A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (21 page)

But there was nothing about his only son’s behavior that prepared the emperor for his shocking demise. On January 30, 1889, Archduke Rudolf was found dead in the royal hunting lodge of Mayerling. He had shot himself in the head. Beside him was his eighteen-year-old mistress, Marie Vetsera, whom Rudolf had killed only a few hours before turning the gun on himself.

Although Marie had been devoted to him, she meant nothing to the deranged prince—just someone to accompany him to the grave. Her body was left in a heap for nearly two days after her death while the royal family engineered a conspiracy of misinformation about the murder-suicide. Rudolf, the official line went, died of a heart attack—alone. All information surrounding the tragedy was destroyed.

The genetically compromised line of Joanna the Mad and Philip the Fair finally came to an end with the defeat and collapse of the ancient Habsburg monarchy after World War I ended in 1918.

 

 

I
f Louis XIV was France’s Sun King, then his brother, Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, was its Drag Queen. Monsieur, as the duke was always referred, loved putting himself on dazzling display, sashaying his way through the gilded halls of Versailles blowing kisses at all the pretty boys. “Monsieur was short and pot bellied,” the court observer Saint Simon wrote, “and wore such high heels he looked as though he was on stilts. He was forever dressing like a woman, with rings, bracelets, and gems everywhere; a long, black powdered wig frilled in the front, ribbons wherever he could put them, and all kinds of perfumes.” In short, he was a little light in the velvet slippers.

In Alexandre Dumas’s classic tale,
The Man in the Iron Mask
, Louis XIV’s identical brother is locked away with his face obscured so as to never pose a threat to the king. In truth, Louis and Philippe were not twins and looked little alike—the latter only a “flaccid reflection” of his brother, as one writer described him. Monsieur was never imprisoned, either. He was rendered impotent not by an iron mask, but by the constant encouragement he received as a young boy to engage in all his frilly interests—leaving the boy stuff to his big brother Louis.

Although the king hated homosexuals, he made an exception for his brother. Monsieur was accorded the highest prominence at court, and Louis was very affectionate toward him. He actually seemed to enjoy his brother’s incessant chattering, and even tolerated his periodic snit fits. But there was always the hint of condescension. “Now we are going to work,” Louis remarked when it was time to settle down to the business of the kingdom. “Go and amuse yourself, brother.” And off Monsieur would flit—to a wig fitting, a gossipy soiree, or any of the other frivolous pastimes that occupied his day.

Yet despite his flamboyant appearance and feminine behavior, Monsieur proved himself a brave warrior. Leading his troops into battle wearing blush, jewels, and a perfectly coiffed wig, the duke fought without fear. “He was more afraid of the sun, or the black smoke of gunpowder, than he was of musket bullets,” his wife once remarked.

 

 

D
uring the dynamic reign of Peter the Great there were occasions when the mighty Russian tsar liked to step off his throne and embark as an eager student on educational field trips across Europe. During these expeditions, which Peter preferred to make incognito so he could explore and learn without undue notice or ceremony, the tsar absorbed a wide variety of skills and knowledge that he brought back home with him and applied with great success. After learning the art of shipbuilding, for example, he personally helped build Russia’s navy, and later he raised St. Petersburg from a swamp to a modern European capital.

Yet while Peter’s intense curiosity about the world helped drag his backward kingdom out of its medieval malaise, many of his subjects would probably have preferred their emperor to be just an ignorant, provincial bumpkin. It would have been easier on them. Peter demanded the people around him share his lust for learning, and woe to those who demonstrated any reluctance. Once, during an anatomy lesson in Holland, the tsar heard squeamish groans coming from his comrades when a dissected corpse was produced. Infuriated by their weakness, Peter ordered each of them to approach the cadaver, bend down, and take a bite out of the body.

He loved to practice the skills he picked up on his journeys. Among them were surgery and dentistry. In the collection of the prestigious Russian Academy of Science, which Peter founded in 1724, are rows and rows of healthy-looking teeth—all neatly mounted and identified. Peter had pulled all of them out himself. He always carried with him a bag filled with surgical instruments. Any servant or courtier who fell ill went to great pains to keep his condition a secret lest the tsar appear at his bedside ready to operate.

After one trip abroad, Peter returned to Russia in 1698 determined to modernize the faces of his male subjects. Facial hair had always been a traditional symbol of Russian religious belief and self-respect. “To shave the beard is a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse,” Peter’s royal ancestor, Ivan the Terrible, once declared. “It is to deface the image of man created by God.” To Peter, however, beards were uncivilized and ridiculous adornments that symbolized Russia’s insular barbarity and made his kingdom a laughingstock in Europe. And so, producing a sharp razor after a welcoming party arrived at his palace, the tsar began hacking at their beards, leaving the stunned group with smooth faces for the first time since childhood.

At one party given in honor of his return, Peter sent his court jester around the room with a razor. Many faces with thick beards that had been cultivated for years were left gouged and bloody from the rough shave. No one dared complain, though, knowing the tsar would personally box their ears if they did. Soon after, he issued a decree that banned beards throughout Russia. To enforce the law, officials were given the power to cut off any they encountered, no matter how important the wearer. Peter did relent a little for those too enmeshed in tradition to shave, allowing them to pay a tax on their beards instead. They were given a little bronze medallion to wear around their necks that noted the tax had been paid. Still, it was never a good idea to come near the tsar with a beard, even with the medallion. According to one chronicler, those who did regretted it, for Peter, “in a merry humor, pulled out their beards by the roots or took it off so roughly [with a razor] that some of the skin went with it.”

Bearded Russians weren’t the only ones adversely affected by Peter’s passion for the West. His foreign hosts often found him to be a troublesome guest. The hard-drinking tsar and his companions loved to party and, like modern-day frat boys, often trashed the place. The English writer John Evelyn discovered this when he rented his elegantly appointed home to Peter and found it utterly destroyed three months later. Windows were smashed, paintings ripped, furniture used as firewood, feather beds, sheets and canopies shredded. The lawn and garden, Evelyn’s pride and joy, were trampled into mud and dust, “as if a regiment of soldiers in iron shoes had drilled on [them].” Neighbors even reported seeing the drunken tsar pushed along in a wheelbarrow—a then unknown contraption in Russia—right into the estate’s carefully cultivated hedges.

Destructive as he was when traveling abroad, Peter was meticulous in maintaining his cabinet of curiosities at home. In addition to the teeth he pulled out of his subjects’ mouths, the collection included a wide variety of other items that the tsar found fascinating. Among them, preserved in alcohol, was the head of Marie Hamilton, one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting who was executed for having killed her three illegitimate babies.

Intrigued by human freaks of nature, Peter also kept the preserved remains of babies born deformed, which he encouraged his subjects to send him, as well as the skeleton of a giant who stood nearly eight feet tall. Not all the genetic anomalies in Peter’s collection were dead, however. Like many royals of the era, he loved midgets and dwarfs, thinking them utterly hilarious. He kept a large stable of them for his amusement. At banquets, they were placed in huge pies, with Peter howling with laughter when he cut open a pie and a dwarf popped out. He particularly enjoyed watching them in mock ceremonies that mirrored the elaborate rituals of his court.

Two days after the marriage of his niece in 1710, a wedding of two dwarfs was held with equal pomp and ceremony. Friedrich Christian Weber, the ambassador of Hanover, described the scene: “A very little dwarf marched at the head of the procession, as being the marshall . . . conductor and master of the ceremony. He was followed by the bride and bridegroom neatly dressed. Then came the Tsar attended by his ministers, princes, boyars, officers and others; next marched all the dwarfs of both sexes in couples. They were in all seventy-two. . . .

“The Tsar, in token of his favor, was pleased to hold the garland over the bride’s head according to the Russian custom. The ceremony being over, the company went . . . to the Prince Menshikov’s palace. . . . Several small tables were placed in the middle of the hall for the new-married couple and the rest of the dwarfs, who were all splendidly dressed after the German fashion. . . .

“After dinner the dwarfs began to dance after the Russian way, which lasted till eleven at night. It is very easy to imagine how much the Tsar and the rest of the company were delighted at the comical capers, strange grimaces, and odd postures of that medley of pygmies, most of whom were of a size the mere sight of which was enough to produce laughter. . . . When these diversions were ended, the newly married couple were carried to the Tsar’s house and bedded in his own bedchamber.”

 

 

A
fter conscientiously ruling Britain for nearly thirty years, George III was overcome by a disturbing change in 1788. His behavior became so bizarre that it seemed the once dull and dutiful monarch was slowly losing his mind. It started one October morning when the king woke up with a severe stomachache—like someone had socked him in the gut as he slept. His joints were so inflamed that he could barely move and a mean rash covered his arms. The king’s physician, Sir George Baker, attributed the symptoms to his “having walked on the grass for several hours, and, without having changed his stockings, which were very wet, went to St. James; and that at night he ate four large pears for supper.” Sir George prescribed what any good doctor of the day would—a bowel-cleansing purge.

Several days later, though, the king was no better. The whites of his eyes had turned a ghastly yellow and his urine brown. Worst of all, he was showing distinct signs of becoming mentally unbalanced. For three nonstop hours the king railed at his doctor, repeating himself frequently, and displaying what Sir George called “an agitation of spirit bordering on delirium.”

The staff started noticing a change in the king’s behavior as well. Fanny Burney, Queen Charlotte’s Keeper of the Robes, unexpectedly encountered him one evening at Windsor Castle. There she recorded that George spoke in “a manner so uncommon that a high fever alone could not account for it; a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness . . . a vehemence, rather . . . it startled me inexpressibly.”

Weeks after the onset of the symptoms, King George attended a concert at Windsor. He barely heard the music as he chatted throughout the entire performance, frequently changing topics and continuously sitting, then standing, and then sitting again. The day before, while worshiping at chapel, George suddenly stood up in the middle of the sermon, threw his arms around his wife and daughters and exclaimed loudly, “You know what it is to be nervous. But was you ever as bad as this?”

At this point the king still had the presence of mind to know he was losing it. “They would make me believe I have the gout,” he complained, kicking one foot against the other, “but if it was gout, how could I kick the part without any pain?” Aware of his babbling, yet unable to control it, King George ordered his attendants to read aloud to him—yet still he kept chattering away. Bursting into tears on the shoulders of his son, the Duke of York, the king anguished over his condition. “I wish to God I may die,” he wept, “for I am going to be mad.”

The self-diagnosis seemed sadly prescient as King George’s behavior became increasingly erratic over the weeks that followed. This period was highlighted by the king’s sudden and violent attack on his eldest son during dinner one night at Windsor Castle—when he grabbed the Prince of Wales by the collar, pulled him out of his chair, and hurled him against a wall.

Upon examining the king after this unpleasant domestic scene, Sir George Baker decided that he was now “under an entire alienation of mind and much more agitated than he had ever been.” Queen Charlotte noted that his eyes were like “blackcurrant jelly, the veins in his face were swelled, the sound of his voice was dreadful; he often spoke till he was exhausted . . . while the foam ran out of his mouth.” The king himself was heard to mutter in a hoarse, barely audible voice, “I am nervous. I am not ill, but I am nervous. If you would know what is the matter with me, I am nervous.”

Bad nerves, however, were the least of George III’s problems. After the violent dinner incident, his mental condition deteriorated even further. He still talked incessantly and incoherently, at one point rambling on for nineteen hours with barely a pause. But his chatter was increasingly peppered with obscene language the normally prudish monarch would otherwise have been mortified to hear, let alone speak.

He gave orders to people who did not exist. On one occasion he became convinced that London was flooded and ordered his yacht there. Looking through a telescope, he claimed he could see his ancestral German homeland of Hanover. He composed letters to foreign courts on imaginary causes and lavished honors on all who approached him, even the lowliest servant. After refusing to be shaved for weeks, he relented by allowing only one side of his face to be clipped.