Sex with Kings

by Eleanor Herman

  Hearing of Madame de Pompadour’s power, the renowned misogynist King Frederick the Great of Prussia was so offended he named his dog—a bitch—after her. According to Countess Lichtenau, the mistress of Frederick’s nephew and heir, the king “thought that it did not become the destined ruler of a great and powerful nation to be governed and duped by women and a set of idle parasites. Such creatures were generally connected with a gang of adventurers who had no other aim but that of creeping into favor of the ruling prince, under the protection of a clever courtesan, and as soon as they had obtained that favor they would interfere with the most serious and momentous concerns of the State.”17

  Perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy for Frederick when Madame de Pompadour used her power to spurn Prussia—France’s traditional ally—and side with Empress Maria Theresa of Austria during the Seven Years’ War (1757–1763). France’s support in this territorial catfight between Prussia and Austria was likely to tip the scales in favor of whichever side France weighed in on. And Frederick’s caustic comments about Madame de Pompadour convinced her to side with two other powerful women, Maria Theresa and Empress Elizabeth of Russia, after both of whom Frederick had named dogs as well. He sometimes called his brood of powerfully named bitches Petticoats I, II, and III. Frederick was delighted that when he snapped his fingers, Madame de Pompadour, Empress Maria Theresa, and Empress Elizabeth came running, and when they misbehaved he could beat them. But that was only the dogs. The women, claws unsheathed, pounced on him in concert.

  The Austrian alliance was not popular among the French people, who until quite recently had lost sons and fathers to Austrian guns and bayonets. But Madame de Pompadour convinced the king that Prussia had become too powerful under Frederick and that an alliance with Austria would create a better balance of European power.

  Madame de Pompadour became the unofficial minister of war, personally choosing the generals. Her choices were extremely limited. Generals had to be selected from the nobility, and many of the best French generals were either too old or too ill to participate. Some competent men were available, but these were not admirers of Madame de Pompadour, who insisted on appointing her friends.

  The French believed that good breeding and noble blood, rather than military genius, could win a war. Undisciplined French armies were encumbered by chefs, hairdressers, valets, and courtesans and became a kind of mobile court. Warhorses dragged barrels of hair powder, pomade, and perfume. One evening, after a brilliant Prussian victory, a captured French officer found himself eating a jovial dinner with Frederick the Great. The officer asked the king how he had won such a triumph against the odds. “It is easy,” replied Frederick. “The Prince de Soubise,” he said, referring to the French general, “has 20 cooks and not a single spy; while I, on my part, have 20 spies and but one cook.”18

  After seven years, both sides were exhausted. The French treasury was empty and, worse, France had lost some two hundred thousand men. In signing the truce, France agreed to give up numerous possessions, including Canada and parts of India. The one case of a royal mistress holding true power in her smooth white hands ended disastrously.

  Perhaps it was fortunate that Madame de Pompadour’s successor, Madame du Barry, was less interested in politics. It was often remarked that when courtiers discussed political matters with her, hoping to win her influence, she smiled vaguely as if she had not understood a word. Madame du Barry was more successful as a patron of arts and letters, generously doling out the king’s money to young artists and writers who sought her assistance. Each morning, as she lay in her perfume-scented bath, her waiting women would read to her petitions and letters begging for help.

  The favor seekers waited patiently in her drawing room until the royal mistress emerged wrapped in a beribboned morning gown. As her hairdressers were putting the finishing touches on her coiffure, tradesmen jostled with each other, eager to show her jewelry, porcelain, and bolts of fine fabric. Most important politicians attended her levee, as well as bankers, artists, and philosophers. Many brought proposals with them, seeking her advice or support. Others were armed only with amusing gossip. Even if Madame du Barry had no political influence, visiting the favorite’s toilette was the best way of running into the king, who often stopped by to visit his mistress on his way to Mass.

  “The power behind the German throne”

  Frederick the Great, who died satisfied that he had trumped Madame de Pompadour during the war and probably hastened her death, would have turned over in his grave if he could have seen his Prussia being ruled by an American courtesan barely a century later. Mary, Countess von Waldersee, was the Bible-thumping daughter of a wealthy New York grocer who married Colonel Alfred von Waldersee, the quartermaster general of the German army. In Berlin, silver-haired Mary created a salon and entertained the right people lavishly, including Prince William, the heir to the throne.

  The older, wiser woman had a great calming effect on the nervous young prince, who took great pains to follow her advice. Soon secret diplomatic dispatches sent from Berlin to the corners of Europe contained suspicions as to the nature of the relationship, even though pious Mary was two years older than the prince’s mother. Ministers and ambassadors suddenly became quite respectful to her. When the French called her a Pompadour, it was the greatest compliment. When the Germans called her a Pompadour, it was the deadliest insult.

  In 1888 Prince Willy became Kaiser Wilhelm II and soon referred all political matters to Mary before he announced his opinion. American newspapers went wild. The New York Tribune proclaimed, “Former New York Woman Dominates New Emperor.”19 The New York Transcript announced, “American Princess Sways the Haughty Kaiser—Romantic Story of Merchant’s Daughter Who Is Power Behind the German Throne.”20 A Boston paper declared, “Every step undertaken by the Kaiser is the outcome of her influence and intrigue.”21

  The New York Tribune stated, “The Countess von Waldersee is so much Commander-in-Chief that she can toss out general officers filling the highest posts.”22 The New York Times reported, “Fortunate indeed is the incoming Ambassador who succeeds in winning the prestige of her personal interest. To him opens as by magic the door to the charmed inner circle, which otherwise is only to be approached after countless struggles with the all-pervading redtapeism of German official life.”23

  Mary angled for the speedy demise of the all-powerful Chancellor Bismarck. She told the kaiser that he could never truly rule with the popular Bismarck in the way. While this was true, Mary’s main objective in removing the Iron Chancellor was to clear the path for her husband to succeed him. Using all her persuasion on the kaiser, Mary worked long and hard to topple the giant.

  In March 1890, Bismarck fell. Mary and Alfred waited confidently for the fruit of their seventeen years of joint effort—Alfred’s appointment as chancellor. But instead of immediately replacing Bismarck with Count von Waldersee, the kaiser chose another man for the job. Egged on by his new set of debauched friends, Willy decided that with Bismarck gone, Mary was the one standing in the way of his exercising complete power. He bristled as he read the newspapers referring to Mary as the power behind the throne.

  Instead of promoting Count von Waldersee, the kaiser publicly demoted him from the highest post in the army to commander of a corps in a suburb of Hamburg, making his disgrace the talk of Berlin. Mary and Alfred lived out their lives in dignified exile. Without Mary’s calming influence, Willy gradually degenerated into a paranoid megalomaniac, setting the wheels in motion for World War I.

  “She does not meddle and shall not meddle”

  The one royal mistress who never had even a taste of power during a twenty-year tenure was Henrietta Howard, the mistress of George II of Great Britain. Though Henrietta had no political interests, she would have liked to procure positions for her friends and family, the time-honored perk of a royal mistress. “Upon my word,” she bemoaned to an old friend, “I have not had one place to dispose of, or you should not be without one.”24


  Henrietta’s friend Lord Hervey wrote that she was keenly aware “that some degree of contempt would attend the not having what in her situation the world would expect her to have, though she had never pretended to be possessed of it, and that a mistress who could not get power was not a much more agreeable or respectable character than a minister who could not keep it.”25

  After gentle Henrietta’s retirement, George II’s next mistress, Lady Deloraine, unsettled the queen and court. The new favorite was a mincing, scheming little jade who boasted every time the king made love to her. One day Lord Walpole remarked how much he regretted that Lady Deloraine was the king’s choice. But Lord Hervey replied, “If she got the ear of anyone in power, it might be of very bad consequence, but since ’tis only the King, I think it of no great signification.”26

  After the queen’s death, George assuaged his grief by sending now and then for Lady Deloraine, even though she had taken to drinking strong Spanish wine and offended the king with the stink of it. Afraid of Lady Deloraine’s political meddling, the prime minister decided it would be best to bring over from Hanover the king’s German mistress, Madame Walmoden, who seemed politically innocuous. In the meantime, he shrugged off the king’s sporadic encounters with that little minx Deloraine. “People must wear old gloves until they can get new,” he sighed.27

  To the king’s delight, Madame Walmoden came over. To her delight, she was created the duchess of Yarmouth. To the ministers’ delight, she did not interfere with politics. Gradually, however, Lady Yarmouth became a conduit of political influence between the king and his ministers, and a wholly beneficial one. She informed the ministers of the right time to approach the king with important matters and how to broach them. She prevented the more irritating politicians from upsetting George.

  The French, studying the influence of the English king’s mistress, found she suffered in comparison to their own Madame de Pompadour. A French nobleman in London wrote to Paris sneeringly, “Whereas Madame de Pompadour shares the absolute power of Louis XV, Lady Yarmouth shares the absolute impotence of George II.”28

  Unlike Louis XV, who encouraged his mistress to make political appointments, George was outraged when he learned that then secretary of state William Pitt had requested an interview with Lady Yarmouth to discuss his candidates for various positions. “Mr. Pitt shall not go to that channel anymore,” the king thundered. “She does not meddle and shall not meddle.”29

  But if the king remained stubbornly oblivious of his mistress’s political influence, his courtiers did not. As the wit Lord Chesterfield noted, Lady Yarmouth must be seen as the keystone of His Majesty’s opinion, “for even the wisest man, like the chameleon, takes…the hue of what he is often upon.”30

  8. Red Whores of Babylon—Public Opinion and the Mistress

  Some praise at morning what they damn at night

  But always think the last opinion’s right.

  —ALEXANDER POPE

  WE CAN ONLY WONDER HOW WOMEN’S LOT IN WESTERN SOCIETY would have improved during the past four thousand years had Genesis blamed seductive Adam for tempting innocent Eve with a banana. But since it was Eve who gave Adam the apple, Sinful Woman became a fair target for tempting Virtuous Man from the straight and narrow path with her sexual wiles.

  This was doubly true for a royal mistress. Whereas most women conducted their illicit affairs hidden from public view, maintaining an outward image of chaste propriety, by virtue of her very position the royal mistress was known by all the world to be having sex with a man not her husband. Moreover, however dissatisfied a nation may have been with its king, it was treason to speak so, and the mistress was a far likelier target of wrath among the people and discontent at court.

  Often a royal mistress could not win in the stern court of public opinion no matter what she did. If she bore the king children, she was a harlot bringing expensive bastards into the world. If she did not, she was even worse—a barren harlot. If she was beautiful, her beauty was a gift from the devil to inflame the hapless monarch. If she was plain, the king deserved better. If she lived opulently, she was selfishly spending the poor people’s taxes. If she lived simply, she was detracting from the king’s glory.

  Mistresses from powerful noble families often meddled in politics and turned their relatives into a political faction, causing strife at court. For this reason, some kings avoided the snares of lovely countesses and breathtaking duchesses and sought out mistresses born as commoners. Such women were far more grateful for blessings bestowed and less adept at intrigue. Commoners usually applauded the rise of one of their own, but those born with blue blood pulsating nobly through purple veins turned green with jealousy when an outsider invaded the Holy of Holies.

  Native-born mistresses were better tolerated than imports, who were often, and sometimes rightly, suspected as foreign spies. In 1736, when George II insisted on bringing over a German mistress, his English subjects wanted to know why he couldn’t content himself with an English whore. After all, they said, “There are enough of them to be had and they are cheaper.”1

  “Königs Hure! Hure!”

  Louis XIV’s brilliant mistress Madame de Montespan was disliked by court and populace alike for her vainglorious spending and imperious attitude. She encouraged the king to build palaces, create gardens, and give lavish entertainments. The court, and French life that aped the court, buzzed with music, dancing, fireworks, gambling, the rustle of colorful silks, and the sparkle of priceless gems.

  During her thirteen-year tenure, this Red Whore of Babylon was considered a drain on the royal treasury, a burden on the backs of the working poor. Hearing of her sordid reputation, German troops marching past her in a military parade shouted, “Königs Hure! Hure!”2 Unable to understand German, Madame de Montespan asked another spectator what the soldiers were yelling and was informed that they had been calling her the “king’s whore.” Unfazed, later that evening she told the king that while she had enjoyed the parade she wished the Germans were not so painfully precise in calling everything by its proper name.

  Once she was dismissed, Louis secretly married the pious Madame de Maintenon, who had all the virtues the French disliked and none of the vices they admired. Suddenly public opinion veered back in Madame de Montespan’s favor. The French wanted their king, and their court, to dazzle the world. They missed the balls, fetes, masquerades. To follow the new fashions, many courtiers traded in dice for rosaries and romance novels for Bibles, but it didn’t mean they liked it. As Louis XIV’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Charlotte, the duchesse d’Orléans, wrote of Madame de Maintenon, “Not all the King’s mistresses together did as much harm as she!”3

  “If I die it will be of grief”

  Madame de Pompadour, despite her generosity and encouragement of French art and industry, was the subject of harsh lampoons and barbed poems throughout her tenure. Many courtiers were simply jealous that Louis XV had chosen a woman of the middle class for the honor, and they poked cruel fun at her background and her maiden name, Poisson, which means “fish” in French. She once found under her napkin at her dining table a poem accusing her of having venereal disease. Away from the poisoned elegance of court, the French populace enjoyed poking fun at her in taverns and tacking up nasty verses on the lampposts.

  Upon her arrival at Versailles, the nobles looked down their long aristocratic noses at her and sniffed. “She is excessively common,” the comte de Maurepas wrote, “a bourgeoise out of her place, who will displace all the world if one cannot manage to displace her.”4 Similarly, the duc de Luyne scoffed, “She will probably be just a passing fancy and not a proper mistress.”5

  Her enemies at court delighted in spreading word among the common people of Madame de Pompadour’s extravagance, wildly inflating the money she spent. When she set up a tiny theater in Versailles for the king’s amusement, word got out in Paris that it had cost an exorbitant sum wrung from them in the form of taxes. When she visited Paris—her childhood home and a place she f
ar preferred to Versailles—her carriage was pelted with eggs and mud, and she was hissed and booed and even threatened with death.

  But it was not until Madame de Pompadour took charge of running the Seven Years’ War beginning in 1757 that she was truly reviled. Some two hundred thousand Frenchmen were killed or wounded, the national treasury was bled dry, taxes were raised. Madame de Pompadour found herself the recipient of frequent death threats, some mysteriously appearing on the mantelpiece of her apartment.

  The detested royal mistress slipped into a profound depression and suffered from insomnia, which she deadened with drugs. When peace was declared in 1763, France lost most of its possessions. The French people did not blame King Louis the Well-Beloved for the devastating losses, but his devilish mistress. Madame de Pompadour, whose health had never been robust, suffered greatly from the barbs and pricks of her unpopularity. “If I die,” she sighed, “it will be of grief.”6 She died the following year.

  Parisians greeted her death with a jeering verse:

  Here lies one who was twenty years a virgin,

  Seven years a whore, and eight years a pimp.7

  “An indecent pitch of luxury as to insult the poverty of the people”

  Madame de Pompadour’s successor, Jeanne du Barry, started off her career as royal courtesan with a dreadful handicap—she had been an infamous Parisian prostitute with whom many of the king’s ministers and courtiers had had sex.

  To become maîtresse-en-titre, Madame du Barry had to be presented officially at court by a noblewoman. And here was the difficulty—no noblewoman would be caught dead facilitating the prostitute’s intrusion into their privileged sphere. Finally the king convinced the impoverished comtesse de Béarn to accept the job by paying off her debts and promoting her sons serving in the armed forces.