A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (20 page)

 

Youngest brother Jerome was far more amenable to dumping his wife at Napoleon’s demand than Lucien ever was. He had too much to lose. The hell-raising nineteen year old had married an American girl by the name of Elizabeth Patterson during a trip to Baltimore in 1803. Receiving the news, Napoleon issued an order barring his brother from returning to France with his new bride. “If he brings her with him, she will not set foot on French territory,” he decreed. “If he comes alone, I will overlook his error.”

Here was yet another brother interfering with his plans for a Bonaparte dynasty that was to be formed by marrying his siblings into the finest families of Europe. Napoleon wasn’t about to tolerate another nobody marrying into his family. Jerome, on the other hand, believed his older brother would soften upon meeting his new wife and planned to set sail with her in time to make the coronation. But their ship sank in a storm and they missed the ceremony.

Napoleon, meanwhile, was busy trying to nullify the union. When Jerome and his wife finally arrived in Europe, they were informed that Elizabeth, now pregnant, would not be allowed on European soil—Emperor’s orders. Enraged, Jerome set off to confront his brother, leaving his wife on the coast. “Rest assured,” he wrote her, “your husband will never abandon you. I would give my life for you, and for my child.”

Elizabeth never saw him again.

Napoleon had appealed to Jerome’s pleasure instinct, insisting that if he did not abandon his wife, his staggering debts would never be covered, and he would be stripped of all ranks and titles, lose his place in the succession, and be an outcast from the empire. Accustomed as he was to high living, Jerome got the message and was duly rewarded for his cooperation with an increased allowance and titles galore. Napoleon even created the kingdom of Westphalia for his little brother, carved out of several formerly independent German states.

The youngest Bonaparte took to his new kingdom as if it were his own personal playground, extravagantly spending on every whim while draining Westphalia in the process. This irked Napoleon, who considered it his right to plunder his brothers’ domains in order to finance his grand rampage through Europe. With Jerome as king, there was rarely anything to take. The Westphalians under the strain of both Bonapartes soon rose in rebellion and Napoleon had to swoop in and save his hapless brother. “Your kingdom has no police, no finances, and no organization,” the emperor berated King Jerome. “One does not found monarchies by living in the lap of luxury, by not lifting a finger. I quite expected that revolt to happen to you, and I hope it will teach you a lesson.” Alas, it did not.

With the empire collapsing and the Russians closing in, Jerome abandoned his brother just when the emperor needed him most. Napoleon had counted on Westphalia as a buffer, but when the Russians entered his kingdom, Jerome bolted in fear. After Napoleon’s forced abdication and attempted suicide, his youngest brother was all sympathy: “The Emperor, after causing all our troubles, has survived!”

 

While Napoleon’s three brothers played the most active roles in his empire, his relationships with the Bonaparte women—his mother and three sisters—were every bit as rancorous. He was stunned when the matriarch of the family, Letizia Bonaparte, whom they called Madame Mere, refused to attend his coronation, preferring to spend the occasion with her exiled son Lucien in Italy. His sisters were all there, but they were as sour as Joseph and Louis that day, all three loudly complaining about having inferior titles to Napoleon’s wife Josephine.
She
was to be empress, while they, mere princesses, would have to bow to her and carry her train. The outrage!

Indeed, if there was one thing that united the cantankerous clan, it was their all-consuming hatred for Josephine—or “the Whore,” as Madame Mere called her. The most joyous moment in the family was not when Napoleon achieved the very pinnacle of power, benefiting them all. It was when he sadly announced his divorce from Josephine, a casualty in his quest to sire a male heir.

Napoleon had the most difficulty with his rather promiscuous sister, Caroline. “Of my entire family, it is Caroline who most resembles me,” he remarked, which might explain why they didn’t get along. She bucked all Napoleon’s efforts to control her and against his will married Joachim Murat (who had slept with Josephine, cuckolding the emperor). Nevertheless, Napoleon made the couple king and queen of Naples. But when his fortunes were waning and he was being attacked on all sides, Caroline and Murat committed the ultimate act of treachery. They joined the allied forces against him. By this time, Napoleon’s exile on Elba must have seemed a sweet relief for all concerned.

T
he randomness of birth, or the strength to conquer, left the thrones of Europe open to a rich assortment of truly bizarre characters. Some were insane, others just appeared to be, yet all managed to disturb or frighten the people around them in one way or another.

Peter the Great hacks away at Russia’s beard problem.

 

 

H
enry II was a model for the ideal monarch: strong, judicious, and fair. Many historians, in fact, credit this twelfth-century king as the father of English Common Law. But Henry had a serious flaw: a blinding temper that tended to diminish his royal dignity.

Besides his treacherous family,
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King Henry is perhaps best remembered for his deadly dispute with Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, over the relative rights of Church and State. Exasperated by Becket’s intransigence, Henry screeched, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Several knights, hoping to please the king, took him literally at his word and slaughtered the archbishop in his own cathedral. As a result of Henry’s fit of pique, Becket was launched almost immediately into sainthood while the king was reduced to wearing sackcloth and ashes in repentance.

While this is the most famous example of the royal temper, it is by no means the most illustrative. Henry looked positively regal in his sackcloth compared to the spectacle he made of himself over a conflict with King William of Scotland. The scene is preserved in a letter written by John of Salisbury: “I heard that when the king was at Caen and was vigorously debating the matterof the king of Scotland, he broke out in abusive language against Richard du Hommet for seeming to speak somewhat in the king of Scotland’s favor, calling him a manifest traitor. And the king, flying into his usual temper, flung his cap from his head, pulled off his belt, threw off his cloak and clothes, grabbed the silken coverlet off the couch, and sitting as it might be on a dungheap, started chewing pieces of straw.”

J
oanna the Mad brought the emerging Spanish empire into her disastrous union with Philip the Fair,
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thus greatly expanding the power of the Habsburg royal family. She also introduced an enduring legacy of mental instability. And, handsome though he himself may have been, Philip carried the gene that would mutate into the grotesque facial deformity known as the Habsburg jaw. Together, Joanna and Philip planted the seeds from which sprung a genetic freak show—nurtured and replenished generation after generation by chronic and relentless inbreeding.

Emperor Charles V was the first beneficiary, and victim, of his parents’ miserable marriage. From Philip he inherited Austria, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, and a lower jaw so grossly extended that it was almost impossible for him to keep his mouth closed. Seeing his king for the first time, a stunned Spanish peasant reportedly shouted, “Your Majesty, shut your mouth, the flies of this country are very insolent.” Charles himself acknowledged his unsettling features in a letter to the king of France inviting him to a meeting. It was true that his mouth often hung open, “but not to bite people,” he reassured the French king. From Joanna, Charles gained the Spanish empire and, though he was spared her madness, a brooding melancholy would ultimately lead him to walk away from all his thrones and retire quietly.

Before his abdication in 1556, Charles split his vast domains in two. The Austrian possessions, including the Holy Roman Empire, went to his brother, Ferdinand, while Spain and all her territories were passed to his son, Philip II. From then on, for years to come, the Austrian and Spanish branches of the Habsburg royal family would rule side by side. They kept in touch by marrying one another.

On the Spanish side, Philip II—a religious fanatic who sent the ill-fated Armada against Elizabeth I of England—married his cousin, Maria of Portugal, and produced Don Carlos, one of the jewels of the Habsburg crown. Hunchbacked and pigeon breasted, with his entire right side less developed than his left, Don Carlos’s twisted frame mirrored his unbalanced mind. Tales of his cruelty and bizarre behavior were legion.

As a child, Don Carlos enjoyed watching rabbits roasted alive and, for kicks, once blinded all the horses in the royal stable. Things got even worse when doctors removed part of his skull to drain built-up fluids after a head injury Don Carlos sustained when he was sixteen. Half-lobotomized, he took to roaming the streets of Madrid, assaulting young girls and hurling obscenities at respectable women. That conk on the head also made him even more ornery than he was before. Once, when a bootmaker delivered the wrong size, Don Carlos ordered the footwear cut into pieces, stewed, and then force-fed to the unfortunate man.

All of this became too much for King Philip, who in 1568 finally had his only son and heir locked away. “I would like to talk in all frankness about the life and conduct of the prince,” Philip wrote his sister, “the degree to which he carried on with licentiousness and confusion, and the means I used to induce him to change his behavior.” All was for nought, the king concluded, thus justifying his son’s imprisonment.

Don Carlos eventually died raving in confinement, leaving his father without an heir. To remedy the situation, Philip married his twenty-one-year-old niece, Anna of Austria. From this, his fourth marriage,
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came King Philip III, who married an Austrian cousin and had Philip IV, who in his turn married an Austrian niece. From that union came the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, Carlos II.
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Impotent, malformed, and hopelessly simple, he was called Carlos the Bewitched—as if some gathering of malevolent forces had conspired against him. No one had any idea about the poisonous effects of chronic incest. With seven of his eight greatgrandparents directly descended from Joanna the Mad and Philip the Fair, Carlos was so inbred he could have been his own first cousin. No wonder he was such a mess.

“His constitution is so very weak and broken much beyond his age [thirty-five],” wrote the English ambassador to Spain in 1696. “He has a ravenous stomach, and swallows all he eats whole, for his nether jaw stands so much out, that his two rows of teeth cannot meet; to compensate which he has a prodigious wide throat, so that a gizzard or a liver of a hen passes down whole, and his weak stomach not being able to digest it, he voids in the same manner.”

Nothing engaged this semi-animated corpse of a king, including the administration of the crumbling Spanish Empire or the siring of an heir. Carlos preferred to spend his days among the moldering remains of his dead ancestors, occasionally having the coffins opened so he could better enjoy their company. When Carlos finally joined the deceased—mercifully childless—in 1700, the Spanish Habsburgs came to a sputtering end and the War of the Spanish Succession began.
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The Austrian branch of the Habsburgs, meanwhile, continued to mingle among themselves and carried on for two more centuries. But by the late nineteenth century their empire was crumbling and Emperor Francis Joseph faced a remarkable string of family tragedies. His wife Elizabeth was stabbed to death by anarchists in 1898; his brother Maximilian, sent to Mexico to rule as emperor, was shot by a firing squad there in 1867; and his nephew and heir, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914. It was this murder that sparked the outbreak of World War I.

The tragedies faced by the “Emperor of Sorrows,” as Francis Joseph was sometimes called, were attributed by some to a curse by Countess Carolyn Korolyi, whose son was put to death for participating in the Hungarian uprising of 1848. She called on “heaven and hell to blast the happiness of the emperor, to exterminate his family, to strike him through those that he loved, to wreck his life and ruin his children.” It was another curse, however that contributed to the most devastating loss faced by Francis Joseph: The curse of Joanna the Mad. Her blood ran strong in the emperor’s melancholy son, Rudolf, whose suicide in 1889 was one of the most devastating blows to the empire.

Chafing under the autocratic rule of his cold and aloof father,Rudolf abandoned himself to promiscuity and drug abuse, which served to deteriorate his already fragile mental state. As his erratic behavior increased over the years, so did the estrangement he felt from his father. It didn’t help that the crown prince dallied with the liberalism that was slowly creeping its way into the scattered empire and undermining the monarchy that had ruled over it for centuries. It was even alleged that Rudolf was involved in the Hungarian independence movement from Austria.
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