Milady de Winter
Her role in the first part of the book is to seduce the English prime minister, the duke of Buckingham, who is also the secret lover of Queen Anne of France.
She is described as being twenty-two years old, tall, fair-haired, and uncommonly beautiful with brilliant blue eyes and black lashes and brows.
[1] A capable and intelligent French spy who can pass effortlessly as a native Englishwoman,[2] Milady's beautiful exterior hides a diabolically cunning, manipulative, ruthless and cruel interior; she is remorseless and unrepentant for her countless misdeeds and is often described as appearing demonic and frighteningly ugly in the instant when she is thwarted.
Athos first knows her as a sixteen years old adolescent Anne de Breuil, but because she already was concealing her past at that time, it was probably not her real name.
According to one of her enemies,[3] the executioner of Lille, as a young Benedictine nun, she seduced the convent's trusting priest, urging him to steal the church's sacred vessels to finance a new life in another part of the country.
As seigneur of the county he says he could have seduced her or taken her by force, but despite the opposition of his family and her obscure origins he married her, giving her his wealth and title and raising her to the nobility.
[4] His wife's so-called brother, who had married the pair, fled the day before any retribution could be taken (this is at odds with the executioner assertion that he went back to Lille right after she left him for Athos, and it is one of the inconsistencies in Milady's story in the book).
Because the Comte de la Fère effectively ceases to exist when he becomes Athos, Milady makes the same mistake in presuming her first husband is dead.
When d'Artagnan first spies Milady in Paris, she has married into English nobility some time previously by wedding a Count,[6] the older brother of Lord de Winter.
When Athos hears this and identifies the ring Milady gave to d'Artagnan as his mother's, the former Comte de la Fère realizes that his wife is not dead after all.
This main characters condemn Milady to death and, despite her requests to be brought to a court, and reminders that they are committing murder, she is beheaded by the executioner.
As twisted and as deceitful as his mother, he sets about avenging her death, posing as a monk and murdering the executioner of Lille while taking his confession.
Mordaunt later becomes involved in the English Civil War and commits regicide, executing King Charles I in spite of the efforts of d'Artagnan and the three former musketeers to prevent it.
[16] In Courtilz's novel (one of the literary sources for the more famous novel by Dumas), Milady is one of the exiled English Queen Henrietta Maria's ladies-in-waiting.
[17] Others think that the character of Milady de Winter may be based on Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle (née Percy; 1599 – 5 November 1660).
François de La Rochefoucauld mentioned in his Memoirs an anecdote he was told by Marie de Rohan, in which Lucy Hay stole some diamond studs (a present of the king of France to Anne of Austria) the queen had given to George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham from the duke as revenge because he had loved her before he loved the queen of France.
In the movie The Return of the Musketeers, Kim Cattrall plays Milady's daughter Justine de Winter as a female version of Mordaunt.
