Antoinette de Maignelais

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Antoinette de Maignelais, baronne de Villequier (1434 — 1474) replaced her deceased cousin Agnès Sorel as the favorite mistress of Charles VII of France from 1450 until his death, and then became the mistress of the Duke of Brittany.

She was the daughter of Jean II de Maignelais and Marie de Jouy. By her father she was a first cousin of Agnès Sorel's, who served Charles VII as his titular mistress from roughly 1441 until her sudden death in 1450.

Even before her cousin's death, Antoinette had caught the King's eye. In 1448, when she was fourteen years old, he gave her the lands of Maignelais for a possession. This estate had been the object of a long lawsuit between the Duke de Bourbon and Raoul de Maignelais, an ancestor of the young lady's, and had ended in its remaining in the hands of the Duke.

In her sixteenth year, shortly after the death of Agnès Sorel, he married Antoinette to his first gentleman of the bedchamber, André, Baron de Villequier, of Guerche, in Touraine; and, on this occasion, presented her with the isles of Oleron, of Marennes, and Arvert, as a marriage portion, with a pension of two thousand livres a year for life. The letters granting these advantages are dated October, 1450. She became a widow after only four years of marriage.

It was for them that the king ordered the construction of the Château de la Guerche.

In 1458, Charles presented her daughter, Jane de Maignelais, with eight thousand two hundred and fifty francs, on the occasion of her union with the Sire of Rochefort. Antoinette had also another daughter; but neither of them was acknowledged by Charles VII.

The king died in 1461 and she became the mistress of Francis II, Duke of Brittany, with whom she had two sons and two daughters. She died peaceably at his court in 1474.