Madeleine de Bourbon-Busset


Princess Madeleine, Duchess of Parma and Piacenza was the titular Duchess of Parma and Piacenza and was also Carlist Queen of Spain as the wife of Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne.

Life and family

She was born of a cadet branch of the Bourbon Counts of Busset, male-line descendants of Louis de Bourbon, prince du sang, Bishop of Liège, allegedly by a liaison with Catherine de Gueldres, on 23 March 1898. Her father was Georges de Bourbon-Busset, Count de Lignières, and her mother Marie Jeanne née de Kerret-Quillien.
Prince Xavier, the younger son of Robert I, Duke of Parma, and Madeleine were married on 12 November 1927 at the château de Lignières in Cher. The couple took up residence in the Bourbonnais, where Xavier managed Madeleine's farm lands. The marriage was accepted as dynastic at the time by neither Elias, Duke of Parma, nor by the senior Bourbons of the Spanish branch, but was later recognized by the Parmesan Duke Robert Hugo, and by the Carlist pretender Infante Alfonso Carlos, Duke of San Jaime.
File:Doop van prins Carlos Xavier Bernardo, zoon van prinses Irene, op Kasteel Lign, Bestanddeelnr 923-2419.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Madeline de Bourbon-Busset, Duchess of Parma at the baptism of her grandson, Prince Carlos de Bourbon, Duke of Parma, held at Château de Lignières, France, in 1970
In 1936, Alfonso Carlos, the last undisputed head of the Carlist movement, appointed her husband Xavier as Carlist "regent". Madeleine actively supported her husband's political activities and social views. Madeleine was the author of "Catherine de Médicis", published in France in 1940.
In 1977, she supported her son Sixtus in his political dispute with Carlos Hugo. and accused Princess Cecile and Carlos Hugo of taking her husband out of the hospital against the instructions of the doctors to force him to sign a manifesto against Traditionalism. After the death of her husband she repudiated and disinherited her children Carlos Hugo, María Teresa, Cecilia and Nieves, and ordered that upon her death they could not attend the wake for his corpse in Lignières.
The couple had six children:
  1. Princess Marie Françoise of Bourbon-Parma, she married Prince Edouard de Lobkowicz and had issue;
  2. Prince Carlos Hugo of Bourbon-Parma, Duke of Parma and Piacenza as head of the house of Bourbon-Parma, "Carlist" King of Spain. He married Princess Irene of the Netherlands and had issue;
  3. Princess Marie Thérèse of Bourbon-Parma, victim of COVID-19;
  4. Princess Cécile Marie of Bourbon-Parma, she was named Countess of Poblet by her father. She never married;
  5. Princess Marie des Neiges of Bourbon-Parma, she was named Countess of Castillo de la Mota by her father. She never married;
  6. Prince Sixtus Henry of Bourbon-Parma, he was named Duke of Aranjuez by his father. He never married.

    Ancestry