Under intense pressure from the king and Madame du Barry’s cabal, three months later the comtesse de Béarn kept her part of the bargain and presented the royal mistress at Versailles. The rooms were packed with courtiers hoping to witness an utter failure. Madame du Barry was late, but when she did arrive even her most bitter enemies gasped at her beauty. She was wearing one hundred thousand livres worth of diamond jewelry and a court gown of silver and gold cloth, with huge panniers and a long sweeping train which she managed gracefully to kick out of the way to make her three backward curtsies. If they had hoped to see an oafish street urchin, they were disappointed. Madame du Barry’s graceful refinement was equal to that of the most inbred duchess.
Nevertheless, for much of her six-year tenure as mistress, Madame du Barry was ostracized by courtiers. When she sat down at a card table, the other seats remained eerily empty. When she gave a party, no one came. Finally, the king ordered courtiers to attend her parties.
Her greatest challenge came when the king’s grandson, the future Louis XVI, received as his bride the fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette, daughter of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. Strong-willed, beautiful, and charming, the new dauphine stole the king’s heart and despised Jeanne du Barry. She demanded that she, as dauphine, be the first lady at court, and snubbed the king’s mistress socially, despite gentle remonstrances from Louis. Courtiers enjoyed this spectacle of two females—a highborn princess and a prostitute—duking it out for the king’s affections.
Finally, after two years Marie Antoinette’s refusal to say even a word to the favorite became an international scandal. The king, Empress Maria Theresa, and the Austrian ambassador to France finally prevailed on the dauphine to say publicly a few polite words to Madame du Barry. At a carefully orchestrated event, the chastened princess coolly remarked to the maîtresse-entitre, “There are a lot of people today at Versailles.”8 The king and his mistress were gushingly grateful. Strained relations between Austria and France were improved, but Marie Antoinette’s hatred of Madame du Barry intensified. She was never invited to join the dauphine’s youthful, fun-loving entourage, which soon became the center of court social life.
Madame de Pompadour, detested toward the end, was now sanctified by the white pall of virtue that death often brings to the departed no matter how scandalous their earthly sins. The living, however, are doomed to suffer for their transgressions, and a former prostitute gracing the gilded halls of Versailles revolted the French populace. Writing pornographic poetry and bawdy songs about the favorite became a new national pastime. During her final months as royal mistress in 1774, Madame du Barry had become so unpopular that she feared entering Paris. Mobs, who called her the “Royal Whore,” attacked her carriage. They saw her lavish lifestyle as the cause of high unemployment, staggering taxes, and a shortage of bread. One courtier wrote that her entertainments “were carried to such an indecent pitch of luxury as to insult the poverty of the people.”9
For many years after the king’s death, Madame du Barry lived a quiet life in a country manor outside of Versailles. Rich from her tenure as royal mistress, she entertained visitors from across Europe who came to look at the face that had bewitched a king. A Versailles courtier enjoying her hospitality told her apologetically, “There was no hatred but we all wanted to have your place.”10
“I am the Protestant whore”
When Charles II was invited to ascend the English throne in 1660, his riotous living was a charming contrast to a decade of the deadly dull Puritan Protectorate. But within a few years, many God-fearing Englishmen decried the debauchery of the court, protesting—perhaps with a bit too much ardor—that the king wasted time with his mistresses “feeling and kissing them naked all over their bodies in bed.”11
Charles’s first royal mistress, Lady Castlemaine, often experienced the stabs of public anger. “Give the King the Countess of Castlemaine and he cares not what the nation suffers,” they said.12 After the birth of her fourth child by the king in as many years, some English subjects thought that enough was enough. One evening as she was walking across St. James Park she was accosted by three men who called her a vile whore and reminded her that two hundred years earlier Jane Shore, the mistress of King Edward IV, had died alone and detested on a pile of manure.
In 1665 while staying with the court in Oxford, Lady Castlemaine gave birth to her fifth child and soon after found an insulting verse nailed to her door in Latin and English, referring to the punishment of ducking immoral women in water:
The king posted a reward of one thousand pounds to find the perpetrators, but no one came forward.
In 1668 a group of London apprentices pulled down some infamous brothels and threatened to pull down the biggest brothel of all, Whitehall Palace, home of King Charles. Soon after, a mock petition was published titled “Petition of the Poor Whores to the Most Splendid, Illustrious, Serene and Eminent Lady of Pleasure, the Countess of Castlemaine,” begging for her influence on their behalf for “a trade wherein your Ladyship has great experience.”14 As Lady Castlemaine stormed and raged, someone then published a “Gracious Answer” to the poor whores, purportedly written by none other than the king’s mistress herself.
Lady Castlemaine’s replacement, Louise de Kéroualle, was known to be an avid supporter of French policy, no matter what disadvantages it might offer England, and an agent for French king Louis XIV. The English people were appalled at their king’s giving her English citizenship and granting her ducal honors. They deeply resented in wartime the cash, jewels, and subsidies he laid at her feet. One day Louise found the following rhyme tacked to the door of her palace apartments:
Louise had the misfortune to be a Catholic mistress in a strongly Protestant country during a time when religious hatred was flaring. King Charles’s mother was Catholic, his younger brother James had converted, and it was suspected—rightly—that Charles himself was a secret Catholic. The Protestant populace lived in fear of regressing to the age, only 120 years earlier, when Bloody Mary burned heretics in the marketplace.
Englishmen were infuriated by the idea of a foreign Catholic mistress whispering blandishments into the ear of their wavering king. They looked back wistfully to the time of Lady Castlemaine, remarking with pride that she had been the best whore of all—delivering countless royal bastards, cleverly bleeding the treasury dry, and boasting English birth to boot.
Matters came to a head in 1680 with a firestorm of riots between Catholics and Protestants in the streets. The pope was burned in effigy almost daily. The French ambassador wrote Louis XIV that the new Parliament would demand Louise’s exile from court, and that she would very likely be imprisoned in the Tower and possibly executed. Protestant leaders attempted to charge Louise with being a common whore before a grand jury. Luckily for Louise, the judge threw the case out of court.
If English commoners were shocked at Charles’s choice of Louise de Kéroualle, courtiers were more shocked at the advent of lowborn Nell Gwynn. The earl of Arlington, one of the king’s ministers, told the French ambassador that “it was well for the King’s good servants that His Majesty should have a fancy for Mademoiselle Kéroualle, who was not of an evil disposition and was a lady. It was better to have dealings with her than with lewd and bouncing orange-girls and actresses, of whom no man could take the measure.”16