However the improves it might have felt upon Liselotte, in spite of all differences, critics and all the life at court she participated in, on 9 June 1701, her husband, circa 60 years of age, died of a stroke at Saint-Cloud. She seemed to have grieved his death genuinely, but was also preoccupied with her condition now that she was a widow. As seen below:
"After her husband's death, Elisabeth Charlotte feared that the king would send her to a convent, as stipulated in her marriage contract. Instead she was confronted with secretly-made excerpts of her all-too-candid letters to correspondents abroad. She was warned to change her attitude toward Madame de Maintenon.
She remained welcome at court. She was allowed to keep her apartments at all the royal residences and retained her rank. From her husband, she inherited 40,000 livres a year. Louis XIV added 250, 000 livres, and her son promised her another 200, 000."
So arises the question, despite being aware of the cust of her life, how did she proceed with the French court after the death of Monsieur? We have already discussed about her rivalry with Mme de Maintenon, her relationship with the King, but even so, remains this question to comprehend the extent of her character we've been analyzing this far. She, who was a free spirit and was caged for some time in a marriage of convenience, was once again freed of duties towards her husband. And although we have no information of her children during these days, we ought to think they might have been already married.
"The life that Madame led at the Court of France varied, necessarily, during the fifty and one years that she spent there; she could not live at the age of sixty as she had done at twenty. But at all times, before and after the death of Monsieur, she had managed to make for herself a retreat and a sort of solitude, The exaggerated and incongrous sides of Madame's nature being now sufficiently visible and well known, I desire to neglect nothing that which show the firm and elevated parts of her soul".
And here comes a letter written by Liselotte herself from Saint Cloud, June 17 1698.
"I do not need much consolation in the matter of death; I do not desire death, neither do I dread it. There is no need of the Catechism of Heidelberg to teach us not to be attached to this world; above all in this country where all things are so full of falseness, envy, and malignity, where the most unheard of vices are displayed without reserve. But to desire death is a thing entirely against natue. In the midst of this great Court I lived retired, as if in solitude; there are vew few persons with whom I have frequent intercourse; I am whole, long days alone in my cabinet, where I busy myself in reading and writing. If any one pays me a visit I see them for only a few moments; I talk of rain and fine weather or the news of the day; and after that I take refuge in my retreat. Four times a week I send off my regular letters: Monday, to Savoie; Wednesday, to Modena; Thursday and Sunday I write very long letters to my aunt in Hanover; from six to eight o'clock I drive out with Monsieur and my ladies; three times a week I go to Paris, and every day I write to my friends who live there; I hunt twice aweek; and this is how I pass my time."
As she has mentioned, hunting was one of her greatest passions. Elisabeth Charlotte seems to have lived fully her life, though in her own way. Aside of hunting and horseback activity (this latter having been forbidden by her father, being a practice that she, however, continued in France) and the long letters she loved writing, she was passionate about theatre and very fond about laughing. These last paragraphs will highlight these great passions that turned Liselotte a woman not only of her time, but the product of, why not, the collision of Protestantism and Catholicism, a unique person amongst the court of Louis XIV.
"Hunting was long one of Madame's greatest pleasures, or rather passions. [...] It was in France, therefore, that she served her apprenticeship, and her impetuosity often made it dangerous. Twenty-six times was she thrown from the horse, without being frightened or discouraged. 'Is it possible', she says, 'that you have never seen a great hunt? I have seen more than a thousand stags taken, and I have had bad falls; but out of twenty-six times that I have been thrown from my horse I never hurt myself but once, and then I dislocated my elbow.
The theatre was another passion, which, in her, was derived from intelligence and her natural taste for things of the understanding. It was the only pleasure (except that of writing letters) which lasted to the end of her life. She was not of the opinion of Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and other geat religious oracles of the day in the matter of theatres; she forestalled the opinion of the future and that of the most indulgent moralists.
"With regard to the priests who forbid the theatre", she says, rather irreverently. "I shall say no more, except this, that if they saw a little further than their own noses they would understand that the money people spend on going to the play is not ill-spent; in the first place, the comedians are poor devils who earn their living that way; and next, comedies inspire joy, joy produces health, health gives strenght, strenght produces good work; therefore comedies should be encouraged, and not forbidden".
She liked to laugh, and the 'Malade Imaginaire' diverted her to such a degree that one might think in reading her letters that she was trying to imitate all that is most physical and unfit for women in its style of pleasantry."
At the age of 70, this very interesting duchess of Orléans came to die. She was a witness of the reign of Louis XIV, and her letters are a proof of it, as well as the rise of his successor, Louis XV. Despite that sentiment of never entirely belonging to France, as comparisons with her homeland are constant in her letters, she by all means settled into it. She was not afraid in holding back her tone, she was never comfortable in wearing fancy clothes, rather preferring those more closely associated to male ones, but doing so at the request of her husband. She was a woman of wit and gentle nature, but proud and with prejudice manners. Nonetheless, as a social actor of those days she lived considerably well and her letters are the legacy of it.
Bibliography:
-WORMELEY, Katherine Prescott. "The Correspondence Of Madame, Princess Palatine, Mother Of The Regent; Marie-Adelaide De Savoie, Duchesse De Bourgogne And Of Madame De Maintenon, In Relation To Saint-Eve." Boston: Hardy, Pratt & Company. 1899.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Charlotte,_Madame_Palatine
-http://partylike1660.com/elisabeth-charlotte-du-palatinat-duchesse-dorleans/
-https://archive.org/details/lettersofmadamec02orluoft
-http://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/princess-palatine
-https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3859/3859-h/3859-h.htm
-https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000002978213;view=1up;seq=6
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