Chapter 14

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.

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.