On March 24, 1668, Queen Maria Francisca of Portugal obtained an annulment from her husband, King Afonso VI, on the grounds of his perpetual impotence. Just nine days later, she married his younger brother, Dom Pedro, the man who had recently overthrown the king in a palace coup. It was one of the most shocking royal scandals of the 17th century. Born Marie Françoise Élisabeth in Paris on June 21, 1646, she was the second surviving daughter of Charles Amadeus of Savoy, Duke of Nemours, and Élisabeth de Bourbon-Vendôme, a granddaughter of King Henry IV of France.
Of their five children, only she and her older sister, Marie-Jeanne-Baptiste, reached adulthood. When Maria Francisca was still a child, her father was killed in a duel in Paris in July 1652, aged just 28. The quarrel had arisen from a bitter dispute with his brother-in-law, François de Vendôme, Duke of Beaufort. After her father’s death, her mother retired to the convent of Fontevraud, where the sisters were raised by nuns.
Despite her simple upbringing, Marie received a good education and later wrote poetry. As the daughters of the late Duke of Nemours, the sisters remained politically significant, and with no direct male heir, their marriage prospects became a matter of interest to Europe’s most powerful courts. Marie’s older sister married Charles, Duke of Lorraine, though the union was swiftly annulled when he refused to recognize it. A parallel scheme to wed Marie to Charles Henri, Duke of Aumale, came to nothing.
When Marie’s mother died in 1664, responsibility for negotiating a marriage fell to her great-uncle, César d’Estrées, Bishop of Laon and a future cardinal. He attracted the interest of the Portuguese court, where King Afonso VI, who was three years older than Marie, remained unmarried. She was not Portugal’s first choice; the Marquis of Sande had earlier been sent to negotiate for the hand of Louis XIV’s cousin, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who declined. Only after further discussions did Maria, as she became known in Portugal, emerge as the chosen bride.
Maria’s marriage treaty was signed in Paris on February 24, 1666. She would provide a dowry of 600,000 escudos, deliberately set high to emphasize the distinction of her family houses, but this was recoverable if the marriage ended. She was also promised extensive lands in Portugal, which she would inherit after the death of her mother-in-law, Dona Luisa de Guzman. A proxy wedding was held at La Rochelle on June 27, 1666, and Maria arrived in Portugal on August 9.
She was escorted to the Palace of Alcântara, where King Afonso VI and the court awaited her. They were married that same day at the Church of the Flemish Convent. Maria was 20; Afonso was 23. Contemporary accounts remarked on the young queen’s beauty, but according to some sources, the king abruptly abandoned his bride during the wedding feast.
It was an ominous sign that the marriage was in trouble from the very beginning. Maria soon realized that the kingdom itself was in turmoil, with factions battling for power around a king many believed incapable of ruling. Afonso VI had been left physically impaired by a serious childhood illness and was frequently portrayed as impulsive, volatile, and ill-suited to the throne. His mother had ruled as regent for years because so many doubted his ability to govern.
Some accounts claim he preferred the company of rough companions, spending his days playing rowdy games and his nights roaming the streets of Lisbon, drinking heavily and terrorizing residents. He neglected his duties as monarch at a time when Portugal was declining and being superseded by the Dutch as a colonial power in parts of Asia and Africa. By the time Maria arrived, a faction opposed to the all-powerful court favorite, the Count of Castelo Melhor, had already emerged. Castelo Melhor exerted enormous influence over Afonso.
The opposing faction was coalescing around the king’s own brother, Pedro. It was this faction that had pushed for the French marriage, in opposition to Castelo Melhor’s preference for a strong alliance with England. Maria initially got on with Castelo Melhor, but when she sought to attend the Council of State as her mother-in-law had done before her, and the Count resisted, she began to ally with the faction building around Pedro. Later accounts claim that as her marriage to Afonso unraveled, she fell for his younger brother.
The contrast between the brothers was striking. Pedro was handsome, charismatic, and capable, while Afonso was physically impaired and intellectually limited. Whether these accounts were true or embellished remains uncertain, but Castelo Melhor came to view the queen and the infante as a dangerous alliance. Both sides began maneuvering against one another, and a conspiracy to remove Castelo Melhor soon emerged, encouraged from a distance by King Louis XIV of France, who wished to undermine the Anglo-Portuguese alliance that Castelo Melhor supported.
Maria’s subsequent actions were a calculated political gamble. She made it clear she was unhappy with her marriage and claimed that Afonso, who suffered from a form of hemiplegia, had been unable to consummate it. She did so despite earlier claims that she believed herself to be pregnant, creating a contradiction that was never resolved. On these grounds, Maria requested an annulment and began to assert that she would take her large dowry and return to France.
In September 1667, a palace coup shattered Afonso’s reign. Castelo Melhor fled into exile in England, while Pedro seized control of the government. Afonso was left king in name only and was later sent into confinement on the island of Terceira in the Azores, stripped of all real authority. Pedro ruled Portugal as prince regent, though he would not officially become king for another 16 years.
On March 24, 1668, Maria was granted an annulment on the grounds of Afonso’s perpetual impotence, which the church declared incurable. It was a humiliating public judgment against the king, but an even greater scandal was still to come. Just days later, Maria married her former brother-in-law, Dom Pedro, the man who now ruled Portugal in all but name. Overnight, the former queen became the wife of the kingdom’s new power behind the throne.
It is unclear whether Maria was involved romantically with Pedro before the coup. She continued to express her wish to leave Portugal with her dowry and return to France even after Pedro had claimed power. It seems the new government may have pressured her into remaining and marrying Pedro, both to retain her dowry at a time of financial stress and to preserve royal links to France and Savoy. On April 2, 1668, just nine days after the annulment, Maria married Pedro.
She became pregnant almost immediately and gave birth to a daughter, Isabel Luísa Josefa, on January 6, 1669. King Louis XIV of France stood as godfather in absentia. The birth helped Maria and Pedro immensely during the early years of their rule. Pedro’s claim to rule as regent was fragile, but in having a child, he could point to a potential heir.
The rumors of Afonso’s impotence meant that even if he were released and remarried, he would not have children of his own. Isabel would be their only child. Maria became pregnant again in 1670 but miscarried in December after rashly traveling to confront her husband over a suspected affair while heavily pregnant. She was unable to conceive again thereafter.
Much of the rest of Maria’s life focused on her daughter’s upbringing and talks over who she might marry. Ironically, despite as many as 17 different suitors over the years, Isabel never married. Negotiations focused at various times on nobles in France and Italy, as well as German candidates from Bavaria and Neuburg. Plans eventually centered on marrying Isabel to her 7-year-old cousin, Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy.
A betrothal ceremony occurred in March 1681, but at the last minute the negotiations collapsed when the government of Savoy became cautious about the possibility that the Duke would have to go and live in Lisbon, potentially subsuming the Duchy to the Portuguese crown. Isabel remained unmarried, becoming known as the eternal fiancée. Between 1672 and 1674, Maria worked against Spanish resistance to secure papal recognition for her second husband as ruler of Portugal. This was a thorny issue, as Spain had ruled Portugal for over 60 years between the 1580s and the 1640s and still had ambitions to reclaim it.
Maria’s final years were overshadowed by illness. Many historians believe she suffered from syphilis, possibly congenital, though its exact origin remains uncertain. Some hostile contemporaries instead claimed Dom Pedro had infected her, portraying the disease as divine punishment for her marriage to her former brother-in-law. Whatever the truth, her health declined throughout the 1670s and worsened dramatically in the early 1680s.
Meanwhile, Afonso had returned to Portugal, though years of confinement had further weakened his health. From 1675 he lived under guard at the Palace of Sintra, where he died of a stroke on September 12, 1683, aged 40. With Afonso’s death, Dom Pedro was finally proclaimed King Pedro II, and for the second and final time in her life, Maria became queen consort of Portugal. By then, it was reported that she had become incredibly thin and ill.
Maria died just three months later, on December 27, 1683, aged 37. She was laid to rest in the Convento do Santo Crucifixo. Her remains were exhumed in 1912, after the convent was demolished, and buried in the Royal Crypt at São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon, alongside both her husbands. Her only child, Isabel Luisa, died unmarried in 1690 at just 21, bringing her mother’s direct line to an end.
Three years after Maria’s death, Pedro married Maria Sofia of Neuburg, and their many children secured the succession. When Pedro died in 1706, his son, John V, inherited the Portuguese throne. Maria Francisca remains the only woman in Portuguese history to have been crowned queen as the wife of two different kings, and one of the only known women in history to have married two brothers who both became kings.
