In the pages written by Alexander Dumas, Lady de Winter is one of the most mysterious characters. We don’t know her name or intentions for sure, and we remain fascinated by her evil and ambition until her violent (and deserved) end. Considering that Dumas liked to mix real characters with others inspired by real people, the question remains: who was the real Lady de Winter? And we have the answer. So let’s see her trajectory in History.

The Countess involved in political plots

Every researcher’s favorite to fill the gap on who could have inspired the antagonist of The Three Musketeers is an English noblewoman, Lucy Hay, the Countess of Carlisle.

Lady Lucy was born in Percy in 1599, the daughter of Henry, Earl of Northumberland, and Lady Dorothy Devereux, who was connected to the family of the Earl of Essex. At just 18 years old, Lucy married the widower James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle, and began to circulate at Court, where her beauty inspired poets and painters, and her friendliness won the Queen’s trust, participating in her parties and acting as Principal companion.

Extremely intelligent and seductive, Lucy ended up involved in scandals, dangerous maneuvers, and political intrigues during the English Civil War. For example, she was the simultaneous lover of two enemies – Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, and John Pym, his parliamentary opponent – and everyone knew. When the Earl of Strafford died, she dedicated herself solely to John Pym, helping him in his actions since she had privileged access to the sovereigns. Lucy’s cunning was instrumental in, for example, the escape of her cousin, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, as she warned him that the King would arrest him in 1642. At this point, the Countess of Carlisle was a double agent who directly interfered in political decisions at a tumultuous time in British history, inflaming all sides with growing political animosity.

Always acting as an intermediary, Lady Carlisle gained prominence in many dangerous actions until she was imprisoned in the Tower of London, where she still maintained a correspondence with King Charles through coded letters, maintaining her silence even under threats of torture. When she was finally released on bail, she was no longer able to regain her former influence in the royalist councils.

Her sudden death shortly after being released is extremely suspicious: she would have felt ill after lunch and within three hours she was lifeless. Just in this quick summary, you can see how she was a different woman than the others.

The legends fed in books

The name of the Countess of Carlisle circulated among the nobles and before reaching Dumas’s ears, it appeared in the pages of the book by François de La Rochefoucauld, who mentioned her in his Memoirs in a passage in which he reproduces what he heard from Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Luynes.

Lucy Hay reportedly stole the diamond earrings of the Queen of France, Anne of Austria, which had been given as a gift to George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham. In this version, the Countess’s motivation would have been resentment because the Duke would have preferred the French queen to her, thus she created an embarrassment for her rival. In fact, we know today that Buckingham was the lover of King Charles of England, not Anne, but in the books, he was a womanizer.

Anyway, as Dumas repeated in The Three Musketeers, suddenly King Louis XIII asked his wife to wear the earrings he had given her, creating a problem since she had given them to the English nobleman. Rochefoucauld does not explain in detail, but the queen manages to recover them and fulfill her husband’s request. Here’s the main hint that yes, Lucy Hay is the real Milady de Winter.

Who else could have inspired Dumas?

However, it would be unlikely that the cunning Milady de Winter, with so many names and scams throughout the adventures of Alexandre Dumas, was the mirror of just a single woman. The possibility that TWO women inspired him cannot be ruled out, after all, Milady managed to pass as English and French without arousing suspicion on either side, something that only the bilingual Eva Green managed to capture in the 2024 film.

In addition to Lucy Hay, the most likely possibility of having been a source for the writer is the woman who told François de La Rochefoucauld about the Queen’s earrings, none other than Marie de Rohan herself, the Duchess of Luynes.

Marie Aimée de Rohan was a courtesan famous for being at the heart of many of the political intrigues of the time. She even has a code name: for many, she is simply Madame de Chevreuse or the hairdresser. Daughter of the Duke of Montbazon, governor of Paris and Île-de-France, and part of King Henry IV’s circle of trust, Marie de Rohan grew up without her mother, who died when she was just 2 years old and circulated both in the capital and on her family’s estates in Brittany and Anjou.

In the promiscuous French Court, Marie de Rohan always had privileged access to the monarchs, including through her first marriage, at just 17 years old, with King Louis XIII’s favorite, Charles d’Albert, seigneur de Luynes. From there she took a liking to political intrigues and, notoriously unscrupulous, began to participate in them.

In Louis XIII’s troubled relationship with Anne of Austria, Marie de Rohan was both useful to the King and Queen. At first, Anne didn’t trust her because Louis paid a lot of attention to her, but little by little the situation changed and soon few people influenced the Queen as strongly as Marie de Rohan.

The favoritism of the Luynes couple became even clearer when they won the title of Duke and Duchess. They had four children, with the King being the godfather of one of them. When Marie de Rohan was widowed, she inherited her husband’s fortune and married Claude de Lorraine, Duke of Chevreuse, with whom she had three more daughters.

The fact of being the queen’s best friend and confidant put Marie de Rohan in some delicate situations: she was accused of having encouraged the pregnant queen in games that caused a miscarriage and for this reason, she was banished from the Court. It was then that she became involved in the drama of the “Buckingham Case”.

As we see in The Three Musketeers, the English duke was close to the French queen and was used as subterfuge by a wing of the nobility who wanted to weaken Cardinal Richelieu and replace the weak Louis XIII with his brother, Gaston D’ Orléans. In the conspiracy that involved the theft of the earrings, which would prove the queen’s affair with Buckingham. Discovered, some were executed but Duchess Chevreuse fled, using the influence of one of her lovers to return to France later.

One way or another, Marie de Rohan was at the center of all the intrigues involving foreign powers against France, exchanging privileged information, planning assassinations, and political conspiracies. She was exiled or fled several times, but she always came back. With Richelieu’s death, she was able to return to France once again but continued her favorite activity: staging coups. She became close to Cardinal Mazarin, but later opposed him, she was never quiet. Until she died in 1679, at almost 80 years old, she was still a dangerous woman.

Quoted in The Three Musketeers

While the English noblewoman was not as well known to the French public, the same Alexandre Dumas could not have expected Marie de Rohan, which is why there is confusion that she would not be Milady de Winter because, in the book The Three Musketeers, she participates in the story, as one of the musketeers Aramis’ lovers. She appears again in the sequel, the book Twenty Years Later, in which Raoul, the hero of the third novel in Dumas’ trilogy, is her secret son with the musketeer Athos. In other words, it proves my thesis.

With so many biographies, paintings, and operas written about Marie de Rohan, it is impossible to dismiss her as one of the sources for Milady.

In his opinion, which of the two women would have a better chance?

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