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

by Farquhar, Michael

  As Queen Mary’s collection grew ever larger, those who regularly hosted her began to take precautions whenever she came for a visit. Anything they thought the queen might like was stashed away until the royal assault was over. Not everyone fell for the queen’s charms, however. When she was collecting miniature items for her elaborate dollhouse, she persuaded famous authors of the time to donate tiny volumes of their works. A whole library was assembled, with one holdout. George Bernard Shaw rebuffed the queen’s request, noted her daughter, “in a very rude manner.” Basically he told her where she could stick her little book.

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  Sloth: An Idle Mind Is the Duchess’s Playground

  If Edward VIII really was in cahoots with the Nazis, as has been alleged, it would prove that at least he was doing something after his abdication of the British throne in 1936. As it stands, however, the rumors of collaboration are almost certainly untrue, making the ex-king’s life every bit as idle and vacuous as it appeared.

  Led by his gasping, domineering duchess10—the woman for whom he set aside his crown to marry—the Duke of Windsor, as he was titled after the abdication, adopted a lifestyle almost totally devoid of purpose. His main preoccupation was social flitting with his wife between New York, Paris, and Palm Beach, always courting the rich and absorbing their hospitality. The only real responsibility the duke seemed willing to shoulder was the care and feeding of the couple’s pet pugs.

  He had given up the only job he was born to do, but he had nothing to replace it. Still, Edward insisted on retaining all of his royal dignity and prerequisites, and those he expected for his wife. The servants wore liveried uniforms, while portraits of the duke and duchess hung amidst those of his royal ancestors in their meticulously decorated homes and apartments. Without a kingdom to rule, Edward and Wallis presided over a small fiefdom of servants, chauffeurs, and cooks.

  If Edward ever did expend any real energy—aside from his perpetual efforts to wring money out of the British government—it was in his almost obsessive desire to have Wallis granted a royal title. This had been refused her when she married Edward—sensibilities at the time utterly opposed to the brash, twice-divorced American from Baltimore being styled “Her Royal Highness.” It was a snub bitterly resented by Edward and one that he never ceased trying to remedy.

  His persistence on the issue drove deeper the wedge between the duke and his family—a relationship that was already strained because of the abdication crisis and the royal family’s refusal to receive Wallis. “I cannot tell you how grieved I am at your brother being so tiresome about the HRH [Her Royal Highness],” Edward’s mother Queen Mary wrote his brother George VI, who had ascended the throne in his place. “Giving her this title would be fatal, and after all these years I fear lest people think that we condone this dreadful marriage which was such a blow to us in every way.”

  Even as Britain was bravely facing Hitler’s devastating onslaught during World War II and Buckingham Palace was being bombed, the former king was badgering the government and the royal family about the title he coveted for his wife. Taking time out from leading the nation’s war effort, Prime Minister Winston Churchill offered the Duke a bit of advice on the issue. “Having voluntarily resigned the finest Throne in the world,” Churchill wrote, “it would be natural to treat all minor questions of ceremony and precedence as entirely beneath your interest and your dignity.”

  Alas, it was not.

  Vigorously pursuing the HRH issue was about as busy as Edward ever got during the war, which, sadly enough, was probably the most active period of his post-abdication career. He did serve as governor of the Bahamas during this time. With a world at war, this was not one of the most taxing assignments, yet Edward found it so unpalatable that he asked for a leave soon after he had arrived. It was August, after all, not the most pleasant month to settle on a tropical island. Churchill found the request for leave a tad premature. He was “very grieved to hear that you are entertaining such an idea,” Walter Monckton wrote Edward. The prime minister hoped that, when the people of Britain were suffering so much, the duke “would be willing to put up with the discomfort and remain at your post until weather conditions made things less unpleasant.”

  Edward did reluctantly come around to his patriotic duty, but insisted that the accommodations in the Bahamas were unacceptable in their current state. “We found Government House quite uninhabitable,” the duke told his friend and predecessor as governor, Bede Clifford, “and fled from the place after a week’s picnic and sandflies.” The money allotted for the home’s upgrading was insufficient, Edward informed Colonial Secretary George Lloyd, and he requested additional funds to whip it into shape. Churchill’s response to the request was succinct. “Comment is needless,” he jotted on the memo.

  After their grueling experience in the Bahamas, Edward and Wallis felt themselves entitled to a little leisure after the war. They spent the rest of their lives drowning in it. A typical day for the Duke consisted of a few rounds of golf, weather permitting, maybe a nap, then a drink—but never before 4 p.M. His main job was passing the duchess’s orders to the help, or meekly following them himself, as she busily arranged for that evening’s dinner and social activities.

  In a moment of perhaps unintentional honesty, Edward revealed the sheer emptiness of his life. “You know what my day was today?” he said to the wife of an American diplomat. “I got up late, and then I went with the Duchess and watched her buy a hat, and then on the way home I had the car drop me in the Bois to watch some of your soldiers playing football, and then I planned to take a walk, but it was so cold that I could hardly bear it . . . When I got home the Duchess was having her French lesson, so I had no one to talk to, so I got a lot of tin boxes down which my mother had sent me last week and looked through them. They were essays and so on that I had written when I was in France studying French before the Great War . . . You know, I’m not much of a reading man.”

  PART III

  Unholy Matrimony

  Among royalty, love and marriage rarely went together like a horse and carriage—more like a mongoose and cobra. All too often royal unions were coldly calculated political arrangements, with some couples not even meeting until the wedding ceremony. If one did have a choice of mate, the desire to wed was not always mutual. Kings had a way with coercion, and woe to his queen when he became bored. The following is a selection of royalty’s most miserable marriages.

  Joanna the Mad still obsessing over Philip the Fair.

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  Mad About You

  He was a dashing prince, heir to vast territories across Europe. They called him “Philip the Handsome,” although “Philip the Heel” would have worked just as well. He treated his wife like a royal rash. She was the striking daughter of Spain’s legendary co-monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. They called her “Joanna the Mad.” Indeed, she was crazy about her husband—absolutely nuts, it turned out. Together, Joan and Phil forged one of the more pathetic unions in European royal history, where sexual dominance and relentless obsession endured to the grave—and well beyond.

  As far as arranged royal marriages went, this one looked promising. Philip found Joanna quite alluring when he first saw her in 1496, a perk not to be underestimated in an era when strangers were wed to strangers without the slightest regard to compatibility. For her part, Joanna was immediately entranced by Philip’s good looks and charm. Their first meeting went so well, in fact, that Philip insisted the wedding ceremony be arranged right away so he could bed his bride without delay.

  Apparently the sex was fantastic and Joanna, who had been raised in the court of her ultra-conservative Catholic parents, was intoxicated. Philip, on the other hand, was a typical royal male who felt no particular allegiance to the marital bed. As Philip roamed, Joanna became more and more despondent. She breathed only for him, ignoring even the religious devotions that had once sustained her. Her neediness, however, only served to bring out Philip’s inherent nastiness. He parceled out sex to
his grateful wife, alternating it with threats of violence to subjugate her further. Joanna’s familiar Spanish staff was sent away, and she was left isolated in Philip’s hostile Flemish court. She was too paranoid even to write her parents.

  Hopelessly in love and living in fear, Joanna was her husband’s virtual prisoner. She was also becoming a bit unbalanced. Her maternal grandmother had died insane and Joanna, always dark and moody, was now exhibiting similar symptoms. Her plunge into madness was marked by one particularly disturbing episode in 1503. She and Philip had come to Spain so that Joanna could be sworn in as heir to her mother’s kingdom of Castile. Philip, however, decided he hated his wife’s homeland and promptly announced he was returning to his kingdom in the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands).

  Pregnant with their fourth child, Joanna was in no condition to travel. So while her beloved took off, she was stuck in Spain and miserable about it. Increasingly morose and withdrawn, she wept constantly and refused to eat. Even the birth of a healthy son failed to drag Joanna out of her neurotic malaise.

  Then one night she simply lost it.

  Barefoot, half-dressed, and raving, Joanna ran out of the castle where she was lodged, wailing in agony. Though the November night was freezing, she refused warm clothing and ignored desperate pleas to come back inside. Dressed only in her flimsy nightgown, she stayed out in the cold for thirty-six hours, clinging to the castle gates and hurling obscene insults at anyone who dared approach her. Though she was eventually coaxed back inside, the damage was done. As word of her behavior spread, “Juana la Loca” was on everyone’s lips.

  The strain was beginning to take its toll on her mother, Queen Isabella. Although this formidable monarch oversaw the Spanish Inquisition and cosponsored Columbus’s voyages to the New World, her difficult daughter left her cowed. “She spoke to me very rudely,” the queen wrote her ambassador in Flanders, “with such contempt and lack of respect that if I had not been aware of her mental condition, I would not have tolerated it in any way.” Joanna was literally making her mother sick. “We believe that the Queen’s life is endangered by her contact with Madame Princess,” Isabella’s doctors wrote King Ferdinand. “We pray that the fire that consumes [Joanna] disappears. Her life and condition has long affected the life and health of our Queen and Ladyship.”

  Meanwhile, back in Flanders, Philip, enjoying the extended respite from his clinging wife, was not pleased by the news of her impending return. His dread was soon confirmed when Joanna came home and went on a rampage with a pair of scissors. She attacked a young woman she suspected of sleeping with Philip, cutting off the poor woman’s blond hair and slashing at her face. Fed up with his unstable spouse, Philip had her locked up in the apartments of his Brussels palace where it was rumored he took to slapping her around. He called her “the terror.” She called him “the fairest of all husbands.”

  Not long after, in 1504, Queen Isabella died and Joanna and Philip were proclaimed the new rulers of Castile. Philip, however, died suddenly at age twenty-eight. Some suspected he was the victim of a poisoning plot by King Ferdinand of Aragon, who never was too fond of his son-in-law and certainly didn’t want to share any power with him. Now Joanna really flipped. Plunged into deep despair, she refused to leave her dead husband’s side. Jealous as ever of other women, she forbade any female to approach the corpse. Periodically, she would order Philip’s casket opened so that she might embrace his decaying remains.

  Resolving to move the body for final burial, the grieving new queen commanded that the funeral train travel only at night because, she said, “a widow who has lost the sun of her own soul should never expose herself to the light of day.” One night the procession came to rest at a convent, but Joanna didn’t want any women near her man—even if they were nuns. She ordered the coffin taken from the monastery and out to the open fields, where she slept beside it all night.

  A monk once told the grieving queen that her beloved husband would come back to life in fourteen years. Eager to believe him, Joanna waited patiently, but when the allotted time came and went with Philip still moldering in his casket, her mental condition deteriorated further. The demented behavior eventually became too much, and Joanna was confined in a Spanish castle until her death in 1555. Her legacy of madness, however, lived on, infiltrating her Habsburg descendants for generations to come.11

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  Until Divorce or Decapitation Do Us Part (in Six Sections)

  Katherine of Aragon

  Living with Henry VIII was no picnic for the six women unfortunate enough to become his wives. And severed heads weren’t necessarily the worst of it. Getting dumped after nearly twenty years of marriage was bad enough for Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, but having the husband who once lovingly declared himself “Sir Loyal Heart” turn into a vicious cad devastated her.

  The union looked auspicious when it began in 1509, just weeks after the nearly eighteen-year-old Henry became king of England. The young monarch was a vigorous and dazzling romantic who rescued Katherine from the life of misery she had been enduring under his cold and forbidding father, Henry VII.

  The youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella (and Joanna the Mad’s kid sister), Katherine had come from Spain eight years earlier as the bride of Henry’s sickly older brother, Arthur. That marriage ended almost as soon as it began, however, when fifteen-year-old Arthur died in 1502. The young widow was left in agonizing limbo. She was stuck in a strange land with no apparent future. Her father-in-law Henry VII used the poor girl as a pawn in his disputes with her father King Ferdinand over her dowry and other matters, depriving Katherine of an allowance and leaving her nearly destitute. The situation had grown so desperate that she was prepared to leave England and become a nun.

  Then suddenly it was all over. Henry VII died and his gallant son immediately stepped in to marry his former sister-in-law, who was six years his senior. It was a love match from the beginning, with the happy newlyweds soon crowned together at Westminster Abbey. The endless celebrations surrounding the new king and queen seemed to usher in a new era of youth, vitality, and Renaissance splendor.

  The years that followed were happy for both of them. Henry had a devoted queen who did everything from sew his shirts to serve ably as regent while he was away fighting in France. Katherine had a husband who respected her virtue, learning, and piety. The marriage was, in the words of the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, a true example of “harmonious wedlock.” Harmonious, that is, until Katherine’s looks faded, her girth expanded, and it became increasingly obvious that she would be barren of the boys Henry craved to carry on the Tudor family line.

  After twenty years of marriage, the king’s conveniently malleable conscience suddenly started gnawing at him. Didn’t the Bible clearly state in Leviticus that it was a sin against God for a man to lie with his brother’s widow? (Never mind that another passage in Deuteronomy encouraged the very same thing.) It was simple, he concluded. God never recognized the patently sinful marriage, so it was cursed with only a daughter, Princess Mary, and in fact never even existed.

  But there was something else pricking the king besides his conscience. He had fallen desperately in love with Katherine’s enchanting lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. Unfortunately, this dark-eyed lady with the graceful neck and sparkling wit was withholding her favors until she had a guarantee that Henry would make her queen. Educated in the worldly court of the French King Francis I, Anne was nothing if not savvy. She had seen how quickly Henry discarded his handful of mistresses, including her own sister, so she wasn’t about to become just another temporary treat. Henry didn’t want this either. He was seeking a new wife who could provide him with legitimate sons as well as a good roll in the sack.

  In a series of passionate love letters to Anne, “the woman in the world that I value most,” Henry pleaded for patience, “assuring you that henceforth my heart will be dedicated to you alone, and wishing greatly that my body was so too.” At the conclusion of anothe
r letter, the king’s mounting lust was plain, “wishing myself in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty ducks [breasts] I trust shortly to kiss.” Before he could get his ducks in line, however, Henry had to confront an unexpected obstacle. Queen Katherine absolutely refused to step aside. Though she broke down and wept when her adored husband revealed that his suddenly troubled conscience was urging him out of the marriage, she didn’t roll over and die. Behind the tears was a dignified determination that would forever alter the course of English history. “I am the king’s true and lawful wife,” she defiantly proclaimed when it was suggested that she quietly retire to a nunnery.

  Katherine of Aragon may have been a submissive wife wishing only to please her man, but she was also a proud princess of Spain who would never willingly hand over her husband to the upstart Boleyn. Nor would the pious queen agree that twenty years of marriage had been a sinful sham in the eyes of the Church, making their daughter Mary a bastard. But there was something else compelling Katherine to stand up and fight. She was still in love with the dashing prince who had fallen in love with her two decades before.

  Stunned by the obstinacy of the woman who had always shown herself to be so amenable, Henry realized that shedding his wife would not be so easy. Furthermore, he was confronted with something he had never encountered before—the unwelcome mutterings of a people unhappy with the prospect of seeing their beloved queen displaced. In what may be one of history’s more disingenuous public speeches, the king attempted a bit of sixteenth-century spin control.

  “If it be adjudged that the Queen is my lawful wife,” he pronounced, “nothing will be more pleasant or more acceptable to me, both for the clearness of my conscience, and also for the good qualities and conditions I know her to be in . . . besides her noble parentage she is a woman of most gentleness, humility and buxomness; yea, and of all good qualities pertaining to nobility she is without comparison. . . . So that if I were to marry again, I would choose her above all women. But if it be determined in judgment that our marriage is against God’s law, then shall I sorrow, parting from so good a lady and loving companion.”