Agnes and Antoinette: The good and bad cousins
Different from her nineteenth-century historians, contemporary chroniclers write little that is positive about Agnes Sorel, except that she was beautiful. They are still less enthusiastic about Antoinette de Maignelais.11 Antoinette’s reputation worsens in seventeenth-century historical romances, where she becomes Agnes’s dark and envious double, sometimes responsible for Agnes’s death.[302] [303] Following Antoinette into the nineteenth century, we find nothing good about her in histories of that period, either, where she is typically depicted as motivated by the desire for wealth.
One of Charles VII’s nineteenth-century biographers, Auguste Vallet de Viriville, who cannot praise Agnes highly enough, writes about Antoinette that shebesmirched the role that she accepted by pimping (‘a l’emploi de proxenete’) for the king; she later took over supervision, like the Pompadours and Du Barrys, of royal debauchery. She squandered her favor in low and vulgar intrigues, to the great prejudice of public affairs and of Charles VII, who dishonored his youth with his licentious old age.[304]
Even some recent historians read the cousins in this way. According to one, Agnes’s “replacement was greedy and cynical;” in contrast with Agnes, who had “brightened the maturity of a fragile and tormented man, raising him above himself, Antoinette lowered him to the level of a lustful old man whose excesses outraged his entourage.”[305]
But what do we actually know about the cousins? Nothing at all about their relationship, unfortunately. As for their circumstances, Agnes’s are better attested than those of her cousin. Although Agnes’s date of birth is not confirmed in any contemporary document, the puzzle of her age at time of death in 1450 was resolved in 2006 when the French Ministry of Culture and the General Council of Indre and Loire,[306] planning a transfer and new restoration of Agnes’s tomb, took advantage of the project to commission a study of Agnes’s remains by medical doctor and forensic historian Philippe Charlier and his team.
Agnes’s teeth and the sutures in her skull show that she was about 26—27 when she died.[307] As for her background, she was a member of the minor nobility. Her father, Jean Soreau, was a counselor to the Count of Clermont, later Charles, Duke of Bourbon, who was often in contact with the king’s brother-in-law Rene, Duke of Anjou;[308] she spent her early years at the court of Rene and his wife Isabelle, Duchess of Lorraine. Agnes’s mother was Catherine de Maignelais, and Catherine’s brother was the father of Antoinette.[309] Agnes would have become Charles VII’s mistress in 1443 or 44 and joined the royal court in 1444; we know that she was his mistress because he officially recognized their children, that is, their three daughters who lived to maturity.[310] Although contemporary chroniclers commented on her great beauty, they also criticized her: the king had elevated far above her station, and her presence was mortifying to the queen, Marie of Anjou.[311] Finally, she died in 1450, of an abrupt, acute ingestion of mercury, which we know, once again, from the studies commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, in this case a series of independent lab tests on hairs from her armpits, pubic region, and head.[312]As for Antoinette de Maignelais, there is no record of her birth either, but historians assume that she was somewhat younger than her cousin. Based on the accounts of three chroniclers, Georges Chastellain (ca. 1405—1475), Jean Le Clerc (ca. 1440—1510), and Jacques Du Clercq (ca. 1420—1501), she is believed to have become Charles VII’s mistress either shortly before Agnes’s death or just afterwards. The king married her to his favorite, Andre de Villequier, in October 1450, roughly eight months after Agnes’s death.[313] Chastellain has nothing good to say about Agnes, lamenting the humiliation she caused the queen; about Antoinette, he writes that “at this time a woman named the demoiselle de Villequier, niece of the one who used to be called the Belle Agnes, was widely acknowledged to rule over the king, and this demoiselle was married to the Norman seigneur de Villequier.”[314] Le Clerc is not particularly enthusiastic about Agnes or Antoinette, either, describing Agnes as “most beautiful young women of her time, and who was in the good graces of the king as much as could possibly be.”[315] As for Antoinette, “she followed Agnes after her death.”[316] Jacques Du Clercq writes that Antoinette “governed” the king just as Agnes had before her, and, in addition, asserts that she pimped for the king.[317]
With the death of Charles VII, Antoinette joined the king’s most prominent courtiers in moving to the Breton court of future father of Anne of Brittany, Duke Franpois II, whose mistress she may have become by the end of the l450s.[318] At Nantes, she was at the center of politics, bore the duke four children, and overshadowed the duchess.
Breton chronicler Alain Bouchart writes that the young and handsome duke took Antoinette to Brittany where he maintained her publicly until her death in “great estate” alongside his wife, a woman of the greatest virtue, daughter of the Duke of Brittany, grand-daughter of the King of Scotland.[319]Agnes, then, according to legend, loved only the king, who never married her to anyone else. In contrast, the king married Antoinette to one of his men; in addition, she may have taken up with the Duke of Brittany even before the death of the king.