Maria Theresa of Spain (; ; 10 September 1638 – 30 July 1683) was Queen of France from 1660 to 1683 as the wife of King Louis XIV. She was born an Infanta of Spain and Portugal as the daughter of King Philip IV and Elisabeth of France, and was also an Archduchess of Austria as a member of the Spanish branch of the House of Habsburg.
Her marriage in 1660 to King Louis XIV, her double first cousin, was arranged with the purpose of ending the lengthy war between France and Spain. Famed for her virtue and piety, she saw five of her six children die in early childhood, and is frequently viewed as an object of pity in historical accounts of her husband's reign, since she was often neglected by the court and overshadowed by the King's many mistresses.
Without any political influence in the French court or government (except briefly in 1672, when she was named regent during her husband's absence during the Franco-Dutch War), she died aged 44 due to complications from an abscess on her arm. Her grandson Philip V inherited the Spanish throne in 1700 after the death of her younger half-brother, Charles II. The resulting War of the Spanish Succession established the House of Bourbon as the new ruling dynasty of Spain, where it has reigned with some interruption until the present time.
Biography
Birth and early life
Born at the Royal Monastery of El Escorial, the Infanta Maria Theresa was the daughter of Philip IV & III, and his first wife Elisabeth of France, who died when Maria Theresa was six years old. As a member of the House of Austria, Maria Theresa was entitled to use the title Archduchess of Austria. Elizabeth of France chose Sainte Thérèse to protect her daughter. She was known in Spain as María Teresa de Austria and in France as Marie-Thérèse d'Autriche.
She was raised by the royal governess Luisa Magdalena de Jesus. The religious education of Marie-Thérèse was carried out by Juan de Palma, commissioner of the Indies who had been the director of Elizabeth of France, was charged by Philippe IV to look after his daughter, as he had looked after the mother of the princess. Finally, in later times it was Father Vasquez, a man recognised in Spain for being highly educated and of great virtue; it was he who had been entrusted with the spiritual education of the young Infanta.
Unlike France, the kingdom of Spain had no Salic Law, so it was possible for a female to assume the throne. When Maria Theresa's brother Balthasar Charles died in 1646, she became heir presumptive to the vast Spanish Empire and remained such until the birth of her brother Philip Prospero, in 1657. She was briefly heir presumptive once more between 1 and 6 November 1661, following the death of Prince Philip and until the birth of Prince Charles, who would later inherit the thrones of Spain as Charles II.
In 1658, as war with France began to wind down, a union between the royal families of Spain and France was proposed as a means to secure peace. Maria Theresa and the French king were double first cousins: Louis XIV's father was Louis XIII of France, who was the brother of Maria Theresa's mother, while her father was brother to Anne of Austria, Louis XIV's mother. Spanish procrastination led to a scheme in which France's prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, pretended to seek a marriage for his master with Margaret Yolande of Savoy. When Philip IV of Spain heard of a meeting at Lyon between the Houses of France and Savoy in November 1658, he reputedly exclaimed of the Franco-Savoyard union that "it cannot be, and will not be". Philip then sent a special envoy to the French court to open negotiations for peace and a royal marriage.
Marriage
The negotiations for the marriage contract were intense. Eager to prevent a union of the two countries or crowns, especially one in which Spain would be subservient to France, the diplomats sought to include a renunciation clause that would deprive Maria Theresa and her children of any rights to the Spanish succession. This was eventually done but, by the skill of Mazarin and his French diplomats, the renunciation and its validity were made conditional upon the payment of a large dowry. As it turned out, Spain, impoverished and bankrupt after decades of war, was unable to pay such a dowry, and France never received the agreed upon sum of 500,000 écus.