A FAIR _INTRIGANTE_
The face of a baby, the heart of a courtesan, and the brain of a
diplomatist. Such was Louise de Querouaille who, two centuries and a
half ago, came to England to barter her charms for a King's dishonour,
and, incidentally, to found a ducal house as a memorial to her
allurements and her shame.
If she had been taken at her own estimate Louise was at least the equal
in lineage of any of the proud beauties whose claim she thus challenged
to Charles II.'s favour. She had behind her, she said, centuries of
noble ancestors, among the greatest in France; and she was kin, near or
remote, to every great name in the land of her birth. All, however, that
is known of this Queen of _intrigantes_ is that she had for father a
worthy, unassuming Breton merchant, who had made a sufficient fortune in
the wool-trade to take his ease, as a country gentleman, for the latter
part of his days, and whose only ambition was to bring up his son and
two daughters respectably, and to dispense a modest hospitality among
his neighbours. It was at Brest that Evelyn enjoyed this hospitality
for a brief period; and the diarist has nothing but what is good to say
of the retired tradesman.
But the worthy merchant had his hands full with one at least of his two
daughters, who was developing dangerous fascinations, and with them a
precocious knowledge of how to turn them to account. He was thankful to
pack Louise off to a boarding-school, where she seems to have led her
teachers such a dance that it became necessary to place her in stronger
hands; and with this view the foolish father sent her to Paris, the last
place in the world for such a charming and designing minx, and to the
custody of a weak-willed aunt.
Nothing could have suited Louise better than this change of arena for
the exercise of her wilfulness and witchery. Before she had been many
days in the French capital she was able to twist her aunt round her
little finger--indeed her power of captivating was, to the end of her
life, her chief dower--and to obtain all the freedom she wanted. And it
was not long before her allurements won the admiration of the dissolute
Duc de Beaufort, High Admiral of France, a man skilled in all the arts
of love. The girl's bourgeois head was completely turned by the
splendour of her first captive; and, to make him secure, she counted no
sacrifice too great. Not, indeed, that she ever regarded her virtue as
anything but the principal piece she intended to play on the chessboard
of life.
For a few years Louise revelled in the new life which the amorous Duc
opened to her, and which only came to an end when the Admiral was
despatched, in command of a fleet, against the Turks, an expedition from
which he was fated never to return. Before he said good-bye, however,
Louise took care to make the next step on her ladder of world-conquest
secure. Through the Duc's influence she was appointed maid-of-honour to
Madame, sister-in-law to Louis XIV., and sister to the second Charles of
England, now restored to the throne of his fathers.
We can well imagine that the wool merchant's daughter wasted no sighs on
the lover she had lost. She had now a much wider and more splendid field
at the Court of France, for the exploiting of her dangerous gifts and
the indulgence of her ambition. That the new maid had no lack of lovers
we may be sure; for though she was not richly dowered with beauty she
always seems to have had a magnetic power over the hearts of men. We
know, too, that she singled out for special favour, the Comte de Sault,
the handsomest noble in France, a man skilled above all his fellows in
the then moribund knightly exercises; and that her _liaison_ with the
Comte, in a court where such intimacies were the fashion, added to,
rather than detracted from, her social prestige.
Such was the life of Louise de Querouaille up to the time when she made
her first acquaintance with the land in which she was destined to crown
her adventurous career, and to make herself at once the most dazzling
and the most hated figure in England. At this time Louis' designs on
Spain and Holland had received a rude check by the signing of an
alliance between England, Sweden, and the United Provinces; and it
became a matter of vital importance to detach England from a combination
so fatal to his schemes. With this object he decided to send Henrietta,
Duchess of Orleans, on a visit, ostensibly of affection, to her brother
Charles II., charged with a secret mission to induce him by every
artifice in her power to withdraw from the alliance.
How Henrietta returned flushed with triumph from this iniquitous
embassy, after ten days of high revelry at Dover, is well-known history.
Charles, in response to his favourite sister's pleading and bribes, not
only consented to desert his allies, but, as soon as he decently could,
to follow in the steps of his brother, the Duke of York, to Rome; and in
return for these evidences of friendship, Louis was gracious enough to
promise him substantial aid and protection; and, further, to grant him a
subsidy of £1,000,000 a year if he would take up arms with France
against Holland.
It is more to our purpose to know that among the gay galaxy of courtiers
who accompanied Madame to England was Louise de Querouaille, who thus
first set eyes on the King, in whose life-drama she was to play so
brilliant and baleful a _rôle_; and that before Charles, with streaming
eyes, said "good-bye" to his scheming sister, she had made excellent use
of her opportunities to enslave this English "King of Hearts." So much
at least was reported to Louis on the return of the embassy, when he
was assured by Madame that, of all the beautiful women in her train, the
only one to make any impression on her Royal brother was Louise de
Querouaille.
This information, no doubt, was in Louis' mind when, later, it became
necessary to cement Charles's allegiance to his compact. Gold was always
a potent lure to the "Merrie Monarch," whose purse was never deep enough
for the demands made on it by his extravagance; but a still more
seductive bait was a beautiful woman to add to his seraglio. The Duchess
of Cleveland had now lost her youth and good looks; the incomparable
Stuart's beauty had been fatally marred by small-pox. Of all the fair
and frail women who had held Charles in thrall there was none left to
dispute the palm with the French maid-of-honour except Nell Gwynn, the
Drury Lane orange-girl, whose sauciness and vulgarity gave to the jaded
Sybarite a piquant relish to her charms.
Here was a splendid opportunity for Louis to complete the conquest of
his vacillating cousin whose allegiance was so vital to his plans of
aggrandisement. Louise should go to Whitehall to play the part of
beautiful spy on Charles, and, by her favours, to make him a pliant tool
in the hand of "le Roi Soleil."
Charles, who was by no means loth to renew his Dover acquaintance with
the bewitching maid-of-honour, sent a yacht to Dieppe to bring her to
England, and charged no less a personage than the Duke of Buckingham to
be her escort to Whitehall. The Duke, however, who was probably too much
occupied with his own affairs of the heart, "totally forgot both the
lady and his promise; and, leaving the disconsolate nymph at Dieppe, to
manage as best she could, passed over to England by way of Calais,"--a
slight which the indignant Louise never forgave.
Thus it was that the new favourite of the King made her journey across
the Channel under the escort of the English Ambassador, and was given by
him into the charge of Buckingham's political rival, Lord Arlington.
"The Duke of Buckingham thus," to quote Bishop Burnet, "lost all merit
he might have pretended to, and brought over a mistress whom his strange
conduct threw into the hands of his enemies."
The arrival of the "French spy," whose mission was well understood, was
hailed by the English nation with execration, modified only by a few
stilted lines of greeting from Dryden, as laureate, and some indecent
verses by St Evremond--efforts which the new beauty equally rewarded
with gracious smiles and thanks. That the English frankly hated her
without having even seen her was a matter of small concern--she was
prepared for it. All she cared for was that Charles should give her a
cordial welcome; and this he did with effusiveness and open arms. Apart
from her character as ambassadress to his "dear brother" of France, she
was a new and piquant stimulus to his sated appetite--a "dainty dish to
set before a King."
She was installed at Whitehall to the flourish of trumpets; was
appointed maid-of-honour to the Queen, who frankly disliked and dreaded
this new rival in her husband's accommodating affection; and at once
assumed her position as chief of those women the King delighted to
honour. And with such restraint and discretion did she conduct herself
during these early days at Whitehall that she disarmed the jealousy of
the Court ladies, while receiving the homage of their gallants.
To Charles she was coyness itself--virtue personified. While smiling
graciously on him she kept him at arm's length, thus adding to her
attractions the allurement of an unexpected virtue. So jealously did she
guard her favours that the French Ambassador began to show alarm.
"I believe," he wrote at this time, "that she has so got
round King Charles as to be of the greatest service to
our Sovereign lord and master, _if_ she only does her
duty."
That Louise was fully conscious of her duty and meant to do it, was
never really in question--but the time to unbend was not yet. It was no
part of her clever strategy to drop like a ripe plum into Charles's
mouth. _Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter._ She would be accounted all
the greater prize for proving difficult to win.
The psychical moment, she decided, had come when Lord Arlington invited
Charles and his Court to his palatial country-seat, Euston, where,
removed from censorious eyes and in the abandon of country-house
freedom, she could exhibit her true colours to full advantage. Over the
revels of which Euston was 183 the scene during a few intoxicating
weeks, it is but decent to draw the curtain. With such guests as the
merry and dissolute Charles, his boon-companions, experts in gallantry,
and his ladies, with most of whom an acquaintance with virtue was but a
faded memory, it is no difficult matter to raise a corner of the curtain
in imagination. One typical scene Forneron records thus:
"Lady Arlington, under the pretext of killing the tedium
of October evenings in a country-house, got up a
burlesque wedding, in which Louise de Querouaille was the
bride and the King the bridegroom, with all the immodest
ceremonies which marked, in the good old times, the
retirement of the former into the nuptial chamber."
It was precisely such a ceremony in which, a few years earlier, Charles
had figured with _La belle Stuart_, while Lady Castlemaine looked on
with laughter and applause.
[Illustration: LOUISE, DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH]
Such was the revolution that resulted from this country visit that
Louise de Querouaille returned to Whitehall, the avowed _maitresse en
titre_ to the King. The French maid-of-honour had justified the
confidence Louis reposed in her; and as reward she was appointed Lady of
the Bedchamber to Catherine, and wore a coronet as Duchess of
Portsmouth. More than this, the delighted Louis raised the wool
merchant's daughter to the proud rank of Duchesse d'Aubigny, in exchange
for which dignity she pledged herself to induce Charles to go to war
with Holland; to avow himself a Catholic; and to persuade his brother
and successor, the Duke of York, to take to wife a Princess of France.
Louise de Querouaille had now reached a dizzier height than, in the
wildest dreams of her girlhood, she had ever hoped to climb. She was a
double-Duchess, of England and of France, the mistress and counsellor of
a puppet-King, and an arbiter of the destinies of nations. Well might
her humble father, when he paid his Duchess-daughter a visit in London,
throw up his hands in amazement at the splendours with which his "petite
Louise" had surrounded herself! So high had she climbed that it seemed
at one time that even the Crown of England was within her reach; for
when Catherine was brought to the verge of death the Duchess was
probably not alone in thinking that she might be her successor on the
throne.
"She has got the notion," wrote the French Ambassador,
"that it is possible she may yet be Queen of England. She
talks from morning till night of the Queen's ailments as
if they were mortal."
But at least, if the crown was not to be hers, there was as much gold to
be had as she cared to garner. Not content with her allowance, which,
nominally £10,000 a year, in one year reached the enormous sum of
£136,000, she heaped fortune on fortune by trafficking in a wide range
of commodities, from peerages and Court appointments to Royal pardons
and slaves. A few years of such rich harvesting made her incomparably
the richest woman in England, although she squandered her ill-gotten
gold with a prodigal hand. Her apartments at Whitehall were crowded with
the costliest furnishings and objects of art that money could buy. When
Evelyn paid a visit to the Court he records:
"But that which engaged my curiosity was the rich and
splendid furniture of this woman's apartment, now twice
or thrice pulled down to satisfy her prodigality and
expensive pleasures; while her Majesty's does not exceed
some gentlemen's wives in furniture and accommodation.
"Here I saw the new fabrics of French tapestry, for
design, tenderness of work and incomparable imitation of
the best paintings, beyond anything I ever beheld. Some
pieces had Versailles, St Germain's, and other palaces of
the French King, with huntings, figures, and landscapes,
exotic flowers and all to the life, rarely done. Then for
Japan cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, great vases of
wrought plate, table-stands, sconces, branches, braseras,
etc., all of massive silver and out of number, besides
some of his Majesty's best paintings!"
Probably at this time of her illicit queendom the only thorn in Louise
de Querouaille's bed of roses was that vulgar, "gutter-rival" of hers,
Nell Gwynn, with whom she suffered the indignity of sharing Charles's
affection. To the high-born, blue-blooded daughter of centuries of
French nobles (of whom her tradesman-father always affected a
disconcerting ignorance) the very sight of her saucy and successful
rival, the ex-orange-wench, was a contamination. She pretended to stifle
in breathing the same air, and with high-tossed head sailed past Madame
Nell (the mother of a duke), in the Court _salons_ and corridors, as if
she were carrion.
And to all these grand, disdainful airs Madame Nell only retorted with a
Drury Lane peal of silvery laughter. She, who was accustomed to "chuck
Charles's royal chin," and to call him her "Charles the third," in
unflattering reference to his two predecessors of the name in her
favour, could afford to snap her fingers at the French madame who, after
all, was no better than herself.
"The Duchess," she would say, "pretends to be a person of quality. She
says she is related to the best families in France; and when any great
person dies she puts herself in mourning. If she be a lady of such
quality, why does she demean herself to be what she is? As for me, it's
my profession; I don't profess to be anything better. And the King is
just as fond of me as he is of his French miss."
But while Her Grace of Portsmouth was revelling in her splendour and her
gold, her mission as Louis's Ambassadress was making unsatisfactory
progress. However disposed Charles may have been to change his faith to
the advantage of his pocket, he was not prepared to risk his crown,
possibly his head, for any Pope who ever lived; nor did the project of
providing a French bride for his successor, the Duke of York, promise
much better. Louis proposed the Duchess of Guise, his own cousin; but
James had heard too much of this unamiable and unattractive Princess
from his sister, Henrietta, to relish the venture. The Duchess herself
suggested a Princess of Lorraine, as a suitable bride, but Louis, who
had no love for the d'Elboeuf ladies, nipped this project in the bud.
After a long resistance, however, she had induced her Royal lover to
declare war on Holland; and Louis professed himself so pleased with this
concession to his schemes, that he dazzled her eyes with splendid
promises if she would but carry out his programme to the full. It had
become her crowning ambition to win the right to a _tabouret_ at the
Court of Versailles--the highest privilege accorded to the old
_noblesse_, that of sitting on a stool in the presence of the King; and
this proud distinction, which would raise her to the highest pinnacle in
France, inferior only to the crown itself, could be hers if Louis would
but grant her the d'Aubigny lands to accompany her title, for the
_tabouret_ went with the Duchy domains. Even this most coveted of all
the gifts in his power Louis promised to the little adventuress if she
would but carry out, not only all she had undertaken, but any future
commands he might lay upon her.
His immediate object now was to take advantage of the distraction caused
by the war between England and Holland to annex the Palatinate and the
Franche Comté, on which he had long set covetous eyes; but he quickly
discovered that for once his vaulting ambition had overleaped itself.
The whole of Europe took alarm; England to a man rose in angry protest,
sworn enemies joining hands to resist such an outrageous aggression; and
Charles, in a frenzy of fear for his crown, dismissed his hireling army
paid with Louis's gold. The proud edifice which the Duchess of
Portsmouth had so carefully reared was threatened with a cataclysm of
popular rage against the "painted French spy" who was regarded, and
perhaps rightly, as a prime instigator of the mischief, and the worst
enemy of the country that had given her such generous hospitality.
To add to the danger of her position she became seriously ill; sustained
heavy money losses; and even her supremacy with the King was gravely
imperilled by the arrival at Court of Mazarin's loveliest niece,
Hortense de Mancini, with whom Charles had flirted in the days of his
exile, and who now came to England in the full bloom of her peerless
beauty to complete her conquest of the amorous Sovereign--"the last
conquest of her conquering eyes," as Waller wrote in his fulsome
greeting of the new divinity of the Whitehall seraglio.
For once Louise's indomitable courage showed signs of yielding. The
whole armoury of fate seemed arrayed against her at this crisis in her
life; even Louis, for whom she had striven so hard, began to distrust
her powers and to show indifference to her. When Forneron paid her a
visit at this time he found her in tears. "She opened her heart to him,
in the presence of her two French maids, who stood by with downcast
eyes. Tears rained down her cheeks; and her speech was broken with sobs
and sighs." Never had this designing beauty been so near the verge of
absolute ruin.
It is not necessary perhaps to follow the Duchess through the period of
her eclipse; to watch the weak-kneed Charles sink deeper and deeper into
the morass of his disloyalty until, in return for a subsidy of
£4,000,000, he offered to dissolve parliament and to make England the
bond-slave of Louis's designs on Europe; or to see Louise, the chief
instrument of all this ignominy, reach the climax of her disgrace and
her peril when mobs besieged Whitehall, and clamoured that the "Jezebel"
should be sent to the scaffold.
It is sufficient for our purpose to know that through all this terrible
time she steered her way with almost superhuman skill back to the
sunshine of success and favour. Her life-long ambition was crowned when
Louis gave her the d'Aubigny lands and, with them, the _tabouret_ which
had so long dazzled her eyes and eluded her grasp. When the sky in
England had at last cleared she paid a visit to her native land. For
four ecstatic months the wool merchant's daughter made a triumphant
progress through France, acclaimed and fêted as a Queen. At her castle
of d'Aubigny she held a splendid court and dispensed a regal hospitality
to the greatest in the land, who had scarcely deigned to notice her in
her days as maid-of-honour. When, according to St Simon, she paid a
visit to the Capucines in Paris her approach was heralded by a
procession of monks, scattering incense and bearing aloft the holy
cross. "She was received," we are told, "as if she were a Queen, which
quite overwhelmed her, as she was not prepared for such an honour." To
such a pitch indeed did this popular idolatry reach that she was
actually painted as a Madonna to grace the altar of the richest convent
in France.
On her return to England from this tour of conquest she found a
reception almost equally regal awaiting her. She was reinstated as chief
favourite of the King, all his other mistresses--even the Queen herself
being relegated to the background; and high statesmen and Ambassadors
did their homage to her before they sought audience with Charles
himself. She was, in fact, as Louis's deputy, Vice-Queen of
England--_plus roi que le Roi_.
Thus secure of her power the Duchess was not unwilling to indulge once
more her old propensity for flirtation (to give it its mildest name).
The handsome and graceless Duke of Monmonth, Charles's favourite son,
Danby and many another gallant, succeeded one another in her favours,
which she dispensed without any care for concealment. But the only one
of her lovers of this time who made any real impression on such heart as
she had was the rakish Philippe de Vendôme, grandson of Henri IV. and
nephew of her first lover, the Admiral, Duc de Beaufort, who, as we have
seen, gave her the first start on her career of infamy and conquest. She
seems to have conducted an open and shameless intrigue with De
Vendôme--a man who, according to St Simon, had never gone sober to bed
for a generation, who was a swindler, liar, and thief, and the most
despicable and dangerous man living. When the Duchess, realising that
her intrigue with this handsome scoundrel was going too far, sought to
withdraw, he threatened to show certain incriminating letters she had
written to him, to the King; and it was only when Louis intervened and,
by bribes and commands, induced her lover to return to France, that she
was able to breathe again.
Not content with setting such a shameless example to the Court, she was
the arch-priestess of the gaming-tables at which Charles and his
courtiers spent their nights to the chink of glasses and gold. She made
light, we learn, of losing 5,000 guineas at a sitting. No wonder Pepys
was shocked at such scenes.
"I was told to-night," he writes, "that my Lady
Castlemaine is so great a gamester as to have won £15,400
in one night, and lost £25,000 in another night at play,
and has played £1000 and £1500 at a cast."
The Duchesse de Mazarin, he tells us,
"won at basset, of Nell Gwynne 1400 guineas in one night,
and of the Duchess of Portsmouth above £8000, in doing
which she exerted her utmost cunning and had the greatest
satisfaction, because they were rivals in the Royal
favour."
But the end of these saturnalia was at hand. The last glimpse we have of
them was on the night of 1st February 1685--the last Sunday Charles was
permitted to spend on earth.
"The great courtiers," says Evelyn, "and other dissolute
persons were playing at basset round a large table, with
a bank of at least £2000 before them. The King, though
not engaged in the game, was to the full as scandalously
occupied, sitting in open dalliance with three of the
shameless women of the Court, the Duchesses of
Portsmouth, Morland, and Mazarin, and others of the same
stamp, while a French boy was singing love-songs in that
glorious gallery. Six days after," he adds, "all was in
the dust."
As the end of that wasted Royal life drew near the Duchess's chief
concern--for it was her last opportunity of redeeming one of her pledges
to Louis, her paymaster--was that Charles should at least die an avowed
Catholic.
"I found her," Barillon wrote to Louis, "overcome with
grief. But, instead of bewailing her own unhappy and
changed condition, she led me into an adjoining chamber
and said: 'M. l'Ambassadeur, I want to confide a secret
to you, although if it were publicly known my head would
pay the forfeit. The King is a Catholic at heart, and yet
there he lies surrounded by Protestant bishops. I dare
not enter the room, and there is no one to talk to him of
his end and of God. The Duke of York is too much occupied
with his own affairs to trouble about his brother's
conscience. Pray go to him and tell him that the end is
near, and that it is his duty to lose no time in saving
his brother's soul.'"
The remainder of the Duchess's life-story is soon told. The days of her
queendom and glory were at an end. She was glad to escape to France
before James's tempestuous reign ended in tragedy. Here trouble and loss
were largely her portion. She lost favour with Louis to such an extent
that, at one time, he seriously thought of exiling her; her son deserted
and disgraced her; her ill-gotten riches took wings, until only a
pension of £800, wrung from Louis, saved her from absolute destitution.
True, she was still able to claim her _tabouret_ at the Court of
Versailles, and, for a few hours occasionally, to revive the glories of
the past; but apart from these ironical spasms of splendour she spent
her last years in loneliness and sadness, turning to a tardy piety as a
refuge from the coldness of the world, and as a solace for its lost
vanities. She saw all the great figures, among whom she had moved, pass
one by one behind the veil before she died, a wrinkled hag of
eighty-five, shorn of the last vestige of the charms which had wrought
such havoc in the world.