The Ethiopian and the elephant? Queen Louise Marie Gonzaga and queenship in an elective monarchy, 1645-1667
ENJust over a year after Louise Marie’s death, John Casimir abdicated his throne, leaving Poland forever to become abbot of St Germain-des-Près on a pension from Louis XIV. It is somehow appropriate that a man whose reign had been defined perhaps more than any other king of Poland Lithuania by his queen should die five years later in Nevers, in the castle in which she had been born in 1611. For Louise Marie played a central role in the political turbulence of the last decade of John Casimir’s reign, which culminated in the impeachment of Grand Marshal Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski in 1664 and the rokosz (rebellion) in 1665–66 that it provoked. It was the Queen’s insistence on pursuing a campaign for the election vivente rege of a French candidate to the Polish throne despite its rejection by the Sejm in 1661–62 which had brought civil war and left the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania teetering on the edge of a political abyss. [Extract, p. 788]
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