Darnley and the nobles agreed on a murderous scheme designed to break the queen. Mary had an Italian secretary, David Riccio, whose company she enjoyed. She listened raptly to his advice and spent hours of quality time with him as her marriage deteriorated. Of course Darnley hated Riccio. The nobles loathed him, too, mostly because he was a Catholic and a foreigner and he had the queen’s ear. They determined to destroy him. It was a March evening in 1566 when the plan was carried out. Six months pregnant (with the future King James I of England), Mary was in her private chambers at the palace of Holyrood dining with Riccio and some other companions when the conspirators suddenly burst in. “Let it please your Majesty,” one of them sneered, “that yonder man David come forth of your privy chamber where he hath been overlong.” Naturally, the queen protested that Riccio was there by her royal invitation and would stay right where he was. The gang informed her otherwise as they moved to snatch the terrified secretary, now clinging desperately to the queen’s skirts.
As Riccio was dragged away from her kicking and screaming for his life, Mary spun on her husband and violently cursed him. The helpless secretary was then viciously slaughtered, stabbed more than fifty times before his bloody and lacerated corpse was tossed down a flight of steps. Needless to say, this savage murder didn’t exactly enhance the marital relations between Mary and Darnley. Now held prisoner in her own palace, the queen choked on the hatred she felt for her husband. She was sure her own life was in danger because of him, either through the violence of the attack on Riccio or by its potential trauma to her pregnancy.
Mary knew she had to swallow her seething contempt if she wanted to help herself. While it was contrary to everything she felt, she had to play nice with Darnley if she wanted to escape her captors. The weakling would-be king, terrified by what he had done, was coaxed back to his wife’s side as easily as he had been won to the murderers’. With Darnley’s help, Mary was able to escape the palace and rally support from her loyalist forces. She regained her position, but domestic harmony was hardly restored. Darnley reverted back to his lazy life of debauchery, while resuming his schemes to glorify himself. “He misuses himself so far towards [Mary] that it is a heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband,” one courtier wrote. The queen would never get over her husband’s complicity in Riccio’s murder. “I have forgiven, but never will forget!” she angrily blasted him after their son was born several months later.
Mary wasn’t Darnley’s only enemy. He ruffled more than a few tartans when he betrayed his merry band of coconspirators and soon found himself their next target. In the early morning hours of February 10, 1567, an enormous explosion destroyed a house on the outskirts of Edinburgh known as Kirk o’Field. Darnley had been lodged there, recovering from a syphilitic illness. Perhaps noticing the cache of gunpowder being hauled in, Darnley managed to escape the blast. It was only a brief reprieve, though, as he was found strangled to death in the courtyard of the ruined home the next morning.
Mary’s involvement in the murder, if any, remains one of history’s greatest mysteries and leaves her legacy shrouded in controversy. Her cause was certainly not aided much by the fact that she ran off and married the Earl of Bothwell, who happened to be the suspected ringleader of the plot to kill Darnley. With her reputation ruined, Mary’s countrymen turned against her, hounded her off the throne and held her captive. After escaping, the disgraced queen fled to England and into the waiting arms of cousin Elizabeth. She was held prisoner there for nineteen years before she was convicted in 1587 of conspiracy to kill the English queen and executed.
In the minds of many the deposed queen remained a shameless harlot, but to others Mary became a holy martyr, her past sins cleanly wiped away by the circumstances of her death. Whatever the case, no doubt Mary Queen of Scots would have been far better off if she had taken a cue from her cousin Queen Elizabeth and simply stayed single.
4
A Wedding! Let’s Celibate!
Catherine the Great of Russia, whose indiscriminate sexual adventures would later become legendary,15 came to her wedding bed a blushing virgin and, thanks to her husband, stayed that way for nearly a decade.
She arrived in Russia from Germany in 1744 with vague royal connections and soon became engaged to Peter, designated by the Empress Elizabeth to succeed her as Peter III. What she found was a frighteningly alien culture, only superficially civilized, and a massively disappointing fiance. Peter was an ugly, mean-spirited simpleton who showed no interest in his future bride. He much preferred putting his toy soldiers through endless military maneuvers. “I understood perfectly how little he wanted to see me and how little affection he bore me,” she wrote in her memoirs. “My self-esteem and vanity were wounded, but I was too proud to complain.”
Her wedding night was disastrous. Dressed in a pink nightie specially ordered from Paris, the naive Catherine waited anxiously in bed for her new husband, who was off carousing with his valets. The groom finally arrived after midnight, declaring that “it would amuse the servants to see us in bed together.” With that he fell into the sack and passed out.
Night after night he ignored her, concentrating instead on his own diversions. Sometimes he would bring his huge collection of toys to bed, forcing Catherine to play army with him. Once she walked into their room to find a rat hanging by a rope. Peter explained that it had committed treason and was paying the penalty.
The future tsar also had a tendency to chatter incessantly, bombarding his bride with whatever bit of trivia happened to have captured his limited imagination. “Often I was very bored by his visits, which would last for hours,” she wrote, “and even exhausted by them, for he never sat down, and I always had to walk up and down the room with him.” The droning chitchat, however, never led to bed, no doubt frustrating the woman who once recalled vigorously riding her pillow as an adolescent, trying to satisfy physical yearnings not yet defined. As the un-consummated marriage progressed, Peter became increasingly tedious. During one period he decided to become a dog trainer, filling their bedroom with barking animals. “It was amid this stench,” she wrote, “that we slept.”
Despite her loathsome marriage, Catherine knew her future was bound to Russia and was determined to absorb its culture totally. She learned the language, read voraciously, adopted the Russian Orthodox faith and carefully cultivated alliances in the debauched court of Empress Elizabeth. She also took to physical activity to relieve the marital strains, riding her horse for hours. “The more violent this exercise was the more I loved it,” she wrote.
Peter, for his part, would not have been able to satisfy his wife even if he wanted to. In the words of French agent Champeaux, he was “unable to have children because of an obstacle, which the Oriental peoples remedy by circumcision, but for which he thought there was no cure.” He had phimosis, a deformation of the foreskin that made erections excruciatingly painful. Even after he consented to the operation that liberated him, he still refused to sleep with his wife. Instead, he took on a series of mistresses, keeping Catherine apprised of every dalliance.
Catherine, meanwhile, was becoming wiser to the ways of the world. Engaging in innocent court flirtations, she gradually discovered that she was indeed desirable. Her confidence and passions aroused, the long-deprived princess finally lost her virginity to a young officer—eight years after her wedding. A succession of lovers and several illegitimate children followed; then Catherine really got her revenge. The Empress Elizabeth died in 1762, and Peter became ruler over subjects who hated him. He made peace with Frederick the Great of Prussia, just as the Russian army was at the point of defeating Frederick’s armies, and compounded the outrage by making his troops wear Prussian-style uniforms.
Peter III also made the foolish mistake of humiliating his now formidable wife in public, forcing her at one point to stand up with the rest of his subjects when the royal family was toasted. Her dignified behavior in the face of all her husband’s insults gained Catherine sympathy and respect, an
d soon a plot to overthrow the tsar centered around her. With the Russian army and establishment firmly behind her, Catherine forced Peter’s abdication. She was proclaimed empress, while her husband was discreetly murdered a few days later. He was a far more effective general, it seems, with tin soldiers on a loveless bed.
5
Wails From the Vienna Wood
Austrian Empress Maria Theresa should not be judged too harshly for the series of miserable marriages she arranged for her large brood of children in the late eighteenth century. Sure, dynastic and diplomatic considerations took precedence over any potential happiness they might have enjoyed in the arrangements, but, in her defense, the empress probably had no notion of what wedded bliss meant. She was, after all, married to a shameless philanderer who humiliated her with his numerous and less than discreet affairs.
From his frequent flirtations with young dancers and opera singers of the Vienna stage to long-term liaisons with ladies of the court, Emperor Francis was the ultimate adulterer. He was particularly enamoured of Princess Auersperg, a paramour thirty years his junior. “The emperor makes no secret of his passion for her,” one visitor to the Austrian court noted. Indeed, Francis and his mistress enjoyed frequent trysts in his hunting lodges, his theater box in Vienna, and the cozy home he purchased for her. Even his somewhat sheltered children knew what was going on. “The emperor is a very good-hearted father,” wrote his daughter Christina, “one can always rely upon him as a friend, and we must do what we can to protect him from his weakness. I am referring to his conduct with Princess Auersperg.” Her mother, Christina continued, was “very jealous of this devotion.”
Despite her displeasure, and the fact that she held all the power as the sovereign of both Austria and Hungary, the empress could do nothing to rein in her wayward husband. Instead, she became obsessed with controlling the moral conduct of her subjects. With its opulent theaters, grand opera houses, and an up-and-coming talent by the name of Mozart, the glittering city of Vienna was a cosmopolitan mecca in the midst of a cultural wasteland. It was “a city of free adultery,” as one visitor put it. And it was here that Emperor Francis’s lifestyle thrived.
Transferring her anger at her husband’s betrayals, Maria Theresa established her Chastity Commission, a special department of the police charged with suppressing vice. The purity patrols were everywhere, infiltrating theaters, social gatherings, and even private homes. Anyone suspected of being less than upright was arrested, while foreigners accused of corrupting the local citizenry were banished from the kingdom. Some said the betrayed empress herself played a part in the commission, disguising herself and roaming Vienna in search of her wayward man.
The usual punishment for those convicted of moral violations was harsh, meant to serve as an example to others. The violators were chained to stone pillars at the city gates where they sat in their own filth, sometimes for weeks or months, completely dependent on the kindness of strangers for food and drink. The punishments, however, backfired. Instead of being ridiculed and scorned, the chained souls became heroes of sorts. The citizens of Vienna fed and catered to them while laughing at the prudish empress with the unfaithful husband.
When she wasn’t storming the bedrooms of her people, Maria Theresa busied herself inflicting marriage on her helpless children. Like many royal offspring, they were to be used as political capital, helping to strengthen their parents’ position through arranged matrimony. This was a particularly rich and ancient tradition in the empress’s Habsburg family line.16
Crown Prince Joseph, as heir to the throne, was given top priority in the marriage market. Luckily for him, he actually fell in love with the mate chosen for him, Princess Isabella of Parma. Unfortunately, Isabella’s affections were directed elsewhere. She had a major crush on Joseph’s sister, Christina. “I am told that the day begins with God,” Isabella gushed to Christina in a letter. “I, however, begin the day by thinking of the object of my love, for I think of her incessantly.”
Empress Maria Theresa would never have tolerated a lesbian relationship between daughter and daughter-in-law, but the issue became moot when Isabella died suddenly from smallpox at age twenty-one. The prince was devastated by his loss, but his mother, ever conscious of dynastic priorities, quickly married him off again. Joseph was given a choice of two brides, neither of whom stirred much desire in him. “I prefer not to marry either,” he announced to his mother, “but since you are holding a knife to my throat, I will take [Princess Josepha of Bavaria], because, from what I hear, she at least has fine breasts.”
Josepha’s breasts, alas, were a disappointment, along with the rest of her. She was short, thickset, and painfully ugly, with festering sores all over her body and bad teeth. Joseph was repulsed by his bride and avoided her at all costs. “They want me to have children,” he wrote despondently. “How can we have them? If I could put the tip of my finger on the tiniest part of her body, which was not covered with pimples, I would try to have children.” Poor Josepha, abandoned and humiliated, suddenly died of smallpox like her predecessor, though this time her husband was not particularly moved by grief.
The smallpox epidemic also saved several of Joseph’s siblings from horrible marriages. His brother Charles died of it before a match could be arranged for him, while his sister Elizabeth, once the great beauty of the family, was so scarred by the disease that no suitor would have her and she was forced into a bitter spinsterhood. Another daughter, Josepha, died just in the nick of time. She had been betrothed to Ferdinand, the child-king of Naples, renowned for his stupidity. He was so dumb, in fact, that his father decided he should be spared the rigors of an education. Needless to say, Josepha was not pleased with the match and made it abundantly clear. Her mother, however, was determined. “I consider Josepha a sacrifice to politics,” the empress wrote firmly to her daughter’s governess, “and if she fulfills her duty to her husband and her God, I shall be content . . . I hope my daughter will not be selfish; she has a tendency in that direction.”
Mercifully, on the day she was to leave Austria to become Queen of Naples, Josepha also succumbed to smallpox. Young King Ferdinand was not terribly upset over the death of his intended. An English ambassador reported seeing him playing funeral, amid much hilarity, with a pal dressed up like the dead Josepha—complete with chocolate dotted all over his face to resemble smallpox. Besides, what was the loss of one sister when another was waiting in the wings to take her place?
That sister, Caroline, was equally displeased with the arrangement. Bitterly homesick, she called her life in Naples “a martyrdom,” and wrote: “I now know what marriage is, and I have a deep pity for [youngest sister] Antoinette who has yet to experience marriage. I admit frankly that I would rather die than be forced to live again what I have gone through. If I had not been taught by my religion to think of God, I should have killed myself, for it was hell to live like that for a week. I shall weep bitterly if ever my sister is in the same situation.”
Sadly, young Antoinette found herself in a very similar situation. She was pawned off to the dauphin of France, the future King Louis XVI, in what her mother considered the ultimate diplomatic coup with Austria’s ancient enemy. Louis was hardly the prince young girls dream about. He was, quite frankly, a rude, pudgy, seemingly asexual loser, with filthy hygiene to boot. The Neopolitan ambassador remarked that the dauphin seemed to have been “born and raised in a forest,” while Madame Du Barry, mistress of his grandfather, Louis XV, called him a “fat, ill-bred boy.”
Young Louis had another problem, one shared by Catherine the Great’s husband, Peter III. He had phimosis. This, combined with his almost phobic shyness and his desperate fear of the surgery necessary to correct his deformity, made Louis less than a great lover. And Marie Antoinette a very lonely bride. Louis studiously avoided her and their marriage bed, leaving the poor girl all alone in the strange, debauched court of Louis XV at Versailles. Though they would eventually reach an accommodation after Louis inherited the French thr
one, the ill-fated couple would have little time to enjoy it. Their frivolous new lifestyle was disrupted by a pesky revolution that would claim both their heads.
6
A Marriage Made in Hell
Among the legendary fiascoes that were so many royal marriages, few stand out as more discordant than the one between George IV of Britain and Caroline of Brunswick. This miserably mismatched pair made a royal sideshow out of a union that was doomed before it ever began. George, Prince of Wales at the time, already had a favorite mistress and a secret wife. But he had married the widow Mrs. Fitzherbert on the sly, without the king’s consent, which violated one law, plus she was Catholic, which violated another. Prince George was facing the prospect of losing his place at the head of the line for the throne.
Lured by the promise of having Parliament pay off his massive debts, George was persuaded to dump his illegal wife and marry his German cousin, Caroline. It was a steep price to pay for a clean credit report. Among other qualities, Caroline was a crude, foul-smelling exhibitionist with an enormous sexual appetite. Harris, Lord Malmesbury, the diplomat given the task of bringing Caroline from Brunswick to marry the prince, described her as having “no acquired morality, and no strong innate notions of its value and necessity”—a reputation she enjoyed all over Germany. She was short and stocky, described by Malmesbury as having “a head always too large for her body, and her neck too short.”
She also apparently shared the same royal malady—porphyria—that is thought to have driven her future father-in-law and uncle, George III, into babbling fits of insanity. While Prince George’s mother, Queen Charlotte, had serious reservations about Caroline’s suitability, his father was delighted. Demonstrating all the shrewd judgment he had earlier used in assessing the mood of the American colonists, George III roundly endorsed his niece. “Undoubtedly she is the person who naturally must be most agreeable to me,” he wrote Prime Minister William Pitt. “I expressed my approbation of the idea.”
A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens Page 8
