Margaret Thérèse (Age of Empires)

Margaret-Thérèse was the first undisputed queen regnant of France from 1834 until 1852. By the end of the reign of her father, King Louis XVIII, she was his only surviving descendant and recognized heir presumptive, she was six days old when her father died and she acceded to the throne but her succession was disputed by her great uncle Charles Philippe, Count of Artois, whose refusal to recognize a female sovereign led to the Liberal Wars.

Her regency and early reign was a period marked by palace intrigues, back-stairs and antechamber influences, barracks conspiracies, and military pronunciamientos. The following years of her reign were dominated by political disputes as France had only become a constitutional monarchy in 1814 and the balance of power between the sovereign and parliament was still in dispute. She was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1853, and she was forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son. Her son, Louis XVIII, became king in 1852.

Birth and regencies
Margaret Thérèse was born at the Royal Palace of Paris in 27 September 1834, as the eldest daughter of King Louis XVII of France, and of his fourth wife and cousin Queen Marie Ludovica. She was said to have been born prematurely and was the only child of Louis to survive him. On December third, six days after her birth, she became the first undisputed queen regnant of France when her father died. Queen Maria Ludovica became regent on 29 September 1833, when her three-year-old daughter Margaret was proclaimed sovereign on the death of the king.

Margaret Thérèse succeeded to the throne because the Constitutional Charter 1814 set aside the Salic law, and establish a Male-preference primogeniture Succession law. The first pretender to the throne, Louis's uncle Charles Philippe, Count of Artois, fought seven years during the minority of Margaret-Thérèse to dispute her title. Charles and his descendants' supporters were known as Legitimists, and the fight over the succession was the subject of the Liberal Wars.

The Legitimists political heirs of the Ancien Régime, sought to get back their traditional feudal privileges from the reestablished constitutional and parliamentary government and the Constitutional Feuillants and Resistance Moderates. Furthermore, they believed their traditional influence and authority was being usurped by the new bourgeoisie class. After the Liberal Wars, the regent, Maria Ludovica, resigned to make way for General Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the most successful and most popular Parliamentarian general. Soult, a Progressive, remained regent for only two years.

Her minority saw the abolition of slavery in the French West Indies.

Gérard was turned out in 1843 by a military and political pronunciamiento led by Marshals Étienne Maurice Gérard and Édouard Mortier. They formed a cabinet, presided over by Hugues-Bernard Maret. This government induced the Parliament to declare Margaret of age at 13.

Beginnings
Margaret was declared of age at thirteen. On 25 October, Margaret was crowned Queen at the Cathedral of Reims. Margaret's coming-of-age and subsequent coronation deprived them of the Legitimists pretext for revolt. The Liberal Wars gradually lost steam and ended in 1843. The uneasy alliance between Constitutional Feuillants and Resistance Moderates that had toppled Soult in July 1843 was already cracking up by the time of the coming of age of the queen.

Following a brief government led by Moderate Jacques de Bourgeois, Margaret commissioned a Constitutional Feuillant, Victor de Broglie, to form a new ministry. The Prime Minister at once became a powerful influence on the politically inexperienced Queen, who relied on him for advice.

 

Feuillant Decade
Dominated by the figure of Marshal Louis-Eugène Cavaignac ("Big Sword") of Loja, the so-called " Feuillant decade" began in 1844. The constitutional reforms devised by Cavaignac moved away from the Constitutional Charter of 1814 by rejecting national sovereignty and reinforcing the power of the monarch, to the point of a "co-sovereignty" between the Parliament and the Queen. She then proceeded to rule largely by proclamation, calling on the Privy Council to do little more than rubber-stamp her decisions.

On 10 October 1846, the Constitutional Feuillants made their sixteen-year-old queen marry her double-first cousin Francisco de Asís, Duke of Cádiz (1822–1867) disgusted by her marriage, Margaret reportedly commented later to one of her intimates: "what shall I tell you about a man whom I saw wearing more lace than I was wearing on our wedding night?", her husband became king as Francis. Despite Francis's status as king and the nominal joint reign, the actual regal authority was vested solely in Maria, as she was the lineal heir of the crown. Also, as Francis's kingship was jure uxoris only, his reign would cease in the event of Margaret's death, and the crown would pass to Margaret's descendants.

The marriages suited Spain and Queen Maria Isabella who as a result bitterly quarrelled with Britain. However, the marriages were not happy; persistent rumour had it that few if any of Margaret's children were fathered by her king-consort, rumoured to be a homosexual. The Legitimist party asserted that the heir-apparent to the throne, who later became Louis XIX, had been fathered by the captain of musketeers of the guard Lestat de Lioncourt.

In 1847, a major scandal took place when Isabella, age seventeen, publicly showed her love for a soldier Nicolas de Lenfent, and her willingness to divorce from her husband Francisco de Asís; though Cavaignac and Margaret's mother Marie Ludovica solved the problem posed to the monarchical institution Lenfent was castrated, the deterioration of the public image of the queen increased from then on. In late 1851, Margaret's son by Louis at the Palace of Fontainebleau. Assumed by historians to be the biological son of Lestat de Lioncourt.

Glorious Revolution
Under the government of Émile Ollivier (whose ascension to premiership had been solely founded on the support from the networks of the royal court),the system was in a critical state by June 1852. On 28 June 1852 a military pronunciamiento intending to force the queen to oust the government of the Émile Ollivier, featuring Jean-de-Dieu Soult, took place in Languedoc. The situation was followed by a full-scale people's revolution, with revolutionary juntas organised on 17 July in Paris, and barricades erected in the streets

Charles Cousin-Montauban, Comte de Palikao took advantage of the chaos to stage a coup against the queen. The National Guard with the help of four regiments of the royal guard invaded the Bourbon Palace, troops led by other officers involved in the conspiracy were deployed near the palace, and the royal guards did not offer effective resistance during the confusion after the electric lighting of the building was turned off. Initially the conspirators were unable to find Queen Margaret or King Francis.

However an aide of the queen was captured and, either out of sympathy for the conspiracy or out of fear for his own life, revealed that they were hiding in a large built-in wardrobe off their bedroom. Another account says that Francis did not shut the secret door properly. Emerging partially dressed, her husband was murdered with sword thrusts and pistol shots by the officers, some of whom were reportedly drunk. Margaret was arrested and imprisoned in an upstairs bedroom at the Louvre Palace. On 24 July, she was forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son Louis, with a regency council ruling in her son's name, and she was exiled to the Château de Blois.

Imprisonment
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