Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
LOUIS VII 1120-1180
HENRY II 1133-1189
EDWARD IV 1442-1483
FERDINAND II OF ARAGON 1452-1516
JOANNA OF CASTILE
ARTHUR, PRINCE OF WALES 1486-1502
Henry VIII 1491-1547
MARY ROSE TUDOR 1495/6-1533
HENRY VIII
HENRI II 1519-1559
HENRY VIII
HENRY VIII
HENRY VIII
HENRY VIII
MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS 1542-1587
GEORGE I 1660-1727
EMPEROR PETER III 1728-1762
LOUIS XVI 1754-1793
GEORGE IV 1762-1830
GEORGE IV
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 1769-1821
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
QUEEN VICTORIA 1819-1901
FRANZ JOSEPH I 1830-1916
TSAR NICHOLAS II 1868-1918
EDWARD VIII 1894-1972
RAINIER III, PRINCE OF MONACO 1923-2005
CHARLES, PRINCE OF WALES B. 1948
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © Leslie Carroll, 2010
All rights reserved
New American Library
Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, January 2010
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Carroll, Leslie.
Notorious royal marriages: a juicy journey through nine centuries of dynasty, destiny, and
desire/Leslie Carroll.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-1101159774
1. Marriages of royalty and nobility—Europe—History. 2. Kings and rulers—Sexual
behavior—History. 3. Queens—Sexual behavior—History. 4. Europe—Politics and
government. I. Title.
D107.C29 2010
940.09’9—dc22 2009030451
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
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For my darling and devoted husband, Scott,
From “Kleines Fraüchen” with “ein Kuss”
“I love you, those three words have my life in them.”
The State of Princes . . . in matters of marriage [is] far of
worse sort than the condition of poor men. For Princes take
as is brought them by others, and poor men be commonly
at their own device and liberty.
—Anthony Denny, Member of the King’s Privy Chamber and chief body servant to Henry VIII, 1540
Foreword
Everyone loves a royal wedding. Except, perhaps, the bride and groom. Throughout history, most royal marriages were arranged affairs, brokered for diplomatic and dynastic reasons, and often when the prospective spouses were mere children. The perfect royal marriage brought territorial gains to the ruling dynasty’s side (usually the groom’s) and cemented alliances between families and regions. It was of little consequence that the spouses often didn’t meet until their wedding day. Or that they had been in love with someone else and were now compelled to abandon all hope of the personal happiness or emotional fulfillment that might have come from nuptial bliss with another. There is no I in dynasty.
In general, there was one primary goal of a royal marriage: to beget an heir. And for a good part of the past millennium, when much of Western Europe was embroiled in perpetual warfare, it was believed that only a male heir would be able to defend and hold the throne, although a female could legally inherit the throne in England and Scotland. During more martial eras, royal wives who managed to produce only daughters—Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, for example—were disposed of by their autocratic spouse, powerless to challenge his authority. If execution was no longer an option to ending a problematic or infertile marriage, there was always divorce. Napoleon Bonaparte divorced his first wife, Josephine de Beauharnais, because she failed to bear him a son.
With so many marriages being little more than dynastic alliances, how did these royals manage to survive their arranged nuptials and make their peace with the world into which they were born? Or did they? Precious few of the notorious royal marriages profiled in this book began as love matches—although they didn’t necessarily stay that way. And for several centuries, if things weren’t working out, the monarch might play the all-purpose, get-out-of-marriage-free card known as a papal dispensation on the grounds of consanguinity. In other words, plenty of unions were sundered after cousins who had received a dispensation to marry in the first place suddenly decided to become appalled and repulsed by how closely they were related when it became expedient to wed another.
With so many intriguing relationships, choosing whose stories to omit was nearly as difficult as selecting which ones to include. Within this volume are some of the world’s most famous royal unions, as they affected and were affected by the historical and political events of the times; it is not intended to provide an overview of world history, to probe with great depth the wars and revolutions that gripped Europe for centuries, or to present full biographies of the principals.
Comparing the selection of a marriage partner to fishing for an eel—that staple of Renaissance diets—Sir Thomas More’s father commented that it was as if “ye should put your hand into a blind bag full of snakes and eels together, seven snakes for one eel.”
In these pages are the snakes as well as the eels—the disastrous unions and the delightful ones; the martyrs to marriage and the iconoclasts who barely took their vows seriously; the saintly and the suffering; the rebels and the renegades—all of whom took the phrases “I do” and “I will” and ran as far as they could go with them, exploring and embracing the broad spectrum of passion, power, and possibilities far beyond the royal bedchamber.
LOUIS VII 1120-1180
RULED AS CO-KING OF FRANCE: 1131-1137
RULED AS KING: 1137-1180
and
ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE
1122-1204
married 1137-1152
“I thought I married a king, but I find I have married a monk.”
—Eleanor of Aquitaine, on her husband, Louis VII of France
WHAT’S IN A NAME? WELL, WHEN YOUR MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER’S is the Countess Dangerosa, one might easily speculate that you, too, could spell Trouble.
The Countess Dangerosa was the mistress of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s grandfather the lusty Duke William IX of Aquitaine, whose bawdy ballads garnered him the reputation as the first known troubadour. Eleanor was the eldest daughter of the duke’s son (also named William) and Dangerosa’s daughter Aenor, by her first husband. After D
uke William X died of dysentery on Good Friday, April 9, 1137, the fifteen-year-old Eleanor became Europe’s richest heiress, inheriting much of what now comprises western and southern France—including the regions of Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony.
According to Richard de Poitevin, writing in the 1170s, Eleanor was “brought up in delicacy and reared in abundance of all delights, living in the bosom of wealth.” She was quite the catch, even if she’d been a bit spoiled as a girl. Headstrong, willful, high-spirited, and exceptionally intelligent, she was also an acknowledged beauty. Although no physical description of her survives, Eleanor’s father and grandfather were both redheads.
Twelfth-century Western Europe was a feudal society. The king was the ultimate overlord, at the apex of a pyramid of power. Dukes and counts were his vassals, but had vassals of their own in the local barons, whose vassals included knights, and so on down the social food chain. It was also an era in which might made right. If a count or baron could take a neighboring castle—or county—or dukedom—by force and hold it, it became his.
Things weren’t much different where women were concerned. Marriage by abduction was a popular way to get a bride. Aenor, about whom little is known, died when Eleanor was only eight years old, so the orphaned teen was at the mercy of predatory nobles who would think nothing of rape as a substitute for an engagement ring. But Eleanor’s father left her lands in trust to his own overlord, King Louis VI of France, until such time as she married, with the tacit understanding that Eleanor would be wed to Louis’s heir.
However, Louis VI’s firstborn son had died at the age of fifteen when his horse shied at a runaway pig and threw him. So the king was compelled to recall his second son, Louis, from the monastery of St. Denis, where he was being groomed to enter the church. The elder Louis had determined that marrying his son to an heiress who would quadruple the size of his kingdom with a simple “I do” beat marrying God any day, so the sixteen-year-old Louis the Young was sent to Bordeaux to wed Eleanor.
Not too many weeks after her father’s death, on Sunday, July 25, 1137, the teens were married at the Romanesque Cathedral of St. André in Bordeaux, followed immediately by their coronation as Duke and Duchess of Aquitaine. A few days later, they were also crowned Count and Countess of Poitou at the region’s capital, Poitiers.
Although his father was the actual ruler until his death, the youth had become King of France in 1131, in accordance with the French custom of royal heirs being crowned during the older king’s lifetime. Louis the Young, as he was called—to differentiate him from his father, Louis the Fat—was a tall blond stripling with the personality of a permanent penitent.
The meek bridegroom, who had spent much of his life as a “child-monk,” was shy and awkward in company, and at his own wedding reception he was both shocked and appalled by the merry dancing and ribald songs, not to mention his new wife’s unchecked vitality and exuberance during the festivities. Luckily, the couple enjoyed a mutual physical attraction—and Louis remained smitten with Eleanor’s looks until the day they divorced. However, their temperaments could not have been more dissimilar.
As Louis was both quiet and spiritual, Eleanor often took the lead in their relationship, although such aggressiveness defied what was considered the natural order of things. But Aquitanian women were more forthright than most and Eleanor had learned how to manage estates, as well as people from all walks of life, having accompanied her father as he rode through his vast territories collecting his vassals’ tithes and tributes.
Her new husband, on the other hand, although he was considered quite intelligent, wasn’t quite ready for prime time when his father died of dysentery on August 1, 1137, just seven days after the royal marriage. In the space of a single week the sensitive, untested Louis became both bridegroom and king.
And although her formal coronation did not take place until Christmas Day, Eleanor was now Queen of France. Her lands, inherited from her father, became Louis’s domains, although they would revert to her if she became widowed or divorced.
Trusted vassals were placed in control of Eleanor’s provinces and seneschals, or stewards, maintained her castles and estates, while the new queen, uprooted from her beloved south, moved to her husband’s damp and dreary capital, Paris. Although it was the greatest center of education in Western Europe, the noisy, filthy city of 200,000 souls, densely concentrated on the tiny Ile de la Cité, offered Eleanor a disappointing welcome. The stench of sewage was everywhere, and beyond the crenellated walls that encircled the fortress-like palace many people lived cheek by jowl in dust and mud.
Her family’s castles in the south had boasted airy rooms and a sultry atmosphere with lush gardens and sparkling fountains. The bleakness of Paris proved a startling contrast. So Eleanor immediately set to redecorating, endeavoring to transform the castle and her own suite of rooms into a sophisticated re-creation of her childhood homes. Her improvements, including the tapestries commissioned from Bourges, shutters fitted over the drafty arrow slits, and a startling innovation—a fireplace and chimney built directly into the wall—cost Louis a fortune and earned Eleanor the immediate enmity of her mother-in-law.
Adelaide, the Dowager Queen of France, had little use for this medieval Martha Stewart who dared to question her own interior design sense while running up impressive bills for her extravagant wardrobe and the care and feeding of the troubadours she imported to the conservative north to entertain her entourage. Eleanor required tablecloths to be spread over the dining boards in the Great Hall, ordered the servants to wash their hands before serving meals, and insisted on attention to table manners—and Adelaide felt insulted that what had been good enough for the Capets, France’s ruling family for centuries, wasn’t acceptable to her spoiled and decadent daughter-in-law. What probably galled the dowager queen the most was that her timid son indulged his fifteen-year-old bride in her every whim, and sought, even deferred to, Eleanor’s opinion in everything, including matters of governance—in which, Adelaide conceded, the vivacious Aquitanian girl had more experience than Louis did.
Adelaide blinked first, moving to another castle. But her démenage had little effect on an ever-widening rift within the royal marriage. Odo de Dieul, Louis’s secretary, and later his chaplain, described the king’s life as “a model of virtue,” noting “worldly glory did not cause him sensual delight.” While his queen entertained the age’s greatest musicians and poets, the pious Louis spent much of the day on his knees in prayer. Eleanor bedecked herself in silks and furs, painted her face, and adorned her neck, wrists, and ears with gold, while Louis felt most at home in a hair shirt.
Their world was a violent one, despite her efforts to civilize it in even the smallest of ways. Many of Louis’s vassals were both ambitious and ruthless and he was not a decisive ruler. At every turn, Eleanor endeavored to toughen up her husband and turn him into a strong sovereign. A contemporary chronicler, William of Newburgh, described Louis as “a man of warm devotion to God and of extraordinary lenity to his subjects . . . but he was rather more credulous than befits a king and prone to listen to advice that was unworthy of him.” It’s not clear to whom William referred, but as it was considered unnatural for wives to offer political counsel, it’s quite possible that the barb was aimed at Eleanor. Whenever Louis tried to impress her by acting like an authoritative overlord, the result was a complete turnaround from tyro to tyrant—unchecked outbursts of temper that invariably led to rash, ill-considered behavior, which he invariably regretted.
In the summer of 1141, Louis tussled with a vassal over the man’s adulterous affair with Eleanor’s sixteen-year-old sister, Petronilla, and had another disagreement with the vassal’s equally powerful brother over the appointment of a bishop. As a result of the latter dispute the Pope excommunicated Louis; and during a turf war between the king and his rebellious vassals, an entire village of innocents was slaughtered inside the church at Vitry-sur-Marne. Mortified by the carnage he had unleashed, Louis underwent an even strict
er course of penance, replacing his regal garb and flowing blond tresses with a monk’s coarse robes and the circular fringe of a tonsure.
The king’s increasing asceticism immensely exacerbated the existing problems within his marriage. As it was, his raging physical attraction to Eleanor was more of a curse than a blessing; he felt guilty every time he went to her bed because it violated his fervent belief that copulation was supposed to be for the getting of heirs, an obligation and duty, not an eagerly anticipated act of enjoyment. The untoward stirrings within his loins therefore required more, and stricter, penance. His conjugal visits, already infrequent, grew even fewer. Religious holidays and feast days were taboo. So were Sundays. And like many men and women of his day, Louis was convinced that performing in anything other than the “missionary” position was punished by three years’ penance; failure to follow any of these connubial rules would result in deformed babies or lepers.
Consequently, Eleanor wasn’t able to uphold her end of the marriage contract, since it was her job to bring forth children. “I thought I married a king, but I find I have married a monk,” she complained, frustrated sexually and dynastically.
And she wasn’t the only one unhappy with the marriage.
Abbé Bernard of Clairvaux, as ascetic as Louis, began to question the union’s validity, expressing his misgivings as early as 1143. Although Louis’s mentor Abbé Suger had given them a dispensation, Eleanor and Louis were fourth cousins, related within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. The unhappy Eleanor silently noted Bernard’s doubts; they would bear fruit one day.
The following year, 1144, the twenty-two-year-old Eleanor received a scolding from the disapproving Bernard, who demanded that she “put an end to your interference with affairs of state.” Eleanor’s response took him utterly by surprise. The queen admitted, quite sincerely, that she delved into politics because her life was otherwise empty; in the seven years since her wedding, she had not been able to conceive a child.
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