Inglorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

  However, Maria Carolina required time to become acclimated to the sovereigns’ primary residence, the Royal Palace, an architectural eyesore situated in the center of the city. The Palazzo Reale failed to impress her brother Joseph during his imperial visit to Naples in 1769, not so much because of its baroque decor, but because of the other residents. He was shocked to find the palace’s “five or six frescoed and marbled rooms . . . filled with chickens, pigeons, ducks, geese, partridges, quails, birds of all sorts, canaries, dogs and even cages full of rats and mice, which the king occasionally sets free and enjoys the pleasure of chasing.”

  Joseph also minced no words in his description of his new brother-in-law, an inch taller than the emperor at five feet, seven inches, with a piercing falsetto voice that was painful to the ear. Maria Carolina’s brother described Ferdinand as “very thin, gaunt and raw-boned . . . his knees always bent and his back very supple, since at every step he bends and sways his whole body. The part below his waist is so limp and feeble that it does not seem to belong to the upper part, which is much stronger. He has muscular arms and wrists, and his coarse brown hands are very dirty since he never wears gloves when he rides or hunts. His head is relatively small, surmounted by a forest of coffee-coloured hair, which he never powders, a nose which begins in his forehead and gradually swells in a straight line as far as his mouth, which is very large with a jutting lower lip, filled with fairly good but irregular teeth.” Joseph also found Ferdinand’s “low brow, pig’s eyes, flat cheeks and long neck” unremarkable. “Although an ugly Prince, he is not absolutely repulsive: his skin is fairly smooth and firm, of a yellowish pallor: he is clean except for his hands; and at least he does not stink.”

  However, the emperor was troubled by the rumors he had heard about the king’s violence toward Maria Carolina. Had he really punched and slapped her? The queen admitted that her husband had kicked her on occasion. Ferdinand had perhaps punched her more than a few times as well, half in anger and half in jest—sometimes when they were in bed, or when they were out riding in their carriage, but she felt that he had never been truly violent, even when she had been furious with him. Ferdinand evidently had a propensity for roughhousing. Finding his own antics wildly amusing, he caned and kicked his attendants, and spanked the ladies of the court during parlor games, and no one could gainsay his boorish behavior because he was their king.

  After attempting to discern his brother-in-law’s religious and moral temperament, Joseph ultimately concluded that Ferdinand hadn’t any. Having ascertained that the king was afraid of the dark, believed in the supernatural, and thought that angels were white and the devil black, the emperor was also fairly convinced that Ferdinand was incapable of reciting the Ten Commandments, although he “explained that he only thought it wrong to sleep with another woman, to steal, murder and lie.” This cherry-picked menu of morality did not prevent the king from frequently committing adultery. And yet Ferdinand assured the emperor “that he was satisfied with the Queen, but he could not conceal that he feared her, since she did not seem so infatuated with his merit or blind about his integrity as he would wish.”

  According to Joseph, Ferdinand’s biggest complaint about his wife was that she was too fond of books. He personally detested reading and did not approve of others, especially women, doing so. As it was abundantly evident that Maria Carolina needed an outlet for her intellect, and her husband was not about to provide it, the emperor suggested that she form a salon. The queen eventually did so, cultivating the acquaintance of the Neapolitan elite, including the Freemasons, a society in which her late father, Joseph, and two of her sisters were members. Ferdinand’s father had banned them in 1751, but under Maria Carolina’s aegis, the Freemasons enjoyed a resurgence until the advent of the French Revolution, when she abolished everything that smacked of Enlightenment.

  During his visit in 1769, Joseph did notice how much in love Ferdinand was with Maria Carolina. He reassured their mother that she had made a wise match, but when the time came for the Hapbsurg siblings to say good-bye, the king mocked his wife for bursting into tears over her brother’s departure. At this, Maria Carolina was on the verge of losing her temper when Joseph lectured her in German, after which she “mastered her feelings and said nothing.” The imperial marriage counselor “preached to the King to leave her alone today and not torment her.”

  The Neapolitan royal couple’s relationship would always be volatile. They endured numerous, and vociferous, squabbles. One subject of contention was that Ferdinand’s eyes followed every woman in a skirt, regardless of her age, her looks, or her social stratum. He carried on torrid affairs with two opera dancers—signorinas Rossi and Bratella—both of whom were later married off to noblemen. The queen forced herself to tolerate these liaisons because her husband’s lovers were from an inferior class. But when he became infatuated with the Duchessa di Lucciana, the daughter of the Neapolitan secretary of state, it was too much for Maria Carolina to bear. After catching the pair of them flirting during a ball, the queen called an abrupt halt to the entertainment and booted everyone out of the ballroom.

  After this incident, Ferdinand learned to conduct his trysts with more discretion, and was better able to conceal his future infidelities, including his liaison with the Marchesa di San Marco—that is, until the queen discovered it and exiled the marchesa from Naples.

  There was no question that the queen wore the metaphorical breeches in the marriage. By gaining the upper hand—or glove—in the kingdom’s governance, as the months and years passed, she schooled herself to become “amused rather than depressed” by her husband’s “eccentric habits,” ultimately characterizing Ferdinand as “a really nice halfwit.”

  The queen tried to live with the bowls of hot macaroni coated in olive oil and melted cheese that her husband dumped onto the heads of opera patrons. It was his roving eyes and hands that most humiliated her. But Maria Carolina revised the court protocol so that during their all-too-frequent marital spats, Ferdinand had to request permission from the First Chamberlain to return to her bed after she had evicted him for an infidelity. The duration of his banishment—which was judged by the queen—was usually proportionate to the gravity of his offense. Nevertheless, the royal couple was hardly lax in their marital duties.

  The only thing they would always share was their unqualified devotion to their progeny. Between the years of 1772 and 1793, Maria Carolina gave birth to eighteen children, including a set of twins; seven of their offspring lived to adulthood. During their first several years of marriage, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina were blessed with a peaceable kingdom. “Naples is a paradise, in it every one lives in a sort of intoxicated self-forgetfulness,” the visiting writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously observed. This lassitude allowed the royal couple ample time to raise their growing brood, and they were devoted parents. Superintending her children’s education, especially that of her daughters, the queen was a much more hands-on mother than Maria Theresa had ever been, although, granted, the empress had a far greater realm to govern.

  Yet Maria Carolina always insisted, “Nature made me a mother; the queen is only a gala-dress, which I put off and on.” However, she was such an astute politician—even as a sixteen-year-old bride—that a stipulation in their marriage contract guaranteed her a seat on the powerful Council of State as a quid pro quo for bearing an heir. The queen’s first son would be born in 1775, and she wasted no time shaking things up and transforming Naples from a chaotically governed satellite of Spain into an independent, and unsurprisingly pro-Austrian, realm.

  Yet even before then, Maria Carolina was gaining influence. By the time she was twenty, while she still had a few detractors who derided her for being “large, raw-boned and bulky . . . with a pinched face and a severe expression,” she was generally considered to be very lovely, and capable of charming everyone around her.

  Lady Anne Miller, an English noblewoman connected with the British embassy in
Naples, described the queen in 1771 as a “beautiful woman” with the “finest and most transparent complexion I ever saw; her hair is of that glossy light chestnut . . . by no means red; her eyes are large, brilliant, and of a dark blue, her eyebrows exact and darker than her hair, her nose inclining to the aquiline, her mouth small, her lips very red (not of the Austrian thickness), her teeth beautifully white and even, and when she smiles she discovers two dimples, which give a finishing sweetness to her whole countenance; her shape is perfect: she is just plump enough not to appear lean; her neck is long, her deportment easy, her walk majestic, her attitudes and action graceful. . . .” Maria Carolina’s political acumen garnered as much praise as her appearance. Elizabeth, the last Margravine of Anspach, praised Maria Carolina’s innate ability to reign. The queen “appeared much better calculated to represent the majesty of a throne [than Ferdinand]. . . . It was natural to her.”

  Maria Carolina had even managed the near-impossible: winning the admiration of the Neapolitan ministers and generals. One of the latter observed that although the queen was “in the prime of youth, her mind was of the most powerful stamp, and her wit of the highest order. By nature she was both proud and haughty, and she nourished within her bosom the most inordinate love of power.” In other words, she was a mini–Maria Theresa, viewing it as her destiny to follow in her mother’s footsteps and to be a ruler in the same mold. As a Hapsburg, and queen of the largest dominions in Italy, Maria Carolina was certain that she was destined to play a role in history. She was—but not the one she foresaw. And the men who so lavishly complimented her acumen had as their basis for comparison her lumpish “halfwit” of a husband!

  Soon it was an open secret that the queen, whom Ferdinand affectionately called maestra mia—my mistress (or boss!)—was the real king of Naples. Whoever had her ear made diplomatic headway, while Ferdinand attended council meetings only if he absolutely had to do so, but paid no attention, and spent the better part of his days hunting, fishing, and chasing other sorts of tail. He never developed a talent or taste for governing, so it was a good thing that his queen possessed those skills in spades. Whenever someone asked Ferdinand about a government-related topic, he would throw his hands in the air and reply, “Ask my wife, she knows everything!” The king was so uninterested in reigning that he had the inkstands removed from his council chambers, lest he be tempted to write something down.

  As the years went by, while Ferdinand occupied himself with hunting, flirting, pranks, and scatological jokes, Maria Carolina overhauled the court, removing the antiquated Spanish influence, much to the consternation of Ferdinand’s father and the despotic Prime Minister Tanucci, whose ouster she engineered in 1777. The hapless king felt caught in the middle of a power struggle between his strong-willed, absent father and his equally formidable, and very present, wife. But Maria Carolina was skilled “in the art of man training” (in the words of her brother Joseph), and knew she had the upper hand. If Ferdinand failed to see things her way, she dramatically threatened to withhold sex. On one occasion, the queen was heard to exclaim, “for at least a year, whether you die or burst, I refuse to be pregnant.” Whatever had set her off, Maria Carolina had not finished making her point. She punctuated her argument by biting her husband’s hand.

  When political appointments fell vacant, believing that the Neapolitans were too uneducated and unqualified to run their own country, the queen nominated Austrians and Germans, and still retained a retinue of forty-five German maids. An Anglophile, she cultivated a relationship with the British ambassador Sir William Hamilton, and later with his mistress-turned-wife, Emma, a stunning former courtesan. In the mid-to-late 1790s, Lady Hamilton became Her Majesty’s closest confidante and eventual interpreter—England’s minister without portfolio during Naples’s efforts to enlist Lord Nelson’s aid in keeping Napoleon at bay.

  Infusing the court with a dash of Viennese glamour, in an effort to transform it from a Mediterranean backwater into an A-list European kingdom, the energetic, vivacious, and ambitious Maria Carolina developed ties with Naples’s intellectual and cultural elite. Out of his element in the presence of the glitterati and literati, Ferdinand “never spoke, or at least very rarely,” according to the writer Louis Dutens, who visited the court at Caserta. “[B]ut the Queen made ample amends for his silence by the affability and the engaging manners with which she received” her guests.

  One of Maria Carolina’s forward-thinking plans was to reorganize and strengthen the navy—vital, as Naples was a kingdom by the sea. To that end, her brother Leopold recommended Sir John Acton, a French-born English baronet who had made his mark with Leopold’s Tuscan navy. Variously described, depending on whether the source was a supporter or a detractor, as “a very pretty sensible young man” or “ambitious and covetous” and a “soldier of fortune,” Acton became Naples’s Secretary of State for the Marine. Within a few years of his 1778 arrival in Naples at the age of forty-two, he had worked his way through the governmental ranks, becoming commander in chief of the armed forces and the navy, so indispensable to Maria Carolina that he acted as her de facto prime minister.

  But some, including Ferdinand and his father, were convinced that Acton was much more to the queen than her favorite minister, despite their fourteen-year age difference. In Naples, it was inconceivable that an attractive, charismatic woman should spend so much time in the company of an equally attractive and charismatic man and not be his lover. King Carlos of Spain used the rumors of an adulterous affair between Acton and Maria Carolina as a wedge to force his son to dismiss the powerful minister, insisting, “They have turned you into a pasteboard king, you must get rid of Acton at once, or send him out of your kingdom.”

  Despite his own frequent extramarital dalliances, the king needed little encouragement. Ferdinand’s conviction that Acton was tupping his wife led, predictably, to another violent argument between the monarchs. For twenty-four hours, they shut themselves inside Maria Carolina’s royal apartments, shouting at each other. “I am trying to surprise you together,” Ferdinand warned the queen. “I will kill you both, and have your bodies thrown out of the windows of the palace!”

  Naturally, Maria Carolina stood her ground and reminded Ferdinand about his own infidelities. After a full day of bickering, the queen emerged from her rooms triumphant. Acton remained; his influence even increased.

  Never ask a boy to do a man’s job, fumed Carlos of Spain. If Ferdinand couldn’t get rid of Acton, he’d take care of it himself, dispatching a chargé d’affaires, one Señor Las Casas, “to persuade her to dismiss Mr. Acton from the business of the state, and from her intimacy.” It didn’t go over too well. Las Casas managed to offend both Maria Carolina and Ferdinand with his questions. Acton received her favor on merit, Her Majesty told the Spanish envoy, and when he had the temerity to openly accuse her of taking the minister as her lover, Maria Carolina, who at the time was in the first trimester of one of her numerous pregnancies, angrily retorted, “I will have his picture drawn by the best painter in Italy, and his bust made by the best sculptor, and both sent to the King of Spain, who may judge whether his is a figure for a woman to fall in love with.”

  Unfazed, Las Casas audaciously replied, “Oh, madam, my master has lived long enough to know there is no answering for the caprices of des dames galantes.”

  Maria Carolina attributed her subsequent miscarriage to her outrage over the envoy’s arrogance and his unforgivable insult (essentially, he had called her a prostitute). When news of her miscarriage reached France, her brother-in-law Louis XVI intervened with Ferdinand on her behalf, and Acton remained as Naples’s prime minister. But the damage to his credibility and reputation had been done, and Acton’s detractors loathed him with renewed venom.

  Even Ferdinand respected Acton’s advice and was gaining the reputation, however fictional, as a ruler of his own dominions. As Maria Carolina wrote in the late 1790s, “Six years ago the name of the King of Naples was ignore
d or at most regarded as a viceroy sent from Spain to a subordinate province. Now he plays a fine role with glory and distinction.”

  Ferdinand’s pet project was the silk factory at San Leucio near Caserta, where he made sure that the workers received a good wage, and that the employees and their families were provided with medical care and education. State-of-the-art machinery made their products competitive with those in other countries. But the king’s critics accused him of founding the silk works for his own sexual gratification, because sturdy country girls were his favorite physical type, and Ferdinand’s frequent visits to San Leucio afforded him an escape from his wife.

  In general, however, Ferdinand received the glory whenever something was a success, even if the achievement was his wife’s. Meanwhile Maria Carolina was blamed for every failure. She was given none of the credit for the myriad accomplishments of the couple’s reign, even from those who knew perfectly well that the king was in no way personally responsible for them.

  But history has frozen Ferdinand and Maria Carolina in amber, characterizing him as a popular hedonist and her as an ambitious harridan, conveniently forgetting her successful transformation of Naples during the first two decades of her reign.

  In 1788, the same year that Ferdinand’s father died, Maria Carolina began arranging marriages for her oldest offspring although she was still bearing children. Like her mother before her, the queen believed that one of her greatest duties was to negotiate brilliant matches for her brood. By placing them in every European court, she thereby extended Naples’s influence. Many of the unions were with the offspring of the queen’s numerous brothers and sisters. She had hoped to unite Ferdinand’s heir, Francesco, to Marie Antoinette’s seven-year-old daughter, Madame Royale, but the girl had already been promised to another first cousin, the oldest son of Louis XVI’s youngest brother. Despite the horrors of the French Revolution, this marriage would eventually come to fruition.