Sex with Kings

by Eleanor Herman

  Once again, things were handled with far greater style on the southern side of the English Channel. George’s contemporary Louis XV (1710–1774) installed Madame de Pompadour as maîtresse-en-titre in 1745. Beautiful, gracious, brilliant, and kind, Madame de Pompadour practically ruled France for nineteen years. She encouraged artists and writers, produced plays in which she sang and danced, invested in French industry, designed châteaus, cut gems, made engravings, experimented in horticulture, and ran the army during the Seven Years’ War.

  But at the height of her power she warily eyed the approaching storm. “After us, the deluge,” she said, though it was not Madame de Pompadour but her successor, Madame du Barry, whose pretty powdered head rolled onto the straw-covered scaffold.10 In France palaces were ransacked and burned. The tombs of kings and courtiers were cracked open and plundered, the bones strewn about. With the sudden crashing force of a guillotine, the French Revolution severed the power of royal mistresses across Europe as its effects rippled like waves in all directions. The lavish self-indulgence of a civilization was indeed deluged, drowned in a sea of wine-dark blood. Gone with it was the glorification of a fallen woman bedecked in crown jewels.

  In the wake of the Revolution, though customs had changed, the sexual needs of kings had not. Royal mistresses continued aplenty, but those doomed to live in the mediocrity of the nineteenth century expected far less than their more fortunate predecessors. They would not be created duchesses or countesses, given palaces and castles, eye-popping incomes, a seat on the council, and a magnificent suite of rooms at the palace. The nineteenth-century royal mistress hoped for a nice house in town, a few pieces of jewelry, a credit line at the most fashionable dressmaker, and the overwhelming aroma of power that got her invited to all the best parties.

  Ludwig I of Bavaria (1786–1868) bucked this trend and paid dearly for it. In 1847 he forced his unwilling parliament to create his nasty mistress Lola Montez the countess of Landsfeld. Within months he had a revolution on his hands; Lola was chased out of town by an angry mob, and Ludwig abdicated. If Lola had tried her ploy seventy years earlier, she would likely have succeeded.

  Before the French Revolution, newspapers were carefully censored, and no ungenerous reference to the king was permitted. Lampoons—verses tacked up on lampposts—flourished, and were ripped off and read in taverns by delighted citizens. Many lampoons ridiculed the king’s mistress. But with the advent of the free press in the nineteenth century, newspaper headlines trumpeted the latest royal scandal. Ribald cartoons portrayed fat and aging monarchs in bed with their greedy mistresses. Royals became more circumspect with regards to illicit liaisons. Their behavior modification went only so far as appearances, however. Adulterous royal sex was as frequent as ever, just hidden under a colorless pall of respectable hypocrisy.

  In 1900 the aging Belgian king Leopold II (1835–1909) often walked in public gardens with his sixteen-year-old mistress, Caroline Delacroix. But when a cabinet minister approached him, Caroline was expected to fall meekly behind and pretend to be a sister of one of the king’s aides-de-camp.

  Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Edward VII (1841–1910), conducted his affairs so skillfully that many people were convinced the ladies were merely good friends and that any other speculation was slanderous. Edward visited his lady friends in the afternoon for tea, when their husbands were out on business—or visiting their own mistresses—and would never think of returning home inconveniently.

  The sexual revolution of the twentieth century bypassed European royal families, who clung to Victorian traditions with one hand and gripped the scepter with the other. Those dynasties fortunate enough to withstand the rising tide of democracy kept their mistresses firmly in the background, with one major exception. Like his ancestor Henry VIII, King Edward VIII of Great Britain (1894–1972) bungled things by insisting on marrying his mistress, Wallis Warfield Simpson. Unlike Henry, Edward didn’t cut off his wife’s head—though in time perhaps he would have liked to—but it can be said he cut off his own. Public outrage, which had been muted by the gallows and the stake in Henry’s time, resulted in Edward’s abdication.

  Prince Charles of Great Britain’s love for his old flame Camilla Parker-Bowles ripped apart his marriage to Princess Diana and astonished the world. Traditionally, princes married ugly but suitable virgins and took beautiful mistresses. But when Charles deserted the preternatural radiance of Diana in favor of the fox-and-hounds plainness of Camilla, the public howled in ridicule.

  From the dawn of time, power has been a mighty aphrodisiac. Royal mistresses, whether vaunted or concealed, have always existed, and will always exist. “Nothing has been more fatal to men, and to great men, than the letting themselves go to the forbidden love of women,” lamented the aging James II of England (1633–1701). “Of all the vices it is the most bewitching and harder to be mastered if it be not crushed in the very bud.”11 But like James, most kings did not crush the forbidden love of women in the bud, only when it had withered on the stalk.

  1. One Sex with the King

  When there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  WE PICTURE THE ROYAL MISTRESS AS, FIRST AND FOREMOST, a sexual creature. She has a heaving bosom, a knowing smile, eyes sparkling with desire. Ready to fling her velvet skirts above her head at a moment’s notice, she offers irresistible delights to a lecherous monarch. The entreaties of his anguished family, the bishop’s admonitions, his own sense of royal sin and guilt, are useless against the mistress’s enticements when compared to those of the woodenly chaste queen.

  Indeed, the horrifying state of most royal marriages created the space for royal mistresses to thrive. A prince’s marriage, celebrated with lavish ceremony, was usually nothing more than a personal catastrophe for the two victims kneeling at the altar. The purpose of a royal marriage was not the happiness of husband and wife, or good sex, or even basic compatibility. The production of princes was the sole purpose, and if the bride trailed treaties and riches in her wake, so much the better.

  Napoleon, franker than most monarchs, stated, “I want to marry a womb.”1 And indeed most royal brides were considered to be nothing more than a walking uterus with a crown on top and skirts on the bottom.

  Disaster at the Altar

  Princesses were brought up from birth to be chaste almost to the point of frigidity, thereby ensuring legitimate heirs. While virtue could be taught, beauty could not. Ambassadors, selling the goods sight unseen to a prospective royal husband, inflated the looks of the princess with hyperbolic praise, often bringing a flattering portrait as evidence.

  In 1540 Henry VIII was duped by the portrait trick in his search for a fourth wife. He wanted to cement an alliance with France and wrote François I asking for suggestions. François graciously replied with the names and portraits of five noble ladies. But Henry was not satisfied. “By God,” he said, studying the flat, unblinking faces on canvas, “I trust no one but myself. The thing touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time before deciding.”2 He wanted to hold a kind of royal beauty pageant at the English-owned town of Calais on the north coast of France where he would personally select the winner after close inspection.

  The French ambassador replied acidly that perhaps Henry should sleep with all five in turn and marry the best performer. François sneeringly remarked, “It is not the custom in France to send damsels of that rank and of such noble and princely families to be passed in review as if they were hackneys [whores] for sale.”3

  Chastened, Henry returned to perusing portraits and decided on a Protestant alliance based on a lovely likeness of Anne of Cleves. But when the royal bridegroom met Anne he was shocked at how little resemblance there was between this hulking, pockmarked Valkyrie and the dainty, smooth-faced woman in the portrait. The king was “struck with consternation when he was shown the Queen” and had never been “so much dismayed in his life as to see a lady so far unlike what had
been represented.” He roared, “I see nothing in this woman as men report of her, and I marvel that wise men would make such report as they have done.” He continued, “Whom shall men trust? I promise you I see no such thing as hath been shown me of her, by pictures and report. I am ashamed that men have praised her as they have done—and I love her not!”4

  Try as he might, the king could not extricate himself from the marriage to his “Flanders mare,” as he dubbed Anne. The duchy of Cleves would be offended if Henry returned the goods. Two days before the wedding, Henry grumbled, “If it were not that she had come so far into my realm, and the great preparations and state that my people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world and of driving her brother into the arms of the Emperor and the French King, I would not now marry her. But now it is too far gone, wherefore I am sorry.”5

  Henry went to his wedding with less grace than many of his victims had gone to their executions. On the way to the chapel, he opined to his counselors, “My lords, if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do what I must do this day for any earthly thing.”6

  The wedding night was a fiasco. The morning after, when Lord Thomas Cromwell, who had arranged the wedding, nervously asked Henry how he had enjoyed his bride, the king thundered, “Surely, my lord, I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse! She is nothing fair, and have very evil smells about her. I took her to be no maid by reason of the looseness of her breasts and other tokens, which, when I felt them, strake me so to the heart, that I had neither will nor courage to prove the rest. I can have none appetite for displeasant airs. I have left her as good a maid as I found her.” The rest of the day he told everyone who would listen that “he had found her body disordered and indisposed to excite and provoke any lust in him.”7

  True to the double standard of the time, no one asked Anne what she thought of the king’s appearance. Her royal bridegroom boasted a fifty-seven-inch waist and a festering ulcer on his leg. Anne was quickly divorced and glad to depart with her head still on her shoulders. But Lord Cromwell felt the full force of Henry’s wrath in the form of an ax cleaving his neck.

  Through debacles like these, everyone soon learned that portraits lied. In 1680 Louis XIV ordered Bavarian princess Maria Anna Christina as a bride for his son and heir. The lovely portrait carted about the court was irrelevant compared to the marriage treaty. According to Madame de Sévigné, as the bride was approaching, “the King was so curious to know what she looked like that he sent Sanguin [his chief butler] whom he knows to be a truthful man and no flatterer. ‘Sire,’ that man told him, ‘once you get over the first impression, you will be delighted.’”8 The unhappy couple managed to catapult three children into the world before the neglected wife died.

  Even less fortunate with his Bavarian princess was the future Joseph II of Austria (1741–1790). In 1765 Joseph found his bride Princess Josepha so loathsome he was unable to consummate the marriage. “Her figure is short,” he reported bitterly, “thickset and without a vestige of charm. Her face is covered with spots and pimples. Her teeth are horrible.”9

  “They want me to have children,” he lamented in another letter. “How can one have them? If I could put the tip of my finger on the tiniest part of her body which was not covered by pimples, I would try to have a child.”10 Joseph was not grieved when his young wife died of smallpox shortly after the wedding.

  Not all princes agreed to be slaughtered on the altar of Hymen for the good of the state. In the 1670s the future James II of England found himself widowed with no son and cast about Europe for an attractive young wife. Louis XIV, hoping to seat a Frenchwoman on the English throne, evidently had difficulties finding a candidate both beautiful and virtuous at the court of Versailles. Finally, deciding that a wife’s appearance could be of no great significance, Louis pushed forward a noble but repulsive French widow, Madame de Guise. The French minister Louvois wrote to England hopefully, “If the Duke of York is desirous of a wife in order to have children, he cannot make a better choice than Madame de Guise, who has been pregnant three times in two years, and whose birth, wealth, and prospects of fecundity appear to me to atone for her want of beauty.”11

  James declined the offer, and the disappointed French ambassador wrote scoffingly to his king that the duke of York insisted on finding a beautiful wife. Madame de Guise and her fecundity were dropped. James married the loveliest princess in Europe, fifteen-year-old Mary of Modena, a tall, slender, ravishing brunette with whom he fell deeply in love.

  The future George IV of Great Britain (1762–1830) had avoided putting his neck in the noose for years but finally, ham-strung by debts, was bribed to marry Princess Caroline of Brunswick by his royal father and Parliament. George, a dandy who spent hours tying his cravat, was poorly suited to the good-natured but ill-mannered princess, who had no regard for dress or personal hygiene.

  When the prince was first introduced to his newly arrived bride, he was so thunderstruck with terror at her appearance that he wiped his brow, whispered, “I am not well,” and called for brandy to quell a fit of faintness.12 Neither was the bride well pleased with her groom. After George had stumbled away, Caroline said to her lady-in-waiting, “Is the Prince always like that? I find him very fat and not nearly so handsome as his portrait.”13

  George managed to rise to the occasion with his wife three times during the first two nights of marriage. He wrote to a friend, “She showed…such marks of filth both in the fore and hind part of her…that she turned my stomach and from that moment I made a vow never to touch her again.”14 Fortunately for George, he had already made Caroline pregnant during his halfhearted efforts. With the birth of an heir the pressure was off, and George never did touch her again. In 1821 the British people were treated to a rare sight—prizefighters hired by the new king barring the doors of Westminster Abbey as Caroline bellowed that she be allowed in and crowned alongside her estranged husband. The same year, when Napoleon expired, the king was informed that his “greatest enemy” was dead. George’s face was suffused with joy as he exclaimed, “Is she, by God!”15

  But the most mismatched couple of all was without a doubt Louis XIV’s brother, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, called “Monsieur,” a transvestite who much preferred male lovers to female, and Elizabeth Charlotte, daughter of the elector of the Palatinate. Many at the French court sneered at an alliance with the elector, a man so poor he had to have his shoes patched. But German princesses were renowned for their fertility. Moreover, since the groom’s lover the chevalier de Lorraine was suspected of poisoning Monsieur’s beautiful first wife Princess Henrietta of England in a fit of jealousy, Louis XIV decided that an ugly second wife would stand a better chance of survival.

  In 1670 when the hopeful bride arrived in France to meet the husband she had already married by proxy, she found an effeminate fop wearing rouge, diamond earrings, cascading rows of lace and ruffles, dozens of clanking bracelets, beribboned pantaloons, and high-heeled shoes. His face was submerged in a frizzy black wig, and waves of his cologne almost suffocated her. When introduced, Monsieur swept into a bow, taking in at a glance his bride’s broad, good-natured German face, freshly scrubbed from her journey, her broad German rear end, and clothing of such rustic simplicity that her new French ladies-in-waiting were appalled. The horrified groom whispered to his gentlemen, “Oh! how can I sleep with that?”16

  Rising from her curtsy, the bride was so shocked at her new husband’s appearance that she couldn’t utter a word of her prepared speech. She finally managed to force a smile. We can hear her muttering to herself behind a painted fan, “Oh! How can I sleep with that?”

  Elizabeth Charlotte endured a great deal during her thirty-year marriage that most royal brides were spared. Monsieur insisted on applying makeup to her face—perhaps in the hopes of rendering it more attractive—which she immediately scrubbed off. He often irked her by stealing her dresses and diamonds for himself and his male lovers. He enjoyed breaking w
ind—though perhaps that was the only thing they had in common. Elizabeth Charlotte, not wanting to touch him as she slept, positioned herself so far to the edge of the bed that she often fell off, waking up with a start.

  It is a testament to this couple’s royal self-discipline that the marriage produced three children, though the clanking saints’ medallions that Monsieur tied to his private parts may have had something to do with it. When he finally called a halt to unwelcome sexual relations, Elizabeth Charlotte was tempted to tell his lovers, “You are welcome to gobble the peas; I don’t like them.”17

  Sex with the King

  In contrast to a prince’s forced performance with his wife, we can imagine his more enjoyable relations with his mistress—the tender foreplay, the artistic technique, the frenzied culmination, the drowsy contented aftermath. Imagine we must, for history has bequeathed us relatively few records of the sex lives of kings and their mistresses. Most sexually suggestive letters written by the enflamed pair were burned in the lifetime of their recipients—sometimes in the last moments of life—or shortly afterward by embarrassed relatives. A few such letters remain to titillate us, as well as numerous stories that shed light on the sexual relationships between kings and mistresses.