A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (12 page)

Transferring her anger at her husband’s betrayals, Maria Theresa established her Chastity Commission, a special department of the police charged with suppressing vice. The purity patrols were everywhere, infiltrating theaters, social gatherings, and even private homes. Anyone suspected of being less than upright was arrested, while foreigners accused of corrupting the local citizenry were banished from the kingdom. Some said the betrayed empress herself played a part in the commission, disguising herself and roaming Vienna in search of her wayward man.

The usual punishment for those convicted of moral violations was harsh, meant to serve as an example to others. The violators were chained to stone pillars at the city gates where they sat in their own filth, sometimes for weeks or months, completely dependent on the kindness of strangers for food and drink. The punishments, however, backfired. Instead of being ridiculed and scorned, the chained souls became heroes of sorts. The citizens of Vienna fed and catered to them while laughing at the prudish empress with the unfaithful husband.

When she wasn’t storming the bedrooms of her people, Maria Theresa busied herself inflicting marriage on her helpless children. Like many royal offspring, they were to be used as political capital, helping to strengthen their parents’ position through arranged matrimony. This was a particularly rich and ancient tradition in the empress’s Habsburg family line.
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Crown Prince Joseph, as heir to the throne, was given top priority in the marriage market. Luckily for him, he actually fell in love with the mate chosen for him, Princess Isabella of Parma. Unfortunately, Isabella’s affections were directed elsewhere. She had a major crush on Joseph’s sister, Christina. “I am told that the day begins with God,” Isabella gushed to Christina in a letter. “I, however, begin the day by thinking of the object of my love, for I think of her incessantly.”

Empress Maria Theresa would never have tolerated a lesbian relationship between daughter and daughter-in-law, but the issue became moot when Isabella died suddenly from smallpox at age twenty-one. The prince was devastated by his loss, but his mother, ever conscious of dynastic priorities, quickly married him off again. Joseph was given a choice of two brides, neither of whom stirred much desire in him. “I prefer not to marry either,” he announced to his mother, “but since you are holding a knife to my throat, I will take [Princess Josepha of Bavaria], because, from what I hear, she at least has fine breasts.”

Josepha’s breasts, alas, were a disappointment, along with the rest of her. She was short, thickset, and painfully ugly, with festering sores all over her body and bad teeth. Joseph was repulsed by his bride and avoided her at all costs. “They want me to have children,” he wrote despondently. “How can we have them? If I could put the tip of my finger on the tiniest part of her body, which was not covered with pimples, I would try to have children.” Poor Josepha, abandoned and humiliated, suddenly died of smallpox like her predecessor, though this time her husband was not particularly moved by grief.

The smallpox epidemic also saved several of Joseph’s siblings from horrible marriages. His brother Charles died of it before a match could be arranged for him, while his sister Elizabeth, once the great beauty of the family, was so scarred by the disease that no suitor would have her and she was forced into a bitter spinsterhood. Another daughter, Josepha, died just in the nick of time. She had been betrothed to Ferdinand, the child-king of Naples, renowned for his stupidity. He was so dumb, in fact, that his father decided he should be spared the rigors of an education. Needless to say, Josepha was not pleased with the match and made it abundantly clear. Her mother, however, was determined. “I consider Josepha a sacrifice to politics,” the empress wrote firmly to her daughter’s governess, “and if she fulfills her duty to her husband and her God, I shall be content . . . I hope my daughter will not be selfish; she has a tendency in that direction.”

Mercifully, on the day she was to leave Austria to become Queen of Naples, Josepha also succumbed to smallpox. Young King Ferdinand was not terribly upset over the death of his intended. An English ambassador reported seeing him playing funeral, amid much hilarity, with a pal dressed up like the dead Josepha—complete with chocolate dotted all over his face to resemble smallpox. Besides, what was the loss of one sister when another was waiting in the wings to take her place?

That sister, Caroline, was equally displeased with the arrangement. Bitterly homesick, she called her life in Naples “a martyrdom,” and wrote: “I now know what marriage is, and I have a deep pity for [youngest sister] Antoinette who has yet to experience marriage. I admit frankly that I would rather die than be forced to live again what I have gone through. If I had not been taught by my religion to think of God, I should have killed myself, for it was hell to live like that for a week. I shall weep bitterly if ever my sister is in the same situation.”

Sadly, young Antoinette found herself in a very similar situation. She was pawned off to the dauphin of France, the future King Louis XVI, in what her mother considered the ultimate diplomatic coup with Austria’s ancient enemy. Louis was hardly the prince young girls dream about. He was, quite frankly, a rude, pudgy, seemingly asexual loser, with filthy hygiene to boot. The Neopolitan ambassador remarked that the dauphin seemed to have been “born and raised in a forest,” while Madame Du Barry, mistress of his grandfather, Louis XV, called him a “fat, ill-bred boy.”

Young Louis had another problem, one shared by Catherine the Great’s husband, Peter III. He had phimosis. This, combined with his almost phobic shyness and his desperate fear of the surgery necessary to correct his deformity, made Louis less than a great lover. And Marie Antoinette a very lonely bride. Louis studiously avoided her and their marriage bed, leaving the poor girl all alone in the strange, debauched court of Louis XV at Versailles. Though they would eventually reach an accommodation after Louis inherited the French throne, the ill-fated couple would have little time to enjoy it. Their frivolous new lifestyle was disrupted by a pesky revolution that would claim both their heads.

 

 

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mong the legendary fiascoes that were so many royal marriages, few stand out as more discordant than the one between George IV of Britain and Caroline of Brunswick. This miserably mismatched pair made a royal sideshow out of a union that was doomed before it ever began. George, Prince of Wales at the time, already had a favorite mistress and a secret wife. But he had married the widow Mrs. Fitzherbert on the sly, without the king’s consent, which violated one law, plus she was Catholic, which violated another. Prince George was facing the prospect of losing his place at the head of the line for the throne.

Lured by the promise of having Parliament pay off his massive debts, George was persuaded to dump his illegal wife and marry his German cousin, Caroline. It was a steep price to pay for a clean credit report. Among other qualities, Caroline was a crude, foul-smelling exhibitionist with an enormous sexual appetite. Harris, Lord Malmesbury, the diplomat given the task of bringing Caroline from Brunswick to marry the prince, described her as having “no acquired morality, and no strong innate notions of its value and necessity”—a reputation she enjoyed all over Germany. She was short and stocky, described by Malmesbury as having “a head always too large for her body, and her neck too short.”

She also apparently shared the same royal malady—porphyria—that is thought to have driven her future father-in-law and uncle, George III, into babbling fits of insanity. While Prince George’s mother, Queen Charlotte, had serious reservations about Caroline’s suitability, his father was delighted. Demonstrating all the shrewd judgment he had earlier used in assessing the mood of the American colonists, George III roundly endorsed his niece. “Undoubtedly she is the person who naturally must be most agreeable to me,” he wrote Prime Minister William Pitt. “I expressed my approbation of the idea.”

The Prince of Wales was introduced to his betrothed for the first time on April 5, 1795. Malmesbury was there to relate the scene at St. James’s Palace. “He turned around, retired to a distant part of the apartment, and, calling me to him, said, ‘Harris, I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.’ ” Three days, and many brandies later, the happy couple were married. George spent the wedding night passed out drunk on the floor, with his mistress Lady Jersey in close attendance during the entire honeymoon.

Several weeks later, they were no longer living as man and wife, although Caroline did manage to get pregnant. Having satisfied the dual purposes of his marriage—siring a legitimate heir and settling his debts—George announced to Caroline a formal separation. “Our inclinations are not in our power,” he wrote her, “nor should either of us be held answerable to the other, because nature had not made us suitable to each other. Tranquil and comfortable society is, however, in our power; let our intercourse, therefore, be restricted to that.”

Caroline took her estranged husband’s letter as a license to let loose, which she did on a spectacular scale. She took to indecorous public displays of flesh. Basically, she became a flasher. “Oh! what an impudent woman was that Princess of Wales,” cried Lady Hester Stanhope. “How many sea-captains used to color up when she danced about, exposing herself like an opera-girl.” Lord Holland called her “utterly destitute of all female delicacy,” while the Rev. William Mason wrote to Bishop Hurd and declared himself “a perfect convert to Your Lordship’s Hypothesis of Insanity.”

All the tongue-wagging eventually landed Caroline in court. A Lady Douglas was spreading tales that the wayward princess had gotten pregnant in an adulterous affair and had given birth to a bastard boy. Caroline’s indignant husband called for an inquiry and the king agreed. What became known as “The Delicate Investigation” convened in July 1806. Several months later, Caroline was acquitted of the charges, but a thorough review of her sex life left her reputation in ruins.

The Princess of Wales became a social pariah. Eight years later, tired of the relentless persecution, she fled Britain right into the arms of King Joachim of Naples. This was a stinging slap at George, now serving as Regent of his father’s kingdom, because Joachim was the brother-in-law of the Prince Regent’s archenemy, Napoleon of France. While the Naples revel ended when Napoleon escaped his exile on Elba in 1815, Caroline’s adventures abroad were just beginning. Soon she had a new beau. “I have Napoleon’s courier with me,” she announced, “which is quite a treasure to me, faithful and prudent. I shall keep him.” The courier and the queen-to-be marauded all over Europe, flaunting their treasonous affair everywhere they went. She showered him with honors, having him named a Knight of Malta and a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, for example, as well as Grand Master of her own Order of St. Caroline.

Never intending to return to England, Caroline found she had changed her mind upon the death of her husband’s father, George III. Since she was not officially divorced, she was now the Queen of England and fully intended to serve. But the new King George IV thought otherwise and set out pursuing a divorce through Parliament. A problem arose, however, as it was determined that the public sentiment was firmly with Caroline—not so much out of loyalty to her, but due to deep disdain for him.

The people reminded George just how unpopular he was with them when they turned out in droves to support Caroline as she faced the “Bill of Pains and Penalties” to “deprive Her Majesty Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of the Title, Prerogatives, Rights, Privileges and Pretensions of Queen Consort of the Realm, and to dissolve the Marriage between His Majesty and the said Queen.” Guards had to be stationed all over the area of Westminster to control the crowds as a parade of witnesses testified inside about the queen’s outrageous conduct abroad. But without the support of the people, the bill, after some debate, was abandoned in Parliament.

George was stuck, but not defeated. When Caroline, looking like a caricature of a queen, arrived at his coronation and demanded entry, the doors to Westminster Abbey were slammed shut right in her face. Several weeks later she was dead, suffering from acute porphyria, or maybe poison, as some suggested. The inscription on her coffin, which she wrote herself, read: “Deposited, Caroline of Brunswick, the Injured Queen of England.”

George IV never remarried.

T
he tree shrew is one species of animal known for eating its young. Royalty is another. Consumed as they were with kingdoms and crowns, many blue-blooded parents willingly sacrificed the well-being of their children to their own agendas. And, in some cases, they made growing up at the palace downright dangerous.

The execution of Lady Jane Grey. Where was Mom?