The Kings' Mistresses (20 page)

Lorenzo's other spies were even more helpless to explain his wife's mind. “I must confess to you sir,” one wrote, “there is nothing more difficult than penetrating the sentiments and objectives of Madame the Constabless. . . . Monsieur Don Maurizio and I still
think that Your Excellency should not delay in making a surprise visit to her as that might have a very good effect.”
¹⁶
But despite a chorus of urgings to this effect, Lorenzo stopped short of making a personal appearance. He knew his wife, and he could not tolerate even the thought of enduring the sort of humiliation to which Duke Mazarin had been reduced in his foiled efforts to recover Hortense. He was much too proud to risk being turned away at the door of whatever refuge Marie had managed to find. And so Marie and Lorenzo continued their cat-and-mouse game, she sometimes openly defying him, spending the money he sent her as soon as it arrived, knowing that his pride would not permit him to leave her in poverty, and he pushing that confidence to the limit, alternately satisfying and denying her requests. Charles-Emmanuel, meanwhile, insisted that he had known nothing of Marie's intentions from the moment of her arrival in Turin, of which he had learned, he said, “only when she was very close and at the gates.”

During this time, Marie revealed some of her private thoughts to Ortensia Stella, ever her most trusted correspondent. In February she wrote from Turin, reflecting on Hortense's apparent attempts in Chambéry to lead a life of restraint and so keep her husband at bay. As for herself, “my poor Countess you know that when one has done a thing such as I have done at my age, it is better to die than fail to sustain it. Madame Mazarin was only twenty when she left Paris, but I had passed six candelabras and thus should know what I was doing.”
¹⁷

From the Convent of the Visitation, Marie resumed her letter-writing campaign to persuade Louis XIV to revoke his orders excluding her from France. The newest in the parade of treacherous Colonna agents to visit her in Turin, Carlo Emanuele d'Este, Marquis of Borgomanero, assured her that even her husband was attempting to persuade the French king to allow her to enter France, for he felt that there was more hope of controlling her in France
than in Savoy. No permission was forthcoming, however, and Marie, ever restless in her pursuit of a destination where she could truly enjoy her liberty, allowed herself to be persuaded by Borgomanero that her best alternative would be to go to Spanish Flanders. The Marquis of Borgomanero was a member of the Este family of Lombardy, a family that, like the Colonnas, served the interests of Spain in Italy. Lorenzo, Borgomanero told Marie, would approve of moving to a state more closely allied with his own political interests, and yet she would be able to remain at liberty there. Marie wanted to believe this but she took some precautions. Sending Nanette and a small group of other servants ahead to a town on the banks of Lake Maggiore, she chose a different route for herself. It was an unlikely choice, and a much more difficult route north, through the Great Saint Bernard Pass, but her diversionary tactic proved wise. Unknown to her, Lorenzo had pressured authorities near Milan to intercept his wife's traveling party and they, not recognizing Nanette as Marie's lady-in-waiting, mistakenly detained her for a week until the confusion was dispelled. This mix-up gave Marie's party time to advance deep into the Alpine pass, “not having so pleasant a time on the mountain of Saint Bernard,” as she wrote.
¹⁸

It was late November 1673, just eighteen months after Marie and Hortense had first left Rome, and now Marie was back on the road, this time in winter, at a very dangerous time for any traveler to undertake such a voyage. France was at war against the Quadruple Alliance of the Dutch Republic, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and Brandenburg; the war had begun in late spring of 1672, precisely when the sisters had left Italy. In addition to “snow and along dreadful paths lined with precipices,” as Marie described the Great Saint Bernard Pass, the ever-present threat of bandits or agents sent to arrest her, and the uncertainty of finding anyplace that could offer her safe haven, there was in northern Europe the likelihood of encountering soldiers. Borgomanero, who was accompanying Marie,
was even more nervous than she. The group took circuitous routes as they progressed toward Brussels, even though Marie argued for more direct paths. This meant that Marie found herself passing through “Frankfurt and then to Cologne, going far off the most direct path in order to please the marquis de Borgomanero and the abbé Oliva, who did not wish to run into the siege of Bonn and who wanted to avoid encountering the Spanish and French troops who had set out with provisions at the same time as we had.”
¹⁹

Marie was impatient with these prudent measures, and chafed against “the contrary nature, the unbearable slowness, and the unnecessary precautions of the Marquis.”
²⁰
In Cologne, she welcomed their encounter with a French regiment that was assigned to undertake peace negotiations and included two French statesmen, Honoré Courtin and Paul de Barillon, with whom she took counsel on her own predicament. Courtin and Barillon did not trust Borgomanero. Marie later reflected that she should have listened to their advice against going to Flanders, and their suspicions of Borgomanero, who continued to urge her on. Their concerns proved justified almost immediately upon her arrival outside of Brussels, after a long ride through conflict-ridden territory, escorted by French troops. In Flanders the party was greeted by an emissary of the Count of Monterey, then governor of Flanders, who informed them that preparations were being made to house Marie in a convent.

This was not what she had been led to expect. At the very least she had hoped to choose her own place of retreat, religious or otherwise, in exchange for agreed-upon restricted liberties that Lorenzo had indicated he would permit. Borgomanero feigned surprise and made protests, but Marie soon saw that she had been trapped. She was escorted to the neighboring port of Antwerp and taken to the citadel built into the eastern wall of the fortified city. It took her two days to realize that she was nothing but a prisoner, with guards in the corridor outside her door and all messages intercepted. Borgomanero seemed to be taking a cruel pleasure in her discomfort.
Only letters from Lorenzo were permitted to reach her. And hers reached him, angry, accusatory letters against Borgomanero:

In letters to the Duke of Savoy she was more explicit in her accusations.
²²

When after two cold months in the Antwerp citadel the Count of Monterey finally agreed to prepare lodging for her in a Brussels convent, Marie was no longer inclined to trust anyone. She wanted only to be released, and agreed to the move, asking first that Nanette and Morena be permitted an advance look at the residence that was being prepared for her. They came back to the citadel reporting that the place was not really a convent, it was a worse prison, and that Borgomanero had even arranged for extra bars to be put on the windows of the two rooms prepared for them. Desperate, en route to her new abode Marie asked to be allowed to go to the adjoining chapel to pray: “I went into the church of the convent on the pretext of saying my prayers there, and I immediately declared
to the captain of the guards who was escorting me that I would not leave the spot where I was.”
²⁴
The count and other mortified city officials came to plead with her to leave the chapel. Finally she was persuaded that they would take her by force if she did not comply. Her only consolation was that she could now receive letters more freely than in the citadel, and hope that the ones she wrote in reply would reach their destination. She resumed her correspondence with Hortense:

The situation was unsustainable, even for the hard-hearted Monterey, supported by a vengeful Borgomanero. Once the count received word from Lorenzo that Marie could leave and continue on her route of exile to Spain, he was relieved. As soon as her escort, a relative of Lorenzo's, arrived in Antwerp to meet her, Monterey was only too happy, as the papal envoy reported, to be “released from this awkward situation in which he had put himself.”
²⁶
As for Marie, she prepared herself for another voyage and another convent.

—Henri de Ruvigny, French ambassador to England, in a letter to the French court

—Diary of John Evelyn

 

 

 

 

I
N 1675, CHARLES II OF ENGLAND was forty-five, and a man fully enjoying the pleasures of royal middle age. His youth had been a series of lost battles, personal traumas, and political humiliations. After his father, Charles I, was beheaded in the English Civil War of 1649, young Charles had mustered an army in Scotland and marched on England, but was defeated by Oliver Cromwell at the battle of Worcester in 1651. Forced into exile, Charles made an adventurous escape but lived in poverty in France and the Spanish Netherlands until 1660, when he was restored to the throne and subsequently crowned in a magnificent ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Since that time, he had progressively maneuvered British interests closer to the French and managed to sustain
a complicated web of political alliances, including a formal alliance with Holland and Sweden and a secret treaty with Louis XIV. He had become skilled in dealing with an ever more powerful Parliament, usually by circumvention rather than direct confrontation.

In 1662 Charles had married the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza, a devout woman soon obliged to tolerate her husband's adulterous affairs, as the poet John Dryden wrote, “The best of Queens, the most obedient wife. . . . His life the theme of her eternal prayer.” The couple were childless, but by 1675 Charles had already fathered several children with mistresses whom he publicly acknowledged: Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, favored by the French interests; Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland; and Nell Gwyn, the celebrated actress. Although he was Protestant, Charles was close to the Catholic factions in England, and his ties to France were strong. He had lived at the French court, and his sister Henrietta had married Philippe d'Orléans, brother of Louis XIV. The greatest personal loss of his life had been Henrietta's death in 1671. Charles had loved Henrietta more than any other, and it took him years to be able to conceal his grief at the mention of her name.

When Charles heard that the runaway Duchess Mazarin was traveling to England, he was intrigued, as was everyone else who heard about her escapades. Once the duchess was back on the road, she was back in the limelight. She had decided, before her predawn departure from Chambéry, that her destination would be London, for several reasons. In London she had a relative in the royal family, Mary Beatrice of Modena, whose mother, Laura Martinozzi, had long ago accompanied her young cousin Hortense on the galley ship taking them with their mothers from Italy to France. Cardinal Mazarin had arranged a fine Italian marriage for his niece Laura, who became Duchess of Modena. Laura's daughter Mary Beatrice, who in 1675 was just seventeen, had two years before been sent to
England to become the second wife of the widowed Duke of York, brother to King Charles II. Mary Beatrice was lonely at the London court. Her marriage to an heir to the throne was regarded with suspicion by the anti-French faction, increasingly concerned by the expanding power of Louis XIV and his Catholic allies in Europe. From Chambéry, Hortense had corresponded with Mary Beatrice, and also with Lord Montagu, the English ambassador to the court of France. For different reasons, both urged her to go to London, where she would be welcomed by a growing French expatriate community and enjoy the safety of being at a distance from her husband's legal pursuits. Lord Montagu was interested in undermining the influence wielded at the court of Charles II by his mistress Louise de Keroualle, and he thought the Duchess Mazarin would provide a diversion at the very least, and more likely an overt competitor for the king's attentions and confidence. As for Mary Beatrice, she welcomed the chance to have her lively older cousin by her side while she waited to give birth to her first child. It was to arrange her move to England that Hortense lingered in Chambéry after the Duke of Savoy's death, and she was bound for London as she set out on that chilly October morning.