had been hailed with general approval. Contemporary rumours that Charles wanted to marry her are certainly not true – he was well aware of the use to which his hand in marriage had to be put – but he was much infatuated. Alas for the youthful Prince, the affair was all the more romantic for being Platonic.
When Henrietta Maria suggested that one solution to the royal finances would be to court the famous heiress the Grande Mademoiselle, Charles applied himself to the task with a kind of jolly gaucherie which hardly suggested the budding rake. Altogether he was not regarded as a very polished figure by the French court at this stage. According to Madame de Motteville, even his natural wit was not apparent because he hesitated and stammered (like his father and his uncle Louis XIII ). 6 Unlike King Charles I , King Charles II showed no trace of this disability in later life, except for some nervousness as a public orator – so perhaps much of the stammer was due to adolescent dislike of the circumstances in which he found himself.
Anne-Marie Louise de Montpensier, known as the Grande Mademoiselle, was Charles’ first cousin. Her grandfather, not her father, having been King, she was in reality only a ‘Petit-Enfant de France’, not an ‘Enfant’ like her aunt Henrietta Maria. But the golden glow cast by her Montpensier inheritance tended to make everyone in this period overlook the fact. Louis XIV had no sisters. Anne-Marie Louise rejoiced undisputed in her title of Mademoiselle. With Charles, she formed part of that web of cousinage, the grandchildren of Henri Quatre and Marie de Medici, whose relationships and alliances were to be spun about seventeenth-century Europe: of these grandchildren fourwould ultimately be paired off – Louis XIV and Maria Teresa, child of the French Princess Elisabeth and the King of Spain; Louis’ brother Philippe and Charles’ sister Henriette-Anne. But Charles and Anne-Marie wee not destined to be amongst that happy (or unhappy) number: they shared a birthday on 29 May (although Anne-Marie was three years older) but otherwise did not have a great deal in common.
For an heiress – and the Grande Mademoiselle was not only rich but the greatest heiress in Europe – she was not bad-looking, being tall, blonde and buxom. Physically at least, the Prince of Wales and this daughter of Gaston Duc d’Orléans by his wealthy first wife, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, would have made a splendid couple.
But beneath Anne-Marie’s Amazonian appearance beat a sentimental heart. That again contrasted with quite a shrewd brain. This mixture of shrewdness and sentimentality meant that Anne-Marie put a certain price on her wealth, particularly when courted by an impoverished and exiled young cousin. That price was a properly convincing application of ardour to her conquest.
Weighed in the scales against the possibility of an august destiny, Charles’ clumsy courtship, so evidently spurred on by his mother, made little progress. For one thing, he declared hopelessly that he really could not speak French. So the sweet nothings which Anne-Marie craved, to make her overlook her cavalier’s lack of fortune, remained firmly stuck behind the language barrier. In the meantime, Charles did manage to communicate successfully with Bablon, but she, of course, was no heiress.
Even if Charles had spoken to his cousin with the tongues of men and of angels – in French – it is improbable that that fierce guardian of national interests, Mazarin, would have allowed such a rich prize to pass outside France. The Grande Mademoiselle herself believed that Charles would become a Catholic to marry her – truly a delusion. That step would be quite fatal to the salvation of the English monarchy, as even the unwise Lord Jermyn pointed out. But the original stumbling-block to the project was Charles’ inability to apply himself to the main chance by the use of his romantic talents.
Like Madame de Motteville at the
When Henrietta Maria suggested that one solution to the royal finances would be to court the famous heiress the Grande Mademoiselle, Charles applied himself to the task with a kind of jolly gaucherie which hardly suggested the budding rake. Altogether he was not regarded as a very polished figure by the French court at this stage. According to Madame de Motteville, even his natural wit was not apparent because he hesitated and stammered (like his father and his uncle Louis XIII ). 6 Unlike King Charles I , King Charles II showed no trace of this disability in later life, except for some nervousness as a public orator – so perhaps much of the stammer was due to adolescent dislike of the circumstances in which he found himself.
Anne-Marie Louise de Montpensier, known as the Grande Mademoiselle, was Charles’ first cousin. Her grandfather, not her father, having been King, she was in reality only a ‘Petit-Enfant de France’, not an ‘Enfant’ like her aunt Henrietta Maria. But the golden glow cast by her Montpensier inheritance tended to make everyone in this period overlook the fact. Louis XIV had no sisters. Anne-Marie Louise rejoiced undisputed in her title of Mademoiselle. With Charles, she formed part of that web of cousinage, the grandchildren of Henri Quatre and Marie de Medici, whose relationships and alliances were to be spun about seventeenth-century Europe: of these grandchildren fourwould ultimately be paired off – Louis XIV and Maria Teresa, child of the French Princess Elisabeth and the King of Spain; Louis’ brother Philippe and Charles’ sister Henriette-Anne. But Charles and Anne-Marie wee not destined to be amongst that happy (or unhappy) number: they shared a birthday on 29 May (although Anne-Marie was three years older) but otherwise did not have a great deal in common.
For an heiress – and the Grande Mademoiselle was not only rich but the greatest heiress in Europe – she was not bad-looking, being tall, blonde and buxom. Physically at least, the Prince of Wales and this daughter of Gaston Duc d’Orléans by his wealthy first wife, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, would have made a splendid couple.
But beneath Anne-Marie’s Amazonian appearance beat a sentimental heart. That again contrasted with quite a shrewd brain. This mixture of shrewdness and sentimentality meant that Anne-Marie put a certain price on her wealth, particularly when courted by an impoverished and exiled young cousin. That price was a properly convincing application of ardour to her conquest.
Weighed in the scales against the possibility of an august destiny, Charles’ clumsy courtship, so evidently spurred on by his mother, made little progress. For one thing, he declared hopelessly that he really could not speak French. So the sweet nothings which Anne-Marie craved, to make her overlook her cavalier’s lack of fortune, remained firmly stuck behind the language barrier. In the meantime, Charles did manage to communicate successfully with Bablon, but she, of course, was no heiress.
Even if Charles had spoken to his cousin with the tongues of men and of angels – in French – it is improbable that that fierce guardian of national interests, Mazarin, would have allowed such a rich prize to pass outside France. The Grande Mademoiselle herself believed that Charles would become a Catholic to marry her – truly a delusion. That step would be quite fatal to the salvation of the English monarchy, as even the unwise Lord Jermyn pointed out. But the original stumbling-block to the project was Charles’ inability to apply himself to the main chance by the use of his romantic talents.
Like Madame de Motteville at the
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