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

by Farquhar, Michael

  Katherine’s dwarfish younger sister Mary apparently learned nothing from her sister’s ordeal. In 1565, she secretly married Thomas Keyes, the Sergeant-Porter at court, who towered above her tiny, misshapen frame. “Here is the most unhappy chance and monstrous,” wrote William Cecil, the queen’s chief counsellor. “The Sergeant-Porter, being the biggest gentleman at this court, hath secretly married Lady Mary Grey, the least of all the court.”

  Enraged at being defied now by two cousins, Elizabeth sent Keyes to Fleet Prison and Mary into exile in the country, stating grimly that she would have “no little bastard Keyes” running around. After being widowed, Mary was allowed back at court, where she continued defiantly to sign her name “Mary Keyes.” She died in 1578, unmourned by the perpetually single Queen Elizabeth I.

  2

  Pride: Here Comes the Sun King

  Being royal required a certain faith in one’s inherent superiority over ordinary men. Few monarchs lacked it. Next to Louis XIV of France, though, even the most self-enamored of sovereigns came off looking neurotically insecure by comparison. In fact, Louis refused to be grouped with other kings under the term “Their Majesties” because, he explained, from that there might be deduced “an equality which does not exist.”

  For most of his seventy-two-year-reign (from 1643 to 1715, the longest in European history), Louis worked methodically to have all the glory and prestige of France embodied in himself. “I am the State,” he proudly declared—even if the state needed six-inch heels to look taller. As an absolute monarch, Louis dictated nearly every facet of French life according to his own rarefied vision of how it should be. Nothing escaped his attention, from the national religion to tree maintenance. He even mandated a twenty-five-step itinerary to be followed by visitors to the gardens of Versailles. It was all about Louis.

  Under him, there was no room for opposition. He and he alone decided what was good and what was right. “The subjugation of a monarch to the law of his people,” he said, “is the last calamity which can befall a gentleman of our rank.” Laws were initiated, aggressive wars pursued, and art and literature commissioned—all designed to make Louis look good. “My dominant passion is certainly love of glory,” he once admitted.

  For the royal emblem, Louis XIV adopted the sun because, as he explained in his Memoirs, “The unique quality of the brilliance which surrounds it, the light it communicates to other heavenly bodies which compose a kind of Court around it, the just and even allotment of its light among all the various tropics of the world, the good it does everywhere, endlessly producing on all sides life, joy, activity, its uninterrupted movement despite an always tranquil appearance, its constant and invariable path, from which it is never drawn or diverted, is assuredly the most beautiful and vivid image of a great monarch.”

  The “Sun King” put himself on dazzling display at Versailles, where in 1682 he permanently moved his court and the seat of government. The palace itself was designed to be a glittering reflection of its most regal inhabitant and everyone was welcome to come and observe him in his daily, unwavering routine. Onlookers were on hand every morning when the king arose, got dressed, and shaved. At meals, they could marvel at his dexterity with an egg as he clipped off the top with just one quick stroke of the spoon. A very privileged few even got to watch him as he sat perched on his other throne when nature called. “What price does even the most repulsive thing that comes from the king have in this country?” asked a shocked visitor from Italy after observing this unusual access.

  The writer Jean de La Bruyere described how Louis worshiped at Mass under the adoring gaze of his subjects: “The great of the nation meet each day at a certain time in a temple called church . . . they form a vast circle at the foot of the altar, standing with their backs to the priest and the holy mysteries, their faces lifted toward their king, who can be seen kneeling at a tribune . . . one cannot help noticing in his usage a sort of subordination; for the people seem to be adoring the prince, who is adoring God.”

  Louis XIV was a genius at making Versailles appear to be the pinnacle of prestige and honor for the thousands of nobles who lived there, with himself as the radiant center of it all. In this way the king utterly obliterated their ancient power by having them chase the artificial gold that he created and dangled before them. The once mighty aristocracy fought for the honor of cramped rooms, handing the king his shirt in the morning, holding a candle for him, or accompanying him on a hunt.

  Louis created hundreds of meaningless posts that the nobility were eager to snatch up at enormous costs, yet even he was surprised at how successful this venture became. “Who will buy them?” the king once asked his Minister of Finance, Desmarets, who wanted to create even more artificial offices. “Your Majesty ignores one of the finest prerogatives of the king of France,” Desmarets replied, “which is that when a King creates an office God instantly creates a fool to buy it.”

  A rigid and highly nuanced code of etiquette flourished at Versailles, designed to flatter the nobility into worshipful and grateful complacency. People were thrilled to be granted the privilege to sit in the king’s presence rather than stand, or to have him doff his hat at certain angles, which designated various levels of favor. “He substituted ideal rewards for real ones,” wrote the Duc de Saint-Simon, an avid court observer and participant, “and these operated through jealousy, the petty preferences he showed many times a day, and his artfulness in showing them.” One of the most coveted marks of favor was an invitation to the king’s more intimate residence at Marley. According to Saint-Simon, “it was a crime not to ask for Marley either always or often, although this did not mean they would obtain it.”

  While Louis operated using an elaborate code of flattery toward the nobility, he demanded it for himself as well. He was surrounded by a sea of sycophants as a result. “Soon after he became master, his ministers, his generals, his mistresses and his courtiers noticed that he had a weakness for, rather than a love of, glory,” Saint-Simon wrote. “They spoiled him with praise. Commendation and flattery pleased him to such a point that the most obvious compliments were received kindly and the most insidious were relished even more. It was the only way to approach him, and those who won his love knew it well and never tired of praising him. That is why his ministers were so powerful, for they had more opportunities to burn incense before him, attribute every success to him, and vow they had learned everything from him. The only way to please him was submissiveness, baseness, an air of admiring and crawling toadyism, and by giving the impression that he was the only source of wisdom.”

  And the ranks of the obsequious were legion. There was, for example, the subject who responded, when Louis asked for the time: “Whatever time Your Majesty desires.” Or his son, the Duc du Maine, who said to his father after a long military campaign, “Ah, Sire, I will never learn anything. My tutor grants me a holiday each time you win a victory.” Then there was the Superintendent of Buildings, the Duc d’Antin, who placed wedges under the statues at Versailles so the king would notice they were askew and d’Antin would get the chance to praise him for his keen perception.

  The aura of majesty was so intoxicating that basking in it took absurd forms. When Louis suffered from a fistula, a deep ulcer of the rectum that required surgery, the ailment became ultra-chic and those fortunate enough to share the operation du Roi were much envied. The surgery carried so much prestige, in fact, that men without fistulas begged and bribed doctors to perform the procedure on them anyway—an entirely new spin on the fine art of kissing ass.

  3

  Wrath: Have an Ice Day

  Indignatio principis mors est. The anger of the prince means death. Over the centuries countless executions by royal order proved this warning to be absolutely true. But with Empress Anna of Russia, the anger of the sovereign meant something else entirely: excruciating humiliation. This early eighteenth-century monarch had a knack for conjuring up the most embarrassing of punishments when she was displeased. In one case, thr
ee nobles who had managed to get on the empress’s bad side were condemned to live like hens for a week. Dressed in feathers and made to roost in specially outfitted nests—complete with eggs—the unfortunate gentlemen were ordered to sit and cluck until the sentence was complete.

  This was mild compared to the ordeal another noble, Prince Michael Alexsyevitch Golitsin, had to face. He had the nerve to marry a woman not to Anna’s liking, and this made her angry. So angry, in fact, that she stripped him of his title and transformed the erstwhile aristocrat into a court jester. But this was just the beginning. When the wife he had chosen for himself died in 1740, Anna decided it was her turn to select a mate for him. She chose a woman who was reportedly one of the ugliest ladies in Russia. For the wedding party, Anna dug into her collection of deformed and freakish human beings to lead a procession of drunkards and other low lifes, all pulled in carriages by goats and pigs. The happy couple followed, in a cage, as the crowds gathered to watch.

  After the wedding ceremony and breakfast reception, it was time for the honeymoon—no doubt one of the chilliest on record. The spot Anna had selected for them was right on the banks of the frozen Neva River. Her wedding present was a palace there made entirely of ice. It was a huge structure, complete with a honeymoon suite that included an ice bed and ice pillows. Outside, ice statues and ice trees were carved, with little ice birds perched upon them. There were even six ice cannons that actually fired. As the wedding party cheered them on, the newlyweds were forced inside the ice palace and ordered to bed down and consummate the marriage. Somehow they did, despite the frigid temperature.

  Nine months later, ornery old Anna was dead. At about the same time, Golitsin’s wife presented him with twin boys. Despite the circumstances of their less-than-fairy-tale union, it was said that the couple did in fact live happily ever after.

  4

  Gluttony: Eat, Drink, and Be Mocked

  George IV was a man of great wit and impeccable taste—a bon vivant noted for his elegant style, keen eye for fine art and architecture, and inclination toward grand generosity and warm amiability. Nevertheless, this early nineteenth-century British monarch was the perpetual target of savage lampoons and public ridicule. He could rarely ride out of the palace in his carriage without being hooted and jeered on the streets of London.

  Some of the invective had to do with his shameless extravagance and enormous debts, his obvious greed for his sick father’s throne, the undue credit he claimed for the British victory over Napoleon, and his flaunted love affairs and spectacularly disastrous marriage.9 But it was George’s status as an obese slob who drank too much—often spiking his liquor with heaping doses of laudanum—that inspired some of the most howling derision. Though he wasn’t the fattest monarch ever to strain the British throne,2 he was almost certainly the booziest—charming and dignified when sober; everything but, when drunk.

  He was still a young prince when his drinking started taking its toll on his appearance, giving him a premature look of dissipation and generating snickers among his subjects. His behavior at a ball given by Lady Hopetoun in 1787 was typical of his early carousing. According to one account, he “posted himself in the doorway, to the terror of everybody that went by, flung his arms round the Duchess of Ancaster’s neck and kissed her with a great smack, threatened to pull Lord Galloway’s wig off and knock out his false teeth, and played all the pranks of a drunken man upon the stage, till some of his companions called for his carriage, and almost forced him away.”

  Had he been a more popular prince, that kind of scene might have been thought delightfully eccentric or sympathetically ignored. But George was widely disliked, and his critics pounced on his all too apparent weaknesses. The Times of London condemned him as a hard-drinking, swearing, whoring man “who at all times would prefer a girl and a bottle to politics and a sermon,” and whose only states of happiness were “gluttony, drunkenness, and gambling.”

  One of the most scathing images of the prince was the widely distributed caricature by James Gillray, portraying him as “a voluptuary under the horrors of digestion.” George is shown picking his teeth with a fork as he recovers from an enormous meal, his guts bursting out of his trousers. Beneath his fat thighs are empty wine bottles and behind him are medicines for “the piles,” “for stinking breath,” and two contemporary cures for venereal disease, “Veno’s Vegetable Syrup” and “Leeke’s Pills.”

  If this ridicule wasn’t enough, friends and family added to it with their own indictments. After one memorable binge, George’s only (legitimate) child, Princess Charlotte, cracked that “too much oil was put into the lamp.” And his tenuous friendship with the famous dandy of the period, Beau Brummell, crashed to a mortifying public end at a ball when George—harboring a lingering resentment over Brummell’s persistent failure to show proper deference to his royal person—spoke to their mutual friend, Lord Alvanely, but pointedly ignored Brummell. “Alvanely,” the rebuffed Brummell shouted across the room, “who is your fat friend?”

  In an earlier era, heads would have rolled for such audacious disrespect, but George presided over a monarchy—first as Prince Regent during his father, George III’s, mental incapacity, then as king—that had been slowly losing its power over the years. As much as he surely would have loved to order the executions of his tormentors, there was little George could do to counter their relentless assault, particularly since they were often right.

  When The Examiner published a particularly nasty attack on the Prince Regent in 1812—calling him, among other things, “a violator of his word, a libertine head over ears in debt” and “a despiser of domestic ties”—he was successful in having the author and his brother, the paper’s editor, arrested and charged “with intention to traduce and vilify His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, Regent of the United Kingdom.” Writer and editor were fined and jailed, but it was hardly a royal victory as the sentences only made George more unpopular. It was during this time that a devastating verse by Charles Lamb made the rounds:Not a fatter fish than he

  Flounders round the polar sea.

  See his blubbers . . . at his gills

  What a world of drink he swills . . .

  Every fish of generous kind

  Scuds aside or shrinks behind;

  But about his presence keep

  All the monsters of the deep . . .

  Name or title what has he? . . .

  Is he Regent of the sea?

  By his bulk and by his size,

  By his oily qualities,

  This (or else my eyesight fails),

  This should be the Prince of Whales.

  Things didn’t get much better when George became king in 1820, probably because he continued to give his critics fresh ammunition. They had a grand time with the king and his last mistress, Lady Conyngham, including the pamphleteer who distributed this verse:

  Quaffing their claret, then mingling their lips, Or tickling the fat about each other’s hips.

  A lifetime of debauchery started wrecking the king’s body and mind toward the end of his life, and he became a recluse at Windsor Castle. His appetite, however, was little affected. His mode of living now was “really beyond belief,” noted Mrs. Arbuthnot, who had chronicled other events in the life of the king. The Duke of Wellington was a frequent visitor at Windsor and noted the king’s breakfast menu one day. He had “a pidgeon and beef steak pie of which he ate two pigeons and three beef-steaks, three parts of a bottle of Mozelle, a glass of dry champagne, two classes of port [and] a glass of brandy! He had taken laudanum the night before, again before this breakfast, again last night and again this morning.” Not surprisingly, George IV died not long after.

  It had been a life of great potential never realized, of appetites out of control. Of course the critics had the last word. “There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King,” the Times of London editorialized the day after his funeral. “What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved
one throb of unmercenary sorrow . . . for that Leviathan of the haut ton, George IV.”

  5

  Covetousness: Hail Mary, Full of Greed

  The kings of Spain once plundered the New World in their quest for gold. Britain’s Queen Mary plundered living rooms. This early twentieth-century consort of King George V was quite a collector. Though she favored valuable little knickknacks and objects d’art, she didn’t like paying for them. Mary had other ways of getting what she wanted and no home she visited was safe from her acquisitive glare.

  “I am caressing it with my eyes,” she would coyly whisper upon spotting a particular item she wanted, while lingering before it for added effect. This little routine was often enough for the owner in awe of royalty to insist immediately that she have it. But for those who didn’t quite get the message, the marauding queen went a step further. Just before leaving the targeted home, Mary would make a dramatic pause at the doorstep and ask, “May I go back and say goodbye to that dear little [fill in the blank of whatever it was she wanted that day]?” With this less than subtle hint, the predatory queen usually got her prize. There were occasions, however, when actually paying became the only option left. If she happened to leave a home empty-handed, her thank-you note often included a request to purchase the coveted piece. Few could resist this final assault.