Restoration influencer: how Charles II's clever mistress set trends ahead of her time

Hortense Mancini’s celebrated London salon allowed her female peers the freedoms men enjoyed

There were few places in 17th-century London where women could embrace the same economic and intellectual freedoms as men. Hortense Mancini’s salon next to St James’s Palace was one of them, new research reveals – yet its influence in Restoration society has largely been dismissed throughout history.

Mancini, a mistress of Charles II, was a renowned Italian beauty who famously fled to England dressed as a man to escape her abusive aristocratic husband. But she also wielded her fame and status to create a subversive space in London where royal mistresses could meet, gamble, drink champagne and discuss science and literature on an equal footing with men, according to Annalisa Nicholson, a researcher in French Studies at Cambridge University.

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