Princesses Behaving Badly

by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

  Margaret and Roddy’s relationship continued throughout her separation, despite the disapproval of her sister and brother-in-law. Roddy, who’d by then completed a horticultural course and found his calling as a gardener, was brought out for events, in the hope that the public might come to accept him. But then he had to go and cut a record. And invest in a restaurant. And generally make a fool of himself. Basically, whatever Roddy did, it would invariably lead to bad press, with Margaret making a “twerp of herself” over him.

  When Roddy eventually left her for a woman his own age, Margaret found herself alone yet again. She faced the situation with a stiff-upper-lip sort of realism: “I don’t see myself ever marrying again.… As a member of the royal family, one is used as a figurehead and, being the sister of you-know-who, it would put her in a difficult position. Anyway, it would probably be too much of a bore!”

  NO FAIRY-TALE ENDING

  Margaret never did remarry, and her middle age was marked by poor health. Drinking became her main vice, even after she received a diagnosis of alcoholic hepatitis in the late 1970s. In 1985 she had part of a lung removed but, according to the BBC, continued to smoke. She suffered a stroke in 1994 and another in 2000, followed by a ministroke; she lost vision in one eye and was confined to a wheelchair. She died on February 9, 2002, at the age of 71.

  Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Margaret remained a favorite target for the British press. Private Eye always called her the “royal dwarf,” owing to her tiny stature; even as a bedridden Margaret neared the end of her life, one tabloid declared, “She’s spoilt and ill-mannered and over the years has drunk enough whisky to open a distillery.”

  As unfair and nasty as the press could be, Margaret didn’t do much to dispel the public’s negative perception of her. “One does feel rather sorry for her but she does so very little to help herself,” wrote a palace insider. She was spoiled, even in middle age; a friend wrote of her in his diary, “She is, as we all know, tiresome, spoilt, idle and irritating; she has no direction, no overriding interest.” Hapless and aimless, she did indeed drink her way through life. She could also be grumpy and ill-tempered, prone to pouts and sulking and occasional bouts of rudeness, none of which plays well to the public.

  But Margaret could also be surprisingly kind. She could be counted on to remember birthdays and to send gifts. Her softer side made striking appearances, such as on a diplomatic trip to the tiny Polynesian island of Tuvalu. When her lady-in-waiting was practically eaten alive by insects, the princess gave her own bed to the unfortunate woman and tended the bites herself. She was also full of weird household tips, like how to make perfect scrambled eggs (add a raw egg at the final moment of cooking), and she wanted people around her to relax and “be normal.” And though Margaret may have been frivolous and boozy, she took her official duties very seriously—so much so that she capitulated to the will of the nation, didn’t marry the man she wanted, and then stayed married to another whom she should have divorced years earlier.

  Princess Margaret’s life was certainly bizarre. She was never given anything to do, and so suffered the “spare’s” fate of being purely ornamental. That left her more than enough latitude to get up to trouble, a situation compounded by being constantly hounded by paparazzi, a new breed of journalists more rabid and ubiquitous than their ancestors. Everything she did was in the spotlight in a way that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations of royals. And it made her a focal point for those in politics who wanted to curtail the monarchy—and its income. They couldn’t attack the queen, on whose head the crown seems to sit as easily as those pillbox hats she wears. But they could attack her scandalous sister.

  Margaret’s life was recorded by a flock of unauthorized biographies, including HRH the Princess Margaret: A Life Unfulfilled and Margaret: The Tragic Princess. Even if the pages of such books are filled with speculation and gossip, they at least got the titles right.

  THREE PRINCESSES WHO CHUCKED THEIR CROWNS FOR LOVE

  Part of the tragedy of Princess Margaret’s life is that she couldn’t give it all up—the title, the family, the privilege—for the man she loved. But here are a few who did.

  PRINCESS PATRICIA OF CONNAUGHT

  The granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Patricia gave up her title when she married a commoner. Sort of. Though no longer allowed to call herself “princess,” she was still a part of the British royal family, was invited to events, and stayed in the royal line of succession. But she was known as Lady Patricia Ramsey, wife of a naval commander, until her death in 1974.

  PRINCESS UBOLRATANA RAJAKANYA

  This Thai princess, the daughter of King Bhumhimbol Adulyadej, relinquished her royal title when she married an American commoner in 1972. The two met when they were studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (she earned a degree in biochemistry). The marriage ended in 1998 after 26 years, and Ubolratana moved back to Thailand.

  PRINCESS SAYAKO

  The daughter of Japanese emperor Akihito, Sayako renounced her title and its privileges when she married a commoner in November 2005. Now simply Sayako Kuroda, she had to take driving lessons and learn how to shop at the supermarket. She also lost her royal allowance, though the sting of that loss was blunted by her $1.2 million dowry.

  Anna of Saxony

  THE PRINCESS WHO FOAMED AT THE MOUTH

  DECEMBER 23, 1544–DECEMBER 18, 1577

  GERMANY, THE NETHERLANDS, TWO ROOMS IN DRESDEN

  In 1561 William, Prince of Orange, was in the market for a wife. His first wife, a wealthy heiress, had died in 1558, and the prominent Dutch nobleman of the Spanish Empire was looking for another way to shore up his political influence.

  Princess Anna of Saxony was an ideal candidate. Daughter of the late elector Maurice of Saxony, and niece of the reigning elector (a princely title of the Holy Roman Empire), she was well bred and well placed. True, she was no great beauty—she was “high colored” (excessively rosy cheeked), lame, and suffered a slight curvature of the spine. But what was that beside money and political connections?

  Ahead of the couple’s first meeting, one of Anna’s ladies-in-waiting warned her aunt that if Anna didn’t like William, there was no way she would play the dutiful princess and marry him: “The Fraulein will never be persuaded to do anything she is not inclined to.” That was an understatement—Princess Anna of Saxony was a handful even then. It wasn’t until after she married, however, that everyone found out just how difficult she could be.

  CRAZY FOR YOU

  Anna’s childhood wasn’t easy. At age 9 she lost her father, followed by her mother when she was 11. Raised by her aunt and uncle, the then-current elector of Saxony, Anna was encouraged to think that she was the center of the universe. But she was also an unloved child, forced to grow up in isolation and never forgiven for not being a boy. These circumstances aggravated her tendency to be cruel and self-absorbed. The family saw but one remedy for her unsavory behavior: marry her off early and make her someone else’s problem.

  Anna met William, then 28 and the acknowledged head of the Dutch nobility, at a wedding in his home region of Nassau. For 17-year-old Anna, it was love at first sight. Gone was the worry that she wouldn’t be led to the altar, though it was replaced by another concern: Anna, single-minded and narcissistic, fell crazy in love. Within hours of his departure, she’d fired off three love letters to William. The flames of her hasty ardor were likely fanned by some of her relatives’ objections to the match, her desperate need to claw at the affection she’d never really had, and the fact that she was absolutely insane.

  William was busy with other things, so he just signed his name to the amorous replies penned by his brother and best friend, Louis. Despite using an epistolary surrogate, William did want to marry Anna—her position and wealth made the match exceptionally attractive. The two were wed in August 1561, during a weeklong bacchanal that included a jousting tournament and a public bedding (a charming custom in which bride and groom were conveyed
to their chamber by jovial wedding guests, dumped into bed amid much ribald joking, and left to consummate the marriage while folks sniggered outside the door). The 5,500 guests drank 3,600 buckets of wine and 1,600 barrels of beer. At one point during the celebrations, William confided to Anna’s aunt that he wanted his young bride to concern herself with dancing and French novels, not sewing and religious education. The electoress was shocked and prophesied that allowing Anna such freedom would prove her undoing.

  Anna did come to a bad end, but it probably wasn’t French novels and dancing that got her there. By 1565, whatever had been sweet in the couple’s four-year marriage had completely soured. Everyone from aristocratic gossips to Antwerp housewives referred to Anna as William’s “domestic curse.” One biographer writing in the 1940s noted that “even the bitterest propagandists, who stopped at nothing to blacken William, could find no word to whiten his wife.”

  With twenty-first-century hindsight, it’s pretty clear that Anna was mentally ill and that the vast amounts of alcohol she consumed, coupled with her social position, exacerbated the condition. She careened from melancholic weeping to reckless hilarity. She often threatened to kill herself and went without eating or speaking to anyone, shutting herself in her room and rocking back and forth. Or she’d go manic and tear off with her entourage of “lewd” friends to Spa, a town southeast of Liège. While there, she’d spend buckets of money she didn’t have and then wail that her husband was trying to poison her when he demanded she come home. When she was home, she abused William’s children from his previous marriage so much that he was forced to send them away.

  Anna was a mean drunk. Once, while staying at a family castle during one of her last pregnancies, she raged against her hosts for trying to keep her from drinking wine. Even at a time when women routinely consumed alcohol during pregnancy, family members feared Anna’s bouts of liquor-infused abandon would harm the fetus. Not that Anna seemed to care. She’d lost two children just days after their births, and though her third, a son, seemed likely to live, she was unable to express any affection for him. Still, despite her erratic behavior and inability to be a mother, Anna did her duty and gave William a respectable five children.

  Anna was also bizarrely jealous. She loved to make scenes and was known to imply that William was involved in some sort of sordid, possibly sexual, relationship with his brother. One count recalled a disastrous evening during which Anna spent the entire meal abusing her husband for what she claimed was his social inferiority; once she finished that harangue, she started in on his sexual inadequacies. After such outbursts, Anna could be dramatically sorry, offering tearful apologies to her beleaguered husband, who by then knew better than to believe them.

  By 1568, Anna’s behavior had become intolerable. She seemed to genuinely hate William, who, to his credit, frequently tried to reconcile with her. Once, when she was living in grotesque extravagance in Cologne, a messenger arrived with a letter from him asking her to come home. In front of a crowd, she tore the note to pieces, stamped on it, and screamed that she’d sooner see him dead and buried than return.

  After the birth of their last child, Anna broke with William completely. She took off with Johannes Rubens, a middle-aged lawyer who was married and had children of his own. The couple was eventually found shacking up outside Cologne in 1571. Though she initially tried to deny the affair, the evidence was rapidly growing—she was unmistakably pregnant with her lover’s child. Rubens confessed, causing Anna to pitch one of her trademark fits. She demanded that William kill both her and her lover, as was his right. Rubens, unsurprisingly, was not a fan of this idea; perhaps more surprisingly, neither was his wife, who pleaded for her wayward husband’s life.

  William declined to execute either of them. After all, beheading a princess of Saxony, mad though she was, was politically unpalatable. (For the history of art, too, this decision proved fortunate: Johannes Rubens would one day father Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish baroque painter.) Johannes and his forgiving wife raised his daughter by Anna, likely sparing the child a lifetime of unhappiness.

  UNDER LOCK AND KEY

  Anna, however, was not so lucky. William divorced her in 1571 and never set eyes on her again. The divorce was kept secret, and she was taken into custody by her family. Her manic behavior only intensified. She was never left alone and, by 1572, was treated to twice-weekly sermons from local preachers, in the hope that divine intervention might inspire her to step off her wicked path. It’s a mark of the times that Anna was never perceived as anything other than willfully bad, guilty of a “stubborn, petrified malice.” The treatment she received toward the end of her life mirrored that of other mentally ill individuals at that time: enforced isolation in abominable conditions, punctuated by frequent applications of religion.

  In 1575, Anna was moved to her family home in Dresden. She was kept locked in two rooms with bricked-up windows; the door had only a small iron-gated opening for the delivery of food. Not surprisingly, her condition worsened. She complained of not being fed enough and drank huge quantities of olive oil for reasons known only to her. She was also tortured by hallucinations. She raved that people were trying to kill her, that she’d murdered her own children, that her daughters had been sexually involved with their father. She foamed at the mouth and talked gibberish “as if she were crazy.” In 1576, she attacked a local man with knives, “raging and foolish as if she were possessed.” She died in 1577, at the age of 33.

  Sadly, some of Anna’s children may have inherited their mother’s wellspring of insanity, or perhaps they had been damaged by such a fraught upbringing. Emilia, William and Anna’s youngest child, went the most spectacularly off the rails. She was arrested as a “madwoman,” screamed at anyone near her, and attempted suicide several times before her death in 1629.

  THREE MAD PRINCESSES (AND ONE WHO PROBABLY WASN’T)

  Anna of Saxony was by no means the only certifiable princess in European history. With consanguinity no barrier to marriage in the Continent’s royal houses, inherited mental disorders were perpetuated, and the bizarre semipublic social positions into which unstable people were often thrust probably didn’t help. But not all who were supposed to be mad really were. Madness, it seems, has its perks.

  PRINCESS ALEXANDRA AMELIE OF BAVARIA

  The daughter of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, Princess Alexandra Amelie was the only one of her nine siblings who never married. Her father put off would-be suitors by claiming she was in fragile health. But her health wasn’t the only thing fragile about Alexandra. At age 23, the pretty, dark-haired princess was found walking slowly, carefully, bow-leggedly down the corridors of the royal palace. When questioned by her worried parents, she claimed that as a little girl she had swallowed a full-size glass grand piano. The princess was worried that if she bumped into something, the piano inside her would shatter and leave her in bloody shreds.

  Glass delusions were a frequent symptom of melancholy, the pre-psychology catchall diagnosis of mental illnesses that endured into the nineteenth century. Sufferers sometimes believed that part or even all of their bodies were made of the material. In the fourteenth century, for example, Charles VI of France thought he had glass internal organs, and to protect them he had iron ribs inserted into his clothes.

  Alexandra’s behavior was odd in other ways as well. She would only wear white and was obsessed with cleanliness; certain sights and smells disturbed her. Gossips claimed that she also believed she had a sofa in her head. In 1850, Alexandra was reportedly treated in a mental institution in Germany. She spent much of her adult life in a convent, where she was made an abbess, probably by virtue of her social station. She later had a career as a writer of children’s stories. She died in 1875, at age 49.

  COUNTESS ELIZABETH BATHORY OF HUNGARY

  On December 29, 1610, Count George Thurzo, accompanied by an armed phalanx of soldiers, seized a small castle in northwest Hungary. Searching the grounds, they found the body of a young woman, recently dead and co
vered with bruises, rope burns, and cuts. In a dank dungeon, they found another woman, nearly dead from the festering wounds all over her body. And there were others, the count wrote to his wife in a hastily scrawled note on December 30, “that damned woman was keeping for torture.”

  “That damned woman” was Countess Elizabeth Bathory, princess of Hungary and one of the most powerful aristocrats in sixteenth-century Europe. A mass murderess, the story goes, she believed that bathing in the blood of young maidens would maintain her youth. This is probably just myth, but Elizabeth was undoubtedly cruel, sadistic, amoral, and insane.

  The number of women and young girls she either killed or tortured—by beating, biting, burning, branding, cutting, and starving them, as well as forcing them to stand naked in freezing streams in the middle of winter—is unclear. Her servants, four people named as accomplices by an investigating commission, claimed they’d been party to between 36 and 50 murders. Later witnesses put the number as high as 650, though that figure is likely an exaggeration.

  How Elizabeth could have killed so many women and gotten away with it for so long is mindboggling. But at that time in Hungary, the feudal pact between the classes was lethally imbalanced. Masters had all the power and few obligations to their serfs. Where a serf could be executed for stealing, a member of the aristocracy could literally get away with murder, provided that the victim was of sufficiently low rank. Cruelty of the kind Elizabeth practiced on her servants was not unheard of—savage beatings for trivial or imagined offenses were the prerogative of the ruling class. What’s more, Elizabeth was spectacularly powerful, second only to the king.