The Kings' Mistresses (23 page)

Early in their relationship Saint-Evremond was already advising his friend concerning how best she should manage her pleasures at court—not that his advice was always heeded. In late 1676 he penned an essay titled “On Friendship,” which he addressed to Hortense, and in which he counseled her to better manage her liaison with Charles II, which appeared to be threatened by her flirtation with a newcomer to London, the Count of Monaco. “If my wishes were realized,” he wrote, “you would be ambitious, and would govern those who govern others. Become Mistress of the World, or remain mistress of yourself.”
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He knew that King Charles was indulgent with his new mistress and tolerant of her fondness for receiving all who were inclined to attend her late-night social gatherings. The king's own visits to the duchess in her little house
in Saint James's Park were frequently even later, after the other guests had left. He would return to his own rooms at Whitehall at dawn. Neither Charles nor Hortense was inclined to jealousy. Nor was the king surprised that his mistress found herself surrounded by men who loved her.

But Saint-Evremond, an astute observer of men and of royal egos, urged Hortense to be more strategic. When the lovesick Count of Monaco announced his decision to leave England out of despair for the love of Duchess Mazarin, her friend knew that the king would take notice. Hortense responded precisely as her enemies had hoped she would. She took pity on the count, began to encourage his melancholy overtures, and persuaded him to stay.

This move was impulsive and of course ill advised. She was finally in a position of safety, protected from a forced return to her husband, and she was letting herself be drawn by her love of pleasure into a relationship that could only damage her newfound security. Perhaps she thought that the infatuated king, who publicly embraced his libertine reputation, would tolerate an infidelity with another man as easily as he had accepted her intimacy with Anne of Sussex. Hortense seemed to believe, too, that her connection to Charles II had been somehow predestined and was invulnerable, determined at the start from the moment he had first seen her as a young girl at the French court.

The strength of their new bond did in fact endure longer than many would have predicted. The king was satisfied at first that Hortense's affection for the Count of Monaco was not serious, even when the count reversed his plans to leave England, and as Courtin urgently reported to the French court that Monsieur de Monaco seemed unwilling to leave Madame Mazarin. Saint-Evremond intensified his warnings to Hortense. But Charles continued to keep the Duchess Mazarin close to him, even seating her behind him at the opening of Parliament in 1677. It was only when Hortense's
liaison with the Count of Monaco became so open that the king felt himself mocked that he withdrew his affection.

In the summer of 1677 Hortense's old friend Marie-Sidonie de Courcelles, herself newly arrived in London, wrote letters home detailing what to her seemed to be Hortense's foolish relinquishing of the position of royal mistress in favor of an affair with a visiting nobleman of little consequence. She described Monsieur de Monaco as physically ill with love, and Hortense in “solitude,” having incurred the anger of Charles II. “The king,” she wrote, “was yesterday making loud jokes about it, saying that the service of Madame Mazarin was too difficult. . . . It was killing her husband as well as all of her noble lovers; Monaco is having dizzy spells just like Mazarin did.”
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Marie-Sidonie and others predicted after this episode that Hortense would have no choice but to return to France. “She is even more unhappy than I and sees no one,” wrote Marie-Sidonie. But her prediction was not borne out. For a time Hortense made a show of devout repentance while appealing once more for her husband to send her funds. But Charles had not cut her off entirely. He continued to provide Hortense with enough financial support to remain in the house in Saint James's Park that was dubbed the “little palace.”

Soon life was almost back to normal, except for the French ambassador, Courtin, who was discouraged and exasperated by his inability to predict with any accuracy what the duchess would do next. He had been informed of his recall to France and the arrival of his replacement Paul Barrillon at about the same time that Marie-Sidonie had arrived in London. Courtin wrote a rueful letter to the French minister Pomponne: “Madame de Courcelles arrived here two days ago; England is the refuge of all women who have quarreled with their husbands; it will be a fine affair for Monsieur de Barrillon.”
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Social life in the “little palace” was only the livelier without Courtin's daily presence in the library. But it was a period of increasing hostility toward Catholics in England, and by extension toward French and Italian residents there. The pope was routinely burned in effigy. Protestant Parliament was hostile to the king's policies promoting religious tolerance, and there was great anxiety about the succession to the throne. Charles had no legitimate children and the heir apparent, his brother James, was Catholic and married to a Catholic of French and Italian origin. Between 1678 and 1681 hysteria mounted surrounding a supposed Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II, with accusations of this “popish plot” brought by Titus Oates, a Protestant clergyman. At first Charles dismissed the accusations as ridiculous but was pressured by Parliament into hearing them. Before it all came to an end in 1681, with Oates arrested and convicted of perjury, fifteen people were falsely tried and executed.

Many highly placed foreign Catholics found themselves threatened by accusations of complicity in this fictitious conspiracy, among them the Duchess Mazarin. In November 1678, Barrillon wrote Louis XIV, “I think that Your Majesty will learn with some surprise that Madame Mazarin was named today by Oates as an accomplice in the schemes formed against the state and religion. The King of England mocked this accusation and spoke to me of it as something that was utterly ridiculous. But he says the same of the Lords who are in the Tower and have been tried by the courts.”
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Among those tried and executed was Edward Coleman, secretary to Hortense's cousin Mary Beatrice of Modena. Charles attempted to dismiss most of the accusations, but he was unable to protect Catholic noblemen from exclusion from the House of Lords. It was not easy to count on his protection, so Hortense considered her other options. She was in contact throughout this period with her sister Marie, by now in Madrid, living in a convent where she
was considered a secular pensioner who could leave at will, and where she felt comfortably connected to the court of Spain. For a few months it seemed that Hortense's best course of action might be to join her sister in Madrid. Her friend Saint-Evremond sent her a letter railing against convents, even liberal ones, and pleading with her to abandon such a notion. Even the pleasure of reuniting with her sister, he wrote her, would be short-lived; they would reminisce for a few days and then she might easily find that further conversation would be forbidden her, for after all, he warned, “one of the rules in a convent is that pleasurable contacts must not be sustained. . . . After you have spoken for three or four days about France and Italy, after you have talked about the King's passion and the weakness of your uncle Mazarin, of what you thought you would be and what you have become, . . . of your flight from Rome and the unhappy successes of your travels, you will find yourselves locked in a convent.”
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Saint-Evremond's eloquence may have worked its magic: Hortense did not leave England. A few months later Oates was thrown in prison, and those friends who were counseling the duchess to leave to avoid persecution were relieved.

Over the next several years Hortense resumed her pleasurable life, punctuated by what had become her almost routine appeals for the restitution of her dowry. Money continued to be her biggest challenge. The “Mazarine” salon was one of the earliest examples of what would later become a vogue of gambling spots in London and Paris, often hosted by women. Her salon became famous as a gambling site, or “gambling academy,” as it was often termed. Hortense became known for her big wins, and even more notorious for her losses. She began to accumulate debts while showing no inclination to curb her passion for the game of basset, all the rage in London's racier social circles by the end of the seventeenth century. Looking back on the heady years of Restoration society from a more
sober vantage point in 1714, Theophilius Lucas compiled an encyclopedia of famous gamblers titled
Lives of the Gamesters
. Hortense Mazarin was the only woman he included.

Her social circle also continued to be noted for literary and political discussions as well as musical performances in which Hortense participated as performer and singer. In the 1680s Hortense's home continued to receive a steady flow of visitors from the Continent. Some were simply curious to see this “famous beauty and errant lady”; others were writers, artists, and scientists drawn to the salon over which she and Saint-Evremond presided. Her salon became a focal point for popular discussions of science and art, and for pre-publication readings of French writers newly translated into English, and English into French. Saint-Evremond, ever attentive to his friend's attraction to danger, wrote verse praising her happy transitions from the gambling table to more elevated interactions. When Bernard de Fontenelle's dialogues on astronomy,
Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,
first appeared, Hortense was obsessed with it and could talk of nothing else for days. “No one would dare speak of Basset even for a moment,” wrote Saint-Evremond. “All is moon, sun, circle, orb, and firmament.”
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His French audiences read of her salon with pleasure and came to regard it as an outpost of French culture and sociability: “It is true that people often argue,” he wrote, “but it is more reasoned than heated. It is less to contradict people, and more to shed light on the subject, more to enliven conversation and less to embitter the mind. . . . Madame Mazarin spreads over all a kind of easy air, free and natural; one would say that things just proceed of their own accord, so difficult it is to see their secret hidden order.”
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These were good years for Hortense. But in the winter of 1684–1685 two dramatic events occurred to darken her happiness. The first was another casualty of her personal charisma. Among the visitors from France was a young relative, Philippe de Soissons,
the seventeen-year-old son of her sister Olympe. The boy had quickly become infatuated with his aunt, so much so that he developed a strong antipathy for one of her admirers she particularly favored, a visiting Swedish baron. Young Philippe challenged the man to a duel and, to everyone's astonishment and horror, fatally wounded him. Hortense was furious and inconsolable, draping her rooms in black and refusing to leave her lodgings. Young Soissons was forced to flee on the spot to avoid arrest. The event damaged Hortense's ever-fragile but mending connections with the French court, as well as with her own family. “Who would have thought that the eyes of a grandmother could still wreak such havoc,” wrote Madame de Sévigné.
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(At thirty-nine, Hortense already had children who were married.)

In London she was more easily forgiven, at least among her friends, including the king. Just a few months later she was already back at Whitehall sharing a gaming table with Charles and two of his mistresses. On a night in early February 1685, John Evelyn was received at the royal residence and recorded in his diary the shock and disapproval that the spectacle inspired in him: “I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which this day I was witness of, the King sitting and toying with his concubines Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarin, a French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table.”
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Six days later, King Charles died after an apoplectic fit, probably caused by kidney failure. He was fifty-four. On his deathbed, he converted to Catholicism.

—Don Bartolomeo de Legassa, secretary to Carlos II of Spain

—Archbishop of Caesarea, papal nuncio in Madrid, to Lorenzo Colonna, March 1677

 

 

 

 

A
YEAR BEFORE HORTENSE FIRST LEFT Chambéry for England, Marie had managed to extricate herself from her “prison” in the Brussels convent and was headed for Madrid. The Spanish capital was a compromise destination, and the only one acceptable to Lorenzo Colonna because of the strong network of family and political allies that he enjoyed there. Marie was willing to go to Spain because she hoped she would be able to find protection and welcome at a court where ties to France were also strong. And she thought that if she lived in Madrid, her
husband might come to see some value in their separation, because there she could work for the family's interests and cultivate contacts that would benefit their sons. Lorenzo himself was expected to make regular voyages to the Spanish capital, and Marie hoped he would bring their three boys with him, or send them to her in Madrid for prolonged visits.