Elizabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine
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Elisabeth Charlotte von der Pfalz
Elisabeth Charlotte von der Pfalz
Born	May 27, 1652(1652-05-27) Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Died	December 9, 1722 (aged 70) Château de Saint-Cloud near Paris, France
Spouse(s)	Philippe I, Duke of Orléans
Children	Alexandre Louis, Duke of Valois Philippe II, Duke of Orléans Élisabeth Charlotte of Orléans
Parents	Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel

Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate (German: Elisabeth Charlotte von der Pfalz May 27, 1652 – October 9 /December 8, 1722) was a German princess and the wife of Philip I, Duke of Orléans, younger brother of Louis XIV of France. Her vast correspondence provides a detailed account of the personalities and activities at the court of Louis XIV, her brother-in-law.

She and her husband, Philippe were the founders of the modern House of Orléans - their only surviving son, Philippe II being the Regent of France during the minority of Louis XV of France. She was also an ancestor of Louis-Philippe of France and thus an ancestor of many royal houses in Europe such as the Spanish, Italian and Bulgarian Royal Families^{citation needed}.

Early life

Born May 27, 1652 in the castle at Heidelberg, to Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine of the Simmern branch of the House of Wittelsbach, and Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel).^[1] In childhood she became known as Liselotte - a mixture of her names. Her parents were in an unhappy dynastic marriage and in 1653 her father began an affair with Marie Luise von Degenfeld, one of his wife's attendants. He purported to marry her without benefit of a judicial divorce, and claimed to have done so to legitimise the bastard children. ^[2] Their daughter was five years old when she was sent to live with her father's sister, Sophia, wife of Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover.

She always remembered her time with her aunt as the happiest of her life, although she became close enough to her younger half-sisters to correspond with them at at least weekly after she married. In 1663 Liselotte had to move back to Heidelberg where she lived with her stepmother, fifteen half-siblings, and brother, the future Charles II, Elector Palatine.

Liselotte in 1671

She had purportedly desired to marry her cousin William of Orange, who would later become King of England. Though her family believed that sacrifices needed to be made in order to make a more beneficial marriage with the recently widowed brother of the King of France. ^[3]

Marriage & Issue

On November 16, 1671 she was married by proxy at Metz. By prearrangement, after leaving her father's realm but prior to arriving in France, she formally converted to Roman Catholicism. At the French court, her husband Philippe was known by the traditional honorific of Monsieur. As his wife, Elizabeth Charlotte assumed the style of Madame. Elizabeth was very close to her two stepdaughter's Marie Louise and Anne Marie (their mother was Henrietta Anne of England, her husbands previous wife).

The homosexual proclivities of her husband were well known at court. Elisabeth Charlotte even confided that he needed "rosaries and holy medals draped in the appropriate places to perform the necessary act" with her.^[4]

Elizabeth Charlotte objected to money spent on his favorites and the exercise of their influence with him to enrich themselves.^[5] She said on the subject:

I could put up with it if Monsieur only squandered his money in gaming, but sometimes he gives away as much as 100,000 francs at one swoop, and all the economies fall upon me and the children. That is not at all pleasant, besides putting me in a position where, as God is my witness, we would have to live entirely on the King's charity, which is a miserable thing.^[6]

Elizabeth Charlotte had apartments at Versailles, use of various châteaux around France, and use of the beautiful château de Saint-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris, which was the couple's main residence when not at the palace of Versailles.

The marriage at first proved to be happy, with the birth of two male heirs. After the death of the couple's first son, the Duke of Valois, she experienced depression and worried about her third pregnancy (with Élisabeth Charlotte of Orléans). After this birth, the relationship between husband and wife was never as close as it had been. The couple had three children;

Liselotte with her children, Philippe and Élisabeth Charlotte.

• Alexandre Louis, Duke of Valois (2 June 1673 – 16 March 1676).
• Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (2 August 1674 – 2 December 1723), married Françoise-Marie de Bourbon, an illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV, and later became Regent of France during the minority of Louis XV.
• Élisabeth Charlotte of Orléans (13 September 1676 – 24 December 1744), married Leopold, Duke of Lorraine.

After the birth of their daughter Elisabeth Charlotte the couple mutually agreed to cease conjugal relations.^[7] Philippe turned to his minions, and Elizabeth Charlotte to writing.

Her letters to her aunt Sophia and others created not only a vivid picture of life during the reign of Louis XIV, but also of the Regency era of her son, Philippe. They reflect her alienation from her husband and other family members, as well as her warm relations with the king, and with her son, daughter and her two step daughters.

Court Life

As the king's only brother and sister-in-law, the couple were expected to be in usual attendance at court, where her husband's rank as a fils de France ensured her precedence before all save the queen, and the wives of the king's son and grandsons — and his current maîtresse-en-titre. This last position, whether occupied by Madame de Montespan or Madame de Maintenon, rankled her, and she disliked the king's illegitimate children, especially Louis-Auguste, Duke of Maine.

Madame de Montespan's youngest daughter, Françoise-Marie de Bourbon, would eventually marry her son. No inducements ever reconciled Elizabeth Charlotte to the marriage. When she discovered that her son had agreed to it at the king's insistence, she slapped his face in front of the whole court, and turned her back on the king as he greeted her with a bow. Later, writing on the subject she put:

If, by shedding my own blood, I could have prevented my son's marriage, I would willingly have done so; but since the thing was done, I have had no other wish than to preserve harmony^[8]

After the king transferred his affections from La Montespan to La Maintenon, Elizabeth Charlotte became obsessively resentful toward and suspicious of the latter; In her correspondence, Elisabeth Charlotte refers to her as the "King's old skank", the "old witch", and the "old whore".^[9]

In addition to letters to her aunt Sophia and her morganatic half-sisters the Raugravines, she also corresponded with the former's courtier Gottfried Leibniz, although they never met. After he died, she insisted that the Académie des Sciences, of which he had been a member, honour his passing.^{citation needed} The resulting eulogy to Leibniz, by Fontenelle, was the only one ever delivered anywhere.

Later life

When the Simmern branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty became extinct in the male line with the death of her brother Karl II in 1685, Louis XIV sent troops to claim the Palatinate in his sister-in-law's name, launching the War of the Bavarian Succession (1688 - 1697).

On June 9, 1701, her husband of just under thirty years died of a stroke at the château de Saint-Cloud. Earlier, he had a heated argument with his brother at the château de Marly about the conduct of his son — who was also the king's son-in-law.

After her husband's death, Elizabeth Charlotte feared that the king would send her to a convent, as stipulated in her marriage contract. Instead she was confronted with secretly-made excerpts of her all-too-candid letters to correspondents abroad. She was warned to change her attitude toward Madame de Maintenon.

Liselotte in later life by Hyacinthe Rigaud.

She remained welcome at court. She was allowed to keep her apartments at all the royal residences and retained her rank. From her husband, she inherited 40,000 livres a year. Louis XIV added 250,000 livres, and her son promised her another 200,000.^{[10]citation needed} Some time after Philippe's death, she wrote:

If those who are in the next world could know what was happening in this one, I think His Grace, the late Monsieur, would be most pleased with me, for I have gone through his boxes to find all the letters written to him by his boyfriends and have burnt them unread, so that they will not fall into other people's hands...then...I receive great comfort from the King, otherwise I could not endure my position. When the King speaks about Monsieur he is quite moved

^[11]

In 1715, Louis XIV died aged seventy-seven at the Palace of Versailles. In his will he divided the regnal prerogatives among relatives and courtiers, allocating to his legitimised son, the Duke of Maine, guardianship of the new king, Louis XV, who was five years-old. The Parlement of Paris overturned the will's provisions at the request of Elizabeth Charlotte's son, who thus became regent.

In her memoirs, Elizabeth Charlotte describes the new era of the Regency. Although no longer outranked by any woman at court and freed from the imagined persecutions of Madame de Maintenon, she did not cease daily complaints to her correspondents about the antics of what she regarded as an increasingly decadent court, about which she wrote:

I believe that the histories that will be written about this court after we are gone will be better and more entertaining than any novel, and I am afraid that those who come after us will not be able to believe them and think they are just fairytales. ^[12]

Elizabeth Charlotte died at the age of seventy on 8 December 1722, like her husband before her, at the château de Saint-Cloud.

Her descendants by her son form the House of Orléans, which came to the French throne in the person of Louis-Philippe in 1830. Through her daughter she was the great-grandmother of Marie Antoinette and ancestress of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.

Nature and Appearance

She was earthy, even vulgar at times, quoting folksy sayings such as "The snow falls as easily on a cowpat as it does a rose petal." She spoke with a noticeable German accent and disliked dancing, which put her at odds with the French fashion. Compared to her predecessor, Henrietta Anne Stuart, who was pretty and graceful, Elisabeth Charlotte was stolid and Amazonian. She possessed the stamina to hunt all day, refusing to wear the mask that Frenchwomen were accustomed to use to protect their skin while watching their men hunt. Her face developed a ruddy and weatherbeaten look.

She walked too rapidly for most courtiers to keep up, save the king. She had a "no-nonsense" attitude^clarify, and was not given to gallantry, but lacked the prudery to prevent her ladies-in-waiting from flirting with courtiers or royalty. Her hearty appetite caused her to gain weight as the years went by, and when describing herself she once commented that she would be as good to eat as a roasted suckling pig.

Raised a Protestant, she was not fond of lengthy Latin masses. However she remained virtuous and at times outraged by the open infidelity practiced by the aristocracy. Her views were frequently the opposite of those prevalent at the French court.^[13]

She is known by different names and styles in different languages with:

• Variations of her given names, such as Charlotte Elisabeth, Elisabeth Charlotte and Liselotte
• Variations of her titles and territorial designations, such as Electoral Princess, Princess Palatine, of the Palatinate, of the Rhine, etc (also in respective forms in French and German)

At any rate, the dynastic titles she was entitled to were Countess Palatine of the Rhine and Duchess of Bavaria.

Gallery

Philippe I, Duke of Orléans

Philippe II, Duke of Orléans

Élisabeth Charlotte of Orléans

Ancestry

Elizabeth Charlotte descended from many of the royal houses of Europe:

Notes

Biography portal

Europe portal

Further reading

• Life and letters of Charlotte Elizabeth, Princess Palatine and mother of Philipp d'Orléans, régent de France 1652 - 1722 / compiled, translated, and gathered from various published and unpublished. London: Chapman & Hall, 1889.

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