A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (14 page)

Desperate, Dudley conspired with the Greys to have his son Guilford marry their daughter Jane. He then persuaded the dying king to exclude both his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from succession and name his Protestant cousin Jane instead. With this arrangement, Dudley believed he could maintain his power after Edward’s death by manipulating his royal daughter-in-law when she became queen. The self-effacing girl, all of fifteen, was horrified at the prospect of marrying Guilford Dudley, whom she considered an arrogant bully. For the first time in her life, Jane actually stood up to her parents and refused to consider the union. Her mother eventually beat the girl into submission.

When Edward VI died in 1553, Dudley immediately declared Jane to be queen, forcing the Council to go along with him. The terrified teen, who had had no idea Edward was even sick—let alone that she had been tapped to replace him—was sickened at the prospect of ruling, particularly at the expense of her cousins Mary and Elizabeth. Fainting at the news, she was slapped awake by her mother. When the crown was brought to her, Jane refused to try it on, protesting that she had no right to it. She was also unnerved to see everyone—including her heretofore brutal parents—now bowing in deference before her.

Jane Grey was Queen of England for only nine days before “Bloody” Mary Tudor claimed her rightful throne. The nine-day queen’s father delivered the news by shredding the cloth of estate that hung behind her throne. While she had been staying at the Tower of London in preparation for her coronation, Jane was now kept prisoner there. Her mother completely abandoned her, absorbed as she was with saving her own skin. Frances Grey did find time to plead successfully with her cousin Queen Mary to pardon her husband for his part in the usurpation attempt, but didn’t bother putting in a good word for her daughter.

Jane was left to defend herself. Writing a humble letter to Mary, she swore that she had never wanted the throne, insisting that it had been forced on her, not only by Dudley and her parents, but under King Edward’s will. “Although my fault be such that but for the goodness and clemency of the queen, I can have no hope of finding pardon,” she wrote, “having given ear to those who at that time appeared, not only to myself, but to a great part of this realm to be wise, and now have manifested themselves to the contrary, not only to my and their great detriment, but with common disgrace and blame of all, they having with shameful boldness made so blameable and dishonorable an attempt to give to other that which was not theirs.” She continued the letter, lamenting her “want of prudence” in accepting the crown, “for which I deserve heavy punishment,” but asked for Mary’s understanding, “it being known that the error imputed to me has not been altogether caused by myself.”

Jane’s plea to the queen may very well have been successful under ordinary circumstances. Despite the bloody reputation she earned later in her reign for her ruthless persecution of heretics, Mary Tudor was naturally inclined to mercy. She had known and loved Jane since her cousin was a little girl and knew she had nothing to do with the plot to steal her throne. But then Jane’s father, who had already been pardoned once, involved himself in another failed rebellion against Mary. He did this knowing full well that his daughter was still vulnerable in the Tower. Now the queen’s hand was forced. She wanted to marry her cousin King Philip II of Spain, but was told by the Spanish that it would be impossible if she continued to be so casual about treason in her midst.

The hapless girl was not yet seventeen when she was beheaded at the Tower in February 1554. In her final hours, the “Nine Days Queen” wrote in a prayer book three small verses—each in a different language:

In Latin: “If justice is done with my body, my soul will find mercy with God.”

In Greek: “Death will give pain to my body for its sins, but the soul will be justified before God.”

In English: “If my faults deserve punishment, my youth at least and my imprudence were worthy of excuse. God and posterity will show me favor.”

She died on the block without ever hearing from her mother, who by some accounts was at that moment romping with a servant fifteen years her junior.

 

 

K
ings have always needed their sons to propagate their dynasties but have often hated them for the same reason. Rising sons have represented grating reminders of the king’s mortality, and were frequently suspected of wishing to hasten it. So it was with Frederick William I, the crude, obese, bigoted eighteenth-century ruler of Prussia, who seems to have had a particularly virulent loathing of his eldest son, Frederick.

It didn’t take the prince long after his birth to begin aggravating the bully king. A frail and sickly child, young Frederick was a gross insult to his father’s vision of what constituted a future monarch. Frederick William would storm into the boy’s nursery, mercilessly poking and prodding him as if he were some odious specimen. As the boy grew older, the treatment grew worse.

Holding that “all learned men are fools,” the blustering king hated the arts, literature, and science. Indeed he went out of his way to insult members of the esteemed Academy of Sciences, founded by his own father. Young Frederick had the misfortune of naturally embracing the very pursuits his father so despised. He was regularly beaten and tormented by the king, left tearful, and trembling in his presence. Prince Frederick’s sister and soul-mate, Wilhelmina, often witnessed the ruthless treatment. “The king could not bear my brother,” she once recalled. “He abused
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him whenever he laid eyes on him, so that Frederick became obsessed with a fear of him which persisted even after he reached the age of reason.”

Determined to eradicate all the cultured interests his son pursued, King Frederick William ordered a Spartan regimen intended to mold the boy into a miniature version of himself—a cruel and hostile tyrant. As for music, plays, and other “dissipations,” young Frederick’s tutors were ordered, on pain of death, to “inspire him with a disgust of them.” The father would flip at any perceived foppish behavior on the part of his son, once beating him senseless for using a three-pronged silver fork instead of the standard two-pronged steel one.

Most everything the prince did invoked his father’s violent wrath, and the relationship deteriorated to such a level of spite that Frederick once wrote the king begging for understanding. The reply was written in the glowing warmth of the third person: “The prince,” wrote the king, “has a willful and wicked disposition; he does not love his father. A son who loves his father does the will of that father, not only in his presence, but also when he is not there to see. He knows perfectly well that I cannot endure an effeminate boy, who is without a single manly inclination, who cannot ride, nor shoot. . . . He has no pleasure but to follow his own head. That is my answer.”

King Frederick William was growing increasingly paranoid of a plot to kill him, imagining his son at the center of it. He once accused the prince in the presence of half a dozen Prussian officers of intending to murder him, not in a direct attack, “since you are too cowardly,” but by stabbing him in the back. Another encounter led the king to strike his cringing son repeatedly, saying contemptuously, “Had I been treated so by my father, I would have blown my brains out. But this fellow has no honor, he takes all that comes.”

To escape his father’s relentless brutality, Frederick determined to seek refuge at the court of his cousin George II in England. But his plan was discovered, and the prince was arrested and sent to a hellish prison. The king then ordered Frederick and his friend, Lt. Hans von Katte, court-martialed. The military tribunal refused to try Frederick, however, calling it a family matter, but it sentenced von Katte to life imprisonment. Waving aside their verdict, the king sought his own revenge. Von Katte was beheaded, while Frederick was forced to watch.

Eventually humbling himself before his father, Prince Frederick was able to effect a tenuous peace. He then had only to wait quietly for the king’s demise. His patience paid off and he assumed the throne in 1740 at age twenty-eight. He would be known to the world as Frederick the Great—famed poet, musician, and military giant who set the stage for the emergence of the German Empire.

 

 

P
eter the Great was what might be best described as a super-tsar. Standing nearly seven feet tall, this swaggering colossus revolutionized Russia at the turn of the eighteenth century. He founded St. Petersburg, one of the world’s most elegant cities. He introduced Western culture to his insular nation and gave it a modern navy. He also tortured his son to death.

The towering tsar was never particularly fond of his heir, Alexis. The mere fact that the tsarevitch was the product of Peter’s first marriage to Empress Eudoxia—whom the emperor had cruelly discarded and sent to a nunnery—was one strike against him. Alexis also was lazy, bookish, and disinclined toward anything military—in short, everything his aggressive and domineering father was not. But what really irked Peter was that his son showed no interest in developing the skills necessary to inherit the great Russian throne. Instead, Alexis preferred boozing with members of the old Russian order that the tsar was trying to reform, and romping with his mistress, a Finnish serf named Afrosina.

Tsar Peter was so determined to rouse Alexis to his responsibilities that the heir lived in pathological fear of disappointing him. Once, dreading an appointment with his dad to demonstrate the military maneuvers he was supposed to be learning, Alexis contrived to create a diversion. It was quite a diversion. He tried to shoot himself in the hand, but flinched and succeeded only in sustaining a severe gunpowder burn.

Growing tired of his son’s gross evasion of duty, Peter sent Alexis a blistering letter, outlining all his failures. “Remember your obstinacy and ill-nature,” the tsar wrote, “how often I reproached you for it and for how many years I almost have not spoken to you. But all this has availed nothing, has effected nothing. I was but losing my time, it was striking the air. You do not make the least endeavors, and all your pleasure seems to consist in staying idle and lazy at home. Things of which you ought to be ashamed (forasmuch as they make you miserable) seem to make up your dearest delight, nor do you see the dangerous consequences of it for yourself and for the whole state.”

Peter concluded his missive with a threat to disinherit his son if he didn’t shape up. To his great surprise, Alexis told him to go ahead and do it. “If Your Majesty will deprive me of the succession to the crown of Russia by reason of my incapacity, your will be done,” he wrote. “I even most urgently beg it of you because I do not think myself fit for government.” Suspicious of the tsarevitch’s easy capitulation, Peter issued a more ominous ultimatum: Either buckle down and prepare to one day rule, or join a monastery. In a blind panic, Alexis opted for something entirely different. He fled Russia.

Dressed as an anonymous Russian officer, accompanied by Afrosina, who was disguised as a male page, and several servants, the terrified Alexis made his way to the Viennese court of his Habsburg brother-in-law, the Emperor Charles VI. Just before Alexis left his homeland, one of his supporters offered a bit of advice: “Remember, if your father sends somebody to persuade you to return, do not do it. He will have you publicly beheaded.” If only Alexis had listened.

Peter was livid when he discovered his son was missing. It was bad enough that Alexis would defy him, but the flight would also encourage all the dissenters who hoped one day to overturn the tsar’s sweeping reforms. It didn’t take him long to track down the wayward heir, first in Austria, then Naples. Alexis broke into a fit of uncontrollable sobs when he was discovered. He soon received a letter from pop:

 

Not only was the prodigal son being lured home with the promise of amnesty, he was further enticed by the guarantee that he could give up the throne, marry Afrosina, and retire to the country. Poor Alexis swallowed it whole. In a public ceremony at the Kremlin, the returning tsarevitch renounced his claim to the throne in favor of his infant half-brother, while prostrating himself before his father, admitting his sins and pleading for forgiveness. Now he could disappear with Afrosina and wait for better times—or so he thought.