A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (4 page)

 

The French monarchy reached its glorious pinnacle during the long reign of Henry IV’s grandson, Louis XIV (1643-1715), only to sputter out completely in the years following Louis XVI’s execution in 1793. If Louis XV—who reigned in between—had any idea he was occupying a throne teetering toward collapse, he wasn’t about to let that ruin a good time. And a good time for Louis meant massive amounts of sex.

Successfully conquering a boyhood shyness around women, Louis XV became so insatiable that he had a private bordello established for himself at Versailles. This ensured a woman would be available whenever he needed one, which was most of the time. While over the years Louis had a number of official mistresses installed at court—including most famously Madame Pompadour, who wielded enormous power due to her influence on the king, and Madame Du Barry, a former prostitute plucked from obscurity to service him in splendor—they weren’t always enough to satisfy this monarch’s unrelenting libido. Certainly his homely and uninspiring Polish queen, Marie Leczinska, wasn’t up to the task. She pooped out after giving Louis ten children in ten years.

At one point during the king’s priapic career, he went through five sisters in succession—most of them already married. “Is it faithlessness or constancy to choose an entire family?” went a popular verse of the time. The first of the sisters, Madame de Mailly, was Louis XV’s very first mistress. After she had initiated the king to the pleasures of adultery, she made the mistake of inviting her sister to court. “You bore me,” Louis sniffed as he unceremoniously dismissed Madame de Mailly and replaced her with her sister, Madame de Vintimille. This one only had a brief tenure with Madame de Vintimille dying less than a year later while giving birth to the king’s bastard. She was replaced by yet another sister, Madame de la Tournelle, who was somewhat wiser than her siblings. She demanded the title of duchess, a large apartment in Versailles, an unlimited allowance, public pregnancies, legitimatized bastards, and the exile of her already discarded sister, Madame de Mailly. She got everything she requested, but perhaps forgot to ask for protection from two more sisters waiting in the wings. They had their turn, too.

 

 

T
he British are rarely associated with blazing sensuality. Stiff upper lips, maybe, but that’s about the extent of it. Considering the rich and nuanced sexual proclivities of a millennium’s worth of British monarchs, this bland reputation hardly seems deserved.

Those meeting King Edward IV in the late fifteenth century often found him surprisingly affable and unaffected. “He was so genial in his greeting,” noted contemporary chronicler Domenico Mancini, “that when he saw a newcomer bewildered by his regal appearance and royal pomp, he would give him courage to speak by laying a kindly hand on his shoulder.” Maybe this was true for the guys. Most women, however, experienced something entirely different when they encountered the tall, handsome monarch.

“He was licentious in the extreme,” Mancini reported. “It was said that he behaved very badly towards numerous women after seducing them because, as soon as he grew tired with the affair, much against their will he would pass the ladies on to other courtiers. He pursued indiscriminately married and unmarried, noble and low-born, though he never raped them. He overcame them all by money and promises and then, having had them, he got rid of them.” It would be interesting to know how exactly Mancini defined rape, given his account of how King Edward threatened Elizabeth Woodville with a dagger when she had the audacity to resist him before they were married.

 

By royal standards of the time, Edward IV’s grandson, Henry VIII, had relatively few mistresses. That’s because he married most of them. Henry seems to have had a thing for the hired help, creating one hell of a hostile work environment. His second wife, Anne Boleyn (whose sister Henry also slept with) had been a lady-in-waiting to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, while his third wife, Jane Seymour, had served both the first and the second. Then he met and fell in love with his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, while she was working for his fourth, Anne of Cleves. Two of these former employees would lose their heads.
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Sex and violent death were as closely intertwined in the psyche of Henry’s younger daughter, Elizabeth I, as sleeping and dreaming. She was not yet three years old when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed for adultery, and she was nine when her young stepmother, Catherine Howard, was dragged away screaming to her own date with the headsman.

As a teenager, Elizabeth enjoyed the flirtatious attentions of Thomas Seymour—her first stepmother’s brother who had married her last stepmother, Katherine Parr, after the death of Henry VIII in 1547. Seymour was beheaded, too, in part for his attempts to seduce her. Little wonder, then, that Elizabeth decided to stay single.

Despite her much lauded spinsterhood, a sexually charged aura attached itself to “The Virgin Queen” for most of her glorious reign. Elizabeth had an enduring passion for one Robert Dudley, going back to the days when they were both held prisoner in the Tower of London by her sister “Bloody” Mary I. As soon as she ascended the throne in 1558, the young, red-headed queen made Dudley her Master of the Horse, and eventually Earl of Leicester. She ordered his apartments at court moved closer to hers and flirted with him in public while enthusiastically extolling his virtues of body and mind. The Spanish ambassador reported that “Lord Robert has come so much into favor that he does whatever he pleases with affairs and it is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.”

This was a couple of centuries before Catherine the Great came to Russia’s throne, and a time when female monarchs were rare and their sexuality expected to be beyond reproach. But the inevitable gossip arising from her dalliances with Lord Robert didn’t faze this virgin queen in the least. When her old governess, Katherine Ashley, begged Elizabeth to be more circumspect in her dealings with her favorite, she denied any misbehavior by irritably pointing out the attendants who surrounded her at all times and made any secret dalliance nearly impossible. “Although,” she concluded in a proud snit, “if I had the will . . . I do not know of anyone who could forbid me!”

Indeed, at twenty-five, the new queen was enjoying the intoxicating sensation of being free for the first time in her life to do exactly as she pleased. And although she was determined never to marry—or risk pregnancy by a fully realized affair—she was happy to wallow in the overtly sexual company of her handsome Master of the Horse, wagging tongues be damned. The fact that Dudley was married and came from humble origins with a tainted family history
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posed no obstacle to the increasingly scandalous affair. Even the suspicious death of his wife, who ended up at the bottom of a stairway with a broken neck, was only a temporary damper. In fact, the intense relationship with the queen lasted until his death in 1588.

Devoted as she was to him, though, Dudley was by no means the only man in Elizabeth’s life. She basked in the attention of foreign princes seeking her hand, and of increasingly younger courtiers like Sir Walter Ralegh and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex (Dudley’s stepson), all of whom professed to worship her. Through it all, the queen played the wily coquette, absorbing all the professions of love yet never committing to anyone.

Inheriting the tremendous vanity of her father Henry VIII, she encouraged the ritualized cult that surrounded her as she grew older. Flattery was the name of the game and Elizabeth’s suitors played to win, rhapsodizing endlessly about her magnificent beauty and glorious majesty. The courting rituals grew rather pathetic as the queen reached the end of her forty-four-year reign. Balding, with blackening teeth from too much sugar consumption and thick, white pancake makeup to cover her smallpox-scarred face, she was hardly England’s rarest beauty. Yet the rewards were potentially great enough for men to attempt to convince her that she was.

 

Elizabeth’s cousin and heir, James I, also reveled in the attention received from handsome young courtiers. One of his favorites was George Villiers, whom he gave the title of Duke of Buckingham. A contemporary wrote about the king’s relationship with Buckingham and his predecessor in the king’s affections, Robert Carr, Lord Somerset: “Now, as no other reason appeared in favour of their choyce but handsomenesse, so the love the King shewed was as amorously conveyed as if he had mistaken their sex, and thought them ladies; which I have seene Sommerset and Buckingham labour to resemble in effiminatenesse of their dressings; though in W[horeson] lookes and wanton gestures, they exceeded any part of woman kind my conversation did ever cope with all.”

It is perhaps ironic that those fundamentalists repulsed by homosexuality would condemn King James by citing the very Bible that bears his name. In any event, his preference for men was not uncommon among British kings. William II, Richard I—the lion-hearted hero-king of the Robin Hood legends—and Edward II were all reputed to have been gay.

 

Charles II, King James’s grandson, was anything but gay. He had a fleet of paramours that help explain his moniker, “The Merry Monarch.” He wasn’t choosy either, drawing his lovers from all levels of society and siring scads of bastards by them. “A king is supposed to be the father of his people and Charles certainly was father to a good many of them,” noted George Villiers, son of the first Duke of Buckingham. Yet while his many mistresses bore him lots of children, his queen, alas, could not. With no legitimate heir to succeed Charles upon his death, the crown passed to his brother, James II, in 1685.

 

Before she married and became half of the William and Mary comonarchy, James II’s eldest daughter was a princess desperately in love—with another girl. She was Frances Apsley, the beautiful daughter of the king’s hawks keeper and nine years Mary’s senior. In her long string of passionate letters, the princess called Frances “Aurelia” and addressed her as “Husband.”

“You shall hear from me every quarter of an hour if it were possible,” Mary gushed in one letter, exclaiming in another that “all the paper books in the world would not hold half the love I have for you my dearest, dearest, dear Aurelia.” While missives like these were filled with the frothy language of a girlish crush, others made it clear that Mary knew how to get down and dirty. “There is nothing in this heart or breast, guts or bowels, but you shall know it,” she wrote, offering at one point to become Frances’s “louse in bosom.” Some of the letters were almost masochistic in their abasement: “[I am] your humble servant to kiss the ground where you go, to be your dog in a string, your fish in a net, your bird in a cage, your humble trout.”

After a while, Mary’s deluge of clingy love letters began to make Frances uncomfortable and she started to withdraw. As Frances’s letters became more and more infrequent and her manner increasingly distant, Mary went into a desperate frenzy. “Oh have some pity on me and love me again or kill me quite with your unkindness for I cannot live with you in indifference, dear dearest loving kind charming obliging sweet dear Aurelia.” Subtle she was not.

Her desperation grew worse when she heard the news that she was to be married to her cold, asthmatic cousin, William of Orange, and sent to live with him in Holland. Mary wept nonstop for a day and a half, lamenting her fate and loss of her “dear dearest Aurelia.” Of course she eventually got over it, learning to love her wheezy mildly hunchbacked husband and helping him to usurp her father’s throne in 1688.

 

When Mary’s sister Queen Anne died in 1714 with no surviving children, a relatively distant number of the royal family was imported from Germany to rule as King George I. Thus arrived the new House of Hanover, whose members would establish themselves as among the most wanton monarchs ever to rule Britain. No sooner had the English taken stock of their new king than they began to laugh at him. It was not just the fact that George I spoke barely a word of English nor his bizarre entourage and strange German customs. It was his penchant for fat and ugly mistresses.

Two of the most famous came over from Hanover with the king. To be fair, only one of these was grossly obese; the other was exceedingly thin. They were dubbed “The Maypole” and “Elephant and Castle.” The essayist Horace Walpole recalled meeting the fat one—whom King George had given the title Countess of Darlington—when he was a young boy and being terrified of her enormous bulk: “Two fierce black eyes, large and rolling beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower part of her body, and no part restrained by a stay . . . no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress, and that the mob of London were highly diverted at the importation of so uncommon a sergalio!”

Lord Chesterfield was particularly vicious in his assessment of King George’s peccadillos: “The standard of His Majesty’s taste, as exemplified in his mistresses, makes all ladies who aspire to his favour . . . strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and dignity of the ox. Some succeed, and others . . . burst.”

 

The king’s son, George II, inherited his father’s tastes as well as his crown. “No woman came amiss to him,” one contemporary snorted, “if she were but very willing and very fat.” His queen, Caroline of Ansbach, shared the second George’s lascivious interests, sometimes even arranging dalliances for him, but always making sure that any mistress she selected was uglier than she. When he was away visiting his Hanoverian homeland, the king always made sure he kept his wife apprised of his sexual exploits. Some of his letters, graphically detailing every conquest, reached thirty pages long! One paramour, Madame von Walmoden, so attracted the king that he determined to bring her back to England with him. “You must love Walmoden, for she loves me,” he excitedly wrote the queen.