SYMHC Classics: Mancini Sisters

This 2022 episode covers Hortense and Marie Mancini, who tried to make a place for themselves in 17th-century Europe, defying all kinds of conventions along the way. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. This episode is coming out on the three
hundred eightieth birthday of Hortense Mancini, who was born on
June sixth, sixteen forty six. She is one of the
two Mancini sisters we talk about in Today's Saturday Classic.
This episode originally came out on November fourteenth, twenty twenty two.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a

(00:27):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we are
going to talk about a pair of sisters who, along
with their other sisters and their cousins, get a lot

(00:48):
of comparisons to whatever influencer, slash media celebrity is making
the most headlines at any given moment. Like over the
past few years, I've seen a lot of people call
them the seventeenth century Kardashians. They are Hortense and Marie Mancini,
and they tried to make a place for themselves in
the seventeenth century in Europe, really defying all kinds of

(01:11):
conventions along the way. We mentioned them extremely briefly, like
just a couple of sentences way back when we interviewed
Jason Porath about his book and website Rejected Princesses in
twenty sixteen, so they've had not even like a six
impossible episodes level of exploration. It just really is just

(01:33):
like paragraph. A thing to note upfront with this episode
is that I love a lot of these two women's stories.
There are big chunks of their lives that are a
really wild ride, and they sound full of adventure and
daring and writing memoirs and hosting salons and becoming the
favorites of various monarchs. But really a lot of this

(01:56):
was also happening as they were trying to get away
from their husbands, both of whom were controlling and abusive
and just frightening. And this was all happening in an
era when women just really didn't have the right to
get a divorce from a bad marriage. So I can
see how just that whole setup would be very troubling

(02:16):
to people. We're also going to talk a little bit
about some pregnancy loss, and there are some very young
marriages in this story, even to the point of seeming
inordinately young given the time period. This is a heads up,
so Hortense and Marie Mancini were two of the women

(02:39):
known as the Mazarinets. They were the nieces of Cardinal
Jule's Mazzarins, chief minister of France. So we need to
talk a little bit about him. Just set the stage.
He was born Julio Mazzarini in Naples in sixteen oh two,
and he changed his name after moving to France, where
he became an advisor and eventually chief minister to King

(03:01):
Louis the thirteenth. In sixteen forty one, Mazarin was named
a cardinal and he was one of the people present
at the baptism of the dauphin the future King Louis
the fourteenth, who of course also became known as the son.
King Louis the thirteenth died in sixteen forty three, and
that was when Louis the fourteenth was still a child

(03:21):
and the young king's mother, Anne of Austria, became his regent.
She and Mazarin did not initially get along. There was
some butting of heads, but he was so charming and
persuasive they eventually became very close, so close that there
were rumors that the two of them were secretly married.

(03:42):
Now there is a whole swath of history that we're
kind of skipping over here, including the Thirty Years War
and Mazarin being exiled for a while and a series
of civil wars in France known as the Fronde. But
eventually Mazarin became one of the most powerful people in France,
which it's he was one of the most powerful countries

(04:02):
in Europe. He had also become extremely wealthy, with money
and titles and land to pass down to an air.
He had no children of his own, though his one
surviving nephew had a reputation as an irresponsible libertine, so
Mazarin did not think that this would be a great
candidate for his successor, so he really focused on his

(04:24):
seven nieces, moving all of them from what's now Italy
to France and managing their educations to make sure that
they would be witty and cultured and personable able to
fit into French society, and then he arranged advantageous marriages
for all of them to build a legacy for himself

(04:45):
that way. Five of Mazarin's nieces were the daughters of
Hieronima and Lorenzo Mancini. That included Hortense and Marie, who
were going to come back to you. Their sister laur Victoire,
married Louis de Vendome, Duke de Mercueur, who was King
Henry the Fourth's grandson. Sadly, she died at the age

(05:05):
of twenty, shortly after giving birth to their third son.
Another sister, Olimpe, married Eugene Maurice of Savoy Contes Soisson.
The youngest mancini sister, Marie Anne, married goud Froid Maurice
de la Tour d'auvel, Duke of Bouillon. Mazarin's two other
nieces were the two daughters of Girolamo Martinozzi and Laura

(05:28):
Margherita Mazzarini. They were Anne Marie, who married Armand de Bourbon,
Prince of Conti, and Laura, who married Alfonse the fourth
dest Duke of Modena. In addition to Hortense and Marie,
some of these women wound up being famous and even
notorious in their own ways. There were court scandals and

(05:48):
affairs with kings, and, in the case of Olampe and
Marie Anne Mancini, allegations of poisoning people. During the Affair
of the Poisons, as its name suggests, the fare of
the poisons, involved poisonings and alleged poisonings, and allegations of
people using black magic and love potions to try to
sway the King. Previous hosts of the show did an

(06:12):
episode on this. It came out on January nineteenth of
twenty eleven. We're not running this one as a Saturday
Classic because it's in the middle of a series that
they did on the House of Bourbon. It builds on
the previous episodes that they had released over the prior
couple of weeks. It was just a little bit more
in medius race than we would generally try to do.

(06:35):
I think you can follow it. It just was a
little like, it's not quite a standalone right right, So
we didn't want to stick it into the feed by itself.
Marie Mancini was born Anna Maria Mancini on August twenty eighth,
sixteen thirty nine. Her younger sister, Hortense, was born Ortensia
Mancini on June sixth, sixteen forty six. In spite of

(06:59):
the seventh gap in their ages, these two sisters became
very close. In sixteen fifty four, when Marie was fifteen
and Hortense was eight. Their caregivers judged them as being
ready to start making their way into French society, but
when Mazarin met with them, he disagreed with that assessment,
and he sent them to a convent together for another

(07:20):
eighteen months for further study and refinement, just in case
anyone is wondering, why are you not saying her name
or Tense as she might have said it in French.
She eventually moved to Britain, and everybody new his Hortense,
and it seemed weird to change pronunciations part way through
the episode. Neither of these sisters was considered to be

(07:41):
particularly exceptional when they were very young. In her younger years,
Marie was described as awkward and uncooperative, while Hortense was
pretty and charming, but also described in terms like apathetic
and insignificant. Seventeenth century French writer Madame Lafayette wrote of
Hortense quote, she was not only the most beautiful of

(08:04):
the cardinal's nieces, but she was the most beautiful of
all the court beauties. Had she been gifted with more
intelligence and a greater vivacity of manner, she would have
been perfect. Not that everyone considered that a weak point
for her. For many people found her careless attitude and
languid manner a distinct attraction. Once they got to court,

(08:26):
Marie caught the eye of one particular man, the King
Louis the fourteenth, with the two teens becoming deeply devoted
to one another. So this might sound like a pretty
great development, considering that Cardinal Mazarin was trying to marry
his nieces to high ranking men. Marie's father was a baron,
so marrying the king would have been an enormous step up.

(08:48):
But Louis needed to marry royalty, ideally someone who could
solidify an alliance between France and another powerful country. By
sixteen fifty nine, when the king was twenty and Marie
was nineteen, he was begging to be allowed to marry her,
and meanwhile his mother and her uncle were working to

(09:09):
separate them. Marie was finally sent away from court in
the company of her sisters Hortens and mary Anne. Reportedly,
the last thing she said to him was quote, Sire,
I am leaving you to weep, and yet you are king.
In spite of efforts to keep them apart, Louis and

(09:29):
Marie kept up a continual secret correspondence including sending one
another gifts. One of these gifts was a puppy sent
from Louis to Marie with a caller that said, I
belonged to Marie. I would have been pretty hard to
keep secret. Yeah, just gonna keep a puppy secret from everybody.
In the ends, a marriage was arranged between King Louis

(09:53):
the fourteenth of France and Maria Teresa and Fanta of
Spain and arch Duchess of Austria. Their marriage part of
the Peace of the Pyrenees, which ended the Franco Spanish War.
Louis managed to arrange a brief visit to Marie on
his way to make the final marriage negotiations, and during
this visit the two of them had a bunch of

(10:14):
very sad, apologetic like teen romance conversations, most of them
happening in front of her sister Hortense. Then, after Louis
was married, Marie and Hortense followed a process that was
outlined in Ovid's Cures for Love, to ritually get rid
of anything that might remind her of him or otherwise

(10:35):
soothe her heartbreak. Meanwhile, Mazarin was working on arranging a
marriage for Marie, not just to try to put a
final end to her feelings of the king, but also
because his own health was declining and he wanted to
make sure all of his nieces were settled before he died.
Marie's marriage contract to Italian Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna was

(10:57):
signed on February twenty first, sixteen sixty one. Hortense was
married very soon after. Like her sister, she had already
captured the interest of someone much more powerful than she
or her family, and that was Charles the Second of
England at the time, though he was not on the
throne of England, he was in exile in France, having

(11:18):
fled England during the English Civil Wars. Charles actually proposed
to Hortense, But unlike her sister and Louis the fourteenth,
the issue wasn't that Charles really needed to make a
royal marriage alliance. It was that Cardinal Mazarin did not
think it was very likely that Charles was actually going
to get to return to the British throne, so he

(11:39):
declined this offer. He was like, no, I'm not marrying
my niece to a deposed king. Would the point of
that be? However, Charles was indeed restored as monarch in
sixteen sixty, which was not long after all of this happened,
made a mistake. Instead, Hortense married mon Charles de la Bertai,

(12:01):
who had been considered a suitor for some of her sisters,
but who had always been particularly interested in Hortense like
interested in a way that multiple people commented on as
disturbing and frankly inappropriate. He had been fixated on her
since she was nine, and he was about fourteen years
older than she was. When they married on March first

(12:24):
of sixteen sixty one, he was twenty nine and she
was just fourteen. Mazarin's acceptance of this proposal seems to
have been largely based on the fact that he thought
Armand would take care of his estates and his fortune.
He had decided that the vast majority of that fortune
was going to go to whoever Hortense married, and that

(12:45):
person would also become the Duke of Mazarin and inherit
Mazarin's other titles. Armand was deeply religious and mature and responsible,
so the Cardinal didn't think he was likely to just
fritter away his inherent or otherwise make an embarrassment of
his legacy armand came into that inheritance really quickly. Cardinal

(13:08):
Jules Mazarin died on March ninth, sixteen sixty one, just
days after the wedding. We're going to talk more about
all of this after a sponsor break. In some ways,
Marie and Hortense Mancini's marriages were similar at first, especially

(13:32):
in that both of them were very focused on having
babies and particularly on trying to have a male heir.
After recovering from a serious illness and then experiencing a miscarriage,
Marie gave birth to three sons, Filippo, Marcantonio, and Carlo,
who were born in sixteen sixty three, sixteen sixty four,
in sixteen sixty five. Hortense had four babies in five years,

(13:56):
Marie Charlotte in sixteen sixty two, Marie Anne in sixty
teen sixty three, Maria lamp in sixteen sixty five, and
Paul Joule's in sixteen sixty six. But in other ways,
the early years of their marriages were almost completely opposite
from one another. It became clear pretty much immediately that
Hortense's husband, the new Duke Mazarin, was a religious fanatic

(14:19):
to the point of being really irrational. He micromanaged minute
details of the lives of people who lived on the
land that he managed, arguing that by doing so he
was going to save their souls. And this included things
like trying to get the milkmaids to spend less time
milking because he thought they might find it erotic, and

(14:40):
believing that churning milk into butter was immodest and could
lead to arousal sounds like the milkmaids are not the problem.
He ordered mothers to teach their babies too fast by
refusing to nurse them on Fridays. When a fire broke
out at the palace, he ordered the servants who put
it out to be flogged, and he flogged some of
them of himself, because he thought that they had interfered

(15:03):
with the will of God. He was also extremely possessive
and controlling of virtually everything about Hortense's life. By the
terms of her uncle's will, they were enormously wealthy as
a couple, but almost none of that wealth was exclusively hers.
The only thing of material value that was actually considered

(15:23):
her property and only hers, was her jewelry, which her
husband tried to confiscate from her because he said that
it was going to lead her into temptation. In terms
of Marie's marriage, there were some ways that her husband,
Lorenzo could be controlling. For example, he blamed her pregnancy
loss on her love of riding horses, and when she

(15:43):
got pregnant again, he forced her to give up riding
and to be carried on a sedan chair. But unlike
Hortense's husband who tried to lock her away and keep
her from anything that might be a temptation, Marie's husband
wanted to show her off, hosting masks, balls and salons
and lavish galas. They became patrons of the arts, theater,

(16:05):
and culture, and they spent lots of time in Venice,
where they crossed paths with past podcast subject Christina of Sweden.
But Marie's relationship with her husband seems to have really deteriorated.
Around the time of her pregnancy with their third son.
He had an affair with another woman who gave birth
to a child that everyone knew was his. Then Marie

(16:29):
had a really difficult delivery and she was worried that
she wouldn't survive another pregnancy. That combined with her mortification
over her husband's affair to lead her to try to
put an end to their physical relationship. Lorenzo, of course,
was not happy about that idea at all. Meanwhile, Hortense,
having provided her husband with a male heir, was trying

(16:52):
to end her physical relationship with him as well. Armand
had become incredibly controlling and paranoid about preconceivable thing, all
within this framework of extreme religious piety. When Hortense started
trying to avoid him, all of that got worse. And
contrary to what Cardinal Mazarin had expected, Armand was not

(17:14):
being that careful with his inheritance. He gave huge amounts
of money away to the church and charities, and he
bought land that wasn't really going to pay off as
an investment. Hortense thought that they were going to wind
up with nothing, and in sixteen sixty six she started
trying to legally separate their assets. This wasn't the same
thing as dissolving the marriage. She was just trying to

(17:35):
kind of partition off some of their money so that
it was under her control, just so Armand couldn't spend
it all. When Armand said that they should pull out
their daughter's front teeth so that men would not find
them tempting. Hortense fled to her sister, Alemp. Alemp promised
to try to protect the children, but she also didn't

(17:56):
really want to bring her sister in to live with
them full time. So a lamp tried to mediate between
Hortense and armand Hortense did not think their issues could
be reconciled, and when her husband said that she could
either live with one of her sisters or go to
a convent, she went to the convent. While in the convent,
Hortense developed an intense relationship with the Marquise mariei Donis

(18:20):
de Carcel, who was there under charges of adultery. She
was seventeen and Hortense was twenty one, and together the
two of them ran roughshod over the nuns who were
essentially acting as their jailers, including playing a whole lot
of pranks, like putting ink in the holy water. That's funny.

(18:41):
It really sounds almost like a weird comedy about a
boarding school, like playing pranks on the teachers. Marie Sony
helped Hortense with her legal filings, and eventually Hortense did
get a partial victory. The court order that her husband
grant her a pension of twenty thousand livres a year

(19:04):
and to document what he was doing with all of
their money. She was also supposed to return back to
their home while her husband, who was the grand Master
of Artillery, would instead live at the Arsenal of Paris.
Hortense left the convent, but Armand refused to do any
of the things he had been ordered to do, and
also destroyed the theater that Hortense had used to stage

(19:28):
small productions at their home while she was away. Meanwhile,
Maurice Donis reconciled with her husband, and that was something
that made Hortense so jealous that she told him that
Maurice Doni had been receiving secret visits from another man.
This led to a duel between Maurice Donise's husband and

(19:48):
her lover, after which both of them were imprisoned for
violating the prohibition on dueling. In the face of Armand's
increasingly erratic and frightening behavior, Hortense moved from trying to
legally separate their assets into a formal separation from their marriage,
and on June thirteenth, sixteen sixty eight, she fled to Italy,

(20:11):
with the help of her brother Philippe and a friend
of theirs, the Chevalier of Rohan. She left her children behind,
hoping that she would be better able to advocate for
them Away from her husband. She took a couple of
servants with her, disguised as men. This was just not done.
Women of her social class did not leave their husbands,

(20:33):
and they certainly did not travel without male escorts. The
trip itself involved a perilous journey through the Alps. In Milan,
Hortense reunited with her sister Marie, who had come out
from Rome with her husband. Lorenzo wanted to go back
home immediately, but Hortense and Marie convinced him to stop
in Siena for a couple of weeks instead, and there

(20:55):
they spent their time riding and hunting, apart from the
social norms that Hortense had really abandoned here. This was
basically an international incident, with Hortense, a duchess, fleeing her
home in France to join her sister, whose husband was
an Italian prince. Hortense also quickly started having an affair

(21:15):
with the Chevalier of Rohann's squire, which was yet another
layer of scandal, and also came across as a huge
annoyance to Marie and Lorenzo. They were sort of like,
we're trying to help you out, and you're having this
public affair with the squire, why are you doing this?
More generally, though, Lorenzo was annoyed with his wife Marie.

(21:36):
They were both living fairly separate lives by this point,
but he was increasingly frustrated by how much money she
spent on things like artwork and improvements to their home
and cultural projects, and as well as the many, many
outings that she took with her sister. In sixteen seventy one,
Marie got really sick and people thought her husband was

(21:58):
poisoning her than while the Chevalier's squire also accused Philippe
and the Chevalier of trying to poison him. This was
during the whole affair of the poisons era. There was
a lot there's a whole lot of poison going on,
poisoning and accused poisoning and potential poisoning happening. A marriage
was arraigned for Philip that year, and Hortense went with

(22:18):
him to Paris to try to get some kind of
legal resolution to her marriage. Her husband was irate when
he heard how Hortense had been spending her time in Rome.
She and her sister had filled their time with parties
and masked balls and musical performances, with Hortons being so
popular with men that two of them allegedly fought a
duel over her armand called for Hortense's arrest, but city

(22:43):
officials refused to do it, and he became so irate
that he destroyed a lot of their art collection. He
smashed the genitals of the statues with a hammer and
cut them out of paintings with scissors. King Louis the
fourteenth was upset about this. In addition to the King's
love of and patronage for art, the king and other

(23:07):
people also considered this art collection that had been destroyed
to have been a national treasure. So whatever goodwill people
might have had for Armand at this point really have oporated.
In France. At this time, divorce as we know it
today really didn't exist. There was a process for separating
a couple's assets. Hortense had already tried that, and separac

(23:29):
de coeurs, or physical separation, in which a couple were
still technically married but lived legally separated lives. But this
was not common at all, and a lot of people
were still pushing for some kind of reconciliation between Hortense
and Ormond. Hortense proposed that she be allowed to live
in a convent with servants that she chose and the

(23:50):
freedom to come and go, based on what had happened
with Maurice Donis de crocell. The abbesses at the convents
proposed as options were pretty wary of this whole idea.
He did not want any more ink in the holy water. Finally,
still without the settlement that she wanted, Hortons left Paris again.

(24:10):
She returned to her sister in Rome in May of
sixteen seventy one, and then about a year later, both
of them fled. We're going to talk more about that
after we paused for a sponsor break. Marie Mancini's relationship

(24:33):
with her husband Lorenzo had clearly been deteriorating for a
long time before she fled from Rome with her sister
Hortons on May twenty ninth of sixteen seventy two. She
was afraid of her husband, and she admired her sister's
will to have left her own husband Armand. But if
there was like some specific last straw that prompted Marie

(24:57):
to decide to leave, like noted anywhere mystery, it may
have just come to that point. The Mansini sisters wanted
to travel unobtrusively, so they didn't take much with them,
apart from some money and jewelry and a letter of
safe passage from King Louis the fourteenth. The sisters and
two maids all warman's clothing under their dresses, and they

(25:19):
took a valet with them as well. They took steps
to try to throw people off the trail, like getting
a carriage and loudly talking about where they were going
when really they were headed to a boat to make
their escape by water. Meanwhile, Lorenzo kept sending people to
find them and trying to put barriers in the way
of their escape, like spreading the word that people should

(25:42):
not give the sisters any kind of shelter or allow
them to pass through areas where he thought they were headed.
He also petitioned King Louis the fourteenth to intervene. Both
Lorenzo and Armand worried about how their wives' behavior would
reflect on them, and there were broader concerns about how
the sisters might inspire other women in unhappy or abusive

(26:05):
marriages to also leave have feelings. As the Vansini sisters
headed for France, this was once again an international incident.
Marie really thought that if she could go speak to
King Louis the fourteenth in person, that he might support
her petition to leave her husband, but she couldn't get
permission to actually go. Once they were traveling over land again,

(26:28):
the two women traveled by post with the hope that
they would be harder to track, but the king sent
messengers to the post stations, telling them to refuse to
give the sisters horses. That was something that the sisters
overcame with bribes. After some close calls, Hortense and Marie
decided to split up, with Marie traveling through France and

(26:49):
Horton's going to Chambray, which today is part of France
but at the time was part of the independent Duchy
of Savoy. There she found a patron with Charles Emmanuel,
the second Duke of Savoy, who had actually been one
of the men whose offer of marriage Hortense's uncle had

(27:09):
not accepted many years before. This Duke seems to have
thought that Hortense would liven up his court, which she
eventually did, but first she spent a stretch of time
mostly in prayer and reflection and writing a whole lot
of letters. King Louis the fourteenth had offered her some
financial support, and so she wrote a lot of letters

(27:30):
to the king to try to maintain his good will
even though she had done something as scandalous as leaving
her husband. She also wrote letters to her sister's husband
to try to convince him that Marie's leaving had been
her own decision, not something that Hortense had forced her
or caused her to do. Towards the end of Hortense's

(27:52):
time in Savoy, when she was twenty nine, she wrote
her memoirs. These were published in sixteen seventy five under
the title Memoir dm LDM or Memoir de Madame de
ces de Mazarin. There was already so much rumor and
gossip about her life and her relationship with her husband
that she just decided to put her own side of

(28:12):
the story out there publicly and in print. This made
her one of the first women in Europe to publish
her own story under her own name. And for a
general audience rather than just for her family and friends. Meanwhile,
Marie was trying to evade various messengers that she knew
were carrying orders for her to stop where she was,

(28:34):
just basically like, if they don't find me, I don't
have to stop. One of them did finally catch up
to her, though, and then she was presented with a
series of proposals that would involve her returning to her husband.
She rejected all of those and said that she wanted
to enter a convent of her choice, something that she
pointed out that thousands of other women had done after

(28:57):
being widowed or otherwise separated from their husbands. Once she
had made her whole position on this clear, she apparently
picked up a guitar and started playing it as though
she had just said all she had to say about
that and moved on. One of the accounts that I
read said that she had kept this guitar with her
the entire time since leaving Rome, But it also said
that they left without a lot of luggage, so I'm

(29:21):
not sure where the guitar came from, but I love
that story. I liked the idea of the guitar being
her version of la la, la la, I'm not listening
to you. Eventually, Marie was allowed to go to a
convent in Lease, about forty miles outside of Paris, which
is one of the convents Hortense had stayed in previously.

(29:42):
At first, Marie had regular visits from her sisters Olimp
and Marianne, and her husband sent some of her servants
with some of her belongings that she had requested, but
Lorenzo had sent one of those servants to act as
a spy, and soon Marie was being allowed visits only
from her sisters. Marie later moved to another convent that

(30:03):
was farther from Paris, but she was even less happy there.
It wasn't as comfortable, and she said that the air
was bad and made her sick. At one point, Marie
arranged a visit to her sister Hortense, but Hortense seems
to have intentionally avoided Marie by going on a trip
to the country instead. I don't think this was just
a case of bad timing. I think it was on purpose.

(30:26):
Hortense may have been worried that if she really welcomed
her sister, she would run afoul of some of the
good graces that at that point were keeping her relatively safe.
But when Marie later wrote to Hortense asking for her protection,
Hortense and the Duke of Savoy arranged for Marie to
enter a convent in Turin. Marie was just really hoping

(30:49):
to find a place where she would have a little
more comfort and autonomy. But after a really perilous journey
through territory that was caught up in the Franco Dutch
War in the winter, she wound up at a convent
where she had even less freedom than she'd had before.
After Hortense's memoirs were published, Marie got a copy. The

(31:10):
memoirs had been so popular that other people started writing
and publishing fake versions of their own. Some of these
were wildly inaccurate about both sisters, including totally distorted versions
of Marie's experiences. So she followed in her sister's footsteps
and she published her own memoir, The Truth in its

(31:30):
Own Light or the Genuine Memoirs of m Mancini Constables Colonna.
Around this time, Hortense was working on plans to leave Savoy.
She and her staff just kind of weren't getting along
with people anymore. As she was trying to make those arrangements.
Though the Duke died suddenly on June twelfth, sixteen seventy five,

(31:52):
at the age of only forty. The Duke's son, Victor
Amadeus the Second was only nine. Biddo was acting as regent,
but she had really never been a fan of Hortense.
She told Hortense that she was no longer welcome at
the late Duke's court. The Duke's death was also a
blow to Marie because even though she had not been

(32:13):
living in Savoy, I'm not sure if these two ever
even actually met, she had written him really often and
counted him as one of her allies. After the Duke's death,
Hortense started making her way to England, where she had
a cousin, and she got a letter from Ralph Montague
passing on an invitation from Charles the Second. The Franco
Dutch War was still ongoing, so Hortense's journey was perilous.

(32:38):
She arrived on New Year's Eve sixteen seventy five. Charles
the Second, of course, was nicknamed the Mary Monarch. He
was famous for having a whole lot of affairs, and
as we said earlier, he was one of the people
who had offered to marry Hortense Mancini decades before. She
also had a reputation for being very charming and witty

(32:59):
in a train and popular with men. So there were
fears at court that the King might be a little
bit overly interested in her, and that she might kind
of throw off the balance of his other relationships and
this house of affairs cards would turn into chaos. These

(33:20):
fears were founded. Soon the King and Hortense were having
an affair, and he had granted her a pension. In
sixteen seventy six, Hortense Mancini started hosting salons in England,
ones that were open to women and gave them opportunities
to learn and experience art and culture, free from many
of the cultural restraints that were normally placed on them.

(33:43):
Her friend Charles des Saint Evermont acted as co host,
and sometimes the two of them are credited with popularizing
champagne in England. Charles imported it from France and they
served it at the salon. Hortense also had a lot
of pets, including dogs and cats, parrots and other exotic birds,
and she had gambling tables, which led some people to

(34:05):
write off her salon as a gambling den. Hortense Mancini
had affairs threw out her life away from her husband,
and one of the most notorious was while she was
in England. It was with Anne, Countess of Sussex, who
was one of the King's illegitimate daughters. Although she was
only fourteen and was already married to a man named

(34:25):
Thomas Lennard, who was one of the gentlemen of the
King's bedchamber. Neither Hortense nor Anne seemed upset by rumors
that they were lovers, and they really did not try
to contradict them. One of the people who commented on
this was Lady Chowers, who wrote this in a letter
to her brother, Lord Ruth on December twenty fifth, sixteen

(34:46):
seventy six, quote, Lady Sussex is not yet gone, but
my lord is better and holds his resolution of going
as soon as the weather breaks up to make good travailing.
She and Madame Massarin have privately learned to fence, and
went down into Saint James Park the other day with
drawn swords under their nightgowns, which they drew out and
made several fine passes with to the admiration of several men.

(35:10):
That was onlookers in the park. In another letter, she wrote, quote,
Lady Sussex is mightily pleased with fox hunting and hair hunting,
but kisses Madame Mazarine's picture with much affection. Still, this
might have been after Anne's husband demanded that she come
back from Hortons's lodgings, and she was forcibly removed from there.

(35:32):
Hortense had various other affairs, including a possible one with
past podcast subject Afra Ben. Her relationship with the Count
of Monaco eventually became public and close enough that King
Charles called off his affair with her, but he wasn't
so upset about it that he made her go back
to France instead. Hortense kept up an active social life
in her house in Saint James's Park, including being reunited

(35:56):
with Maurice Donis de Carcel when she came to visit Lundon.
While Horten's was having what sounds like a pretty fabulous
time in London. Marie made her way to Madrid and
she moved into another convent. While there, she was reunited
with her sons, who by now were teenagers. Her husband,
Lorenzo kept trying to restrict her movements. He seems to

(36:19):
have kind of allowed her to go to Madrid, thinking
that family members he had there would help keep her
in line. But officials in Madrid seemed less inclined to
do what Lorenzo wanted them to do. The Archbishop of
Caesara wrote him a letter that said, in part quote, here,
we do not treat our wives as you do in Italy.

(36:41):
Your wish to put her in a prison is not
enough to see it done. But Lorenzo would not give
up in his efforts to get her to return to
their marriage, or, if not that, at least to be
able to control her comings and goings. Eventually, he ordered
her imprisonment in a medieval fortress in Seville known as
the Alcazar, something even her detractors thought was too extreme

(37:04):
because this was a cold, drafty place and this was
happening in the middle of winter. In sixteen eighty one,
Lorenzo proposed that Marie enter the convent as a novice,
meaning that she would be on her way to taking
steps to becoming a nun, rather than just being sheltered
in the convents. He said that he would be taking

(37:26):
holy orders as well. Marie agreed to this although Lorenzo
did not hold up his end of the bargain to
take holy orders of his own. Meanwhile, back in England,
Hortense had fallen under suspicion in the wake of the
Popish plot. This was not a real plot. It was
based on fabricated allegations by Anglican clergyman Titus Oates that

(37:49):
Jesuits were planning to assassinate Charles the second. Even though
this was not true, a lot of people believed it,
and since Hortense was Catholic and a foreigner, people began
to dis trust her. Then, in sixteen eighty four, her
nephew Philippe, who was her sister Olimp's son, challenged one
of Hortense's admirers to a duel and killed him in France.

(38:12):
This was a huge scandal and people blamed Hortense for
not being a better influence on him. Then, in February
of sixteen eighty five, King Charles the Second died. His successor,
James the Second and seventh, continued to support Hortense financially,
but he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of sixteen
eighty eight. A year later, on April fifteenth, sixteen eighty nine,

(38:36):
Marie's husband, Lorenzo and Offrio Colonna, died, and as a widow,
Marie finally had some of the freedom that she had
been trying to get for herself for most of her life.
She reconnected with her sons and she traveled. She also
reconnected with her old friend Ortensia Stella, who had been
one of her ladies in waiting and who also was

(38:59):
one of the women that Lorenzo had had an affair with.
Lorenzo and Ortensi Estella had two children that Lorenzo had
formally recognized, and these two women each worked to help
the other one out with various issues that were related
to Lorenzo's estate. Well, we kind of both got in
this mess. Possibly inspired by Lorenzo's death, Armand sued Hortense

(39:25):
in sixteen eighty nine during a formal separation hearing. He
vilified her as a gambler in Libertine, and the legal
arguments surrounding the hearing were published afterward. The case was
decided in the Duke's favor, and Hortense was ordered to
return to France, first to a convent and then to
her husband, and she said she would rather die. It

(39:49):
was not possible for Armand to force Hortense to return,
though it might have been except that the Nine Years'
War had started the year before and England and France
were at war with one another. Hortense just defied this
order and stayed where she was, although she had to
move into smaller and smaller lodgings as her money dwindled.

(40:11):
By June of sixteen ninety nine, Hortense was described as
increasingly depressed, including drinking too much, not eating enough, and
deeply in debt. She died on July second, sixteen ninety nine.
John Evelyn wrote about it in his diary on the eleventh,
describing her as quote an extraordinary beauty and wit, but

(40:32):
dissolute and impatient of matrimonial restraint. After paying off her debts,
Armand had Hortense's body embalmed and returned to France. He
took it through what seems like an intentionally planned round
about and very long route, traveling through places that he

(40:52):
knew that she hated to get there. The drama uh
Marie Vancini's last year seemed to have been more comfortable
and happier than her sisters. She did not have much
of her own but her sons were generous with her.
She traveled when things like the nine Years wore weren't
making it too dangerous to do so. She died in
Pisa on May eighth, seventeen fifteen, and she was buried there.

(41:16):
She had asked to be buried wherever it was she
happened to be when she died. Her first love, Louis
the fourteenth, died a few months later. There are lots
of books about Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini, and others
of their sisters and the Affair of the Poisons that's
come up a couple times. One of the books that
spocused just on Hortons and Marie is The King's Mistresses,

(41:39):
The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna and her sister,
Horton's Duchess Mazarin, that came out in twenty twelve. There's
also a pretty new translation of their groundbreaking memoirs, which
came out in two thousand and eight from the University
of Chicago Press. Thanks so much for joining us on

(42:02):
this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. And
you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
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