‘The king collected money from the Palatinate in my name, and now the poor people must think that I have profited from their misery as well as being the cause of it all. It grieves me bitterly’.Footnote 1 The Duchess of Orléans, Elisabeth-Charlotte of the Palatinate, wrote these plaintive words to her aunt, Sophie of the Palatinate, Duchess of Hanover, in June 1689, shortly after the brutal destruction of Heidelberg, Mannheim and other towns in the Palatinate by the armies of France. French force was exerted to press claims that Elisabeth-Charlotte (Liselotte to her family, but known at court simply as Madame) could have put forward for the succession of her childless brother’s domains in the Palatinate—the electorate of the Rhine—following his death in 1685. But as Madame knew full well, her marriage had been contracted to the brother of Louis XIV, only a decade before, to help protect her homeland from invasion, not to cause its devastation. To make matters worse, Liselotte was denied any pleasure from this financial windfall, as she continued in her letter: ‘I wish to God I had been given all the money that has been extracted from the Palatinate to do as I liked with … but the truth is I have not seen a single penny’.Footnote 2 Madame felt that her position, near the very top of the social hierarchy in France, was actually quite futile. She felt completely powerless.

Four decades earlier, another Madame, Marguerite of Lorraine, a previous Duchess of Orléans, must have felt an even greater sense of futility as she sat in her rooms in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris awaiting news from the long siege of La Mothe, the greatest defensive stronghold of her homeland, the duchy of Lorraine. After nearly six months of resistance, the fortress surrendered on 1 July 1645; but contrary to terms, the French army destroyed not only the fortifications, but the entire town, never to be rebuilt.Footnote 3 This Madame’s marriage was also—though not officially and not sanctioned by the Crown—arranged to help protect the small state of Lorraine from its much larger neighbour, France. And it too was an utter failure, and itself a cause of the duchy’s occupation shortly after the marriage in 1632, a brutal occupation that would endure off and on for the next sixty years.

The long reign of Louis XIV was framed by these experiences of two brides from two of France’s neighbours on its sensitive north-east frontier; women from two of Europe’s oldest and most prestigious dynasties, Wittelsbach and Lorraine, both married to the second highest ranking man in the kingdom of France, a king’s younger brother, Gaston and Philippe, successively dukes of Orléans. Yet neither woman ever mustered much authority at court or in aristocratic society, unlike even the weakest of queen consorts, in part due to the increasingly weakened position of their husband, the ‘spare’, in a monarchy now devoted to centralised, one-man rule.Footnote 4 The first, Elisabeth-Charlotte of the Palatinate (1652–1722), is well known as a source for colourful anecdotes about the court of the Sun King, but is rarely looked at as a historical figure of note;Footnote 5 the second, Marguerite of Lorraine (1615–1672), is almost unknown and most of the details of her life remain a mystery.Footnote 6 This essay focuses on the aspect of their lives concerning their ‘usefulness’—often with great potential, but in both cases unrealised—on the geopolitical stage of seventeenth-century Europe. In the end we shall see that although on the most apparent level of diplomatic activity their marriages achieved little for their homelands, we can ascertain some benefit in the longer term for both, particularly if we approach the question of ‘success’ from the perspective of ‘home’ referring to dynasty not physical space.

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One of the most difficult responsibilities for princes from small- or medium-sized states in early modern European history was to ensure the independence of their dynasty—as manifested in the recognised sovereignty of its territory—in the face of the growing consolidation of the great powers, notably the kingdoms of France and Spain. Having been so preoccupied with affairs in Italy for much of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the shifting geopolitics of the great powers placed an increasing focus on the Rhineland, and the kingdom of France’s relatively exposed north-east frontier. The two medium-sized states that controlled strategic access in this region—a key component of the Spanish Road along which Habsburg troops could travel from Italy to the Low Countries—were the duchy of Lorraine and the county palatine of the Rhine. There had long been dynastic arrangements connecting the ruling houses of these territories with that of France, notably in the string of marriages between Lorraine and France: Claude de France, daughter of King Henry II, with Duke Charles III of Lorraine in 1559; Louise de Lorraine-Vaudémont and King Henri III in 1575; and Catherine of Navarre, sister of King Henri IV, to Duke Henri II of Lorraine, in 1599.Footnote 7 As a Protestant principality, the Palatinate’s rulers from the Wittelsbach dynasty were less able (or willing) to participate in this sort of dynastic exchange, being more concerned with forging a great northern ‘Protestant alliance’ with the houses of Orange-Nassau and Stuart.Footnote 8 But Catholic France’s entrance into the Thirty Years’ War on the side of the Protestant powers (and ostensibly to defend the rights of the exiled elector palatine) in 1635 altered this dynamic and opened the door to such an arrangement with the Bourbons. Could marital diplomacy, ‘soft power’, be used to secure the independence of these two smaller states, Lorraine and the Palatinate, amidst the intense rivalry between the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties?Footnote 9

Scholars of queenship will know of the importance of royal bride exchanges in the history of premodern Europe.Footnote 10 Routinely studied as part of diplomatic history, and more recently as the focus of the history of cultural exchange, there is an abundance of research on well-known, important royal figures such as Henrietta Maria of France, queen of England and Scotland, or Marie Antoinette of Austria, queen of France.Footnote 11 Often overlooked, however, are the women who either came from second-tier states, such as Bavaria or Tuscany, or those who married second sons rather than kings. The name given to such a woman at the court of France in the early modern period was ‘Madame’, as wife of the king’s brother, who was known simply as ‘Monsieur’. The practice of using such brief honorific titles at the French court was part of the wider developments of the early to mid-sixteenth century by which the monarchy transformed itself, using ritual and ceremony rather than violence, into an institution far more distinct from the nobility, the ‘divine’ absolutist monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 12 The shortest court titles became the preserve of the people of highest rank: Monseigneur for the heir to the throne, Monsieur and Madame for the brother and sister-in-law of the king, Monsieur le Prince for the first prince of the blood, and Monsieur le Duc for his son and heir.

Perhaps the best-known Madame was Philippe d’Orléans’ first wife, Henrietta Anne, Princess of Great Britain (1644–1670). As sister of King Charles II, she did play an active role in French diplomacy, even personally negotiating a treaty between Britain and France, the Treaty of Dover, June 1670.Footnote 13 As a daughter of England, Henrietta Anne belonged in a different category to her predecessor and her successor as Madame, who hailed from smaller states; and although her history was a key component in the evolution of the role of the ‘spare’ in the history of the French court, she will not be the focus here. Instead, Bourbon brides who were born in Lorraine and the Palatinate are examined as representatives of the resilience of second-tier dynasties in the face of the expansion of power by the first-tier dynasties of Bourbon and Habsburg.

Both Marguerite and Elisabeth-Charlotte represent a transformational phase in France’s development as a nation-state in the early modern period, which in the nineteenth-century étatiste or nationalist mode was usually portrayed as an inevitable process, a great success, and a logical expansion of the kingdom to its natural borders, notably to the Rhine.Footnote 14 Until recently, patriotic historians of Lorraine have been careful not to overemphasise the brutality of the occupation of Lorraine by France in the seventeenth century;Footnote 15 historians of the Palatinate, not similarly bound, have shown less restraint. Ask any German student of history when and where the first incidences of ‘total war’ appear in European history, and they will cite Heidelberg, 1689, General Mélac, and the phrase ‘Brûlez le Palatinat!’Footnote 16 Yet both Lorraine and the Palatinate have suffered in the past from being analysed solely as part of a larger national unit, France or Germany. In the past decade, increasing attention has been paid to smaller states as representatives of much of the history of medieval and early modern Europe. As Charles Lipp has put it: ‘Lorraine and places like it provided the contemporary geopolitical norm. … With their limited resources and complicated political situations (often the product of medieval subinfeudation), small states have come to embody the “early” social and political models supposedly rejected over the course of the early modern period’.Footnote 17

As small states, the Palatinate and Lorraine had many things in common, notably porous borders that were difficult to defend. They also differed in significant ways. The Palatinate was German-speaking, a core of the old imperial Reich since its inception in the tenth century, and master of the vital Rhine River trade corridor, whereas Lorraine was multilingual (German and French), and located more on the periphery of the Holy Roman Empire—since 1542, Lorraine had been regarded as a free state, merely ‘protected’ by the empire, not a full component (though this relationship was always imprecise and negotiable).Footnote 18 The two states and their dynasties were on opposite sides of the Reformation, the Palatinate adopting first Lutheranism then Calvinism by the 1560s, while Lorraine remained one of the most solid bulwarks of the Catholic Church outside of Italy. Both were at the centre of important trade routes across Europe which gave them both great economic advantages, but also brought them trouble when France and the Empire went to war. Both suffered untold devastation during the Thirty Years’ War, best exemplified by the dramatic artworks generated by one of Lorraine’s most famous artists, Jacques Callot, the Miseries of War; or by the literature of devastation penned in the 1630s by Johann Michael Moscherosch, a Protestant writer from the linguistically mixed regions between Lorraine and the Palatinate.Footnote 19

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The marriages of both Madames examined here were arranged by their families to help preserve or restore peace in these troubled border regions. Marguerite of Lorraine had been swept off her feet as a teenager by the charming, handsome Gaston d’Orléans when he sought refuge in the winter of 1629–1630 at the court of her brother, Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine.Footnote 20 Gaston was fighting back against the aggressive political centralisation policies of his brother Louis XIII and his first minister, Cardinal Richelieu. The aims of Monsieur’s numerous rebellions were inspired in part by an older ideology for the conduct of monarchical business, through a reliance on the old nobility and the forging of dynastic alliances with neighbouring princes to secure peace and maintain honour, rather than the ‘immoral’ drive of raison d’état—ironically, this innately conservative outlook was taken up by later historians as ‘liberalism’ in its desire to inhibit the growing power of the Crown, and Gaston was its champion.Footnote 21 But Monsieur’s interest in a matrimonial alliance between France and Lorraine was in keeping with a long tradition, and also represented the pro-Catholic (and pro-Habsburg) policies espoused by his mother, Marie de Medici, whose niece, Margherita Gonzaga, was the dowager duchess of Lorraine.Footnote 22 His views and political stance could not simply be ignored, as he was still the heir to the throne, and Louis XIII, whose health was never robust, continued to be childless after fifteen years of marriage. Gaston’s choice of a spouse was thus very important, and a recent analysis by Michel de Waele has demonstrated this princely rebellion, like the one that followed swiftly after in 1631, was not an easily dismissible outburst of a petulant younger brother, but a serious piece in a much wider network of anti-French diplomacy.Footnote 23

By January 1632, Gaston was once again in rebellion against his brother. He returned to Nancy and married Marguerite, without first obtaining his brother’s consent—a requirement for any high-ranking member of the royal family, and certainly for the heir to the throne. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or perhaps provided the excuse needed by the government of Cardinal Richelieu to rid itself of a nagging problem on France’s north-east border: the unpredictable regime of Duke Charles IV of Lorraine. The duke’s predecessors had been mostly reliable allies of France, but ever since Charles came to power in a contested succession in 1624, he had looked increasingly eastwards to his uncle the Duke of Bavaria, leader of the Catholic League in the Holy Roman Empire, and to the emperor himself.Footnote 24 As the Thirty Years’ War came closer to the borders of France (notably with the Swedish invasion of the Rhineland and Alsace in 1631–1632), the unreliable position of Charles IV became a liability. Shortly after his illicit wedding with Marguerite, Gaston left Lorraine for the Spanish Netherlands, led a disastrous campaign against his brother in Languedoc, then retreated to Brussels. French armies moved in to occupy Lorraine in 1633, and in September, Marguerite slipped across the frontier to join her husband in the Spanish Netherlands.Footnote 25 For the next decade Marguerite lived in exile in Brussels, while French troops completed the occupation of the duchy of Lorraine.

Gaston made peace with his brother and returned to France in the autumn of 1634, leaving Marguerite behind, but he was not welcome at court, living in semi-disgrace in the Loire valley, until both he and Marguerite were finally permitted to settle in Paris after the deaths of both Richelieu (1642) and Louis XIII (1643). They were officially remarried, and although the regent, Anne of Austria, looked to her new sister-in-law Marguerite for support for her planned reconstruction of the image of Catholic piety for the French monarchy, Madame never played a strong role in court politics or aristocratic society.Footnote 26 Most contemporary descriptions paint her as a shy recluse and a hypochondriac, never as a leader of the bustling salon life that characterised Paris in the 1640s and 1650s.Footnote 27 But one area where she did attempt to exert her will was on behalf of her homeland of Lorraine.

Having raised his status on the European diplomatic stage through prominent victories in command of imperial troops, notably at Nördlingen in 1634, Duke Charles IV of Lorraine brokered a peace treaty with France in 1641 to attempt his restoration. The terms were constrained, which he eventually rejected, and the duke once again went into exile by the end of the year.Footnote 28 Like Gaston in 1632–1634, Duke Charles was not just an exiled prince, but an important piece of Europe’s diplomatic chessboard, in his case as one of the leading commanders of his day, with an independent and remarkably loyal fighting force. He could not simply be ignored, and was thus courted by the Imperial, Spanish and French governments.Footnote 29 Charles sometimes worked closely with Anne of Austria and her minister, Cardinal Mazarin, but their refusal to offer him new terms for a restoration as part of the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 ensured that he returned to Habsburg service. During the civil wars in France known as the Fronde, Charles at times intervened to offer his troops to the rebels opposing the Crown—and when these rebels were aligned with the Duke of Orléans, it was Marguerite who facilitated discussions between her brother and her husband. Cardinal de Retz, one leader of the Frondeurs, describes how he asked Charles to support his cause in the summer of 1652, by meeting at the Palais du Luxembourg, the Paris residence of Monsieur and Madame. Here they relaxed ceremonial regulations within their private spaces; otherwise, the Duke of Lorraine and the Cardinal would have found it difficult due to imperial protocols that the duke insisted must be maintained.Footnote 30 Marguerite also sometimes hosted her brother at the Orléans’ chief country residence, the château of Blois.Footnote 31

Yet even while the duchy of Lorraine remained occupied, there remained a persistent Lorraine presence at the French court through service in Madame’s household. The nineteenth-century Lorraine historian Lucien de Warren examined the connections between Marguerite and Lorraine in the 1640s and 1650s, through her role in keeping her shattered family together by sheltering her brothers, Charles IV and Nicolas-François, and her nephew Charles (the future Duke Charles V), as well as her aunt, Catherine de Lorraine, abbess of Remiremont. According to Warren, Marguerite, ‘remained a Lorrainer to the very depths of her heart’, and people saw her ‘seize any occasion to serve her country’, notably in encouraging her husband Gaston to use his influence as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom to push for Charles’s restoration at the peace talks in Westphalia.Footnote 32 Georges Dethan notes that Gaston joked about his wife’s passion for Lorraine and its ducal dynasty (and more seriously, the propensity for Habsburg spies to gather information in her household), saying to Mazarin: ‘Madame, if it would benefit her brothers, would willingly burn all of France. If you wish something to be known in Brussels, you only need to have it said in her chambers, on the day of the regular post’.Footnote 33

This raises an important question for this essay. Was Marguerite’s passionate Lorraine identity concerned with her family or with the physical space they ruled? Anne Motta has demonstrated how Marguerite intervened in wartime to ask one Lorraine nobleman (the Comte de Lignéville, commander-in-chief of Charles’s armies) to ensure that the estates of another Lorraine nobleman (the pro-French Marquis de Lenoncourt) would not be ravaged.Footnote 34 My own recent examination of household accounts and lists of household officers provide key names and suggestions of ongoing connections with the nobility of Lorraine, such as Madame’s dame d’atours, Anne des Salles, Dame de Crissé, the daughter of a former chamberlain of the dukes of Lorraine, and, like her, several other women from Lorraine families such as Hennezel or Maillart, which indicate that Marguerite’s interests went beyond just her family, at least to include members of the Lorraine nobility.Footnote 35 More research needs to be done to investigate the role of these Lorraine ladies, if any, in court politics and diplomacy in the era of Mazarin, and in efforts either to restore the independence of Lorraine or in contrast to integrate its nobility with that of France.Footnote 36

The emphatically pro-Lorraine attitude of the Duchess of Orléans rarely features in accounts of the period, but it did not go unnoticed: La Grande Mademoiselle, Gaston’s daughter by a previous marriage, deeply disliked her stepmother, and wrote in her memoirs that Madame had only two interests: praying and restoring the independence of Lorraine.Footnote 37 Madame’s influence in the Regency of Queen Anne, never strong, was further weakened when her brother changed tack in 1652 and supported the Fronde of the Princes against the Crown, then quit France altogether and joined forces once more with the enemy, Habsburg Spain. Now seen as an unreliable ally by both sides, Charles was imprisoned in Toledo from 1654, and Marguerite spent the next few years working with her husband and, extraordinarily, with her brother’s estranged wife, Duchess Nicole, to negotiate his release by pressuring Queen Anne and by writing directly to Anne’s brother Philip IV of Spain.Footnote 38 Charles IV was freed and was promised a restoration as part of the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659 which ended the war between France and Spain, and it is conceivable, though never mentioned directly, that Marguerite’s quiet diplomacy at home, with Anne, Mazarin, and the teen-aged Louis XIV, had some influence. We know that her husband Gaston advised Mazarin, when the Cardinal visited Chambord in the summer of 1659, that having a contented and loyal sovereign prince as a neighbour would be more useful, and less costly, than continuing an unpopular occupation.Footnote 39 Yet the needs of the French state intervened, and the king stopped short of simply granting Charles IV full sovereignty in a region the French relied on so heavily to transport (and feed) its armies in the Rhineland. The constraints placed on Charles’s restoration in 1660 were thus hardly any better than those rejected in 1641, and it took some time to negotiate the details.Footnote 40

In the personal rule of Louis XIV of the early 1660s, the newly widowed Madame (Gaston died in February 1660) was interested in acting as a conduit to help settle the terms of Charles IV’s restoration, but she opposed the Treaty of Montmartre her brother agreed to in February 1662. This treaty would have ceded Lorraine’s sovereignty to the French Crown in exchange for a huge pension for its duke (and his illegitimate son)—though Marguerite was more concerned with preventing him from contracting a disastrous marriage with various young women in her household, notably Marianne Pajot, daughter of her apothecary.Footnote 41 The Treaty of Montmartre failed within a month of its signing; Charles accepted a more limiting restoration treaty, and began to rebuild his state. His sister, now a mature, independent widow with three marriageable royal daughters, was now seen herself as useful to the state since the king had no sisters, and so far had no daughters. The eldest of the Orléans princesses, Marguerite-Louise, was married to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in April 1661, followed soon after by the marriage of Françoise-Madeleine to the Duke of Savoy in March 1663. Madame recognised the importance of having the king treat them as if they were his own daughters, as she indicated in a letter to Cardinal Mazarin shortly after Gaston’s death.Footnote 42 Tuscany and Savoy were two crucial chess-pieces in French diplomacy in Italy, but neither very useful for the status of Lorraine; Marguerite had pushed instead for a marriage of her eldest daughter to her nephew, Prince Charles de Lorraine (the future Duke Charles V), but this failed as the young prince was chased from France into the service of the Habsburgs.Footnote 43 It is possible, though highly speculative, that there might have been other dynastic plans for Lorraine in the marriage of the third Orléans daughter, Elisabeth (or Isabel), through her marriage to the head of the House of Lorraine’s cadet branch, Louis-Joseph, Duke of Guise, in May 1667—perhaps to be set up as a future heir to the officially childless Duke Charles IV, and a pro-French block against the now Austrian general Prince Charles?Footnote 44 Guise died only a few years later, followed soon after by his infant son, so any potential plans were dashed.

By the later 1660s, no one in France had much use for Old Madame, as she was now called, since her nephew Philippe had taken a wife who thus became the New Madame, and whose bright star was soon ascendant. Anne of Austria had died in 1666, and the prominent position of her dévot party at the French court, including Marguerite of Lorraine, faded. This new Madame was Henrietta Anne, whose history and fate are well known. Her marriage was a seemingly endless sequence of bickering matches with Philippe and his mignons, notably the Chevalier de Lorraine, and her great achievement on the diplomatic stage with the Treaty of Dover was swiftly overshadowed by her sudden death in 1670, many suspected by poison.Footnote 45 True or not, contemporaries could take it as a sign that if a Madame, second lady of the kingdom, involved herself too much in politics in favour of her homeland, a similar fate might await her. In fact, the next Madame, Elisabeth-Charlotte, did indeed believe the rumours.Footnote 46 The year 1670 also saw the sudden exile once more of Duke Charles IV of Lorraine, and another French occupation of his duchy, with Old Madame helpless to prevent it; this was followed by her death in April 1672, forgotten and unmourned.Footnote 47

Five months before, a new Madame had arrived from the north-east. The nineteen-year-old Elisabeth-Charlotte of the Palatinate arrived in Metz in November 1671 where she abjured the Calvinism of her fathers and swiftly went through all the processes of becoming a Catholic before meeting her husband, Philippe.Footnote 48 Although their marriage was not as volatile as that of Henriette-Anne, Liselotte was never comfortable living among her husband’s male favourites, his junge Kerls or Buben, as she called them in letters home to family in Germany.Footnote 49 She enjoyed her relationship with the king, as a passionate hunter like him, and, always interested in hierarchy and the proper order of things, Madame enjoyed her position as second lady of France, though she later came to dread it when she had to step in as first lady of France after the successive deaths of the queen in 1683 and the dauphine in 1690. Writing about a new princess arriving in France to marry the king’s grandson and heir, Madame noted that ‘she will have to take precedence over me in the end … apart from precedence I have never had the slightest advantage out of being the first lady’.Footnote 50 This was a role previous holders of the title Madame never had to perform. But Elisabeth-Charlotte was, like Marguerite, a reluctant player on the stage of international diplomacy.

Elisabeth-Charlotte was born in the years immediately following the restoration of her father, the Elector Karl Ludwig, after the Thirty Years’ War. The elector worked to re-establish his court in Heidelberg and rebuild his city after the devastations of the war caused in part by the actions of his own parents, the so-called ‘Winter king and queen’ of Bohemia.Footnote 51 Like many other princes of the westernmost parts of the empire, Karl Ludwig was keen to protect his territory’s post-Westphalian independence from the Habsburg passion for centralisation by allying with the Bourbon king of France. He did not join the pro-French League of the Rhine, formed in 1658, however, as it was led by his regional enemies, the elector-archbishops of Mainz and Trier and his cousin, the head of the Catholic branch of the Palatine dynasty, the Duke of Neuburg.Footnote 52 By the late 1660s, the elector felt very exposed by the short war he fought with his Rhenish neighbours and with the Duke of Lorraine.Footnote 53 His willingness to sacrifice his daughter’s immortal soul by marrying her to a Catholic prince was a sign of the weakness of his position, though his new alliance with France quickly crumbled after Louis XIV’s troops crossed the Rhine and entered the Netherlands through his territories only one year later, and in 1673, the elector quickly joined the Quadruple Alliance against France. The new bride’s diplomatic value at the French court had evaporated almost immediately.

Madame was still relatively young and certainly inexperienced in the early 1670s, and she felt overwhelming futility about foreign affairs. As she wrote to her aunt Sophie—herself a child of the Palatinate—during the campaign of 1674: ‘Te Deums have been sung everywhere because of the battle M. le Prince [of Condé] has won [against the Prince of Orange, at Seneffe].… All that may be well and good, but frankly I should prefer a prosperous peace, and for the dear Palatinate and Papa to be left alone’.Footnote 54 Six years later, she wrote that her relationship with Louis XIV had broken down: ‘I admit that I did love him very dearly and have always been happy to be with him, but that was before he started persecuting Papa. I can assure you that since then I have found it very hard indeed, and shall do as long as I live’.Footnote 55 Was Madame able to help in this conflict? In 1679, the French king set up his Chambres de Réunion, whose job it was to make use of ancient and mostly forgotten feudal rights to make claims on various territories in Lorraine, Luxembourg, and the Rhineland, including some in the Palatinate. The elector wrote to his sister Sophie complaining that his daughter did not seem able to use her proximity to Louis to do anything about it. Sophie answered by saying that Liselotte stayed in the king’s favour by being an amiable hunting companion, ‘fearing to displease him if she asked for any favour’. And later, ‘Liselotte has such fear of putting herself into the wrong with the king her brother-in-law that she dares not speak to him about anything except to make him laugh’.Footnote 56

The Elector Karl Ludwig died in August 1680 and was followed to the grave by his son, Karl II, in 1685. Elisabeth-Charlotte’s position suddenly became relevant again, as the sole remaining (legitimate) member of her family, and despite her protests to the contrary, her husband, in her name, put forward formal claims to inherit the private properties of the Simmern branch of the House of the Palatinate. These could be inherited by a woman, though the electoral title itself by law passed to the next male heir. The new elector, the Duke of Neuburg, refused to part with any of the Wittelsbach lands, and this issue formed one of the war aims of the French king in the Nine Years’ War.Footnote 57 In her correspondence, Madame expressed her horror at the destruction of Heidelberg and other towns in 1689 and again in 1693—utterly flattened despite having surrendered. ‘Every day I have to listen to their plans for the bombardment of Mannheim, which the Elector, my father, rebuilt with such care. It makes my heart bleed. And then they are highly offended’.Footnote 58 She particularly disliked it being done ostensibly in her name: ‘my name is being used for the ruin of my homeland. Far from being pleased, I am very angry’.Footnote 59 Or worse: ‘What distresses me most is that the poor people are plunged into their utter misery in my name.… I am so filled with horror at all the destruction there that every night, as I fall asleep, I seem to find myself in Mannheim or Heidelberg gazing at all the devastation’.Footnote 60

Beyond the destruction, Liselotte expressed her frustration that the financial claims were being made by her husband Philippe with no input from her: ‘I am told that I have no rights at all, and that Monsieur, as maître de la communauté [shared marital finances] is its sole lord and master, and can use it as he pleases. To my mind this is absurd’.Footnote 61 By the late 1690s, French troops were bringing back furniture and priceless tapestries from the electoral residences in Heidelberg, and large quantities of silver: ‘Monsieur has had all the silver from the Palatinate melted down and sold. The money has been given to his young men. New ones appear every day’.Footnote 62 By the terms of the settlement under the Peace of Ryswick of 1697, Philippe was not to have land from the Palatine succession, but money, the Orleansgeld. Monsieur was awarded 200,000 livres annually, to be paid into his treasury until a definitive settlement could be reached with the new electoral house in the Palatinate (Neuburg). This was seen by the diplomatic community as a face-saving measure for Louis XIV, as a gain, despite being forced to give up all territorial advances in the Palatinate made in the war.Footnote 63

Madame had been a failure as a diplomatic chess piece. Her situation was different from that of Marguerite of Lorraine because the land of her birth was now being ruled by a very different branch of the family. She commented on her brief hope of marrying her daughter to the new elector’s heir as a means of rapprochement (‘It would be such a comfort to think that my lamented father’s grandchild ruled in the Palatinate’), but otherwise she was uninvolved.Footnote 64 Her remaining attachments with Germany, similar to those of Marguerite of Lorraine, were with those in her household: the one or two of the ladies who remained (notably Madame Rathsamshausen), and two German officers who served her especially late in life, Wendt and Harling.Footnote 65 Otherwise she was connected with the remaining members of her family living not in Heidelberg but in Hanover, notably her aunt Sophie, her half-sister Luise, and her former governess Frau von Harling. As late as 1696, Liselotte continued to express what might later be seen as ‘nationalist’ sentiment, but her letter writing was more about family and dynastic identity than it was about a physical place.Footnote 66 In the end, it may be better to say that her chief loyalties were dynastic, not national, though that is an oversimplification: she continued to long for things she cherished in her childhood, such as the red cabbage ‘which is not to be found anywhere in France.… I hope they will cure my cough, since nothing is better for my chest’.Footnote 67

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In the final analysis, neither Marguerite of Lorraine nor Elisabeth-Charlotte of the Palatinate can be said to have been a successful diplomatic player in the role of Madame. Neither did much for the resilience of the dynasties of their birth. Neither Lorraine nor the Palatinate was saved from invasion by the marriages of 1632 or 1671. We have seen that Marguerite provided negotiating space and unofficial diplomatic connections for a settlement with Charles IV in 1659–1660, and her daughters were crucial for French diplomacy with Tuscany and Savoy. More importantly, her quiet piety was a model for royal women’s behaviour, in support of the two queens Anne and Marie-Thérèse, forging a new role for French queen-consorts in the face of increasing exclusion from power in an absolutist monarchy, a support extended by the continued presence at court of her daughter, the Duchesse de Guise.Footnote 68 In his eulogy of 1696 the Capuchin Jérothée de Mortagne noted the direct connection between the two women in terms of their piety and devotion to charity: ‘she [Guise] listened attentively to the lessons of a virtuous mother’.Footnote 69

Elisabeth-Charlotte’s marriage to the king’s brother did not solidify an alliance between France and the Palatinate, and her claims to the succession in her homeland led to its devastation. At the French court, this Madame was not a model of Catholic piety, but a thinly veiled convert at best. With the extinction of her branch of the House of Wittelsbach, there was no family to be restored, but interestingly, Elisabeth-Charlotte did in a way contribute to the success of the House of Lorraine (an interesting twist, given her relationship with her husband’s favourite, the Chevalier de Lorraine). Her daughter, also named Elisabeth-Charlotte, was married to the new duke, Léopold, as part of the treaty settlements of 1697. The younger Liselotte brought with her the lustre of her rank as a royal princess and helped her Austrian-educated husband rebuild his court partly along French lines in terms of courtly protocols and public ceremonial. In particular, he drew on her contacts in Paris—artists, architects and musicians—to develop a new princely showpiece, the Palace of Lunéville.Footnote 70 Madame’s son, Philippe, 2nd Duke of Orléans, became the regent in 1715, and worked with his sister to ease tensions along France’s eastern border, and even agreed to finally recognise her husband the duke as a ‘royal highness’ in February 1718, in effect recognising Lorraine’s sovereignty.Footnote 71

We can only speculate on the real influence Madame had over her son’s diplomatic policies regarding the duchy of Lorraine. Saint-Simon, who was involved in the Regency councils, claims that Duke Léopold could manipulate the regent’s ‘feebleness’ due to his intense fondness for his sister and his slavish devotion to his mother’s ‘blindly German passion’ for her son-in-law, the Duke of Lorraine (who was regarded with suspicion as a ‘German’ by the French government); but Madame herself writing to Léopold gave nothing away, merely stating, ‘I praise God that all has succeeded to your satisfaction; my son never had any other intentions. As for me, Monsieur, I had no other part in it than many good wishes for a good outcome, and to press a little more Monsieur de Saint-Contest and the Marshal d’Huxelles [the negotiators]’.Footnote 72 This recognition as ‘royal highness’ was a crucial step in the elevation of the Lorraine dynasty—more than simply resilience, but resurgence—which in the longer term enabled them to take an even bigger step, assuming the mantle of the imperial family after the marriage in 1736 of Léopold and Elisabeth-Charlotte’s son, Duke François III of Lorraine, to the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria. Even before this, Elisabeth-Charlotte had expressed joy at another success in her extended family: she was proud to see that her own marriage, to a Catholic, had removed her from the pathway of another dynastic resurgence, as her cousin George of Hanover ascended the throne of Great Britain in 1714.Footnote 73

Second-tier states may not have wielded great power militarily, but they did, sometimes, punch above their weight as cultural arbiters, as Nancy and Heidelberg did at the end of the sixteenth century, and as later capitals Lunéville and Mannheim would do as centres of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth. They also successfully employed dynasticism as a diplomatic tool, sending their daughters to the French court, though in the cases of Marguerite of Lorraine and Elisabeth-Charlotte of the Palatinate the payoff was difficult to discern and long in coming. Nevertheless, it was a lesson well learned by the House of Palatinate-Neuburg who made use of matrimonial diplomacy in the late seventeenth century to transform themselves from a second-tier to a first-tier dynasty, with daughters as royal consorts in Madrid, Lisbon and Vienna.Footnote 74 Being the second lady of France was rarely a position of great influence, but as a dynastic chess piece, the post of Madame was a useful tool to have in the arsenal of a second-tier state to aid in the flow of dynasticism as a diplomatic force across Europe. Ultimately, both Madames’ efforts had an impact on the House of Lorraine, first in its physical restorations (in 1660 and 1697), but in the longer term in its boost to full royal status, allowing the dynasty to merge with the House of Habsburg and continue dynastic rule in Central Europe until the twentieth century. Success, like futility, can sometimes be measured in the extreme long term and in unexpected places.

Archives Consulted

Archives des Affaires Etrangères (Foreign Affairs Archive), Paris – La Courneuve (AAE).

Archives nationales de France (National Archives of France), Paris (ANF).

Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), Paris (BNF).