[1677-1679 A.D.]
The administration of Don John was no less deplorable than that of the regent whom he had so criminally supplanted. Occupied in the cares of vengeance, or in providing for his creatures, he feebly opposed the victorious progress of Louis. Valenciennes, Cambray, St. Omer, and other places were speedily reduced: Ypres and Ghent were assailed with equal success; and Puycerda, on the Catalan frontier, yielded about the same time to another French army. Most of these places, however, were restored at the Peace of Nimeguen, September, 1678, of which the most unpopular condition was that Charles should receive the hand of the princess Marie Louise, niece of the French king. That nation had always been regarded with jealousy, it was now hated by the Spaniards. John did not live to witness the solemnisation of the nuptials. The ill success of his government, his haughty behaviour towards the grandees, his persecution of such as belonged rather to their country than to his party, and his tyranny even over the king, rendered him not merely unpopular, but odious. In this state mental anxiety put an end to his life (September 17th, 1679) at the moment his enemies were preparing to hasten his downfall.[96] The queen-dowager returned to court, not indeed to resume her ancient influence, but to assist in the multiplication of intrigues, and, consequently, the perplexities of her imbecile son.[c]
THE FATE OF THE YOUNG QUEEN
[1679-1691 A.D.]
Marriage had come to be one of the political resources of Louis XIV. Another matrimonial alliance, still more important, had been concluded a few months previously. It has been said that Don John of Austria, the uncle and minister of the king of Spain, hoped to find in France a support against his rival, the king’s mother, who was upheld by the court at Vienna. Don John had caused the negotiations undertaken by the queen-mother for uniting the Catholic king with a daughter of the emperor to be broken off, and had solicited for Charles II the hand of Marie Louise of Orléans, a niece of Louis XIV and daughter of the duke of Orléans by his first wife Henrietta of England. It can be imagined with what eagerness this proposition was received, since it was supposed that it would establish the diplomatic preponderance of France at Madrid.
A Spaniard of the Seventeenth Century
The contract was signed on the 30th of August, 1679, to the great joy of Louis XIV, but to the still greater sorrow of the bride. It was only with despair that the poor young girl left the paradise of Versailles to bury herself in the tomb of the Escorial, at the side of that strange husband who was only the shadow of a king, only the shadow of a man. For a whole month she saddened the court and wounded the national susceptibilities of the Spanish ambassadors by the violence of her grief. She seemed to have a presentiment of her sad fate. She had not yet started when the protector she was to meet on the other side of the mountains expired and her natural enemy the queen-mother seized again from the dying hands of Don John the power she had lost. Marie Louise found on foreign soil only long hours of weariness, and implacable persecutions which were terminated by a prolonged agony and perhaps by a crime. She was one of the most pathetic victims of the cruel policy of dynasties. The sacrifice, however, was useless; the young queen acquired no influence at Madrid and, the anti-French policy having gotten the upper hand together with the queen-mother, by the intervention of the prince of Orange, a rapprochement was brought about between Spain and England, the effects of which Louis XIV fought with greater success at Windsor than at the Escorial.[l]
Dunlop[k] gives many details of the journey of the young bride to her imbecile husband. To the natural homesickness so peculiarly characteristic of the French, she added a complete ignorance of the Spanish language and a nature rebellious to the unusual formality of Spanish court etiquette. The royal bridegroom into whose arms she was driven was, as a result of the Austrian marriages, not only weak-minded but also repulsive physically; his chin was so huge that he could not masticate and his tongue so large that his speech could hardly be understood. He was treated as a baby till he was ten and was almost illiterate; his amusements were those of a lascivious boy and he died in the decay of old age when he was not yet forty.
An incident of Charles II’s reign was the renewal of the inquisitional fury, and one of the fêtes of the young queen was the privilege of watching fifty wretches led out to torture and execution; one beautiful Jewess appealed to the queen who was helpless to save her.