The French Mistress

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “I don’t want you frightened,” he said firmly. “You’ll be safe, Louise. I’ll see to that. You’re far too important to me for it to be otherwise.”

  “But Mrs. Gwyn—”

  “I’ll speak to her,” he said. “As droll as she was in the prologue, she shouldn’t be using the stage to make light of our allies. Let her find sport in the Dutch, if she must.”

  “Oh, sir,” I said with a sigh of content, “you are too kind to me.”

  “Not at all,” he said, and kissed me, taking advantage of my gratitude to press me back against the paneled wall. I melted against him, kissing him in return, for I was not above taking a bit of advantage, either. Deftly he slipped his hand inside my bodice to fondle my breast, and I sighed restlessly, arching my back to offer the soft flesh to his caress. His fingers sought and tweaked my nipple, making it rise at once in proud salute, and making him groan, too.

  “How much longer, Louise?” he asked, his whisper more a growl.

  “Soon, sir,” I breathed, and smiled over his shoulder. “Soon.”

  With his low-crowned hat in his hands, Lord de Croissy walked the length of the empty room, his footsteps echoing against the long row of bare windows. At last he came to stand before me, a spindleshanked crow in his customary black.

  “All this is yours, mademoiselle?” he asked again. “You are certain?”

  “All,” I said proudly, holding up the ring of keys to my new lodgings for him to see. “His Majesty brought me here himself yesterday to make certain the rooms would suit me.”

  “Oh, I am sure they do.” The ambassador smiled, and granted me a small nod of approval. “You are to be congratulated, mademoiselle. His Majesty shows you very great favor indeed. Did he also grant you an allowance for refurbishing?”

  “Whatever I wish is mine.” I crossed the room to the window to look down on the privy garden below, the beds now green with the new shoots of spring. “Everything is to be charged to him.”

  Charles had indeed shown me great favor to grant such a large apartment for my own use. The rest of the Court was amazed, and could speak of nothing else. I’d this first chamber, and besides that a bedchamber, a privy chamber, a wardrobe, and a withdrawing chamber that could also serve for dining, all for my own use. There was even a small alcove, previously used for books, where I intended to set a prie-dieu and a shrine for private prayer and reflection.

  The rooms were a considerable improvement over the crowded quarters I’d shared with the queen’s other maids of honor. The only other unattached lady who’d received such impressive lodgings had been Lady Cleveland in her prime. I couldn’t take possession yet, of course. First I meant to make a great many improvements to the rooms to agree to my taste, and transform them into the most beautiful in this shambling palace, so I could entertain Charles in a fashion that would truly befit a king. I knew he was anticipating a happy future for us, too, for my new rooms were situated conveniently close to his.

  “His Majesty has done well for you, mademoiselle,” the ambassador said, joining me at the window. “Am I to believe his persistence has been rewarded?”

  I leaned closer to the glass, idly watching a small flock of brown sparrows swoop and dive over the gallery’s roof. “That, monsieur, is between His Majesty and me.”

  “Forgive me, mademoiselle, but it is also the concern of His Most Christian Majesty,” he said in his usual insistent manner, his voice quiet, reserved, but always expecting compliance. “Have you earned the privilege of these rooms? Have you accommodated the English king’s desires as you were sent here to do, and secured a lasting place in his graces?”

  I did not answer, for in these last months I’d grown exceptionally weary of the ambassador’s meddling. I’d managed my affairs with Charles well enough thus far, and I’d no need of Lord de Croissy’s endless suggestions. Weren’t these new lodgings proof enough of my success, and the king’s continuing interest in me?

  The ambassador leaned closer, determined to make me listen to his advice. “His Majesty will not wait for you forever, mademoiselle. The world is full of women with greater beauty than yours, women who are happily willing to give themselves to him for far less than you demand.”

  Restlessly I tapped the ring of keys against the sill. “The king and I understand each other thoroughly, my lord,” I said, terse in my own defense. “You may assure His Most Christian Majesty that I remain a most loyal daughter of France.”

  “If that were so, mademoiselle,” he replied, his manner turning tart to match my own, “then you would have performed your duty to your country by now.”

  “Then what of the information I have sent to Paris?” I’d been proud of what I’d learned in my conversations with the king, and I’d believed that what I’d relayed had been useful to France as well. “What of the new ships being built in the Portsmouth yards, and their designs? What of the Duke of York entertaining the Dutch ambassador at St. James’s Palace, but by the king’s wish? Does none of that matter?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the ambassador said, sweeping his hand impatiently through the air. “Your information has been useful, but if information was all we wished from you, then we could easily have sent a gentleman in your place, and for less cost, too. You are here to seduce the English king, mademoiselle, and if you cannot oblige—”

  “I will oblige, my lord,” I said sharply. “If you’d wished me to present myself to the king like a mare to be covered for breeding, then I could have done so the day I arrived, and he would have been finished with me so swiftly that he’d not recall my name now. But if you wish me to seduce him, to become part of his life, to find a lasting place in this Court for the sake of France—that, my lord, takes time.”

  I frowned, restlessly slipping the ring of keys back and forth over my wrist like a bracelet. I’d explained my situation as well as I could, though not with perfect honesty. I was still young, and I still dreamed. I knew now I’d never replace the queen on the throne of England. That dream was done. Yet I dared to hope and to pray, too, that in time I might capture the wandering heart of Charles Stuart, the way he’d already done with mine.

  But the ambassador only grumbled, unconvinced.

  “Were you aware, mademoiselle, that Lord Buckingham has allied himself with Mrs. Gwyn again?” he said. “Have you heard that the two have resolved to work in union to depose you from the king’s favor?”

  “I have heard,” I said with what I prayed was lofty disdain. I’d heard this rumor, yes, and likewise I’d heard how the two of them would shamelessly imitate both Charles and me before their friends. They mocked my accent and Charles’s devotion to me, and called me “Squintabella.” It had pained me, imagining their cruel satires, both for my sake and Charles’s. But the only way to treat people as disrespectful as these was to ignore them, and that was what I’d done. “His Grace and Mrs. Gwyn are nothing to me.”

  “They should be,” the ambassador cautioned. “You may have been granted these rooms, mademoiselle, but the king has given the actress a house in Pall Mall.”

  I’d already had myself driven by Mrs. Gwyn’s new house to see it. It was handsome enough, I suppose, though only hers by lease. But I’d heard her entertainments were filled with riotous sport, music, and dance, combining her friends from the playhouse and every other walk of life with the most amusing people from the Court, and I suspected Charles went there more often than he admitted. Anxiously I glanced again about the empty space that would be my rooms. The sooner I had them ready and could begin my own form of entertainment, the better.

  “Mrs. Gwyn is welcome to her house,” I said, swallowing back my worries. “Why not, when she is too common to hold a place at Court or lodgings in the palace?”

  “She is baseborn,” agreed the ambassador, as if explaining the most obvious fact to a half-wit, “and undeserving of those favors, while you, mademoiselle, are a French lady of rank and entirely worthy, if you’d but bring yourself to fulfill your destiny.”

&nbs
p; I resented him lecturing me like this, and in defense my tongue turned tart.

  “Why, thank you, my lord,” I retorted. “How pleased I am to learn I am a lady! You know, I feared you’d forgotten.”

  He sighed, looking down his thin nose at me.

  “Pray don’t be cynical, mademoiselle,” he cautioned. “It does not become you. Nor does this surfeit of pride. Recall instead that this vulgar wench maintains the greater hold on the English king, and all because she has given him one son, and let him fill her belly again with a second.”

  I looked at him sharply. “Mrs. Gwyn is with child again?”

  “She is, mademoiselle,” he said, “and without doubt the king is the father.”

  I looked down at the keys in my hand. When Charles had given these rooms to me, he’d held me close and whispered only the sweetest endearments to me, and promised I’d find nothing but happiness here. Yet now I learned he’d been with his Nelly, finding his own happiness with her in the house in Pall Mall.

  “I did not intend to distress you, mademoiselle.” The ambassador leaned closer, his voice full of urgency, not sympathy. “But you must listen to reason. His Majesty’s desires are simple ones. He enjoys lying with young women, for they make him feel younger himself. He enjoys beautiful partners, for they flatter his pride. He sires bastards on his mistresses, for they prove his wife’s barrenness is not the fault of his seed. The simple desires of a man, simply met. Good day, mademoiselle.”

  He bowed one final time, set his hat once again on his head, and closing the door, left me alone.

  I stared from the window, no longer seeing the garden before me or the darting sparrows at their play.

  Charles, Charles, my dear sir! Here I’d believed I was ahead of the race, and instead I’d fallen two paces behind.

  Chapter Seventeen

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON

  February 1671

  Outwardly there is no finer life for a man than to be a king. He lives in a great palace and wants for nothing. His every whim and wish are instantly obeyed, and he is surrounded by friends, family, and courtiers who exist to sooth and flatter him. Ordained by God’s wish, he has power and rank, and a secure place in the esteem of the world.

  But life was not always as easy for the King of England. Accustomed as I was to how Louis had carefully ordered everything about him, I was astonished by how many conflicts, large and petty, swirled constantly around Charles. To be sure, some of these trials were of his own making, while others were far beyond the hand of any mortal man to change, no matter that he wears a crown. But all did test him, and often made the royal quarters of Whitehall a stormy place in which to be.

  Most somber was the death of the duchess of York in March. The wife of Charles’s brother, James, this poor lady was only thirty-three years of age, worn from endless pregnancies and stillbirths and finally consumed by a cancer of her breast. Like the queen, she had failed to give her husband a son, leaving only two young daughters, one being the Lady Anne, who had also served and mourned Madame.

  In her final suffering, the duchess had turned her back on the Anglican Church and become a Roman Catholic, and the public outcry was harsh when her conversion became more widely known at her death. Worse still were the rumors that James had joined her in conversion. It was considered unlucky enough that the foreign-born queen was a Papist, but to have James, the only surviving male Stuart heir to the throne, made one as well was perceived as a dangerous sign by Protestant England.

  To ease this furor, Charles immediately ordered a Protestant princess be found as a new wife and duchess for his widowed brother. James had chosen his first wife, an unsuitable commoner, without Charles’s permission, and Charles was determined his brother would not err that way again. But James, whose grief was as embarrassingly short-lived as Monsieur’s had been for Madame, insisted that his bride also be young and beautiful, and began his own negotiations with several Catholic princesses. To have his royal will challenged in this way much displeased Charles, as can be imagined, and the quarrels between the brothers were heated.

  At the same time, a lesser but very public embarrassment was dealt the king by the duchess of Cleveland. Charles had not broken entirely with this lady and each day dutifully visited their five children at the great house he’d given her near St. James’s Palace. She remained nominally one of his mistresses, and certainly received the income of a lady in favor. But in February she had begun a shamefully blatant intrigue with an officer ten years her junior. John Churchill was new returned from Tangier, with the burnished glow of a warrior to his handsome person, and though he was but twenty, the duchess had fair devoured him, parading him as her lover and making unlovely comparisons between his youthful prowess and that of the older king. Charles’s patience and temper were sorely tested, and it seemed the final break between him and this lady must surely be near.

  Nor was Mrs. Gwyn silent. As her belly swelled bigger and bigger with her latest bastard, her insolence seemed to grow as well. Now that Charles had set her in keeping in the Pall Mall house, she aimed next for a title such as Lady Cleveland had been granted. No matter that she’d been born in some low brothel. Now she greedily believed she should be ennobled, raised to at least a countess, and from what I’d heard, she pestered and nagged poor Charles endlessly about it like the small mongrel bitch she was.

  But most taxing of all to the king was his contentious relations with the English Parliament. The very notion of a Parliament was new to me, for in France there is no such corresponding body. His Most Christian Majesty ruled the country and in his supreme splendor and wisdom made every decision for France’s welfare. But here in England, the king was forced to share his power with two groups. The House of Lords consisted of gentlemen of the greatest families in the land, at least by their rank worthy of advising the king. The House of Commons seemed sadly lacking in gentlemen of any variety; these rascals were chosen by election, voted to their place by the fancy of every common jack. Together these two Houses formed the Parliament, and no greater pack of scoundrels did ever exist to plague and confound a king. How Charles could bring himself to trust any of them was beyond me, for hadn’t an earlier Parliament voted to execute his own father and remove Charles himself from his family’s throne?

  This latest crop of members had been called to London in February, and at once they set to challenging Charles’s plans for a new war with the Dutch. Because Parliament controlled the country’s treasury, Charles was forced to ask them for the funds for building the ships of war that he’d promised to Louis, and for raising and training the troops.

  In turn this Parliament fussed and bothered like an old woman guarding her purse on market day, questioning the necessity of every last farthing and quarreling among themselves in their great House beside the river. They did not care about complying with the terms of the new treaty, nor that France had already begun her preparations for war, and at an imposing pace. Why should they, when they openly despised all things French? Nor did they care if they humiliated Charles by denying his requests. In fact they seemed to delight in trying to humble him, acting as if he didn’t always put the welfare of England first in his thoughts, the way any good king should. Further, they began to question whether Charles should have the right to make treaties in the first place, or whether every last tom fool of them could do better.

  Of course Charles had already begun to receive the monetary supplements from Louis as stipulated in the Secret Treaty. How exactly these made their way to him from France I never learned; I suppose through Monsieur Colbert or some other trusted minister. But Charles had considered those funds for his exclusive use, not to be spent on the navy or its ships. Nor, for obvious reasons, did he wish Parliament to know he’d accepted a golden gift from his cousin, or what he’d conceded in return.

  Thus Charles followed Parliament’s tedious arguments during that long and difficult spring, meeting often with his privy council as well as individual members of the two Houses. He
even traveled to the House of Parliament himself to address them, hoping to sway them to the rightful path. Nothing worked. They remained stubborn and quarrelsome and thoroughly vexing.

  Finally, in April, Charles decided he’d had enough or, rather, not enough. He prorogued Parliament, meaning he exercised his right to dissolve the session and sent the members back to their distant homes and estates, and as far as possible from the king in London. He was done with their contentious parsimony, but he was now forced to look for other means of funding his new ships. Notified by Lord de Croissy and by myself of these developments, Louis also began to make the most delicate of inquiries regarding whether England would be able to meet her promised contributions for the upcoming war. Swiftly Charles assured him he would, but I doubt even he had any notion of exactly how this would come to pass.

  In short, it all made for a thoroughly displeasing time for Charles, who seemed to toil many hours on affairs of state and family with little to show for it. His time was occupied, and I did not see as much of him as I had when I’d first arrived in London last autumn.

  Yet in a curious way, this all was to my advantage. With the advice of Lady de Croissy, I was able to find in London many skilled French carpenters, plaster workers, and painters who were eager to work for me to transform my new rooms at Whitehall into a glowing representation of French taste. I’d replaced the dark, old-fashioned paneling (surely there from the days of the last King Henry!) with white plaster trimmed in gold, and hung large looking glasses opposite the privy garden windows to make the room look double its size, and reflect all within in the most cunning fashion. I was exceptionally proud of these looking glasses, and it was only on account of my exceptional connections in Paris that I’d been able to have them sent to me. They were the product of the Royal Mirror Manufactory in the rue de Reuilly, the same company to produce the looking glass for Versailles, and their glittering clarity and size were far beyond any to be found in England, including the mean, dark glasses that Mrs. Gwyn had installed in her house. That they also served to reflect my own beauty over and over and display my person to best advantage was another benefit, and who, truly, could fault me for it?