‘Chimeres, monopoles and stratagems’: French Exiles in the Spanish Netherlands during the Thirty Years' War

Abstract

In July 1631 Marie de' Medici, the queen mother of Louis XIII of France, arrived in the Spanish Netherlands as an exile. After passing through various towns she made her entry to the capital of Brussels in the company of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. According to the queen mother's official apologist, Jean Puget de la Serre, the spectacular event was marked with the pomp and ceremony reserved for a visiting sovereign: as they entered the city, the bells of the city churches were rung, the local elites turned out in regiments of civic guards and confraternities, and formal speeches were made in Marie de' Medici's honour. Standing before the queen mother, the Chevalier and Pensionary of Brussels welcomed her to Brussels as the first queen-consort of France since Eleanor, elder sister of Charles V and second wife of Francis I, had visited the city nearly a century before.1Marie de' Medici's self-imposed exile deepened the rift within the French royal family that had already been exposed following the Day of Dupes (10-11 March 1630), and which was worsened by the tensions between Louis XIII and his younger brother, Gaston d'Orleans, who himself had left France for Lorraine. Attention from around the courts of Europe understandably focused at this crucial political juncture on the divided Bourbon House. Apparently surprised by Marie de' Medici's arrival, the Infanta Isabella wrote to her nephew, Philip IV, expressing her uncertainty about the wider consequences of the queen mother's exile and of Gaston's attempts to seek aid from Spain, while the papal inter-nuncio in Brussels went further in reporting the fears expressed that Richelieu might actually use the exile of the Bourbons as a pretext to attack the Spanish Netherlands.2 In the meantime, the Spanish ambassador to the papal court, Diego Saavedra y Fajardo, reported the concerns felt in Rome over the possibility of renewed Habsburg aggression in Europe in the wake of Bourbon divisions.3The fears of the papal court were not totally unfounded. For the Spanish regime in Madrid, still smarting after the massive setbacks in the recent north Italian war over Mantua and Monferrato, the Bourbon split presented potential opportunities for applying pressure against Richelieu, even though the same concerns about provoking France into open war were again raised.4 In the summer of 1631 the pro-Habsburg Savoyard agent Abbot Alessandro Scaglia travelled to London as extraordinary ambassador of Spain, and while publicly the Spanish offered to mediate between the queen mother, Gaston and Louis XIII, Scaglia carried secret instructions for organising a coalition against Richelieu with England, Savoy and Lorraine in support of the exiled Bourbons.5 To the Count-Duke Olivares, commenting with a typical rhetorical flourish in November 1631 on the state of Spain's fortunes in Europe and Scaglia's mission to Charles I, it seemed 'that the most critical point in current affairs has arrived'.6The split in the Bourbon House and the exile of Louis XIII's mother and brother were of considerable importance both to France and to the wider fortunes of international relations during the Thirty Years' War. Yet while the broad narrative of the episode is generally known, the issues raised by their act of going into exile has received little more than a cursory examination, aside from the disorganised and anecdotal study by the Belgian historian Ernest Gossart, and Paul Henrard's now-dated and limited work on Marie de' Medici.7 Michel Carmona, the queen mother's most recent biographer, affords probably the best treatment of the period, though his book also reveals a relative lack of research in Belgian archives and only scant work on Spanish material, while Georges Dethan has correspondingly neglected Gaston's years in exile in his biography of the prince, effectively picking up the narrative on his return to France in October 1634.8 There is indeed still relatively little scholarly literature in English on the Spanish Netherlands. …