Andrew Taylor on Royal Intrigues and Charles II's French Mistress

History rarely repeats itself but it’s certainly a place of familiar echoes. One of them is the ruthlessness which men bring to the pursuit of power. Another is their desire to possess beautiful young women, and to do so on their own terms. 

Occasionally society holds such men to account - Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein are recent examples - but often the usual rules of decent behaviour do not apply. Which brings us to Charles II and Louise de Keroualle, the king’s principal mistress during the second half of his reign. The carefully orchestrated intrigue that led to Louise’s seduction forms the historical backbone of The Shadows of London, the sixth Marwood-and-Lovett historical thriller.

Charles was nearly twenty years older than Louise. He had a well-deserved European reputation as a philanderer. Given his position, it was difficult for any woman to resist him. (One object of his attentions was forced to elope with someone else in order to escape the determined royal advances.) 

But Louise de Keroualle had an additional problem. Several powerful men were quietly conspiring behind the scenes to make her the king’s mistress. She was vulnerable to their pressure as well as the king’s. 

Convent-bred, Louise came from an aristocratic but impoverished Breton family. A friend had found the young girl a place as a maid of honour to Minette, the Duchess of Orleans - whose brother was Charles II. The hope was that, moving in the highest circles, she would make an advantageous marriage. The problem was, though she was an acknowledged beauty, she had no fortune of her own. If she couldn’t marry money, she would be forced to enter a convent.

When Minette died suddenly in 1670, Charles offered to provide a home for those ladies of his sister’s household who would otherwise be cast adrift. Louise arrived in England in the autumn of that year to take up her new post as a maid of honour to Queen Catherine. But all was not quite as it seemed. 

Monsieur Colbert de Croissy, the French ambassador, wanted Louise to become Charles’s mistress as soon as possible. It was thought that pillow-talk would provide a useful source of intelligence and also offer an indirect way for the French to influence the king’s actions. 

Both King Louis XIV and the French foreign secretary were actively behind this scheme. So was Lord Arlington, Charles’s most powerful minister, who had recently helped negotiate a highly controversial and partly secret alliance between England and France. Quite possibly Charles himself was aware of it too - he was no fool - but he was perfectly willing to go along with an intrigue that would help him attain his goal. 

Penniless, homeless, reliant on royal patronage, Louise had no one to protect her interests. Despite the forces ranged against her, she held out for nearly a year before succumbing to the king’s advances at Euston Hall, Arlington’s palatial country house. 

With some justification, history has given Louise a bad press. So did her contemporaries. Once installed as the king’s mistress, she proved single-mindedly greedy in her pursuit of influence and hard cash. 

On the other hand, who can blame her for that? In the months that led up to her seduction, she must have felt powerless in the face of the men who controlled her destiny. There was no #MeToo movement to come to her defence. 

We shouldn’t judge her. She wasn’t the culprit here. She was the victim.