Catherine had immediately fallen deeply in love with her tall, darkly swashbuckling husband, and Charles insisted a bit too often that he, too, was delighted. A sexual athlete, Charles likely found in Catherine a tightly furled bud, a bud that would never unfurl further. We can picture her, shy and chaste, a dutiful wife in bed, while Lady Castlemaine reveled with him in sexual abandon.
Beneath the smile Charles wore when beginning his married life simmered a secret which he knew would devastate his bride. To pacify Lady Castlemaine’s wrath at his marriage, he had promised her the honor of becoming a lady of the queen’s bedchamber. Not only would she live at court, but as a lady of the bedchamber Lady Castlemaine would be concerned with the most intimate details of the queen’s life, including sexual relations with her husband, bodily functions, menstruation, and pregnancy. The position offered great status, as it was one of the few that could officially be given to a woman directly. It would cement Lady Castlemaine’s standing in an envious, backbiting court.
Two months after the king’s wedding, the royal mistress gave birth to their second child, and Charles glumly decided it was time to fulfill his promise to her, even at the risk of alienating his bride. He invited Lady Castlemaine to Hampton Court and, taking her by the arm, walked up to the queen to present her. Admiring the beautiful visitor, Catherine stood up smiling and extended her hand as her husband introduced Lady Castlemaine. Upon hearing the name, Catherine’s reaction was gut-wrenching. She blanched and sank down visibly upset. Tears fell fast and heavy down her cheeks. Suddenly, blood dripped from her nose and she passed out on the floor. She was carried into an adjoining room, but Charles did not follow. He interpreted his wife’s illness as defiance; wrath clouded his dark face as he took his mistress back to her coach.
When he reproached the queen for her insolent behavior, she was intransigent rather than contrite. Charles retaliated by sending home Catherine’s retinue of Portuguese ladies and monks—many of them her childhood friends. Charles further isolated his wife by ignoring her completely. He caroused through the night with friends as the queen lay sleepless in her cold bed.
Charles’s faithful lord chancellor, Edward Clarendon, begged him to give up Lady Castlemaine and restore his marriage. This would also quiet any dissent among his people, some of whom had already lost respect for the king’s personal life. But Charles indignantly defended Lady Castlemaine. “I have undone this lady,” he said, “and ruined her reputation, which was fair and untainted till her friendship with me, and I am obliged in conscience and honor to repair her to the utmost of my power.”9
Charles was uneasy about becoming “ridiculous to the world” if he did not win this very public debate with his new wife.10 He forced poor Lord Clarendon, who despised Lady Castlemaine, to persuade the queen to accept her as a lady of the bedchamber. To this request the queen replied, “The King’s insistence upon that particular can proceed from no other ground but his hatred of my person. He wishes to expose me to the contempt of the world. And the world will think me deserving of such an affront if I submitted to it. Before I do that I will put myself on board any little vessel and so be transported to Lisbon.”11
Charles stubbornly presented his wife with a list of ladies to be approved for bedchamber positions. At the top of the list was the name of Barbara, Lady Castlemaine. Equally stubborn, Catherine crossed out the name and again threatened to get on the next boat home.
The king moved his mistress to luxurious apartments in Hampton Court, above his own, their suites connected by a secret stair. He sat next to Lady Castlemaine at meals, laughing and talking gaily with her, while the queen sat in mute dejection. No one wanted to be seen talking to the queen, as it might awaken the prejudice of the king and Lady Castlemaine. As soon as Catherine retired, courtiers made insulting jokes about her.
By the end of summer, Catherine broke. Lonely, far from home, she simply couldn’t stand the isolation anymore. She apologized to Charles and welcomed his mistress into her inner circle as a friend. The queen and Lady Castlemaine were often crammed into a coach with the king between them. Grateful Charles became an attentive husband. His respect for Catherine became friendship and eventually a kind of love. When Lady Castlemaine demanded that she be the first to ride with the king in a revolutionary new open carriage—and threatened to have a miscarriage on the spot if she was not—Charles selected Catherine for the honor. As the king held the hand of his beaming wife, his mistress was forced to join the procession that followed on horseback, and dejectedly kept her distance from the boisterous courtiers.
While bending her husband to her will by cheerful obedience, Catherine sometimes found herself in a position to exact revenge. Two days after Lady Castlemaine gave birth to her third royal bastard in September 1663, the queen—pretending to know nothing of royal bastards—insisted that Lady Castlemaine ride on horseback with her to Oxford or lose her position as lady of the bedchamber. The new mother, still sore and bleeding, clambered on top of the horse and rode uncomplaining, but gritting her teeth.
It is ironic that when Queen Catherine became seriously ill in 1663, no one in England was more interested in her recovery than the king’s mistress. Lady Castlemaine knew that if Catherine died, Charles would marry the beautiful sixteen-year-old noblewoman Frances Stuart, who had aroused his lust but refused to assuage it. Lifted from the depths of bereavement into the heights of passion, Charles would have no need of his rancorous mistress. Barbara prayed heartily for the life of her royal lover’s wife.
Similarly, in 1670 Charles’s mistresses—he now had a harem—rallied around Queen Catherine when Lord Buckingham presented Parliament with a bill enabling the king to divorce his stonily barren wife and remarry. Clucking and cackling, the royal mistresses insisted that the barren, powerless queen stay exactly where she was. A nubile new queen would certainly sink their ships with all their cargo. And heaven forbid the new queen would bear a passel of royal children. Certainly Charles would neglect his numerous royal bastards.
But Charles, in an act of conscience, stopped the bill, stating, “It was a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only because she was his wife and had no children by him, which was no fault of hers.”12
“An old, dull, deaf, peevish beast”
In contrast to the glory of England’s merry monarch Charles II a half century earlier, beginning in 1714 “the Hanoverian dynasty seem[ed] to have brought in…a sort of triumph of pudding, turnips, and muddy ale, over the lace, maypoles, champagne and burgundy of the preceding period,” according to the courtier Brimley Johnson.13
Blonde, large-boned Queen Caroline of England certainly followed the pudding-and-turnip trend. Rather than nobly suffering her husband’s infidelities as a crown of thorns on the head of a martyred queen, Caroline once told a courtier that, as regards her husband’s mistresses, “She was sorry for the scandal it gave others, but for herself she minded it no more than his going to the close stool [toilet].”14
While still prince of Hanover, Caroline’s husband, the future George II of England, took as his first mistress thirty-year-old Henrietta Howard, pretty, pleasant, and discreet. One courtier described Henrietta as “civil to everybody, friendly to many, and unjust to none.”15 Caroline was relieved at George’s choice. While the typical wife bore the greatest malice toward her husband’s first mistress, sensible Caroline knew that Henrietta would not plunder the treasury, snub her when she became queen, angle for political power, or sow disruptive intrigues at court.
As Queen Caroline’s friend Lord Hervey described it, “The Queen, knowing the vanity of her husband’s temper, and that he must have some woman for the world to believe he lay with, wisely suffered one to remain in that situation whom she despised and had got the better of, for fear of making room for a successor whom he might really love, and that might get the better of her.”16
Like most other royal mistresses, Henrietta became a lady-in-waiting to the queen. Unlike others, however, Henrietta’s position was not es
pecially envied. Plump, red-faced George, renowned for tearing off his wig and kicking it across the floor when angry, bucked the trend by loving his wife and tolerating his mistress. Although he believed Caroline to be the most beautiful, intelligent, and charming woman in the world, he also considered a mistress to be an indispensable accessory of a monarch, along with the crown and scepter. George pointedly visited Henrietta every evening for several hours and locked the door. Courtiers speculated crudely about their sex life—one wit compared George to a mill horse plodding around its unending track—and most agreed that they usually spent the time playing cards.
By 1722, in her early forties, Henrietta was growing prematurely deaf. As she had primarily pleased George by being a good audience, he now began to grow impatient with her disability. For Henrietta, however, her deafness may have been a blessing, relieving the daily monotony of listening to George.
George became so irritated with his mistress that on one occasion, as Henrietta tied a kerchief around Caroline’s neck, George snatched it off. “Because you have an ugly neck yourself you love to hide the Queen’s,” he raged.17
But George, a man of habit, did not dismiss his mistress. Then in 1729 Henrietta’s husband, having been estranged from his wife for fifteen years, decided he could no longer live with his humiliation and ordered her back to her conjugal duties. He obtained a warrant from the lord chief justice permitting him to seize her wherever and whenever she should be found. Hearing this, Henrietta hid in the palace day and night. The queen, alarmed that the king no longer wanted Henrietta and Henrietta’s husband did, intrigued to keep her in the palace. If Henrietta should go, George would feel required to select another official mistress, and the next one might not be so tractable.
When the brutish Mr. Howard—often angry, rarely sober—accosted the queen’s carriage and threatened to pluck out his wife, Caroline knew something must be done. One suggestion was to bribe Howard with twelve hundred pounds a year to leave his wife in peace, to which the queen remarked she found it a bit hard to not only keep her husband’s “trulls under my roof, but pay them, too.”18
George gallantly stepped in and paid the twelve hundred pounds a year, which was undoubtedly what Mr. Howard had hoped for in making such a fuss. As Lord Hervey reported, Mr. Howard was required to sign a document for Henrietta swearing that “for the future to give her as little trouble in the capacity of husband as he had ever given her pleasure. And so this affair ended, the King paying 1200 pounds a year for the possession of what he did not want to enjoy, and Mr. Howard receiving them, for relinquishing what he would have been sorry to keep.”19
By 1734, George was snubbing Henrietta for her friendships with several prominent men, including the poet Alexander Pope, whose sarcastic political verses were critical of the king. When Caroline spoke to George about his rude treatment of Henrietta, he angrily replied, “What the devil did you mean by trying to make an old, dull, deaf, peevish beast stay and plague me when I had so good an opportunity of getting rid of her!”20
And so ended a relationship of twenty years. The old, dull, deaf, and peevish beast suddenly found herself a widow and soon remarried. When the queen informed him of the marriage, George laughed that “my old mistress has married that old rake George Berkeley, and I am very glad of it. I would not make such a gift to my friends, and when my enemies rob me, please God it will always be in this manner.”21 Not a very gallant way to bid farewell to a lover of such long standing, but Henrietta was well rid of him and had the last laugh. She enjoyed a very happy marriage with that old rake George Berkeley, who was, in fact, a dozen years younger than his blushing bride. Henrietta survived her second husband by twenty years, living in comfort in the country.
As Caroline had feared, Henrietta was replaced by younger, prettier, more manipulating mistresses. Dying from an umbilical rupture in 1737, wrapped in towels as her intestines spilled out, the queen, sensible to the end, suggested that George remarry. But the king, heartbroken, hovering near her bed in her last agonizing moments, swore he would have only mistresses and never remarry.
“Oh, my God!” the dying queen said in French, with characteristic practicality, “that won’t make any difference!”22
“That whore will be the death of me”
Louis XIV, the most powerful man in Europe, suffered his own share of disputes between his wife and his mistresses. In 1660 at the age of twenty-two the handsome young king married the infanta Marie-Thérèse of Spain, a short, dwarflike product of generations of inbreeding. Fortunately for the queen, she did not suffer the insanity and physical handicaps of her relatives Juana the Mad, John the Imbecile, and Isabella the Insane. Her only debility was a childlike simplicity—though even this was cruelly ridiculed in the sophisticated world of Versailles.
Marie-Thérèse never learned to speak French well, and her new subjects found her coarse Spanish accent irritating. She had no idea of politics, literature, or witty conversation and preferred to spend hours playing cards. Courtiers patiently waited for a seat at the queen’s card table, which almost amounted to winning the lottery, as she would invariably bet high and play poorly. Primi Visconti reported that “the Queen’s losses provide the poor Princess d’Elbeuf with her sole means of support.”23
Louis was faithful to his devoted wife for a full year before he began flirting with his brother’s wife, Princess Henrietta of England. To distract him from such an unfortunate choice, Louis’s mother, the dowager queen Anne, planted a trio of fresh young things in his path. These three graces wore special heron plumes in their hair and were placed prominently near him at banquets.
The ruse worked better than his mother had hoped. The king fell head over heels in love with one of them, Louise de La Vallière, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a petty nobleman. She had ash-blonde hair, dazzling white skin, and large blue eyes. One leg was a bit shorter than the other, so she wore specially made heels. Most attractive to the young king was her genuine mantle of innocence and kindness, of piety and modesty.
The queen was devastated to learn that her husband had taken a mistress. “That young girl with the diamond earrings,” Marie-Thérèse said acidly one day in Spanish to a court lady, “is the one the King’s in love with.”24
Compared to other royal mistresses, sweet Louise de La Vallière did not deserve to become the target of the queen’s venom-spitting rage. Ashamed before God for her adultery, humiliated before the queen for tender stolen moments with her husband, Louise treated Marie-Thérèse with humility and respect. But the queen pointedly snubbed her at every opportunity.
Though realizing her husband had a mistress, Marie-Thérèse remained extremely naïve. The king’s cousin Anne-Marie de Montpensier wrote, “One day at table she told me that the King had not come to bed until four o’clock in the morning. In answer to her questions, he had told her that he had been busy till then reading letters and writing his replies. When the Queen asked him whether he could not find another hour for that work, he turned his head away from her, lest she see him laugh. Lest she see me doing likewise, I kept my eyes down, fastened on my plate.”25
Marie-Thérèse was always the last to know that her husband had taken a new mistress. She had thought Louis was still in love with his sister-in-law Henrietta when he had, in fact, become involved with Louise de La Vallière. Now, seven years later, still spewing her poison at Louise, the queen did not notice that the tornado had changed course and was heading in an entirely different direction. For Louis, now a dashing thirty, no longer wanted a sweet and modest mistress. He was ready for the hard, glittering Athénaïs de Montespan, Louise’s best friend and the queen’s lady-in-waiting.
Madame de Montespan had frequently raged to the queen against the effrontery of Louise de La Vallière, swearing she would rather die than play such a role. Suddenly it was Madame de Montespan who was the king’s new favorite, while Louise retained an uncomfortable place on the sidelines, neither in nor out of the game. The queen’s ignorance of this mome
ntous shift became a court joke, but someone eventually informed her of it.
Madame de Caylus wrote, “She had loved Madame de Montespan because she had believed her to be a respectable woman, loyal to her duties and her husband. Thus Her Majesty’s surprise equaled her sorrow when she later found her to be unlike what she had imagined. The Queen’s distress was made no easier by Madame de Montespan’s lack of consideration…. Of all the King’s mistresses, Madame de Montespan is the one who caused Her Majesty the greatest anguish; not only because that particular passion between Madame de Montespan and the King raged for so long, not only because she took such few pains to spare pain to the Queen but, above all, because it was pain inflicted by a woman whom the Queen had trusted and vouchsafed a special friendship.”26
While Louise de La Vallière had always treated the queen with deference, Madame de Montespan tried to upstage and insult her at every turn. As lady-in-waiting to the queen, instead of meekly assisting her, the king’s mistress often chastised her for taking too long getting dressed. Marie-Thérèse, rarely complaining to her husband, often lamented to her friends, “That whore will be the death of me!”27 and “That slut will kill me yet!”28
In 1670 the king, anxious to take Madame de Montespan on a military campaign, needed to drag both the queen along as chaperone to avoid scandal and Louise to confuse the public about his relationship with Madame de Montespan. As the duc de Saint-Simon reported, “He paraded the two of them in the carriage with the Queen, along the frontier, at the encampments…. Crowds came running everywhere along the route, pointing at the carriage and naively calling to one another to come and see the three Queens!”29
In 1671 the poor queen found herself on another journey stuffed into a carriage with her husband and his two mistresses. One night, seven exalted travelers found themselves obliged to stay in the same room with one bed. Marie-Thérèse was given the bed, while the other six—the king, his brother and sister-in-law, his cousin Anne-Marie, Louise de La Vallière, and Athénaïs de Montespan, slept on mattresses on the floor. The flabbergasted queen cried out in her throaty Spanish accent, “What? All of us here together?” To which her husband retorted, “If you leave your bed curtains open, you can keep an eye on us all!”30
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