Anne of Brittany was the eldest
child of Francis II, Duke of Brittany and his second wife, Margaret of Foix.
She was born on January 25/26, 1477 in the Castle of the Dukes of Brittany,
which is located in the city of Nantes. Anne’s father was the maternal
great-grandchild of King Charles V of France and the grandnephew of King
Charles VI of France. He was also the nephew of Louis XII of France, Anne’s
future husband. Anne’s mother was the daughter of Queen Eleanor of Navarre,
whose father was King John II of Aragon and Navarre. As a noblewoman, Anne was given a
well-rounded education for a lady of her time. Along with learning the usual
feminine pursuits of embroidery, singing, dancing, and manners, she was taught
the Latin and Greek languages as well as French literature. Although she was
praised for her intelligence and astute mind, she was criticized for her aloof
personality and her unattractive features. Anne was a very small and thin woman
with a prominent hunched back and a congenital hip defect that caused her to
limp. To hide this, she wore an extra high heel in one shoe beneath the rich
fabrics of traditional Breton dresses that she liked to wear.
Anne’s happy childhood came to an abrupt
end when her mother died in May of 1486. Anne was just nine years old at the
time and she suffered another loss just four years later when her only sibling,
her younger sister Isabeau, died as well. As the heiress to her father’s
dukedom, he began taking her with him on his trips to various castles and
lands. Francis had already spent a long period of time fighting some of his own
countrymen who wanted to annex Brittany into the holdings of France. He
ultimately lost the war in 1488 at the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier and was
forced to not only give some of his towns to King Charles VIII of France but
also recognize the King’s rights to his duchy. In regards to Anne, Francis was
not allowed to marry his daughter off without Charles’s permission (since her
position as his heiress made her a valuable commodity).
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Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor (Albrecht Dürer, 1519) |
Less than two months after Francis’s
disastrous loss in battle, he died after a fall from his horse. On his
deathbed, he made his daughter swear that she would never allow the King to
take their duchy for himself. With Francis’s death, the eleven year-old Anne
was now the official Duchess of Brittany, as well as the Countess of Nantes,
Montfort, and Richmond, and Viscountess of Limoges. As a result of her young
age and inexperience, France leaped into another war with Brittany, again to
try to subject the duchy. Francis had died without making marriage arrangements
for his daughter, so Anne’s various advisors were divided over the issue of whom
their young Duchess should wed. It was certainly important that Anne married
soon, not just to secure her position and create heirs, but also to form an
alliance that could protect Brittany against the invading royal army. At the
time, Brittany was in a state of crisis due to an empty treasury and a virulent
plague and was unable to fight against the enemy at full force. Ultimately, in
1490, Anne secretly agreed to marry Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, for a
marriage without King Charles’s consent was a direct infringement of her late
father’s treaty. A proxy marriage was held on December 19, 1490 at Rennes
Cathedral, upon which Anne was named Queen of the Romans. At the time of the
marriage, Anne was a month shy of fourteen while Maximilian, a widower with two
children, was thirty-one. Anne’s secret marriage was revealed to the
King soon after the proxy ceremony took place. In the spring of 1491, Charles
came into Anne’s duchy with his large army and began the Siege of Rennes in
response. The city held out for two months until it finally fell after fighting
without outside assistance or support. Anne was forced to surrender to the King
but, after Charles held a long, private meeting with her, he proposed marriage.
Anne consented, seeing as though she had no other choice, and on December 6,
1491, the fourteen year-old Anne married the twenty year-old King in the Great
Hall of the Château de Langeais, officially becoming the Queen of France.
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Charles VIII, King of France (Ecole Française, 1500's) |
The marriage between Charles VIII and Anne
(who were third cousins through their descent from King Charles V of France) stunned
not just France but the entirety of Europe. Charles had been engaged to
Margaret of Austria, the daughter of Anne’s first husband, Maximilian I, since
1482. Although poor Margaret developed feelings for the French king, she was
sent back home hurt and humiliated once he broke their engagement to marry Anne.
As for Anne’s marriage, the Pope granted her a dispensation because she had
only married Maximilian by proxy and not officially, which made their union
null and void. A marriage contract between Anne and Charles was also drawn up
discussing the matter of who was in control of Brittany. It was agreed that
whoever outlived the other would maintain control of the duchy, but, if Charles
died without male heirs, Anne would marry his successor to guarantee that the
Crown would have another opportunity to annex Brittany. The King and his new Queen returned to
Paris soon after their wedding, celebrating along the way. Anne was
enthusiastically welcomed into the kingdom’s capital where, on February 8,
1492, she was crowned at St. Denis Basilica. However, during her marriage to
Charles he refused to allow her to use her title as Duchess of Brittany, which
seriously hurt relations between the couple. The marriage was never a happy
one, as Charles didn’t permit his wife to have any say in political and public
affairs and every decision regarding Brittany was made in his name. The two
often lived apart but somehow, Anne was constantly pregnant during her
marriage, with an average of a child every fourteen months. But what really
fractured the couple’s relationship was the lack of power that Anne her husband
granted her, although she was the ruler of a duchy in her own right. When
Charles was away fighting in Italy from 1494-98 (he had a weak claim to the
throne of Naples through his grandmother), he refused to let his wife rule
France as his regent and let his older sister, Anne of Beaujeu, to take the
position instead.
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Anne of Brittany |
Anne delivered a son, Charles Orland, on
October 11, 1492 when she was fifteen years old. Although she was pregnant a
total of seven times during her marriage to Charles, her first son was her only
healthy child. But even little Charles didn’t live for long. When he was three
years old, he fell ill from an outbreak of measles and died on December 6,
1495, despite his parents’ efforts to safeguard his health. The death of
Charles devastated his mother and father but Anne’s next six pregnancies would
have an increasingly traumatizing effect on her psyche. Between 1493-98, she
gave birth to two stillborn daughters and a son, a son who lived for just a
month, and a daughter who died on the day she was born. With all these losses
and Charles’s blatant and public infidelities with other women, Anne suffered a
great deal emotionally and tried to be away from court as much as possible. She
lived principally in the royal residences of Amboise, Loches, and Plessis, or,
when her husband was fighting in Italy, in the towns of Lyon, Grenoble, and
Moulins. In 1498, after the birth and death of their last child, Charles had a
change of heart and became more loyal to his wife, spending more time with her
and focusing more on ruling than engaging in personal indulgences. But Charles’s health, which had never been
great, worsened as the years dragged on. On April 7, 1498, Charles was on his
way to watch a tennis match when he hit his head quite severely on the archway
of a door. He was fine at first and went on to attend the game but, a few hours
later, he fell into a sudden coma and died late in the night with Anne by his
side. He was just twenty-seven years old. Today, it is said that the most
likely cause of his death was a subdural hematoma.
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Louis XII, King of France (Jean Perréal, 1514) |
Despite the couple’s rather shaky
relationship, Anne was visibly devastated by her husband’s unexpected death. Since
Charles died without any living heirs, his second cousin once removed, Louis,
Duke of Orléans, succeeded him as Louis XII. Because of Charles’s early demise,
Anne reclaimed power over Brittany and was once again in complete control of
her lands. This was the result of the terms of Anne’s marriage contract with
Charles, but there was another term that had to be fulfilled– the matter of
Anne’s marriage to Charles’s successor. The problem was that Louis XII was
married at the time of his accession to Charles’s sister, the deformed and allegedly
sterile Princess Joan. Louis resolved the matter by seeking an annulment from
the Pope while Anne returned to her duchy in October of 1498. Perhaps at this
time, Anne was hoping that Louis wouldn’t be able to dissolve his marriage
contract so she could be a free woman with complete power to rule as she
pleased. But the Pope did grant Louis an annulment by the end of the year,
which meant that Anne would have to marry and become Queen of France once
again. The twenty-two year old Queen Dowager and
the thirty-six year old king were married on January 8, 1499 at Nantes. A new
marriage contract was drawn up, under which Louis formally recognized his
wife’s powers as the ruler of Brittany, as well as her right to the title of
“Duchess”. The contract also stipulated that Anne and Louis’s second child, no
matter their gender, would inherit their mother’s duchy upon her death. This
contract favored Anne’s demands far more than that of the one she made with
Charles, for this time she was not a child but an adult and, more importantly,
a Dowager Queen.
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Statue of Anne of Brittany at Cours Saint-Pierre, Nantes |
Anne had her second coronation ceremony as
the Queen of France on November 18, 1504, again at St. Denis Basilica. Five
years before this, on October 13, 1499, Anne gave birth to her first surviving
child – a daughter named Claude. Unfortunately, she had a string of five
miscarriages and one stillbirth from 1500 to 1509 after Claude’s birth and it
was doubtful that she would ever have another healthy child. But, almost
miraculously, she delivered a second surviving daughter named Renée on October
25, 1510. Renée would be her last healthy child. Anne would become pregnant one
last time after her second daughter’s birth, which resulted in yet another
stillbirth in 1512. Between her sixteen pregnancies (seven with Charles and
nine with Louis), she produced only two daughters that survived infancy. It is
suggested that the reason why Anne had so many failed pregnancies was because
of an incompatibility with RH factors between Anne and her husbands (Anne was
related to her third husband, as they were first cousins once removed. As
stated previously, she was a third cousin of her second husband).
Louis respected his wife’s power over
Brittany, unlike Charles, and let her rule her duchy with almost total freedom.
If he did make any decisions regarding Brittany, they were made in his wife’s
name. Anne was a fair and just ruler who was known for her obstinate, strict,
and adamant deportment. Although some of her husband’s men grumbled about her
sharp temper and stubborn, rancorous temper, Louis cared for his wife and
respected her. He saw her talent for government and even let her help him make
political decisions regarding the kingdom, something that was almost unheard of
regarding queen consorts. Anne could be seen as harsh but in some cases, she
displayed her genuine kind nature. She was a very religious woman and helped
the poor, earning her the nickname “the Good Duchess”. At her court in her main
residence of the Château de Blois, she surrounded herself with intellectual and
talented poets, musicians, and other learned men. She made her court a center
of education for the young daughters of French noblemen where they were taught
good manners and proper demeanor. She was the first Queen of France to be
regarded as a patron of the arts and also took an interest in the written word,
as she had a grand library full of manuscripts that she accumulated. Renée’s birth in 1510 was difficult for
the thirty-three year old Anne, who was already suffering from the strain of
her many pregnancies. After she delivered her second healthy daughter, she was
unable to speak and was so weak that preparations for her death were actually
carried out. Anne managed to slowly recover but her health suffered once again
after her last birth in 1512 of a stillborn son, which caused her to suffer a
serious fever. Fortunately, she managed to recover but after these last two
dangerous births, she was never the same again.
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Tomb effigies of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany in Saint-Denis Basilica |
Anne always wanted her duchy to remain
independent and out of the control of France, especially when her daughter
inherited it. In an effort to protect Brittany, she arranged a match between
her eldest, Claude, and Charles of Austria to reinvigorate the Franco-Spanish
alliance and guarantee France’s victory in the ongoing Italian Wars. But Louis
canceled the engagement before the marriage could take place. He knew that his
wife couldn’t give him a male heir so he betrothed his daughter to the next in
line to the throne, Francis of Angoulême, his second cousin once removed. Anne
was furious about the match, as it meant Brittany would lose its independence
and fall into the domain of France, but even though she fought vigorously with
her husband over the matter, she could not change his mind. By 1512, Anne’s health was failing due to
the damaging effects of her many pregnancies and miscarriages. This, combined
with her naturally weak physicality, resulted in her death on the morning of
January 9, 1514 at her home of the Château de
Blois from
a kidney-stone attack. At the time of her passing, she was just a few weeks
away from her thirty-seventh birthday. Louis gave his deceased wife a grand
funeral that lasted for forty days (the ceremony was the model for every future
burial of a French royal until the 18th century), after which her
remains were laid to rest at the Saint Denis Basilica, where she had been
crowned Queen of France twice. Her heart was removed from her body upon her
request and was buried in the tomb of her parents at Nantes, which she had
built herself. Louis would remarry exactly nine months
after his wife’s death to the young and beautiful Princess Mary Tudor of
England, the sister of the famous King Henry VIII, in a last-ditch effort to
produce a male heir. However, the marriage lasted less than three months, as
Louis died on January 1, 1515 at the age of fifty-two, supposedly from exerting
himself too much in the bedroom (the real reason he died was most likely from
the effects of gout). As he died with no male heirs, the crown passed to his
daughter Claude’s husband, Francis of Angoulême, who took the throne as Francis
I.
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Anne of Brittany's daughters (left to right): Claude, Queen of France & Duchess of Brittany and Renée, Duchess of Ferrara, Modena, & Reggio |
Francis had fulfilled his marriage
contract when he married Princess Claude on May 18, 1514, months before Louis
had died. The marriage ensured that Brittany would unite with the Crown, as
Claude had been named Duchess of Brittany after her mother’s death instead of
her younger sister Renée, as Anne’s marriage contract to Louis had stipulated.
Claude and Francis had seven children, including a King of France and a Queen of
Scotland, but only two of their children – Henry II and Margaret, Duchess of
Savoy – lived past the age of thirty. Princess Renée married Ercole II d'Este,
Duke of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio, the son of Lucrezia Borgia and the
grandson of the infamous Pope Alexander VI. Despite their rather turbulent
relationship, they had five children together. In regards to Anne, she is an ancestor of
Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, the current pretender to the Italian
throne, through her granddaughter Margaret, Duchess of Savoy (Claude’s youngest
child). Through her great-granddaughter, Claude, Duchess of Lorraine (the
daughter of Claude’s son, King Henry II of France), Anne is an ancestor of the
current pretender to the throne of Austria, Karl von Habsburg. On Renée's side
of the family, Anne is an ancestor of the Houses of Guise and Savoy-Nemours
through her granddaughter, Anna d’Este.
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