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From Blackwood's Magazine.

THE PRINCESSE DES URSINS.*

ultimately took root; and if Spain under the Bourbons rose in the scale of nations, much THE dynasty of the Bourbons in Spain, of the credit is due to Madame des Ursins. which has just ended in a woman, was Although her sudden fall was owing directly founded by a woman; for it was the Prin- to the ordinary ingratitude of absolute moncesse des Ursins who was veritably Queen archs, yet the inspiring primal causes were of Spain for the first fifteen years of their the machinations of the grandees whose audomination; and without the aid of her pro-thority she had curtailed, joined to the dark tection, courage, and indomitable spirit, the descendants of Philip V. would never have occupied the throne of Spain.

This extraordinary person has hitherto obtained too little consideration in the page of history. Writers, relying almost solely on the pages of St. Simon, have passed her by as a mere intriguante; but there was infinitely more than this in the Princesse des Ursins. She was the incarnate representative of the French spirit of progress in Spain, a female politician of the school of Richelieu and Colbert; she thoroughly understood by what means a stable government was to be secured for the country with which the peculiar circumstances of her early life had made her acquainted before the Bourbon accession; she had entirely comprehended by what measures bankrupt, beggarly, incapable Spain could be raised again in the scale of nations. The chief of these measures were the repression of the superb, punctilious, and factious spirit of the grandees, the reform in taxation and administration of the finances, the assimilation and centralization of the charter-system of provincial rights, privileges, and legislatures (the provincial fueros) which embarrassed the operations of government, and the suppression of ecclesiastic immunities in a country which was being yearly devoured by priests and monks. For the Spain which Charles II. had left behind him was a desert land, eaten up by grandees and churches and convents. After fifteen years of immense activity, Madame des Ursins, without a moment's warning, was forcibly seized in the middle of a horribly cold December night and carried out of Spain; but the greater part of the reforms she set on foot

*La Princesse des Ursins. Essai sur sa vie et son caractere politique d'apres de nombreux documents inedits." Par M. Francois Combes. Paris, 1858. This volume, two volumes of Correspondence of the Princess, published by M. Geffroy, and the Memoires of the time, have given us the materials out of which the present article is constructed.

workings of the Inquisition. To the honour of Madame des Ursins she dared to proclaim herself the enemy of this abominable institution; and the first, a small but ultimately deadly wound, which their power received, came from the hand of a woman, and that of a woman of nearly eighty years of age.

For, strange to say, the historic career, the public life, of Madame des Ursins did not begin till she was sixty-five years old. Her long life may be divided into five portions that of the handsome, brilliant, witty, and intelligent Mademoiselle de la Tremouille up to the age of twenty-two; that of the loving and devoted wife, the Princesse de Chalais, up to the death of her first husband, Adrien Blaise de Talleyrand, Prince de Chalais, in 1670, when she was thirty-five years of age; that of the great Duchesse de Bracciano, when she was the leader of fashion and of elegant amusements in the great Orsini palace in the Piazza Navona, at Rome, after her second marriage in 1675; that of the Princesse des Ursins, which title she took after the death of the Duke of Bracciano in 1698, when her diplomatic and political career first commenced; that of the ex-regent of Spain, during her second residence at Rome, from 1715 to 1722, where she died at the age of eighty-seven.

If the Princesse de Chalais had been a mother, we might never have heard of the Princesse des Ursins; but, a solitary widow, childless and without scope for her great intelligence and her deeply affectionate nature, she seems to have thrown herself in the decline of life, when the brilliance of her beauty no longer inspired the makers of sonnets and madrigals, upon diplomacy and politics, from the very lack of womanly occupation.

She first became acquainted with Spain in 1663, when she accompanied her first husband, the Prince de Chalais, in his flight from France to escape the sanguinary edicts of Richelieu still in force against duelling.

He had fought in one of the duelling en- which the Papal Court was the unrivalled counters so common among the nobility of school. The portrait of St. Simon, even in the Fronde, a duel of four against four, in this reduced form, will afford some explawhich the Duc De Beauvilliers had been nation of the absorbing fascination which killed. From Spain they passed to Italy, the Princesse des Ursins exercised on the where the Prince died while away from his young, brilliant, devoted, and heroic-nawife at Venice. The Princess, who was at tured Marie Louise, the first wife of Philip that time at Rome, showed exemplary grief V. "Don't let her speak to you for two as a widow, and gained the sympathies of all hours," said Philip V. to his second wife, as Roman society. She remained for some she was about to meet the Princesse des time secluded in a convent, and only five Ursins in her first and only interview," or years afterwards accepted the hand of the she will enchain you for ever." During the Duke of Bracciano, the head of the Orsini time of her second marriage she made sunfamily. This marriage, however, was not dry visits to France, and renewed her a happy one: the Duke and Duchess had acquaintance with Madame de Maintenon, different tastes and divergent views in poli- of whom she had been a rival in the salons tics. The Orsini Palace was, however, the of the Hotel d'Albret when the latter was centre of all that was distinguished in Rome. only Madame Scarron and she herself was The Duchess supported the honours of her but a girl. It may be imagined that the position with consummate grace, but also unrivalled position and influence of Madame with a great deal of extravagance - an ad- de Maintenon may have stimulated the ditional item in the Duke's list of complaints | seeds of ambition hitherto dormant in her against her, for from the age of forty to the nature, for she certainly was conscious of commencement of her diplomatic career, she no inferiority to Madame de Maintenon. seems to have taken part with a ready spirit It has been even said that she nourished in all the joyous follies of Roman life, in all secretly the design of displacing the rigid "the revel and the masque of Italy," and favourite in the good graces of Louis XIV. to have wanted no taste for art or for the Of this there is no proof, but at any rate growing superiority of Italian music. She she was sufficiently conscious of her abilities was, according to St. Simon, well qualified and her power of command to look out for to take the lead in any line of life. She was a theatre for her activity; and the force of above the middle height, with blue eyes circumstances, as well, perhaps as her own which expressed anything she pleased; she calculations, drew her to Spain. had a perfect figure and bust; a face with- During the time of her visits to France out regular beauty, but yet charming; a and to Versailles the question of the Spannoble air, an exquisite and natural grace. ish Succession was agitating all Europe; St. Simon, whose experience was great, said and, as is well known, it was the opinion of he never saw anything approaching her Innocent XI., formally expressed in a letter, charm of manner; it was flattering, caress-which finally determined the moribund ing, animating, yet kept always in due lim- Charles II. to draw up his famous testaits, as though she wished to please merely ment in favour of the Duke d'Anjou, for the sake of pleasing. It was impossible grandson of Louis XIV. The Duchess of to resist her when she had set her heart on Bracciano, connected by alliance with the captivating and seducing. With all this, a greatest Pontifical families, with her little most agreeable voice and a faculty in con- court in the Piazza Navona, attended by versation delicious, inexhaustible, and highly Roman cardinals, seemed a person deserventertaining. Since she had seen many ing of the attention of the French Governcountries and all their chief people, she was, ment. She was thoroughly tutored in the moreover, a great judge of character; she matter by Torcy, the French minister, and attracted to her the best society, and kept it was recommended to her diplomatic advoquite a little court of her own; and from cacy at Rome. She had the credit of havher position at Rome, and intimacy with the ing exercised a real influence upon the judg Roman cardinals, she became a mistress in ment of Innocent XI.; but she achieved that art of polished and subtle intrigue of something more effective even than this.

Portocarrero, the Archbishop of Toledo, | such a proceeding, she knew, would raise the greatest ecclesiastic in Spain, the confi- the suspicions of the politic monarch in her dential adviser and minister of Charles II., disfavour. She asked merely, as a prelimicame to Rome to receive the pallium and nary, for the honour of being the lady the cardinal's hat. She completely capti- attendant who, as custom was, accompanied vated Portocarrero, and elicited from him a Spanish royal bride across the frontier. a promise to advocate the French claims But she had already previously carefully to the succession with Charles II. When prepared her way to Madrid by gaining Louis XIV. knew that Portocarrero was entirely the friendship of Portocarrero in won over, he considered the matter settled. her intercourse with him at Rome, and by He granted a pension to the Duchess of acquiring the favour of the Duchesse de Bracciano, and Torcy wrote that he had Bourgogne, and of the Piedmontese Court, now only to lower his flag before her in through her activity in obtaining the goodmatters of diplomacy, and to become her will of the great Spanish ecclesiastics and pupil. grandees for the Piedmontese marriage of Philip V.

man.

But neither Louis XIV., nor Torcy, nor Madame de Maintenon, had any notion of the heights to which ambition was now leading the Duchess of Bracciano, who, on the death of her husband, appeared before the world as the Princesse des Ursins, Ursins being the French for Orsini, her late husband's family name. The Duke had become reconciled to her before he died, and left her all he possessed; but she disposed of the duchy and title of Bracciano to Don Luigi Odelscalchi, her late husband's kinsThe young Duke of Anjou had now gone to Spain, and taken the title of Philip V., and was about to be married to a princess of Savoy, aged fourteen, the daughter of the wily Victor Amadeus, and the sister of the Duchesse de Bourgogne. According to the usage of the Spanish Court, the camerera mayor, the head lady-in-waiting of the Queen, was an indispensable and awful functionary, a sort of female grand inquisitor of etiquette, to whom constant domesticity with the royal couple gave terrible power and authority. If such was the case ordinarily, what ascendancy might not a camerera mayor such as the Princesse des Ursins attain over the minds of a boy king and a girl queen in the present condition of Spain?

Carefully and cautiously did she gradually disclose the real object of her diplomacy, working by turns through her friend, the Maréchal de Noailles, through the Maréchale, the friend of Madame de Maintenon, through Madame de Maintenon herself, through Torcy the minister. The Maréchale de Noailles, later called by the wits of Versailles the mother of the ten tribes of Israel (she had twenty-two children), was fully equal to the confidence reposed in her by the Princesse des Ursins and to the occasion. "I think," the Princess suggested to Madame de Noailles, "that if I was in a good position I might make rain and sunshine in the Court of Spain; and that it would be easy enough for me to establish a dozen of mesdemoiselles vos filles in that country." Moreover, the young Duc d'Ayen, the eldest son and heir of the Noailles, was named for a mission to Spain at the Court of Philip V. The Princesse des Ursins took care to recommmend him carefully to Portocarrero and her friends among the grandees; and when the Duc d'Ayen, who had himself considerable tact and ability, was making way to the favour of king and court, she began to make use of his influence in the most delicate way Such was the reasoning of Madame des possible for it naturally required great Ursins as she set about diplomatizing for nicety of management for an elderly lady the post of camerera mayor: and she diplo- of the great position of the Princess to matized in a way which proved her admir- solicit any favour of so young a man as the able sagacity in the ways of courts, and her Duc d'Ayen at the very outset of his career. knowledge of the natures of kings and min- The way in which she approached the isters. She was by no means so impolitic young Duke was a model of diplomatic subas to ask at once for the post, which was of tlety. "What opinion can you have of us course virtually in the gift of Louis XIV.: | Roman ladies," she wrote, "when you see