Louise de Querouaille had now reached a dizzier height than, in the wildest dreams of her girlhood, she had ever hoped to climb.  She was a double-Duchess, of England and of France, the mistress and counsellor of a puppet-King, and an arbiter of the destinies of nations.  Well might her humble father, when he paid his Duchess-daughter a visit in London, throw up his hands in amazement at the splendours with which his “petite Louise” had surrounded herself!  So high had she climbed that it seemed at one time that even the Crown of England was within her reach; for when Catherine was brought to the verge of death the Duchess was probably not alone in thinking that she might be her successor on the throne.

“She has got the notion,” wrote the French Ambassador, “that it is possible she may yet be Queen of England.  She talks from morning till night of the Queen’s ailments as if they were mortal.”

But at least, if the crown was not to be hers, there was as much gold to be had as she cared to garner.  Not content with her allowance, which, nominally L10,000 a year, in one year reached the enormous sum of L136,000, she heaped fortune on fortune by trafficking in a wide range of commodities, from peerages and Court appointments to Royal pardons and slaves.  A few years of such rich harvesting made her incomparably the richest woman in England, although she squandered her ill-gotten gold with a prodigal hand.  Her apartments at Whitehall were crowded with the costliest furnishings and objects of art that money could buy.  When Evelyn paid a visit to the Court he records: 

“But that which engaged my curiosity was the rich and splendid furniture of this woman’s apartment, now twice or thrice pulled down to satisfy her prodigality and expensive pleasures; while her Majesty’s does not exceed some gentlemen’s wives in furniture and accommodation.

“Here I saw the new fabrics of French tapestry, for design, tenderness of work and incomparable imitation of the best paintings, beyond anything I ever beheld.  Some pieces had Versailles, St Germain’s, and other palaces of the French King, with huntings, figures, and landscapes, exotic flowers and all to the life, rarely done.  Then for Japan cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, great vases of wrought plate, table-stands, sconces, branches, braseras, etc., all of massive silver and out of number, besides some of his Majesty’s best paintings!”

Probably at this time of her illicit queendom the only thorn in Louise de Querouaille’s bed of roses was that vulgar, “gutter-rival” of hers, Nell Gwynn, with whom she suffered the indignity of sharing Charles’s affection.  To the high-born, blue-blooded daughter of centuries of French nobles (of whom her tradesman-father always affected a disconcerting ignorance) the very sight of her saucy and successful rival, the ex-orange-wench, was a contamination.  She pretended to stifle in breathing the same air, and with high-tossed head sailed past Madame Nell (the mother of a duke), in the Court salons and corridors, as if she were carrion.