The Kings' Mistresses by Elizabeth Goldsmith

dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which this day I was witness of, the King sitting and toying with his concubines Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarin, a French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table.” 28
    Six days later, King Charles died after an apoplectic fit, probably caused by kidney failure. He was fifty-four. On his deathbed, he converted to Catholicism.

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    â€œDUST and ASHES”
    And yet I did not lose heart for having seen my attempts at freeing myself turn out so badly, and conscious that freedom is the richest treasure in the world and that a noble and generous spirit must stop at nothing to acquire it or to recover it after having lost it, I applied my efforts once again to obtaining it.
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—Marie Mancini, The Truth in Its Own Light
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    T HE DECISION OF THE Grand Council court in Paris had been in favor of the Duke Mazarin, but the duchess refused to obey the order to return to France. She remained in London, close to the court of William and Mary, though not in favor there, and she no longer had access to the apartment at Whitehall. To her friends, she expressed no regret over being excluded from the new elite society surrounding the king and queen, which everyone said was anything but animated. William suffered from asthma, which seemed to be aggravated by the damp palace air. Almost immediately after arriving in London in 1689, the royal couple commissioned Christopher Wren to expand the buildings of Kensington palace to make it a more suitable residence for them, and the court was transferred there at the end of that same year. When fire broke out and destroyed much of Whitehall palace in 1698,
William was quite content to know that he never would have to return to that chilly and damp residence along the banks of the Thames. The Duchess Mazarin moved her own residence to 15 Kensington Square sometime in 1690. It was a smaller house than her “little palace” in Saint James’s Park but was located in a rapidly growing and fashionable district just down the street from the new royal palace. She maintained this residence for a time as her lodging close to the court but sometime in 1693 acquired another, more modest home on Paradise Row in Chelsea, where she spent an increasing amount of time in the years that followed. It was an effort to economize, bemoaned by Saint-Evremond and others who found the neighborhood isolated and entirely too far from the hustle and bustle of the city. Hortense dismissed their worries and held to her habitual lifestyle, continuing to host regular social gatherings in her new home and making her own way about the city without concern for the dangers of returning home alone late at night. She held chamber concerts, some of them short operas with such titles as The Chelsea Concert and The Basset Scene , that played out on stage the conversations, music, and gambling for which her gatherings continued to be well known.
    During this time, France and England were at war, and would remain so until 1697. Within London, many friendships of long standing were broken and new alliances formed. Hortense was accustomed to loyalty in her friendships. If she had survived different regimes and cultural environments in the years since fleeing from Paris, it was not because she knew how to cynically manipulate different political interests. Her feelings were never hard to read, and she had pursued her pleasures openly, confronted her enemies, and held fast to her friends. Saint-Evremond had little luck persuading her to pay court to the new figures in power and to forget those who had fallen from it. You must do as I do, said the old exile: “I always have an unwavering attachment to the present government
of the country in which I reside.” Hortense laughed at him, but their