Sex with Kings

by Eleanor Herman

  In 1847 Lola Montez had wrapped King Ludwig I of Bavaria so tightly around her little finger that the miserly monarch—who made his queen wear old dresses to the theater—showered her with jewels. One night at the opera haughty Lola appeared shining in thirteen thousand florins’ worth of glittering diamonds—including a tiara—far outstripping the queen, who sat glumly in her old-fashioned heirlooms and rusty dress.

  Of all royal mistresses, Lola Montez was so hated that she truly needed plenty of jewels to make a quick escape. Ironically, Lola’s expulsion happened so quickly that she had no time to grab her jewel box. Threatened by an angry mob in front of her house, Lola was pushed by her friends against her will into a carriage, which raced out of town. Wearing a plain dress and no cloak on the cold February night, Lola went into exile.

  Ludwig stopped the mob from ransacking her house and arranged for the sale of the building and her furniture, dresses, and jewels to pay her debts. The king sent Lola the little that remained, for her debts in Munich were significant. She should have grabbed the jewels and run.

  Royal Apartments, Real Estate, and Furnishings

  One of the greatest benefits given a royal mistress—though only during her tenure—was luxurious apartments in all the royal palaces, usually attached to those of the king by a secret door or staircase. One’s rooms at court proclaimed one’s status. Hundreds of noble families vied for the limited space, eager for a single cramped, cheerless room under the eaves. While most courtiers had comfortable homes near the royal palaces, they coveted the honor of lodging under the king’s roof.

  We can imagine the inexpressible joy of an obscure woman—who under ordinary circumstances would never have been given the coldest garret in the royal household—when she found herself the mistress of not only the king, but a huge suite of palace rooms. Often the mistress had more—and lovelier—rooms at court than the queen. For instance, in the 1670s Queen Marie-Thérèse was given only eleven rooms at Versailles, whereas Madame de Montespan occupied a suite of twenty.

  Charles II’s mistress Louise de Kéroualle had a lavish suite with furnishings so ostentatious that the queen’s apartments looked poverty-stricken in comparison. The diarist John Evelyn visited the royal mistress as she sat in a rich dressing gown, having her hair combed. Looking around her apartment in amazement at “the riches and splendor of this world, purchased with vice and dishonor,” he saw “the new fabric of French tapestry, for design, tenderness of work and incomparable imitation of the best paintings, beyond anything I had ever beheld…. Japon cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, huge vases of wrought plate, tables, stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braziers, etc…. all of massive silver, and without number, besides of His Majesty’s best paintings.”6

  As highly coveted as court apartments were, they were the first perquisite a disgraced royal mistress would lose. As she left her suite of finely furnished rooms with head hung low, her replacement would be tripping in eagerly with her luggage. So it made sense for the mistress to acquire property away from court.

  Country estates were highly desirable, providing considerable income from tenants and the sale of crops and wine produced on them. In the 1440s Charles VII of France bestowed several castles and manor houses on Agnes Sorel, the first of which was the Château de Beauté—the Castle of Beauty—from which she acquired her nickname, the Lady of Beauty. Other properties were given to her on the births of her children.

  Not content with vast suites of rooms in each of the three royal palaces, Athénaïs de Montespan wanted Louis XIV to build her a château of her own. He had already purchased her a fine house near the Louvre in Paris, but she wanted one in the country as well. When Louis had floor plans drawn up for a country house near his Palace of Saint-Germain, she rejected them out of hand as “good only for a chorus girl.”7 So Louis gave her the château of Clagny, which took ten years to build, with up to twelve hundred men working on it at a time, and which cost $11 million in today’s money.

  In 1668 Charles II gave Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, the lovely Berkshire House. The gift had a dual purpose—to silence her clamoring for money for a while and to remove her termagant presence from Whitehall Palace. Soon the French ambassador reported, “She is busying herself getting her gift valued and having the house furnished.”8 Realizing the value of the land, Lady Castlemaine demolished the venerable mansion, then sold the timber and all the land except a small corner of the property, where she built a new brick house. She pocketed a great deal of cash in the transaction.

  In the early 1700s Augustus, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, built a palace for his mistress Madame Cosel. Her two summer apartments were lined with cool marble; her two winter apartments were inlaid with fine wood and adorned with porcelain and brocade hangings. In addition, he filled the palace with silver plates, crystal tables, and beds of exquisitely embroidered brocade.

  Over her nineteen-year tenure as Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour owned seventeen estates, in addition to numerous houses that she bought as investments. She devoted the equivalent of millions of dollars to improving and decorating these estates—mainly for the king’s convenience. Linens alone cost her a fortune—one item in the inventory of her estate listed 112 pairs of sheets, 160 tablecloths, 1,600 napkins, and 388 kitchen aprons. Firewood, candles, and food would have cost her additional large sums. But her estate expenses were not as frivolous as they might seem; the properties yielded rents from tenants and income from the sale of wine and crops. Many estates she sold at a profit.

  But properties, unlike jewels, could not be hidden in a bodice and spirited away. In the late 1690s Peter the Great gave his mistress Anna Mons 295 farms and a mansion near Moscow. Anna was stripped of all these when Peter learned of her infidelity.

  Even a tenure of twenty years could not protect Wilhelmine Rietz from losing her home. In 1775 Frederick the Great was worried about the expensive dissipations in Berlin of his nephew and heir, Prince Frederick William. Hoping to save money in the long run, the king gave his nephew twenty thousand thalers to buy a country estate outside Berlin for himself and his mistress. But in 1797, after King Frederick William’s death, Wilhelmine was kicked off the estate by the new king, who grabbed it for himself.

  Titles

  One of the greatest privileges for a royal mistress was to be raised into the rarefied air of the nobility, to be created a countess, marquise, or duchess with a stroke of the royal pen.

  There were various reasons for a king to upgrade the status of his mistress. In 1450 Charles VII made Agnes Sorel a duchess, but only after her death so she could receive a splendid ducal burial.

  A few kings ennobled their mistresses as a preparation for marriage. A king marrying a commoner or a member of the minor nobility would be frowned upon, but marrying a woman of great rank would be more acceptable. Preparing to marry Anne Boleyn, in 1532 Henry VIII created her the marchioness of Pembroke, an English peer in her own right and an unprecedented honor for a woman. The title carried with it large revenues and great privileges. Similarly, Henri IV made his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées the marquise de Monceaux in 1594 and the duchesse de Beaufort in 1597, gifts strewn on her way to the altar.

  Sometimes the ennoblement occurred as a kind of consolation prize when the king decided to replace his mistress with a new face. In 1853 Emperor Napoleon III created his long-suffering mistress Harriet Howard the countess of Beaurégard when he became engaged to the beautiful Spaniard, Eugénie de Montijo. Harriet, who had been angling for the honor of becoming empress of France, suddenly found herself dismissed and exiled. “His Majesty was here last night, offering to pay me off,” Harriet wrote sadly to a friend. “Yes, an earldom in my own right, a castle and a decent French husband into the bargain…. The Lord Almighty spent two hours arguing with me…. Later he fell asleep on the crimson sofa and snored while I wept.”9

  In 1670 Charles II, growing tired of Lady Castlemaine, created her the duchess of Cleveland, an honor which brought wit
h it extensive lands and revenues. The elevated status assuaged the king’s conscience as he ardently pursued his next mistress, French-born Louise de Kéroualle.

  At about the same time, on the other side of the Channel, Charles’s cousin Louis XIV was faced with a similar problem. He created Louise de La Vallière, his mistress of seven years, a duchess, ostensibly as a reward for the birth of her fourth royal bastard. But in reality the king was beginning to tire of her and salivate over her prettier friend, Madame de Montespan. As a duchess, Louise would now be able to wear a train three yards long and sit on a taboret in the presence of the queen.

  The much-coveted taboret was a wooden folding stool used by duchesses in France—which boasted the most etiquette-bound court in Europe—upon which the lucky few could sit in the presence of the royal family. The stool consisted of a few pieces of curved wood which served as legs, and a piece of tapestry at the top, which served as the seat, edged with tassels. It was carried pompously about by a bewigged and liveried servant, who snapped it open with a flourish and set it down when the duchess was ready to be seated.

  For so small a thing, the taboret was one of the premier honors at the French court. When the Polish nobleman John Sobieski—who would become king of Poland in 1674—married Marie d’Arquien and lived at Versailles, his wife never ceased needling him to use his influence with Louis XIV to make her a duchess, which would automatically give her a taboret. Sobieski called it “this miserable stool.”10 In 1650 Louis XIV’s mother Anne the Regent granted taborets to two nonduchesses, raising such a storm of protest that she shamefacedly had to revoke them.

  Upon receiving her taboret, however, Louise de La Vallière was not impressed. She said it seemed to her a kind of retirement present given to a servant.

  Often mistresses were raised in rank because their status reflected the glory of their royal lovers. Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, created his new mistress Madame Lubomirski the princess of Teschen shortly after he was elected king of Poland in 1704, giving her the certificate of her new status along with a box bursting with jewels of every kind. But soon thereafter Augustus fell in love with a Madame Hoym, who requested a signal honor—she wanted to be made a countess of the Holy Roman Empire. Augustus, who was not the Holy Roman Emperor, had to call in some chips with the emperor and obtained the title of Countess Cosel for his mistress.

  In 1745, Louis XV created Jeanne-Antoinette d’Etioles the marquise de Pompadour, giving her the title, estate, and coat of arms of a defunct noble family which had reverted to the crown, along with all the estate’s revenues. In 1752 he raised her to the rank of duchess. This new position gave her not only the taboret but in some obfuscation of royal etiquette allowed her to sit on an armchair like a princess with the royal family during public dinners. Her coach, bearing ducal arms, was now permitted to enter the innermost courtyards of the various royal palaces. Lesser mortals were required to get out of their coaches at the outer courtyards, hold up their skirts, and walk around piles of horse manure. But Madame de Pompadour, while enjoying the privileges of her new title, never used it, still proclaiming herself the marquise de Pompadour, out of respect for the queen.

  Sometimes kings favored their foreign-born mistresses with titles to help them better fit into their adopted country. George I turned his stiffly Teutonic mistress Ermengarda Melusina von Schulenberg into the smoothly English duchess of Suffolk. Similarly, George II’s Hanoverian mistress Amelia von Walmoden became the countess of Yarmouth. Charles II honored French-born Louise de Kéroualle by presenting her with a bouquet of fragrant English titles—Baroness Petersfield, countess of Farnham, and duchess of Portsmouth.

  Perhaps Lola Montez cast her glance backward into history and decided that as a royal mistress she, too, should be ennobled. If so, she did not recognize that she lived in a different time, a time when the king’s word was not law. The timid mewling of most seventeenth-and eighteenth-century political opposition had swelled into a roar with the French Revolution and would never again be muted. Nevertheless, Lola demanded that Ludwig give her the title of a Bavarian countess, something which she hoped would provide her with an air of respectability, or at least officially elevate her position above that of her angry detractors.

  Ludwig succeeded only with great difficulty in pushing Lola’s Bavarian citizenship and ennoblement as countess of Landsfeld through his ministry. His entire council resigned in protest. But Lola was now permitted to drive a carriage with the nine-pointed crown of a Bavarian countess, and she gave herself more imperious airs than ever. To her chagrin, the new countess was still not received by Bavarian high society, as Queen Therese made known that she would not receive anyone who received Lola.

  For two years after her exile from Bavaria Lola traveled about Europe, where her title was ridiculed by true blue bloods. Curiously, her title did her more good in the United States, where she lived in the 1850s. Unlike the ossified European nobility, Americans were thrilled to meet a real Bavarian countess and didn’t care how she had come by the title.

  Gambling Debts

  In past centuries gambling debts routinely made up a significant part of the cost of living. Those in the upper echelons of society were expected to play cards and dice and wager large sums on the outcome. Those who refused were considered boring or, even worse, poor. Needless to say, many of the players suffered extraordinary losses, which as a matter of honor had to be paid promptly. One of the most satisfying perquisites of a royal mistress was the certainty that the king would pay her gambling debts.

  Throughout her decade-long reign at court—and a decade beyond that—Charles II would pay what in today’s money would be millions of dollars in gambling debts for Lady Castlemaine. She would lose—and sometimes win—startling amounts, wagering princely sums without blinking an eye. In 1679, Lady Castlemaine returned to England from a long stay in France. One courtier reported that upon hearing this, “His Majesty gave the Commissioners of the Treasury fair warning to look to themselves, for that she would have a bout with them for money, having lately lost 20,000 pounds in money and jewels in one night at play.”11

  Lady Castlemaine’s contemporary and French counterpart Athénaïs de Montespan was also an avid card player and gambled heavily, sometimes hazarding several hundred thousand pounds on the play of a single card. She won often, and when she didn’t, Louis XIV routinely paid off her debts. One Christmas Day she lost the staggering sum of £230,000, kept playing, and won back £500,000 on one play involving three cards.

  Since the beginning of her relationship with Emperor Franz Josef in 1886, Katharina Schratt benefited by having her gambling debts paid. She routinely lost frightful sums at the casino in Monte Carlo and seems to have suffered an addiction to gambling. In 1890 she lost all her travel money and had to borrow her train fare back to Vienna. This happened again in 1906, when she lost no less than two hundred thousand francs and found herself stranded on the Riviera with a nasty red rash all over her body. She immediately contacted the emperor, who was so angry he let her stew awhile before responding. He finally sent her the money and a letter brimming with reproaches.

  The imperial mistress replied, “A thousand thanks for your dear kind letter. The doctor, who at first thought I had chicken-pox, is now of the opinion that Monte Carlo is responsible for my rash. My heavy losses appear to have upset my stomach, then my nerves and finally affected my skin. If only your Majesty had inherited the gambling instincts of some of your ancestors, then you would be able to sympathize and understand, and I would not have to go through the world disfigured and misunderstood.”12

  The emperor, so thrifty that he wrote urgent telegrams on old scraps of paper, wrote back, “I am glad you are happy again and so hope that by now you are fully recovered. Medical science has obviously made a new discovery through your illness, for I have never before heard of a rash brought on by bad luck at gambling.”13

  Pensions and Cash

  Royal mistresses were usually given monthly allowance
s—often startling sums—which rapidly vanished, often leaving the mistress in debt at the end of the month. What happened to the royal largesse? Quite simply, the mistress had to keep up appearances—royal appearances. She was required to be a glorious accessory to the glory of the king. Not all her gowns and jewels arrived in gift boxes from her royal lover; the mistress had to keep herself fashionable with part of her allowance. There was an unspoken rule that the royal mistress’s wardrobe had to outshine that of all the other ladies at court—including the queen.

  Even Lillie Langtry, who did not receive a regular allowance from Edward VII, was expected to appear in an astonishing array of new gowns. In her later years, Lillie reported that she had had only one quarrel with Edward during her three-year tenure as his mistress. “I wore a dress of white and silver at two balls in succession,” she reminisced. “I did not know that he was going to be present at both balls, but he was. He came up to me on the second night and exclaimed, ‘That damned dress again!’ He walked away in a temper…. It took me a long time to make it up…. That was the only quarrel we ever had.”14

  Lillie, who had come to London with just one plain black dress, patronized the fashion houses of Worth and Doucet. Her evening gowns were embroidered with pearls, her tea gowns bordered with silver fox, her dressing gowns lined with ermine. For a ball at Marlborough House, Lillie appeared in a confection of yellow tulle over which a gold net held preserved butterflies of various sizes and colors.

  In the 1890s Edward’s second official mistress, Daisy Warwick, never paid less than five thousand dollars in today’s money for a gown, often far more. Society columns gushed about the “violet velvet with two splendid turquoise-and-diamond brooches in her bodice” she wore to a ball; the “gauzy white gown beneath which meandered delicately shaded ribbons” she wore to a dinner party; the “splendid purple-grape-trimmed robes and veil of pearls on white” she wore to a drawing room.15