SYMHC Classics: Mancini Sisters

Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we are going to talk about a pair of sisters who, along with their other sisters and their cousins, get a lot of comparisons to whatever influencer, slash media celebrity is making the most headlines at any given moment. Like over the past few years, I've seen a lot of people call

them the seventeenth century Kardashians. They are Hortense and Marie Mancini, and they tried to make a place for themselves in the seventeenth century in Europe, really defying all kinds of conventions along the way. We mentioned them extremely briefly, like just a couple of sentences way back when we interviewed Jason Porath about his book and website Rejected Princesses in twenty sixteen, so they've had not even like a six impossible episodes level of exploration. It just really is just

like paragraph. A thing to note upfront with this episode is that I love a lot of these two women's stories. There are big chunks of their lives that are a really wild ride, and they sound full of adventure and daring and writing memoirs and hosting salons and becoming the favorites of various monarchs. But really a lot of this was also happening as they were trying to get away from their husbands, both of whom were controlling and abusive

and just frightening. And this was all happening in an era when women just really didn't have the right to get a divorce from a bad marriage. So I can see how just that whole setup would be very troubling to people. We're also going to talk a little bit about some pregnancy loss, and there are some very young marriages in this story, even to the point of seeming inordinately young given the time period. This is a heads up, so Hortense and Marie Mancini were two of the women

known as the Mazarinets. They were the nieces of Cardinal Jule's Mazzarins, chief minister of France. So we need to talk a little bit about him. Just set the stage. He was born Julio Mazzarini in Naples in sixteen oh two, and he changed his name after moving to France, where he became an advisor and eventually chief minister to King

Louis the thirteenth. In sixteen forty one, Mazarin was named a cardinal and he was one of the people present at the baptism of the dauphin the future King Louis the fourteenth, who of course also became known as the son. King Louis the thirteenth died in sixteen forty three, and that was when Louis the fourteenth was still a child and the young king's mother, Anne of Austria, became his regent.

She and Mazarin did not initially get along. There was some butting of heads, but he was so charming and persuasive they eventually became very close, so close that there were rumors that the two of them were secretly married. Now there is a whole swath of history that we're kind of skipping over here, including the Thirty Years War and Mazarin being exiled for a while and a series

of civil wars in France known as the Fronde. But eventually Mazarin became one of the most powerful people in France, which it's he was one of the most powerful countries in Europe. He had also become extremely wealthy, with money and titles and land to pass down to an air.

He had no children of his own, though his one surviving nephew had a reputation as an irresponsible libertine, so Mazarin did not think that this would be a great candidate for his successor, so he really focused on his seven nieces, moving all of them from what's now Italy to France and managing their educations to make sure that they would be witty and cultured and personable able to fit into French society, and then he arranged advantageous marriages

for all of them to build a legacy for himself that way. Five of Mazarin's nieces were the daughters of Hieronima and Lorenzo Mancini. That included Hortense and Marie, who were going to come back to you. Their sister laur Victoire, married Louis de Vendome, Duke de Mercueur, who was King Henry the Fourth's grandson. Sadly, she died at the age of twenty, shortly after giving birth to their third son. Another sister, Olimpe, married Eugene Maurice of Savoy Contes Soisson.

The youngest mancini sister, Marie Anne, married goud Froid Maurice de la Tour d'auvel, Duke of Bouillon. Mazarin's two other nieces were the two daughters of Girolamo Martinozzi and Laura Margherita Mazzarini. They were Anne Marie, who married Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and Laura, who married Alfonse the fourth dest Duke of Modena. In addition to Hortense and Marie, some of these women wound up being famous and even

notorious in their own ways. There were court scandals and affairs with kings, and, in the case of Olampe and Marie Anne Mancini, allegations of poisoning people. During the Affair of the Poisons, as its name suggests, the fare of the poisons, involved poisonings and alleged poisonings, and allegations of people using black magic and love potions to try to sway the King. Previous hosts of the show did an episode on this. It came out on January nineteenth of

twenty eleven. We're not running this one as a Saturday Classic because it's in the middle of a series that they did on the House of Bourbon. It builds on the previous episodes that they had released over the prior couple of weeks. It was just a little bit more in medius race than we would generally try to do. I think you can follow it. It just was a little like, it's not quite a standalone right right, So we didn't want to stick it into the feed by itself.

Marie Mancini was born Anna Maria Mancini on August twenty eighth, sixteen thirty nine. Her younger sister, Hortense, was born Ortensia Mancini on June sixth, sixteen forty six. In spite of the seventh gap in their ages, these two sisters became very close. In sixteen fifty four, when Marie was fifteen

and Hortense was eight. Their caregivers judged them as being ready to start making their way into French society, but when Mazarin met with them, he disagreed with that assessment, and he sent them to a convent together for another eighteen months for further study and refinement, just in case anyone is wondering, why are you not saying her name or Tense as she might have said it in French.

She eventually moved to Britain, and everybody new his Hortense, and it seemed weird to change pronunciations part way through the episode. Neither of these sisters was considered to be particularly exceptional when they were very young. In her younger years, Marie was described as awkward and uncooperative, while Hortense was pretty and charming, but also described in terms like apathetic

and insignificant. Seventeenth century French writer Madame Lafayette wrote of Hortense quote, she was not only the most beautiful of the cardinal's nieces, but she was the most beautiful of all the court beauties. Had she been gifted with more intelligence and a greater vivacity of manner, she would have been perfect. Not that everyone considered that a weak point for her. For many people found her careless attitude and

languid manner a distinct attraction. Once they got to court, Marie caught the eye of one particular man, the King Louis the fourteenth, with the two teens becoming deeply devoted to one another. So this might sound like a pretty great development, considering that Cardinal Mazarin was trying to marry his nieces to high ranking men. Marie's father was a baron, so marrying the king would have been an enormous step up. But Louis needed to marry royalty, ideally someone who could

solidify an alliance between France and another powerful country. By sixteen fifty nine, when the king was twenty and Marie was nineteen, he was begging to be allowed to marry her, and meanwhile his mother and her uncle were working to separate them. Marie was finally sent away from court in the company of her sisters Hortens and mary Anne. Reportedly, the last thing she said to him was quote, Sire, I am leaving you to weep, and yet you are king.

In spite of efforts to keep them apart, Louis and Marie kept up a continual secret correspondence including sending one another gifts. One of these gifts was a puppy sent from Louis to Marie with a caller that said, I belonged to Marie. I would have been pretty hard to keep secret. Yeah, just gonna keep a puppy secret from everybody. In the ends, a marriage was arranged between King Louis the fourteenth of France and Maria Teresa and Fanta of

Spain and arch Duchess of Austria. Their marriage part of the Peace of the Pyrenees, which ended the Franco Spanish War. Louis managed to arrange a brief visit to Marie on his way to make the final marriage negotiations, and during this visit the two of them had a bunch of very sad, apologetic like teen romance conversations, most of them

happening in front of her sister Hortense. Then, after Louis was married, Marie and Hortense followed a process that was outlined in Ovid's Cures for Love, to ritually get rid of anything that might remind her of him or otherwise

soothe her heartbreak. Meanwhile, Mazarin was working on arranging a marriage for Marie, not just to try to put a final end to her feelings of the king, but also because his own health was declining and he wanted to make sure all of his nieces were settled before he died. Marie's marriage contract to Italian Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna was signed on February twenty first, sixteen sixty one. Hortense was

married very soon after. Like her sister, she had already captured the interest of someone much more powerful than she or her family, and that was Charles the Second of England at the time, though he was not on the throne of England, he was in exile in France, having fled England during the English Civil Wars. Charles actually proposed to Hortense, But unlike her sister and Louis the fourteenth, the issue wasn't that Charles really needed to make a

royal marriage alliance. It was that Cardinal Mazarin did not think it was very likely that Charles was actually going to get to return to the British throne, so he declined this offer. He was like, no, I'm not marrying my niece to a deposed king. Would the point of that be? However, Charles was indeed restored as monarch in sixteen sixty, which was not long after all of this happened,

made a mistake. Instead, Hortense married mon Charles de la Bertai, who had been considered a suitor for some of her sisters, but who had always been particularly interested in Hortense like interested in a way that multiple people commented on as disturbing and frankly inappropriate. He had been fixated on her since she was nine, and he was about fourteen years older than she was. When they married on March first of sixteen sixty one, he was twenty nine and she

was just fourteen. Mazarin's acceptance of this proposal seems to have been largely based on the fact that he thought Armand would take care of his estates and his fortune. He had decided that the vast majority of that fortune was going to go to whoever Hortense married, and that person would also become the Duke of Mazarin and inherit

Mazarin's other titles. Armand was deeply religious and mature and responsible, so the Cardinal didn't think he was likely to just fritter away his inherent or otherwise make an embarrassment of his legacy armand came into that inheritance really quickly. Cardinal Jules Mazarin died on March ninth, sixteen sixty one, just days after the wedding. We're going to talk more about

all of this after a sponsor break. In some ways, Marie and Hortense Mancini's marriages were similar at first, especially in that both of them were very focused on having babies and particularly on trying to have a male heir. After recovering from a serious illness and then experiencing a miscarriage, Marie gave birth to three sons, Filippo, Marcantonio, and Carlo, who were born in sixteen sixty three, sixteen sixty four,

in sixteen sixty five. Hortense had four babies in five years, Marie Charlotte in sixteen sixty two, Marie Anne in sixty teen sixty three, Maria lamp in sixteen sixty five, and Paul Joule's in sixteen sixty six. But in other ways, the early years of their marriages were almost completely opposite from one another. It became clear pretty much immediately that Hortense's husband, the new Duke Mazarin, was a religious fanatic

to the point of being really irrational. He micromanaged minute details of the lives of people who lived on the land that he managed, arguing that by doing so he was going to save their souls. And this included things like trying to get the milkmaids to spend less time milking because he thought they might find it erotic, and believing that churning milk into butter was immodest and could lead to arousal sounds like the milkmaids are not the problem.

He ordered mothers to teach their babies too fast by refusing to nurse them on Fridays. When a fire broke out at the palace, he ordered the servants who put it out to be flogged, and he flogged some of them of himself, because he thought that they had interfered with the will of God. He was also extremely possessive

and controlling of virtually everything about Hortense's life. By the terms of her uncle's will, they were enormously wealthy as a couple, but almost none of that wealth was exclusively hers. The only thing of material value that was actually considered her property and only hers, was her jewelry, which her husband tried to confiscate from her because he said that it was going to lead her into temptation. In terms of Marie's marriage, there were some ways that her husband,

Lorenzo could be controlling. For example, he blamed her pregnancy loss on her love of riding horses, and when she got pregnant again, he forced her to give up riding and to be carried on a sedan chair. But unlike Hortense's husband who tried to lock her away and keep her from anything that might be a temptation, Marie's husband wanted to show her off, hosting masks, balls and salons

and lavish galas. They became patrons of the arts, theater, and culture, and they spent lots of time in Venice, where they crossed paths with past podcast subject Christina of Sweden. But Marie's relationship with her husband seems to have really deteriorated. Around the time of her pregnancy with their third son. He had an affair with another woman who gave birth to a child that everyone knew was his. Then Marie had a really difficult delivery and she was worried that

she wouldn't survive another pregnancy. That combined with her mortification over her husband's affair to lead her to try to put an end to their physical relationship. Lorenzo, of course, was not happy about that idea at all. Meanwhile, Hortense, having provided her husband with a male heir, was trying to end her physical relationship with him as well. Armand had become incredibly controlling and paranoid about preconceivable thing, all

within this framework of extreme religious piety. When Hortense started trying to avoid him, all of that got worse. And contrary to what Cardinal Mazarin had expected, Armand was not being that careful with his inheritance. He gave huge amounts of money away to the church and charities, and he bought land that wasn't really going to pay off as an investment. Hortense thought that they were going to wind up with nothing, and in sixteen sixty six she started

trying to legally separate their assets. This wasn't the same thing as dissolving the marriage. She was just trying to kind of partition off some of their money so that it was under her control, just so Armand couldn't spend it all. When Armand said that they should pull out their daughter's front teeth so that men would not find them tempting. Hortense fled to her sister, Alemp. Alemp promised to try to protect the children, but she also didn't really want to bring her sister in to live with

them full time. So a lamp tried to mediate between Hortense and armand Hortense did not think their issues could be reconciled, and when her husband said that she could either live with one of her sisters or go to a convent, she went to the convent. While in the convent, Hortense developed an intense relationship with the Marquise mariei Donis

de Carcel, who was there under charges of adultery. She was seventeen and Hortense was twenty one, and together the two of them ran roughshod over the nuns who were essentially acting as their jailers, including playing a whole lot of pranks, like putting ink in the holy water. That's funny. It really sounds almost like a weird comedy about a boarding school, like playing pranks on the teachers. Marie Sony helped Hortense with her legal filings, and eventually Hortense did

get a partial victory. The court order that her husband grant her a pension of twenty thousand livres a year and to document what he was doing with all of their money. She was also supposed to return back to their home while her husband, who was the grand Master of Artillery, would instead live at the Arsenal of Paris. Hortense left the convent, but Armand refused to do any of the things he had been ordered to do, and also destroyed the theater that Hortense had used to stage

small productions at their home while she was away. Meanwhile, Maurice Donis reconciled with her husband, and that was something that made Hortense so jealous that she told him that Maurice Doni had been receiving secret visits from another man. This led to a duel between Maurice Donise's husband and her lover, after which both of them were imprisoned for

violating the prohibition on dueling. In the face of Armand's increasingly erratic and frightening behavior, Hortense moved from trying to legally separate their assets into a formal separation from their marriage, and on June thirteenth, sixteen sixty eight, she fled to Italy, with the help of her brother Philippe and a friend of theirs, the Chevalier of Rohan. She left her children behind, hoping that she would be better able to advocate for them Away from her husband. She took a couple of

servants with her, disguised as men. This was just not done. Women of her social class did not leave their husbands, and they certainly did not travel without male escorts. The trip itself involved a perilous journey through the Alps. In Milan, Hortense reunited with her sister Marie, who had come out

from Rome with her husband. Lorenzo wanted to go back home immediately, but Hortense and Marie convinced him to stop in Siena for a couple of weeks instead, and there they spent their time riding and hunting, apart from the social norms that Hortense had really abandoned here. This was basically an international incident, with Hortense, a duchess, fleeing her home in France to join her sister, whose husband was

an Italian prince. Hortense also quickly started having an affair with the Chevalier of Rohann's squire, which was yet another layer of scandal, and also came across as a huge annoyance to Marie and Lorenzo. They were sort of like, we're trying to help you out, and you're having this public affair with the squire, why are you doing this? More generally, though, Lorenzo was annoyed with his wife Marie.

They were both living fairly separate lives by this point, but he was increasingly frustrated by how much money she spent on things like artwork and improvements to their home and cultural projects, and as well as the many, many outings that she took with her sister. In sixteen seventy one, Marie got really sick and people thought her husband was poisoning her than while the Chevalier's squire also accused Philippe and the Chevalier of trying to poison him. This was

during the whole affair of the poisons era. There was a lot there's a whole lot of poison going on, poisoning and accused poisoning and potential poisoning happening. A marriage was arraigned for Philip that year, and Hortense went with him to Paris to try to get some kind of legal resolution to her marriage. Her husband was irate when he heard how Hortense had been spending her time in Rome.

She and her sister had filled their time with parties and masked balls and musical performances, with Hortons being so popular with men that two of them allegedly fought a duel over her armand called for Hortense's arrest, but city officials refused to do it, and he became so irate that he destroyed a lot of their art collection. He smashed the genitals of the statues with a hammer and cut them out of paintings with scissors. King Louis the

fourteenth was upset about this. In addition to the King's love of and patronage for art, the king and other people also considered this art collection that had been destroyed to have been a national treasure. So whatever goodwill people might have had for Armand at this point really have oporated. In France. At this time, divorce as we know it today really didn't exist. There was a process for separating

a couple's assets. Hortense had already tried that, and separac de coeurs, or physical separation, in which a couple were still technically married but lived legally separated lives. But this was not common at all, and a lot of people were still pushing for some kind of reconciliation between Hortense and Ormond. Hortense proposed that she be allowed to live in a convent with servants that she chose and the freedom to come and go, based on what had happened

with Maurice Donis de crocell. The abbesses at the convents proposed as options were pretty wary of this whole idea. He did not want any more ink in the holy water. Finally, still without the settlement that she wanted, Hortons left Paris again. She returned to her sister in Rome in May of sixteen seventy one, and then about a year later, both of them fled. We're going to talk more about that

after we paused for a sponsor break. Marie Mancini's relationship with her husband Lorenzo had clearly been deteriorating for a long time before she fled from Rome with her sister Hortons on May twenty ninth of sixteen seventy two. She was afraid of her husband, and she admired her sister's will to have left her own husband Armand. But if there was like some specific last straw that prompted Marie to decide to leave, like noted anywhere mystery, it may

have just come to that point. The Mansini sisters wanted to travel unobtrusively, so they didn't take much with them, apart from some money and jewelry and a letter of safe passage from King Louis the fourteenth. The sisters and two maids all warman's clothing under their dresses, and they took a valet with them as well. They took steps to try to throw people off the trail, like getting a carriage and loudly talking about where they were going when really they were headed to a boat to make

their escape by water. Meanwhile, Lorenzo kept sending people to find them and trying to put barriers in the way of their escape, like spreading the word that people should not give the sisters any kind of shelter or allow them to pass through areas where he thought they were headed.

He also petitioned King Louis the fourteenth to intervene. Both Lorenzo and Armand worried about how their wives' behavior would reflect on them, and there were broader concerns about how the sisters might inspire other women in unhappy or abusive marriages to also leave have feelings. As the Vansini sisters headed for France, this was once again an international incident.

Marie really thought that if she could go speak to King Louis the fourteenth in person, that he might support her petition to leave her husband, but she couldn't get permission to actually go. Once they were traveling over land again, the two women traveled by post with the hope that they would be harder to track, but the king sent messengers to the post stations, telling them to refuse to give the sisters horses. That was something that the sisters

overcame with bribes. After some close calls, Hortense and Marie decided to split up, with Marie traveling through France and Horton's going to Chambray, which today is part of France but at the time was part of the independent Duchy of Savoy. There she found a patron with Charles Emmanuel, the second Duke of Savoy, who had actually been one of the men whose offer of marriage Hortense's uncle had

not accepted many years before. This Duke seems to have thought that Hortense would liven up his court, which she eventually did, but first she spent a stretch of time mostly in prayer and reflection and writing a whole lot of letters. King Louis the fourteenth had offered her some financial support, and so she wrote a lot of letters to the king to try to maintain his good will even though she had done something as scandalous as leaving

her husband. She also wrote letters to her sister's husband to try to convince him that Marie's leaving had been her own decision, not something that Hortense had forced her or caused her to do. Towards the end of Hortense's time in Savoy, when she was twenty nine, she wrote her memoirs. These were published in sixteen seventy five under the title Memoir dm LDM or Memoir de Madame de

ces de Mazarin. There was already so much rumor and gossip about her life and her relationship with her husband that she just decided to put her own side of the story out there publicly and in print. This made her one of the first women in Europe to publish her own story under her own name. And for a

general audience rather than just for her family and friends. Meanwhile, Marie was trying to evade various messengers that she knew were carrying orders for her to stop where she was, just basically like, if they don't find me, I don't have to stop. One of them did finally catch up to her, though, and then she was presented with a series of proposals that would involve her returning to her husband.

She rejected all of those and said that she wanted to enter a convent of her choice, something that she pointed out that thousands of other women had done after being widowed or otherwise separated from their husbands. Once she had made her whole position on this clear, she apparently picked up a guitar and started playing it as though she had just said all she had to say about

that and moved on. One of the accounts that I read said that she had kept this guitar with her the entire time since leaving Rome, But it also said that they left without a lot of luggage, so I'm not sure where the guitar came from, but I love that story. I liked the idea of the guitar being her version of la la, la la, I'm not listening

to you. Eventually, Marie was allowed to go to a convent in Lease, about forty miles outside of Paris, which is one of the convents Hortense had stayed in previously. At first, Marie had regular visits from her sisters Olimp and Marianne, and her husband sent some of her servants with some of her belongings that she had requested, but Lorenzo had sent one of those servants to act as a spy, and soon Marie was being allowed visits only

from her sisters. Marie later moved to another convent that was farther from Paris, but she was even less happy there. It wasn't as comfortable, and she said that the air was bad and made her sick. At one point, Marie arranged a visit to her sister Hortense, but Hortense seems to have intentionally avoided Marie by going on a trip to the country instead. I don't think this was just a case of bad timing. I think it was on purpose.

Hortense may have been worried that if she really welcomed her sister, she would run afoul of some of the good graces that at that point were keeping her relatively safe. But when Marie later wrote to Hortense asking for her protection, Hortense and the Duke of Savoy arranged for Marie to enter a convent in Turin. Marie was just really hoping to find a place where she would have a little

more comfort and autonomy. But after a really perilous journey through territory that was caught up in the Franco Dutch War in the winter, she wound up at a convent where she had even less freedom than she'd had before. After Hortense's memoirs were published, Marie got a copy. The memoirs had been so popular that other people started writing and publishing fake versions of their own. Some of these were wildly inaccurate about both sisters, including totally distorted versions

of Marie's experiences. So she followed in her sister's footsteps and she published her own memoir, The Truth in its Own Light or the Genuine Memoirs of m Mancini Constables Colonna. Around this time, Hortense was working on plans to leave Savoy. She and her staff just kind of weren't getting along with people anymore. As she was trying to make those arrangements. Though the Duke died suddenly on June twelfth, sixteen seventy five, at the age of only forty. The Duke's son, Victor

Amadeus the Second was only nine. Biddo was acting as regent, but she had really never been a fan of Hortense. She told Hortense that she was no longer welcome at the late Duke's court. The Duke's death was also a blow to Marie because even though she had not been living in Savoy, I'm not sure if these two ever even actually met, she had written him really often and

counted him as one of her allies. After the Duke's death, Hortense started making her way to England, where she had a cousin, and she got a letter from Ralph Montague passing on an invitation from Charles the Second. The Franco Dutch War was still ongoing, so Hortense's journey was perilous. She arrived on New Year's Eve sixteen seventy five. Charles

the Second, of course, was nicknamed the Mary Monarch. He was famous for having a whole lot of affairs, and as we said earlier, he was one of the people who had offered to marry Hortense Mancini decades before. She also had a reputation for being very charming and witty in a train and popular with men. So there were fears at court that the King might be a little bit overly interested in her, and that she might kind of throw off the balance of his other relationships and

this house of affairs cards would turn into chaos. These fears were founded. Soon the King and Hortense were having an affair, and he had granted her a pension. In sixteen seventy six, Hortense Mancini started hosting salons in England, ones that were open to women and gave them opportunities to learn and experience art and culture, free from many of the cultural restraints that were normally placed on them.

Her friend Charles des Saint Evermont acted as co host, and sometimes the two of them are credited with popularizing champagne in England. Charles imported it from France and they served it at the salon. Hortense also had a lot of pets, including dogs and cats, parrots and other exotic birds, and she had gambling tables, which led some people to

write off her salon as a gambling den. Hortense Mancini had affairs threw out her life away from her husband, and one of the most notorious was while she was in England. It was with Anne, Countess of Sussex, who was one of the King's illegitimate daughters. Although she was only fourteen and was already married to a man named Thomas Lennard, who was one of the gentlemen of the King's bedchamber. Neither Hortense nor Anne seemed upset by rumors that they were lovers, and they really did not try

to contradict them. One of the people who commented on this was Lady Chowers, who wrote this in a letter to her brother, Lord Ruth on December twenty fifth, sixteen seventy six, quote, Lady Sussex is not yet gone, but my lord is better and holds his resolution of going as soon as the weather breaks up to make good travailing.

She and Madame Massarin have privately learned to fence, and went down into Saint James Park the other day with drawn swords under their nightgowns, which they drew out and made several fine passes with to the admiration of several men. That was onlookers in the park. In another letter, she wrote, quote, Lady Sussex is mightily pleased with fox hunting and hair hunting,

but kisses Madame Mazarine's picture with much affection. Still, this might have been after Anne's husband demanded that she come back from Hortons's lodgings, and she was forcibly removed from there. Hortense had various other affairs, including a possible one with past podcast subject Afra Ben. Her relationship with the Count of Monaco eventually became public and close enough that King Charles called off his affair with her, but he wasn't so upset about it that he made her go back

to France instead. Hortense kept up an active social life in her house in Saint James's Park, including being reunited with Maurice Donis de Carcel when she came to visit Lundon. While Horten's was having what sounds like a pretty fabulous time in London. Marie made her way to Madrid and she moved into another convent. While there, she was reunited with her sons, who by now were teenagers. Her husband,

Lorenzo kept trying to restrict her movements. He seems to have kind of allowed her to go to Madrid, thinking that family members he had there would help keep her in line. But officials in Madrid seemed less inclined to do what Lorenzo wanted them to do. The Archbishop of Caesara wrote him a letter that said, in part quote, here, we do not treat our wives as you do in Italy. Your wish to put her in a prison is not

enough to see it done. But Lorenzo would not give up in his efforts to get her to return to their marriage, or, if not that, at least to be able to control her comings and goings. Eventually, he ordered her imprisonment in a medieval fortress in Seville known as the Alcazar, something even her detractors thought was too extreme because this was a cold, drafty place and this was

happening in the middle of winter. In sixteen eighty one, Lorenzo proposed that Marie enter the convent as a novice, meaning that she would be on her way to taking steps to becoming a nun, rather than just being sheltered in the convents. He said that he would be taking holy orders as well. Marie agreed to this although Lorenzo did not hold up his end of the bargain to take holy orders of his own. Meanwhile, back in England, Hortense had fallen under suspicion in the wake of the

Popish plot. This was not a real plot. It was based on fabricated allegations by Anglican clergyman Titus Oates that Jesuits were planning to assassinate Charles the second. Even though this was not true, a lot of people believed it, and since Hortense was Catholic and a foreigner, people began to dis trust her. Then, in sixteen eighty four, her nephew Philippe, who was her sister Olimp's son, challenged one of Hortense's admirers to a duel and killed him in France.

This was a huge scandal and people blamed Hortense for not being a better influence on him. Then, in February of sixteen eighty five, King Charles the Second died. His successor, James the Second and seventh, continued to support Hortense financially, but he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of sixteen

eighty eight. A year later, on April fifteenth, sixteen eighty nine, Marie's husband, Lorenzo and Offrio Colonna, died, and as a widow, Marie finally had some of the freedom that she had been trying to get for herself for most of her life. She reconnected with her sons and she traveled. She also reconnected with her old friend Ortensia Stella, who had been one of her ladies in waiting and who also was one of the women that Lorenzo had had an affair with.

Lorenzo and Ortensi Estella had two children that Lorenzo had formally recognized, and these two women each worked to help the other one out with various issues that were related to Lorenzo's estate. Well, we kind of both got in this mess. Possibly inspired by Lorenzo's death, Armand sued Hortense in sixteen eighty nine during a formal separation hearing. He vilified her as a gambler in Libertine, and the legal

arguments surrounding the hearing were published afterward. The case was decided in the Duke's favor, and Hortense was ordered to return to France, first to a convent and then to her husband, and she said she would rather die. It was not possible for Armand to force Hortense to return, though it might have been except that the Nine Years' War had started the year before and England and France

were at war with one another. Hortense just defied this order and stayed where she was, although she had to move into smaller and smaller lodgings as her money dwindled. By June of sixteen ninety nine, Hortense was described as increasingly depressed, including drinking too much, not eating enough, and deeply in debt. She died on July second, sixteen ninety nine. John Evelyn wrote about it in his diary on the eleventh, describing her as quote an extraordinary beauty and wit, but

dissolute and impatient of matrimonial restraint. After paying off her debts, Armand had Hortense's body embalmed and returned to France. He took it through what seems like an intentionally planned round about and very long route, traveling through places that he knew that she hated to get there. The drama uh Marie Vancini's last year seemed to have been more comfortable and happier than her sisters. She did not have much of her own but her sons were generous with her.

She traveled when things like the nine Years wore weren't making it too dangerous to do so. She died in Pisa on May eighth, seventeen fifteen, and she was buried there. She had asked to be buried wherever it was she happened to be when she died. Her first love, Louis the fourteenth, died a few months later. There are lots of books about Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini, and others of their sisters and the Affair of the Poisons that's

come up a couple times. One of the books that spocused just on Hortons and Marie is The King's Mistresses, The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna and her sister, Horton's Duchess Mazarin, that came out in twenty twelve. There's also a pretty new translation of their groundbreaking memoirs, which came out in two thousand and eight from the University of Chicago Press. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,

our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.