A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (15 page)

While Peter had publicly pardoned Alexis, he was consumed with gnawing doubts about the escape. Had there been a larger conspiracy behind it? Had his life or crown been in danger? Retracting his earlier promise of unconditional immunity, the tsar demanded from his son the names of every person who had been involved with the ignominious flight, or even knew of it. A huge round-up followed. Some of the people Alexis named were executed immediately in a vast public spectacle. Others had their noses and tongues cut off, or their bones broken with a hammer. Some were stretched on a wheel until they died. Some were burned with red-hot irons and glowing coals, or impaled rectally.

Alexis felt lucky to avoid the carnage, but his relief was premature. Peter was convinced his son hadn’t told the whole truth regarding any conspiracy to dethrone him. He wanted Alexis to spill all and, to help him along, subjected him to a uniquely Russian torture: the knout, a thick, hard leather whip about three and a half feet long that tore the skin off a victim’s back. Fifteen to twenty-five lashes were considered standard; any more than that often led to death.

Alexis received twenty-five strokes the first day of interrogation, but revealed no more than he had already admitted (that he had spoken disparagingly of the tsar to the Austrian emperor). Fifteen more strokes several days later elicited the admission that he had once confessed to a priest that he wished his father were dead. Several days after that Alexis was himself dead, sparing his dad from having to sign his death warrant. It was possibly the greatest price anyone ever paid for running away from home.
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Q
ueen Victoria reigned longer than any British monarch before or since, and considering her vigilance in keeping him politically and socially impotent while she lived, her longevity was perhaps her final and greatest disservice to her eldest son and heir, the future King Edward VII.

The rigid, repressed Victoria was never a particularly cozy mum, candidly acknowledging early on that she derived “no especial pleasure or compensation” from her large brood of children. Even when they were tiny babies, Victoria regarded them as distasteful little creatures. “I have no tendre for them,” she once remarked, “til they have become a little human; an ugly baby is a very nasty object . . . and the prettiest is frightful when undressed . . . as long as they have their big body and little limbs and that terrible frog-like action.”

Victoria displayed a particular enmity toward Prince Edward almost from the beginning. “The hereditary and unfailing antipathy of our Sovereigns to their Heirs Apparent seems thus early to be taking root,” Lord Grenville noted, while Lord Clarendon later said that the queen’s dislike of the Prince of Wales was “a positive monomania with her. She got quite excited while speaking of him, and it quite irritated her to see him in the room.”

The young prince was gregarious and fun-loving—everything his mother forced herself not to be, and with her driving fear that he would grow up to be like her debauched Hanoverian uncles,
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the queen prescribed a torturously rigid upbringing that stifled the boy’s natural inclinations for enjoyment. His rebellion from the constraints imposed did little to endear him to his mama, who bombarded him with criticism and rarely missed an opportunity to register her disappointment in him. “I am in utter despair!” the queen wrote her daughter Vicky in 1858. “The systematic idleness, laziness—disregard of everything is enough to break one’s heart, and fills me with indignation!”

On another occasion, Victoria spoke of “the sorrow and bitter disappointment and the awful anxiety for the future this causes us.” Even her son’s appearance seemed to annoy her. “Handsome I cannot think him,” she sniffed, “with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of a chin.” It was an ironic critique coming from a woman who could very well have been describing herself and who at least admitted of Edward: “He is my caricature.”

The chasm between mother and son widened considerably upon the death of Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, to whom she was fanatically devoted and for whose death she loudly blamed Edward. It was enough to make any son feel special. The prince had been caught in a youthful indiscretion with an actress, and the morally sensitive Albert was devastated by the scandal surrounding his son. Coincidentally, he died a short time later. Victoria could not be convinced that it was typhoid, not grief, that carried her beloved away. In her gloom, the queen declared that she could never look at Edward again “without a shudder.” With his typical good nature and kindness, however, the prince overlooked his mother’s cruel accusations and remained solicitous and devoted to her.

During Victoria’s morbid, self-imposed seclusion that would last for decades, the crepe-draped queen remained determined to keep the Prince of Wales away from anything even remotely resembling responsibility. She was convinced, unjustly, of Edward’s inherent unworthiness. “What would happen if I were to die next winter!” she wrote her daughter. “One shudders to think of it: it is too awful a contemplation. . . . The greatest improvement I fear will never make him fit for his position.” On another occasion she confided, “I often pray he may never survive me, for I know not what would happen.” All important state papers were kept from the prince, providing zero training for his future role. Removing a key from his pocket, Edward’s little brother, Leopold, once said: “It is the Queen’s Cabinet key, which opens all the secret despatch boxes. . . . The Prince of Wales is not allowed to have one.”

Warm-hearted as he was, Edward couldn’t help but resent how insignificant his mother made him feel. “I am not of the slightest use to the Queen,” he once complained. “Everything I say or suggest is pooh-poohed and my brothers and sisters are more listened to than I am.” The more the queen kept him away from responsibility, the more Edward turned to other idle distractions like gambling and womanizing. This only confirmed in Victoria’s mind how unworthy he really was.

Never trusting his judgment, the queen even tried to control Edward’s private life long after he was married. Lord Stanley noted in 1863 that all London was gossiping about the “extraordinary way” in which the queen insisted on directing “the Prince and Princess of Wales in every detail of their lives. They may not dine out, except with previous approval. . . . In addition, a daily and minute report of what passes at Marlborough House [their London residence] has to be sent to Windsor.”

Throughout it all, the prince handled the mistrust and disapproval with dignity and good humor, always remaining a respectful and dutiful son. After he inherited the throne in 1901 at age fifty-nine, King Edward VII would reign with distinction for nine years, proving his mother’s attitude toward him totally unfounded. He lent his name to a genteel era, and was nicknamed Edward the Peacemaker for his adroit efforts to keep Europe from war. He was a good king, his mother be damned.

B
ear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,” wrote Alexander Pope in
An Essay on Man
, recalling the days when Eastern kings would secure their thrones by gouging out the hearts and livers of their brethren. Royal relationships were no warmer in Western Europe. The crown meant power, and monarchs spent their days either defending it from predatory relatives, or lording it over the more compliant of their kinsmen. Family ties tended to suffer as a result, rendered as fragile as antique lace.

Richard III: History’s most evil uncle?

F
euding royal families have been a part of Britain’s heritage from the very beginning. William the Conqueror had barely staked his claim to the island in 1066 before his snarly clan started bickering among themselves. His son, Henry I, imprisoned another son, Robert, Duke of Normandy, for twenty-eight years and is suspected of having orchestrated the tragic hunting “accident” that killed a third son, William II, in 1100. Vying for the crown years later, two of the Conqueror’s grandchildren, Stephen and Matilda, plunged the kingdom into a fierce civil war that was only settled when Matilda’s son became Henry II in 1154. Poor Henry was subjected to no fewer than four rebellions by his grasping sons, all urged on by their mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose bitter estrangement from Henry resulted in her lengthy imprisonment. This loving family would hound its patriarch to death.

Ruler of vast domains that included all of England and much of France, Henry II decided to divide up his territory among his sons while he was still alive. He even had his eldest son, Henry the Younger, crowned king of England while he, too, retained the title. If Henry was hoping this would make the boys happy and ensure a peaceful transition after his death, he was tragically mistaken. The children wanted the power as well as the titles, and rebelled when Henry indicated he wasn’t ready to relinquish that. In various combinations, and with stunning treachery, they rose up against their father—and each other.

There was, at the time, a tapestry hanging in the royal chamber at Westminster. It featured four eaglets preying upon the parent bird, the fourth poised at the parent’s neck prepared to gouge out the eyes. “The four eaglets are my four sons who cease not to persecute me even unto death,” King Henry reportedly said. “The youngest of them, who I now embrace with so much affection, will some time in the end insult me more grievously than any of the others.” And so it came to be.

The fourth eaglet ready to rip out the father’s eyes turned out to be Henry’s beloved youngest son, the infamous future King John of Magna Carta fame. King Henry had striven to advance John’s fortunes, especially since he didn’t inherit all the land his brothers did (hence the “Lackland” that is often attached to his name). Showing just how grateful he was, John joined older brother Richard (the Lion Hearted) in his final rebellion against their father.

At least Richard had some legitimate gripes with dad, not the least of which was the recurring rumor that Henry was sleeping with Richard’s fiancée. But John’s betrayal was too much for his father to bear. When he saw his beloved son had covertly switched allegiance, and that his name now headed the list of conspirators, Henry was finally defeated and broken. The once proud monarch lay back in his bed, closed his eyes in despair, and died. John subsequently kept himself busy during the next reign—that of Richard I—trying to steal his brother’s throne while the new king was off fighting in the Crusades. It was against this background of fraternal disloyalty that the legendary Robin Hood played his part.

Royal family relations had hardly improved several generations later when Queen Isabella, estranged wife of Edward II, raided her husband’s kingdom with her lover in 1326 and had the king put to a ghastly death.
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Their son Edward III then sired a family whose descendents engaged in a bloody feud that lasted for more than three decades and became famous as “The Wars of the Roses.”

 

 

T
he Wars of the Roses was a fancy name, coined years later, for a nasty feud in the late fifteenth century between the royal houses of York, represented by the white rose, and Lancaster, represented by the red, over which branch of the Plantagenet dynasty should rule England. Three kings, a prince of Wales, and numerous royal dukes were murdered, executed, or killed in battle during this dark era of inbred intrigue.

The extended royal drama, which so intrigued Shakespeare that he devoted half his history plays to it, originated late in the fourteenth century when Edward III’s grandson, who became Henry IV and started the Lancastrian line of kings, usurped the throne of his cousin, Richard II, and had him murdered. While regicide wasn’t any way to promote kinship, things nevertheless went fairly smoothly for the Lancastrian kings—at least for a time. Though Henry IV faced a series of rebellions, his son peacefully inherited his throne and went down in history as the heroic Henry V who defeated the French at Agincourt and other great battles during the Hundred Years War while reasserting English power on the continent. The triumphant king died young, however, and was succeeded by his far less inspiring son.

Henry VI, who was not yet a year old when he became king in 1422, grew up to be a kind, pious man, if a bit of a simpleton. Plain and unassuming, he much preferred wearing a hair shirt to a crown and abhorred war and bloodshed. He is still revered today as the founder of the famed boys’ school Eton and of King’s College, Cambridge. Good guy though he was, Henry proved to be a dazzlingly incompetent monarch.

In the medieval world, when mighty rulers were needed to subdue sometimes overwhelming chaos, Henry VI was a toothless lion on a savage plain. He was, as Pope Pius II described him, “a man more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit.” Blushing at the very mention of sex, and sincerely believing his son was sired by the Holy Spirit, Henry was hardly the type meant to dominate the feudal food chain.