My Lord Clarendon
declares that his spirits never recovered from the shock of his Majesty's
restoration, which falsified all his calculations. He might have made his
favourite niece Queen of England; but his Italian caution restrained him,
and the beautiful Hortense has to put up with a new-made duke--a title
bought with her uncle's money--to whom the Cardinal affianced her on his
death-bed. He was a remarkable man, and so profound a dissembler that his
pretended opposition to King Louis' marriage with his niece Olympe Mancini
would have deceived the shrewdest observer, had we not all known that he
ardently desired the union, and that it was only his fear of Queen Anne's
anger which prevented it. Her Spanish pride was in arms at the notion, and
she would not have stopped short at revolution to prevent or to revenge
such an alliance.
"This was perhaps the only occasion upon which she ever seriously opposed
Mazarin. With him expires all her political power. She is now as much a
cypher as in the time of the late King, when France had only one master,
the great Cardinal. He who is just dead, Fareham says, was but a little
Richelieu; and he recalls how when the great Cardinal died people scarce
dared tell one another of his death, so profound was the awe in which he
was held.
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