In point of fact, the Duke of Mantua was, as Mr. Tighe Hopkins puts it, “up for sale”; his revenues, as D’Estrades reported to Louvois, were spent in advance, and he was helplessly in the hands of the Jews; there was nothing he owned that he would not be willing to sell for money to spend on his pleasures in Venice, where he lived almost habitually and whence he never returned to Mantua except upon expeditions of rack-rent. He was also much under the influence of his favourites, to whom he was accustomed to leave the governing of Mantua and the administration of his affairs; all he asked for himself was that they should leave him to his boon companions in Venice, “his gamesters, his women, and his wine-parties.” And it was D’Estrades’ opinion that he might best be approached in the matter of Casale through one of his favourites.
The responsibility for Duke Charles’ way of life may not have lain entirely with the young man himself, then in the springtime of life; for it would seem that some of the blame should fall upon his widowed mother, Archduchess Isabella Clara of Austria, the head of his council and virtual ruler of his small domain; and Isabella Clara was as notoriously opposed to the interests of the King of France as she was favourable to those of the King of Spain, his sworn opponent in Italy. And it may even be that, in order to keep the destinies of Mantua in her own control, she rather encouraged than otherwise her son’s absence from his territories in order the more easily to administer them in union with the Spanish policy—Spain being then allied with Austria against the encroachments of their rapacious Gallic neighbour.
Duke Charles, himself, according to D’Estrades in writing to Louis XIV from Venice, was endowed with “more talent and ambition than he is thought to have,” was eager to recover for himself the authority he had let fall into his mother’s hands; and, supremely, was imbued with profound suspicion of the Spaniards, who, as he believed, had every intention of making themselves masters of Montferrat and the fortress of Casale. Moreover, wrote D’Estrades, he was convinced that the duke would be willing to accept King Louis “to some extent” as his protector.