Maria Theresa of Spain

Maria Theresa of Spain: One Happy Day in Twenty-Three Years

She is supposed to have said, dying at forty-four, that since becoming queen she had had only one happy day. Her husband — Louis XIV, the Sun King, the most powerful monarch in Europe — greeted the news of her death with the remark that this was the first trouble she had ever caused him. Within two months he had secretly married one of the women who had displaced her. And yet the Spanish princess whom Versailles files under "timid, patient, naive" ran France for three months in 1672, and it was her bloodline, not his mistresses', that put a Bourbon on the throne of Spain.

Daughter of a Failing Empire

Maria Theresa was born on 10 September 1638 at El Escorial, daughter of Philip IV of Spain and Elisabeth of France. As a Habsburg she was styled Archduchess of Austria; as a Spanish infanta she was raised in the full apparatus of Counter-Reformation piety, under royal governesses and confessors, in the most rigidly ceremonial court in Europe.

Her mother died in 1644, when she was six, and the loss marked her permanently. When her brother Balthasar Charles died in 1646 she became heiress presumptive to the Spanish monarchy — a position she held until her father remarried in 1649 and began producing sons. She spent her childhood, in other words, as the possible inheritor of a global empire, and then as a diplomatic asset.

The Isle of Pheasants

The Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659 ended twenty-four years of Franco-Spanish war, and Maria Theresa was part of the settlement. Her marriage contract bound her to Louis XIV, who was her double first cousin — the two families had been intermarrying for so long that the genealogy folds back on itself. She renounced, for herself and her descendants, all claim to the Spanish succession.

The renunciation had a condition: a dowry of 500,000 écus. Spain never paid it. That unpaid bill became one of the most consequential defaults in European history, because France argued that a renunciation unpaid for was a renunciation void — the legal basis for the War of Devolution of 1667–68, and, eventually, for the Bourbon claim to Spain itself.

She married by proxy at Fuenterrabía on 2 June 1660, met Louis in person on the Isle of Pheasants in the middle of the border river, married him formally at Saint-Jean-de-Luz on 9 June, and entered Paris on 26 August.

A Foreigner at Versailles

The marriage was a diplomatic triumph and a personal disaster. Maria Theresa never mastered French, spoke with a heavy Spanish accent, and could not adapt to the French court's etiquette, which was less rigid than Spain's but far more socially competitive. She withdrew into devotions and card games with her Spanish attendants. Her aunt Anne of Austria, the queen mother, was her protector and confidante until Anne's death in 1666, after which she had no ally of consequence.

Louis's affection lasted about a year. From 1661 he was openly involved with Louise de La Vallière, and thereafter with a succession of mistresses of whom Madame de Montespan was the most prominent and the most painful. He required his wife to accept them as her own attendants — a humiliation that was also policy, since it made the arrangement official. She tried to fight back with spies and sympathetic ladies-in-waiting, and lost. Of Madame de Maintenon, the last and least flamboyant of them, she said with what is either gratitude or heartbreaking resignation: "God has raised up Madame de Maintenon to give me back the heart of the King!"

She bore six children between 1661 and 1672. Five died in infancy or childhood: Anne-Élisabeth at one month, Marie-Anne in infancy, Marie Thérèse of tuberculosis at five, Philippe Charles at three, Louis-François at four months. One survived — Louis, the Grand Dauphin, born 1661, who died in 1711 without ever reigning. She took the work of motherhood seriously, corresponding with Bossuet about the Dauphin's education.

Three Months in Charge

In 1672, with Louis away on campaign in the Franco-Dutch War, the king appointed his wife regent from 23 April to 31 July. It was not a decorative appointment. She administered the state finances, raised troops, received ambassadors and presided over the councils of ministers. Bossuet's verdict is the single most important sentence in her documentary record: "This regency did not last long but served to prove the Queen's ability in business."

She was never given the job again.

Death

On 20 July 1683 she returned from a tour of Burgundy in good health. Within days she had a fever and an abscess under her left arm. A surgeon warned against bleeding her; the physicians bled her anyway. She died on 30 July 1683, aged forty-four.

Why Maria Theresa Is Called a Genius

This is the case where honesty requires saying that the word does not fit, and then identifying what does. There is no evidence that Maria Theresa possessed exceptional intellect, and no contemporary appears to have claimed it. Versailles' own historians describe her as timid, patient, naive, sweet-natured and very pious, and record that she showed no political ambition. She wrote nothing of note, patronised no significant art, influenced no policy. The first full biography of her appeared in 1992 — 309 years after her death — which is itself a measure of how little there was thought to be to say.

The one piece of real evidence points a different way. Given executive power for three months in 1672, she did the job: finances, troop levies, ambassadors, ministerial councils. Bossuet, no flatterer, judged that the regency proved her ability in business. That is a single data point, but it is a contemporary and competent one, and it suggests a woman of ordinary sound judgement who was never permitted to use it — kept ceremonial not because she was incapable but because the court had no use for a capable queen.

The other claim on her significance is not intellectual at all but genetic and legal. Her unpaid dowry and her disputed renunciation were the instruments through which her grandson Philip V took the Spanish throne in 1700, founding the Bourbon dynasty that reigns in Spain today. That is enormous historical consequence attaching to a person, not achievement produced by one. The distinction matters, and inflating it would be a disservice to a woman whose life was in fact mostly endurance.

Legacy

Louis XIV's response to her death — that it was the first trouble she had ever given him — has survived as the epitaph of a marriage, and it is usually quoted against him. It should be. She had been queen of France for twenty-three years, buried five of her six children, and been made to wait on her husband's mistresses. Her line, not his affections, decided the future of Spain.