Dan Snow's History Hit - Royal Mistresses

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

The role of the royal mistress may, on the face of it, seem a simple position but in reality, there was a lot more to being a royal mistress than it might seem. Throughout the courts of Europe, the role of the royal mistress was often a semi formalised one and gave these women extraordinary influence and power. Joining Dan to discuss the importance of the mistress is Dr Linda Kiernan Knowles Adjunct Assistant Professor in History at Trinity College Dublin. They look particularly at the courts of Charles II and Louis XIV and how their respective mistresses controlled access to power, took part in political intrigue and caused great controversy both inside and outside of court.

I've already welcomed Dan Snow's history. We have got such good subjects on today's part. We've got a brilliant, brilliant historian. It is Dr. Linda Kiernan-Knowles. She's an adjunct assistant professor in history at Trinity College, Dublin. I talked to her from the mighty city of Drogheda on the coast there at the mouth of the Boyne River, a city so full of history that we could have done several podcasts about the place that she was in, but we didn't talk about that at all. We talked about royal mistresses. She's looking at early modern monarchs in England, people like Charles II, but obviously Louis XIV of France, Loum's very large as well, but the Spanish and Northern Italian courts. She's looking at those monarchs and their

relationship with the mistresses. It turns out there's a lot more to being a royal mistress than you might've thought. It's absolutely extraordinary. In this, I think it's fair to say, wide-ranging and slightly eclectic conversation, we talk about royal mistresses. The access to power and influence that that gave certain women. It's a really, really interesting discussion. If you want to listen to other podcasts about the early modern period, then trust me, I've got plenty because I love it.

I love the 18th century. I'll tolerate the 17th century. If you become a subscriber at historyhit.tv, you get access to all the back episodes of this podcast about the ads. You have a whale of a time over there. You're going to go crazy. You're going to be like Charles II in a room full of aspiring royal mistresses. That's the nearest you're ever going to feel to that experience. And over to historyhit.tv, you get a month of free sign-up, and you get all sorts of exciting news. And Netflix for history, everyone.

You're going to love it. It's the world's best history channel. But in the meantime, it gives me very, very great pleasure to have Linda, Kiernan, Knowles on the podcast talking about royal mistresses. Enjoy. Linda, thanks so much for coming on the pod. Not at all, my pleasure.

Now, Linda, I heard you on another podcast the other day and it blew my little old mind because I didn't know that Royal Mistresses was like a semi-formal position. I mean, obviously, we're talking about a huge geographical and time range here, but talk to me about why and where it becomes sort of almost part of the formal structure of the court. Yeah, you're right. It becomes really that huge geographical and time range here, but talk to me about why and where it becomes sort of almost part of the formal structure of the court. Yeah, you're right. It becomes really kind of part of the European political landscape, particularly in the Western parts of Europe in the early modern period. As long as there's been marriage, there have been third parties really to marriage. So if you go back in history, you'll find positions like concubines, for instance, in the medieval period and before. But coming into the early modern period and particularly the 15th and 16th centuries

you start to see the emergence of what is termed a maîtresse and it does come from the French originally but a mistress and someone who is partner of a married king but who is pretty much publicly recognized as his partner and as someone who may have children with him who may gain title and as someone who is very much an auxiliary to power then the 80s so trying a bit more about obviously george ii here in britain you've got the duchess of kendall and war post genius is working out whether it was duchess kendall who do you need to manipulate it It was Duchess of Kendal who was first, but actually it was George II's wife, controversially, who was the most important woman in his life. So what is it about that period? Why is this sort of growing sharpness

around that particular role in your period? I think what happens is in the 15th and 16th centuries, you have the development, not just of monarchy and a centralisation of power, but you have the development of royal households as well. And they become more complex, more varieties of positions within those roles too. Now really what we see from the position of the Royal Mistress is France takes the lead on this particular position. You have the emergence of very notable people like Agnes Sorel in the 1440s, and then later Anne de Pistelieu under François Ier. And what we see in that case is the advent of women making their mark at the court as kind of adjunct power. Now, in the French court, they have a thing called Salic Law. It prohibits women from inheriting the throne in their own right.

Hey, listen, you don't need to tell this Plantagenet fan about Salic Law, man. You know, it's frustrating. One glorious Anglo-French kingdom stretching from Carlisle to Nice. Yeah. So in that respect, what you have is the recognition then of women in power as consorts, as regents, but not as monarchs in their own right. And I think that kind of lends itself to the mistress then emerging as a position that is recognised as a form of soft power, essentially. It's very kind of gendered in the

sense that women are the ones who can exercise soft power from the perspective of negotiation at the court, of maybe undertaking some kind of diplomacy, and also to be able to do it under the radar. So when women undertake negotiation or networking, and perhaps things don't go according to plan, things might fail, it's not seen as a loss of face then as well for families that are involved or particular figures that are involved. So in that respect, the strength then of feminine influence at the court is particularly through its kind of subtleties and how it comes about in the background. But they exercise very kind of significant roles in that respect then too. Is this yet another case of modern historians like you looking at things differently and changing the historiography around

women and power in these courts. I mean, 19th century, early 20th century generation of male historians had completely ignored these people. Yeah, that's true. The Royal Mistress has been a really interesting one from a historiographical point of view. She's been seen as this figure that kind of is used to titillate the audience in the 19th century. And you have writers like the Goncourt brothers in France, who produced these grand biographies and studies of women during the early modern period, and are judging them on the basis of what might be accepted as legitimate authority or formal power in the 19th and 20th century. So projecting back categories of power that are perhaps anachronistic for the time. Yeah, like in the Seven Years' War, which is something I've looked into,

the Madame de Pompadour is described, isn't she, as the prime minister all the time, which seems to me a problematic allusion. It doesn't really work, does it? But she was obviously really important. Yeah, it's an interesting category to place upon her because at once she is probably one of the most, if not the most successful royal mistress, I think, of that period in time. Not just for the fact of her longevity,

but the fact that she also stays on well beyond her relationship with the king has ended. She is there primarily as an advisor, really for the last, I think it's almost 15 years of their relationship. And in that respect, seeing her as a minister advisor, it is projecting a category on her that maybe discounts then the personal aspect of the role too. There's a much

deeper connection between, I think, kings and their mistresses than between them perhaps and their queens. You know, a queen is chosen by the head, but a mistress is chosen by the heart. And there is a very kind of deep then connection between the two the real reliance upon them it's really making my head explode because people have tried to interrogate the relationship between say you know i don't know henry the eighth and thomas cromwell and it's like it's all of that plus the sex involved and children are completely exhausting so let's go back like What's going on with the mistresses? Were kings also having sex with other kind of concubines, if you like?

I mean, I know Pompadour actually filled Louis XV's bed with low-status women, didn't he, who couldn't sort of usurp, or at least that's the cliche. But Henry I in England was like shagging anyone, right? Just endless shagging all over the place. Charles II seems to have not been quite as... Although he's an interesting example, isn't he? Because he had...

Charles II gets up to all sorts. But he had sort of high status and low status. And low status, yeah. He's really interesting. Sometimes Louis XIV gets the blame for Charles II's debauchery at the court. But, you know, Charles II is restored in 1660. He needed no help.

He needed no help from Louis. He didn't really help, but Louis hadn't got his own party started at that stage. You know, it's not until Land of Austria clears off that Louis gets going. And Charles II is interesting because obviously he has Barbara Villiers, but then he has Maul Davis,

then he has Nell Gwynne and Louise de Cajeral. So there's quite a range there of mistresses. The royal mistress is not as formalised as it is at the French court, at the English court. The English court is a more kind of informal role. But nonetheless, people know who they are. They're very aware of what's going on. It's fascinating to see. I feel like the 1670s, 1680s is really kind of peak of royal mistress activity in Western Europe, you've got a number of hugely

kind of charismatic women who are influencing not just the kind of the king themselves, but the culture of the court and the image of the court then too. So coming back to where it's a more formal position in France in the 16th, 17th, 18th, for example, the king is choosing a royal mistress. Is he partly falling in love with someone and choosing someone for his bed, but also based on their ability to be good at politics? Is he thinking, oh, you know, I do fancy this person, but I also want them to be able to help me on the budget? Oh, that's a really good question, because, yeah, you've got a wide variety of personalities involved in who becomes a mistress. and he becomes a mistress.

I think at times kings make the decision to get involved with women who are definitely not going to complicate things politically. So taking the example of Charles II, Barbara Villiers is from a family that has a history of getting involved. She is part of the original Duke of Buckingham's family, for instance, who had been a favourite. Oh God.

Yes. The trouble they caused. The trouble that man caused. I mean, jeepers Christ. So she's got a bit of a lineage there. Whereas people like Mal Davis and Nell Gwynn, well, they're from the acting profession. They're very accomplished women. They're very witty, very entertaining.

Nell Gwynn has more of a tenure than Mal does. But I think it's clear that they're not going to be politically a threat at the court. They may represent certain things. I mean, the famous quote from Nell, of course, is that they mistake her for, I think, Louise de Carral at one stage, the Catholic. The crowd kind of boo her in the streets and the carriage. And she says, no, it's just me, the Protestant whore. So in that respect, you know, representing even different, not just political factions, but religions can also play part of it as well. So the identity then of the mistress and the background, you do have certainly mistresses who are pushed to the fore at courts by their families, with the eye on catching the king, basically. So visibility and proximity are key to the

prospective mistress, you have to be seen, you have to be near power, first of all. And that's why a lot of them are drawn from the ranks of the Queen's household. A lot of them will have been ladies-in-waiting. They may even be higher up. They may have management roles within the Queen's household then too. So in that regard, they're already playing a game at the court of influence on behalf, not just of themselves, but of their families as well. And of course, there's the often trotted outline about the father of the new mistress, where he says, my daughter has become the mistress of the king. At last, our fortune is made. So this idea of it being an ambition on the part of

networking families is very, very strong at the courts as well. In terms then of it being an ambition on the part of networking families is very, very strong at the courts as well. In terms then of them being a political advisor and whether they would have political acumen, well, certainly they would have more invested, say, in the domestic politics of the court than the Queen would have. The Queen is usually foreign and she represents the crown's relationship with a foreign power. Usually they're obviously undertaking marriages for reasons of dynastic alliances, peace treaties as well and so on. So the queen may not necessarily even speak the language. There may be that barrier there between the king and the queen. But between the king and the mistress, the mistress is very much clued into probably

the domestic politics, to the factions at the court, to the interests at the court. And they share then a common culture as well. So there's that affinity between a king and his mistress, that there will not just be genuine attraction there, but they will connect on a level that is probably just not available to the queen, for instance. that is probably just not available to the Queen, for instance. Yeah, I guess, obviously, your Anne of Cleves, foreign princess ditched for her 17-year-old lady-in-waiting, Catherine Howard.

I mean, it's a great one by Henry VIII. It's a good example, I guess. Oh, and Catherine of Braganza. I mean, Charles II's wife. I mean, what the hell was going on with her? Poor thing. I guess let's talk about Queens. I mean, it was expected. Their mums would have said, right, here you go.

You're heading off to France or England, your husband will take mistresses? Again, there's a range of reactions to it. For the most part, there's like a very stoic acceptance of the mistress by the queen. A lot of the time, the kings will expect that the mistress pays respect to their queen, that there is no open disparaging of the queen, that there has to be acknowledgement of the position of the queen. So Catherine of Braganza, yeah, that relationship is tested,

particularly by some of the mistresses themselves. I think it's Barbara Villiers who gets herself painted by Peter Lilly, as the Madonna and the child, then with her own son by Charles II. And of course, Charles doesn't leave any legitimate children. He leaves over a dozen illegitimate children. And so when she gets her portrait painted with her son, this is a kind of a snub to Catherine of Pagranta then is to say, here we go. Here's my child. Where's yours? And she also then as well gets herself painted as Saint Catherine. So again,

this kind of snubbed them too. The other examples might be, I think, George II's wife puts up with Henrietta Howard because she figures Henrietta's not a threat to her. And she likes to keep her there in the sense that it may not cause enormous problems. Better the devil you know, in certain respects. Yeah, there are other ones. I mean, you mentioned as well the supposed lowly born women that Louis XV was supplied with by Madame de Pompadour. We don't really know about that, but we do know that one of them was quickly jettisoned from her lodgings when she didn't disrespect the Queen, she disrespected Madame de Pompadour.

She asked Louis XV, how is the old trout? And he said, right, that's it, you're gone. So in the respect of how they should treat the Queens, the Kings seem to expect more from the mistresses than they nearly expect from themselves. Their own fidelity to their Queens is not as criticised by themselves. They don't cast the critical eye on themselves as much as they might cast the critical eye on how the mistress would treat the queen. And what about these queens? Elizabeth Tudor, a queen regnant, I guess, slightly different category.

Was she allowed to have intimacy, love life, etc., as her male counterparts were? But what about queen consorts? Were they allowed just to have fun by themselves and just crack on? Poor Cassidy Beganza, I'd like to think of that she managed to have fun by themselves and just crack on? Poor Cassidy I'd like to think of that she managed to have some intimate moment in her life apart from her husband. No there's a major problem with any queens having any kind of extracurricular activities

because the key issue is of course legitimacy of the royal line and any question over that legitimacy, that cannot be brought into date in any respect whatsoever. And that's, again, where you see this double standard with regards to fidelity between men and women. For instance, men committed adultery in the early modern period, it's certainly frowned upon, but for women to commit adultery could result in imprisonment. So, for instance, the future, I think George I of England in the 1690s divorced his wife, grounds of adultery, had her imprisoned basically for the rest of her life. And yet when he came to the throne,

he brought along his mistress, Wanda Schulenburg, and lived openly with her. So there's a huge difference between what is allowed to a king and what is allowed to a queen, whether they be consort or regnant for that matter. The really interesting example of Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI never took a mistress. Didn't work out well for her in the end, I think, because had he taken a mistress, the mistress would have taken some of the flack.

But her own possible affair with Count Fearson was used then very potently against her, the crown, and then the entire royal lineage because of that question of her fidelity, of her physical integrity, and therefore the integrity of the royal bloodline itself. So there's a whole set of rules that apply to women when it comes to fidelity that never apply to the men whatsoever. So the question of paternity, that's the key thing. Paternity, something now that we can say with certainty, but not then. So there has to be no doubt, there has to be a level of control over women to ensure that line. And I think it's really interesting because sometimes we don't know when there may have been an illegitimate birth within marriage.

Legally speaking, any birth to a woman within marriage is her husband's child. And there's no real way of definitively disputing that at the time. You remember when they found Richard III's remains and they tested the remains against the three descendants. And one of them didn't match up anymore because I think it's 19 generations between them. I loved how they put it. They said there had been a false paternity event. And that meant that there had been an illegitimate birth within wedlock that hadn't been caught at the time, busted in the 21st century. Dude, 19 generations. I mean, come on, they think it's the numbers well i've often thought that in england in

the medieval period we got edward ii who i'm not sure was the dad of edward iii if i'm being honest i guess they tried to stop queens being unfaithful but if they were the kings just swallow it go you know what any son's better than no son like i'll take it again you know the lines go forward and the assumption is they are absolutely resolutely the legitimate heir because for an illegitimate heir to inherit causes chaos. In the medieval period you've got numerous examples of jostling between legitimate and illegitimate lines. By the 16th, 17th, 18th century the thrones that we're looking at they are very precarious at times due to the death of heirs in the lead up to a transition. But they hang on just about. And of course, the English throne is kind of sidewinding at times as

well across Europe. But for the French throne, and this is where the illegitimate children come into play, which are essentially shadow royal families or parallel royal families, they can cause a lot of hassle. They can cause a lot of hassle they can cause a lot of problems domestically between factions they can rouse rebellion in the case of the duke of monmouth in 1685 and he's eventually executed for treason so that's charles ii's natural son with lucy walter and in france at the same time lou Louis XIV has six legitimate children, only one of whom survives, the Dauphin. The Dauphin lives to provide then a son and then great-grandsons for Louis XIV. But at the same time, you have a long line of illegitimate children from Louise de la Vallière, Madame de Montesemont. and by the time Louis XIV dies in 1715, he has lost his son, his grandson and great-grandsons

in the previous three years and he's left with the five-year-old Louis XV to inherit from him. So at the same time, he also has the Duke du Men who's in his mid-40s at this stage and the Duke du Men then stages an attempt to wrest power from the regency, because his father had named him and his illegitimate brother, they had now been legitimised, given titles and brought into the hierarchy of the French nobility, much to the annoyance of the nobility that are there already. But they kind of start jostling for power too. And what happens within the first weeks after Louis XIV's death is attempts to take them out of the line of succession again.

So illegitimate children, whether they're legitimised or not, can cause huge problems. I think it's the main reason why then Louis XV doesn't go for the same methods in relation to his own illegitimate children. He never legitimises them, but he does recognise them to the degree that he's able to perhaps secure favourable marriages for them. So he'll give them letters of recognition.

And people know what it means, but they know what it doesn't mean as well. He's not formally recognising them too, so. Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about royal mistresses. There's a lot more there than meets the eye. More after this. Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603?

Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies? And do you want to know about chin-chucking and thigh sex? Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, is a deep dive into what I like to think of as the long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Velazquez to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower.

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listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. sad charles seconds favoring of his son is kind of lovely but ultimately very destructive as you say i've always quite been interested in james the second so i quite like beric i like that bevy of kind of they're quite swashbuckling those boys anyway you mentioned louis the 14th grandson is he's a lovely louis who was in a real love match with his wife and they both died of measles together because they nursed each other and they had a million children yeah yeah the last three years of louis the 14th life are completely beset with tragedy and it's a terrible story because there

is this real fondness then for this granddaughter-in-law and it's taken away in the last few years. I mean, Louis XIV had worked so assiduously throughout his reign to maintain this image of power and also then obviously, like any king, to establish the line. But yeah, in the last three years, 1712 onwards, it starts to fall apart. Well, family life and his international position. I mean, he's bankrupted with us a different podcast, but I mean, talk about a celebrated king who actually just ends the last few years as it rained. It's just catastrophe. But that grandson and granddaughter in law, would they be an example like George II and Caroline of a real love match in marriage? And does that make you any less likely to have a mistress if you actually are into your wife properly?

Yeah, certainly. You can see across reigns where you don't find a royal mistress. There just seems to be this genuine devotion between certain kings and their queens. But look at Louis XIV himself with Madame de Maintenon. She was his secret wife. I mean, the old saying is, what is it? When a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy.

But not in those respects. When Madame de Mentenon becomes the morganatic wife, so she never becomes recognised queen, but he's devoted to her for the rest of his life. I mean, this is someone who is a titan on the European stage. He should be making a second marriage after his first wife dies. He should be putting it to dynastic use. He's quite young, wife dies. He should be putting it to dynastic use. He's quite young, even at that stage still. Instead, he decides to marry this person who's in the background, who seems to be someone who really relies upon, who's a real confidant. It's not what you'd call a huge kind of lustful marriage or anything. It's one that's very, very solid, a very solid relationship. Yeah, I think George II and Caroline, didn't George II and Caroline,

didn't George II tell Caroline that I take mistresses because it's expected of me? I think I have to, which I don't buy as an explanation whatsoever. Yeah, so there is certain, I mean, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, where you don't have a mistress either, they have problems in their marriage to begin with, obviously problems with consummation and problems with the production of an heir to begin with.

But there does seem to have been a devotion there too, despite her supposed dalliances. They're not confirmed. And in that respect, yeah, there seems to be this emergence within them of this genuine kind of little family unit amongst them, this genuine affection. So it is down to the relationship with the Queen can

determine whether a mistress will gain a foothold, but also whether the King is open to a relationship like that, whether the King determines it to be advantageous for whatever reasons. What about homosexual relationships? Because obviously William of Orange was said to be very close to Bentic wasn't it who made the Duke of Porton I think and then obviously there's questions around Louis XVI and George I sometimes is that something that you come across or is it a very different category there? Well the male favourite then would cover a number of different roles they might be men who could be taken on as advisors or as ministers, though they don't necessarily overlap.

The most probably prominent example would be at the court of Henri III in France, where you have the mignon, the male favourites, the entourage almost that he has of young men who kind of follow him about, carousing and partying, and they get a real reputation at that court. And almost the idea of the mignon lays more ground really for the position of the mistress then later on it's seen as more kind of sometimes gender historians would say heteronormative to have a royal mistress rather than is to have a male favorite in the background where there may or may not be any kind of physical or romantic

relationship for buckingham obviously during the reign of James I. Yeah, of course, Villiers and James I, coming back to that family. Yeah. And then later on, for instance, Louis XIV's own brother, Philippe d'Orléans. Louis XIII as well, some rumours kind of floating around about him too, although he does seem to have had quite passionate affairs with women as well. So the idea of the male favourite, there are certainly rumours, there's certainly examples of it, but they don't fall into a category in the same way, obviously, as the royal mistress, because the royal mistress is an expected affair. And it's really difficult as well, then in the early modern period, to talk about this concept we have of homosexuality, because homosexuality isn't used as a term

until the 19th century and so placing that category that idea that identity on behaviors or activities in the early modern period again that's another it's like the category of power we're projecting a category on it that may not be necessarily appropriate so Henri Troyes I think if anyone is interested in male favourites, the mignons of the course of Henri III is very kind of interesting because what you see there is probably the most prominent example of that. The idea of the male favourites could at times, just like the image of the royal mistress, could be very much used against the king, could be used as an example of them being emasculated or in feminacy in the monarchs. So they would want to avoid those associations at the time, but they're

certainly there. Can we finish up with Madame de Pompadour? Because I feel I'm nervous I've shared fake news now. Tell everyone about Pompadour and why she has become such a prominent example in the historiography of a royal mistress. Pompadour is from a background that wouldn't necessarily have gained access to the court. She's from a financial background. She's married. Her maiden name was unfortunately Poisson, Miss Fish. And she married into the D'Etoile family who are very, very well established in the financial world. And then they become even more established in the financial world once she gets into the court. She is from a very much a bourgeois kind of upper bourgeois financial background and she gains the eye of Louis XV. Apparently went out kind of in her carriage kind of stalking around where he

would be out hunting hoping to catch her eye and then eventually in 1744-45, the relationship seems to have begun. She seems to have kind of got her way into the court, into the social circles of the court at that stage. It should be added as well at this point that the connections between the court of Versailles and Paris were starting to really strengthen at this time. The cultural dominance was starting to shift from court to city. So there's increasingly blurred lines between the two societies at this stage. That helps her as well. And she becomes very quickly a very trusted confidant, a very significant advisor to Louis XV. And Louis XV is a much more private person than his great grandfather. He tends to stay much more in the background at Versailles.

He doesn't put on the public displays to the same extent that his great-grandfather did. And that works to Pompadour's advantage, because then she becomes increasingly a person who is able to control access to him. So increasingly, you have to go through Pompadour to get to the king. So increasingly, you have to go through Pompadour to get to the king. And for anything that may involve particularly ambassadors, any foreign diplomats, and then even the factions within the court, it's becoming very, very clear in the late 1740s that she is the person in charge. And she does a great job of building up her image as this, almost like a shadow queen. She is this patron of the arts. She's cultured. She wants to get away from being little old Miss Fish and wife of an

she wants to be seen as an enlightened lady, perhaps as someone who is in touch with all the kind of latest ideas of the city perhaps, but certainly someone who is cultured, someone who is to be admired. And in that respect, then she's having her portrait painted, for instance, there's numerous portraits of Pompadour showing her. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies

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Very regal, very regal positions, showing her then kind of surrounded by her books, by her learning. By about the 1752-53, it seems that the physical relationship had cooled at that stage, and yet she remains on as the royal mistress. There's no one else who supplants her during her lifetime and the only thing that brings her tenure to an end is her death and she pre-deceases Louis XV. But during this time she is associated with then the emergence of this harem that Louis XV apparently keeps at Versailles, the Parc aux Cerfs, the Deer Park, where young ladies from Paris are apparently brought out. And there's a number of them. They're referred to sometimes by the courtiers as the Petit Maîtresse, or the Passades, the passing fancies. And it's really interesting to look at the courtiers and how they talk about this. And you see actually from these

discussions, the power that Pompadour obviously has has and how much they want to get rid of her, especially if she's not doing what they want. So you have people like the Marquis d'Argencon, who would be from a very kind of well-connected family, who would have had positions within ministries for Louis XV. He's hoping and praying that one of the new ones is going to supplant Padour but it never happens they never get near because they're never on site they're never in the palace they're actually kept within the confines of town of versailles but never presented at court and one of them is really interesting marie louisa murphy who's from an irish emigre family very low down the social scale, probably a model for Boucher, François Boucher, her sister as well. There's five sisters in total. And the way she comes to the attention

of the king apparently is that Boucher uses her as a model for the Virgin Mary for a painting in the Queen's Oratory. And he sees her and he says, who's this? And she gets brought out. So lots of stories about kind of how they're connected. But the speculation that's generated by these petit maîtresses shows us then as well, the amount of speculation and conjecture and discussion of royal mistresses that went on. Everyone's dying to know, not just, you know, who's in favour, who does the king give his time to now, but almost like kind of a bellwether, you know, where are things going at the court? What faction may come to the fore? So for Pompadour, Pompadour is able to really navigate all of that really well. Not to rule out, of course, that she does

become the whipping boy too for policies that go wrong. And there's plenty of those in the Seven Years' War, plenty of policies that go wrong. Exactly, exactly. And I guess she's a convenient, misogynistic way of offloading a lot of that failure in that seven years war. There's a huge archive of Li Belle's, the pamphlets and the songs that were recorded on the streets of Paris during this time. So the things that are said about her, I mean, they really get down to the nitty gritty. They will criticise everything about a mistress's body. They'll make assumptions about disease and the corruption then that that brings

to the monarchy. And that's one of the things then levelled against Louis XV, that his behaviour with these young girls, and he's not just bodily corrupt himself, but he is spreading this corruption through younger girls and then by extension infecting the entire kingdom. I mean, this was the thing about Louis XV, the king's touch was traditionally used to cure scrofula. He did away with that. And I don't think people were too kind of miffed because you're probably more likely to catch something from Louis XV than to be cured by anything.

So in that respect, there's a whole host of different layers of meaning then that come with the image of the royal mistress by that time. A lot of these mistresses, do they have husbands that are still alive? They do, some of them. Ideally speaking, a royal mistress should be single, but you have plenty who are already married and you have a variety of reactions from husbands. Some of them quite happy to go along with the status quo and to allow the wife to become mistress and to remain mistress because they're paid off handsomely. They're

given pensions and they may be given a state. They may be given new positions at the court or with commissions within the army. And if it's advantageous to the family. Some would say that someone who didn't take up the opportunity was politically naive. They would see as, why wouldn't you do this? Sometimes you have examples, I think at one stage, one courtier was really trying to cultivate a relationship between the king and his wife during Louis XIV's reign. And Louis XIV caught wind that the husband was being a bit too actively involved in engineering the liaison. And Louis XIV wasn't happy about this whatsoever. Whereas Louis XIV's mistress, Madame de Montespan,

her husband, he was okay. They had already had two children by the time the relationship with Louis XIV had started. And in fact, the two legitimate children wanted to be categorised with the legitimised children. They wanted to be more associated with their mother's illegitimate children than with their own father. But the father went along with it for a while, there was money exchanged, and then he decided he wanted more. And what he did was he staged a fake funeral for his wife and draped his carriage in black and he put horns and antlers on the outside of the carriage

too because they're the symbols of the cookhold the wronged husband or the cheated on husband and he paraded this around and louis the 14th said right we've had enough of him off he goes and banished him off to the estates so respect, yeah, you do have the husbands in the background, some of them content to go along, others, not so much. Absolutely. Last question, very short. Is the kind of history that you're doing at the moment, you and your contemporaries, in 50 years time or now, are we going to have a lot more women in the histories of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries who are considered important politicians that we will be learning about, like Madame de Pompadour in the context of the Seven Years' War? Are you really putting these

women back into positions of power and influence? Or do you think that some of the formal structures of army command, of controlling exchequers and things, which are dominated by men, are still the ones that we should be looking at in more detail. We think about the categories, again, I keep coming back to this idea of the categories that we place upon them and the definitions that we have of what power should be. I think they're up for review all the time. I think we have really very solid ideas about what legitimate democratic power should be. What is a legitimate institution of power? And in the 19th century, it becomes obviously male-dominated, male-run institutions. And in fact, actually, you know,

the Royal Mistress is used as an example during the French Revolution as a justification for excluding women from power, for characterising female power as inherently corruptive, manipulative, subversive, deviant, that it is anathema to the male virtue within the exercise of power. So the way that we think about power, they're very much, I think, constructions of the 19th and the 20th century. So when we think about the early modern period, we are trying to really get to know the subtleties of power, power in all its varieties, power in how it is expressed. I mean, we think about, you know, absolutism has been dismantled as a myth. The idea is just centralised power in one monarch. And yet we can see monarchs themselves, even Louis XIV, this archetype of centralised power, constantly negotiating with varieties of courtiers, diplomats, ambassadors, even institutions like the

Parliament of Paris, constantly trying to balance out power within that. And women are there all the time. They're in the background. Another thing that springs to mind is the Irish émigré community in France and how the Irish émigré community integrate with French society. So we think about students, soldiers, merchants, all of them are male categories. But we also have to think about then how women were part of that integration too. And they were part of not marital strategies, but marital strategies of their families. So women in general, when it comes to marriage law, women can marry up, but men don't marry up because they don't carry their title with them. So in that respect, women actually have the advantage in going up the

social scale. Whereas we think about that as a submissive role, but it's not a submissive role at all. It's actually a very progressive, assertive role, I think, in that kind of strategy of integration. So yeah, I think what we're trying to do is tease out the nuances of all these different roles and to understand them for their own time and not for what particularly the 19th century will tell us about them. It's interesting, the 19th century, because if you look at Bill and Hillary Clinton's relationship or Boris Johnson's relationship with his now wife, it was thought the kind of shambolic, intriguing, informal, nepotistic world of Ancien Regime. Like, in the 19th century, well, what we're interested in is, like, clear government with ministerial responsibility and accountability and transparency.

And this is what we're trying to build. It's very modern. And this, like, whirs, family members, kids, wives, girlfriends, it's all super 18th century. And in a way, you can see that women were the victims of that otherwise quite understandable drive for kind of, quote unquote, modern accountable government. Oh, yeah, the 19th century wants to make that clean break away. It wants to distance itself, even though there's so much continuity between before 1789 and afterwards, but they don't want to highlight that. They want to show that this is a complete departure. And then obviously they tell a story. They tell their own story about what the 17th and 18th century was. And that's why when I hear kind of Ancien Regime, I hear the term aristocracy, they're really kind of loaded terms, obviously. Ancien Regime doesn't exist until after it's over. Aristocracy is a pejorative term for what would always be regarded as the nobility. And nobility carries different connotations with it. And, you know, courtiers and all the rest are

painted in a particular way in the 19th century by 19th century standards. But there are different standards in the 17th, the 18th century, and they're the norms. This is where, you know, cultural history comes in. What's the norm? What was the norm for their time? Often invisible to them. And it's very hard then for historians to actually tease out what is the baseline? What is their norm? What is their expectation of, for instance, nobility? They're not thinking of themselves as a corrupt aristocracy they're thinking of themselves as something else terribly modern and cutting edge and content this is very you know they thought they were it listen thank you so much that was absolutely amazing how can people

follow your work and get your books and do all that kind of thing follow me on twitter i'm tweeting about french history i've got an exhibition coming up at the Irish College in Paris. It should be online soon, which is called How to Be Good on the Courtesy Literature of the Early Modern Period. So that's there too.

You can have a look at that. Linda, thank you for teasing that out. It's amazing. And thank you for coming on and giving me so much of your time. My pleasure. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All the traditions of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

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