A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (29 page)

With his last breath in 1087, the once awesome ruler was instantly transformed into a bloated corpse destined for a series of indignities he could never have imagined during his lifetime. Actually, the humiliation began shortly before William expired—with the wound that killed him. While fighting in France, the warrior king was felled not by an enemy’s ax or sword, but by his own saddle—gouged on its horn when his horse reared at a burning ruin. History does not record exactly where on his person William was ruptured. One can only imagine.

The stricken king was taken by his retainers to the priory of Saint-Gervais, where he died several days later. With their sovereign dead, William’s loyal companions immediately raced off to secure their own interests, leaving the body alone with the servants. William the Conqueror was now ripe for the picking. Seizing the opportunity, the greedy staff started hauling away all his possessions, even his clothes, and the dead king was left on the floor nearly naked.

The Norman chronicler Ordericus Vitalis recorded the whole ghastly episode a generation later: “Behold this mighty prince who was lately obsequiously obeyed by more than a hundred thousand men in arms, and at whose nod nations trembled, was now stripped by his own attendants, in a house which was not his own, and left on the bare ground from early morn to almost noon.”

And yet the ordeal wasn’t over. Eventually King William’s body was collected by a group of monks and given a funeral. When it came time to place the corpse in its coffin, however, the gathered were stunned to find it didn’t quite fit. William had to be crammed in. He had grown a bit obese after his glory days, so this was difficult. Suddenly the church was filled with a horrible stench. Ordericus Vitalis concludes the story: “His corpulent stomach, fattened with so many delicacies, shamefully burst, to give a lesson, both to the prudent and the thoughtless, on what is the end of fleshy glory.”

 

 

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all, strong, and golden-haired, Edward II looked every inch the medieval ideal of kingly splendor. And were it not for his penchant for perfumed male lovers and the utter contempt he felt for his wife and his royal duties, the image might have been complete. As it stood, though, this English king spent most of his time fawning over one Piers Gaveston, whom Edward’s ma-cho father, Edward I, had banished from the kingdom during the previous reign for unseemly behavior with his son.

Showering Gaveston with land, titles, and sexual treats when he inherited the throne in 1307, King Edward managed to alienate his queen, Isabella of France, and England’s most powerful magnates. Isabella could not have been too pleased, in fact, when Edward gave Gaveston all their wedding presents and indicated from the beginning that he far preferred Gaveston’s bed to hers. And the nobles found it more than a little irritating that the king ignored them while bestowing fortune and honors upon this upstart who openly mocked them.

Fed up, the barons wrenched Gaveston away from the king and chopped off his head. Like an oversexed hydra, however, new favorites immediately sprang up in his place. Now it was Isabella who had finally had enough. Fleeing to her native France, the queen took herself a lover, Roger Mortimer, and raised an army to invade her wayward husband’s kingdom.

In September 1326, they arrived in England without meeting any resistance. The king was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Edward III, and was kept starving in the dungeon of Berkeley Castle. Isabella and Mortimer wanted Edward dead, but killed in a way that would leave no mark on his body. Accordingly, he met a ghastly demise involving the insertion of a red-hot iron poker.

 

 

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s the last of Henry VIII’s six wives, Katherine Parr was fortunate enough to outlive the dangerously fickle old king. Afterwards, she even got to marry the love of her life, Thomas Seymour, who happened to be her late husband’s former brother-in-law. Life was bliss for the thirty-nine-year-old Queen Dowager, but it was suddenly cut short soon after she gave birth to her only child in 1547. Though she was interred at the chapel of her Sudely Castle estate, she would not rest in peace for centuries to come.

The chapel holding Katherine Parr’s remains began to fall into neglect after some years, and by the 1700s it had crumbled to such an extent that no one was really sure where exactly the late queen rested. Then, in 1782, the occupant of the Sudely property, a man named John Lucas, came across her coffin amidst the rubble of the old chapel. His morbid curiosity overwhelming any respect he may have had for dead royalty, Lucas hacked open the casket. In it he found the almost perfectly preserved remains of the queen who had been dead for more than two hundred years.

The pristine corpse didn’t retain its freshness for long, though. People were reporting a sickening stench emanating from it a year later. A stone slab was placed on the tomb to discourage further sightseeing, but ten years after that, Queen Katherine was disturbed yet again. A group of drunken men decided she needed a proper burial and proceeded to dig a grave. Unfortunately, they tossed her in upside down.

In the early nineteenth century, the ivy-choked tomb was rediscovered. This time it was sealed shut once and for all. A marble effigy of the queen was placed in the restored chapel at Sudely, and an altar there was dedicated to her memory. Nearly three centuries after her death, Katherine Parr was finally at rest.

 

 

M
ary Queen of Scots had a real knack for getting herself into trouble. She married a jerk just because he looked good, and then eloped with the chief suspect in his murder.
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After abdicating the throne and fleeing her disgusted Scottish subjects, she was kept prisoner in England by her cousin Elizabeth I for almost twenty years. During this time she was involved in no fewer than four dangerous plots designed to free her and place her on the English throne, one of which finally sealed her doom. It seems the Scottish queen was a genius at making bad choices. Still, no matter what kind of mess Mary had made of her life, it didn’t compare to the mess an inexperienced executioner made of her.

After Queen Elizabeth reluctantly signed her cousin’s death warrant, events moved quickly. None of her counselors wanted the English queen, who despaired at the idea of executing a fellow monarch, to suddenly change her mind as she often did. On the morning of February 8, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was led into the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle. Eyes straight ahead, back rigid, and head held high, she paused at the foot of the steps leading to the black-draped scaffold upon which she was to die. Her once magnificent looks had faded with age and years of imprisonment, but she still radiated royal dignity.

Reaching the platform, the forty-four-year-old queen was directed to sit in a chair as the warrant of her execution was read aloud. Looking about the Great Hall, she saw the crowd gathered to witness her demise. More than one hundred people were riveted by the unfolding spectacle. Nearby was the hooded executioner dressed entirely in black, the instrument of his trade lying on the floor.

As she faced the block where she was to lose her head, Mary saw herself as a martyr for her Catholic faith and she was proud. Suddenly, though, a man emerged from the crowd and interrupted the moment. “I am the Dean of Peterborough!” he shouted. “It is not too late to embrace the true faith! Yea, the Reformed Religion, which hath . . .” Mary, taken aback, interjected calmly, saying: “Good Mister Dean, trouble not yourself any more about this matter. I was born in this religion, have lived in this religion, and am resolved to die in this religion.”

As the dean continued his exhortation, Mary turned away and prayed quietly in Latin. The headsman stepped forward and knelt before her. “Forgive me,” he said, as decorum required. “I forgive you and all the world with all my heart,” she answered gently, “for I hope this death will make an end to all my troubles.”

Wishful thinking.

Rising, the executioner offered to help the queen disrobe in preparation for the ax. Declining politely, Mary turned instead to her ladies-in-waiting for assistance. They unbuttoned her black gown, revealing a vibrant crimson one underneath. Her veil and headdress were removed and set on a nearby stool. Taking out a gold-bordered handkerchief, she handed it to one of her ladies, whose hands were trembling so much that Mary had to help secure it as her blindfold.

Someone then led the queen to the block and helped her to kneel on the cushion before it. She reached out, groping for the cold wood, and placed her neck on it. “Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,” she whispered in Latin, as the executioner raised his ax and brought it down hard.

A groan was heard coming from the victim. To his horror, the executioner had missed his target, grazing the side of the queen’s skull instead. “Sweet Jesus,” she was heard to mutter before the ax was lifted again. This time it nearly severed neck from body. Angry and exasperated, the executioner sawed through the remaining flesh. The head rolled away, while the body fell on its back, gushing blood. “God save Queen Elizabeth,” the executioner shouted as he grasped the severed head by the hair and raised it to the crowd. Suddenly, it fell and rolled away, leaving in his hand only a red wig. Onlookers gasped, seeing the gray-haired head, suddenly old, facing them, lips still moving.

The executioner then lifted the queen’s dress to remove her garters, his time-honored prerogative, but was startled as a small dog emerged from the folds. Mary’s pet, Geddon, had been hidden in the dress. The little dog rushed to the corpse and circled, confused and distraught, then began to howl. The Protestant dean who had earlier confronted Mary leapt to the platform and pushed the dog’s face into the pool of blood. “Remember what [John] Knox prophesied about the dogs drinking her blood!” he screeched. “Drink, you cur!” But Geddon resisted, instead sinking his teeth into the dean’s hand.

Mary’s head was displayed on a velvet cushion before an open window at Fotheringhay Castle. Her crucifix, prayer book, bloodstained clothes, the execution block and anything she had touched were taken to the courtyard and burned, obliterating all traces of the mutilated queen.

 

 

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fter Charles II suffered what was probably a minor stroke in 1685, twelve physicians were summoned to the royal chambers and immediately set upon a course intended to rid the English king’s body of all poisons. They extracted a full quart of his blood. They drained him of liquids by administering powerful emetics and enemas. Charles, not surprisingly, remained ill.

The doctors were on top of the situation, though. Over the next few days, they shaved the king’s scalp and singed it with burning irons, filled his nose with sneezing powder, covered him with hot plasters and then ripped them off. After Charles complained of a sore throat, body aches, and cold sweats, the medics rubbed his feet with a mixture of resin and pigeon feces.

The king was sinking rapidly. The doctors pulled out all the stops. It was time to exercise the most sophisticated techniques known to modern practitioners. They drilled holes in the royal noggin to drain off the bad humors. But it was no use. Five days after treatment began, “The Merry Monarch” breathed his last, apologizing for taking so long to die, and thanking his physicians for the heroic efforts to save him.

 

 

C
harles II left lots of bastards when he died, but no legitimate heirs to succeed him on the throne. This didn’t stop his eldest son, James, Duke of Monmouth, from making an armed grab for the crown anyway. The revolt was a flop, easily squashed by the forces of Monmouth’s uncle, King James II, who ordered his ambitious nephew beheaded. What happened next is an irresistible tale, frequently told by the Yeoman Warders at the Tower of London.

After the duke’s execution, someone remembered that no official portrait of him existed. Treasonous bastard though he may have been, he was still the son of a king and it seemed only proper that his image be preserved. With his head now hacked off, it would be difficult for Monmouth to pose for an artist. But not impossible. All it took was a little ingenuity. The severed head was simply sewn back on the body, which was then propped up for its sitting. It should be noted for the record that certain authorities dispute the Beefeaters’ story of the reattached head, but what fun are they?

 

 

W
hen a king of France died, he was subject to a fairly rigorous post-mortem. His body was sliced open from throat to hips, after which his internal organs were removed and preserved. This ritual wasn’t so bad. After all, it was part of an old tradition going back to the ancient Egyptians. The procedure took an odd twist with Louis XIV, however. While the hearts of most French kings were placed in gilded urns to rest for eternity, the Sun King’s ended up in the stomach of an English eccentric. Or so the story goes.

Blame it on the French Revolution. Sure, Louis XIV had been dead for decades before the popular uprising even started, but he was royal, and as his descendent Louis XVI discovered on the guillotine, royalty wasn’t going over very well at the time. Even dead royalty. At the Cathedral of St. Denis, an angry mob raided the tomb of the king who had gloriously wallowed in absolute monarchy for more than half a century.
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They stole his embalmed heart.

The organ was then sold to an English nobleman, Lord Harcourt, who in turn sold it to the dean of Westminster, Rev. William Buckland. When the good dean died, the heart passed by inheritance to his son, Francis Buckland. Frank, as he was called by his friends, was a scientifically minded man, but nevertheless a bit bizarre. He was among the founders of the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals in the United Kingdom, whose goal it was to import and raise exotic animals to increase the national food supply.