A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (11 page)

No longer Queen of France, Mary went back to Scotland in 1561 to reclaim the throne that had been hers since she was six days old. Only a few years later, she came to discover a little something that had been missing from her first marriage: primal, pulsating lust. Mary had the hots for cousin Henry. Darnley,unfortunately, was a boastful, grasping nincompoop who just happened to look good in a pair of tights. But Mary liked what she saw. Failing to notice any of his less pleasant characteristics, the queen determined to marry him. Thomas Randolph, the ambassador to England, lamented that his “poor Queen whom ever before I esteemed so worthy, so wise, so honorable in all her doings” was now acting like a giddy teenager in love.

Good sex only goes so far, and it took only a couple months—and a nauseating pregnancy—for Mary to realize that she had saddled herself with a loser simply because he scratched her lusty itch. Darnley was a spoiled lightweight who, when he wasn’t frequenting the bordellos of Edinburgh, or passing out drunk, persistently harassed his wife to grant him all the powers of a king—not just the title. He would prove himself a terrible liability to Mary’s throne, which was barely secure to begin with.

Though she had been pampered and indulged in France, Scotland was a different story entirely. The cold, wet country of her birth was dominated by clannish, swaggering nobles who showed little reverence for royalty—especially a female, Catholic monarch who had been raised as a foreigner. The Protestant Reformation had swept Scotland while Mary was away in France, and her return was greeted with cool suspicion by certain nobles, including her own half-brother, and outright hostility by the new Protestant establishment. John Knox, the vicar of the Scottish Reformation, was a particularly vocal critic who railed against the “monstrous” rule of women. Permitting these “weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish creatures” to sit on a throne, he declared, was the “subversion of good order, of all equity and justice” as well as being contrary to God and repugnant to nature.

Knox’s bold verbal lashings were enough to drive his queen to tears of frustration, particularly since she had determined to maintain a moderate approach to matters of religion. But he wasn’t her only problem. While Mary’s Protestant cousin to the south, Elizabeth I of England (daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn), certainly took great exception to Knox’s assessment of female monarchs, she too was wary of the Scottish queen. The two women shared the same royal blood and Mary had established a claim to the English crown because of it. This didn’t sit well with Elizabeth, who was a zealous guardian of her power and position.

It was into this atmosphere of hostility and suspicion that Darnley strutted. Unlike the infatuated Mary, Queen Elizabeth and the Scottish establishment were less than enthusiastic about his presence. Besides being insufferable, Darnley was also Catholic. And he had the same royal blood that flowed through Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, which in the eyes of the English queen only made the Scottish queen’s claim to her crown more of a threat. The Scottish nobles, however, soon determined that they could use Darnley’s weak and vacillating nature to their advantage in undermining Mary. They appealed to his petty ego, dangling the prospect of making him sole ruler of Scotland if he would come over to their side. Darnley snatched the bait like a greedy bottom-dweller. After all, his wife was growing to hate him more and more every day and wasn’t about to grant him the kingly power he craved.

Darnley and the nobles agreed on a murderous scheme designed to break the queen. Mary had an Italian secretary, David Riccio, whose company she enjoyed. She listened raptly to his advice and spent hours of quality time with him as her marriage deteriorated. Of course Darnley hated Riccio. The nobles loathed him, too, mostly because he was a Catholic and a foreigner and he had the queen’s ear. They determined to destroy him. It was a March evening in 1566 when the plan was carried out. Six months pregnant (with the future King James I of England), Mary was in her private chambers at the palace of Holyrood dining with Riccio and some other companions when the conspirators suddenly burst in. “Let it please your Majesty,” one of them sneered, “that yonder man David come forth of your privy chamber where he hath been overlong.” Naturally, the queen protested that Riccio was there by her royal invitation and would stay right where he was. The gang informed her otherwise as they moved to snatch the terrified secretary, now clinging desperately to the queen’s skirts.

As Riccio was dragged away from her kicking and screaming for his life, Mary spun on her husband and violently cursed him. The helpless secretary was then viciously slaughtered, stabbed more than fifty times before his bloody and lacerated corpse was tossed down a flight of steps. Needless to say, this savage murder didn’t exactly enhance the marital relations between Mary and Darnley. Now held prisoner in her own palace, the queen choked on the hatred she felt for her husband. She was sure her own life was in danger because of him, either through the violence of the attack on Riccio or by its potential trauma to her pregnancy.

Mary knew she had to swallow her seething contempt if she wanted to help herself. While it was contrary to everything she felt, she had to play nice with Darnley if she wanted to escape her captors. The weakling would-be king, terrified by what he had done, was coaxed back to his wife’s side as easily as he had been won to the murderers’. With Darnley’s help, Mary was able to escape the palace and rally support from her loyalist forces. She regained her position, but domestic harmony was hardly restored. Darnley reverted back to his lazy life of debauchery, while resuming his schemes to glorify himself. “He misuses himself so far towards [Mary] that it is a heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband,” one courtier wrote. The queen would never get over her husband’s complicity in Riccio’s murder. “I have forgiven, but never will forget!” she angrily blasted him after their son was born several months later.

Mary wasn’t Darnley’s only enemy. He ruffled more than a few tartans when he betrayed his merry band of coconspirators and soon found himself their next target. In the early morning hours of February 10, 1567, an enormous explosion destroyed a house on the outskirts of Edinburgh known as Kirk o’Field. Darnley had been lodged there, recovering from a syphilitic illness. Perhaps noticing the cache of gunpowder being hauled in, Darnley managed to escape the blast. It was only a brief reprieve, though, as he was found strangled to death in the courtyard of the ruined home the next morning.

Mary’s involvement in the murder, if any, remains one of history’s greatest mysteries and leaves her legacy shrouded in controversy. Her cause was certainly not aided much by the fact that she ran off and married the Earl of Bothwell, who happened to be the suspected ringleader of the plot to kill Darnley. With her reputation ruined, Mary’s countrymen turned against her, hounded her off the throne and held her captive. After escaping, the disgraced queen fled to England and into the waiting arms of cousin Elizabeth. She was held prisoner there for nineteen years before she was convicted in 1587 of conspiracy to kill the English queen and executed.

In the minds of many the deposed queen remained a shameless harlot, but to others Mary became a holy martyr, her past sins cleanly wiped away by the circumstances of her death. Whatever the case, no doubt Mary Queen of Scots would have been far better off if she had taken a cue from her cousin Queen Elizabeth and simply stayed single.

 

 

C
atherine the Great of Russia, whose indiscriminate sexual adventures would later become legendary,
¹⁵
came to her wedding bed a blushing virgin and, thanks to her husband, stayed that way for nearly a decade.

She arrived in Russia from Germany in 1744 with vague royal connections and soon became engaged to Peter, designated by the Empress Elizabeth to succeed her as Peter III. What she found was a frighteningly alien culture, only superficially civilized, and a massively disappointing fiance. Peter was an ugly, mean-spirited simpleton who showed no interest in his future bride. He much preferred putting his toy soldiers through endless military maneuvers. “I understood perfectly how little he wanted to see me and how little affection he bore me,” she wrote in her memoirs. “My self-esteem and vanity were wounded, but I was too proud to complain.”

Her wedding night was disastrous. Dressed in a pink nightie specially ordered from Paris, the naive Catherine waited anxiously in bed for her new husband, who was off carousing with his valets. The groom finally arrived after midnight, declaring that “it would amuse the servants to see us in bed together.” With that he fell into the sack and passed out.

Night after night he ignored her, concentrating instead on his own diversions. Sometimes he would bring his huge collection of toys to bed, forcing Catherine to play army with him. Once she walked into their room to find a rat hanging by a rope. Peter explained that it had committed treason and was paying the penalty.

The future tsar also had a tendency to chatter incessantly, bombarding his bride with whatever bit of trivia happened to have captured his limited imagination. “Often I was very bored by his visits, which would last for hours,” she wrote, “and even exhausted by them, for he never sat down, and I always had to walk up and down the room with him.” The droning chitchat, however, never led to bed, no doubt frustrating the woman who once recalled vigorously riding her pillow as an adolescent, trying to satisfy physical yearnings not yet defined. As the un-consummated marriage progressed, Peter became increasingly tedious. During one period he decided to become a dog trainer, filling their bedroom with barking animals. “It was amid this stench,” she wrote, “that we slept.”

Despite her loathsome marriage, Catherine knew her future was bound to Russia and was determined to absorb its culture totally. She learned the language, read voraciously, adopted the Russian Orthodox faith and carefully cultivated alliances in the debauched court of Empress Elizabeth. She also took to physical activity to relieve the marital strains, riding her horse for hours. “The more violent this exercise was the more I loved it,” she wrote.

Peter, for his part, would not have been able to satisfy his wife even if he wanted to. In the words of French agent Champeaux, he was “unable to have children because of an obstacle, which the Oriental peoples remedy by circumcision, but for which he thought there was no cure.” He had phimosis, a deformation of the foreskin that made erections excruciatingly painful. Even after he consented to the operation that liberated him, he still refused to sleep with his wife. Instead, he took on a series of mistresses, keeping Catherine apprised of every dalliance.

Catherine, meanwhile, was becoming wiser to the ways of the world. Engaging in innocent court flirtations, she gradually discovered that she was indeed desirable. Her confidence and passions aroused, the long-deprived princess finally lost her virginity to a young officer—eight years after her wedding. A succession of lovers and several illegitimate children followed; then Catherine really got her revenge. The Empress Elizabeth died in 1762, and Peter became ruler over subjects who hated him. He made peace with Frederick the Great of Prussia, just as the Russian army was at the point of defeating Frederick’s armies, and compounded the outrage by making his troops wear Prussian-style uniforms.

Peter III also made the foolish mistake of humiliating his now formidable wife in public, forcing her at one point to stand up with the rest of his subjects when the royal family was toasted. Her dignified behavior in the face of all her husband’s insults gained Catherine sympathy and respect, and soon a plot to overthrow the tsar centered around her. With the Russian army and establishment firmly behind her, Catherine forced Peter’s abdication. She was proclaimed empress, while her husband was discreetly murdered a few days later. He was a far more effective general, it seems, with tin soldiers on a loveless bed.

 

 

A
ustrian Empress Maria Theresa should not be judged too harshly for the series of miserable marriages she arranged for her large brood of children in the late eighteenth century. Sure, dynastic and diplomatic considerations took precedence over any potential happiness they might have enjoyed in the arrangements, but, in her defense, the empress probably had no notion of what wedded bliss meant. She was, after all, married to a shameless philanderer who humiliated her with his numerous and less than discreet affairs.

From his frequent flirtations with young dancers and opera singers of the Vienna stage to long-term liaisons with ladies of the court, Emperor Francis was the ultimate adulterer. He was particularly enamoured of Princess Auersperg, a paramour thirty years his junior. “The emperor makes no secret of his passion for her,” one visitor to the Austrian court noted. Indeed, Francis and his mistress enjoyed frequent trysts in his hunting lodges, his theater box in Vienna, and the cozy home he purchased for her. Even his somewhat sheltered children knew what was going on. “The emperor is a very good-hearted father,” wrote his daughter Christina, “one can always rely upon him as a friend, and we must do what we can to protect him from his weakness. I am referring to his conduct with Princess Auersperg.” Her mother, Christina continued, was “very jealous of this devotion.”

Despite her displeasure, and the fact that she held all the power as the sovereign of both Austria and Hungary, the empress could do nothing to rein in her wayward husband. Instead, she became obsessed with controlling the moral conduct of her subjects. With its opulent theaters, grand opera houses, and an up-and-coming talent by the name of Mozart, the glittering city of Vienna was a cosmopolitan mecca in the midst of a cultural wasteland. It was “a city of free adultery,” as one visitor put it. And it was here that Emperor Francis’s lifestyle thrived.