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The glittering world of le Grand Siècle, the “great” 17th Century, recalls the French political and cultural domination of Europe. The era evokes the luxury of the palace at Versailles, the elegance of the French court and the height of daring Baroque art and fashion throughout the continent. But this fabulous period is equally infamous for another reason: the proliferation of queer subcultures, especially among the well-heeled nobility of the age. It is within the upper crust of the ancien régime that we find a fascinating web of lesbian love across nations – one which involves an Italian princess, a French marquise and even an English countess.
This scandalous, sensual story takes observers of queer history through a continent and back, exposing both the limitations that queer women have faced since time immemorial, and how they defied convention with reckless abandon for the sake of love.
Age of Absolutism
Rare indeed is the historian who would point to the 17th century as an apogee for queer expression in Europe. Instead, a brief glance at the religious and socio-political dynamics of the age would suggest the opposite is closer to the truth. The court at Versailles, presided over by the era’s domineering monarch King Louis XIV of France, provided the political model of royal absolutism which defined the century and the one which followed. As the King himself summarized his own vision: “one king, one law, one faith.” That faith, in France at least, was an avowed Roman Catholicism (though by this point, Europe was effectively sliced into thirds among the Roman faith, Eastern Orthodoxy and the newly established Protestant monarchies).
None of these versions of Christianity, however, was friendly to the libertine excesses which became synonymous with the Baroque period. Here again, King Louis XIV himself took the lead: throughout his more than seventy years of rule, His Majesty took a bevy of beautiful mistresses under his wing (and into his bed). His fellow monarchs and his own court followed his lead – and they were hardly confined to heterosexual liaisons.
Past posts in this blog series have discussed the ribald queer subcultures present throughout the history of Versailles, spurred by none other than the King’s younger brother Philippe, Duc d’Orléans. But the King’s own son and apparently dozens of his noblemen were similarly engaged in “confréries” or “fraternities” of queer men. While such sexual acts were theoretically grounds for capital punishment during this period, persecution of the nobility for such crimes was apparently rare.
Les Lesbiennes
Which points to another recurrent question: what of the women?
Though the evidence for bisexual and lesbian women is thinner for this period than it is for men, it is far from nonexistent. Indeed, several prominent royals and noblewomen of various sexual and gender identities emerged from the 17th century. Previously featured among these include the renegade Queen Christina of Sweden and the bisexual swordswoman Julie d’Aubigny. Incidentally, both queer heroines had their own run-ins with the Sun King’s court in their illustrious lives.
But to what extent was love among women even understood, let alone acknowledged, during this theoretically repressive age? Louis Crompton writes that while lesbianism was hardly a common social construct, the notion of “women loving women” was well-established in literature by le Grand Siècle. He notes, for example, that the term les lesbiennes first appeared in the late 16th century as a synonym for “tribade”, the then-slur leveled at women who engaged in “masculinized” sexual acts with other women.[1]
Intriguingly, such acts were not always condemned in harsh terms (certainly not to the same degree as male homosexuality) by doctors and theologians of the day. This relative leniency usually resulted from differences in how dangerously subversive the perceived “bad” acts associated with fulfillment of lesbian desires were thought to be.
It was around this time, likewise, that the erotic poetry of Sappho was rediscovered by a wide European audience and offered in vernacular translations. Sappho’s writings, particularly those which allude to pining for other women, became the subject of profound controversy in the 17th century. Attempts to rewrite, edit and sanitize her work proliferated among the European educated elite.[2] In England, meanwhile, the work of multiple contemporary female poets in this period extolled the virtues of female adoration and desire – even without explicitly endorsing sexual gratification. Katherine Philips (1631 – 1664) and Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689), both leading lights of the literary age, were trailblazers in sapphic love as written word – and the latter may have gone further than that, as discussed in more detail below.[3]
Lesbianism and/or bisexuality among ladies was thus not a foreign concept in this period, even if it was still a censured one. But rules, after all, were made to be broken. Indeed, a particular cohort of high-born ladies excelled at breaking the rules of compulsory heterosexuality (which were as potent then as now) all while tearing up every other social convention along the way. One lady in particular was at the beating heart of an apparently passionate sapphic circle. She would become the scandal of the century.
La Duchesse
The indefatigable Hortense Mancini would enjoy a host of noble and royal relationships throughout her lifetime as she trod the pathway of life alongside Europe’s elites. Nothing less could be expected for the niece of the powerful Cardinal Mazarin, chief confidante and top advisor to Louis XIV for the first half of his lengthy reign. One of the great beauties of the age, the intelligent and audacious Hortense would emerge among the most infamous personalities of the Baroque period.
Born in Rome in June 1646, Hortense was among several children of Baron Lorenzo Mancini and Girolama Mazzarini, the aforementioned Cardinal’s sister. Hortense was just one of the “fair five sisters” who would each become influential wives and mistresses to men of high status in Italy, France and England throughout their lives.[4] Hortense’s elder sister, Marie, was considered the first lover of the youthful King Louis XIV. It was through Marie’s rising star at the French royal court that Hortense and her siblings would likewise rise to the skies.
But Hortense’s romantic affairs began inauspiciously; at first, she was courted by none other than the dispossessed King Charles II of England, then living in exile after his father’s ignominious execution by English parliamentary rebels. Hortense’s all-powerful uncle, however, refused the match by (incorrectly) assuming that the exiled monarch would never regain his throne. Had Hortense been allowed this match, it would have eventually made her the Queen of England.
Unfortunately, the teenager was instead wed to an older nobleman, Armand-Charles de la Porte de la Meilleraye, in March 1661 as her uncle’s dying wish to see her settled.[5] The newlyweds were promptly given the titles Duc and Duchesse Mazarin, putting them immediately in the highest ranks of European nobility with fantastic wealth at their disposal. Alas, it soon became clear that the match was wholly unsuitable for either partner.
It is with this marriage, or rather its destruction, that Hortense’s forays into bisexuality and sapphic love first occurred. Although Hortense would ultimately bear four children to the Duc between 1662 and 1666, her husband proved to be deeply unstable. Endlessly suspicious of his beautiful wife, he brought a borderline manic approach to religiosity to their unpleasant union. The Duc, for example, regularly destroyed valuable works of art if they dared to portray human figures in the nude.[6] Hortense had been a bright, vivacious light at the French court, but her austere and anxious husband seemed determined to squash all of who she had become. As one source describes her plight, “as wife of the Duc she also became one of the most hounded and unhappy wives of the hard-hearted 17th century.”[7]
Dangerous Liaisons
Fed up, and now in her early 20s, Hortense looked anywhere for an escape from the cruelties of her marriage. Sources differ on what exactly happened next, but Hortense found her way to a Parisian convent – either of her own free will to get far away from her husband, or as a result of his own attempts to confine her from the evil wiles he constantly suspected around her person.[8]
Either way, it was in the convent that Hortense’s first sapphic affair became public knowledge. Her lady friend, ally and assumed lover was the lovely Sidonie, Marquise de Courcelles, another young woman stuck in a toxic arranged marriage. The latter was confined to holy walls as a presumed adulteress, but she and Hortense soon became hotly involved with one another.[9] Whether or not that affair went beyond racing their dogs through the convent hallways and apparently causing minor floods with their shared baths is unclear – but Hortense’s later tacit admission of multiple affairs with women suggests there is little reason to doubt this was her first sapphic relationship.[10]
Indeed, the flummoxed Duc Mazarin certainly thought something salacious was afoot behind the nunnery’s grates. His embarrassing attempts to force her out of the convent and back into his safe keeping (all of which were thwarted by her powerful relations) finally convinced Hortense to abandon France for safer shores. It was perhaps just as well, for fresh arms awaited her wherever the now infamous beauty went.
“Myself in Cupid’s Chains…”
Undaunted and undeterred, Hortense would eventually wind her way back to Italy and then to the Kingdom of Savoy, where she started a sordid affair with the reigning Duc Charles-Emmanuel.[11] His demise in 1675, however, precipitated Hortense’s decision to leave continental Europe and seek refuge (and money) at the court of King Charles II. It was an ironic twist that the young girl who had been denied the chance to become his queen would instead become his mistress more than fifteen years later.
Charles II would not be the still-vivacious Hortense’s only conquest while in England; indeed, her memoirs and the wider historical record point to a number of affairs with notable English ladies of the era.[12]
One of these left a tantalizing trail of evidence not in the surviving rumors of the court, but rather in her own poetry. Aphra Behn was a trailblazing writer of the 17th century who specialized in what would today be considered sexually libertine and feminist prose – touching on a range of controversial and intimate topics, including romantic love among women. One of her poems published posthumously (perhaps because of its content) is titled “Verses designed by Mrs. A. Behn to be sent to a fair Lady that desired she would absent herself to cure her love.” Said poem is otherwise unequivocal in its meaning:
“The more I struggl’d, to my grief I found
Myself in Cupid’s chains more surely bound.”
Crompton says of these verses that they may be “the first in English in which one woman unambiguously declares her infatuation with another. As such it trod a dangerous line.”[13]
But was Hortense Mancini, who flitted about the same privileged social circles as Behn, among the objects of her desire? One of Behn’s surviving works certainly suggests thus is the case.
The prose in question is an “amatory novella” published in 1689 called The History of the Nun. To be sure, its subject matter – a renegade nun who breaks her vows to pursue love, but finds herself caught among a scandalous cast of characters, the constraints of societal expectations for noble ladies and possible crimes including murder – cannily reflects the real-life struggles of Hortense herself.
The introductory note seems to confirm the connection. It dedicates the novella to the “Most Illustrious Princess, The Dutchess of Mazarine.” It continues:
“I was impatient for an Opportunity, to tell Your Grace, how infinitely one of Your own Sex ador’d You, and that, among all the numerous Conquest, Your Grace has made over the Hearts of Men, Your Grace had not subdu’d a more intire Slave; I assure you, Madam, there is neither Compliment, nor Poetry, in this humble Declaration, but a Truth, which has cost me a great deal of Inquietude, for that Fortune has not set me in such a Station, as might justifie my Pretence to the honour and satisfaction of being ever near Your Grace, to view eternally that lovely Person.”[14]
To be sure, these verses could be viewed as indulgent, emphatic flattery to a potential patron or simply a noblewoman of exalted status. However, in light of how female sexual desire is featured in this particular narrative, and how central sapphic love appears in Behn’s other works, it is not unreasonable to suspect that Behn’s effusive praise pointed at a deeper and intimate personal connection.
Swordfights
If Aphra Behn was among Hortense’s hinted lady lovers who made England all the merrier for her stay, she was likely not alone. Now well into her 30s, Hortense’s bed remained a warm one for men and women alike.
One of these purported paramours was the child of her former suitor-turned-lover King Charles. Anne Fitzroy, so surnamed as the child of the King and his mistress Barbara Castlemaine, was reportedly one of six royal bastards born to the latter.[15] In this time period, royal illegitimate children could usually expect to marry well within the upper nobility. Accordingly, King Charles provided a regal dowry for his thirteen-year-old daughter – a staggering 20,000 pounds – when she was married to Thomas Lennard, Lord Dacre, in 1674.[16] The newlyweds were immediately ennobled as the Earl and Countess of Sussex, but their marriage would prove far from a fairytale.
Hortense Mancini, who came into Anne’s orbit when the latter was just fifteen, understood the pangs of being married as a teenager to a man wholly unsuitable to her sparkling personality. Regardless, the subsequent rumored affair between Anne and the Italian duchess (who was more than twice Anne’s age) was scandalous even by the libertine standards of the Restoration English court. It reportedly culminated in a famous public fencing duel between Anne and Hortense – on friendly terms, perhaps even more than friendly. The two noblewomen, clad in nothing but sheer nightgowns, sparred in the moonlight of St. James Park.
Like the Duc Mazarin years before, the Earl of Sussex found it nigh impossible to curb his young wife’s behavior, though not for lack of effort. The Earl, apparently having suspected a lesbian affair between his wife and Mancini, used the dueling incident as justification to force his wife to his own rural estate and far away from the cosmopolitan seductions of London. Anne’s brief time languishing there was said to be spent kissing a miniature portrait of Hortense.[17] Anne would go on to enjoy more affairs throughout her life, although she ultimately had four children (presumably fathered by her vexed husband).
Lady Loves
Hortense Mancini, perhaps unsurprisingly, passed away in 1699 with a mountain of debts to her name and a reputation that would outlive her for centuries. But where does her trail of reckless abandon, littered with queer affairs throughout, leave us in our understanding of the age in which she lived?
Two points bear emphasis: first, these queer ladies of le Grand Siècle were undeniably operating within a stridently heteronormative and patriarchal system. The Age of Absolutism was itself enmeshed fully with both of these concepts. Accordingly, each of these women saw their lives dominated and defined by the goals, pleasures and weaknesses of the powerful men to whom they were attached in various ways.
Aphra Behn, with her progressive pen, was perhaps the most successful in staking an artistic claim independently of masculine domination and narratives – but even her work suggests careful effort to test the boundaries of topics like sapphic love with plausible deniability and coy gestures.
That these women were able to pursue queer expressions of love at all leads to a second consideration: each of these women enjoyed exceptional privilege wholly unavailable to the vast majority of women and queer individuals in the early modern era. Many of these ladies leveraged their relationships to entitled men to attain power, influence and wealth, enabling their relative freedom even in painful marriages and offering a semblance of sexual independence.
Previous entries in this blog have noted the critical intersection between privilege (economic, social, racial and otherwise) and queer expression in repressive or unsupportive time periods. It is difficult to imagine that Hortense, Sidonie, Aphra or Anne would have survived (let alone passed their stories down generations into the future) had they not been women of elevated status with the privilege of breaking the rules and getting away with it.
Which begs the question: how many more queer women lived or maybe even thrived in le Grand Siècle whose names are unknown to us today? How many lesbian affairs were kept off the record books, how many untoward rumors were quietly lost to time, which loves were buried in common graveyards?
These 17th century stories should be the beginning of a conversation – not its end – as we continue to search for queer history beyond society’s elites. If anything, Hortense and her lovers represent the tip of an iceberg which researchers have just barely come to understand, let alone fully explore, as this much wider history is still being written.
[1] Louis Crompton, “Les Lesbiennes” in Homosexuality and Civilization (Harvard University Press, 2003), pg. 351.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Harriette Andreadis, “The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664,” Signs 15, no. 1 (1989): 34–60, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174705.
[4] Linda Porter, “Charles II’s last mistress,” Historia, April 16, 2020, https://www.historiamag.com/charles-iis-last-mistress/.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Grant Hayter-Menzies, “Shadow on Earth: Hortense Duchess Mazarin,” Family History Journal, Canterbury, UK and The European History Journal, No.5, 1998, https://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewArticle.asp?id=9931.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Porter, ibid.
[10] Hayter-Menzies, ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Porter, ibid.
[13] Crompton, pg. 402.
[14] The full text is available here: http://mason.gmu.edu/~ayadav/Behn%20The%20History%20of%20the%20Nun.pdf.
[15] The Friends of Lydiard Park, “Anne Fitzroy, Countess of Sussex,” accessed May 24, 2025, https://www.friendsoflydiardpark.org.uk/news/blog-post/anne-fitzroy-countess-of-sussex/.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.