Velázquez returned to a crestfallen Philip IV, who promoted him to director of palace spectacles, in which role he redesigned the pantheon of Habsburg coffins at El Escorial* while still painting the now sad, saggy face of the Planet King until he banned more portraits. When Queen Mariana delivered a daughter, Margarita, Velázquez recorded the development of this very Habsburgian child whom Philip called ‘my joy’. Philip gave him the Main Room of his dead heir’s apartments in the Alcázar, where he spent much time and which inspired his
Now Velázquez, finally knighted by the king, produced a different sort of masterpiece. On 7 June 1660, at the Isle of Pheasants on the French border, he stage-managed a marriage – the handover of Philip’s daughter María Teresa to the young French king who would dominate Europe for the next fifty years.
ANNE AND MAZARIN
Louis XIV, aged twenty, could not wait to consummate his marriage,* but he had not wanted to marry at all. He had been tutored in statesmanship and intrigue by his glamorous Habsburg mother Anne and Julio Mazarini, an Italian priest transformed into a professional Frenchman as Cardinal Jules Mazarin.
It was Mazarin who had negotiated the Habsburg marriage. He had been selected and trained by Louis XIII’s minister Cardinal Richelieu, whose far-sighted finesse he shared, to which he added an Italianate flamboyance and shameless venality all his own. On his deathbed Louis XIII had appointed Anne his son’s regent, Mazarin his godfather.
They were the most important people in Louis’s life, and they were almost certainly lovers. In their surviving letters, peppered with secret signs and codes that semaphored love and sex, Mazarin reflects, ‘Never has there been a friendship approaching what I have for you,’ and ‘I am till the last breath ***,’ while the queen, admitting she could not put much in writing, proclaimed, ‘I will always be as I ought to be, whatever happens … a million times till the last breath.’ Their codename for the little king was the Confidant. Unusually for a royal family, Louis was extremely close to his mother, and to her lover, whom he adored like a father. Royalty can never trust their own families; they have to make their own.
Yet as the war against the Habsburgs bled the state, France was hit by five years of turbulence – La Fronde, named after the slings used by the mobs to smash the windows of their enemies – as bad harvests, exorbitant taxes and royal corruption unleashed Bourbon princes, overmighty grandees, Parisian mobs, unpaid soldiers and parlements (the ancient law courts which also registered royal edicts). At its worst, mobs terrified the boy-king who along with his mother and Mazarin was forced to flee Paris. That the Fronde coincided with the execution of Charles I and the enthronement of Cromwell only heightened that terror. The humiliations never left Louis. After Mazarin had fled into temporary exile (accompanied by his most trusted henchman, d’Artagnan), mother and son returned. But when the danger had passed and peace had been signed with Spain, the threesome were reunited.
Louis’s first loves were Mazarin’s nieces (known as the Mazarinettes), Olympe and Marie Mancini, but this rapidly became a problem. His libido was as powerful as his appetite for
When Anne and Mazarin started to negotiate his Spanish marriage,* Louis refused to contemplate it, determined to marry Marie Mancini. ‘Remember I beg you what I had the honour to tell you several times when you asked what you needed to be a great king,’ wrote Mazarin to Louis. ‘It was this: not to be dominated by any passion.’ When Louis sent Marie a puppy with a collar engraved ‘I belong to Marie Mancini’, Mazarin was beside himself. Finally Louis gave her up. ‘You are king,’ she said: ‘you cry and I leave.’ Nine months after his marriage to his cousin María Teresa, a son, the dauphin, was born – but their consanguinity explains why, of their six children, only the first survived beyond the age of fifteen.
