Sex with the Queen (54 page)

A Swiss chambermaid related that one night, when Pergami had been out of town on business, she had bedded down with her mistress. But in the middle of the night Pergami returned and threw the maid out of the room, taking her place. “I have also seen Pergami in the princess’s room when she was at her toilette, when she had no skirts on,” the maid continued. “Pergami turned round and said, ‘Oh! How pretty you are. I like you much better so.’ ”29

A servant named Giuseppe Rastelli had the most shocking ev-idence. He reported that while riding past the princess’s carriage on horse, he looked in the window and saw Caroline and Pergami, both sound asleep, her hand resting lovingly on his private parts.

On cross-examination all of the servants admitted to being well paid for their time and living expenses in England or to be-ing dismissed by the princess for poor work performance, ad-missions which served to destroy the value of their testimony.

Caroline’s defense attorney, Henry Brougham, relentlessly dis-credited witnesses and pointed out inconsistencies in testimony, ripping the prosecution’s case to shreds. “Was it not a curious thing that these people, all of them poor,” he thundered,

“should be brought over to England to live in luxury and idle-ness and should be in receipt of great rewards?”30

Brougham derided the government’s evidence as the “tittle-tattle of coffee-houses and alehouses, the gossip of bargemen on canals and . . . cast-off servants.”31 He described the Milan Commission as “that great receipt of perjury—that store house of false swearing and all iniquity.”32

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In the heated debates which followed the concluding state-ments of both sides, the general feeling was echoed by Lord El-lenborough who, admitting “the queen was the last woman any one would wish his own wife to resemble,” felt forced to vote against the bill.33

As Brougham later said, “The strength of the Queen’s case lay in the general demurrer which all men, both in and out of Parliament, made, viz., admit everything to be true which is al-leged against the Queen, yet, after the treatment she had re-ceived ever since she first came to England, her husband had no right to the relief prayed by him, or the punishment sought against her.”34

Perhaps Caroline had put it best herself in a letter written to her husband which she sent to a newspaper for publication.

“From the very threshold of your Majesty’s mansion the mother of your child was pursued by spies, conspirators, and trai-tors . . . ,” she wrote. “You have pursued me with hatred and scorn, and with all the means of destruction. You wrested me from my child. . . . You sent me sorrowing through the world, and even in my sorrows pursued me with unrelenting persecu-tion. . . .”35

After closing arguments, the bill to condemn the queen would have three readings, each one followed by a debate and a vote. The vote of the third reading would be the judgment of the case. On November 6, after one of the longest debates in British history, 123 lords voted for the bill to condemn the queen and 95 against it. After discussion, a second reading of the bill re-sulted in 108 for condemnation and 99 against. The govern-ment then withdrew the entire bill before a third reading could officially vindicate Caroline. And yet she was already vindicated; the British peers wisely chose to punish hypocrisy rather than adultery.

For five nights the major British cities were illuminated in support of the queen’s victory and the king’s defeat. George was so stunned that he talked of abdicating and leaving the country forever.

A few days after the trial, a Sicilian, Iacinto Greco, who had 2 4 8

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served as Caroline’s cook in 1816 during her visit to Syracuse, arrived with shocking new evidence. He reported that after din-ner one evening he opened a door and saw “the Princess on the sofa at the further end of the saloon—Pergami was standing be-tween her legs which were in his arms—his breeches were down, and his back towards the door—at which I was. I saw the Princess’s thighs quite naked—Pergami was moving backwards and forwards and in the very act with the Princess.”36 Pergami looked back and saw the cook, and the next day he was fired.

When asked why he had not come forward sooner, Greco replied that his wife had told him that the English would cut off his head. But his testimony arrived too late and could not be used against the freshly vindicated queen.

The trial over, the king could now make plans for his corona-tion. Much to his irritation, he had not obtained the desired di-vorce and Caroline was still queen of England. On May 5, 1821, the king was told, “Sire, your bitterest enemy is dead.” “Is she, by God!” George replied, his face beaming with joy.37 But it was, alas, only Napoleon who had died, not Caroline. And Caroline made it known that she would attend the coronation and ruin it by demanding that she, too, be crowned.

But at his coronation on July 19, Caroline made the mistake of planning a grand entrance once everyone was seated and the ceremony about to begin. Hearing of this, George had all the doors locked once the guests were inside and hired prizefighters to stand guard. Hammering on the door with her fist Caroline cried, “The Queen—open!” The pages opened the door a crack, and the sentries inside stood resolutely with crossed bayonets.

According to an eyewitness seated in the hall, Caroline “was rag-ing and storming and vociferating. ‘Let me pass; I am your Queen, I am Queen of Britain.’ ” The lord high chamberlain sent his deputy who, with a voice that rang throughout the entire abbey, cried, “Do your duty, shut the Hall door,” and the pages slammed the great door shut in the queen’s face.38

His Majesty King George IV, puffed up with wine, pork chops, and pride, held in his monstrous bulk with a specially de-signed contraption of whalebone and corset strings. He strode t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y

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through his coronation magnificently, gleeful in the knowledge that his wife was fruitlessly banging on the doors of Westminster Abbey.

That night Caroline invited several friends for supper. Her friend Lady Anne Hamilton wrote, “Her Majesty put on the semblance of unusual gaiety, but the friends who were around her observed that though she labored hard to deceive them, she only deceived herself, for while she laughed, the tears rolled down her face—tears of anguish so acute that she seemed to dread the usual approach of rest.”39

The fiasco of the coronation had finally crushed the unflap-pable Caroline. Her stomach had been troubling her for months. Within days of her defeat she suffered an obstruction and inflammation of the bowels and her doctors soon concluded that she was dying. When informed of this, she calmly instructed that her body rest not in England, the land where she had never truly rested, but be returned to Brunswick with a simple plate af-fixed to her coffin: “Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England.”40 She died on August 7, 1821.

With regard to her love affairs, Caroline once quipped, “I never did commit adultery but once, and I have repented of it ever since. It was with the husband of Mrs. Fitzherbert.”41

I s a b e l l a I I , Q u e e n o f S p a i n : t h e L u s t T h a t L o s t t h e T h r o n e In the 1820s, when the convulsions of the French Revolution and its aftermath had subsided, Europeans looked around and didn’t like what they saw—thirty years of bloodshed, war, suffer-ing, and shocking immorality personified by Maria Luisa of Spain, Maria Carolina of Naples, Napoleon’s three sisters, and the rowdy Queen Caroline of Britain. Unable to control the po-litical upheavals of nations, they realized that one aspect of life they could control was family life. A tidy home harboring a sturdy husband, a chaste and motherly wife, and several bounc-ing rosy-cheeked children. Yes! That was much better than guil-2 5 0

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lotines, marches on Russia, and the disgusting licentiousness of men and women of the preceding generation.

Since human nature had not changed along with human morals, male adultery was not to be given up, but to be kept po-litely concealed to avoid causing scandal or hurting the wife’s feelings. The husband, pretending to visit a gentlemen’s club, would instead visit his mistress and no one would be the wiser.

The wife, of course, would not commit adultery at all. The ideal woman didn’t even enjoy sex with her husband, but sacrificed herself now and then upon the altar of wifely duty.

While those in former centuries often shrugged off female adultery, especially if the adulteress had reformed her ways, the nineteenth-century woman, once fallen, could never hope to redeem herself socially. If she was repentant, God might forgive her, but society never would.

In 1846 the sixteen-year-old Queen Isabella II was forced to marry her cousin, the twenty-four-year-old Don Francisco d’Assisi, duque de Cadiz. The bridegroom had a shrill falsetto voice and was thought unfit to marry, a polite way of saying he was homosexual. Don Francisco was slightly built with a faint trace of moustache, and he moved strangely, like a mechanical doll. He had a feminine fascination for perfume, jewels, and fine fabrics. His frequent baths were eyed with suspicion. What normal man would insist on being so clean? Pale-faced and dark-haired, his features were attractive enough, and he was certainly elegant. But an observer could detect not the faintest trace of testosterone. The royal doctor, having examined the prince, declared optimistically that he did not think him impo-tent.

Isabella’s mother Queen Cristina told the French ambassa-dor, “To be sure, you have seen him, you have heard him; his hips, his movements, his sweet little voice. Is it not a little dis-turbing, a little strange?”42

Isabella was devastated to hear the choice and said she would be happy to marry Francisco if only he were a man. Seeing the virile Spanish grandees swashbuckling about court, she could t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y

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