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.
Bribes and Gifts
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.