Marie Louise d'Orleans

Marie Louise of Orleans was married to the most disabled king in Europe for political reasons, failed to produce an heir, and died at twenty-six amid accusations of poison. She was the daughter of Philippe of Orleans, the brother of Louis XIV, and of Henrietta of England, and grew up at the French court expecting to marry her cousin the Dauphin. In 1679 Louis XIV instead sent her to Spain to marry Charles II, the last Habsburg king, whose physical and mental disabilities were the product of generations of close intermarriage and whose inability to father a child was already the central question of European politics. She is recorded as weeping and telling her uncle she was being sent to her ruin. In Madrid she was isolated by the rigid etiquette of the Spanish court, watched by a camarera mayor who reported on her, and separated from her French attendants. Charles was reportedly devoted to her. She was blamed publicly for the absence of an heir, subjected to fertility treatments and religious remedies, and by the end was the object of open hostility from a court that read the failure as hers. She died suddenly in February 1689 after abdominal pain, and appendicitis is the modern guess; poison was suspected at the time and the Austrian party and Olympia Mancini were both accused without evidence. Charles married again, had no child, and his will handed Spain to a French Bourbon, which produced the war her marriage had been meant to prevent. Her body was examined and no poison was found, though the examination proved nothing by later standards. She had no surviving portrait painted in Spain that is certainly hers. Her correspondence with her family in France was read before it was sent.

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