Beauty is potent, but money is omnipotent.
—JOHN RAY, ENGLISH PROVERBS
ONE DAY IN THE LATE 1850S A GROUP OF FRENCH COURTIERS visited an old castle under restoration. Among the group was Napoleon III’s mistress, Marie-Anne de Ricci, Countess Walewska, an Italian charmer who had married the son of Maria Walewska, and Napoleon. The countess pointed to a lizard gargoyle and remarked, “It is very well executed, but such a water pipe must be very expensive.” The emperor’s minister of the household, Marshal Vaillant, replied angrily, “Less expensive than yours, Madame.” When another member of the party remonstrated with him for his rudeness, he continued, “This drainage has cost us four million francs!”1
The mistress, as opposed to the wife, could be dismissed at any moment with no financial settlement. Her powerful friends at court supported her only while she retained power, expecting favors in return. Exiled and reviled, the former royal mistress could find herself flying from the zenith of magnificence to the depths of poverty and disgrace at a moment’s notice.
The wise royal mistress, therefore, began to collect for her retirement as soon as she was appointed, ensuring a lavish lifestyle to cushion her inevitable fall. Cash was always handy, as well as jewels, gilded carriages, fine horses, and gold and silver plate—objects which could easily be converted into cash should the deposed mistress suddenly find herself sent packing into exile.
Royal mistresses also coveted titles—countess, marquise, and duchess—which gave them an official position at court on a par with other courtiers. The titles came with castles and rent-producing lands, which also provided cash if managed well. Additionally, most royal mistresses received annual pensions for their services. The problem with titles, lands, and pensions was that they could always be revoked if the political winds reversed direction. Cash and its equivalent were always preferable in times of emergency.
Ironically, this lining of the royal mistress’s pockets with taxpayer money so enraged the king’s family, court, and subjects that she had to line them even more quickly.
Athénaïs de Montespan loved profitably indeed. When she began her affair with Louis XIV, her best pair of diamond earrings was in hock. Within a short time, she built three navy vessels for the king at her own expense, and recruited the crews from her native region of Poitou.
English royal mistresses did not have it quite as easy as their fair French counterparts. While the Sun King’s word was law, his contemporary Charles II often found his gifts to royal mistresses blocked by court officials. Lord Chancellor Clarendon—who controlled much of Charles’s money—made known that he was “an implacable enemy to the power and interest she [Barbara, Lady Castlemaine] had with the King, and had used all the endeavors he could to destroy it.”2 He knew that Lady Castlemaine’s “principal business was to get an estate for her and her children,”3 and “to pay her debts, which she had in few years contracted to unimaginable greatness, and to defray her constant expenses, which were very excessive in coaches and horses, clothes and jewels.”4 The king’s requests for gifts to Lady Castlemaine never seemed to make it past Lord Clarendon’s desk, and the king had to find other paths by which to route his largesse.
Most royal mistresses were known for their greedy love of fine jewelry, and many flaunted finer gems than the queen. It was not only vanity which prompted the mistress to weigh down her neck and ears, wrists and fingers with diamonds, but the omnipresent fear of sudden disgrace. Indeed, jewelry was the commodity closest to cash. A king’s ransom could be stuffed into a small sack or sewn into hems and bodices if the mistress needed a hasty escape—as some did.
In 1662 when the Muscovite ambassador brought Charles II rich presents from the czar—furs and jewels amounting to £150,000—Lord Chancellor Clarendon begged the king not to give them away to “anyone.” By “anyone” the chancellor meant the grasping Lady Castlemaine. Charles promised. Stymied here, Lady Castlemaine then persuaded her royal lover to give her every Christmas present he had received from the peers—many were jewels intended for Charles to pass on to his queen. Soon Lady Castlemaine was loaded down with jewels “far out-shining the Queen,” according to diarist John Evelyn, who saw her at a palace celebration.5 Courtiers were not pleased to see their gifts to the king adorn his nasty mistress.
Lady Castlemaine had excellent credit with London jewelers, as they knew the king would pay her bills. There are some records of her purchases—a ring for £850 and two diamond rings for a total of £2,000.
In 1666—a year when sailors in the Royal Navy were given worthless vouchers instead of pay—the king cleared Lady Castlemaine’s debts to the amount of thirty thousand pounds, which included jewelry and gold and silver plate—and bought her more jewelry. Unsatisfied with such bounty, Lady Castlemaine helped herself to the king’s Jewel House in the Tower of London, signing documents agreeing to return the jewelry and plate that she had borrowed. But somehow she always managed to turn the loan into a gift.
England’s prince regent, who later became George IV, was so generous in dispensing valuable jewelry to his lady friends that he single-handedly made his jeweler a multimillionaire. Horribly in debt, chased by creditors, the heir to the throne made monthly visits to the London showroom of Rundell and Bridge. In October 1807 the prince spent nearly two thousand pounds (approximately two hundred thousand dollars in today’s money) on more than thirty pieces of jewelry inlaid with precious gems, including eight bracelets, four brooches, several silver serving dishes, and fine snuffboxes. It was his habit, when wooing a new mistress, to present her first with a miniature portrait of himself or a lock of his hair in a locket surrounded by diamonds. As the affair progressed he would lavish her with emerald rings, ruby necklaces, and a matched pair of sapphire bracelets.
It should come as no surprise that it was a mistress of George IV who amassed the greatest heap of gemstones during her tenure. Lady Conyngham was an unlikely royal mistress—fat and kind, rich and rapacious. In 1820, at the age of fifty, she found her way into the bed of the far heavier sixty-year-old king.
Lady Conyngham immediately reaped the rewards of her services in jewelry. The king gave her a large sapphire surrounded by diamonds which had belonged to the Stuart monarchs. When taking it from the Royal Treasury, the king had said the sapphire must go in his coronation crown. Instead, it appeared on Lady Conyngham’s ample waist. Upon King George’s death in 1830, Lady Conyngham—having been reminded by the government of Madame du Barry’s unfortunate death on the guillotine—very decently returned the sapphire and other royal gems to the keeper of the privy purse, saying she was not certain that the late king should have given them to her.
Lady Conyngham was always aglitter with gems at parties. One witness described her as being very dull and very brilliant at the same time. George’s bills at jewelers at this time included £3,150 for a necklace of remarkably large oriental pearls, £400 for a pair of diamond earrings, £437 for a pair of pearl bracelets, £530 for an emerald necklace, and £740 for another pearl necklace. Some estimated that the king had given his mistress £100,000 worth of jewelry, or $10 million in today’s money.
Louis XV’s Madame de Pompadour preferred collecting estates to jewelry. She had little taste for jewels, though her position required her to wear them daily. Her gems were of the finest quality. A portion of her collection consisted of a diamond necklace with 547 stones, a set of emerald jewelry, and forty-two priceless rings. But they meant little to her; she twice turned in her jewels to the treasury to help out in time of war.
Her successor, Madame du Barry, would never have been so generous. She positively adored her gems and launched new fashions in jewelry. Throughout the first seven decades of the eighteenth century, court women usually wore diamonds or pearls alone, or sometimes emeralds or rubies outlined by small rows of diamonds, but never two conflicting colors. When she became royal mistress in 1769, Madame du Barry encouraged jewelers to experiment with setting different-colored stones together—amethysts and sapphires, rubies and emeralds, aquamarines and garnets.
The infamous diamond necklace which would cause Queen Marie Antoinette such trouble a decade later was originally made for Madame du Barry. A veritable yoke of the largest and finest gems collected throughout Europe, the necklace consisted of a collar of huge stones from which hung intertwined ropes of diamonds. In a time of national financial disaster, this necklace outraged even the frivolous courtiers of Versailles. Despite the quality of its stones, many found the necklace to be incredibly ugly and compared it to an animal halter. Madame du Barry would have worn it with pride, however, if Louis had not died before purchasing it for her.
In 1847 Lola Montez had wrapped King Ludwig I of Bavaria so tightly around her little finger that the miserly monarch—who made his queen wear old dresses to the theater—showered her with jewels. One night at the opera haughty Lola appeared shining in thirteen thousand florins’ worth of glittering diamonds—including a tiara—far outstripping the queen, who sat glumly in her old-fashioned heirlooms and rusty dress.
Of all royal mistresses, Lola Montez was so hated that she truly needed plenty of jewels to make a quick escape. Ironically, Lola’s expulsion happened so quickly that she had no time to grab her jewel box. Threatened by an angry mob in front of her house, Lola was pushed by her friends against her will into a carriage, which raced out of town. Wearing a plain dress and no cloak on the cold February night, Lola went into exile.
Ludwig stopped the mob from ransacking her house and arranged for the sale of the building and her furniture, dresses, and jewels to pay her debts. The king sent Lola the little that remained, for her debts in Munich were significant. She should have grabbed the jewels and run.
One of the greatest benefits given a royal mistress—though only during her tenure—was luxurious apartments in all the royal palaces, usually attached to those of the king by a secret door or staircase. One’s rooms at court proclaimed one’s status. Hundreds of noble families vied for the limited space, eager for a single cramped, cheerless room under the eaves. While most courtiers had comfortable homes near the royal palaces, they coveted the honor of lodging under the king’s roof.
We can imagine the inexpressible joy of an obscure woman—who under ordinary circumstances would never have been given the coldest garret in the royal household—when she found herself the mistress of not only the king, but a huge suite of palace rooms. Often the mistress had more—and lovelier—rooms at court than the queen. For instance, in the 1670s Queen Marie-Thérèse was given only eleven rooms at Versailles, whereas Madame de Montespan occupied a suite of twenty.
Charles II’s mistress Louise de Kéroualle had a lavish suite with furnishings so ostentatious that the queen’s apartments looked poverty-stricken in comparison. The diarist John Evelyn visited the royal mistress as she sat in a rich dressing gown, having her hair combed. Looking around her apartment in amazement at “the riches and splendor of this world, purchased with vice and dishonor,” he saw “the new fabric of French tapestry, for design, tenderness of work and incomparable imitation of the best paintings, beyond anything I had ever beheld…. Japon cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, huge vases of wrought plate, tables, stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braziers, etc…. all of massive silver, and without number, besides of His Majesty’s best paintings.”6
As highly coveted as court apartments were, they were the first perquisite a disgraced royal mistress would lose. As she left her suite of finely furnished rooms with head hung low, her replacement would be tripping in eagerly with her luggage. So it made sense for the mistress to acquire property away from court.
Country estates were highly desirable, providing considerable income from tenants and the sale of crops and wine produced on them. In the 1440s Charles VII of France bestowed several castles and manor houses on Agnes Sorel, the first of which was the Château de Beauté—the Castle of Beauty—from which she acquired her nickname, the Lady of Beauty. Other properties were given to her on the births of her children.
Not content with vast suites of rooms in each of the three royal palaces, Athénaïs de Montespan wanted Louis XIV to build her a château of her own. He had already purchased her a fine house near the Louvre in Paris, but she wanted one in the country as well. When Louis had floor plans drawn up for a country house near his Palace of Saint-Germain, she rejected them out of hand as “good only for a chorus girl.”7 So Louis gave her the château of Clagny, which took ten years to build, with up to twelve hundred men working on it at a time, and which cost $11 million in today’s money.
In 1668 Charles II gave Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, the lovely Berkshire House. The gift had a dual purpose—to silence her clamoring for money for a while and to remove her termagant presence from Whitehall Palace. Soon the French ambassador reported, “She is busying herself getting her gift valued and having the house furnished.”8 Realizing the value of the land, Lady Castlemaine demolished the venerable mansion, then sold the timber and all the land except a small corner of the property, where she built a new brick house. She pocketed a great deal of cash in the transaction.
In the early 1700s Augustus, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, built a palace for his mistress Madame Cosel. Her two summer apartments were lined with cool marble; her two winter apartments were inlaid with fine wood and adorned with porcelain and brocade hangings. In addition, he filled the palace with silver plates, crystal tables, and beds of exquisitely embroidered brocade.
Over her nineteen-year tenure as Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour owned seventeen estates, in addition to numerous houses that she bought as investments. She devoted the equivalent of millions of dollars to improving and decorating these estates—mainly for the king’s convenience. Linens alone cost her a fortune—one item in the inventory of her estate listed 112 pairs of sheets, 160 tablecloths, 1,600 napkins, and 388 kitchen aprons. Firewood, candles, and food would have cost her additional large sums. But her estate expenses were not as frivolous as they might seem; the properties yielded rents from tenants and income from the sale of wine and crops. Many estates she sold at a profit.
But properties, unlike jewels, could not be hidden in a bodice and spirited away. In the late 1690s Peter the Great gave his mistress Anna Mons 295 farms and a mansion near Moscow. Anna was stripped of all these when Peter learned of her infidelity.
Even a tenure of twenty years could not protect Wilhelmine Rietz from losing her home. In 1775 Frederick the Great was worried about the expensive dissipations in Berlin of his nephew and heir, Prince Frederick William. Hoping to save money in the long run, the king gave his nephew twenty thousand thalers to buy a country estate outside Berlin for himself and his mistress. But in 1797, after King Frederick William’s death, Wilhelmine was kicked off the estate by the new king, who grabbed it for himself.
One of the greatest privileges for a royal mistress was to be raised into the rarefied air of the nobility, to be created a countess, marquise, or duchess with a stroke of the royal pen.
There were various reasons for a king to upgrade the status of his mistress. In 1450 Charles VII made Agnes Sorel a duchess, but only after her death so she could receive a splendid ducal burial.
A few kings ennobled their mistresses as a preparation for marriage. A king marrying a commoner or a member of the minor nobility would be frowned upon, but marrying a woman of great rank would be more acceptable. Preparing to marry Anne Boleyn, in 1532 Henry VIII created her the marchioness of Pembroke, an English peer in her own right and an unprecedented honor for a woman. The title carried with it large revenues and great privileges. Similarly, Henri IV made his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées the marquise de Monceaux in 1594 and the duchesse de Beaufort in 1597, gifts strewn on her way to the altar.
Sometimes the ennoblement occurred as a kind of consolation prize when the king decided to replace his mistress with a new face. In 1853 Emperor Napoleon III created his long-suffering mistress Harriet Howard the countess of Beaurégard when he became engaged to the beautiful Spaniard, Eugénie de Montijo. Harriet, who had been angling for the honor of becoming empress of France, suddenly found herself dismissed and exiled. “His Majesty was here last night, offering to pay me off,” Harriet wrote sadly to a friend. “Yes, an earldom in my own right, a castle and a decent French husband into the bargain…. The Lord Almighty spent two hours arguing with me…. Later he fell asleep on the crimson sofa and snored while I wept.”9
In 1670 Charles II, growing tired of Lady Castlemaine, created her the duchess of Cleveland, an honor which brought with it extensive lands and revenues. The elevated status assuaged the king’s conscience as he ardently pursued his next mistress, French-born Louise de Kéroualle.
At about the same time, on the other side of the Channel, Charles’s cousin Louis XIV was faced with a similar problem. He created Louise de La Vallière, his mistress of seven years, a duchess, ostensibly as a reward for the birth of her fourth royal bastard. But in reality the king was beginning to tire of her and salivate over her prettier friend, Madame de Montespan. As a duchess, Louise would now be able to wear a train three yards long and sit on a taboret in the presence of the queen.
The much-coveted taboret was a wooden folding stool used by duchesses in France—which boasted the most etiquette-bound court in Europe—upon which the lucky few could sit in the presence of the royal family. The stool consisted of a few pieces of curved wood which served as legs, and a piece of tapestry at the top, which served as the seat, edged with tassels. It was carried pompously about by a bewigged and liveried servant, who snapped it open with a flourish and set it down when the duchess was ready to be seated.
For so small a thing, the taboret was one of the premier honors at the French court. When the Polish nobleman John Sobieski—who would become king of Poland in 1674—married Marie d’Arquien and lived at Versailles, his wife never ceased needling him to use his influence with Louis XIV to make her a duchess, which would automatically give her a taboret. Sobieski called it “this miserable stool.”10 In 1650 Louis XIV’s mother Anne the Regent granted taborets to two nonduchesses, raising such a storm of protest that she shamefacedly had to revoke them.
Upon receiving her taboret, however, Louise de La Vallière was not impressed. She said it seemed to her a kind of retirement present given to a servant.
Often mistresses were raised in rank because their status reflected the glory of their royal lovers. Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, created his new mistress Madame Lubomirski the princess of Teschen shortly after he was elected king of Poland in 1704, giving her the certificate of her new status along with a box bursting with jewels of every kind. But soon thereafter Augustus fell in love with a Madame Hoym, who requested a signal honor—she wanted to be made a countess of the Holy Roman Empire. Augustus, who was not the Holy Roman Emperor, had to call in some chips with the emperor and obtained the title of Countess Cosel for his mistress.
In 1745, Louis XV created Jeanne-Antoinette d’Etioles the marquise de Pompadour, giving her the title, estate, and coat of arms of a defunct noble family which had reverted to the crown, along with all the estate’s revenues. In 1752 he raised her to the rank of duchess. This new position gave her not only the taboret but in some obfuscation of royal etiquette allowed her to sit on an armchair like a princess with the royal family during public dinners. Her coach, bearing ducal arms, was now permitted to enter the innermost courtyards of the various royal palaces. Lesser mortals were required to get out of their coaches at the outer courtyards, hold up their skirts, and walk around piles of horse manure. But Madame de Pompadour, while enjoying the privileges of her new title, never used it, still proclaiming herself the marquise de Pompadour, out of respect for the queen.
Sometimes kings favored their foreign-born mistresses with titles to help them better fit into their adopted country. George I turned his stiffly Teutonic mistress Ermengarda Melusina von Schulenberg into the smoothly English duchess of Suffolk. Similarly, George II’s Hanoverian mistress Amelia von Walmoden became the countess of Yarmouth. Charles II honored French-born Louise de Kéroualle by presenting her with a bouquet of fragrant English titles—Baroness Petersfield, countess of Farnham, and duchess of Portsmouth.
Perhaps Lola Montez cast her glance backward into history and decided that as a royal mistress she, too, should be ennobled. If so, she did not recognize that she lived in a different time, a time when the king’s word was not law. The timid mewling of most seventeenth-and eighteenth-century political opposition had swelled into a roar with the French Revolution and would never again be muted. Nevertheless, Lola demanded that Ludwig give her the title of a Bavarian countess, something which she hoped would provide her with an air of respectability, or at least officially elevate her position above that of her angry detractors.
Ludwig succeeded only with great difficulty in pushing Lola’s Bavarian citizenship and ennoblement as countess of Landsfeld through his ministry. His entire council resigned in protest. But Lola was now permitted to drive a carriage with the nine-pointed crown of a Bavarian countess, and she gave herself more imperious airs than ever. To her chagrin, the new countess was still not received by Bavarian high society, as Queen Therese made known that she would not receive anyone who received Lola.
For two years after her exile from Bavaria Lola traveled about Europe, where her title was ridiculed by true blue bloods. Curiously, her title did her more good in the United States, where she lived in the 1850s. Unlike the ossified European nobility, Americans were thrilled to meet a real Bavarian countess and didn’t care how she had come by the title.
In past centuries gambling debts routinely made up a significant part of the cost of living. Those in the upper echelons of society were expected to play cards and dice and wager large sums on the outcome. Those who refused were considered boring or, even worse, poor. Needless to say, many of the players suffered extraordinary losses, which as a matter of honor had to be paid promptly. One of the most satisfying perquisites of a royal mistress was the certainty that the king would pay her gambling debts.
Throughout her decade-long reign at court—and a decade beyond that—Charles II would pay what in today’s money would be millions of dollars in gambling debts for Lady Castlemaine. She would lose—and sometimes win—startling amounts, wagering princely sums without blinking an eye. In 1679, Lady Castlemaine returned to England from a long stay in France. One courtier reported that upon hearing this, “His Majesty gave the Commissioners of the Treasury fair warning to look to themselves, for that she would have a bout with them for money, having lately lost 20,000 pounds in money and jewels in one night at play.”11
Lady Castlemaine’s contemporary and French counterpart Athénaïs de Montespan was also an avid card player and gambled heavily, sometimes hazarding several hundred thousand pounds on the play of a single card. She won often, and when she didn’t, Louis XIV routinely paid off her debts. One Christmas Day she lost the staggering sum of £230,000, kept playing, and won back £500,000 on one play involving three cards.
Since the beginning of her relationship with Emperor Franz Josef in 1886, Katharina Schratt benefited by having her gambling debts paid. She routinely lost frightful sums at the casino in Monte Carlo and seems to have suffered an addiction to gambling. In 1890 she lost all her travel money and had to borrow her train fare back to Vienna. This happened again in 1906, when she lost no less than two hundred thousand francs and found herself stranded on the Riviera with a nasty red rash all over her body. She immediately contacted the emperor, who was so angry he let her stew awhile before responding. He finally sent her the money and a letter brimming with reproaches.
The imperial mistress replied, “A thousand thanks for your dear kind letter. The doctor, who at first thought I had chicken-pox, is now of the opinion that Monte Carlo is responsible for my rash. My heavy losses appear to have upset my stomach, then my nerves and finally affected my skin. If only your Majesty had inherited the gambling instincts of some of your ancestors, then you would be able to sympathize and understand, and I would not have to go through the world disfigured and misunderstood.”12
The emperor, so thrifty that he wrote urgent telegrams on old scraps of paper, wrote back, “I am glad you are happy again and so hope that by now you are fully recovered. Medical science has obviously made a new discovery through your illness, for I have never before heard of a rash brought on by bad luck at gambling.”13
Royal mistresses were usually given monthly allowances—often startling sums—which rapidly vanished, often leaving the mistress in debt at the end of the month. What happened to the royal largesse? Quite simply, the mistress had to keep up appearances—royal appearances. She was required to be a glorious accessory to the glory of the king. Not all her gowns and jewels arrived in gift boxes from her royal lover; the mistress had to keep herself fashionable with part of her allowance. There was an unspoken rule that the royal mistress’s wardrobe had to outshine that of all the other ladies at court—including the queen.
Even Lillie Langtry, who did not receive a regular allowance from Edward VII, was expected to appear in an astonishing array of new gowns. In her later years, Lillie reported that she had had only one quarrel with Edward during her three-year tenure as his mistress. “I wore a dress of white and silver at two balls in succession,” she reminisced. “I did not know that he was going to be present at both balls, but he was. He came up to me on the second night and exclaimed, ‘That damned dress again!’ He walked away in a temper…. It took me a long time to make it up…. That was the only quarrel we ever had.”14
Lillie, who had come to London with just one plain black dress, patronized the fashion houses of Worth and Doucet. Her evening gowns were embroidered with pearls, her tea gowns bordered with silver fox, her dressing gowns lined with ermine. For a ball at Marlborough House, Lillie appeared in a confection of yellow tulle over which a gold net held preserved butterflies of various sizes and colors.
In the 1890s Edward’s second official mistress, Daisy Warwick, never paid less than five thousand dollars in today’s money for a gown, often far more. Society columns gushed about the “violet velvet with two splendid turquoise-and-diamond brooches in her bodice” she wore to a ball; the “gauzy white gown beneath which meandered delicately shaded ribbons” she wore to a dinner party; the “splendid purple-grape-trimmed robes and veil of pearls on white” she wore to a drawing room.15
More expensive—and certainly less rewarding than the mistress’s own bodily glorification—was the management of a large household of retainers and servants. In the 1590s Gabrielle d’Estrées managed a household consisting of eighty-three ladies and gentlemen, seventeen crown officials, and more than two hundred servants. This large tribe of hangers-on needed to be fed, housed, paid a salary, and in some cases clothed.
A portion of the mistress’s cash went to maintain the ultimate status symbol of centuries past: a magnificent coach. The mistress needed to keep her coach in good order—fresh paint and gilding on the outside, plush upholstery and plump pillows on the inside. The carriage was pulled by horses which she needed to feed and stable. In addition, she had to pay the staff that looked after them. Madame de Montespan, the proud owner of a luxurious carriage drawn by six horses, was flabbergasted to see her younger rival, the teenage Mademoiselle de Fontanges, drive by in a grander carriage pulled by eight horses.
The mistress arranged entertainments for the king, often lavish ones, where she paid not only for food, cooks, and waiters but for actors, singers, musicians, theatrical sets, costumes, and fireworks. In 1671, for instance, as a token of her gratitude for being created a duchess, Louise de Kéroualle gave a dinner for the entire English court.
A portion of the royal mistress’s pension went to purchase expensive gifts for courtiers, ambassadors, and servants, as well as for the king himself. She was expected to contribute to charities—the church poor box, indigent families, wounded soldiers, hospitals, orphanages, and the like. In time of war she might receive hints to donate money back into the royal treasury from whence it had come.
We can understand the financial side of a mistress’s life by examining the meticulous records kept by Madame de Pompadour of her expenses from September 9, 1745, when she was officially installed as king’s mistress at Versailles, until her death in April 1764. During those nineteen years, she was given the astonishing amount of 36,827,268 livres, or what today might be valued at $200 million.
But though free-spending, Madame de Pompadour usually spent wisely, buying and renovating estates, which she could rent and sell, and amassing collections of gems and porcelain, which increased in value and were eventually bequeathed to the king. She even invested in what amounted to pirate ships, fitted out to prey on English merchants, and shared in the pirates’ treasure. She was a leading force in the revival of French industry, founding the world-renowned Sèvres porcelain factory—still in existence today—and a successful glassworks that produced bottles, carafes, and enameled pieces.
However acquisitive Madame de Pompadour was—she loved buying and beautifying—she always retained a generous heart, contributing dowries to poor brides, even selling diamonds to endow a hospital for the poor. During her disastrous running of the Seven Years’ War, she turned in to the treasury most of her jewelry to help pay the soldiers. Because of her generosity and her surprising promptness in paying her contractors’ bills—a quality almost unknown in eighteenth-century France—Madame de Pompadour never amassed great quantities of cash. The returns from her many investments went out just as quickly. When she died only a few gold coins were found in her desk.
Her successor, Madame du Barry, was forever in debt despite her huge monthly income from the king—at one point three hundred thousand livres. In addition to exquisite gowns and jewels, she surrounded herself with luxurious furnishings—a chandelier of rock crystal, a mirror made of pure gold, perfume bottles of crystal with solid gold stoppers. She employed sixteen footmen and at least as many maids, whom she had to dress, feed, and house, and paid for the stabling and feeding of her numerous horses.
Charles II—who never concerned himself with paying the salaries of his soldiers and sailors—was constantly thinking about providing his mistresses with financial assistance. By 1674 Lady Castlemaine was receiving annually £15,000 directly from the king, £10,000 from customs taxes, £10,000 from the beer and ale tax, £4,700 from the post office, and £3,500 from wine licenses. Louise de Kéroualle received £18,600 from Charles and, ironically, an annual pension from the taxes paid by the clergy. Gradually her pension increased to about £40,000, though in one year—1681—she received an eye-popping £136,000. Nell Gwynn, always coming in last, received a mere £4,000 for herself and her two sons.
While new monarchs often cut off pensions given to the mistresses of former kings, Lady Castlemaine miraculously retained hers. Many of her pensions continued after Charles’s death in 1685, after his brother James II’s exile in 1688, throughout the reign of William and Mary, and well into that of Queen Anne. While Lady Castlemaine periodically had to badger monarchs and their officials to send her the money, she retained her pensions until her death in 1709. Her success was no doubt due to the effective combination of her relentless will and the fact that she had married her royal bastards into the best families in England, who supported her quest to retain her pensions.
By the late nineteenth century, a monarch was in no position to give large amounts of cash to his mistress either from public funds or from his personal allowance. Parliament looked carefully into a monarch’s spending; tabloid newspapers gleefully printed scandalous rumors, and the king’s subjects frowned when reading them. But Emperor Franz Josef and his contemporary Edward VII found a way to help their mistresses financially that would avoid public scrutiny. Both men appointed clever financial advisers to quickly turn the women’s meager savings into huge fortunes. Both also found lucrative employment for their mistresses’ husbands, serving the dual purpose of earning even more money and getting them out of the house when the royal lovers came calling.
In addition to benefits bestowed by the king, royal mistresses were often the recipients of legitimate gifts from ambassadors, public officials, and courtiers, and some not so legitimate gifts in the form of bribes to procure influence. Behavior that was acceptable before the French Revolution—the giving of valuables to influential people—was seen as corruption by the following generation.
One African ambassador, having heard about Louis XIV’s Madame de Montespan, considered her the second queen of France. In presenting himself to Louis, he brought forth extraordinary gifts for the king, the queen, and the royal mistress. Not wanting to commit a faux pas, this honorable gentleman, who had three wives of his own, gave pearls and sapphires to “the King’s second wife,” which delighted Madame de Montespan but must have infuriated the queen.16
Gabrielle d’Estrées received gifts on a regular basis from foreign monarchs and the French nobility. She kept a detailed record of gifts she received when making an official visit with Henri IV to the city of Rouen. Queen Elizabeth I of England sent Gabrielle a large diamond-and-sapphire broach mounted in gold; Archduke Ferdinando de Medici of Tuscany gave her a set of twenty-four goblets of chased silver; a French politician presented an emerald pin; a noblewoman handed her a jar of fine perfumed oil; and a courtier bestowed on her two stags he had just killed.
In 1669, Barbara, Lady Castlemaine’s rapacious appetite for gifts and bribes ate up the French ambassador’s budget. “I have given away everything I brought from France,” he lamented, “not excepting my wife’s skirts…. As for Lady Castlemaine, if we lavish handsome gifts on her King Charles will understand that we believe she rules him in spite of his denials. We ought to dispense no more than ribbons, dressing gowns and other little fineries.”17
But Louis XIV had a difficult task in mind for Lady Castlemaine, one that required an ampler reward than mere ribbons. First, Lady Castlemaine was to convince Charles II that he should not extend a general religious indulgence. Second, she should persuade him against reconvening Parliament.
The French foreign minister replied to the ambassador, “The King highly appreciates the confidence you have cultivated with Lady Castlemaine…and since…you believe she can put more pressure on King Charles…than any other person, His Majesty wishes you to cultivate this good beginning with her…. In this regard he has ordered your brother to send you a gift of jewels from France which you may present to her in your own name—and jewels always go down well with ladies, whatever their mood.”18
The gift of jewels was valued at a thousand pounds. Delighted, Lady Castlemaine showed it to King Charles, who—not seeming to mind his mistress’s being bribed to influence him—agreed it was in excellent taste. The French-English alliance took two years to craft, but Barbara abandoned the cause early in the game. She kept the diamonds, however.
The French king had more luck with Lady Castlemaine’s replacement, Louise de Kéroualle, who, fortunately for Louis, happened to be French. She rendered her native land such indispensable services in influencing Charles II’s pro-French position that in 1675 Louis gave her a pair of earrings worth the astonishing sum of eighteen thousand pounds, his most expensive gift to England that year, and certainly more lavish than anything he had ever given Charles’s queen.
In addition to official gifts there were those that smelled faintly of contamination, and others that positively reeked. George I’s mistress Ermengarda Melusina, countess of Schulenberg, was delighted at her lover’s promotion from a mere elector of Hanover to king of Great Britain, because of the financial rewards she would reap. The new king gave her an annual pension of seventy-five hundred pounds a year and suggested she acquire funds on her own if this income did not suffice. The countess gratefully accepted bribes as large as ten thousand pounds each from courtiers who felt she would influence the king on their behalf. George was aware of her earnings on the side and, with traditional German thriftiness, approved of her tidy income, which did not diminish the royal coffers.
George II probably learned from his father how to keep his mistresses wealthy without draining the treasury. When Lady Yarmouth asked him for thirty thousand pounds, he tactfully suggested that he sell two peerages with the funds made payable to her. Lady Yarmouth happily pocketed the money, and George was thrilled that it hadn’t cost him a cent.
In the 1660s and 1670s, Lady Castlemaine routinely sold political offices, raking in some fifteen thousand pounds a year. Her successor, Louise de Kéroualle, did a brisk business selling royal pardons to wealthy criminals. But times had changed by 1809, when George III’s son the duke of York was investigated by Parliament because his mistress, Mary Anne Clark, had been selling military commissions.
Upon making Mary Anne his mistress, the duke had promised her an annual income of twelve thousand pounds. The giddy woman immediately rented a huge house; hired numerous servants; bought horses, carriages, gowns, and jewels; and entertained extravagantly—all on credit. When the duke—kept on a tight allowance by his thrifty parents—could not keep his promise and creditors pressed, Mary Anne went into business for herself, selling promotions to ambitious officers.
Eight charges were brought against the duke but none stuck. Although he had clearly profited from the transactions, it could not be proven that he had actually known about them. Though known to be thoroughly guilty, Mary Anne was not charged and became something of a folk heroine, cheered by people in the street. It was a short-lived victory. The duke of York broke with her, hid himself for shame, and resigned his post as commander in chief, losing the annual income of six thousand pounds, which he so sorely needed. And Mary Anne Clark sank back into the streets from which she had risen.
Not all mistresses reaped piles of gold and diamonds from their royal lovers. Some actually lost money. Others could make ends meet only with the utmost frugality. When George, elector of Hanover, became king of Great Britain in 1714, he jumped on a boat to claim his rich inheritance. His mistress Sophia Charlotte Kielmansegge, however, was detained in Hanover by her creditors. When the new king of Great Britain refused to help her out with her debts, she escaped by donning a disguise and followed him to his new land.
Frederick the Great of Prussia kept his nephew and heir, Prince Frederick William, on a tight financial leash. The prince lived in a charming estate outside Berlin with his mistress Wilhelmine Rietz, their children, and his children by several other mistresses. Wilhelmine had to stretch her small pension to keep up appearances. She carefully selected furniture that was elegant but affordable. Once, to provide the prince with an excellent meal, she pawned her silver. Wilhelmine was rewarded for her patience when her lover became King Frederick William II in 1786. She was given a beautiful palace in Berlin, a generous pension, and eye-popping jewels, and was later made a countess.
Of all royal mistresses, the one who fared worst financially was without doubt the English comic actress Dorothy Jordan. When speaking of her former royal lover, the future William IV, she once said, “Had he left me to starve, I would never have uttered a word to his disadvantage!”19 Her statement would prove to be deadly accurate. He did leave her to starve, and she was too fiercely loyal to utter a word to his disadvantage.
Sprightly Dorothy Jordan, a comic genius, was already the mother of four children from two different men when William, duke of Clarence, saw her on the Drury Lane stage and wanted her for himself. One contemporary described her as follows: “Her face, if not exactly beautiful, was irresistibly agreeable; her person and gait were eminently elastic; her voice in singing perfectly sweet and melodious, and in speaking clear and impressive.”20
In 1791 Dorothy yielded to William’s ardent suit for—it was reported in the papers—the princely sum of three thousand pounds before consummation and one thousand pounds a year. Together with her theatrical earnings, this would have made Dorothy a wealthy woman. But kindhearted Dorothy and her money soon parted ways.
Before long, papers reported that the duke, suffered to live on the pauper’s allowance meted out to him by his parsimonious father King George III, not only was withholding Dorothy’s allowance, but arranged profitable terms for her performances and actually showed up at the theater to collect her earnings himself. One wit quipped:
As Jordan’s high and mighty squire,
Her play-house profit deigns to skim,
Some folks audaciously inquire
If he keeps her or she keeps him.21
Over a period of twenty years, Dorothy bore William ten children. To generate the greatest possible revenues, she performed all over England, often bumping about for days in a carriage on muddy roads. But however generous her acting income, it was immediately siphoned off for the care of her fourteen children—education for the boys, dowries for the girls, and gambling debts for sons and sons-in-law. In 1797 the duke and Dorothy moved into the elegant Bushy House. This venerable mansion was not a gift from William to his mistress, but a gift from the mistress to her prince. In one letter complaining about the pace of her acting engagements, Dorothy wrote, “I have been playing [acting], and fagging myself to death, but it has enabled me to pay a good part of the purchase money of my house.”22
In 1810, as William ran headlong into debt, Dorothy felt him slipping away from her and worked harder than ever for the cash she hoped would bind him to her; but as she jolted across England for performances, the duke began courting an heiress of twenty-two. When the heiress rejected him, William coldly informed Dorothy that they must part, as he considered his relationship with her a primary obstacle to a successful matrimonial suit.
By 1815, in poor health and besieged by her own creditors and those of impecunious family members, Dorothy escaped to France rather than face debtors’ prison. The duke, her lover of twenty years and father of ten of her children, refused to lift a finger. She was not even allowed to write to him.
In France, worn down by disappointment and worry, Dorothy’s health took a turn for the worse. She awaited eagerly each day’s mail, hoping against hope for news that she could return home to England. Her neighbors in France, including many British expatriates, admired Dorothy’s loyalty and fortitude. They never heard her say an unkind word about the duke. One day, when the post failed yet again to bring her a letter, Dorothy collapsed and died. She was buried in a corner of the churchyard through the charity of friends. None of her family was present at her death or burial.
When William became king in 1830, the dark whispers about his treatment of Dorothy rose into a pained cry. One paper lambasted him: “The people…have witnessed a man who has inundated his country with bastards, and deserted the deserving but helpless mother of his offspring, and finally left her to perish like a dog in the streets, and to be buried as a pauper at the public charge when she ceased to maintain him by her own exertions.”23
After her death, one of her daughters revealed that the duke of Clarence had borrowed—and never repaid—some thirty thousand pounds from Dorothy.