The Kings' Mistresses (21 page)

The route she would choose to get there, however, was anything but direct. She did not want to risk traveling through France, so she planned to leave from Holland. But she took her time, nearly three months, to get to London, first going through Geneva and then crossing Germany and the Dutch states, along the way making contact with acquaintances who reported home on these stages of her itinerary. The slow pace of her travels seemed to taunt her husband the duke, while the French public relished in the spectacle. Rumors flew that “the Mazarine” was approaching Paris, only to be contradicted in the next gazette posting or letter delivery. Madame de Sévigné wrote breathlessly to her daughter on November 20, “Here is a little note from the Count of Saint-Maurice, which will
inform you of the news of the Mazarine. I am assured that at this moment she is six leagues from Paris. What folly! What folly!”
¹
Though Hortense skirted the borders of France, she did not attempt to disguise her travels in the least. When her party approached Geneva after a difficult voyage on snowy mountain roads, she paused long enough to acquire an elegant escort and fresh horses, then made an entrance designed to cause a stir. Her old friend Marie-Sidonie de Courcelles, herself again on the run to escape her own husband, arrived in Geneva two weeks after Hortense passed through the city, and the event was still being talked about. “It is a great misfortune to find oneself pursued to all corners of the world,” Courcelles wrote in a letter to Paris, “but what is extraordinary is that this woman triumphs over all her disgraces with an excess of folly that has never been seen. After experiencing this misfortune she thinks only of pleasure. Arriving here, she was on horseback, wearing a wig and feathers, with twenty men in her escort, talking only of violins and hunting parties, in short, anything that gives pleasure.”
²

Hortense had written in the opening line of her memoirs that “a woman's reputation depends on not being talked about,” but then she proceeded to write and publish her own life story, and from that point on she would continue to live as though the act of going public was a destiny that she embraced. Although she might feel that she had lost control of her reputation, she was learning how to manipulate her public image. The image of herself that she now projected was not that of a fragile prey to those who would hunt her down but rather a strong huntswoman herself, in her favorite guises as the goddess Diana, or as an Amazon. Most frequently on her travels she simply dressed as a man but without much concern for the efficacy of the disguise. This was the persona she maintained throughout her continued voyage through war-ravaged Germany, as her adoring friend Charles de Saint-Evremond would later exclaim, “She had to cross wild, armed states, calming some and commanding
the respect of others. She spoke none of the languages of these peoples, but they understood her.”
³

She finally arrived at the Dutch port of Brill in December 1675 and prepared to embark for the coast of Britain. Travel on the English Channel was fraught with dangers typical of open water at the time: violent storms; French, Dutch, Spanish, and English ships vying for control of the trade routes; and pirates, hijackers, or ordinary thieves. Once on land, seafaring voyagers were in no less danger until they were well inland. Entire villages had been abandoned along the Atlantic coast because of the threat of marauders arriving by sea. Inevitably, adventure awaited Hortense, this time a violent winter storm lasting five days, forcing her vessel to land at Solebay, a considerable distance from their intended port of entry into England. She was exhausted. Her servant Mustapha and the others in her little party were in even worse condition.

When the Duchess Mazarin finally arrived in London on New Year's Eve in 1665, she was on horseback, wet and muddy, and at first mistaken by onlookers for a postal courier because of the men's clothing and long cloak she was wearing. Her arrival made an immediate impression, within days being reported in London gazettes and circulated in pamphlets. One pamphlet recorded excited discussion in a coffeehouse between Englishmen (or “coffists,” as they were called) and Frenchmen about her dramatic arrival by postal horse:

This “new Queen of the Amazons,” as the coffists went on to label her, who had survived a difficult journey “on a post horse and in the depth of winter,” was a courier without a packet of letters. It was as though Hortense was staging her own arrival, drawing on the familiar sight of a postal horse to stress her impressive capacity to move about freely. The package she was delivering to the shores of England was her own person, a
coureuse,
or loose woman, as the Frenchmen had jokingly called her.

Who would become her next protector? This was the question to which her new public turned. Henri de Ruvigny, the French ambassador, wrote a letter on January 2, 1666, describing the sensational news and speculating on its political implications:

From the time he heard that the Duchess Mazarin was headed for England, Ruvigny had been worried. With Lord Montagu advising her, it was certain that she would be encouraged to do what she could to weaken the favor that Louise de Keroualle enjoyed at the English court as Charles II's mistress. Ruvigny had a comfortable relationship with Louise, she was happy to pass on information to France through him, and she was relatively pliant, usually ready to take her cues from Paris. The dramatic arrival of the Duchess Mazarin on British shores threw the French ambassador into a panic. He decided that the best course of action would be to find a way to send her home, and soon. The only means to accomplish this, he reasoned, would be to grant the conditions that she had always demanded for her return: the restitution of her wealth and property and, most important, as part of her protection from her husband's vengeance, a residence where she could live independently and come and go as she pleased. The ambassador sounded out King Charles, who was quite aware of the speculation swirling around him about Hortense's irresistibility, and reported that the king was reassuring. But Ruvigny was not easily reassured. He noted every expression on the faces of the king and his courtiers since Hortense had “arrived at the court of England like Armida in Godfrey's camp.”
⁶
He observed that the duchess spent most of her time by the bedside of her cousin Mary Beatrice for her lying-in. King Charles was also visiting his sister-in-law, and with increasing frequency.

By the end of January, Charles had added his own personal appeal to the king of France that Hortense be provided an income worthy of her station and that was hers by right. Ruvigny could only nervously echo the request, but Louis XIV promptly turned it down and charged his ambassador with informing Hortense of his decision. In the next letter from Ruvigny, the French king learned that Charles had supplied the money that he had denied, a gift, Ruvigny
added timidly, “that will have a very adverse effect on Madame the Duchess of Portsmouth.”
⁷

And indeed it did. The consequences fell also on Ruvigny, who was recalled to France and replaced by Honoré de Courtin, a mature and politically astute courtier who had enjoyed the favor of Louis XIV since the king's youth. And although Courtin claimed to agree that the best course of action would be to return the Duchess Mazarin to France, soon he was spending long hours in her company and writing letters to her husband reassuring him that his wife was conducting herself with all propriety. “Madame your wife gives so little thought to her beauty, her coiffure, and the clothes that might flatter it, . . . that it is easy to see that she has no interest in making any use of it in any way that could give you the slightest cause for concern.”
⁸

Courtin's reports to the king and his minister Arnauld de Pomponne were more blunt. King Charles, he wrote, had assured him and Ruvigny “that he would not be won over. But she is beautiful. . . . All those closest to him talk only of her merits. It will be very difficult for him to resist temptation much longer. . . . The best thing would be for her to cross the sea again. It matters little to Your Majesty that she not sleep with M. Mazarin, and that she be given fifty thousand francs, but it matters a great deal to you that in the meantime England not join your enemies.”
⁹

And so Hortense had occasion once again to reflect on how her life resembled the plot of a novel. Washed up on the shores of England by a storm, this mysterious and foreign noblewoman was heralded as an immediate threat to the reigning royal mistress. At one time, when King Charles II had been living in exile in France many years earlier, he had indicated that he might want to marry this young niece of Cardinal Mazarin. At that time, Mazarin had declined the offer from a suitor who was a deposed king with an uncertain future. But the episode had an important place in Hortense's
public image, as well as in her own self-image. As she reminded her readers in her memoirs, “Everyone knows about the proposals that were made several times, to marry me to the King of England.”
¹⁰

By the time the Duchess Mazarin arrived in London, Charles had long been labeled “the pleasure king” by some of his subjects. His political adversaries in Parliament associated the king's lax ways with immoral influences, primarily French and Catholic, from the Continent. The king's sensual looks were often caricatured in pamphlets and broadsheets, where his more lofty pursuits of pleasure and learning were rarely acknowledged. He had been the most important patron of architect Christopher Wren during the ambitious projects for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. Charles had founded a national school of mathematics and nautical science. He was an enthusiastic supporter of new scientific experimentalism in botany and agriculture, and in 1660, he founded the Royal Society of London, a learned society for science. Under Charles II, London became a flourishing cultural capital for theater and the arts.

By 1675, the king had learned to navigate the treacherous factionalism pitting Protestants against Catholics. He was sympathetic to the Catholic faction but may have formally converted only on his deathbed. He was not a ruler easily angered by petty offenses or lapses in protocol, and he encouraged an informal atmosphere at court. In matters of politics, religion, and personal affection, he was known to be tolerant. His connections with the French court remained strong, not the least because England had become a haven of tolerance for courtiers who had not been so fortunate at the court of Versailles. Hortense could count herself as one of these, but at the same time the French king's advisers viewed her as a possible ally, a potentially useful pawn who could act as an inside informant and exert influence on Charles should she become close to him.

On this subject there were mixed feelings. Some of the French envoys were enthusiastic about the idea. Others were more cautious, recognizing that the Duchess of Portsmouth was already a useful, more pliable presence close to Charles who could be relied upon to serve the interests of Louis XIV, whereas Hortense Mancini had shown herself to be anything but dutiful. But everyone clearly enjoyed watching what would happen. Inevitably, those who were close enough to observe and report on her were also inclined to fall under her spell. Ruvigny had panicked at the spectacle of her triumph and had to be recalled to France. Hortense's friend from Savoy, the writer Saint-Réal would not stay long in London after Hortense's arrival, when he found himself reduced to the status of just one in a long line of admirers.

To no one's surprise, Hortense became the king's mistress not long after her first meeting with him. Though she kept her residence at Saint James's Park, close to Mary Beatrice, she was frequently at Whitehall, the king's residence. She had arrived in January 1675, and by August she had been given an apartment at Whitehall, the same one that had been previously occupied by the king's mistress Barbara Villiers. Louise de Keroualle remained at court but was reported to look perpetually unhappy. Before long Louise was advised by her friends that if she wished to retain any favor at all with the king, she would have to receive the Duchess Mazarin and seek her company. It was a bitter pill, but the Duchess of Portsmouth took it, humiliating herself by making a show of enjoying outings and visits with her French compatriot. There could be no better public evidence of Hortense's newly acquired power at the court of England.