One principal cause of disagreement was the upbringing of their son, Cosimo. The Grand Duke wanted him to be given a modern education with due attention paid to the scientific discoveries which he himself found so deeply interesting. But the Grand Duchess would have none of that. She insisted that their son be educated by priests in the old-fashioned way. And so he was. He was taught to suppose that the scientific experiments of the Cimento were not only impious but beneath a prince’s notice. He accepted the teaching and soon developed a priggish intolerance that was to mar his character for life. When he was sixteen he was already exhibiting ‘symptoms of a singular piety’, the Lucchese ambassador reported.
He is dominated by melancholy to an extraordinary degree, quite unlike his father. The Grand Duke is affable with everyone, as ready with a laugh as with a joke, whereas the Prince is never seen to smile. The people attribute this to an imperious and reserved disposition.
Cosimo did not like music, except church music; he did not like dancing; he preferred to go to Mass rather than to the theatre; he would rather talk to monks than to girls or courtiers; he went out shooting, but when a bird flew over his head he would murmur, ‘Poverino’ and lower his gun – though afterwards he would eat with relish the birds that others had shot. His father decided that the sooner he was married the better, and that the ideal bride for him would be Marguerite-Louise, daughter of Gaston d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s uncle. This was a match that was also favoured in Paris, where Cardinal Mazarin entertained hopes of becoming Pope and was anxious to obtain the support of the Medici. The prospect, however, of being married to a gloomy, plump Italian with thick lips and droopy eyes, the heir to an impoverished duchy, was not at all pleasing to Marguerite-Louise herself. She was a high-spirited girl, quick, energetic, playful and capricious. Besides, she was in love with her cousin, Prince Charles of Lorraine. She begged her other cousin, King Louis XIV, not to send her to Florence. She knelt before him at the Louvre, imploring him to spare her such a dreadful fate; but he helped her to her feet and told her that it was now too late to break her word. So she was married to Cosimo by proxy in Paris on 17 April 1661. She was fifteen years old. Cosimo, who was in bed with measles at the Pitti Palace, was eighteen.
The bride left for Florence, ‘crying aloud for everyone to hear’, delaying her departure from every town where they stopped for the night, reaching Marseilles in the pouring rain, pretending to be too ill to leave her cabin in the flower-bedecked galley in which she was rowed to Leghorn. The bridegroom was waiting to meet her at the Villa Ambrogiana, near Empoli.8 He displayed no pleasure when he saw her for the first time, declining to kiss her; while she, for her part, did not attempt to disguise her relief when her doctor said that, although she had already had measles and the Prince was no longer infectious, she ought not yet to share his bed.
When they did go to bed together, after a magnificent ceremony in the Cathedral, the Prince was not enthusiastic, and was soon asleep. He would be stronger, the bride was assured, when he had fully recovered from his recent illness; but Marguerite-Louise seemed not to care whether he ever got better or not. According to Princess Sophia of Hanover, he never really did recover properly. ‘He sleeps with his wife but once a week,’ she reported years later, ‘and then under supervision of a doctor who has him taken out of bed lest he should impair his health by staying there overlong.’ Marguerite-Louise thoroughly disliked him; even his politeness seemed to her a kind of insult.
On the second night of her marriage she asked him to give her the crown jewels. He replied that they were not his to give, whereupon she lost her temper with him, declaring that she would rather live in the most squalid hut in France than in a palace in Tuscany. The next day she helped herself to several of the jewels anyway and gave them to her French attendants from whom they were only recovered with difficulty. After that she rarely spoke to her husband. By the end of their first month together, so the Bishop of Béziers reported, the Prince had only ‘couched with her three times’. ‘Every time he does not go,’ the Bishop continued, ‘he sends a valet to tell her not to wait up for him. The French ladies… are much embarrassed because she is always sad… She finds the life here very strange.’
It was hoped that the splendid entertainments which were staged in Florence that summer would dispel her gloom. There were banquets in the Palazzo Vecchio, balls at the Pitti Palace, firework displays over the bridge of Santa Trinità, horse races in the Via Maggio, chariot races in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, processions through the carpeted streets. On St John the Baptist’s Day, the Festa degli Omaggi was held as usual in the Piazza della Signoria. A week later, before an audience of almost twenty thousand people in the amphitheatre in the Boboli gardens, a performance was given of I1 Mondo Festeggiante, a fantastic and spectacular combination of masque, tableaux vivants, costume parade, ballet on horseback, musical pageant and phantasmagoria in which Cosimo himself appeared in jewelled armour as Hercules. Ten days after this there was a presentation of Jacopo Melani’s Hercules in Thebes at the theatre in the Via della Pergola. Thereafter Marguerite-Louise was taken on a tour of the villas and gardens of the Medici, from Poggio Imperiale to Poggio a Caiano, from Artimino to Castello and Pratolino. Yet still the Princess only occasionally displayed traces of her former high spirits. Most of the time she was homesick, unhappy, bored and crotchety, finding fault with everything Tuscan because it was not French, rarely going out in public and then always masked. When someone asked her if she liked Florence, she grumpily replied that she would have liked it much better had it been near Paris. She was also extravagant, spending such sums of money on her clothes and her table that the frugal Grand Duke was horrified. Worse than this, she was indiscreet. When Prince Charles of Lorraine visited Florence she made no secret of her love for him, writing passionate letters to him after his departure. His replies were intercepted and there was another row. In August 1663 she gave birth to a son, Ferdinando, and afterwards fell ill with a tumour on her breast. During her convalescence she refused to see anyone other than her French attendants. Blaming them for her petulant behaviour, Cosimo replaced twenty-eight of them with Italians as a result of which Marguerite-Louise became more rebellious than ever.
‘She is deaf to protests,’ the Venetian ambassador wrote. ‘She attaches importance to no one. It is her usual conceit to say that she has married beneath her, into a family vastly inferior to her proper merit; and this pricks the family at the most delicate point of their sensibilities.’ She took the most extreme measures to avoid her husband, moving from room to room in the palace so as not to be near him, asking her father-in-law to allow her to live by herself in a country villa. The Grand Duke Ferdinando had been patient, understanding and tolerant for a long time, but eventually he was driven to firmness. He replied that he would have her sent not to a villa but to a convent if she went on behaving like this. Pertly she replied that he would be sorry if he did, for she would soon have all the nuns skipping about like monkeys. She took a malicious delight in piquing Cosimo, in spreading stories of his inadequacy, telling him in public that he would not even make a good groom, let alone a proper husband. The Grand Duke retaliated by having her moved to his brother Mattias’s villa of Lappeggi when the rest of the Court drove off to Artimino for the shooting, and by having her closely watched by attendants who were instructed to follow her wherever she went and to ensure that she received no unauthorized letters. She took her revenge by pretending that the Medici were trying to poison her, and that it was necessary for a steward to taste all her dishes which must be prepared by French cooks. She gave it out that the marriage had been forced upon her, and that she was not therefore legally married to Cosimo. She was living as a concubine; her husband was a fornicator. She would have to enter a convent now – a French convent, of course. When this solution to her problem was put to Louis XIV, he replied that if she returned to France at all it would certainly not be to a convent but to the Bastille, and he followed up this threat by sending an envoy to Tuscany with a letter of remonstrance sternly condemning her ‘capricious’ behaviour and her ‘invincible obstinacy’.