Annalisa Nicholson: Hortense Mancini and the Mazarin Salon
Liv Bonsall
Co-Editor-in-Chief Liv Bonsalls speaks to Cambridge PhD candidate Annalisa Nicholson about her work on Hortense Mancini, as well as Anglo-French relations in Restoration England and the importance of studying seventeenth-century women.
Liv Bonsall
Good morning Annalisa. Could you tell me a bit about yourself and your academic journey before your PhD?
Annalisa Nicholson
I live in Cambridge, and I'm at Corpus Christi college. But prior to coming to Cambridge, I did my BA in French and ab initio Russian. I did so because I wanted to do another language - I'd only done French at A level - and because while I was in sixth form, I was really, really into Russian literature, like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. So I took the plunge and opted for ab initio Russian alongside French at University College London. I thoroughly enjoyed both languages and had already started developing an interest in 16th and 17th century France. After my undergraduate degree I stayed on at UCL to do a master's in early modern studies, which is a brilliant master's run by a team called CELL (The Centre for Editing Lives and Letters). When you’ve done a modern languages degree, you often have a literary background, and my master's was instead quite history focused. I got to learn about palaeography: reading old handwritings, how to look at book history and how to adopt historical approaches. During that time, I came across the figure of Hortense Mancini and decided in the future I might do a PhD. But in between my master's and PhD, I worked in education. I had about a year and a half working in non-mainstream education (part time in an interim school), and the rest of the time doing home education or working with students with special educational needs. At the end of that, I applied to do my PhD at Cambridge and was very lucky to be awarded funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to do it.
Annalisa Nicholson, PhD candidate at Queen’s College, Cambridge.
Liv Bonsall
As you said, you’re now interested in Hortense Mancini and the Mazarin Salon in 17th century London. Could you tell me a bit about who she was, how she came to be in the UK and how she came to be Charles II’s mistress?
Annalisa Nicholson
Hortense Mancini was one of the nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, who, at the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign, was the First Minister, which is the most important political post in France. Mancini and her siblings are actually born in Italy, but they come to France when they are very young because their uncle is Cardinal Mazarin, so that the family can profit from this incredible influence. So she’s already well known from a very young age as one of these nieces. Then, as a teenager, she’s married to one of the richest men in France, a man called Armand Charles de La Porte de La Meilleraye. Essentially, they have a terrible, terrible marriage. The only thing they have in common, in fact, is their extraordinary wealth. Apart from that they are total opposites. Early on, they have problems in this marriage; Mancini is already staying for long periods at her sister’s, while there’s some mediation going on with her husband. Today we would call this behaviour domestic abuse; it encompassed constantly searching her rooms, searching her for hidden love letters, refusing her access to wealth, so that she was not only entirely dependent on her husband, but also often refused any sort of financial independence. Bear in mind, of course, that she has brought an enormous amount of wealth to this marriage, having grown up in the luxury of the French court. She was often under a kind of house arrest; she wasn’t allowed to leave the premises of the house. We know all of this because she writes about it later in her memoirs. There's no suggestion in the memoirs per se of physical abuse. However, in the 17th century, you wouldn't expect a wife of aristocratic status to talk about it, so there's just a question mark hanging.
After about seven years of marriage and several children, notably after she gave birth to a male heir, she decides to leave. This scandalises France. While people are sympathetic to the harsh constraints which her husband has placed over her, the fact of running away and leaving this marriage is shocking to the French aristocracy. But she clearly feels that she has no choice but to leave. She spends about eight years as a sort of refugee, but as an aristocratic refugee, so she has servants, she attends European city courts and different parties, etc., but she’s looking for somewhere to take her in and to block her husband's attempts to repatriate her back to Paris. Eventually, the English ambassador to France, Ralph Montagu, offers her permanent sanctuary in England, and she takes up the offer. Montagu wants to instal her as the new mistress to Charles II, hoping that the fact he offered her sanctuary would mean that in the future, if she was the official royal mistress, she would be very loyal to him. So she comes to England, and Montagu organises her first meeting with Charles II at his sister's house in Covent Garden. Essentially, from there, a new relationship between Charles II and Hortense Mancini emerges. At this point, Mancini is a bona fide celebrity, so I think that is the appeal for Charles. She’s a famous beauty, the runaway Duchess. She’s not only famed for being very beautiful, but also for being very witty. So, pretty much as soon as she arrives in England, she becomes Charles II's Second Mistress.
Liv Bonsall
In a recent interview you did with The Guardian, Hortense Mancini is described as a Restoration Influencer, which I find very interesting. Who did she influence, and to what extent?
Annalisa Nicholson
I think there are different layers to her influence. She has a very direct influence on the English court, in the circles in which she moves from the very beginning, particularly on women in this court. They imitate Mancini’s dress and fashion, they become interested in the authors or scientists that she talks about, they start to look into the types of food and wine that she orders to her salon. And this is because Mancini is a very famous aristocratic woman. She’s also French, and in the second half of the 17th century - in Restoration England - France is seen as the epitome of style and fashion. All of the latest fashions come from France into England. So she’s seen as somebody to copy. And very importantly, she also influences many of these women to gamble. This is more important than it sounds. During her travels, Mancini became very interested in a number of card games, particularly the game of Basset, and she brings it to her salon. Women gambling is not necessarily encouraged from all corners of Restoration society, as you can imagine. There are some pockets that think it’s immoral, and of course, if you’re a woman, the standards for morality are a little bit higher. So it is seen as deeply immoral for a woman to engage in such behaviour, particularly as gambling will often happen in a context of drinking alcohol. There’s also another set of people that think women are intellectually incapable of gambling well, i.e. they are intellectually inferior, there’s no hope of them ever winning at gambling and for that reason, it’s completely reckless. Mancini is not only a gambler, she is a high stakes gambler. She’s not making very controlled bets - she’s just having fun. And because she’s doing it, and because she’s quite famous, other women copy her and get involved in this. This is important because, firstly, in these games every player is equal, so there’s at least a performance of equality in these games. Secondly, there’s also a sense of financial independence. If you remember what I was saying earlier about the fact Mancini had been blocked from financial independence by her husband, and that she hadn’t been able to access her dowry and her inheritance, these acts of gambling were, to some extent, showcasing a sense of independence that many of these women probably yearned for outside of the game. Over the next few decades, lots of other women then set up gambling houses and they are in charge of them. Again, organising things independently as a woman in the 17th century is an act of resistance against the general patriarchy, which often contains them to the domestic sphere.
There is a broader influence though, in terms of Mancini’s French style salon. A salon is essentially a place where you invite different intellectuals, court figures, writers and witty people, and you partake in conversation, drinking or gambling. People in London hear about this salon and how brilliant and dazzling it is, and eventually other salons are created. By the 18th century, there are some phenomenal salons being set up, for example, very famously by Elizabeth Montagu, the first bluestocking. So there is also a long term influence, in terms of women running these intellectual communities, that is set off by Mancini’s salon.
Portrait of Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin by Jacob Ferdinand Voet. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HortenseManciniJacob_FerdinandVoet.jpg
Liv Bonsall
Where did the concept of salons come from? And who, specifically, was attending Mancini’s salon?
Annalisa Nicholson
The word salon probably wasn’t used until the 19th century, but in Mancini’s time it was called someone's rooms, their house or their cabinet. The concept of the salon has a messy history, because it can be defined as an intellectual and artistic community. I'm sure you could look back and argue that many things were a salon, much further back than the early modern period. But in French studies, generally speaking, you see the emergence of salons in the 16th century, when we think about women in these intellectual and literary communities. The presence of women is what we generally characterise this salon by. The real heyday of the salons is the 17th century, when women organise and shape the salon. Sometimes they are aristocratic women, but not always. Sometimes it is an acclaimed writer or novelist, like Madeleine de Scudéry, who opens their rooms to their social circle, which normally will include some novelists, playwrights, poets, painters, scientists, mathematicians, theologians and philosophers. They will invite different courtiers and people who are very witty. It isn’t always the elite, because sometimes people from non-elite families that had risen in society because of their talent are invited. So it's an intellectual community in which women play a dominant role. Before Mancini comes to London, there have been attempts to set up a salon in England. But those salons are always run by men, and they have never really taken off. This shows you that there's something very important about the role of women in these salons. They open up opportunities for women to engage in intellectual conversation in learning about the latest scientific research and talking to the people that were putting this research together. This means that they actually get to engage with it very directly at a time when women are unable to attend universities. Also, part of the spark of salons is that women are so involved. By bringing women in, there is a dazzling new model which appeals to people very widely.
At Mancini’s salon, there is a very eclectic mix of people. For example, she invites the second Duke of Buckingham, who has written a few plays, the poet Thomas Shadwell, and possibly Aphra Benn. She invites a number of scientists from the Royal Society, theologians such as Henri Justel and possibly the scientist Isaac Vossius. And she invites a number of women courtiers of course, including Jane Myddelton and others of what's known as the Windsor beauties. She invites philosophers and people who are very interested in philosophy, such as her very close friend Charles de Saint-Evremond, a well known libertine and Epicurean thinker, and she invites painters such as Peter Lely. A number of French exiles also come to her salon. At this point in the second half of the 17th century, Louis XIV’s reign is gradually becoming more and more absolutist, so many French courtiers flee to London, having been banished or exiled from France. And in the 1680s, there are also many Huguenots, or French Protestants, fleeing France and searching for a place of refuge. So there’s a growing French expatriate community in the salon, which means that it’s very multilingual, which is very exciting to imagine. You’ll be in a room where there might be different conversations happening in different languages. And as happens in these multilingual settings, lots of conversations revolve around vocabulary. When you're trying to grasp the right word, or you hear a word in a language that is maybe not your native language and you want to discuss this new word and how you might translate it into English, for example. So it’s a multilingual environment, and also an interconfessional environment. Mancini is a Catholic, as are many of the other French noble exiles, but then there’s also a very strong Huguenot presence. Then on top of that, you've got all of the restoration courtiers who are Anglican. So, in a period that we often think about as deeply suspicious of other religions, a period in which conflict is hardening these religious divides, there’s a salon in which people come together at least every week to talk about books and science in spite of their religious affiliation.
Liv Bonsall
Despite that, the Restoration was still a very uncertain time. Did this have an impact on Anglo-French relations, whether positively or negatively? Was Mancini a rare French exile in England, or one of many?
Annalisa Nicholson
The Restoration is nothing short of a shocking time for people. It’s incredibly uncertain because, prior to the Restoration, there has been a complete breakdown of the British monarchy. It has descended into civil war in the Three Kingdoms. It results in the execution of the monarch, the exile of the royal family and a Commonwealth for several years, headed by a dictator in the figure of Oliver Cromwell. Many things during the interregnum are very shocking. Then when Cromwell dies, there’s an uncertain feeling about who his successor should be. People, including Ralph Montagu, whom I mentioned earlier, start to organise for the restoration of the monarchy. But even when the monarchy is restored, because of everything else that must have, at one time, seemed so impossible, there’s a sense of living in an unpredictable world. That, even though the monarchy has been restored, people realise how fragile that institution is.
One of the people at Mancini’s salon is a man called Gregorio Letty, who is an Italian Protestant exile and a very well known intellectual. He ends up writing a biography of Oliver Cromwell. In it, he likens English history in the last few decades to the waxing and waning of the moon, and describes all its stages: there's a monarchy, and then there's a civil war, and then there's a republic and Commonwealth and an execution of the monarch, and then it turns around and the executed monarch’s son is invited to take over. I always like to read not just the British view on this, but also what it must have been like for the European spectators. So when Charles II, then, is restored to the monarchy, it’s a very difficult time, there needs to be some sort of religious settlement. Early on, he says that he is going to be a very tolerant monarch. He's just spent the last decade on the Catholic continent at different Catholic courts. And he has to deal with the fact that there are Catholics living in England, and the fact that most people are obsessed with the idea that the Catholics are papal spies. He also has to deal with the other side of the coin, which is the Protestants who are not Anglican, those who are nonconforming Protestants. As the years go by, he’s pressured into enacting laws that limit the rights of all of those nonconformist groups: Catholics, Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Quakers, etc.
The result on Anglo-French relations is that they are increasingly strained throughout Charles II’s reign. Charles himself is always very eager to pursue friendly relations with France. But it isn’t just his decision; he has to work very closely with Parliament because of the history of the civil wars, and what a hostile relationship between the monarchy and Parliament has led to. And there’s also the backdrop of European conflict that’s going on - France is at war with the Netherlands, for example, and this puts England in a compromised position. They have to decide whether to ally with France, the country that had hosted Charles when he was in exile during interregnum, or the Netherlands, which is a Protestant country. Eventually, Louis XIV comes up with a master plan. He sends over a woman called Louise de Kérouaille, who Charles has met previously. He sends her over and essentially encourages her to become the next official royal mistress; she's paid by the French monarchy to encourage Charles to pursue friendly Anglo-French relations. And he's quite sympathetic to it, so it doesn't take much persuading. That sets the tone for those relations for a number of years. The other side to it is, when we think about Anglo-French relations, there's a political side and there's a cultural side. The political side is quite tense and moves with what’s happening on the continent and with the private factions in the English court, but the cultural side is that Restoration London is fairly Francophile. People are obsessed with the elegance of the French court. They want to copy the fashions. They want to practise their French language - people go to the Huguenot churches in London just to practise their French. They want to read the latest French novels. And unsurprisingly, there’s also a backlash to it, of people feeling like French culture is invading and pushing out British culture. There may be transtemporal resonances within that!
And all this is accompanied by a growing French presence in London. There are a number of French nobles starting to live their banishment out in Restoration London, and there’s the French Huguenot presence which swells after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which criminalises Protestantism in France. Andrew Marvell describes this French presence as the second Norman conquest; people are picking up this language of invasion and conquest. I think there's something interesting to be said there because a lot of these French people are coming to look for sanctuary rather than spoils - but it's a rhetorical trope. So in that respect, Mancini is a lone French migrant or exile living in London, but her exile is quite particular because she’s a woman who has left her husband. She’s actually not the only person who has done this when she arrives in London. In fact, Honoré Courtin, the French ambassador at the time, says that London is the city for all the wives embroiled against their husbands. London has a reputation for accommodating women who have left abusive marriages. But there are probably only three or four, it’s still a rare status to be living more in exile from your marriage than from your country.
Portrait of Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin by Godfrey Kneller. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HortenseManciniGodfreyKneller.jpg
Liv Bonsall
What happened to Mancini in the end? What provoked her fall from grace, if you can call it that?
Annalisa Nicholson
It’s complicated. To some extent, she was always unpopular, in certain factions. She’s the cousin of Mary of Medina, who is the wife of James the Duke of York, who will eventually be James II. James II and his wife, Queen Mary, are unpopular figures because they are Catholic. Charles II is unable to produce an heir, so there’s constant anxiety over the succession, with the knowledge that his Catholic younger brother is therefore the heir. Questions proliferate over what this means for the future, particularly England’s future. Hortense Mancini, being the cousin of Mary of Medina, is aligned with this family. James II has a very brief reign before being forced to flee during the Glorious Revolution, and when William III takes the throne with Mary, there are numerous calls for Mancini to be expelled from the kingdom. And she manages to ride that out, but it does threaten her salon; they try to force her to leave the rooms that she has near St. James's Palace where she hosts it. So at some point in the 1690s, she has to move - first to Kensington, and then to Chelsea. Around this time, she develops a problem with alcoholism. In about 1699, it becomes quite serious, and eventually she dies, by all accounts, having committed suicide. It's described, sort of enigmatically, as her taking a particular concoction of liquids that is well known to cause death when ingested together.
I think some historians have, unfortunately, taken very odd stances on Mancini’s suicide, coming up with all sorts of reasons such as her being so depressed because she had been a beautiful woman in her 20s and couldn’t cope in her 40s. Someone else has pathologized her as entering menopausal depression and not being able to cope. To me, none of these seem particularly plausible. Instead, I came across a number of letters, written before her death, which describe her daughter's deportation from London - one of Mancini’s daughters had come to London to see her mother, and it's a bit of a long-winded story, so I won't go into it. But she had also left her husband, and was seeking out a mother who had done the same, and the daughter was definitely deported on royal orders. It does seem that there were a number of rumours at the time that the daughter had engaged in a relationship with Mancini's lover, and that Mancini herself had requested her daughter’s deportation. And I think this could have been a very traumatic event for Mancini at this time - not only the betrayal of the daughter, but also the loss of the daughter in the deportation, and also the scandal surrounding the whole situation. So in 1699, eventually, Mancini dies, almost certainly from suicide. But even after her death, tributes pour in from all parts of Restoration society. So, on the one hand, she was unpopular in certain parts, but on the other hand, the tributes testify to the loss that people feel with the news of her death.
Liv Bonsall
Why do you feel that studying Mancini, in particular, is important? What kind of impact do you hope your studies, focusing on both Mancini and early modern women in general, will have today?
Annalisa Nicholson
Mancini is a very important figure in a number of fields that chime, I think, with some of our concerns today. She's a very important figure in the history of women's emancipation, as somebody who leaves an abusive marriage, as somebody who tries to fight for separation from her husband, and then as a woman who writes this story in her memoirs. That's a very significant contribution. Her legal case and her memoirs prompted the English philosopher Mary Astell to write a text called Some Reflections upon Marriage, where there's a more focused exploration of the legal and social inequalities in marriage for women.
Mancini is also a very important figure in the history of celebrity, which definitely appeals to us today, particularly as celebrity tends to be thought of as something very new, something very particular to our time, and we ask ourselves why our culture seems to be so oriented around the cult of celebrity. But there's a much longer history that possibly offers some answers on this.
I also think her story is very important in the context of the social history of suicide. She is a woman who commits suicide, having lived an extraordinarily difficult life, but she is also an aristocratic woman; her death can’t be hushed up or forgotten about. So there's a lot there to grapple with, again, because for so long, taboos around suicide almost silenced conversations about it. Looking at an historical example of this reveals a lot about the way that suicide has been treated in the 18th century, the 19th century, and then the 20th century. Put together, all of those reasons fit into French history more generally: women in French history, salon history, and how French history intersects with British history.
Liv Bonsall
Your PhD on Mancini and her salon has obviously been a huge project. (How) have you been staying motivated during lockdown?
Annalisa Nicholson
There have definitely been days where I have not been motivated in lockdown and I think that's normal. In fact, even if there wasn't a lockdown, some days I wouldn’t be very motivated. I have been doing some of the cliché things, like yoga, and I did a knitting course. I read a lot of very easy fiction, too, best-selling stuff. And I suppose you can stay motivated by the hopes of things to come! I genuinely have no wisdom for it, to be quite honest, except taking it one day at a time, and leaving the house every time the sun even peeps through the clouds. You never know when it's going to come back again.
Liv Bonsall
And finally, what advice would you give to students considering a PhD?
Annalisa Nicholson
My advice would be to pick a topic that you love. By that I don’t mean that you have to love or even like the particular figures (if it's about people), or that you have to be an adherent of an idea (if it’s philosophy). I mean pick something you love to read about, and you love to learn about, because if you pick a topic that you really, really enjoy studying, eventually you will find a gap in the scholarship and the bonus is that you really enjoy doing it. There's always going to be a focus on doing something that scholarship hasn't yet done, but it helps if you also really enjoy it. A PhD is not only at least three years of reading and writing on that subject, but it's also attending conferences, meeting people in those subject areas and talking to people about it, who maybe aren't in those subject areas. So it does help if you're at least enthusiastic about it before you start. Initially, I wanted to work on the famous French salonnière, or salon hostess, Madeleine de Scudéry, who is a much bigger figure in French history than Hortense Mancini. This was because I was really into women's writing and its origins. And someone said to me, ‘Everyone writes on Scudéry, don't do that’. This was during my master's. So I took out all the books in the library on women's writing in France, and eventually found Hortense Mancini. That’s one way to do it. I didn't have a plan. It was ‘Go for what you want to do - if you want to work with women, go read as much as you can and you will stumble across something that will be perfect material’. Then you already have some energy for it on those days where you're feeling less than motivated.
