ABSTRACT
For the devoutly Catholic Lorraine-Guise, the belief that plans may be laid by man, but God remains the ultimate decision maker, is alluded to by the last of the Guise princesses in her testament of 1686. She does not seem to place blame on bad planning in family marriage strategies: namely, the choice in two generations of mentally and physically disabled brides. But then of course, neither did the Habsburgs attribute to themselves the genetic catastrophe that was Carlos II of Spain. The hand of the divine was seen to dictate whether or not a marriage would be fruitful, and how long the partnership would endure. But an aristocratic family could not expect to rely entirely on the Heavens to ensure the success and continuity of their line, so efforts in planning the outcome of a marriage’s dissolution were almost as important as for its formation. Marriage was both a holy sacrament of the Church and a means of aggrandising or solidifying a family’s economic standing, ‘une double compétence spirituelle et temporelle’.2
