In contrast with the lack of specific documentation about Agnes Sorel’s political role, a substantial body of evidence suggests that Franpois I’s favorite Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, Duchess of Etampes (1508—1580), and Henri Il’s Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois (1499—1566), wielded real influence.

Anne and Diane, like male favorites, served their kings as trusted counselors and dealt at times with foreign diplomats. However, their influence differed in a significant way from that of male favorites.

Whereas the latter were often military leaders and/or officers of the king, the tenure of the royal mistress was always unofficial, or, more accurately, the roles that she performed on the public stage of the court—lady-in-waiting to the queen, governess to the royal children—had nothing to do with her political role, which she performed discreetly, backstage.

The Duchess of Etampes has been characterized over the centuries in reflexively misogynistic terms, and traces of the misogyny remain despite the scholarship of David Potter and Francis Nawracki demonstrating that that she was a central political figure during the last years of the reign of Franpois I (r. 1515—1547). She is described, for example, as “undoubtedly a detestable person, capricious, arrogant, taking advantage of her powers as favorite of a feeble, aged

king,”¹ and as “the duchess, insolent, capricious,” who “made sure that no one was unaware of the power that she held over [the king].”^[515] ^{^[516] She was at “the heart of much in-fighting at court,” and she was “fickle.”^[517] Charges of greed and vainglory persist, as well: “Combining intelligence with beauty, she was also ambitious and grasping.”^[518] The reputation of Diane de Poitiers among historians has been different. She was much reviled immediately after her death, but, by the nineteenth century, she had been embraced as a romantic icon, and, ever since, she has been treated with sympathy or curiosity—the story that she ingested gold to preserve her beauty has garnered considerable interest in the popular press over the past few years—in recent biographies.^[519]}

The issue I would like to explore in this chapter, however, is not the reputation of these two individuals but, rather, how they have been regarded as a pair.

A handful of references in ambassadorial correspondance suggests that the women were not friends. As mistresses of the king and the dauphin, whose father-son relationship was often rocky, they allied themselves with the faction members loyal to their respective partners, as we would expect. And yet, their animosity has typically not been attributed to political difference but to personal jealousy, and they have been cast as rivals, one a youthful beauty, the other an aging former beauty. As I have suggested in earlier chapters, historians frequently treat pairs of women as adversaries motivated by vanity and an overweening and illegitimate ambition for riches and power. Anne and Diane, like Isabeau of Bavaria and Valentina Visconti, Agnes Sorel and Antoinette de Maignelais, and Anne of France and Anne of Brittany, have been treated with snide amusement. In what follows, I propose that many historians have attributed Anne and Diane with too much power to control the events around them and insufficient interest in the court politics in which they were embedded. Also, much modern discussion of their relationship encodes the assumption that allowing mistresses political influence is inherently corrupt, an assumption itself grounded in the broader one that political nepotism is corrupt. Certainly nepotism is understood as corrupt today. However, for the court society within which Anne and Diane were active, nepotism was a given, a constant feature of governance. This point is taken for granted in recent discussions of male favorites and regents like Louise of Savoy and Catherine de Medicis, whose regencies on behalf of their sons are no longer regarded as improper interventions into the political order. Assumptions of corruption, along with the trivialization of political factionalism, subject of this essay, need to be revised in the case of French royal mistresses as well.

I first briefly explore the position of French royal mistress in the sixteenth century, fleshing out the cultural space within which the role became possible. Developments during the 1530s, that is, the period immediately preceding Anne and Diane’s rise, permitted their roles to emerge. In the second part of the essay, I revisit the popular notion of Anne and Diane as jealous rivals around whom court factions formed while the women carried out their personal agendas and suggest some more appropriate ways of understanding their political activity.

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Source: Adams Tracy. Queens, Regents, Mistresses: Reflections on Extracting Elite Women’s Stories from Medieval and Early Modern French Narrative Sources. Peter Lang, 2023. — 248 p.. 2023