Sex with Kings

by Eleanor Herman

Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, described her royal lover Charles II as being magnificently endowed, prompting her friend Lord Rochester to write:

  Nor are his high desires above his strength

  His scepter and his prick are of a length.18

  Hearing this couplet, Louis XIV’s mistress the princesse de Monaco remarked that while Louis’s power was great, his “scepter” was small compared to that of his royal cousin across the English Channel.

  In the 1540s the future Henri II of France was so enthralled with his strawberry blonde mistress Diane de Poitiers that he had little appetite for his plain brown wife, the dauphine, Catherine de Medici. Studious Catherine was described by one ambassador as a fine woman when her face was veiled, and her face when unveiled resembled nothing so much as a plank of wood. She had been selected as Henri’s bride only because of her close relationship with the pope and a rich dowry including several cities, jewels, horses, and furnishings. In 1542 after nine years of marriage Henri and Catherine had produced no children, not even a pregnancy.

  Though eighteen years older than her royal lover, Diane kept immaculate care of herself and was far sexier than the dauphine. Slender and athletic, Diane began each day with a bracing ride on horseback for up to three hours. Ever mindful of her clear white skin, she always wore a black velvet mask outside, daily drank a mixture containing gold, and bathed in asses’ milk and cold water. Terrified of wrinkles, Diane slept sitting up on pillows. Her beauty regimen worked. Henri made love to Diane almost every night and left his wife alone in her cold bed.

  The penalty for a barren princess was often annulment, banishment, and life in a convent. Diane, while no great friend of Catherine’s, was pleased that she was dull and plain and had absolutely no influence over her husband. Diane feared a new alliance, a beautiful foreign princess who would win Henri’s heart away from her. Better, she resolved, to assist Catherine in bearing an heir.

  On appointed nights, Diane would begin the lovemaking session getting Henri incredibly aroused, then send him upstairs to his wife’s room to finish the job. Having done his dynastic duty, the prince would go back downstairs to fall asleep in Diane’s arms. Soon after this practice began, Catherine became pregnant and bore a healthy son. Henri rewarded his mistress “for the good and commendable services” she had done for the dauphine.19

  Intelligent Catherine did not understand what her husband saw in his aging mistress. Curious, she had an Italian carpenter drill two holes in her floor, directly above Diane’s bedroom. She and her lady’s maid would watch Henri and Diane make love in the flickering shadows of the fire, roll off the bed, and exhaust their passion on the floor. Catherine was astonished at the great gentleness Henri showed Diane and, weeping, told her lady-in-waiting that he had “never used her so well.”20

  The lovely hazel-eyed Madame de Pompadour, who became Louis XV’s mistress in 1745, opined that she was used too well. For the poster child of royal mistresses had a disturbing secret—she was frigid. There is some evidence that indicates she suffered from a chronic vaginal infection with a foul white discharge, for which there was no cure at the time. “I have acquired a cold sea-bird,” lamented Louis XV.21 Sometimes he was so disappointed in her performance that he would leave her bed without the usual good-bye kiss.

  Louis XV had a voracious sexual appetite and enjoyed lovemaking several times a day. But his mistress, always teetering somewhere between sickness and health, quickly became exhausted and had to pretend she was enjoying his exertions. We can picture her, a silken woman on satin sheets, her nakedness warmed by the candles’ glow, waiting for the king to be finished.

  Hoping to stimulate her libido, Madame de Pompadour began to experiment with a diet of celery, truffles, and vanilla that only succeeded in harming her health. One day when her friend the duchesse de Brancas expressed concern, the royal mistress burst into tears and said, “I’m terrified of not pleasing the King anymore and of losing him. You know, men attach a great deal of importance to certain things and I, unfortunately for me, am very cold by nature. I thought I might warm myself up if I went on a diet to heat the blood…. You don’t know what happened last week, the King said it was too hot, an excuse to spend half the night on my sofa. He’ll get tired of me and find somebody else.”

  The duchess sagely advised her friend, “But your diet won’t stop him, and it will kill you. No, you must make yourself indispensable to the King by always being nice to him. Don’t rebuff him, of course, at these other moments, but just let time do its work and in the end he’ll be tied to you forever by force of habit.”22

  If Madame de Pompadour had lost her position when she stopped having sex with the king, she would have been out of a job by sometime in the early 1750s. As it was, she skillfully changed their love affair into a deep friendship, becoming an astute political adviser and one-woman entertainment committee.

  It is ironic that Louis XV’s principal mistress when he was a young man—Madame de Pompadour—was frigid, and his mistress when he was old—Madame du Barry—was one of the most talented prostitutes of her day. Or perhaps not. While still young, Louis relied on Madame de Pompadour’s devotion, charm, and intelligence, and got his sexual relief elsewhere. As an aging monarch trembling before the gates of death, he had little need of intelligence. He wanted frequent athletic sex to convince him he was still alive. As he aged, he had difficulty finding women who aroused him, until he met the enthusiastic Parisian prostitute he made his final mistress.

  Jeanne du Barry walked into Louis’s life at the right time for both of them. If she had been a few years earlier, under the firm reign of Madame de Pompadour, she would have been a mere fling. As it was, her arrival some four years after Madame de Pompadour’s premature death brought a melancholy monarch back to life and created for herself a career she had never dreamed of.

  The duc de Richelieu, an aging roué, had enjoyed the beautiful blonde so much that he recommended her to the jaded king. After their first sexual encounter, the king told the duke, “I am delighted with your Jeanne. She is the only woman in France who has managed to make me forget that I am sixty.”23

  But instead of bedding her and sending her away, as he had all the others, he kept her around. Almost apologetically he said to his friend the duc d’Ayen that he had “discovered some pleasures entirely new to him.” In reply, the duke sniffed, “That, Sire, is because you have never been to a brothel.”24

  The king had been led to believe that Jeanne was a respectable married woman who had enjoyed a few affairs with noblemen and bankers. His faithful valet and longtime procurer, Lebel—alarmed at the king’s inclination for so inappropriate a woman—finally told Louis during his morning toilette that Jeanne’s sexual talents were the result of years of professional training, that she didn’t even offer the respectable cover of being married. We can picture Louis, being powdered and perfumed, with a regal wave of the hand ordering Lebel to shut his mouth and find the woman a suitable husband. Reeling from the shock, Lebel—who had served the king for most of his life—died soon after.

  Court physicians admonished Louis that his mistress was too young for him and suggested that an older woman might be better for his heart. But this was not a recommendation likely to win the king’s agreement. Meanwhile, some courtiers said they had never seen Louis in better health—he seemed younger and more energetic than he had been in years.

  But a few weeks before his death, the sixty-four-year-old monarch realized that even Jeanne was losing her ability to arouse him. He confided to his doctor, “I am growing old and it is time I reined in the horses.” The doctor immediately responded, “Sire, it is not a question of reining them in. It would be better they were taken out of harness.”25

  The aging monarch, facing death and the divine judgment he knew could not be far off, sometimes suffered bitter pangs of remorse for his carnal sins and refused to see his mistress. But these twinges of conscience were soon replaced by other twinges, and Louis found himself once more in her shapely w
hite arms. The king’s hot-blooded Bourbon temperament lasted, literally, until the moment of death. Even as his putrefying body was riddled with smallpox, Louis stretched forth a pus-ravaged hand to fumble his mistress’s enticing breasts.

  Perhaps Louis XV got his relentless libido from his predecessor, Louis XIV, who burdened his mistresses not only with his ravenous sexual needs but, worse, with his infinite fertility. Louise de La Vallière gave birth to four children in seven years. Her successor, the brilliant Athénaïs de Montespan, bore seven children in nine years. Dour Madame de Maintenon was past menopause when she secretly married Louis, but at the age of seventy-five she complained to her priest that the king insisted on sex every day, sometimes several times. The priest replied that as God had appointed her to keep the king from sinning, she must simply endure it. It was believed that a too frequent indulgence in sex gave men “gout, constipation, bad breath and a red nose,” all of which Louis suffered from, but not enough to curb his appetite.26

  While sex between even the lustiest pair usually fizzled after a few years, Czar Alexander II (1818–1881) and his pretty brunette mistress Katia Dolguruky enjoyed a passionate sex life throughout a fifteen-year relationship that ended only with his death. Though profoundly stupid, Katia was thirty years younger than Alexander and adored lovemaking. In 1870 the czar wrote her, “What I felt within me you saw for yourself, just as I saw what was happening to you. That was why we clenched each other like hungry cats both in the morning and in the afternoon, and it was sweet to the verge of madness, so that even now I want to squeal for joy and I am still saturated in all my being.”27

  In 1876 the czar’s health seemed to be failing. He was examined by the court physician who could find no illness and indicated diplomatically that the fifty-eight-year-old czar was suffering from exhaustion and “excesses in sexual relations.”28 But this medical opinion did not deter the czar. Soon after, he wrote Katia, “I enjoyed our love-making madly, and am still all steeped in it. You are so tempting, it is impossible to resist! There is no word for this delirium.”29

  The same year, as Katia prepared to deliver her third child, she lamented the fact that she would not be able to have sex for some time after the birth. “I feel so heavy,” she wrote, “but I am not grumbling because it is my fault, and I confess I cannot be without your fountain, which I love so, and therefore after my six weeks are over I count on renewing my injections.”30

  The love affairs of Napoleon III (1808–1873) were not nearly as satisfying. The emperor’s libido had forced him to marry the only woman who had refused to have sex with him, Eugénie de Montijo, the beautiful daughter of a petty Spanish grandee. One wit said that Napoleon III had become emperor by election, but Eugénie became empress by erection.

  But when Napoleon discovered that his wife’s virtue was, in fact, frigidity, he roamed the court like a lion sniffing for prey, prowling the ballrooms on sexual hunting expeditions. In the 1860s, now in his fifties, the emperor was unable to sustain foreplay and dove into his pleasure with little concern for his partners.

  The marquise de Taisey-Châtenoy endured one of these encounters after having made a rendezvous with the emperor during a ball at the Tuileries. After midnight, he arrived in her bedroom in mauve pajamas looking faintly ridiculous. She reported, “There follows a brief period of physical exertion, during which he breathes heavily and the wax on the ends of his mustaches melts, causing them to droop, and finally a hasty withdrawal, leaving the Marquise unimpressed and unsatisfied.”31

  A journalist and acquaintance of the imperial family Jules de Goncourt wrote, “When a woman is brought into the Tuileries, she is undressed in one room, then goes nude to another room where the Emperor, also nude, awaits her. [The chamberlain] who is in charge, gives her the following instruction: You may kiss His Majesty on any part of his person except the face.”32

  One woman, the wife of a court official, sought a private audience with the emperor to discuss her husband’s career. She reported that she “did not even have time to make a token protest before he laid hold of me in an intimate place…. It all happens so quickly that even the staunchest principles are rendered powerless.”33

  Some of Napoleon’s predatory expeditions were completely unsuccessful. One evening the lecherous emperor entered a dimly lit drawing room, sat down on a sofa next to a fetching creature in an ornate gown, slipped his hand beneath the skirt to find a shapely leg within a silk stocking, and pinched it. The bishop of Nancy stood up bellowing in protest.

  The kinkiest sexual relationship on record between monarch and mistress was that of raven-haired Lola Montez and Ludwig I of Bavaria. Ludwig developed an obsession with the dancer’s feet. In her exile, he wrote her, “I take your feet into my mouth, where I have never had any others, that would have been repugnant to me, but with you, it’s just the opposite.”34 And another letter, “I want to take your feet in my mouth, at once, without giving you time to wash them after you’ve arrived from a trip.”35

  Their letters indicated that Lola performed oral sex on Ludwig, and at other times he masturbated as he sucked on her feet. It is likely that these practices occurred in lieu of sexual intercourse, which Lola had with the king on only a handful of occasions. Perhaps she had little sexual attraction for a man thirty-four years her senior with a knob growing in the middle of his forehead. She often excused herself from intercourse on the grounds of menstruation, poor health, or the danger of pregnancy.

  In addition, during their fifteen-month relationship in Munich, Ludwig would ask her to wear pieces of flannel in two places next to her skin—we can only imagine which two places—and give them to him. Later, during her exile, he made the same request and she sent him the flannel she had worn. He particularly wanted to know which side of the flannel had been against her skin, as he would wear this side next to his. He insisted on knowing if she had worn the flannel in both places.

  During Lola’s exile, she sent Ludwig a letter with a little circle she had drawn to represent her mouth for him to kiss. Ludwig replied, “The drawing in your letter that is meant to represent your mouth (each time I give it a kiss), I took at first to represent your cuño [vagina], and my jarajo [penis] began to get erect. As much pleasure as your mouth has given me, your cuño would have pleased me greatly. I give kisses to one and to the other.”36

  By all accounts Lillie Langtry and the future Edward VII of Great Britain had a lusty sex life. Edward was stunned in 1877 when he first saw the long-legged, voluptuous redhead who walked “like a beautiful hound set upon its feet.”37 He quickly made her his first official mistress, and for three years they were almost inseparable. Lillie related that one day the prince said to her, “I’ve spent enough on you to buy a battleship.” To which she tartly replied, “And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.”38

  Fidelity in an Adulterous Relationship

  Like biblical patriarchs, Turkish sultans, and Chinese emperors, European kings were usually involved in sexual relationships with several women at a time. While usually only one woman held the title of official mistress—maîtresse-en-titre—there were invariably lesser lights, some that were quickly extinguished, others that occupied a lower orbit but gleamed faintly for many years.

  In accordance with the time-honored tradition of the sexual double standard, while the kings and princes were rolling around in bed with other women, their mistresses were supposed to wait quietly in their apartments, embroidering perhaps, or planning a gala dinner to entertain the unfaithful lover. Such was the case of Mademoiselle de Choin, the mistress of Louis, dauphin of France (1661–1711), heir to the throne of his father, Louis XIV. Louis’s devotion to his mistress—he would secretly marry her after his wife’s death—did not preclude his copulating with actresses he saw on the Paris stage or anyone else who came his way.

  On one occasion the dauphin invited a pretty young actress to visit him in his rooms at Versailles. She arrived with an older, unattractive female companion. Informed that the actress
had arrived, the dauphin opened the door to the antechamber, grabbed the woman closest to him—which happened to be the ugly older woman—and pulled her into his room. When his friend and procurer Monsieur Du Mont found the sexy actress waiting in the antechamber, highly amused at the mistake, he banged on the dauphin’s door, crying, “That’s not the one you want! You’ve taken the wrong one!” The door opened, and the dauphin shoved the ugly one out. “Wait, here she is!” said Du Mont, pushing the pretty one toward him. “No, the business is done,” the dauphin said. “She will have to await another occasion.”39

  In contrast, most royal mistresses would not have dared risk love affairs with other men. A few who did were generously forgiven by their womanizing monarchs. But many would have expected a punishment similar to that of Madame d’Esterle, who became mistress of Augustus, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, in 1704. When the playboy king discovered that Madame d’Esterle had been having affairs with several gentlemen at court, he gave her twenty-four hours to pack her bags and leave the country. Worse was the vengeance of Peter the Great (1672–1725), who in 1703 discovered that his mistress of thirteen years, Anna Mons, had been sleeping with the Swedish ambassador. Peter, who throughout his relationship with Anna had routinely enjoyed drunken orgies, was so enraged at her infidelity that he threw her in prison along with thirty of her friends.

  For a woman who publicly declared that whoredom was her profession, plucky Nell Gwynn proved remarkably faithful to Charles II, even after his death. Bereft of her royal lover, pretty Nell was courted by numerous suitors. She sadly informed one ardent admirer that she “would not lay a dog where the deer laid.”40

  Ironically, Charles’s nobly born mistresses, the imperious duchesses, were not nearly as faithful as his spunky whore. Auburn-haired Barbara Palmer, whom Charles created the countess of Castlemaine and duchess of Cleveland, was the most notorious. Perhaps Charles tolerated her blatant infidelity because she was his dream sex partner. One childhood acquaintance of Barbara’s described her as “a lecherous little girl…[who] used to rub her thing with her fingers.”41