On this day, it is reported that Prince Charles of Lorraine has been appointed to go and meet the Queen of Spain at Étampes, and escort her to the Château de Vincennes.
Commentary:
The Queen of Spain is Louise-Élisabeth d’Orléans, one of the many daughters of the late Regent. She is the widow of King Louis I, who died last summer.
Pictured: Louise-Élisabeth d’Orléans (1709-1742), Grand Daughter of France by birth and Queen of Spain by marriage, afterwards Queen Dowager, painted by Ranc in 1724.
Their reign only lasted 7 months and they had no children. Louis’s father, Philip V, had abdicated in his favour early in 1724. He had a notion of positioning himself as his nephew Louis XV’s successor since the boy king is unmarried and reputed to have a weak constitution. Philip resumed the Spanish throne after his son’s death.
Pictured: Louis I (1707-1724), King of Spain from January to August of 1724.
Louis XV will soon marry an exiled, penniless Polish princess called Marie Leczinska and they will go on to have a healthy son who lives to adulthood, thus ending Philip V’s expectations of becoming King of France.
Pictured: Marie Leczinska/Maria Leszczyńska (1703-1768) around the time of her marriage.
Marie has only recently come into the picture, however. Louis XV was previously engaged to Philip V’s daughter Marie-Anne-Victoire, who had actually come to live at the French court in preparation for their eventual marriage, which was to take place once she reached puberty. Louise-Élisabeth d’Orléans, in turn, was sent off to Spain with one of her younger sisters to marry the future Louis I and his half-brother the Infante Charles, respectively. When Louis XV’s chief minister, the Duc de Bourbon, decided earlier this year to break Marie-Anne-Victoire’s engagement to his master, supposedly because she was too young but really because he wanted a bride beholden to himself, she was sent back to Spain. In retaliation, Philip V has now sent Louise-Élisabeth and her sister, whose marriage never took place, back to France.
Pictured: Louis XV with a portrait of Marie-Anne-Victoire of Spain (1718-1781), as painted by Alexis Simon Belle. She will later marry the future King Joseph of Portugal.
Louise-Élisabeth will initially stay at the château of Vincennes outside of Paris, but only while her permanent residence in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris is made ready for her. She will live out the remaining 18 years of her life there.
Pictured: The Pavillon de la Reine at Vincennes, my own photo taken in 2020. The building is named not for Louise-Elisabeth, but for her paternal great-grandmother, Anne d’Autriche.
If you have questions that I have not addressed in the commentary, please ask in the comments.
The marriage between Louis and Louise-Élisabeth was not apparently a happy one. Spanish accounts say that she behaved extravagantly and that she refused to live together with her husband - but maybe it was gossip intended to criticize the manipulation Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese exerted from the shadows on their son from their "retirement" in the palace of La Granja, not too different from Louis XIV's control on Philip himself during the first years of his reign.
Leszczinska’s here now. Looking good.
But, although this hardly needs saying, what a horror the marriage market must have been. Not just here, but across all the Courts of Europe.