The Kings' Mistresses (26 page)

If Lorenzo was not particularly pleased with his wife's portrayal of his own role in these events, he apparently did not tell her so directly.
Marie wrote in one letter to him, “I am pleased that the book has been to your liking,”
²⁶
and he made no objection to Marie's publishing successes. Even in Rome, she had been known as a writer, having authored two astrological almanacs. From her convent residence in Madrid she managed, quite remarkably, to have her memoirs printed in Saragossa and translated into Spanish for a second edition. The book quickly appeared in English in London, where a public familiar with the life of the Duchess Mazarin was curious about her sister. But although Lorenzo did not try to interfere with the book's circulation (an attempt that in any event would certainly have failed), he worked feverishly to place stricter limits on his wife's own freedom of movement. Marie learned of these obsessive efforts during the summer months of 1677. She in turn had written her own petitions to the Spanish court and used her book as testimony before a special tribunal of government ministers that had been formed to consider how to respond to the conflicting requests being put forth by the haughty constable and his fugitive wife. Other members of the French community in Madrid wrote home about her presence among them and her stubborn struggle to build her own network of alliances to counter her husband's influence with the Spanish court. The papal nuncio Savo Mellini, who had arrived in Madrid shortly after Marie, was sympathetic to her. This archbishop of Caesarea was a young man, in his early thirties, and impatient with some of the more severe approaches to marital discord that prevailed in Rome. Responding to Lorenzo's demand that Marie be locked in a fortress if she could not be contained in the convent, he wrote:

Lorenzo persisted. The envoy was obliged to repeat himself in subsequent letters throughout the summer. “That you find it strange that a husband can't pay to have his wife put in a fortress, I find totally in keeping with the practices in Italy,” wrote the archbishop. “Here, however, one approaches wives using different methods.”
²⁸
Marie, meanwhile, made Lorenzo aware that she knew he was conspiring against her:

On May 23, 1677, the Spanish council of state delivered its judgment, which satisfied neither party. On the one hand, Marie was authorized to “choose for herself a decent residence in a healthy environment with good air,” but on the other hand, this authorization “awaited the approval of the constable.”
³⁰
The council seemed to want to indicate its opinion in the matter, but without directly challenging Lorenzo's authority. However, Marie wanted a more definitive decision. She immediately left her Santo Domingo residence, without authorization, as if to prove her own freedom. Fleeing to a small house she had been given by a noblewoman she had befriended at the court, she was pursued immediately by Don
Ferdinando. The papal nuncio followed close behind and managed to negotiate her return to the city with the promise that she could live in Don Ferdinando's house that was just within the convent walls but did not have bars on the windows. Even the Spanish prime minister, Don Juan of Austria, was drawn into the dispute.

Marie had reason to believe the new prime minister would be in a position to act more decisively in her favor than the queen had been. The year 1677 had been a disruptive one for the Spanish government. Having reached majority, the sixteen-year-old Carlos II was eligible to govern, but incompetent. The queen mother found herself marginalized by the ever-declining popularity of her prime minister and her son's increasing reluctance to follow her orders. In January the popular Don Juan José of Austria, illegitimate half-brother to Carlos II, arrived in Madrid at the head of an army and exiled the prime minister to the Philippines and the queen mother to the Spanish province of Toledo. Carlos promptly made him prime minister. Up to that time, Don Juan's career had been largely a military one. He had shown himself to be a skilled negotiator, in both victory and defeat. Neither political nor domestic intrigue was daunting to him, and he understood how the two could coincide. His own illegitimate status, and his hatred of his father's wife, would continue to propel him in his political decision-making until his death. When called upon to address the dispute between Lorenzo Colonna and Marie Mancini, he made a political decision that he thought could lead to a resolution of the domestic divide. The Constable Colonna, ever susceptible to flattery and honors, was appointed to the position of Viceroy of Aragon, the same position that Don Juan had just relinquished to take on his new role as Spanish prime minister. In that capacity, Lorenzo would be required to take up residence in Saragossa for part of the year, with inevitable trips to Madrid. Marie had always said she would consider reuniting with her husband if certain
conditions were met. Lorenzo's agents had always told him that an essential gesture would be to meet with her in person. Now it seemed that these conditions might be realized. Lorenzo prepared for a voyage to Spain, and Marie for the longed-for reunion with her sons.

—Don Ferdinando Colonna, letter to Lorenzo Colonna, February 4, 1677

—Charles de Saint-Evremond,
Factum for Madame the Duchess Mazarin Against Monsieur Mazarin Her Husband

 

 

 

 

I
N THE YEARS FOLLOWING the death of King Charles II in 1685, tensions between England and France increased, despite the early efforts of Charles's brother, the Catholic James II, to strengthen ties between the two nations. But James was obliged to defend his succession to the throne from the beginning. He had served in the French army during the period of exile that he and his brother had spent in France, where he was also drawn to Catholicism. Anti-Catholic factions in Parliament attempted on more than one occasion to exclude him from the line of succession. Once he assumed the throne, Parliament viewed him as a threat to English liberties. For the Duchess Mazarin, living in London, James's accession to the throne had to some extent
enhanced her status and security there; after all, the new Queen Mary Beatrice of Modena was her cousin's daughter, and Hortense had played the role of affectionate aunt to the younger woman since her arrival in England fourteen years earlier. The Duchess Mazarin had been close to Mary Beatrice during her early years at the English court. Hortense's apartment at Whitehall placed her near her cousin throughout Mary Beatrice's confinements during pregnancy. Despite multiple pregnancies, James and Mary Beatrice had not been fortunate in children. Mary Beatrice had suffered several miscarriages and had given birth to five children, four of whom died in infancy, by the time she was twenty-four. The Duchess Mazarin had attempted to help Mary Beatrice cope with her grief when the queen returned from a voyage to Scotland in 1681 to learn that her one surviving child, Isabella, who had celebrated her second birthday just six months earlier, had suddenly died of smallpox. Three years after Mary Beatrice assumed the throne, she still had not produced an heir.

Standing to inherit the English throne if no heir was produced were James's two Protestant daughters by his first marriage. Then Mary Beatrice became pregnant once again in 1687, and the news provoked anti-Catholic rioting. When a healthy son was born on June 10, 1688, wild accusations began to circulate almost immediately. This was a queen, after all, who had proven herself unable to produce a viable male heir—this birth was not possible; the baby must be a changeling! Despite the testimony of more than thirty witnesses who had been present at the birth (challenges to its authenticity had been anticipated), many citizens were convinced that the newborn James Frances Edward was an impostor.

It is likely that the Duchess Mazarin was among those present at the much anticipated birth of Mary Beatrice's son. She heard the news of the parliamentary resolution accusing James and his wife of secretly conspiring to introduce an infant who was not theirs
into the birthing room, and she must have reacted with astonishment and indignation. But by then the public sentiment against King James was irreversible.

In November 1688, William of Orange, husband to James's daughter Mary by his first marriage, invaded England with an army supported by the Protestant factions, and the government of James II collapsed. The royal couple fled to France with their infant son, where Louis XIV offered his protection and his country residence of the Chateau de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. William and Mary were Protestant, and members of the French Catholic community remaining in England found themselves much less likely to be treated with favor by the new king and queen. When William of Orange was proclaimed king on February 13, 1689, one of his first moves was to grant permission to Charles de Saint-Evremond and his community of French friends to remain in London without fear of reprisal. This was a gesture of generosity to a group of expatriates who themselves had, more often than not, acted as thorns in the side of the French king. Hortense was among them. But some members of the House of Commons were less generous. In July they petitioned William to have Hortense removed from the kingdom. William responded only by asking the duchess to vacate the apartment that had been set aside for her visits to Whitehall when Mary Beatrice had occupied the palace. For the time being, she remained in her residence in Saint James's Park and continued to host a vibrant salon.

Starting in 1685, when the throng of French émigrés arriving in London became predominantly Huguenot, the society that had continued to gather in the Duchess Mazarin's salon had changed. In that year, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, the royal declaration of religious freedom that his grandfather Henry IV had designed to put an end to the French Wars of Religion. In renouncing the edict, the king outlawed Protestantism in France. Waves of wealthy exiles fled to Holland and England. The Duchess Mazarin's
reputation for making her home a crossroads of diverse social groups became even more pronounced, as her salon drew visitors from an ever-broadening array of social, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. But her own future in England seemed to be uncertain at best. And her husband, observing her weakened position there and the increasing political tensions between France and England, decided to make another attempt to force her repatriation to France.

And so as the deposed James II began to amass troops in France for an assault on England and an attempt to regain his throne, the Duke Mazarin was gathering his own forces for a retaliatory attack on his wayward wife. His arms of choice were drawn from the dense network of legal assistants, judges, lawyers, and courtiers who over the years had come to know Armand-Charles de la Meilleraye as a reliable source of income. The Duke Mazarin enjoyed keeping an array of legal suits constantly in process. In his religious frenzies he had been compared to Molière's Tartuffe, and in his eagerness to litigate he evoked Molière's Misanthrope, who didn't even mind losing court cases because his losses showed the world that he was being wronged. In this instance, Armand-Charles's enemy was a wife who, though not enamored of litigation, was nonetheless as tenacious as her husband. She had continued, even through the years in England when all her friends were congratulating her on having escaped the clutches of a madman, to press her own arguments for legal independence and recovery of her dowry.

It had been more than twenty years since Hortense had run away from the Mazarin palace, and now Armand-Charles watched as her kinswoman Mary Beatrice was welcomed to the court of Versailles. He joined in the chorus of praise for the exiled Catholic queen, writing her a letter declaring his intent to bring Hortense back from the “road to perdition” that she was following in England. “I see no alternative but that of placing her under my lawful power,” he
wrote. “Pride caused the rupture between us, license has sustained it, and intrigue has strengthened it.”
¹
It was a long, rambling letter, rehashing all of the accusations that Hortense had made against him, accusations he knew she had shared with Mary Beatrice. He refuted them one by one, but if he hoped that Mary Beatrice would lend him her support, he went on to undermine his own position with crazed declarations of his determination to “persecute” his wife: “I swear it here: menaces, prayers, rewards, punishments, the loss of fortune or even of life itself will never deter me from being the persecutor of Madame Mazarin. But you must also believe me when I say that if she is willing to return to me I shall be the most gentle, the most humble, the most tender husband that anyone could ever imagine.”
²