A Queen Mother in Exile: Marie De Médicis in the Spanish Netherlands and England, 1631–41

Abstract

Marie de Medicis (1575–1642), daughter of Grand-Duke Francesco I of Tuscany and Archduchess Joanna, and the queen consort of Henri IV of France, was widowed on 14 May 1610 following the assassination of her Bourbon husband. For the next four years, until September 1614, she acted as regent of France on behalf of her elder son, Louis XIII, but thereafter the relationship became increasingly problematic, culminating in the fall in 1617 of her favourite, Concino Concini, and her temporary internal exile at Blois. During the 1620s, when Cardinal Richelieu assumed power as Louis’s creature, her alienation from her elder son became still more pronounced because of her growing hostility to the Cardinal-Minister’s policies and his successful working relationship with the king. After she failed to oust the cardinal through a court coup, more famously known as the Day of Dupes (11–12 November 1630), she withdrew from court, first to internal exile at Compiegne. In July 1631 she slipped out of the French kingdom to self-imposed exile abroad, never to return. Between 1631 and the autumn of 1638 she was in the Spanish Netherlands; after passing through the Low Countries, she crossed the Channel to England, where she remained until the summer of 1641. Returning to the Continent, she passed once again through the Low Countries on her way to the imperial city of Cologne where, on 3 July 1642, she died.