Mistresses

by Linda Porter

  Nell’s madcap days were over and she had settled into a quieter life that bordered on respectability. The wider English public had become her audience and she was secure in their affection. This was more than could be said for her main rival for the king’s affections, the Frenchwoman whom she despised and who, with characteristic wit, she gave the unkind name of ‘Squintabella’.

  Part Six

  Baby Face

  LOUISE DE KÉROUALLE

  1649–1734

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  La Bretonne

  ‘The famous new French maid of honour, Mademoiselle Quierovil, now coming to be in great favour with the King’

  Diary of John Evelyn, 9 October 1671

  SHE WAS BORN in an area once considered so remote that they called it the ends of the earth. Louise Renée de Penancoët de Kéroualle was from Finistère, in the far western part of France, in the region of Brittany. With its coastline of rugged headlands shaped by the Atlantic waves and wild, remote hinterland of forests and moorland, it was a place apart, steeped in Celtic legend and with a proud history as an independent duchy until the late fifteenth century. Louise, who was born at her father’s country seat, the Manoir de Kéroualle, not far from the seaport of Brest, in 1649, was the second child of Sebastien de Ploeuc, a local marquess of the minor Breton nobility and his wife, Marie de Rieux, whose family were well connected in Brittany. On both sides, Louise was of aristocratic stock but the family, like many of the provincial upper classes in France, were not well off. Louise was not brought up amid the trappings of grandeur, though she certainly acquired a taste for them later in life. The family were devout Catholics and although we know little of her upbringing she was probably educated in a nearby Ursuline convent. She was certainly literate, though her large, looped handwriting is more reminiscent of the scrawl of a small child than a grown woman. Louise would have been prepared for the life of a provincial lady and might have stayed as such were it not for the fact that she was considered to have an unusually pretty face and pleasing personality, which might act as her passport to a very different life in the French capital. Her parents, who were proud and ambitious, perhaps the more so because of their financially straitened circumstances, were fortunate enough to be offered a place for Louise as maid of honour to Charles II’s sister, the duchess of Orléans. The precise circumstances of how this appointment was achieved are unclear, though it may have owed something to a recommendation from the governor of Brittany and possibly to her father’s friendship with the duc de Beaufort, chief admiral of France. Louise left home at the age of nineteen to join the household of the woman known simply as Madame.

  Princess Henrietta Stuart (Minette), the youngest child of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, was known in France as Henriette Anne, duchess of Orléans. Her marriage to Louis XIV’s brother made her the second lady of France and she was a more influential figure at court than the Sun King’s naive and undeniably plain Spanish wife, Queen Marie Thérèse. On the face of it, a position in the queen’s bedchamber would have appeared more prestigious but the huge household and wealth of the duke and duchess of Orléans constituted a rival centre of power and cultural influence to that of the king and was very much centred on Paris, where the duke was often more popular with the changeable local populace than his brother. At the refurbished Palais Royal and the Orléans country residence of St Cloud, just across the Seine from the capital, Louise experienced grandeur on a major scale. It could not fail to leave its mark on her. Nor could she escape the recognition that all was not well in this gilded world.

  The marriage of the duke and duchess was desperately unhappy and the recriminations and sheer nastiness of it all inevitably cast a pall over life in their service. The duke was bisexual and in thrall to an unscrupulous male lover. His wife, of whom he was very jealous, was a young woman who hid her undoubted intelligence beneath a shallow, flirtatious exterior. Frequently unwell, almost constantly pregnant, Henriette Anne was a kind and considerate mistress, regarded with affection by the ladies who served her, but there was little lasting tranquillity in her life or theirs. Royal households were always on the move, their nomadic existence dictated by the demands of the social calendar and the more prosaic necessities of inadequate sanitation and incessant rebuilding. Adapting to this new life and its demands, even given the stimulation of a life very different from that in which she had been raised, called for a calm head and considerable powers of discretion. Louise appears to have managed both successfully, though there is no documentary evidence of how she reacted to her new situation. She had arrived at court somewhat older than many maids of honour, who, both in France and Britain, were often girls in their early, rather than late teens, and her background meant that she had much to learn about the intrigue and backbiting of court life, in a short time. Earlier writers have speculated on her thoughts while in Madame’s service but it is extremely unlikely that Henriette Anne would have shared confidences about her marital troubles with a maid of honour.1

  In June 1670, Louise accompanied Madame on her visit to England and was at Dover with her during the talks that culminated in the Secret Treaty of Dover. Since the real reason for the meeting between Charles II and his sister was carefully guarded, it is unlikely that Louise viewed it as anything other than the family reunion it was supposed to be. Nor do we know if she first came to the king’s attention at that time, though his past history would suggest that he always kept a lascivious eye on female courtiers. Louise was only one of several ladies who supported their mistress on this trip and, once the business was done, she returned to France with Madame; her thoughts, if she had any, on what she had seen of England at that time were left unrecorded. The summer season would soon be in full swing in France, with trips to Fontainebleau and long evenings at St Cloud in prospect. But Louise had not been three weeks back in France when her world was turned upside down.

  Henriette Anne collapsed in the late afternoon of 29 June 1670. Her husband was with her, having called in to take his leave for the evening, as he intended to go into the centre of Paris. Punctilious in observing the elaborate formalities that dictated their daily lives, he came in person to inform his duchess. Startled by Henriette’s evident pain, he soon realized that she was in a serious condition. In the course of a long evening, doctors administered all the treatments of the vicious quackery of the day, causing Henriette to weaken further, and by the time Louis XIV himself arrived, it was obvious that she did not have long to live. Louise de Kéroualle is not mentioned among the ladies who witnessed her mistress’s death at about three in the morning of 30 June, so we do not know if she was present amid all the lamentation. But as the whole of St Cloud was in uproar, it could not have been long before she realized that, with Henriette gone, she faced an uncertain future.

  Rumours that Madame had been poisoned soon began to circulate, but this was often the default explanation in those days for a sudden, unexplained death. In the duchess of Orléans’s case, they were given some credence because of the widespread knowledge of the state of her marriage. But Philippe, her husband, though the most difficult of spouses, was innocent of any involvement in her demise. Henriette had been in poor health since childhood and an autopsy showed no signs of poison; the likelihood is, given her symptoms, that she died of peritonitis, caused by a ruptured duodenal ulcer. That she had not actually been murdered was cold comfort to her grief-stricken brother, Charles II, who was even more overwhelmed by her death than he had been when, in the year of his restoration, smallpox claimed the lives of his sister, Mary, and brother, Henry, within three months of each other.

  After he had got over the initial agony of loss, he began to entertain ideas of how he could honour his sister’s memory by meeting the request she had made on her deathbed: Madame had made a special plea that he protect her servants. The letters from ‘a person of quality’ to Charles II (apparently Ralph Montagu, who may have wished to distance himself in this convenient anonymity from some of the more colourful accus
ations flying around after Madame’s death) stated that ‘she recommended to you to help, as much as you could, all her poor servants’.2 Charles wasted no time in acting on his sister’s wishes. Henriette de Bordes, one of her chief ladies, who had attended her mistress during the last hours of Henriette Anne’s life and fainted away at her sufferings, arrived in England within a matter of weeks and was given a post as dresser to Catherine of Braganza. She was followed later in the autumn by Louise de Kéroualle, who joined the queen’s maids of honour in a similar role to the one she’d had in Madame’s household. Despite claims, unsubstantiated by any evidence, that Charles II was desperate for Louise to come to England and that Louis XIV was equally keen for her to be planted there, she was, in fact, left waiting for transport across the Channel at Dieppe when the duke of Buckingham failed to arrange her passage. In October 1670, Ralph Montagu reported that, ‘Mademoiselle Kéroualle hath been at Dieppe these ten days and hears nothing of the yacht that the Duke of Buckingham, Mr Godolphin tells me, was to send for her.’3 This was a humiliating start to Louise’s new life.

  In view of her subsequent career, the position of maid of honour seems inappropriate, though Louise probably was a maid in the technical sense of being a virgin at the time. But time was passing, if she was to find a husband. Uncertainty about her long-term future remained. Louise’s parents could not afford to give her a dowry that would attract gentlemen in the circles in which she now moved, so her appointment by no means guaranteed a prosperous or settled future. Yet there were encouraging precedents. Frances Teresa Stuart, though considerably younger than Louise when she moved from the French court to England, had managed to bewitch a king and marry a duke. Louise would certainly succeed at the former; as for the latter, she would, just three years later, become a duchess in her own right. It is unlikely, however, that she foresaw such a startling trajectory towards riches and influence when she arrived in London, though it very soon became apparent to those around Charles II that he was attracted to her. From this realization, it was just a short step to contemplating how this brunette from Brittany with an arresting figure could be manipulated for their own ends. The French, however, had other ideas.

  *

  EVEN GIVEN THE king’s wide-ranging tastes in women, it is not hard to understand how Charles II fell so quickly for Louise de Kéroualle. She was a link with the beloved sister that he had so recently lost. Her very Frenchness was a powerful draw. The two women did not particularly resemble one another; Minette was always as thin as a rail, whereas Louise was plump and would grow plumper. Minette was an extrovert, Louise more self-contained, and her defensiveness about her background as a provincial lady of limited means made her a snob with a tendency to claim that she was close to people with whom she was barely acquainted. Louise knew how to charm and be pleasant but not how to endear – except where the besotted king was concerned. She could arrange a fine dinner with an almost ostentatious display of good taste but she was not the life and soul of the party. Once the opportunity came her way, she aspired to play a political role without ever really understanding the complexity of British politics or the wider European ambitions of France, the country she had left behind. A tendency to hold herself in high regard made her easy prey for the mockery and wit of Nell Gwyn, while her greed rivalled that of Lady Castlemaine.

  Louise was already attracting attention at court by the end of 1670, though not everyone admired her appearance. A portrait painted at about this time shows a young woman of sensual appearance in déshabillé, her left breast exposed, with long, loose, curly dark hair, from which peeps out a pearl earring. She is holding a bird (perhaps a dove), and her gaze, directly at the artist, is a striking mixture of innocence and seductiveness. Evelyn was not impressed by her looks, writing in his diary for 1 November 1670, ‘I now also saw that famed beauty (but in my opinion of a childish simple and baby face) Mademoiselle Quirreval.’ Given his antipathy to all the king’s mistresses, Evelyn’s criticism might be easily dismissed but it was not so wide of the mark. Louise did have a baby face and she may well have traded on the superficial vulnerability that it suggested.

  Her first public appearance at court was as companion to a much less majestic figure than the king. During the Christmas season, she was escorted to a masquerade by Charles II’s nephew, William of Orange, who regularly visited England despite his uncle’s propensity to make war on the Dutch. William and Louise made an unlikely couple. He was a year younger, short, very thin, slightly hunchbacked and asthmatic. It is not clear whether this rather gauche young man enjoyed having such a beauty, already the talk of the town, on his arm. Relations between the two would become frosty as Louise’s influence grew. Charles II’s interest, however, intensified as the months passed. Initially, he was careful to observe the proprieties by merely engaging Louise in conversation in the queen’s apartments. Like most educated men of his time, the king spoke several foreign languages and was fluent in French. It is not clear how much English Louise had by this time or when she started to learn. Catherine of Braganza, never a Francophile, would not have been pleased to hear French spoken too often in her apartments. Yet while the French ambassador may have been content to play a longer game and let Louise’s relationship with the king follow a natural course, Arlington, Charles’s chief minister, was not. He was determined to establish Louise as Charles’s mistress, and the sooner the better.

  Various stories, based on reports in Evelyn’s diary and endlessly embroidered by the biographers, both French and English, who have written a great deal of nonsense about Louise, claim that she finally succumbed to the king’s sexual desires in October 1671, at Arlington’s splendid country house, Euston Hall, in Suffolk. Euston Hall was conveniently situated close to Newmarket, where the king frequently indulged his passion for horse racing and where he had his own stud. Indeed, it might be said that Charles II’s passion for horseflesh was just as great as it was for female flesh. Arlington had shrewdly realized that Euston Hall, an old house that he refurbished and extended, could complement his London residence, Goring House, as his seat of power in the country. It was certainly magnificent enough to be the scene of a royal seduction. ‘Arlington,’ notes the historian Helen Jacobsen, ‘transformed Euston into as much of a working home as any town house and into an unrivalled locus of power, wealth, intrigue, entertainment, and erudition.’4 The earl had made himself indispensable (or so he hoped) to Charles II through his determination to take on the responsibility for handling foreign affairs himself. In order to underline his pre-eminence in this crucial area of government, he had drawn on his experiences as a diplomat and his knowledge of Europe in the design and furnishing of his London and Suffolk homes. Both revealed an impressive display of conspicuous consumption. They were showcases for his power and taste. The architect for the changes made at Euston Hall is unknown but the French influence was everywhere in the external architecture. Inside the house, Arlington used Italian marble from Carrara and frescoes painted by Antonio Verrio. Through his Dutch wife, Isabella van Beverweerd, Arlington also patronized Dutch painters and sculptors. Together, they entertained most of the diplomats resident in London, who were happy to accept Arlington’s hospitality. The earl was at the height of his political success when Louise de Kéroualle arrived there with the queen on a royal visit to Newmarket.

  John Evelyn, who was present at Euston Hall for nearly two weeks, recorded the rumour that Louise had finally succumbed to Charles during that time. The precise place and circumstances of her seduction remain, however, unknown. Catherine may well have left Suffolk before her husband but it seems odd that she would have acquiesced in leaving one of her maids of honour behind, especially when it was so obvious that the king was smitten with Louise. Equally puzzling is whether Charles II would really have risked insulting his wife, if she was still in residence, by the very public bedding of Louise, which is described in breathless prose, worthy of any cheap historical novel, by one of Louise’s French biographers: ‘In spite of th
e grins of the accomplices and the miserable excitement of the depraved women at the sight of an innocent girl dishonouring herself, Louise may have thought that the play would now stop. Wine and exhaustion drew her eyelids down. Suddenly the room was empty and Charles was irresistible.’5

  Evelyn was more measured in his diary. He had not heard or witnessed anything himself but he accepted that the rumour going round was probably true, writing, ‘It was universally reported that the fair Lady was bedded one of these nights, and the stocking flung, after the manner of a married bride: I acknowledge she was for the most part in her undress all day, and that there was fondness and toying with that young wanton.’ (Charles II was apparently given to publicly pawing his mistresses, rather in the manner of the French King Henry II and Diane de Poitiers.) But Evelyn denied having been at this ‘ceremony’: ‘I neither saw, nor heard on any such thing whilst I was there, though I had been in her chamber and all over that apartment late enough . . . however, twas with confidence believed that she was first made a Misse, as they called these unhappy creatures, with solemnity at this time.’6 The French ambassador, Colbert de Croissy, reported in early November to the French foreign minister, Louvois, that Louise de Kéroualle had, indeed, become Charles II’s mistress, that she was pleased to learn of Louis XIV’s approval and that there was every prospect ‘that she would hold long what she had conquered.’7 This was a proud boast in view of Charles’s inability to remain faithful for long to any mistress, yet time would prove that Louise de Kéroualle’s hold on the king, though challenged, would remain fast until his death.