Portrait of Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy 1690c.

By Henri Gascar

The fifteenth Duke of Savoy, and in 1713 became King of Sicily. He then exchanged this kingdom with that of Sardinia in 1718, at the suggestion of the Holy Roman Emperor.

He married Anne Marie d’Orléans the youngest child of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (brother of Louis XIV) and Henrietta of England, youngest child of Charles I of England.

Anne Marie d’Orléans (27 August 1669 – 26 August 1728) was the first Queen consort of Sardinia and the maternal grandmother of Louis XV of France.

She was the daughter of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, younger brother of Louis XIV, and Princess Henrietta of England, the youngest daughter of Charles I of England. Her mother died at the Château de Saint-Cloud ten months after Anne Marie’s birth. A year later, her father married 21-year-old Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, who became very close to her stepdaughters (her other stepdaughter being Anne’s sister Marie Louise who became queen consort of Spain). Her half-brother Philippe d’Orléans, the future Regent of France, was born of her father’s second marriage.

She married the Duke of Savoy, later King of Sicily and then of Sardinia in 1684 and bore eight children.

Her Stepmother described her as “one of the most amiable and virtuous of women”

She died of heart failure in 1728 aged 59.