Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  The gentle, feminine, well-read Louise, with her interest in politics and her head for strategy, set up her own salon, where with taste and decorum she entertained visiting foreign dignitaries, hostessing them lavishly as though she were herself a queen. This hubris did not sit well with a number of Charles’s courtiers, including some of his closest friends. It was widely believed that the devilish Earl of Rochester penned the following couplet, which one day Louise found pinned to her boudoir door: Within this place a bed’s appointed For a French bitch and God’s anointed.

  Another of Louise’s displays of ego included having her own medal struck. Borrowing the motto of Diane de Poitiers, maîtresse en titre to Henri III, it bore the Latin inscription “omnium victorem vici” (I conquered him who conquered all).

  The English were (correctly) convinced that Louise was a spy for France. And though it had been rumored that on her arrival at Whitehall she was no stranger to the secrets of the boudoir, Louise was in some ways a finer actress than Nell. She managed to snooker Charles with her performances in a variety of stock roles—beginning with the Damsel in Distress over the unexpected death of her mistress Minette, moving on to the Affronted Virgin, and finally, when her infidelities to the king were unmasked, trotting out her version of the Scorned Woman.

  In 1674, Louise came down with a case of the clap, courtesy of her royal paramour—who’d likely gotten it from one of his backstairs trulls. Charles privately believed that Louise had gotten the pox from one of her own extraregal intrigues. However, since he had no proof, by accusing her he had nothing to gain and everything to lose in terms of his relations with France. Instead, while Louise posted about from Tunbridge Wells to Bath to Epsom in search of a cure, Charles sought to assuage her itch with the gift of two necklaces—one of diamonds and the other of pearls. Louise did eventually recover (or was thought to in her day), but in the course of her recuperation she had become quite stout.

  Charles loved her none the less for her increasing girth, affectionately referring to her as “My darling Fubbs,” “fubbs” being slang for a short, chubby person. However, by the time one of the king’s old flames, the vibrant Hortense Mancini, Duchesse Mazarin, arrived on the scene in 1675, Louise realized that she couldn’t compete with this new rival. She’d grown zaftig and her personality was a downer. Her frequent crying jags, which had annoyed everyone at court ever since her arrival, were finally beginning to depress the king, and Louise’s handlers advised her to cut it out unless she wanted to lose his favor altogether.

  Her stock dropped to its lowest point between 1678 and 1680, during the Popish Plot. This was a much-believed conspiracy said to have been instigated by the Catholics to assassinate Charles and place his brother James on the throne—when in fact it was a nearly diabolical ruse to discredit Catholics, formally exclude James from ever inheriting the throne, and instead install a puppet, possibly Charles’s first royal bastard, the Duke of Monmouth. Louise downplayed her Catholicism by hiring Protestant servants and aligning herself with the Earl of Shaftsbury, who led the fight for exclusion. Somehow, Louise had taken it into her head that her son by Charles, the young Duke of Richmond, would be the one placed on the English throne.

  Louise’s disloyalty disgusted the king, but he ultimately forgave her. Because her continued presence at court was important for political, diplomatic, and financial relations with France, she was too important a chess piece to remove from the board altogether.

  By the early 1680s, Louise was trusted enough by her royal lover to handle affairs of state in his absence. Yet her behavior could swing like a pendulum from entire indifference to carnality to complete depravity.

  She seduced Named Achmet, the Moroccan ambassador who arrived from Tangiers on a diplomatic mission in January 1682; and there was another lover in the picture as well. Toward the end of 1681, the twenty-eight-year-old Philippe de Vendôme, Grand Prior of France, had come to England to visit his aunt, Hortense Mancini. The thirty-five-year-old Louise commenced a torrid affair with this boozing womanizer that became the talk of the court and nearly cost her her courtesan’s career. After Charles discovered a sheaf of compromising love letters that Louise had penned to her young swain, he sought to expel the Frenchman from England. To avoid a diplomatic incident, Louis XIV stepped in and strongly advised Vendôme to forget he ever knew anyone named Louise de Kéroualle.

  Louis XIV was enraged that his spy had been heedless enough to jeopardize her position at Whitehall, but in March of 1682, Louise traveled to France for four months and was feted everywhere she went. News of her social successes reached English ears, and when she returned to London in July, her star at court shone as brightly as ever.

  According to Bishop Burnet, an eyewitness to court events, “After this the king kissed her often before all the world, which he was never observed to do before this time.” So Charles must have forgiven his Fubbs her infidelities.

  In February 1685, when Charles lay dying, although wellborn, Louise was not permitted to enter his chamber to pay her last respects because she had been his mistress. However, she had one more triumph to secure.

  Louise told the French ambassador Paul Barillon that Charles had wanted to be received into the bosom of the Catholic faith. The story seems a bit pat to be true, but allegedly in the king’s final days, while strolling through the corridors of Whitehall, Barillon happened to encounter Father Huddlestone, the same Catholic priest who had offered comfort to Charles after the Battle of Worcester. James, Duke of York, who desired nothing better than that his brother should die a Catholic, escorted the father up the back stairs to Charles’s bedroom, where communion and last rites were administered. Retaining his sense of humor to the last, Charles purportedly whispered to the priest, “You who saved my life are come now to save my soul.” Among the king’s final words were “Be kind to the Duchess of Cleveland, and especially Portsmouth. I have always loved her and I die loving her.”

  After Charles shuffled off his mortal coil, Louise sought sanctuary in the French ambassador’s London town house, but King James summoned her back to the palace to settle her debts before leaving the country. Acknowledging her service to the crown and her continuing political importance, the new king agreed to maintain her annual pension to the tune of £19,000 (nearly $4.9 million today).

  Louise had done very well for herself as a royal mistress. Under Charles, so to speak, she had pocketed an annual pension (which had started at £18,600 in her early days), plus an annuity from taxes paid by the clergy, and £25,000 (almost $6 million) annually from Irish revenues. Over time, her pension increased to £40,000, and in some years she amassed nearly tenfold that amount. In 1681, it was reported that Louise de Kéroualle had received £136,000 (almost $33.5 million in today’s economy)—a figure that probably didn’t include the money she made selling pardons to wealthy criminals, or the value of her vast collection of jewels, including a pair of diamond earrings worth £18,000 that Louis XIV had given her in 1675 for services rendered to the French crown.

  Louise returned to France and eventually retired to the countryside, where she lived extremely modestly, her passion for gambling having wiped out much of her fortune. She died on November 14, 1734, forty-seven years to the day after Nell Gwyn breathed her last.

  CHARLES II and Hortense Mancini, Duchesse Mazarin 1646-1699

  Hortense Mancini was the favorite niece—and heiress—of the extremely powerful French cardinal Jules Mazarin. Mazarin, who succeeded Richelieu as cardinal, had been the lover of Anne of Austria, the mother of the young Louis XIV. On the death of Louis XIII, the cardinal and Anne ruled France as co-regents until her son attained his majority.

  The future Charles II twice petitioned the cardinal for Hortense’s hand in marriage when he was a teenage exile in France, but at the time Mazarin didn’t think the impoverished and itinerant youth’s prospects were adequate enough, so he quashed Charles’s hopes of marriage to his vibrant niece. After the Restoration, however, Mazarin was quite willing
to swallow his pride and change his mind, offering to dower Hortense quite handsomely; but Charles’s advisers cautioned him against choosing a French queen, and the cardinal’s offer was rejected.

  Hortense was quite the catch. Her black hair tumbled to her waist; her sparkling eyes changed color with the light. She was tall and slender, an accomplished sportswoman, musician, and linguist. And of course her pedigree was impeccable. In short, other than being French, she would have made the perfect queen.

  But her uncle had cruelly dashed her hopes. Instead, Hortense was married off at the age of fifteen to the clinically mad Armand de la Porte, Marquis de Meilleraye, whom the cardinal made duc Mazarin so that his own name would live on.

  A religious fanatic and maniacal prude, Armand psychologically abused Hortense and locked her away from the world so that she would be free of its many temptations. He fired her servants if she expressed any kindness toward them, and willfully took a paintbrush and chisel to her late uncle’s priceless collection of Old Masters in which any nudity was displayed. Any mention of something even remotely sexual drove him further off the deep end. It was the most dreadful match imaginable for the hedonistic Hortense, who realized that she had no alternative but to flee, which in 1666 she did—disguised as a man.

  The cross-dressing, pistol- and saber-wielding Hortense became an exotic adventuress, traveling to Savoy in Italy, where she ended up as the mistress to Charles Emmanuel II, the married duke who had once asked Cardinal Mazarin for her hand. She penned her memoirs—an exceptionally rare thing for a woman to do at the time—which justified her flight from her wacko spouse and expiated herself for her infidelities. When the Duke of Savoy died, his widow told Hortense in no uncertain terms that she was no longer a welcome houseguest. So Hortense hit the road once more, eventually arriving in London in 1675 at the age of thirty, with a train of twenty liveried nobles, a parrot, and a little Moorish pageboy named Mustapha. The French ambassador de Courtin had once described England as a haven for all women who had quarreled with their husbands, and Hortense was no exception.

  Charles’s younger brother James and his new Duchess of York—Hortense’s relation, Mary of Modena—welcomed the colorful traveler into their social circle. Hortense briefly stayed at one of the Yorks’ houses in St. James’s, and was soon a fixture at court.

  According to the French ambassador, who was quite impressed with Hortense’s beauty and vivacity, he had never seen “anyone who so well defies the power of time and vice to disfigure.” In other words, Hortense’s debaucheries had not aged her nor dimmed her luster.

  Charles’s old passion for her soon burned anew. “Mme. Mazarin is well satisfied with the conversation she had with the king of England,” reported the French envoy. One result of this “conversation” was a town house in Chelsea, where the sovereign set her up in style. Gossips soon spread the word that Charles would spend hours beneath Hortense’s window, gazing up like a lovestruck spaniel in the hope of glimpsing the brunette beauty.

  Though they referred to Hortense as “the Roman whore” because she was related to Mary of Modena, the monarch’s subjects blackened her reputation with the Gallic-tinted brush as well. They were disgusted that “the king should send of another French whore when one already [Louise de Kéroualle] had made him poor.”

  But Hortense was never a serious candidate for maîtresse en titre. For one thing, her nature was too peripatetic to enjoy a gilded cage at Whitehall. For another, she reveled in her bohemian lifestyle. For a third, she was emphatically bisexual.

  “Each sex provides its lovers for Hortense,” an English courtier observed. Her affairs included the visiting Prince of Monaco and the Countess of Sussex, Anne Palmer—Charles’s then-pregnant teenage daughter by the former royal mistress Barbara Castlemaine. Anne occupied her mother’s old apartments directly above the king’s bedchamber, and it was said that each morning Charles would ascend the secret back stairs connecting the two apartments in the hopes of catching his daughter in bed with Hortense. Neither of Anne’s parents were terribly amused by her passion for Hortense; Barbara briefly shoved the rebellious teen into a Parisian convent, where Anne spent much of her time smothering Hortense’s portrait with kisses and the rest of it bribing the abbess to release her whenever she felt the urge to depart.

  When one of Hortense’s lovers was killed in a duel, she briefly considered retiring to a convent—given Hortense’s predilections, not so dire a penance as one might assume. Charles was greatly amused by the notion.

  Considering her incapability for fidelity, perhaps it was for old time’s sake that Hortense was permitted to remain in the sovereign’s seraglio. Flouting royal protocol, she never addressed him as “Your Majesty.” But the king seems not to have minded. Hortense and Charles provided variety for each other. The Duchesse Mazarin was not nearly as demanding as his other mistresses, content to maintain her Chelsea salon peopled with artists and intellectuals while collecting her £4,000 (roughly $1 million) pension from the king.

  It was Louise de Kéroualle who felt most threatened by Hortense’s existence. Hortense boasted birthright, breeding, and beauty. Her slender figure, thanks to horseback riding, swimming, and swordplay, looked great in anything she chose to wear, including the menswear ensembles that so excited king and court and scandalized the envious ladies. She was accomplished in many disciplines and well versed in languages and literature. In short, except for her rampant promiscuity, as far as Louise was concerned, Hortense had the whole package.

  But Hortense didn’t consider herself a rival. She simply didn’t want the top-dog honors as much as Nell Gwyn or Louise craved them. Supremely self-aware, Hortense was too wild and craved variety too much to be domesticated as the perfect royal paramour. She couldn’t have cared less about affairs of state. Hortense was a sensualist, not a politician.

  After Charles’s death in 1685, Hortense remained in England, residing on Paradise Row. She still collected a portion of her pension from his successors, James II and William III. Although she was in her forties, one of her admirers during the beginning of William’s reign was Arnold Joost van Keppel, William’s rakish young page, who would eventually be made 1st Earl of Albemarle. At the time, Keppel, twenty-three years younger than Hortense, was merely a colonel in the Horse Guards.

  But when Hortense discovered that Albemarle had fallen in love with her visiting daughter, Marie-Charlotte, and had begun to see her on the sly, the duchess, understandably, fell to pieces.

  Faced with the ugly fact that her own daughter was her rival, the great beauty deteriorated rapidly. Alcoholism destroyed her looks and her health, and her penchant for high-stakes gambling bankrupted her. She retired to a country home, and passed away there in 1699 at the age of fifty-three. The wealthiest heiress in Europe during her youth, she died so hopelessly in debt that the bailiffs wanted to enumerate her lifeless body among her goods and chattels.

  It was Hortense’s insane estranged husband Armand who redeemed her, so to speak. She had successfully avoided him for thirty-three years, but now that she had expired, the duc Mazarin had come to claim her. Armand purchased her body from her creditors, carting it all over France so that he could keep an eye on her. He finally buried her in the family crypt.

  JAMES II OF ENGLAND/ JAMES VII OF SCOTLAND

  1633-1701 RULED 1685-1688 (DEPOSED)

  JAMES WAS THE SECOND SURVIVING SON OF CHARLES I and Queen Henrietta Maria. He was created Duke of York in 1644 when he was eleven years old. Two years later, during the English Civil War, he was captured and imprisoned at St. James’s Palace in London. In April 1648, James escaped, disguised as a girl, with his elder brother, Charles. The boys went to Holland, where their sister Mary and her husband, Prince William II of Orange, reigned.

  During the early years of Charles II’s reign, James distinguished himself as commander of the Royal Navy and Lord High Admiral. But when Charles passed the first Test Act, making it a precondition for any public officeholder to take communion in the C
hurch of England, the secretly Catholic James resigned his commission.

  At the age of fifty-one, he became king upon Charles’s death on February 6, 1685. Soon thereafter, the Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s illegitimate son by Lucy Walter, asserted his claim to the throne as Charles’s heir, raised an army against James, and was subsequently executed for treason.

  James undid many of the exclusionary acts passed against Catholics during Charles’s reign. After he suspended the penal laws in the autumn of 1685, the House of Commons protested, so James suspended all parliamentary activity, dissolving the Parliament entirely in 1687. He also purged the judges of the high court.

  On April 4, 1687, James issued a Declaration of Indulgence aimed at religious toleration of Catholics. The following year, a second Declaration of Indulgence prohibited Anglican ministers from preaching against the Catholic religion.

  This was too much for the Bishop of London. He and six laymen—known as the Immortal Seven—extended an invitation to Prince William (III) of Orange, James’s nephew as well as his son-in-law, since William was wed to James’s oldest daughter, Mary, to come to England for the purposes of protecting liberty and property, and to assert Mary’s claim (as the daughter of James) to the throne.

  William of Orange landed in England on November 5, 1688, with a large army behind him. By that time, public opinion had so turned against James that his military refused to fight for him. Hyperaware of his father’s fate on the scaffold—though he still believed himself king—he surrendered the throne in the blink of an eye. James made a cosmetic attempt at negotiation with William. Then, after sending his second wife, Mary of Modena, and their infant son to the Continent, James sneaked out of London. He arrived in France on Christmas Day 1688, placing himself under the protection of Louis XIV.