Religion and Confession as the Bedrock of Monarchy and Court in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

At the moment of his coronation or succession, the early modern ruler, whether Catholic or Protestant, took on the role of bishop in the territory he ruled over. In addition, many rulers were imbued with a very real personal faith which underpinned their pious practices and those of their families. The first half of this article examines the monarch’s divine mandate and the reality of piety at court. The second half moves from the notion of religion as the foundation of the monarchical state, irrespective of confessional difference, to the impact that post-Reformation confessional divisions had on the lives of royal women by determining their marriage partners. It also discusses the way in which religion provided them with comfort in times of sorrow and the way in which they used the convent as a refuge from the world of the court.

Scholars who study early modern courts and rulers often focus first and foremost on the political context of a particular court, proceeding from this to an analysis of the way in which it employed cultural artefacts and genres to express symbolic power. These are indeed important aspects, but our post-religious age is apt to forget that underlying all political power in the early modern period was a belief in the existence of God. There was no such thing as a monarch who had not been publicly mandated by God and who had not been confirmed in his or her role by the relevant religious authorities. At the moment of his coronation or succession, the ruler, whether Catholic or Protestant, took on the role of bishop in the territory he ruled over. In addition, many rulers were imbued with a very real personal faith which underpinned their pious practices and those of their families and courtiers and this in turn determined much early modern court ceremonial.

The first half of this article examines two points — the monarch’s divine mandate, emphasized by his role as bishop, and the reality of piety at court. The second half moves from the notion of religion as the foundation of the monarchical state, irrespective of confessional difference, to the impact that post-Reformation confessional divisions had on the lives of royal women by determining their marriage partners. It also discusses the way in which religion provided them with comfort in times of sorrow and the way in which they used the convent as a refuge from the world of the court.

The Monarch’s Divine Mandate

In 1657 the poet and dramatist Andreas Gryphius (1616–64) published his verse tragedy Murdered Majesty or Charles Stuart, King of Great Britain in what was then Breslau (nowadays Wrocław in Poland).² Its subject is the execution in London in January 1649 of Charles I, king of England, Scotland and Ireland (1600–49). Gryphius began to write his play within a year of the King’s death and the title tells us, before we have either seen or read the work, that the author regards the execution as murder. Gryphius was a fervent Lutheran, so we might have expected him to be on the side of Charles’s opponent Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and relieved that a king with a French Catholic wife who himself had supposedly Catholic leanings should be deposed and killed in order to institute a Protestant polity. But it is precisely because he was a Lutheran that Gryphius was so appalled by Charles’s execution. His stance was based on Luther’s doctrine on worldly authority as expressed in the pamphlet Temporal Authority — to what extent it must be obeyed of 1523:

First, we must provide a sound basis for the civil law and sword so no one will doubt that it is in the world by God’s will and ordinance. The passages which do this are the following: Romans 12, ‘Let every soul be subject to the governing authority, for there is no authority except from God; the authority which everywhere exists has been ordained by God. He then who resists the governing authority resists the ordinance of God, and he who resists God’s ordinance will incur judgment.’ Again, in 1 Peter 2 [:13–14], ‘Be subject to every kind of human ordinance, whether it be to the king as supreme, or to governors, as those who have been sent by him to punish the wicked and to praise the righteous.’³

St Paul’s letter to the Romans was a key text for Luther the religious reformer, for it expressed what was for him the fundamental doctrine of the Reformation, justification by faith, not works. That it is in the same central text that St Paul states that all secular power comes from God and that to disobey it is to disobey God gives the concept added validity.

With this firm belief in the King’s divine mandate as his starting point, Gryphius wrote a tragedy based on the Senecan model, in which a virtuous man is destroyed by an evil world and in which Charles is depicted as a martyr who shed his blood for his people like a latter-day Christ. This interpretation of his death was well established among Charles’s supporters and was set out in the royalist pamphlet Eikon Basilike published in 1649, which ran to thirty-six editions in that year alone, and was known to Gryphius.⁴ Eikon Basilike presented Charles as a steadfast courageous martyr king and the frontispiece depicted the King with his earthly crown cast aside at his feet, grasping a crown of thorns while gazing upwards at the heavenly crown of martyrdom. Gryphius made his appalled horror at Charles’s death clear in the choruses that come at the end of each act. The first chorus imagines Britain surrounded by a sea stained red and covered with a thousand corpses. Indeed, by killing their king Britain is turning itself into a corpse:

O Land, sprinkled with the blood of a king?

With one mad stroke you turn

Yourself into a dead corpse.⁵

‘Deluded Britain’, cries the chorus, ‘Britain is no place for quiet souls.’⁶ The chorus at the end of the fourth act shows True Religion fleeing from this nest of murderers. The chorus at the end of the fifth and last act is made up of the ghosts of the murdered kings of Britain, showing the audience how many of them there are. These ghostly figures call on the figure of Revenge to avenge Charles’s death and the play ends with Revenge painting a hideous vision of a damned country, in which civil war, hunger, plague, fear and suicide stalk the land. In 1663, by which time Cromwell was dead and the Commonwealth at an end, Gryphius published a revised edition of the play in which he was able to demonstrate that the wicked British could not derail God’s plan, for Charles II, the rightful son and heir of the murdered Charles I, had been restored to the British throne in 1660. This confirmed that earthly power could only come from God, for it is he who ordains who is to be king.

In a forthcoming article in European History Quarterly, Lana Martysheva shows how Catholic prelates supported the Protestant Henry IV because he was the rightful king of France, even if they were not in sympathy with his Protestant views.⁷ She demonstrates the delicate balance that these prelates had to achieve when, by supporting the so-called ‘heretic king’, they were necessarily disobeying the Pope. The support of such prominent religious figures was essential in confirming to Henry’s subjects that his power came from God by virtue of his succession according to the Salic Law and the rules of primogeniture. In the case of Charles II and Henry IV, the rightful king according to the laws of succession was, by definition, divinely mandated and this was the basis for his authority.

The Religious Authority of the Ruler

In both Protestant and Catholic territories, the ruler’s authority was religious as well as secular. In a German Protestant territory, for instance, one of his most important roles was that of summus episcopus or supreme bishop, a function he exercised in German states until after World War I.⁸ This meant that he had to ensure the good governance of the church in his lands. What this meant in practice is described by Julius Bernhard von Rohr in his Ceremoniel-Wissenschafft der Grossen Herren (1733), his manual on how princes were to behave in every aspect of their lives, both public and private.⁹ In a chapter on the prince’s duties relating to religion entitled ‘Von den heiligen Handlungen’, he stipulates that the prince has to keep a watch on the purity of (Protestant) teaching, not only by calling synods of his own theologians if errors begin to creep in but by organising theological conferences (‘colloquia’) to which outside experts are invited.¹⁰ He must appoint pastors and teachers in his territory through whose ‘tireless watchfulness, Christian behaviour in daily life and enthusiastic pastoral care congregations and his subjects would be led to true fear of God, and moral improvement and devotion would be driven forward’.¹¹ This is, of course, in addition to the prince’s own personal prayer and bible study, his public practice of religion as an example to his subjects and the organisation of worship in the day-to-day life of his court. In the course of this short chapter, Rohr illustrates each of his tenets with reference to the model behaviour of some nine German Protestant princes and refers the reader to the funeral sermon by Martin Geier for John George II, elector of Saxony (1613–80). Geier praises the deceased for the way in which he fulfilled his duties as a Protestant prince.¹² The first thing he did on awaking, we learn, whether in good health or bad, was to pray and then to read the Bible or have it read to him. He and his consort compared different editions of the Bible and made sure that the version in print was free of printing errors. He paid special attention to the ceremonies and the hymns laid down for feast days and for days of fasting and repentance and in the year of his death — 1680 — he was arranging a special celebration for the 150^th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession. He patiently accepted correction from his pastors, when necessary. Even on his deathbed, having let fall certain impatient remarks, he listened quietly to them and with tears in his eyes and in a broken voice, said that he was only human and would not fail again and graciously gave thanks for the admonishment. In this way, Geier is confirming John George’s dual role as a model Protestant but also as a model supreme bishop of Saxony. His text also illustrates the central role of the court preacher (the ‘Hofprediger’), an office he held himself in Dresden.¹³ Lutherans, unlike Catholics, did not need ordained priests who could help them get to heaven by celebrating the eucharist as a channel for God’s grace and by absolving them of their sins. A Lutheran pastor’s duties were to expound the Bible and to draw moral lessons from it in his sermons, for, according to Lutheran doctrine, the Christian was already saved.

Even though the Pope in Rome was the head of the church and so had authority in church matters over the ruler, the notion of the king as bishop was also central to the Catholic understanding of the monarchy. The coronation of a Holy Roman Emperor, for instance, took place during the Catholic mass and continued to do so up to and including the last such coronation, that of Francis II, in 1792. The emperor elect prostrated himself in the shape of a cross before the altar like a priest about to be ordained and, before he was conferred with the imperial insignia and then enthroned, he was anointed in the same manner as a bishop.¹⁴ This anointing (‘die Salbung’) was the essential element of the ceremony, rather than the actual placing of the crown on the elected emperor’s head. After the coronation ceremony, the Holy Roman Emperor was admitted as a canon of the monastery of the Marienstift in Aachen and had the right to vote in the chapter. The royal touch, the monarch’s supposed ability to cure such diseases as scrofula by touching the sufferer, was based on the notion that he was the Lord’s Anointed, that God had transmitted a divine power to his deputy on earth through the holy oil. At Reims, where all the early modern kings of France apart from Henry IV were crowned, the holy oil or chrism, preserved in the monastery of Saint-Remi, was brought to the cathedral for the anointing and coronation. The king was anointed as a bishop in nine separate places on his body: on his breast, between his two shoulder blades, on his shoulders, in the crook of each elbow, on the top of his head and on the palms of his hands. He became thereby ‘le roi-évêque’ (the king-bishop).¹⁵

Anointing was so central an element in the creation of the sacral aura of a king that the Calvinist Frederick III, elector of Brandenburg (1688–1713), built it into the coronation ceremony when he crowned himself Frederick I, king in Prussia, in Königsberg in 1701, even though he was creating a new monarchy.¹⁶ The coronation is described in detail by the ‘Ceremonienmeister’ or Lord High Chamberlain Johann von Besser (1674–1729), who was responsible for the arrangements. The title of his account tells the reader that the King accepted the royal dignity which he himself had created but that through the unction or anointing he and his consort were consecrated king and queen (‘Durch die Salbung als König und Königin einweihen lassen’).¹⁷ He describes how the Elector, a Calvinist ruling over a largely Lutheran population, first crowned himself in a secular ceremony in the Castle on 15 January 1701 and then on 17 January went to church for the ceremony of anointing.¹⁸ Heinz Duchhardt points out that the anointing was secondary to the coronation because, when Frederick I went to church to be anointed, he was robed as a king and wore his crown.¹⁹ If the anointing had been superfluous, however, Frederick could simply have left it out. A recognized authority on ceremonial, Besser admits that in 1701 the coronation and the anointing happened the wrong way round and then goes on to describe the latter in great detail over eighteen folio pages.²⁰ Frederick I asked both the Calvinist and the Lutheran Senior Court Preachers to play the role of bishops in the anointing ceremony and he had the chrism (the ‘Salb-Oel’) poured into a precious ampoule of jade and placed on a golden plate. The officiating minister then poured oil over his own fingers and made a circle surrounding two crosses on the King’s forehead and on each of his wrists. The minister asked the King to accept the anointing

as a divine symbol through which God formerly, through his priests and prophets, confirmed to the kings that it was He Himself, God in the Highest, who had made, named and ordained them kings; and may the Lord our God hereby also anoint Your Royal Majesty with the Holy Ghost! So that You, as an Anointed of the Lord, may rule and govern Your people and kingdom with a cheerful, courageous and willing heart.²¹

That the king’s mandate came from God and that he was, therefore, God’s representative on earth was something that Louis XIV, king of France (1638–1715) understood well. In the Mémoires written for the Dauphin he explains that the king must publicly show respect for God in order both to remind his people of this divine mandate and to demonstrate how he himself must therefore be respected:

To tell you the truth, my son, we are not only lacking in gratitude and justice but also in prudence and good sense when we do not venerate Him of whom we are nothing more than the representatives. Our submission to him is the rule and the model for that which is due to us. The armies, the councils, all of human industry would be only weak instruments to keep us on the throne if everyone believed that he had the same right that we do and did not revere a superior power of which ours forms part. The public gestures of respect which we render to that invisible power could in fact be called the first and most important part of our policy, if they did not have a more noble and disinterested motive.²²

The Reality of Piety at Court

While this passage in Louis’s Mémoires sounds as though he is recommending veneration of the godhead for politically expedient reasons, it is well known that Louis himself had a deep personal Catholic faith.²³ His day and therefore that of the court was organized around daily Mass. The priests who officiated in the court chapel were ‘Lazaristes’ (Vincentians in English), an order founded in Paris in 1625 by St Vincent de Paul (1581–1660). They said as many as twenty masses in the court chapel during the day in the period 1710–15,²⁴ but the most important mass of the day was the service attended by the King and the court, at noon during the lifetime of Queen Marie-Thérèse, after her death in 1683 at ten o’clock in the morning. On solemn feast days sung High Mass was celebrated, on which occasions it was said that ‘le roi “tient chapelle”’, that is, he descended into the nave of the church rather than remaining in the gallery as he usually did.²⁵ A bell was rung a quarter of an hour before the beginning of Mass and at the appointed hour a procession set off from the King’s apartment towards the chapel in a strict order, led by the royal male children, the princes of the blood and the legitimized princes followed by the French guards and the Swiss guards. Then came the King, accompanied on his right by his almoner and followed immediately by the captain of the guard. They were followed by the royal female children, the princesses of the blood and the legitimized princesses and after them by the courtiers. This meant that every morning an impressive group of between forty and sixty people processed through the palace to the chapel, past the ranks of petitioners waiting for the King to pass.

As well as attending daily Mass, the King regularly went to vespers, particularly on solemn feast days, and he also took part in the exposition and benediction of the sacrament. He washed the feet of thirteen poor boys and the Queen those of thirteen poor girls in Holy Week on Maundy Thursday and took part in the adoration of the cross on Good Friday. He even went on foot through the streets of Paris and Versailles in processions such as that for Corpus Christi (Fête Dieu).²⁶ The King’s participation in all these ceremonies went far beyond being merely physically present, for his role was a liturgical one; he was taking part in his capacity as ‘le roi-évêque’.²⁷ Everything Louis XIV did in the course of a normal day was accompanied by prayer. Before getting out of bed at the lever, for instance, he was first offered holy water, blessed himself and said some prayers. When he was dressed, he knelt down by his bed, prayed for a while in silence and then the Grand Aumônier said a Latin prayer. Grace was said before meals and the food was blessed. At the coucher the King again prayed on his knees, took holy water and the same Latin prayer was said as in the morning. The importance of the royal chapel in the ceremonial life of the court can be seen from the fact that Volume I of the État de France, the manual of ceremony for the royal household dating to 1702, begins with the chapel, giving a detailed account of the celebrants of the various masses, of the music and of the etiquette to be observed by the office-holders.²⁸ Quite apart from the daily mass in the presence of the King and the court, the chapel was also the scene of a constant round of baptisms, confirmations, weddings, commemorative masses, masses for the conferring of orders of chivalry and thanksgiving ceremonies. It is no exaggeration to say that life at Versailles was organized around devotion.

The practice of religion was equally prominent in Vienna at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor. For the House of Habsburg, that overt and visible religious devotion known as the pietas austriaca was part of the dynasty’s self-definition. It was a piety that had three main elements: devotion to the Cross, to the Virgin Mary, and to the Eucharist.²⁹ From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs believed that the Virgin Mary as the Magna Mater Austriae helped them to win battles against their heretical or infidel enemies: for instance, against the Protestants at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547 and against the Turks at Lepanto in 1571 and at the Siege of Vienna in 1683. The Habsburgs also regarded their devotion to the Cross and to the Eucharist as having enabled them to re-catholicise those parts of their dominions that had gone over to Protestantism after the Reformation. As in France, the practice of religion played a large part in their daily ceremonial. All the members of the dynasty engaged in frequent rituals of penance and devotion to the Virgin Mary and the saints and went on pilgrimages. At the feast of Corpus Christi, as in France, the emperor walked on foot through the streets of Vienna behind the sacrament held aloft in a monstrance and accompanied by the entire court. This practice continued right up to the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918.

Confessional Difference and the Consort

If religion gave the ruler legitimacy and a sacral aura, irrespective of whether he was Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist, it was confessional allegiance that dictated the course of his womenfolk’s lives. From the Reformation on, marriage alliances were arranged according to confessional congruity and therefore dictated where a high-born woman would spend most of her life. Confessional congruity narrowed the potential source of marriage partners, so that royal and ducal consorts were likely to be chosen again and again in different generations from the same princely houses. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Wettin electors of Saxony, who ruled over a territory regarded as the cradle of the Reformation, often chose princesses from Lutheran Denmark.³⁰ The descendants of John Sigismund, elector of Brandenburg, who had converted to Calvinism in 1613/4, chose consorts from other Calvinist dynasties such as Hesse-Kassel, the Palatine branch of the Wittelsbachs and the House of Orange-Nassau.

Political expediency could, however, trump confessional congruence. A Bourbon or a Habsburg, especially if he were expected to succeed to a royal or imperial throne, was seen as such an advantageous match for a Protestant princess that in such cases the bride’s family put pressure on her to convert to the confession of her husband, no matter what her conscience dictated. Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate (known as Liselotte, 1652–1722) had to convert from Calvinism to Catholicism in 1671 in order to marry Philippe, duc d’Orléans (1640–1701), the brother of Louis XIV. Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1691–1750) had to convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism when she married the Habsburg Archduke Charles (1685–1740) in 1708. At that date Charles was the disputed king of Spain as Carlos III but in 1711 was elected emperor as Charles VI on the death of his older brother.

In rare cases a bride could stipulate in her marriage contract her desire to practise her own religion in her husband’s territory after her marriage. Two examples are Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705), consort of Charles II of Britain and Ireland, who was allowed to remain a Catholic at the Protestant (Anglican) English court after her marriage in 1662, and Charlotte Amalie of Hesse-Kassel (1650–1714), who remained a Calvinist at the Lutheran Danish court even after her marriage to the future Christian V, king of Denmark and Norway (1646–99), in 1667. Such a divergence from her husband and her subjects in confessional matters aroused the suspicion of the court and the country, for the public performance of religion was one of a consort’s main duties. English Protestants constantly intrigued against Catherine of Braganza and she was even accused in the trumped-up Popish Plot of 1678–81 of attempting to poison her husband.³¹ Even if the consort was not directly an object of suspicion, her divergent beliefs meant that she was not able to play a full part in important church services and, if she were a Catholic, was regarded as taking her instructions from the pope rather than from her own husband.

If a prince changed his own confessional allegiance, he usually expected his wife to follow suit, though not always successfully. Anna of Prussia (1576–1625) refused to convert to Calvinism when her husband John Sigismund, elector of Brandenburg, did so in 1613 and she supported those of her subjects who wished to remain Lutheran.³² Christiane Eberhardine, margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth (1671–1727), a Lutheran who married Frederick August I, elector of Saxony (known as August the Strong, 1670–1733), also refused to convert when he became a Catholic in 1697 in order to be elected King of Poland as August II.³³ She even refused to set foot in Poland and, though she bore the title of queen of Poland for the rest of her life, she resisted every pressure to be crowned in Cracow and to reign at her husband’s side in Warsaw, even though she would have been allowed to practise her religion in private. She had fulfilled her primary purpose as a consort in giving birth to a son in 1696 in her only pregnancy. August the Strong could not divorce his wife because her steadfast Lutheranism was an important sign to his Saxon subjects that some members of the dynasty kept faith with their Lutheran heritage, which was so central to Saxon identity. Christiane Eberhardine not only attended Lutheran church services assiduously and publicly but a collection of more than a thousand Lutheran hymns appeared in 1719 in Leipzig in a second edition with her name attached to them. Her piety meant that she became known to her Saxon subjects as ‘Sachsen’s Betsäule’ (Saxony’s pillar of prayer), a reference to psalm 75. Numerous publications confirmed this as her role and achievement, lamenting at her death that ‘the pillar of prayer for the whole country and the prop of Lutheran Zion has fallen’.³⁴

Piety and the Consort

Visible piety was one of the duties of an early modern consort, but so many royal women went beyond routine religious observance in their daily lives that pious practices clearly fulfilled a need. Early modern society used religion to discipline behaviour and regulate emotion, forbidding excessive mourning on the death of a loved one, because it was ‘pagan behaviour’ which ‘exposes a lack of faith in the doctrines of the resurrection and eternal life’.³⁵ However, religion also served as a comfort in times of distress, and high-born women often needed such comfort. A princess usually had to leave home at a young age, in many cases never to see her family or birthplace again. The pain felt by the bride and her family on her departure for her husband’s court was described again and again in the printed accounts of early modern royal weddings.³⁶ Women themselves commented on it, as Maria Amalia of Saxony, queen of the Two Sicilies, queen of Spain (1724–60), did in a letter to her sister-in-law, Maria Antonia, electoral princess of Saxony (1724–80). Writing from Spain on 11 February 1760 she says: ‘In this matter our fate is very sad, for normally, when we leave home, we have to say goodbye for our entire life to all that is dearest to us in the whole world.’³⁷ A princess had to accept the husband her parents had chosen for her, no matter how incompatible, brutal, drunken or mentally unstable he was. An example is Caroline Mathilde, princess of Great Britain and Ireland (1751–75), who was given in marriage in 1766 at the age of fifteen to her cousin Christian VII, king of Denmark (1749–1808), who was not only deranged but dissolute. The outcome was scandal and tragedy and Caroline Mathilde’s death at the age of twenty-four.

Whether a royal marriage was happy or not, the woman was constantly pregnant and frequently grieving for the loss of a child. When her first child, a son, died at the age of two years nine months Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans (Liselotte of the Palatinate), wrote to her former governess and friend Frau von Harling on 26 April 1676:

It has been impossible for me to answer you before now, for I have been simply too distraught by the unexpected event which Almighty God has visited upon me. Do not believe that one can die of excessive grief for, if it were so, I would certainly have given up the ghost. For it is impossible to describe what I felt within me. If God Almighty does not give special help to the child I am now pregnant with, in that case I have a bad opinion of its [future] life and health, for it is impossible that the child has not felt something of my inner pain. ³⁸

She was mourning the child whose death she saw as God’s doing and was at the same time fearful that, as was believed at the time, her negative emotions would damage the child she was now carrying in her womb. There was no one but God to whom she could appeal. When the seventeen-year-old Maria Amalia’s two children died on 1 April and 2 November 1742 respectively, she exhibited a similar determination to comfort herself by believing in God’s providence. She wrote as follows to her brother Electoral Prince Frederick Christian on 13 January 1743:

I recognised from that that a benevolent God did not want to leave me any [daughter] on this earth and that there is no other true consolation except in Him. At the same time I have recognised His divine mercy in the fact that He has had the goodness to save me from any other misfortune.³⁹

Faith enabled early modern princesses to control their emotions and to survive their isolation in a foreign land and the loss of their children.

The Role of the Convent

Finally, the religious institution of the convent provided many princesses with places of refuge during their active life at court and sometimes as sites for their retirement. It is striking how many queens founded convents, choosing the community of nuns who would live there, nominating the prioress and even the confessor and deciding on the architect and the architecture. Only in rare cases did this mean that they took the veil. Usually, they remained members of the court, fulfilling their ceremonial duties there but using the convent as a refuge, spending time with the nuns, praying and eating with them. One of the most remarkable of these convents, still in existence, is the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales in Madrid. It was founded by Juana of Austria, infanta of Spain, princess of Portugal (1535–73), in 1557. She was the daughter of Emperor Charles V and sister of Philip II, king of Spain, and in 1552 married her first cousin, John Manuel of Portugal (1537–54). He died two years later of juvenile diabetes but not before he had fathered a child with Juana, the future king of Portugal, Sebastian I (1554–78). The widowed Juana returned to Spain where she acted as regent for her father from 1554 to 1559. In 1559 she retired to the convent she had founded and lived there until her death fourteen years later. It is there that she is buried. The Descalzas, discalced or barefoot nuns, are a Franciscan order for women, known in English as the Poor Clares.⁴⁰ The adjective ‘reales’ — royal — was applied to the convent because so many Habsburg princesses from both the Spanish and Austrian branches of the dynasty were associated with it.

One of the most powerful was Juana’s older sister, the Dowager Empress Maria (1528–1603). Born in Madrid, she had married her first cousin Archduke Maximilian, the future Emperor Maximilian II, in 1548. Like Juana some years later, Maria and Maximilian acted as regents of Spain from 1548 to 1551. In 1552, the couple moved to Vienna, where Maximilian was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1564. Maria remained in Austria for six years after her husband’s death in 1576 but returned to Spain in 1582 with her youngest daughter Archduchess Margaret (1567–1633). Margaret, rather than become the fifth wife of her widowed uncle Philip II, entered the convent of the Descalzas as a fully professed nun in 1585, took the name Sor Margarita de la Cruz, and lived there until her death. Her mother, Empress Maria, lived in rooms adjacent to the convent, entering the cloistered areas daily for prayers, mass and occasional meals from 1583 until her death in 1603.⁴¹ In the words of the historian Magdalena S. Sánchez: ‘Life in a convent allowed women to escape from what was a predominantly male world, enter a female community, and create an alternate political network’ and her assessment is that the Empress established her own court attached to the Descalzas.⁴² Overlapping with these two women was Margaret, archduchess of Austria-Styria (1584–1611), who came to Spain in 1599 on her marriage to Philip III, who reigned from 1598 to 1621. The Queen attended mass every day in the convent, ‘stayed to have her midday meal with the nuns and did not return to the palace until the early evening’.⁴³ She visited Margarita de la Cruz frequently in the convent, as did the King. Margaret founded another convent in Madrid, the convent of the Encarnación, installing the reforming Augustinian nun Sor Mariana de San José (1568–1638) as its prioress. The convent was connected to the palace by means of a passageway, which enabled Margaret’s daughters to enter the convent for their education and the Queen herself to withdraw there, whenever she wished. All three of these Habsburg princesses — Empress Maria, Margarita de la Cruz and Queen Margaret — wielded great influence at the Spanish court, as Sánchez has shown, with their piety giving them increased standing and influence while allowing them to remain in contact with the outside world and correspond freely with their Austrian relatives. They spoke German to each other and to the long-standing Austrian ambassador to Spain, Hans Khevenhüller (1538–1606), German being a language that the Spaniards rarely understood.⁴⁴ They used their influence to persuade the Spanish king to support their Austrian relatives both politically and militarily.⁴⁵

Another Habsburg woman who overlapped in the Descalzas with her aunt Margarita de la Cruz was Ana Dorotea (1611–94), the youngest illegitimate daughter of Emperor Rudolf II. She was sent to Spain from Vienna in 1622, again a native speaker of German who had to learn Spanish on arrival. She was professed a nun in 1628 and spent the rest of her life in the convent, though ‘in continuous communication with the outer world through visits and letters, with the approval of her community and her religious order’.⁴⁶ She too acted as a diplomat, using her connections, as ‘yet another Habsburg woman who mediated and influenced the politics concerning both Habsburg branches’.⁴⁷

Queen Margaret’s daughter, Anne of Austria (1601–66), came to Paris in 1615 as the consort of Louis XIII, king of France, and followed the example of her mother both in finding an abbess as a spiritual mentor and in founding a convent. Anne got to know the reforming Benedictine nun Marguerite Vény d’Arbouze (1580–1626) in 1619 when Marguerite was appointed by Louis XIII as abbess of a convent in Bièvres outside Paris. The convent was moved to land which Anne bought from the crown in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris and became known as Val-de-Grâce. Anne agreed to pay half the cost of a new convent building, on which construction began in 1624. It included an apartment for the queen to which she often retreated and where she could meet people who were out of favour with her husband and with Cardinal Richelieu. In 1638, however, Anne gave birth to the future Louis XIV (1638–1715) and in 1640 to another son, Philippe, duc d’Orléans (1640–1701), which considerably raised her standing at court. After the deaths of Richelieu in 1642 and of Louis XIII in 1643, Anne, who was personally very devout, became queen regent and built a new convent and a magnificent church at Val-de-Grâce to celebrate the birth of her first son.⁴⁸ The original architect was François Mansart and the frescoes inside the huge cupola were painted by Pierre Mignard. The high altar stands under an impressive baldacchino supported by large twisted columns in the Italian baroque style and is surmounted by a life-size group of the Holy Family. Elsewhere, in bas-reliefs depicting Saints Joachim and Anne and Zacharias and Elizabeth, the theme of motherhood is emphasized again. The initials of Anne and Louis can be seen everywhere, and the church is intended both as a thanksgiving for her first successful pregnancy at the age of thirty-seven and as a celebration of Anne as queen mother. Inside the convent was what Philip Mansel calls ‘a gilded pavilion, or hermitage’, in which the queen could ‘rest, pray or sleep’. During the twenty-three years of her widowhood up to her death in 1666, ‘she would visit Val-de-Grâce 537 times and spend 146 nights there’.⁴⁹ The church, in which she is buried, was finally finished in 1667.

Other queens founded convents on the same pattern, that is, as works of piety, as places of refuge during their married lives and as residences during their widowhood. Wilhelmina Amalia of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1673–1742) is an important Austrian example. She belonged to the Catholic branch of the Guelphs and grew up in Paris in the convent of Maubuisson. In 1699 she married the future Emperor Joseph I (1678–1711) and bore him two daughters who lived to adulthood but only one son who died as a baby. Joseph infected her with syphilis, and she could not bear any more children. Already a widow in 1711, Wilhelmina Amalia founded the Salesian convent of Mariä Heimsuchung (the Visitation of Mary) in the Rennweg in Vienna, near the Belvedere Palace, in 1717. A community of nuns from the Austrian Netherlands took up residence there in 1719 and an apartment for the empress was planned from the start in the west wing. Plans dating to 1730 show that by this date she had three apartments in the convent: a grand apartment at the top of a magnificent staircase in which she gave audiences and received important visitors, a private apartment at the back, looking onto the garden and partly inside the cloistered part of the convent, and a third suite of rooms for the summer months on the ground floor leading directly into the garden.⁵⁰ The walls of the grand ‘appartement de parade’ were covered with portraits of all the members, living and dead, of the princely families of Bavaria and Saxony, the dynasties into which her two daughters had married, reported Giovanna Carriera in 1730, the sister of the painter Rosalba Carriera, after a visit to the convent.⁵¹ Wilhelmina Amalia often came to the convent for days at a time, attended services and ate with the nuns but always kept her apartments in the Hofburg and in the Favorita palace. Like Empress Maria in Madrid, she used the convent as a place for devotion and retreat without ever taking the veil or retreating completely from the life of the court. There are plenty of other similar examples, such as the Salesian convent of the Visitation founded in Warsaw in 1654 by Marie-Louise de Gonzague de Nevers (Ludwika Maria, queen of Poland, 1611–67), the wife in succession of two Vasa kings of Poland, Ladislaus IV (1595–1648) and John II Casimir (1609–72). Marie-Louise was a great friend of Anne of Austria during her time in Paris and was influenced by Angélique Arnaud, the abbess of the convent of Port-Royal. Marie-Louise brought a French community of ‘Visitandines’, as Salesians were called in France, to Warsaw and spent a great deal of time with them, even in 1663 building a passage that linked her residence directly to the convent. She died in the convent and her heart is buried there.⁵²

Male members of the court were often suspicious of a woman’s desire to spend time in an environment to which they had no entry and where they therefore could not supervise her. The lengthy report back to the Spanish court in Madrid of the Spanish ambassador to Rome, Don Alfonso Clemente de Aróstegui (1698–74), dated 1753–54 and now in the national Spanish archives in Simancas, is redolent of this unease.⁵³ He notes that, when she was at Caserta where she and her husband were building Europe’s largest palace, Maria Amalia, queen of the Two Sicilies, usually spent a day each week, while her husband was hunting, at the convent of a holy woman he calls ‘la Monja de Capua’ (the Nun of Capua), Angela Marrapese (1711–89), Suor Maria Angela de Divino Amore. Aróstegui is so concerned about this woman that he writes a three-page report on her.⁵⁴ She had gathered a community of like-minded women around her in the convent of San Gabriele in Capua. They followed the rule of the Discalced Carmelites but were not at first professed nuns and their community was only formally recognised as an enclosed convent in 1764.⁵⁵ As in the case of Queen Margaret of Spain with Mariana de San José or her daughter Anne of Austria with Marguerite d’Arbouze, Maria Amalia clearly regarded this nun as a spiritual mentor. Her sojourns in the convent, together with her lady-in-waiting and great friend Zenobia Revertera, duchess of Castropignano (?–1779), gave her access to spiritual guidance, as well as a break from court ceremonial. After Maria Amalia’s death, Carlos III wrote from Madrid to his minister Bernardo Tanucci in Naples asking him to protect the Capua convent ‘much loved by the late queen’.⁵⁶ Maria Amalia even asked to be buried in the habit of the Capua nuns.⁵⁷ Vázquez Gestal quotes a sneering account of Maria Amalia’s relationship with Angela Marrapese by the British envoy Sir Horace Mann (1706–86) to his distant relative Horace Walpole (1717–97) in London, describing an encounter between the two women of which Mann can have had no personal knowledge.⁵⁸

So far we have been discussing Roman Catholic convents, but all three confessions had less strict religious communities known as ‘Damenstifte’ or ‘béguinages’ which were not devotional centres in the same way.⁵⁹ Unmarried aristocratic women could live in these communities as canonesses. Though they took part in communal worship and promised to be obedient and chaste, they did not take conventual vows or belong to a recognised order of nuns, they could leave and even marry, and they often brought their own furniture and servants with them. Seven of these ‘Stifte’ in the German territories were designated ‘Reichsstifte’ (imperial religious houses) — four of them Catholic, two Lutheran and one Calvinist. The abbesses of these houses, which had rich medieval histories, were elected and bore the rank of ‘Fürst-Äbtissinnen’ — abbesses of princely rank. They could raise taxes, mint coins and dispense justice in the small territories that they governed, and they had the right to attend the Reichstag and sit on the Bench of Prelates.⁶⁰ By the eighteenth century royal princesses began to be elected as Fürst-Äbtissinnen: Maria Kunigunde of Saxony, princess of Poland, was abbess of the Catholic Reichsstift of Essen from 1776 to 1802, and the last two abbesses of the Lutheran abbey of Quedlinburg were Amalie, princess of Prussia (abbess from 1756–87), and Sophie Albertine, princess of Sweden (abbess from 1787–1803).⁶¹ Politics, of course, played a role in these appointments. Many of these high-born abbesses, like Maria Kunigunde, did not actually reside in the convent at all but resided elsewhere in a more comfortable setting with greater cultural opportunities.⁶²

Conclusion

This article began with the Lutheran dramatist Andreas Gryphius castigating as murderers the leaders of the Protestant Commonwealth in Britain for executing their rightful king, no matter how out of sympathy with that king’s supposed Catholic leanings Gryphius may personally have been. Lana Martysheva showed how Catholic prelates supported the Protestant Henry IV because he was the rightful king of France, even if they did not approve of his Protestant views.⁶³ In both cases, the rightful king according to the laws of succession was, by definition, divinely mandated and this was the basis for his authority. At the level of the monarch, therefore, politics always had a religious component, while, as Louis XIV made clear to his son, there was always a political component in the exercise of religion. A ruler’s divine mandate was further emphasized by the ecclesiastical authority he exercised in his domains either as ‘roi-évêque’ in a Catholic territory or as summus episcopus in a Protestant one.

At the level of personal piety, the practice of religion dominated the daily life of the court and of its members from the monarch down and did so for the adherents of all three confessions: Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist.⁶⁴ It is argued above that, while monarchy and lordship in general were based on divine authority and therefore on religion regardless of confession, confessional difference impacted more directly on the outward circumstances of highborn women, determining their marriage partners and therefore where they were to spend their lives and sometimes even compelling them to convert. Religion was used to discipline their sexuality and their emotions, but it also gave them strength and consolation in times of distress. Catholic convents often provided the female members of royal and princely houses with a sphere of independent action, sometimes under the guidance of a female mentor and most often gave them a respite from the demands of court ceremonial in the company of other women. Communities of canonesses — ‘Stifte’ — though not centres of devotion in the same way, provided a refuge for unmarried women of all three confessions. To be elected abbess of one of the seven imperial houses gave the incumbent, often a princess, a title and a recognized position of authority.

Wherever we look in our examination of either early modern monarchy or the world of the court, religion and piety are the bedrock on which everything else is built and it is impossible to research them if we ignore their centrality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly

Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly

Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly is Professor of German Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. She works on court culture from the Renaissance to the present day, on German literature, gender questions and cultural history. She has edited, among other works, Europa Triumphans. Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe with J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (2004), and Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics 1550–1750 with Adam Morton (2016). Among her books are Court Culture in Dresden from Renaissance to Baroque (2002), Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (2010) and Projecting Imperial Power: New Nineteenth Century Emperors and the Public Sphere (2021). In 2012 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and holds honorary doctorates from the National University of Ireland and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Since 2017 she has been President of the Society for Court Studies.

Notes

2 Andreas Gryphius, Ermordete Majestät Oder Carolus Stuardus König von GroßBrittannien. Trauer=Spil, in Gesamtausgabe der deutschsprachigen Werke IV (Trauerspiele I), ed. Hugh Powell (Tübingen, 1964).

3 ‘Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523)’, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings: Third Edition, 3rd edn, ed. William R. Russell and Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, 2012), pp. 428-55, pp. 430-31. The German original in Martin Luther, ‘Von welltlicher Uberkeytt, wie weyt man yhr gehorsam schuldig sey’, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesammtausgabe, Abt.1, Werke, vol. 11, Predigten und Schriften, 1523 (Weimar, 1900), pp. 245-80, p. 247: ‘Auffs erst muessen wyr das welltlich recht und schwerd wol gruenden, das nicht yemand dran zweyffel, es sey von Gottis willen und ordnung ynn der wellt. Die spruech aber, die es gruenden, sind diße. Ro. 12. ‘Eyn igliche seele sey der gewallt und uberkeyt unterthan, Denn es ist keyn gewallt on von Gott; die gewallt aber, die allenthalben ist, die ist von Gott verordnet. Wer nu der gewallt widderstehet, der widdersteht gottis ordnung; wer aber gottis ordnung widdersteht, der wirt yhm selb das verdamnis erlangen’. Item 1. Pet. 2. ‘Seyd unterthan allerley menschlicher ordnung, es sey dem koenige als dem furnemisten oder den pflegern, als die von yhm gesand sind zur rach der boesen und zů lob den frumen’.

4 Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings (London, 1648). The text is usually credited today to John Gauden and was published in 1648 according to the English Julian calendar and 1649 according to the Gregorian calendar.

5 Gryphius, Ermordete Majestät, p. 72: ‘O Land mit Königs Blutt durchspritzt? / Machst du mit einem tollen Streiche / Dich selbst zu einer todten Leiche?’

6 Gryphius, Ermordete Majestät, p. 74: ‘Verblendet Brittenland’ and ‘Britten ist kein Ort vor stille Seelen’.

7 Lana Martysheva, ‘The Shifting Political Roles of French Court Prelates’, in European History Quarterly: special issue The Fabric of Power (forthcoming).

8 John A. Moses, ‘Church and State in Post-Reformation Germany, 1530–1914’, in Hilary M. and John Gascoigne (eds), Church and State in Old and New Worlds (Leiden, 2010), pp. 77-97.

9 Julius Bernhard von Rohr, Ceremoniel-Wissenschafft der Grossen Herren, Die in vier besondern Theilen Die meisten Ceremoniel-Handlungen/ so die Europaischen Puissancen überhaupt/ und die Teutschen Landes=Fürsten insonderheit [ . . .] zu beobachten pflegen [. . .] (Berlin, 1733).

10 Rohr, Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft, pp. 42-54: ‘Von den heiligen Handlungen’.

11 Rohr, Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft, p. 48: ‘Unermüdete Wachsamkeit, Christlichen Wandel und eifrige Seelen=Arbeit, die Gemeinden und Unterthanen zu wahrhaffter Gottesfurcht angeleitet, und bey Alten und Jungen die tägliche Besserung und Erbauung getrieben werde’.

12 Martin Geier, Sursum Deorsum! Oder die alleredelste Sorgfalt Des weyland Durchlauchtigsten Fürsten und Herrn/ Herrn Johann Georgen Des Andern/ [. . . ] (Dresden, 1680).

13 Wolfgang Sommer, Die lutherischen Hofprediger in Dresden: Grundzüge ihrer Geschichte und Verkündigung im Kurfürstentum Sachsen (Stuttgart, 2006).

14 Christian Hattenhauer, Das Heilige Reich krönt seinen letzten KaiWalpoleser. Das Tagebuch des Reichsquartiermeisters Hieronymus Gottfried von Müller und Anlagen (Frankfurt, 1995), p. 185.

15 Alexandre Maral, ‘Le sacre royal des Bourbons sous l’ancien régime’, in Frédéric Lacaille, Alexandre Maral and Benoît-Henry Papounaud, Sacres Royaux de Louis XIII à Charles X (Paris, 2014), p. 6.

16 Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘The Last Habsburg Coronation and What it Means to be Anointed’, in Klaas Van Gelder (ed.), More than Mere Spectacle. Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New York, 2021), pp. 303-12.

17 Johann von Besser, Preußische Krönungs-Geschichte, Oder Verlauf der Ceremonien, Mit welchen Der Allerdurchlauchtigste, Großmächtigste Fürst und Herr, Hr. Friderich der Dritte, Marggraf und Churfürst zu Brandenburg, Die Königliche Würde Des von Ihm gestiffteten Königreichs Preussen angenommen, Und Sich und Seine Gemahlin Die Allerdurchlauchtigste Fürstin und Frau, Fr. Sophie Charlotte, Aus dem Chur-Hause Braunschweig, Den 18. Januarii des 1701. Jahres Durch die Salbung als König und Königin einweihen lassen: Nebst allem was sich auf Jhrer Majestäten Preußischen Hin- und Her-Reise bis zu Jhrer Wiederkunfft und Einzuge in Berlin, und dem darauf erfolgtem Danck- Buß- und Beth-Tage zugetragen; Aufs sorgfältigste beschrieben, und im Jahre 1702. das erstemahl gedrucket (Cölnn an der Spree, 1702).

18 Karin Friedrich and Sara Smart (eds), The cultivation of monarchy and the rise of Berlin: Brandenburg-Prussia, 1700 (Farnham, 2010); Sara Smart, ‘Johann von Besser and the Court of Friedrich III/I’, in Sara Smart (ed.), The Ideal Image: Studies in Writing for the German Court 1616–1706 (Amsterdam, 2005), pp. 277-312.

19 Heinz Duchhardt, ‘Die preussische Königskrönung von 1701: Ein europäisches Modell?,’ in Heinz Duchhardt (ed.), Herrscherweihe und Königskrönung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa (Wiesbaden, 1983), pp. 82-95. Strangely, Duchhardt does not mention Besser himself and his account at all.

20 Besser, Preußische Krönungs-Geschichte, pp. 25-42.

21 Besser, Preußische Krönungs-Geschichte, p. 39.

22 Louis XIV, Mémoires pour l’instruction du Dauphin année 1661, ed. Pierre Goubert (Paris, 1992), pp. 83-4 : ‘À vous dire la vérité, mon fils, nous ne manquons pas seulement de reconnaissance et de justice, mais de prudence et de bon sens, quand nous manquons de vénération pour Celui dont nous ne sommes que les lieutenants. Notre soumission pour lui est la règle et l’exemple de celle qui nous est due. Les armées, les conseils, toute l’industrie humaine seraient de faibles moyens pour nous maintenir sur le trône, si chacun y croyait avoir même droit que nous et ne révérait pas une puissance supérieure dont la nôtre est une partie. Les respects publics que nous rendons à cette puissance invisible pourraient enfin être nommés justement la première et la plus importante partie de notre politique, s’ils ne devaient avoir un motif plus noble et désintéressé.’

23 See, for instance, Sébastien Gaudelus, ‘La mise en spectacle de la religion royale: recherches sur la dévotion de Louis XIV’, Histoire, Économie et Société 19, no. 4: special issue Louis XIV et la Construction de l’état royale (1661–1672) (2000), pp. 513-26.

24 Alexandre Maral, La chapelle royale de Versailles sous Louis XIV: cérémonial, liturgie et musique (Sprimont, 2002), p. 111.

25 Maral, La chapelle royale de Versailles, p. 115.

26 Philip Mansel, King of the World. The Life of Louis XIV (London, 2019), p. 266.

27 Maral, La chapelle royale de Versailles, p. 253.

28 L. Trabouillet (ed.), L'Etat de la France, contant tous les Princes, Ducs & Pairs, & Marêchaux de France: les Evêques, les Juridictions du Roïaume; les Gouverneurs des Provinces, les Chevaliers des Ordres du Roy, &c. (3 vols, Paris, 1702), vol. 1, pp. 15-51. Published online by C. zum Kolk as part of the project ‘Curia’, Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, 2010 (http://chateauversailles-recherche.fr/curia/documents/roi1702.pdf). Accessed 19 January 2021.

29 See Anna Coreth, Pietas Austriaca. Ursprung und Entwicklung barocker Frömmigkeit in Österreich (Munich, 1959) and Karl Vocelka and Lynne Heller, Die private Welt der Habsburger. Kultur- und Mentalitätsgeschiche einer Familie (Graz, Vienna, Cologne, 1997), pp. 13-8.

30 Jutta Kappel and Claudia Brink (eds), Mit Fortuna übers Meer. Sachsen und Dänemark — Ehe und Allianzen im Spiegel der Kunst (1548–1709) (Dresden, 2009).

31 Adam Morton, ‘Sanctity and Suspicion: Catholicism, Conspiracy and the Representation of Henrietta Maria of France and Catherine of Braganza, Queens of Britain’, in Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Adam Morton (eds), Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics, c.1500–1800 (Abingdon, 2016), pp. 172-201.

32 Michael Kaiser, ‘Anna von Preußen und der Kampf um das Jülicher Erbe’, in Julia Klein et al. (eds), Frauensache. Wie Brandenburg Preußen wurde (Dresden, 2015), pp. 230-39.

33 Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘Religion and the Consort: Two Electresses of Saxony and Queens of Poland (1697–1757)’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Europe 1660–1815. The Role of the Consort (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 252-75.

34 Michael Ranft, Necrologium Domus Saxonicae Coaevum, Oder Vollständige Lebens Geschichte Aller in diesem ietztlauffenden XVIII. Seculo Verstorbenen Herzoge von Sachsen, Nebst Dem Anhangs Weise beygefügten Leben und Tode Der Allerdurchl. und Großmächtigst. Frauen, Frauen Christiane Eberhardinen, Königin in Pohlen und Churfürstin zu Sachsen, etc. Aus guten und Glaubwürdigen Nachrichten zusammen getragen von M.M.R (Leipzig: Augustus Martini, 1728), p. 391: ‘Die Beth-Säule des gantzen Landes und die Stütze des Evangelisch-Lutherischen Zions umgefallen [ist]’. See Jill Bepler, ‘Die Fürstin als Betsäule: Anleitung und Praxis der Erbauung am Hof’, Morgen-Glantz: Zeitschrift der Christian-Knorr-von Rosenroth-Gesellschaft 12 (2002), pp. 249-64.

35 Anna Linton, Poetry and Parental Bereavement in Early Modern Lutheran Germany (Oxford, 2008), p. 31.

36 Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘Public Roles, Private Feelings: The Princess and the Emotions in the Context of the Early Modern Court’, in Andreas Höfele and Beate Kellner (eds), Natur in politischen Ordnungsentwürfen der Vormoderne (Munich, 2018), pp. 91-102, pp. 95-7.

37 Hauptstaatsarchiv (hereafter HStA) Dresden, Nachlass Maria Antonia (1724–1780) Nr. 18, Brief Nr. 55: ‘Nôtre sort en cela est bien triste puisque ordinairement en sortant de chez nous il faut dire a Dieu pour toutte nôtre vie a tout ce que nous avons de plus cher au monde.’

38 Liselotte von der Pfalz in ihren Harling-Briefen, ed. Hannelore Helfer (2 vols, Hannover, 2007), vol. 1, p. 130: ‘Es ist mir vnmöglich geweßen euch eher alß nun zu antworten — den ich gar zu bestürtzt geweßen bin vber den vnversehnen fall — wo mitt mich got der allmächtige heimgesucht hatt […] glaube nicht — daß man auß vbermäßiger trawerigkeit sterben kan — den sonsten were ich ohnen zweiffel drauff gangen; Den waß ich in mir entpfunden ist vnmöglich zu beschreiben; Wan got der allmächtige dißem kint nicht absonderlich hilfft — womitt ich jetzt schwanger gehe, sonste habe ich schlechten opinion von seinem leben vndt gesundtheitt — den es vnmöglich ist — daß es nicht etwaß mitt von meinem innerlichen schmertzen entpfunden‘.

39 HStA Dresden, Nachlass Friedrich Christian, fol. 80: ‘J’ai conue par la que le bon Dieu ne m’en a voulu laisser aucune en ce monde, et qu’il n’ÿ a autre vraÿ consolation qu’en Luÿ j’ai conue en même tems sa divine misericorde de m’avoir fait la grace que cela ne m’ait pas aportee quelque autre malheur.’

40 ‘Clarisses’, ‘clarisas’ or ‘Clarissen’ in French, Spanish and German respectively.

41 Magdalena S. Sánchez, The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain (Baltimore, 1998), p. 137.

42 Sánchez, The Empress, p. 146.

43 Sánchez, The Empress, p. 139.

44 Sánchez, The Empress, p. 141; Diario de Hans Khevenhüller: embajador imperial en la corte de Felipe II, ed. Félix Labrador Arroyo and Sara Veronelli (Madrid, 2001).

45 See Ulrich Nagel, Zwischen Dynastie und Staatsräson. Die Habsburgischen Botschafter in Wien und Madrid am Beginn des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Göttingen, 2018).

46 Vanessa de Cruz Medina, ‘An Illegitimate Habsburg: Sor Ana Dorotea de la Concepción, Marquise of Austria’, in Anne J. Cruz and Maria Galli Stampino (eds), Early Modern Habsburg Women. Transnational Contexts, Cultural Conflicts, Dynastic Continuities (Farnham, 2013), pp. 97-117.

47 De Cruz Medina, ‘An Illegitimate Habsburg’, p. 110.

48 Ruth Kleinmann, Anne of Austria (Columbus, Ohio, 1985), pp. 164-65 and 185-87.

49 Mansel, King of the World, p. 36.

50 Gernot Mayer, ‘Kloster/Residenz: Ein Ort des Rückzugs, ein Ort der Repräsentation? Zur Ambiguität der Residenz von Kaiserinwitwe Wihelmina Amalia am Rennweg’, in Helga Penz (ed.), Das Kloster der Kaiserin. 300 Jahre Salesianerinnen in Wien (Petersberg, 2017), pp. 165-79, 167.

51 Mayer, ‘Kloster/Residenz’, pp. 169-70.

52 This account is based on the research of Dr Ewa Kociszewska, Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, who kindly allowed me to see an unpublished paper on Marie-Louise de Gonzague de Nevers.

53 Archivo General de Simancas (hereafter AGS), Estado, Legajo 5857: ‘Correspondencia confidencial y reservada de Dn. Alphonso de Arostegui’.

54 AGS, Estado, Legajo 5857, doc. 129.

55 See Pasquale Palmieri, ‘La terra dell’obbedienza. Aspiranti santi e potere politico nel Regno di Napoli (secole XVII–XIX)’, Ph.D thesis Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘Federico II’ (Naples, 2008), pp. 103-40, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11914006.pdf. Accessed 21 January 2021.

56 AGS, Estado, libro 347 (43).

57 AGS, Estado, libro 317, doc. 49.

58 Pablo Vázquez Gestal, Verso la riforma della Spagna. Il carteggio tra Maria Amalia di Sassonia e Bernardo Tanucci (1759–60) (Naples, 2016), vol. II, pp. 186-87

59 Ute Küppers-Braun, ‘“Il n’y a rien de Si agreable que d’etre Sa propre maitresse”. Äbtissinnen als Fürstinnen des Reiches’, in Susanne Rode-Breymann and Antje Tumat (eds), Der Hof. Ort kulturellen Handelns von Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2014), pp. 132-56.

60 The women did not attend in person and the whole Bench only had one vote between its nineteen members.

61 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_%C3%84btissinnen_von_Essen and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_%C3%84btissinnen_von_Quedlinburg. Both accessed 19 January 2021.

62 For a full account of imperial abbesses see Teresa Schröder-Stapper, Fürstäbtissinnen: frühneuzeitliche Stiftsherrschaften zwischen Verwandtschaft, Lokalgewalten und Reichsverband (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2015) and Teresa Schröder-Stapper, ‘Äbtissinnen und Stiftsdamen unterwegs. Die Reisen der Herforder Äbtissin Charlotte Sophie von Kurland (1651–1728)’, in Annette C. Cremer, Anette Baumann and Eva Bender (eds), Prinzessinnen unterwegs: Reisen fürstlicher Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Oldenburg, 2018), pp. 133-54.

63 Lana Martysheva, ‘The Shifting Political Roles of French Court Prelates’ (forthcoming).

64 In their introduction to Religion ou confession. Un bilan franco-allemand sur l’époque moderne (xvi^e–xviii^e siècles) (Paris, 2018), the editors Philippe Büttgen and Christophe Duhamelle point out how differently the two terms are used in French and German historical scholarship.