Mother Knows Best: The Dowager Duchess of Guise, a Son's Ambitions, and the Regencies of Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria.

Spangler, JW (2015) Mother Knows Best: The Dowager Duchess of Guise, a Son's Ambitions, and the Regencies of Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria. In: Aspiration, Representation and Memory: The Guise in Europe, 1506-1688. Routledge, pp. 125-146. ISBN 9781472419347

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Abstract

The death of Henri IV in 1610 abruptly reopened a key political debate for the Guise and their social peers: would they continue to support the new Bourbon monarchy, or take up once more their role as defenders of aristocratic privilege against royal absolutism? What strategies were required to secure lasting social pre-eminence of the Grandees in an increasingly centralising state? In this chapter, Jonathan Spangler examines this issue specifically through the case study of Henriette-Catherine de Joyeuse, Duchess of Guise, as a ‘regent’ of the Guise family, by looking at her relationships with the two Queens-Regent of France in the seventeenth century, and her relationship with her son, Duke Henri II. This chapter focuses on how Guisard women like the Duchess Henriette-Catherine de Joyeuse made use of an international reputation and the ambiguous roles afforded to aristocratic widows to ensure their family’s survival and its pre-eminent reputation in the changing political environment of the seventeenth century.