Born in 1638 at the Escorial Palace outside Madrid, Maria Theresa of Spain entered a world of immense power and devastating loss. Her father, Philip IV, ruled the largest colonial empire the world had yet seen, stretching from Mexico to Chile and Argentina. Her mother, Elizabeth of France, was the daughter of Henry IV of France and sister of Louis XIII. But the Spanish royal family was haunted by death.
Of Maria Theresa’s four siblings, only one brother, Baltasar Charles, survived infancy, and he died in 1646 at just sixteen. Her mother had died two years earlier from complications following a miscarriage. With her brother’s passing, the six-year-old Maria Theresa suddenly became heir to the Spanish throne. Her father gave her a strict Catholic education, personally introducing her to politics and history while surrounding her with the splendor of the Spanish court, enriched by American gold and graced by painters like Diego Velázquez.
Yet Philip understood that a sole daughter as heir could destabilize the monarchy. In 1649, he remarried his own niece, fourteen-year-old Mariana of Austria, who eventually gave him a surviving son, Carlos, born in 1661. That half-brother replaced Maria Theresa as heir and would later reign as the tragically inbred Carlos II. To understand what happened to Maria Theresa, one must understand the bitter enmity between Spain and France.
For more than 150 years, the two powers had fought almost continuously. France invaded Italy in 1494, where Spain held vast territories, sparking the Italian Wars that ended in 1559 with Spanish dominance. France then tore itself apart in religious wars, into which Spain intervened. They clashed again on opposite sides of the Thirty Years’ War, where France supported rebellions in Portugal and Catalonia against Spanish rule.
Even after the rest of Europe made peace in 1648, France and Spain kept fighting. By the 1650s, Spain was exhausted, its treasury empty, its empire fraying. On November 7, 1659, the two crowns agreed to the Treaty of the Pyrenees. Spain ceded territory in the Spanish Netherlands to France, and a marriage alliance was arranged to cement the peace: Maria Theresa would marry Louis XIV, King of France.
The treaty was formally signed on June 7, 1660, on the tiny Pheasant Island in the Bidasoa River on the border. There, Maria Theresa met her future husband for the first time. Both were twenty-one, born just five days apart. Louis had been king of France since 1643, when he was not yet five, and he was already signaling his absolutist intentions, presenting himself as God’s chosen ruler.
Maria Theresa was small and plump with fair skin and blonde hair, well within the beauty standards of the time. She had escaped the severe facial deformities that afflicted many Habsburgs, though she had poor teeth from her love of sweets and hot chocolate. Strikingly, she was marrying her double first cousin. Louis’s mother was Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain, Maria Theresa’s grandfather.
Maria Theresa’s mother, Elizabeth, was Louis XIV’s aunt. Both were products of the intense inbreeding among Europe’s royal houses, and their union compounded it. After the formal meeting, Maria Theresa bid her father a heartbreaking farewell, both knowing they would never meet again. Philip reminded her of her new destiny: “You must forget that you were an infanta and remember only that you are queen of France.
” They married on June 9, 1660, at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in French territory, and entered Paris in triumph on August 26, greeted by vast crowds. Maria Theresa became pregnant almost immediately. On November 1, 1661, she gave birth to a son, named Louis after his father, who would live a healthy life. Her subsequent children were far less fortunate.
Two daughters, born in 1662 and 1664, both died after six weeks. A third child, named Maria Theresa after her mother, lived to five before dying of what was believed to be tuberculosis in 1672. Two more sons, born in 1668 and 1672, also died in infancy. Of her six children, only her firstborn survived to adulthood.
While infant mortality was common in the seventeenth century, her losses were especially severe, likely worsened by her deeply inbred lineage. As queen consort, Maria Theresa was shy, charitable, superstitious, and devotedly in love with her husband. She adopted French fashions, participated in balls despite her natural reticence, and spent her free time with her Spanish ladies, her dwarves, her little dogs, and her beloved chocolate. She wore high heels to compensate for her small stature, but was clumsy and often fell.
Her devotion, however, was tested daily. Louis XIV was a serial philanderer who maintained a string of mistresses both in Paris and later at Versailles. Maria Theresa despised many of them and often wept in private, but she never publicly confronted him. To compensate in part for his infidelities, Louis staged performances of comedy, particularly Spanish comedy, which he knew she loved.
She formed a close bond with her mother-in-law, Anne of Austria, herself a Habsburg. With Anne, Maria Theresa could speak Spanish, pray, visit churches, and do charitable works away from the prying eyes of the French court. She affectionately called her “Dia. ” Anne’s death in January 1666 was a devastating blow, removing her key ally and protector.
After that, Louis no longer bothered to hide his affairs. Her other primary role was to mediate relations between France and Spain. Louis XIV was determined to expand his kingdom toward the Rhine, which meant conflict with Spain, which still controlled the Spanish Netherlands, roughly modern-day Belgium, and the Franche-Comté in eastern France. In May 1667, Louis went to war against her native country in the War of Devolution.
The French quickly overran the Spanish Netherlands. By May 1668, peace was patched up, with Spain ceding a large chunk of territory to France. The terms might have been even harsher had Maria Theresa not moderated her husband’s demands. She did not live to be old.
In July 1683, she developed a severe abscess in her armpit. A fever rose, and her physicians resorted to the standard procedure of the time: bloodletting. The incision struck a large vein or artery, and she died on July 30, 1683, at forty-four years old. Her last words were, “Since I have been queen, I have had only one happy day.
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Louis XIV soon privately married one of his long-standing mistresses, though the marriage was never made public and produced no legitimate children. Maria Theresa’s sole surviving child, the Grand Dauphin, remained the only heir to the throne. He died in 1711, failing to outlive his father, who lived until 1715. In the end, it was Maria Theresa’s great-grandson who succeeded as Louis XV.
Maria Theresa’s family line in Spain died out in 1700, when her half-brother Carlos II, ruined by generations of inbreeding, died in his late thirties. When he passed, Philip of Anjou, son of the Grand Dauphin and grandson of Maria Theresa, succeeded as King Philip V of Spain. Her marriage to Louis XIV in 1660 had not only helped cement peace between France and Spain; forty years later, it placed a member of the French royal family on the Spanish throne.