At length, on the night of 21st January, Valenzuela took fright at some voices near, and foolishly let himself down by his twisted sheets from the window of his safe retreat; and, though one sentry let him go, and the monks made desperate attempts to keep him hidden, he was captured on the 22nd January and carried with every circumstance of ignominy to close confinement in Don Juan’s fortress of Consuegra; then after terrible sufferings and stripped of all his honours and possessions, he was imprisoned in Manila, and afterwards taken to Mexico to die; whilst his unfortunate wife, treated with atrocious brutality by Toledo, was reduced to beg from door to door for charity, until her troubles drove her mad.[[277]] No sooner was Valenzuela safe behind the bars at Consuegra than Don Juan of Austria entered Madrid in state on the 23rd January, acclaimed by the populace as the saviour of Spain, and welcomed by the King as the heaven-sent minister who was to make his reign brilliant and successful. Don Juan’s vengeance knew no limit, as his soul knew no generosity. Whatever may have been Mariana’s faults as a Queen of Spain, or her errors as a diplomatist, the ignominy to which she was now subjected by order of her son, at the instance of Don Juan, shows the lack of generosity of the latter and the miserable weakness of the former. Mariana’s turn was to come again by and bye, but with her banishment to Toledo her life as ruling Queen of Spain came to an end. She lived nearly twenty years afterwards, but her vicissitudes during that time may be told more fittingly in connection with the lives of her two successors, the wives of her afflicted son.

BOOK V
I
MARIE LOUISE OF ORLEANS

With Mariana, closely watched in her convent at Toledo, and all her friends exiled from Court, Don Juan of Austria reigned supreme. For years he had been clamouring for reform, and holding up as a terrible example of the results of mis-government the utter prostration that had seized upon the nation. This was his chance, and he missed it; for he, whom a whole people had acclaimed as the strong man that was to redeem Spain from the sins and errors of the past, proved in power to be a jealous vindictive trifler, incapable of great ideas or statesmanlike action. Every supporter of the Queen-Mother, from the highest to the lowest, was made to feel the persecution of Don Juan; letters from Toledo were opened, spies listened at every corner, and violated the sanctity of every home, in the anxiety of the Prince to discover plots against him. His pride exceeded all bounds, and most of his time was occupied in intrigues to secure for himself the treatment due to a royal prince of legitimate birth.

Whilst Don Juan was engaged in these trifles and equally futile government measures, such as endeavouring by decree to make the courtiers dress in the French fashion instead of Spanish, the taxes were as heavy as before, the prices of food higher than ever, the administration remained unreformed, and the law was still contemned: the Spanish troops were being beaten by the French in Catalonia for lack of support, and King Louis still occupied Sicily. Don Juan’s own supporters, too, soon got tired of him when they saw that he was grudging of rewards, even to them; and pasquins and pamphlets rained against him and in favour of the Queen-Mother. The latter and the imperial ambassador had, before the coming of Don Juan, betrothed the King to his niece the Archduchess Marie Antoinette, aged nine, the daughter of the Emperor; as if the miserable Charles himself had not been a sufficient warning against further consanguineous marriages in the house of Austria: but Don Juan promptly put an end to that arrangement, and proposed to marry Charles to a little Portuguese Infanta of similar age. Peace was now an absolute necessity to all Europe. The pourparlers between the powers at Nimeguen had already lasted two years, and ended in an arrangement between Holland and France, in which Spain was left out. Louis could then exact his own terms; and, as usual, they were crushingly hard on Spain, which lost some of the richest cities in Flanders and all the Franche Comté (September 1678). But it was peace, and the rejoicing of the overburdened Spanish people was pathetic to witness.

Charles was seventeen years of age, and already his country was speculating eagerly upon his marriage; whilst his degeneracy and weakness aroused hopes and fears of what might happen if he died without issue. According to the will of Philip IV., the succession fell to the Empress Margaret, daughter of Mariana; but the French King, who from the first had made light of his wife’s renunciation of her Spanish birthright, and Maria Theresa herself, were not inclined to let her claims go by default. Soon the gossips in Madrid began to whisper that a French Queen Consort, a descendant of the house which had given them their beloved Isabel of Bourbon, would suit Spain best, and Don Juan himself was not unwilling to listen to such a suggestion; for, in any case, the King must marry, and a French match would be a blow against Mariana and the Austrian connection. The Duke of Medina Celi, Don Juan’s principal henchman, slept, as sumiller de corps, in the King’s room; and it was he who first broached to Charles the idea of a French wife. He was, the Duke reminded him, a grown man now, and the Austrian Archduchess of ten was too young for him. The Princess of Portugal, he said, would never be consented to by the French, and she was also too youthful: but there was at St. Cloud the most lovely Princess ever seen, only a year younger than himself, who was a bride for the greatest king in the world.[[278]]

Her name was Marie Louise, and she was the daughter of the brother of King Louis, the Duke of Orleans, by Henriette of England, that beautiful daughter of Charles I. who had been so beloved in the country of her adoption. Maria Theresa took care that miniatures of her lovely niece should go to the Spanish Court, and when one of them was brought to the notice of the young King, his adolescent passion was inflamed at once, and the Marquis de los Balbeses, who had represented Spain at the conference of Nimeguen, was instructed by Don Juan to proceed to Paris and ask King Louis for the hand of his niece.

Marie Louise was a spoilt beauty of the most refined and gayest court in Europe. She had when a child lost her English mother; but every body was in love with her, from King Louis downward; and it had long been understood that she might marry the Dauphin, with whom she was on the tenderest terms of affection. But the treaties of Nimeguen had transformed the face of Europe, and Louis had other views for his son, whilst the need for securing a footing in Spain during the critical period approaching was evident. So, when Balbeses came to Paris with unusual state, and Saint Germain and Saint Cloud were a blaze of magnificence to receive him, the girl’s heart sank; for with her precocious intelligence she guessed the meaning of the whispers and curious glances that greeted her every appearance in the ceremonies in honour of the King of Spain’s ambassador.

She and the Dauphin were deeply in love with each other, and had been so since childhood; and it was like a sentence of death for the beautiful girl with the burnished copper-brown hair and flashing eyes, to learn that she was to be the bride of the long-faced, pallid boy, with the monstrous jaw and dull stare, in his gloomy palace far away from brilliant Versailles, and from her own home at Saint Cloud. When her father, the Duke of Orleans, and afterwards King Louis himself, gravely told her the honour that was in store for her, she implored them in an agony of passionate tears to save her from such a fate. To her stepmother, Charlotte of Bavaria, to the Queen Maria Theresa, to the King, she appealed on her knees, again and again, to let her stay in France, where she was so happy; and not to send her far away amongst people she did not love. She was told that her duty was to France; and Colbert, by the order of King Louis, drew up a serious State paper for the instruction of the frightened girl in the manner that French interests might be served by her as Queen of Spain.

The fine pearl necklace, worth a hundred thousand crowns, given to her by King Louis, the magnificent diamonds brought by the Duke of Pastrana,[[279]] as a present to her from her future husband, the title of Majesty, ostentatiously given to her as soon as preliminaries were arranged, the fine dresses and jewels, and the new deference with which she was surrounded, only deepened the girl’s grief. Her heart grew hard and her spirit reckless when she understood that, regardless of her own feelings, she was to be a sacrifice: and, as the pompous ceremony of her marriage by proxy approached, she became outwardly calm, and more proudly beautiful than ever. On the 30th August 1679, as the new Queen was led by her father on one hand and the Dauphin she loved on the other, into the principal saloon at Fontainebleau for the formal betrothal to the Prince of Conti, representing the King of Spain, all the Court was enraptured at her peerless loveliness. Her train, seven yards long, of cloth of gold, was borne by princesses of the blood; and the magnificence that the Roi Soleil loved so well found its centre in the jewels that blazed over the young Princess who was being sacrificed for France.

It would be tedious to recount the splendour of the betrothal, and marriage the next day, 31st August,[[280]] but when, after the ceremony with Conti that made Marie Louise the wife of Charles II., she left the chapel in her royal crown, her purple velvet robe lined with ermine and covered with golden fleurs de lis, and her flashing gems enveloping her in light, King Louis and his Queen, between whom she walked in the procession, praised and soothed her as the most perfect princess and queen in the world. At the State concert and ball that night, and at the ceremonies of the morrow, Marie Louise was radiant in her loveliness, and shed no tears, for she was steeled now to the sacrifice, and determined thenceforward to get as much sensuous joy out of life as she could, in spite of the fate that had befallen her.