A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (3 page)

Of course Catherine loved the sex, and in her exultation could sound much more like a bad romance novelist than the authoritarian empress of all the Russias:

 

Moody and temperamental, subject to bouts of black depression and fits of jealousy, Potemkin was sometimes lovingly scolded by his royal mistress: “There is a woman in the world who loves you and who has a right to a tender word from you, Imbecile, Tatar, Cossack, infidel, Muscovite,
morbleu
! ” The relationship was so physically intimate that Catherine did not hesitate to share even the most unflattering of ailments with him: “I have some diarrhea today, but apart from that, I am well, my adored one. . . . Do not be distressed because of my diarrhea, it cleans out the intestines.”

There is no surviving evidence to support the rumor that Catherine secretly married Potemkin, although she often referred to him in her letters as “my beloved spouse,” or “my dearest husband.” Married or not, the relationship certainly transcended the bedroom as it evolved into a close political partnership. Catherine shared her vast kingdom with Potemkin as if he were her king. She consulted with him on all affairs of state, working closely with him on her ambitious plans to expand Russia’s borders and crush the Muslim Turks.

The empress’s powerful lover is perhaps best remembered for the legendary “Potemkin Villages” he is said to have created for her benefit as she embarked on a grand tour of all the newly Russianized lands he had conquered for her. These “villages,” it was said, were little more than elaborate stage sets of prosperous towns, populated by cheerful serfs, all of which were quickly collapsed and set up again at the next stop on Catherine’s carefully plotted itinerary. The artificiality of the Potemkin Villages came to represent in the minds of many, Catherine’s superficial and halfhearted attempts to reform and liberalize her kingdom.

Though the relationship with Potemkin endured until his death in 1791, the sexual intensity between them dimmed after only a few years. No longer champion of the empress’s boudoir, Potemkin resolved to retain her favor by pimping his replacements. He handpicked a steady succession of new lovers for his erstwhile mistress—all of whom paid him a handsome brokerage fee for the privilege of servicing her. There was Zavadovsky, followed by Zorich, followed by Rimsky-Korsakov, followed by Lanskoy, followed by Ermolov, followed by Mamonov and so on and on, and on.

After being installed in the official apartment set aside for Catherine’s lovers, each new favorite was feted and adored by the passionate monarch with almost girlish enthusiasm. But each, in turn, was eventually dismissed, either for boring Catherine or breaking her heart. Few, however, left her service without a handsome settlement. When Zavadovsky was dismissed in 1776, for example, Chevalier de Corberon, the French chargé d’affaires in Russia, wrote that “He has received from Her Majesty 50,000 rubles, a pension of 5,000, and 4,000 peasants in the Ukraine, where they are worth a great deal [serfs at the time were trade-able commodities, like cattle]. . . . You must agree, my friend, that it’s not a bad line of work to be in here.”

One ex-lover, Count Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, was even given the crown of Poland, although Catherine did eventually hack away huge chunks of his kingdom and absorb them into her own. All told, the generous payments to fallen lovers amounted to billions of dollars in today’s currency. When her friend, the French philosopher Voltaire, gently chided Catherine for inconsistency in her love affairs, she responded that she was, on the contrary, “absolutely faithful.”

“To whom? To beauty, of course. Beauty alone attracts me!”

 

F
rancis I was a true Renaissance monarch: warrior, grand patron of the arts, and skirt-chaser extraordinaire. This was a king who loved the ladies—lots and lots of ladies. “A court without women is a year without spring and a spring without roses,” the promiscuous French ruler once remarked. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm for plucking as many roses as possible, Francis gave his long-suffering queen a scorching case of syphilis. His son and heir, Henri II, was also a passionate adulterer. Rather than a sexually transmitted disease, though, he impetuously gave his favorite mistress, Diane de Poitiers, something else entirely: all the French crown jewels.

Henri’s enchantment with Diane, who was old enough to be his mother, was in direct proportion to the distaste he had for his dumpy and unappealing queen, Catherine de Medici of Italy. Nevertheless, wife and mistress did develop a tenuous relationship of sorts. The queen quietly tolerated the affair, while her rival moved into the household and treated Catherine with a kind of contemptuous affection—even nursing her when she came down with scarlet fever. It was Diane who gently nudged the king out of her bed so he could sire legitimate children with his wife as duty demanded.

Despite her general composure in light of the odd arrangement, the queen’s temper occasionally got the better of her. Once, during an argument with the king and his mistress over Henri’s policies toward her native land, Catherine disdainfully confronted Diane. “I have read the histories of this kingdom,” she informed her rival, “and I have found in them that from time to time at all periods whores have managed the business of kings.”

Years later, after Henri II’s death in 1559,
²
Catherine wrote of her true feelings regarding the humiliating situation with her husband and his mistress. “I was hospitable to [Diane]; he was the king; yet even so I always let him know that it was to my great regret; for never has a woman who loves her husband liked his whore; for even though this is an ugly word for us to use, one cannot call her anything else.”

 

Given the atmosphere in which they grew up, it’s not surprising that some of Henri and Catherine’s children were a little unconventional when it came to sex. Henri III, who succeeded his father and two brothers in the Valois line of French kings, was an ostentatious transvestite who surrounded himself with an obsequious band of gay young men the French scathingly called
mignons.
The king and his male harem loved nothing more than dressing up and prancing around Paris in lace and ruffles, with long curls flowing from under dainty little caps. On special occasions, Henri dolled himself up magnificently, dripping with diamonds and swathed in silk. “One did not know whether it was a woman king or a man queen,” a bewildered observer said at the time.

Historians have noted the peculiar affection Catherine de Medici had for her son Henri. The formidable woman the French came to call “Madame Serpente,” had consolidated her power after the death of her husband and, with three sons in a row reigning as kings of France, became history’s ultimate Queen Mother. An avid disciple of Machiavelli’s blueprint for power,
The Prince
, she considered her fellow Florentine almost a personal guru.

With a daunting combination of guile, treachery, and shrewd intelligence, this plump matron in her habitual black dress was ruthless in the struggle to maintain her family’s power. Yet while Catherine orchestrated the lives of all of her other children, using them as pawns to achieve her political ends, Henri was special. Her devotion to him, in fact, bordered on the incestuous. She was certainly indulgent of his flamboyant lifestyle, even arranging lavish orgies for his royal pleasure. Henri, however, was completely controlled by his mignons, some of whom wielded enormous power. Fights often broke out among the perfumed favorites—sometimes to the death—as they vied for the king’s affections.

Despite her overwhelming maternal devotion, Catherine was left out of the loop. With the kingdom shredded by religious wars, the government coffers empty and an attack by neighboring Spain a looming threat, Catherine begged for Henri’s attention to the desperate situation she was trying so hard to remedy for him. “Things are in a worse state than they are thought to be,” the ailing Queen Mother wrote in one of many long letters to the king while traveling around France in a vain attempt to generate support for him. “I beg you to control your finances very carefully in order to raise money for your service without having to rob your people, for you are on the brink of a general revolt . . . and whoever tells you otherwise deceives you.”

All Catherine’s tireless efforts on her beloved son’s behalf were ignored, causing her no end of distress. King Henri was far too busy with his mignons to listen to his mother’s barrage of pleas and warnings. The “King of Trifles,” as his disgusted subjects called him, was more interested in finding new ways to entertain the boys than he was in the fate of France. There were occasions, though, when Henri was entirely overcome by a violent revulsion to his habitual frivolity. During these times he transformed himself into a religious fanatic—publicly flogging himself, walking barefoot in bizarre religious processions, and outfitting himself in monk’s clothes with a rosary of small ivory skulls hanging from his waist. “I am frightened that everything is not golden here,” Ougier de Busbecq wrote after witnessing the demonstration of Henri’s unconventional piety.

During several of his manic bouts of religion, the king made pilgrimages to Chartres on foot, begging the Virgin Mary to give him a son and heir. Alas, even the Mother of God couldn’t help him there. While he loved dressing up his wife, Queen Louise, doing her makeup and playing with her hair, he was rarely up to the task of sleeping with her.

 

Occupying almost as much of Henri III’s time as his pretty boys and his alternating episodes of penance was his intense feud with his beautiful sister, Marguerite. Margot, as she was known, had a voracious appetite for men. Dating her, however, was often deadly, thanks to her despised brother. Actually, it was several members of the Valois royal family who arranged to make Margot’s active love life lethal.

She was the youngest and most magnificent of the three daughters of Henri II and Catherine de Medici. When she was nineteen, her ambitious mother married her off to her Bourbon cousin, King Henry of Navarre. It was a cynical political match intended to shore up relations with the tiny kingdom wedged between France and Spain. Even if the newlyweds had loved one another, which they clearly did not, any happiness they might have shared was shattered only days after the wedding.

Margot’s mother had been involved in a plot to assassinate a Huguenot leader. The murder was planned for just after the wedding, but the scheme failed. Fearing her role in it would be discovered and lead to a violent Protestant revolt, Catherine and her son (King Charles IX, who ruled just before Henri III) secretly initiated a sweeping slaughter of Huguenots who had gathered in Paris to celebrate the union of the Catholic French princess and the Protestant king of Navarre. The event, which became infamous as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, was quite a wedding present. Although Margot, now queen of Navarre, was able to save her new husband from being murdered in the bloody frenzy, he was held prisoner in Paris, a situation that did not enhance the couple’s already tenuous relationship. Both Margot and Henry were extraordinarily passionate people—just not for each other.

Desperate for satisfaction, Queen Margot took on the first of her many doomed lovers not long after she was married. His name was Joseph de Boniface de la Molle and her family hated him. Accused of conspiracy against King Charles IX, La Molle was hideously tortured. His fingernails were torn off and his bones crushed. He was then beheaded, but not before sending salutations to Margot from the scaffold. It was said that the distraught queen secretly ordered her lover’s head removed from public display and brought to her for burial.

After La Molle’s execution, Margot acquired several more lovers who were lucky enough to narrowly avoid her family’s wrath. Then, wishing to escape her brother Henri, now king of France, and her estranged husband, the king of Navarre, Margot moved to the French town of Agen. Seeing the glamorous queen for the first time, a young officer by the name of Aubiac was entranced. “Let me be hanged,” he exclaimed, “if I might only once sleep with that woman!” He would soon get both his wishes.

When the town of Agen was ransacked by the king’s forces, Aubiac helped Margot escape. At some point they became lovers, for which he would pay dearly. After Aubiac was captured, Henri III announced that the Queen Mother had begged him to have Margot’s lover “hung in the presence of this miserable woman, in the courtyard of the Castle of Usson, so that plenty of people may see him.” The unfortunate lover was hung, upside down. Before he had even ceased breathing, Aubiac was cut down, tossed into a grave and buried alive.

Don Juan of Austria had once said of Margot: “She looks more like a goddess of Heaven than a princess of earth. Her charms are better suited to ruin men than to save them. Her beauty was sent to damn us.” A succession of ill-fated lovers was proving Don Juan remarkably prescient.

Over time, Margot’s once breathtaking beauty was fading, but then so was her tyrannical family. After the death of her mother and the assassination of her brother, Henri, both in 1589, she was the last of the Valois line. As French law barred women from inheriting the throne, it went to the nearest male relative. He happened to be Margot’s long estranged husband, who became King Henry IV. With him began the Bourbon line of French kings. A genuine friendship developed between the childless couple and, for a fat settlement, Margot agreed to divorce Henry so he could remarry and start a family.

Obese and heavily made up as she aged, often sporting a little blonde wig, Margot started to look like a caricature of her former self. As she reveled in her freedom, her libido became exaggerated as well. Where once only noble gentlemen shared her bed, now she had her way with a series of virile young nobodies, among them the son of a local coppersmith, a shepherd, a strolling musician, and a son of a carpenter. The ex-queen took good care of her men, giving them positions and titles, and even sometimes arranging advantageous marriages for them. One, however, made her mad when he proved
too
devoted a husband to the maid she had chosen for him, leaving poor Margot out in the cold.