The Ethiopian and the Elephant? Queen Louise Marie Gonzaga and Queenship in an Elective Monarchy,

The Ethiopian and the Elephant? Queen Louise Marie Gonzaga and Queenship in an Elective Monarchy, 1645 1667 At five thirty on the morning of Tuesday 10 May 1667, as another Polish- Lithuanian Sejm bickered its way to its contentious and ultimately inconclusive climax, Queen Louise Marie Gonzaga of Poland-Lithuania died in her apartments in the Villa Regia in Warsaw at the age of 55. Her death was sudden and unexpected, if not altogether a surprise: her health had been poor for some time, but she had rallied in recent weeks. On the Sunday, she had been active, strolling in her beloved gardens overlooking the Vistula, eating supper with her husband, King John Casimir, the French ambassador, Pierre de Bonzy, Bishop of Bezières, and other dignitaries. Accounts differ as to the circumstances of her death: according to Bonzy, she was taken ill at her midday meal on the Monday, coughing up blood; other versions relate how she had collapsed during a heated exchange with the Lithuanian grand hetman, Michał Kazimierz Pac, who had told her that he was no longer willing to support the campaign for the election of a successor to John Casimir vivente rege (in the king s lifetime). Whatever the truth, she was taken to the small palace of the Villa Regia, a kilometre from the Royal Castle where the Sejm was in session, but refused to allow word to be sent to her husband, who was sitting in the Senate. The issue before it was controversial the problem of compensation for exiles who had owned estates in the lands ceded to Muscovy in the Treaty of Andrusovo, signed in January and the session was to last until eleven o clock in the evening. Later, after a period of unconsciousness, the Queen rallied Robert Frost is Burnett Fletcher Chair of History at the University of Aberdeen. Slavonic and East European Review, 91, 4, 2013

788 sufficiently to take confession at midnight and to tell her ladies-in-waiting and the sisters of her favourite Order of the Visitation, who were in attendance, that she felt better. By five o clock, however, her condition had worsened: extreme unction was administered and word was sent to the King, spending the night in the Royal Castle after the late ending of the Sejm session. He was so upset at the news that he set out on foot as dawn broke, not even waiting for the arrival of his carriage. He was too late. Told on the staircase by Bonzy that Louise Marie had died minutes earlier, he was, according to one report, overwhelmed with grief and shock, letting his stick fall from his hand as he hurried to his wife s bedchamber, where, sitting with a stricken countenance he spent a long time silently contemplating her body from which the soul had fled. 1 Just over a year after Louise Marie s death, John Casimir abdicated his throne, leaving Poland forever to become abbot of St Germain-des-Près on a pension from Louis XIV. It is somehow appropriate that a man whose reign had been defined perhaps more than any other king of Poland- Lithuania by his queen should die five years later in Nevers, in the castle in which she had been born in 1611. For Louise Marie played a central role in the political turbulence of the last decade of John Casimir s reign, which culminated in the impeachment of Grand Marshal Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski in 1664 and the rokosz (rebellion) in 1665 66 that it provoked. It was the Queen s insistence on pursuing a campaign for the election vivente rege of a French candidate to the Polish throne despite its rejection by the Sejm in 1661 62 which had brought civil war and left the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania teetering on the edge of a political abyss. 2 1 Particular-Schreiben, auß Warschau vom 13. May, Den Todt, oder das Absterben der Polnischen Königin betreffende. Auß dem Polnischen verdeutschet, 1667 (unpaginated); Jan Antoni Chrapowicki, Diariusz, ed. Andrzej Rachuba and Tadeusz Wasilewski, 2 vols, Warsaw, 1978 88, 2, p. 318; Stefania Ochmann-Staniszewska, Sejm Rzeczypospolitej za panowania Jana Kazimierza Wazy. Prawo dokryna praktyka, 2 vols, Wrocław, 2000, 1, p. 485; Zofia Libiszowska, Żona dwóch Wazów, Warsaw, 1963, p. 233; Maciej Matwijów, Ostatnie sejmy przed abdykacją Jana Kazimierza 1667 i 1668, Wrocław, 1992, p. 81; Witold Kłaczewski, Abdykacja Jana Kazimierza. Społeczeństwo szlacheckie wobec kryzysu politycznego lat 1667 1668, Lublin, 1993, pp. 62 63, 279; Konrad Bobiatyński, Michał Kazimierz Pac. Wojewoda wileński, hetman wielki litewski, Warsaw, 2008, 189 90. Some secondary sources suggest 10.30 am as the time of death, but the earlier time is confirmed in the contemporary accounts of the Brandenburg ambassador Hoverbeck and of Bonzy, who was present towards the end: Hoverbeck to Elector Frederick William, Warsaw, 10 May 1667, Urkunden und Actenstücke zur Geschichte des Kurfürsten Friedrich Wilhelms von Brandenburg, 19 vols, Berlin and Leipzig, 1864 1906, 12, p. 334; Bonzy to Louis XIV, Warsaw, 11 May 1667, Polsko-Francuskie stosunki w XVII wieku, 1664 1667, ed. Kazimierz Waliszewski, Cracow, 1889, no. 207, pp. 298 99. 2 The most complete account of the last years of John Casimir s reign is still to be found

QUEENSHIP IN AN ELECTIVE MONARCHY 1645 67 789 The political turmoil of the 1660s was a direct consequence of the royal government s determined attempt to reform the Commonwealth s political system, whose flaws had been pitilessly exposed in the aftermath of the great Cossack rebellion that had engulfed its southern Ukrainian palatinates after 1648. Its decentralized, consensual political system struggled to cope as the astute Cossack leader, Bohdan Khmel nyt skyi, exploited widespread peasant resistance to the rapid expansion of serfdom in the Ukrainian territories in the 1640s, and secured diplomatic and military support from neighbouring powers: first the Crimean Tatars, and then, in a move that was to initiate a decisive shift in the geopolitics of eastern Europe, from Tsar Alexis of Muscovy at Pereiaslav in 1654. The dramatic collapse of Lithuanian resistance in the face of the Muscovite invasion later that year deepened the Commonwealth s internal political crisis and provoked a Swedish invasion in the summer of 1655 that temporarily brought it to its knees. John Casimir was widely blamed for the Swedish attack on account of his refusal to surrender his claim to the Swedish throne. When the Wielkopolskan levy, the Lithuanian grand hetman, Janusz Radziwiłł and his supporters, and then the main Polish army surrendered to the Swedes between July and October 1655, John Casimir and Louise Marie were forced to take temporary refuge in Silesia. They returned in early 1656 to rally opposition as the implications of the Swedish and Musovite victories became clear. They constructed at considerable cost an alliance with the Austrian Habsburgs, Brandenburg and Denmark which forced the Swedes to the negotiating table and ultimately produced peace at Oliva in 1660. Although Alexis, alarmed at the initial Swedish successes and seduced by a promise of his election to the Polish throne, agreed a truce in 1656, war with Muscovy resumed in 1660. Despite the expulsion of the Muscovites from most of Lithuania by 1665, however, the failure to solve the Cossack problem after Khmel nyts kyi s death in 1657 meant that the Commonwealth was forced to sign a compromise peace at Andrusovo in 1667, in which Muscovy acquired the Ukrainian lands on the left bank of the Dnieper and was granted Kyiv for three years. Kyiv was never returned, as the Commonwealth s internal problems rendered it incapable of pursuing an assertive foreign policy. The failure to crush the Cossacks after 1648 placed unprecedented strains on its political system. In 1652, as the Sejm became ever more difficult to manage, the in Wiktor Czermak, Ostatnie lata Jana Kazimierza, ed. Adam Kersten, Warsaw, 1971, a collection of articles originally published in the 1880s and 1890s.

790 principle of unanimity that traditionally governed its debates saw the recognition of its logical extension by which the objection of one envoy was deemed sufficient to prevent the Sejm reaching a conclusion. Thus was born the notorious liberum veto; since all legislation including taxation was lost in such circumstances, the breaking of Sejms in 1652 and 1654 made the effective conduct of war all but impossible, and played a significant part in the collapse of 1654 55. 3 It was against this turbulent background that Louise Marie emerged as a prominent and effective political operator. She was certainly a remarkable character. Born in 1611, she grew up at the court of Louis XIII of France. As an adolescent she lived through the War of the Mantuan Succession (1628 31) which established her father Charles as duke of Mantua and Montferrat. Remaining in France, where she survived two scandals, the first when Louis XIII s brother, the Duke of Orléans, fell for and wanted to marry her; the second involving Louis s erstwhile favourite, Cinq-Mars, executed in 1642, who was also supposed to be in love with her. In 1646, at the age of 35, with her youthful beauty fading and her waistline thickening, she married John Casimir s elder brother Władysław IV (1632 48) after he, frustrated by the failure of the Habsburgs to offer Poland-Lithuania any reward for its diplomatic support during the Thirty Years War, abandoned the Vasa dynasty s traditional Austrian alliance to move closer to France. The marriage was not a success. At their first meeting Władysław, who had been shown the obligatory flattering portraits, did not invite Louise Marie to rise after she knelt before him, remarking loudly to de Brégy, the French ambassador: so this is the beauty of whose miracles you told me so much. His new queen was, however, mature enough and strong enough to overcome this inauspicious start. Her private wealth she had inherited the Gonzaga possessions in France on her father s death in 1637 helped considerably. In 1646 she lent Władysław the colossal sum of 800,000 złoties to raise troops for his abortive plans for a Turkish war, in return for which he granted her leases on royal land and a substantial degree of influence over appointments to office. It meant that she was soon exercising considerable informal influence through patronage. The bloated and dropsical Władysław was already a sick man. In May 1648 he died unexpectedly at his hunting lodge at Merecz in Lithuania, just after learning of the outbreak of the Cossack revolt. Within days, 3 For the Commonwealth s collapse and recovery, and the origins of the campaign for an election vivente rege, see Robert I. Frost, After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War, 1655 1660, Cambridge, 1993.

QUEENSHIP IN AN ELECTIVE MONARCHY 1645 67 791 the Cossacks had destroyed the Polish army at the battles of Zhovti Vody and Korsun; during the turbulent interregnum that followed, Louise Marie played a significant role. She had met Władysław s younger brother John Casimir during the extraordinary episode of his arrest in 1638 by the French while en route to Spain to take up the position of viceroy of Portugal; she now supported his candidacy over that of his younger brother, Charles Ferdinand, Bishop of Breslau and Płock. Louise Marie was in a strong position, since the Commonwealth s perilous situation meant that it was incapable of repaying the loans she had made to Władysław, or of honouring her marriage contract. The obvious solution was for her to marry the new king; after John Casimir s successful election in November, a papal dispensation was secured, and the couple were married in May 1649. Louise Marie s influence only strengthened after her second marriage. Her involvement in appointments gave her political influence and provided a good income: the practice was worth some 200,000 zloties per annum to her under Władysław, while the price of office rose steadily after 1648. In 1652 Stefan Koryciński paid 100,000 złoties for the vice-chancellorship, a position that had cost his disgraced predecessor, Hieronim Radziejowski, half this amount two years earlier. 4 Louise Marie s growing influence over appointments has traditionally been seen as but one aspect of her domination of her second husband. John Casimir has not, on the whole, secured the approval of historians, though he appears in Henryk Sienkiewicz s famous trilogy of novels as the epitome of wise kingship. Described by the Queen s secretary, Pierre des Noyers, as being unable to apply himself to anything, and having never read a book to the end in his life, he has been presented by generations of historians as an indolent and capricious melancholic who, according to des Noyers, preferred to spend time on his own, or among his familiers, who were all of his nature; that is to say people without spirit. 5 John Casimir s subservience to his energetic and intelligent wife was most famously depicted by Wawrzyniec 4 Zbigniew Wójcik, Jan Kazimierz Waza, Wrocław, 1997, p. 82; Kazimierz Przyboś, Finanse królewskie a ceremoniał na dworze Władysława IV, in Mariusz Markiewicz and Ryszard Skowron (eds), Theatrum Ceremoniale na dworze książąt i królów polskich, Cracow, 1999, pp. 267 75 (p. 269); Tadeusz Wasilewski, Ostatni Waza na polskim tronie, Katowice, 1984, p. 123; Adam Kersten, Hieronim Radziejowski. Studium władzy i opozycji, Warsaw, 1988, p. 225. 5 Lettres du Pierre des Noyers, secrétaire de la reine de Pologne Marie-Louise de Gonzague [...] (à Ismaël Bouillaud) pour servir à l histoire de Pologne et du Suède de 1655 à 1659, ed. Erazm Rykaczewski, Berlin, 1859, p. 446.

792 Rudawski, royal secretary and canon of Warmia, who, in a resonant phrase which is routinely cited, claimed that Louise Marie ruled her husband like a small Ethiopian rules his elephant. 6 It was not an isolated view. The contemporary chronicler Joachim Jerlicz talked of how the Queen led her husband by the nose like a bear, 7 while the Austrian ambassador Franz Lisola observed in 1659 that at court, the all-powerful Queen rules ; having won the King for her plans, she directs him as she wishes. 8 Whether or not one can accept such accounts at face value, as many historians have, Louise Marie s prominence in the politics of John Casimir s reign is undeniable. It is the more remarkable because the elective monarchy of Poland-Lithuania left little room for queens consort to play any political role at all. This is not an issue that has attracted attention in the growing literature on queenship in medieval and early modern Europe, most of which, inevitably, has been devoted to the many queens who, through the vagaries of royal succession, came to rule over states in which the Salic Law did not operate, while the contingencies that brought successive female rulers to the thrones of Castile and England in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the lively debate concerning gynecocracy the exercise of political power by women that they provoked has also been the subject of sustained analysis. 9 Recently, however, an increasing amount of attention has been given to the role not of queens regnant, but of queens consort. 10 This interest, fuelled by a growing awareness of the 6 Laurentius Rudavius [Wawrzyniec Rudawski], Historiarum Poloniae ab excessu Vladislai IV ad Pacem Olivensem usque Annales regnante Ioanne Casimiro, Poloniarum Sueciaeque Rege, ab anno MDCXLVIII usque ad annum MDCLX, Warsaw and Leipzig, 1755, p. 398. 7 Latopisiec Joachima Jerlicza, 2 vols, ed. Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki, Warsaw, 1853, 2, p. 116. 8 Quoted by Wójcik, Jan Kazimierz, p. 179. 9 For good introductions to the vast literature on queens regnant and the contemporary debate on female power, see Sharon J. Jansen, The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe, New York, 2002; idem. Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe, New York, 2008; Louise Fradenburg (ed.), Women and Sovereignity, Edinburgh, 1992; Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock (eds), Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, New York, 2010; Sarah Duncan, Mary I: Gender, Power and Ceremony in the Reign of England s first Queen, New York, 2012; Anne McLaren, Political Culture in England in the Reign of Elizabeth I, Cambridge, 1999; David A. Boruchoff (ed.), Isabel la Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays, London, 2003; Barbara F. Weissberger, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Authority, Minneapolis, MN, 2004; Bethany Arram, Juana the Mad: Dynasty and Sovereignty in Renaissance Europe, Baltimore, MD and London, 2005. 10 Clarissa Campbell Orr, Introduction, in Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Europe, 1660 1815, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 1 15.

QUEENSHIP IN AN ELECTIVE MONARCHY 1645 67 793 importance of informal structures in particular courts and patronage networks in early modern systems of power, has revealed much about the surprisingly prominent role that queens could play in politics. 11 The vast majority of these studies, however, are based on assumptions derived from the study of hereditary monarchies. Yet Poland had effectively been an elective monarchy since 1382, if not since 1370, while at the Warsaw Sejm of 1563 64 the childless Sigismund August, the last Jagiellonian monarch in the direct male line, disinherited his sisters and their descendants by assigning his hereditary rights to Lithuania to the Crown of Poland in order to advance the cause of closer union, which was achieved at Lublin in 1569. 12 From 1572, the year of Sigismund August s death, all the noble citizens of the new Commonwealth claimed the right of free election viritim (in person), thereby establishing the most radical elective monarchy in Europe. The establishment of fully elective monarchy fundamentally altered the position of Polish queens. For, as studies of queenship make clear, much of the power of queens consort derived from their dynastic role within hereditary monarchies, as custodians of the interests of heirs to the throne, which they often had to defend against the rapacious ambitions of sundry male members of the royal family. Thus, even if the Salic Law operated in France, Catherine de Medici, Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria all exercised not just power, but legal authority, during their periods as regents for their sons. It was not uncommon for queens consort to act as ad hoc regents for shorter or longer periods when their husbands were away travelling, fighting or hunting. 13 In Sweden, for example, although Hedwig Eleanora, wife of Charles X, had to share power with a regency 11 Apart from the essays in Campbell Orr s collection, see John C. Parsons (ed.), Medieval Queenship, New York, 1993; Anne J. Duggan (ed.), Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, Woodbridge, 1997; Liz Oakley-Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson (eds), The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern, Dublin, 2009; Theresa Earenfight (ed.), Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, Aldershot, 2005; idem. The King s Other Body: Maria of Castile and the Crown of Aragon, Philadelphia, PA, 2010; Pauline Matarasso, Queen s Mate: Three Women of Power in France on the Eve of the Renaissance, Aldershot, 2001; Fiona Downie, She is but a Woman: Queenship in Scotland 1424 1463, Edinburgh, 2006; Joanna Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445 1503, Oxford, 2003; Kavita Mudan Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre and Historiography, 1440 1627, New York, 2012. 12 Volumina Constitutionum, (hereafter, VC), 3 vols, Warsaw, 2005 10, 2/1, p. 130. 13 See, for example, the cases of the otherwise politically marginalized Habsburg consorts Eleanore, wife of Leopold I, and Elizabeth Christine, wife of his second son, Charles VI: Charles Ingrao and Andrew Thomas, Piety and Power: The Empresses- Consort of the High Baroque, in Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship, pp. 125 26.

794 council in the periods when she served as regent for her son, Charles XI, and grandson, Charles XII, the long absences in particular of her grandson from court gave her considerable political influence as the guardian of the dynasty s interests in what, after 1680, was an absolute monarchy. 14 Even when queens fell out with their husbands, or were marginalized by them, their position could be strengthened by their construction of a reversionary interest around their sons. If it was only in Russia that political conditions twice allowed queens consort to seize the ultimate prize of the throne itself, with the accession of Catherine I in 1725 and the coup mounted by Catherine II in 1762, their position within the dynasty could afford them considerable influence and power. The dynamics of power in the elective monarchy of Poland-Lithuania were very different. Before 1572, the hereditary claims maintained by the Jagiellons in Lithuania enabled them to be treated as equals by the monarchs of Europe, and before the death of Louis Jagiellon at the battle of Mohács in 1526 spoiled the party, a canny marriage policy had brought the wealthy kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia into the dynasty s grasp. The position of Jagiellonian consorts was broadly comparable to their counterparts in other European monarchies, and the most notable of them, Bona Sforza, wife of Sigismund I and mother of Sigismund August, built herself a formidable position through her acquisition and careful stewardship of a considerable number of royal estates, especially in Mazovia and Lithuania, and because of the gradual decline of her husband into senility in the 1540s. All this changed dramatically after 1572. The citizen-electorate showed some attachment to candidates with Jagiellonian blood in the female line, which helped the Vasa dynasty, descended from Sigismund August s sister Catherine, to secure the successive election of three kings in 1587, 1632 and 1648. In the elective monarchy, however, the position of heirs was highly uncertain. Although kings remained relatively successful in arranging marriages for their daughters after 1572 the supply of eligible Catholic princesses having declined sharply after the Reformation Europe s hereditary monarchs frequently showed their contempt for the elective status of the Polish monarchy, and their reluctance to allow their daughters to marry into it, at least until after a candidate had secured his election: Augustus III (1733 63) and Jakub Sobieski were the only male heirs to the Polish-Lithuanian throne after 1572 to secure a bride in their father s lifetime. The former s marriage, to Maria Josepha, daughter of emperor 14 Liz Granlund, Queen Hedwig Eleonora of Sweden: Dowager, Builder, and Collector, in ibid. pp. 56 76.

QUEENSHIP IN AN ELECTIVE MONARCHY 1645 67 795 Charles VI, was, however, largely due to the status of his father, Augustus II (1697 1732) as elector of Saxony, while if Jakub s bride, Hedwig Eleanora of Pfalz-Neuburg, was a younger sister of Eleanora, the wife of emperor Leopold I, he demonstrated why Europe s royal families were reluctant to commit themselves by becoming the only adult male son of a Polish king after 1572 apart from his two brothers not to be elected in succession to his father. In the Commonwealth there was no opportunity for a queen consort to act as regent, or to build her influence round a reversionary interest: during interregna it was the primate who served as interrex, and the Commonwealth s institutions functioned perfectly well without a king. She might keep a close eye on the succession, as in the case of Constance Habsburg, the second wife of Sigismund III (1587 1632), who intrigued to promote her eldest son, John Casimir, as a candidate for the throne over the older Władysław, son of her sister Anna, Sigismund s first wife. At a royal election, however, with the king removed from the scene, such manoeuvring counted for nothing, as was demonstrated in 1632, when Władysław was duly elected with no serious talk of any other candidate. Even if a queen survived her husband, as Constance did not she died in 1631 the removal of the king from the scene rendered her largely powerless; Louise Marie s influence in 1648 derived from her considerable political skill in extraordinary circumstances. Even as influential a queen as Marie Casimire d Arquien, wife of John III, was unable to secure the election of any of her sons after her husband s death in 1696. The question of queenship has received little attention from historians of Poland-Lithuania. While there is no shortage of biographies of queens, they are mostly popular in their approach and, reflecting the limited or non-existent political role played by most consorts, concentrate largely on the private life of queens. 15 There has been some attention paid to the royal court as an institution, though the important studies of Louise Marie by Bożena Fabiani and Karolina Targosz of Louise Marie s court concentrate on her household and the lively intellectual life she promoted, and pay little attention to the court s political role. Thus although the term dwór (court) is routinely used to denote a political actor in studies of John Casimir s reign, reflecting contemporary usage and to indicate that the queen played 15 For exceptions, see the pioneering if not always convincing study of Władysław Jagiełło s fourth wife, Zofia Holszańska by Ewa Maleczyńska, Rola polityczna królowa Zofii Holszańskiej na tle walki stronnictw w Polsce w latach 1422 1434, Lwów, 1936, and two biographies of Bona Sforza: the monumental work by Władysław Pociecha, Królowa Bona, 4 vols, Poznań, 1949 58, and Maria Bogucka s more balanced Bona Sforza, Warsaw, 1989.

796 an important role in politics, analyses of how the court in this sense actually operated are thin on the ground, and it is routinely assumed that attachment to the queen s political programme can be explained largely in terms of the patronage power she wielded. Augustyniak has gone further, suggesting that the Polish court under the Vasas was simply not in a position to play any political role comparable to that of courts in hereditary monarchies. 16 The most influential and politically significant queen consort before Louise Marie was Bona Sforza, wife of Sigismund I (1506 48). Her position, however, at a point when her husband s prerogative powers as grand duke of Lithuania were still substantial, was rather different to that of queens after 1572. Bona s daughter, Anna Jagiellonka, was elected queen regnant (rex) of Poland-Lithuania in December 1575 following the deposition of the first freely-elected king, Henry Valois, after his flight back to France the year before. 17 On the model of Jadwiga, who ruled as queen regnant alongside her husband, Władysław Jagiełło, between 1386 and her death in 1399, Anna might be presumed to have enjoyed the right to rule alongside her husband, King Stefan Batory, who had to marry the 52-year-old as the price for accepting the crown. In practice, however, she was given no opportunity to exercise the regnal powers she certainly believed she possessed. To her mortification, these were deemed to have lapsed on Batory s unexpected death in 1586. More importantly, as the price for her 1576 coronation, she was, after fierce resistance, forced to sign away the vast Jagiellonian lands in Lithuania that she had inherited from her brother in favour of the Commonwealth. 18 Thus although the power to appoint to starosties (starostwa) made up of individual estates in this complex of land remained one of the monarch s most important prerogatives, no queen would ever again be able to exploit the royal lands in quite the way Bona Sforza had done. For they were now regarded as belonging to the Commonwealth, and resentment at the way in which Louise Marie influenced their distribution was strong: 16 Bożena Fabiani published a scholarly study of the queen s household, Warszawski dwór Ludwiki Marii, Warsaw, 1976, and a more popular work, Na dworze Wazów w Warszawie, Warsaw, 1988, while Karolina Targosz concentrated on its intellectual life: Uczony dwór Ludwiki Marii Gonzagi (1646 1667). Z dziejów polsko-francuskich stosunków kulturalnych,wrocław, 1975; French translation: La cour savante de Louise-Marie de Gonzague et ses liens scientifiques avec la France, Wrocław, 1982; Urszula Augustyniak, Wazowie i królowie rodacy, Warsaw, 1999, pp. 167 95. 17 VC, 2/1, p. 339. Maria Bogucka, Anna Jagiellonka, 2nd edn, Warsaw, 2009, p. 134. 18 Wacław Sobieski and Kazimierz Lepszy, Anna Jagiellonka, Polski Słownik Biograficzny, Cracow, 1936 (hereafter, PSB) 1, pp. 128 32; Bogucka, Anna Jagiellonka, pp. 135 38.

QUEENSHIP IN AN ELECTIVE MONARCHY 1645 67 797 It was distasteful to everyone at that time when the custom arose that dignities and the bread for those who have served well were distributed not according to their services [of their recipients], but according to payment at the pleasure of the French through their influence on Queen Louise Marie. 19 Louise Marie was the first consort after Bona Sforza to take an active political role. After Anna s death in 1595, the three successive Habsburg queens of the first two Vasas, Anna (1592 98), Constance (1605 31) and Cecilia Renate (1637 45), were content to play a largely domestic role, though they all took an interest in the religious life of the court. If these submissive consorts set the template for queenly behaviour in the new republican monarchy, Louise Marie, brought up in the very different world of the French court, had considerable political ambitions. In the early years of John Casimir s reign much of her influence was indirect, deriving from her prominent role in the distribution of royal patronage, but the 1655 Swedish Deluge gave her an unparalleled opportunity to become directly involved in day-to-day politics on a wider front. John Casimir s cession to her of his rights to the mortgaged Habsburg duchies of Opole and Ratibor in Silesia following the death of their previous holder, Charles Ferdinand, in May 1655, helped to restore her fortune, and she was quick to mobilize her resources after the Swedish invasion in July. 20 She was widely credited with stiffening her husband s resolve in the difficult months of July and August, and when the royal court went into exile in Silesia in the autumn: she greeted her husband coldly upon his arrival in Glogau and criticized him publicly for having abandoned his kingdom. 21 As Jemiołowski, a soldier of minor szlachta pedigree, observed: Queen Louise through her arguments with, truth be told, a humour, imagination and brilliance that is rarely seen and wholly unlike a mere woman, animated the king day and night, and through various means roused her despairing husband and the various senators at his side to support the war against the Swedes. 22 19 Mikołaj Jemiołowski, Pamiętnik dzieje Polski zawierający, ed. Jan Dzięgielewski, Warsaw, 2000, p. 94. Bread for those that have served well (chleb dobrze zasłużonych) was a standard phrase to indicate the rewards to which those who served the state felt entitled through, in particular, the grant of leases on royal estates. 20 Zofia Libiszowska, Królowa Ludwika Maria na Śląsku 1655 1656, Katowice, 1986, pp. 38 39. 21 Wasilewski, Ostatni Waza, p. 170. 22 Jemiołowski, Pamiętnik, p. 170.

798 Louise Marie had long shown an interest in matters military. She spent a considerable amount of her own money strengthening Cracow s defences in the autumn of 1655, and on her return to Poland in the spring of 1656 she threw herself eagerly into the fray. After the recapture of Warsaw in June, she refused to leave the city, despite attempts to persuade her, as an allied Swedish-Brandenburg army marched down the Vistula, and she watched the great battle of July 28 30 from the terrace of the Royal Castle. On the first day, she personally ordered the resiting of two Polish guns, which were dragged into position by her own coach horses on the banks of the Vistula; following them down on foot, she directed their fire to prevent the Swedes watering their horses on the far bank of the river, cheering every hit and cutting swathes through their ranks, in an incident marked by Erik Dahlberg on the first of his great sequence of engravings of the battle, in which he fought on the Swedish side. 23 Her military feats continued at the 1658 siege of Thorn, where she was fired on while observing the siege shortly after her arrival her ladies-in-waiting subsequently amused themselves by gathering up the eight-pound balls scattered around after the cannonade and was actively involved in discussions with Souches, the Habsburg commander, strongly supporting Field Hetman Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski s complaints about the lacklustre performance of the Austrian troops. On one occasion she interrogated the startled Souches, asking pointedly why the Poles were paying him for considerably greater numbers of troops than he had deployed. In November, she followed hard on the heels of the assault troops as they captured a vital bastion. 24 Louise Marie s keen intelligence and forceful personality rapidly saw her involved in politics to an unprecedented extent for a queen of Poland- Lithuania. It was now that her restless energy and keen political instincts were channelled most effectively. She was tireless, holding audiences or having individual discussions with senators and politicians, and not just with a narrow circle: the diary of Jan Antoni Chrapowicki, a Lithuanian politician then of relatively junior rank, who was only elevated to the Senate in 1669, reveals just how frequently she wrote to him, or summoned him to see her, particularly if he was newly arrived in town. 25 Chrapowicki was a prominent political activist who served regularly as an envoy to 23 Ibid., p. 210; Libiszowska, Ludwika Maria, PSB, 18, p. 108; Patrick Gordon, Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries 1635 1699, 1, 1634 1659, ed. Dmitry Fedosov, Aberdeen, 2009, p. 112. 24 Tadeusz Nowak, Oblężenie Torunia w roku 1658, Toruń, 1936, pp. 52 53, 94 95; Libiszowska, Żona, p. 152. 25 Chrapowicki, Diariusz, 1, 151 55, 167 69, 172, 178, 521, 530.

QUEENSHIP IN AN ELECTIVE MONARCHY 1645 67 799 the Sejm and a close associate of Paweł Sapieha, the Lithuanian Grand Hetman, which explains the Queen s interest in him: she was adept at keeping channels open to leading political figures. Perhaps most surprising of all, given the prevailing assumptions concerning appropriate gender roles, was Louise Marie s close involvement in the formation of political strategy. Between 1655 and 1658, the Sejm did not meet, and the senate council became the centre of political activity. The council was the main executive body between sessions of the Sejm, and senators were also meant to act as custodians of the law, opposing royal actions that were deemed to breach it. The senators resident, appointed by the Sejm to attend council meetings in order to keep a watch on the king and report back to the Sejm rarely fulfilled their obligations, and in practice the council effectively comprised government ministers and senators who were present at court, the majority of whom tended to be royal supporters. Although szlachta pressure meant that formal minutes were kept from 1658, senators resented this attempt at Sejm control; in practice the minutes were minimal. 26 In the exceptional circumstances between 1655 and 1660, policy tended to be agreed at informal meetings of senators, often held in the royal apartments, in the Queen s presence. She also took part in more formal meetings. She was involved in the council meetings in Cracow in September 1655, convened meetings of councillors in Silesia in the autumn of 1655 before the King s arrival, and in Poland after her return: for example at Kalisz in January 1657. 27 She took part in the extended councils involving representatives of the szlachta alongside senators held at Częstochowa in March 1657 and Warsaw in February March 1658. From 1658, she took to attending the Sejm itself, observing debates from a specially-constructed box. This close involvement in politics, and in particular her attendance at the long sessions of the Sejm, suggests that Louise Marie had mastered enough Polish to follow debates, and perhaps to converse on a basic level, though opinion is divided on this point. She began learning Polish as soon as she left France, telling Mazarin she intended to master it; Libiszowska suggests that did manage to learn some Polish, but Ochmann-Staniszewska 26 Cracow, Biblioteka Książąt Czartoryskich ( Czart.), 401, Senatus Consilia [...] 1658 1668 r. 27 Ludwik Kubala, Wojna szwecka w roku 1655 i 1656, (Lwów, 1913), 110; Czart. 424, 9, Relacja wojny szwedzkiey od 1655 ; Paris, Archives de la Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Correspondance Politique: Pologne, XI, 1650 1657, Louise Marie to Mazarin, Danków, 17 February 1657, f. 194.

800 is sceptical, arguing that she lacked the discipline and patience. 28 She communicated with her husband and with many Poles in Italian, and if she never mastered Polish and used translators with Poles who did not know Italian or French this does not in itself mean that she was as ignorant of it as is often maintained: she knew enough to sign documents Maria Ludwika Krolowa, as a small exercise in public relations, and it is unlikely that she could have played such a significant political role without the ability at least to understand some Polish, and hard to believe that she would have spent as long as she did observing Sejm debates, if she had not had some idea what was being said, though she was no doubt assisted by her attendants. Language was less of a barrier in foreign relations, one of the most important areas of Louise Marie s activity. She regularly had private talks with ambassadors and diplomatic agents, and constructed her own informal diplomatic network: in January 1656 she approached the French scientist and politician Ismaël Bouillau through her secretary des Noyers, who had been writing to Bouillau about Polish affairs for some time. 29 Louise Marie had read Bouillau s replies, and and had formed the conviction that he was l homme de la mission à laquelle elle songeait. Boulliau was invited to undertake a mission to The Hague to negotiate a league between the Commonwealth and the United Provinces; although he declined, the connection continued when he later accepted the position of secretary to the French delegation to The Hague. 30 Louise Marie played a prominent role in the diplomatic negotiations with Brandenburg to entice it out of its 1656 alliance with Sweden, in particular in the talks over the treaty of Bromberg in the autumn of 1657, which adjusted the terms of the original settlement at Wehlau, and her signature even appeared on the final text of the treaty. 31 Thereafter she maintained a regular correspondence with Elector Frederick William, and visited Berlin in 1658 at a point when relations were difficult, with Frederick William fearing an attack by the Swedes after their victory over Denmark, sealed in the peace of Roskilde in February. 32 This was far more than a mere courtesy call, 28 Libiszowska, Królowa Ludwika Maria, Warsaw, 1985, pp. 68 69; Ochmann- Staniszewska, Dynastia Wazów w Polsce, Warsaw, 2007, pp. 143 44. 29 The 1859 edition of des Noyers letters (see note 6) represents an edited version of the correspondance during the war. The full correspondence is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris: Correspondance d Ismaël Bouillaud, FFr. 13019 13040. 30 Henk Nellen, Ismael Boulliau (1605 1694) Nieuwsjager en Correspondent, 2 vols, Nijmegen, 1980, pp. 229 30, 252. 31 Libiszowska, Żona, p. 139. 32 Zofia Libiszowska, Ludwika Maria w Berlinie (28 VI 3 VII 1658), in Krystian

QUEENSHIP IN AN ELECTIVE MONARCHY 1645 67 801 and the Queen discussed a range of matters, standing firm on the terms of Wehlau-Bromberg, and urging the Elector to show more fortitude. The discussions included the contentious issue of terms for a future peace with Sweden, and Louise Marie was to play a major if informal role in the negotiations which ended the war at Oliwa in 1660. It was, however, as the driving force behind plans for political reform through an election vivente rege that Louise Marie really began to dominate the political scene. From 1659 she organized the campaign at all levels, taking the lead in clandestine negotiations with the French which eventually resulted in the nomination of the Duc d Enghien as the French candidate in 1660. This was so secret that his identity was even kept initially from John Casimir; when the time came for him to be informed, Louise Marie suggested that Louis XIV should present him with a gift of expensive clocks to sweeten the pill. 33 It was Louise Marie s indefatigable energy that whipped the Senate into line behind the plan, using persuasion and her influence over patronage to construct an apparently formidable party. In 1660 61, she gathered signatures of almost all the leading senators on a document in which they promised to back the election. 34 It was the Queen who drove the extensive campaign before the 1661 Sejm, at which the plan for an election was formally unveiled, though John Casimir assured the Sejm that the election would be free, and certainly did not reveal that the Court had its own candidate. Louise Marie was tireless in her efforts to win support for the idea, travelling round the pre-sejm sejmiks, speaking directly to the szlachta collectively or individually, exhorting support for the election and assembling significant support, most notably in Lithuania. Opponents of the plan, led by Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro, Castellan of Lwów, who, with Florian Czartoryski, Bishop of Chełmno, was one of only two senators publicly to break ranks in 1661, were able to block the idea at the Sejm, however, and it was now that Louis Marie s activities took a more dubious turn. One plan was use French subsidies to win over enough of the unpaid army to force the election through; another was simply to bring about an election through the King s abdication, a plan for which John Casimir showed rather more enthusiasm than his wife. Thus Louise Marie played a direct part in the negotiations which wound up the military Matwijowski and Zbigniew Wójcik (eds), Studia z dziejów Rzeczypospolitej szlacheckiej, Wrocław, 1988, pp. 219 31. For her correspondance with the Elector, see Urkunden und Actenstücke, 8, pp. 202 07, 265 332. 33 Libiszowska, Żona, p. 175. 34 Cracow, Biblioteka Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności i Polskiej Akademii Nauk (hereafter, BPAUN), 1065, pp. 452 54.

802 confederations after the Sejm s outright condemnation of the election plan in 1662 63, pledging her jewels as security for the money promised; she was also central to the negotiations at Rawa in 1666 with Lubomirski s supporters. 35 Despite all Louise Marie s charisma and energy, she failed. That failure had terrible consequences: her blatant continuation of the campaign after it had been declared illegal caused outrage, as many among the szlachta with considerable justification feared a royal coup d état. The campaign, and the way it was conducted, helped spread the conviction among the szlachta that monarchs inevitably sought to make their power absolute; it also entrenched a view of the role of the Queen and of her relationship with her husband that has never been properly scrutinized. I do not have the space here to undertake a full investigation of this issue, but in the rest of this article, I would like to suggest that not only were the politics and political impact of that relationship far more complex than is usually allowed, expanding on the necessarily brief remarks I made on this subject in 1993, but that they also reveal much about queenship and the gendering of power in an elective, constitutional monarchy. 36 Historians have, on the whole, been happy to accept the picture of the marriage of John Casimir and Louise Marie presented in Rudawski s pithy image and des Noyer s ascerbic characterization. It echoes the topos of dull husbands dominated by termagant wives which is as old as literature itself, and which emerges powerfully from a welter of sources throughout the reign. Although there were, apart from the usual panegyrics, many positive contemporary assessments of Louise Marie, a point to which I shall return, the 1660s brought a torrent of abuse about the Queen and her political role. Polish-Lithuanian political rhetoric was merciless. The fact that John Casimir had married his brother s widow occasioned negative comment from the outset, with one verse circulating in 1649 predicting misfortune because the pungent whiff of incest was strengthened by the fact that John Casimir s mother had been the younger sister of his father s first wife: Casimirus rex, germana sorore natus, Germani coniugi copulatus, Nunquam erit fortunatus, as one wit put it in a quip which was soon doing 35 Libiszowska, Ludwika Maria, p. 109; L viv, Tsentral nyi Derzhavnyi Istorychnyi Arkhiv Ukrainy m. L viv, f. 5, op. 1, d. 849, 421; Mirosław Nagielski, Partia dworska w schyłkowym okresie panowania Jana Kazimierza Wazy (1664 1668), in Mariusz Markiewicz and Ryszard Skowron (eds), Faworyci i opozycjoniści w Rzeczypospolitej XV XVIII wieku, Cracow, 2006, pp. 331 57 (p. 341). 36 Frost, After the Deluge, pp. 27 28, 115 16.

QUEENSHIP IN AN ELECTIVE MONARCHY 1645 67 803 the rounds. 37 It was not, however, until the election campaign was cranked up in the late 1650s that the usual grumblings about the corruption of the court and the pernicious influence of foreigners were swept aside by more serious accusations and a torrent of angry abuse. Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro, in his great 1660 polemic in support of the liberum veto, made oblique reference to Louise Marie s role in a work devoted to advising princes on the appropriate use of power, warning about the dangers of relying on female ministers. 38 Others were less polite, and the whole range of opprobrious epithets for assertive women who did not know their place were flung at Louise Marie. Jakub Łoś, another soldier-diarist, praised Fredro for his principled opposition to the election campaign, approvingly referring to his defiance of that hellish Fury, which he undertook at the peril of his health, on account of the threats directed at him. 39 In similar vein, a 1660s lampoon mixed classical allusion with a parody of the Ave Maria: You unhealthy Ludwika, French Mary, In Poland not full of grace, you hellish Harpy! 40 In Polonia Plangens, a sour little ditty published in parallel Latin and German versions after the Queen s death, she was again accused of being a voracious Harpy. Given her habit of observing Sejm debates, it was inevitable that comparisons were made with the empress Agrippina who, according to Tacitus, used to listen to debates in the Roman Senate from behind a curtain. 41 The unnatural status of such female meddling was 37 The joke, such as it is, turns on the pun in Latin between German and germane ; it suggests that John Casimir would never be fortunate, having been born of his father s German sister (-in-law), and having married his own sister (-in-law). Quoted by Wójcik, Jan Kazimierz, p. 61. 38 tum publicis judiciis intersint & apertioribus consiliis, quasi inde feminarium ministrorum, consiliariorum, belli Ducum, Princeps habiturus sit. Andrzej Maksimiliam Fredro, Scriptorum, seu Togae et Belli Notationum Fragmenta. Accesserunt Peristromata Regum Symbolis expressa, Danzig, 1660, p. 17. 39 Jakub Łoś, Pamiętnik towarzystwa chorągwi pancernej, ed. Romuald Śreniowa- Szypiowski, Warsaw, 2000, pp. 110 11. 40 Niezdrowaś, Ludwiko, Francuska Maryjo, / W Polsce łaski niepełna, piekielna Harpijo! The verse exists in numerous copies. See, for example, Gdańsk, Biblioteka Polskiej Adademii Nauk, 1025, ff. 62 3. The Queen had simply been known as Mary in France, but had added Louise/Ludwika on her marriage, having been informed that in Poland only the Virgin was called Mary. 41 Anon., Polonia Plangens, 1667, f. A ii verso, f. A iv verso; Tacitus, Annales. 13.2, 5. See Anthony A. Barrett, Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire, New Haven, CT, 1996, p. 152.

804 spelled out: O infanum Fœminæ Caput!. To complete the pantheon of uppity females, Louise Marie was likened to the impious Jezebel, who never favoured peace. 42 Another mock eulogy containing a litany of accusations against the queen, began with the epitaph: LUDOVICA MARIA GONZAGA, POLONIÆ ET SVECIÆ/non Regni sed Regis/ REGINA (Louise Marie Gonzaga, Queen of Poland and Sweden, head not of the kingdom, but of the King), a sentiment voiced even by the court preacher Father Adrian Pikarski, who claimed in his sermon at her funeral that the Queen had replaced the King s head with her own. 43 Such examples could be multiplied many times over. There is no shortage of contemporary sources to underpin views of a dull, lumbering monarch being led to disaster by an intelligent, forceful wife, deemed on account of her gender to be capricious, devious and emotionally unstable. Historians, on the whole, have done very little to challenge this view, or even to examine it closely. Libiszowska, who wrote several studies of Louise Marie, including a popular biography which remains the most substantial modern account of her eventful life, is content to accept a negative picture of John Casimir based on Rudawski, des Noyers and other contemporary sources. John Casimir s two modern biographers, Wasilewski and Wójcik, give judicious, balanced accounts, in which his virtues as well as his vices are stressed, but with regard to his relationship with his wife are largely content to follow the traditional line as recounted by Libiszowska. Yet even a brief consideration of the problems of the sources, which is all there is space for here, suggest that the real story of this royal marriage is far more interesting and complex than the tired and simplistic stereotype of a dominant wife and a subservient husband that is routinely trotted out to explain the political dynamics of one of the most crucial periods in the Commonwealth s history. The first problem emerges when one looks more closely at Rudawski, whose characterization has been so influential. Even a cursory examination of the passage in which he evokes the striking image of the Ethiopian and the elephant, reveals that the notorious phrase does not refer, as generations of historians have suggested, to the relationship between the 42 Polonia Plangens, ff. A ii verso, B verso. 43 Anon., Pietas Reginæ Poloniæ Elogium, 1667, (unpaginated). Maria Bogucka, Women in Early Modern Polish Society, Against the European Background, Aldershot, 2004, p. 164, n. 12. Pikarski was the author of two panegyrics of the queen, Najjaśniejsze zwierciadło majestatu bez makuły, Cracow, 1667, and Lodovicæ Mariæ Poloniæ ac Sueciæ reginæ viva et augusta imago, Cracow, 1667, in which he presented her as the epitome of the ideal woman and queen.