Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  But the rumor is just too good for tabloids to ignore. In December 2002 two newspapers reported that a competing paper had hired a pretty girl, a “honey trap,” to seduce Harry and pluck a hair—we can assume from his head—to be sent for DNA analysis. Stories abound of tabloid investigators taking sheets off the hotel beds of Prince Harry and James Hewitt, of fishing used tissues out of public trash cans, of stealing coffee cups with minute particles of lip detritus, of swabbing drops of sweat from polo gear in a locker room.

  The British antimonarchy group ThroneOut is calling for all members of the royal family, who occupy their positions based solely on heredity, to take DNA tests. The royal family’s response to these requests has been dignified silence, and reports indicate they are guarding their DNA more jealously than the crown jewels themselves.

  Yet it is only a matter of time before a servant or acquaintance does acquire a hair, a coffee cup, or a bedsheet and hands it over for analysis. Modern science is now able to provide answers to the question marks of paternity that have punctuated history from the dawn of time. And the truth may not be what royal families want to hear.

  ACCUSATIONS OF ADULTERY—A POWERFUL WEAPON

  It was never adultery alone that did in a queen, or the fact that she did not resemble the Virgin Mary, or that she had polluted the royal bloodline. It was politics.

  If the queen followed the traditional pattern of bearing children, embroidering altar cloths, and interceding for the poor— pious duties that the Virgin Mary would likely have approved of—even if she took a lover she was usually left in peace. There was rarely reason to shoot down a political nonentity at court. But an intelligent ambitious woman who spoke her mind and built up a faction was always open to the accusation of adultery by her political rivals, whether the accusation was true or fabricated.

  Adultery charges offered the accuser many benefits. The very mention of adultery suddenly cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the offspring of a suspected queen, possibly rendering them unfit for the throne and opening the door to other ambitious candidates—usually the accusers themselves.

  In 830 Queen Judith of the Franks, the second wife of King Louis the Pious, found herself accused of adultery with a handsome court chamberlain. The accusers were her husband’s three sons by his first marriage who feared that Judith would influence their aging father to name her son, Charles, as his heir. Bristling with weapons, the three brothers forced their father to abdicate and imprisoned Judith in a convent. We don’t know if the queen committed adultery or not; we do know that the missiles of her enemies hit their mark and she was removed.

  In those cases where a powerful man was accused of being the queen’s lover, we must assume that he and the queen had formed a faction that threatened other groups at court; whether or not the pair was in fact committing adultery was not the crucial question. In such a case, the powerful queen could be imprisoned in a convent, and her threatening lover executed, exiled, or imprisoned, his friends and relatives collapsing in the wake of his own disgrace. Very neatly, aiming only one poisoned dart at the queen, her enemy could remove the entire rival power base at court.

  In 887 Queen Richardis of the East Franks, wife of King Charles the Fat, was accused of adultery with Bishop Liutward of Vercelli, the king’s powerful archchancellor. It was the custom at the time for an accused woman to defend her honor by walking over burning plowshares. If she emerged unharmed, God was protecting her because she was innocent. Only the guilty, it was assumed, would be burned to a crisp. Richardis came through the ordeal unscathed, retired to a convent, and was later made a saint. But her enemies had successfully removed her.

  Character assassination which had proved so effective in the ninth century was alive and well a thousand years later. Napoleon, who hated the virtuous and beautiful Queen Louise of Prussia for egging her apathetic husband on to defend his country against the French, twisted her admiration for Czar Alexander of Russia into a slanderous story. The handsome blond czar had visited Prussia in 1805 and an instant bond sprang up between the czar and the queen. When French troops marched into the vacated royal palace in Potsdam, Napoleon was delighted to find Alexander’s portrait hanging in the queen’s bedroom. He did all he could to tarnish the lady’s unblemished reputation and make her bumbling husband, King Frederick William III, look like a cuckold. Stories of the pious queen’s sordid affair with the czar haunt her memory to this day.

  It was harder for Napoleon to blacken the reputation of Louise’s aunt, Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, who had had numerous affairs with courtiers and a decades-long affair with her top minister. What outraged the prudish French emperor received only a shrug and a wink from the rowdy Neapolitans.

  Stymied in his efforts to ruin the queen’s reputation, Napoleon invented the story of a lesbian affair between Maria Carolina and her friend Emma, Lady Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador and later the mistress of Admiral Horatio Nelson. Emma, the conqueror learned, would tiptoe up a secret stairway to the queen’s apartments, probably to deliver dispatches from British allies or perhaps just to avoid palace protocol and enjoy a cup of coffee. But Napoleon saw the secret staircase as proof of unnatural vice. Unfortunately for the French emperor, his dart did not hit home; the raucous Neapolitans were equally undisturbed by rumors of the queen’s lesbianism.

  Some Italians gladly strangled erring wives with silken ribbons, but many more were cavalier about sexual escapades. When the theocrat Savonarola, who had held a moral stranglehold over the sex lives of Florentines, was burned at the stake in 1498, one high-level magistrate, eyeing the rising flames of the pyre, heaved a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank God,” he grunted. “Now we can return to our sodomy.”8

  Indeed, of all European nations, the king, court, and country of Naples was the least disturbed by stories of queenly adultery. When a stroke felled the sixty-one-year-old queen Maria Carolina in her sleep in 1814, her husband, King Ferdinand, loudly proclaimed that his forty-four years of marriage had been nothing short of martyrdom, and within two months he married his young mistress. Ferdinand’s son, the hereditary prince, sharply rebuked him for marrying a woman known to have enjoyed so many lovers. But the king, laughing, replied, “Think of your mamma, my boy!”9

  1. LIFE BEHIND PALACE WALLS

  In love the heavens themselves do guide the state;

  Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  PRINCESSES WERE RAISED TO BE DEVOUT, OBEDIENT, AND faithful. When sent to meet their new husbands, they set off with every intention of retaining these vital qualities in their new lives. What happened over the years that made so many of them lose their religion, their obedience, and their fidelity?

  When imagining the life of a princess bride, we envision opulent rooms boasting every comfort, efficient servants carrying out her every whim, a wardrobe of luxurious gowns, and a jewel box bursting with sparkling gems. We can hear the sweet strains of violins at a candlelit ball, smell the aroma of succulent roasted meats at the banquet table. We picture her handsome loving husband, her growing brood of healthy children, and envy her.

  And yet the queen was often chained to a husband who didn’t want her, didn’t even want to sleep with her. Her children were taken out of her control and raised by palace officials as property of the state. She was forced to stand by patiently while doctors killed her children by bleeding them to death.

  Her servants were often spies in the pay of her enemies. Nor was her life what we would call physically comfortable, let alone luxurious. For several months a year, drafts sliced through palace rooms like knives. Rats and insects nested behind gilded walls. Nor was the queen consort necessarily rolling in money; she possessed only the funds which her husband chose to bestow upon her—in some cases, nothing.

  Until the mid-nineteenth century when travel became easier, the princess sent off to wed a foreign monarch would likely never see her family again. The childhood friends and devoted servants she brou
ght to her new country caused jealous intrigues and were often sent home as meddling intruders, leaving the princess alone and friendless.

  Perhaps we will begin to comprehend why a decent God-fearing woman, cast upon a foreign shore bereft of family and friends, might jump into an adulterous affair, might seek a little love and understanding in the midst of her misery.

  PALATIAL LUXURY

  The beauty of royal lodgings increased with the centuries. The medieval queen spent most of her time in the great hall, a large dark chamber with slits for windows and an enormous hearth. Meals were served here, and in between meals the queen sewed with her ladies and met with subjects seeking mercy or justice. But she was not alone in the hall; also present were the rest of the royal family, the entire court, bustling servants, and flea-bitten dogs hunting for food scraps on the rush-covered floor. There was scant furniture, and that was uncomfortable—tables, benches, and, for the queen, a stiff high-backed chair. Vivid tapestries covered the stone walls but did little to dispel the gloom.

  By the Renaissance, a European queen had her own suite of small, cozy wood-paneled rooms with large windows and heavy ornately carved furniture. In the baroque period, royal rooms boasted high ceilings painted with mythological scenes, gilded walls, silver-framed mirrors, and gleaming parquet floors. The dainty furniture was covered in silk or satin. Yet despite the ever-increasing grandeur of royal suites, life in the palace remained profoundly uncomfortable.

  Catherine the Great, who arrived in Russia in 1744 as a German bride for Empress Elizabeth’s nephew and heir, suffered terribly from the cold. Russian winters, so hard on peasants, were often not much easier on royalty. Churches were unheated, and many of the palace rooms were drafty and cold despite the presence of a crackling fire. Windows did not close properly, letting icy arctic winds howl through the rooms. Many days Catherine was “blue as a plum” and numb from the cold.1 She frequently suffered colds and fevers.

  At night she was often kept awake by the sounds of rats scuttling behind the walls. Once, when a palace caught fire, Catherine stood outside in the street watching thousands of black rats evacuating the palace in an orderly fashion, followed by thousands of gray mice. She was not sorry to see that palace go; in addition to the rats and mice it had been “filled with every kind of insect.”2

  In the 1660s, utilizing daring feats of engineering, experts transformed a hunting lodge in a swamp into glorious Versailles Palace with an impressive system of fountains and canals. Yet for all the engineering advances of the time, no one had come up with the simple idea of window screens. Open windows allowed in a pleasant breeze, to be sure, as well as birds, squirrels, bats, and insects.

  “The confounded gnats here do not let me have an hour’s sleep,” opined Elizabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, from her gilded Versailles apartments in 1702. “They have chewed me up so much that I look as if I had smallpox again. We are also plagued with wasps,” she added. “Not a day goes by that someone is not stung. A few days ago there was tremendous laughter: one of these wasps had flown under a lady’s skirt; the lady ran around like mad because the wasp was stinging her high up on the thigh, she pulled up her skirt, ran around, and cried, ‘Help! Close your eyes and take it off!’”3

  Elizabeth Charlotte also suffered from the extremes of weather. “The heat is so great that the oldest people cannot say they have ever experienced anything like it,” she reported in July 1707. “Yesterday everyone kept to his room in his shirt until seven at night; one constantly had to change shirts; I changed mine eight times in one day, and it was as if they had been dipped into water. At table too people keep mopping their faces.”4

  “The cold here is so fierce that it fairly defies description,” she wrote in January 1709. “I am sitting by a roaring fire… and still I am shivering with cold and can barely hold the pen….The wine freezes in the bottles.”5

  Nor had palace sanitation evolved to a high level. In the early eighteenth century, the duc de Saint-Simon wrote, “The royal apartments at Versailles are the last word in inconvenience, with back views over the privies and other dark and evil smelling places.”6

  “How would it be possible to prevent men from pissing in the streets?” lamented Elizabeth Charlotte in 1720. “In fact it is a wonder that there are not entire rivers of piss, considering the huge numbers of people living in Paris.”7 But hygiene inside the palace was no better than in the streets. English visitors to Versailles were shocked to find the most elegant courtiers spitting on the floor and urinating in the corners.

  Even life in a modern palace is not what we would imagine. The British royal family insists on cost-saving measures that would be laughed at by a middle-class family. In 1981 Diana, Princess of Wales, was baffled to find Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain wandering around Buckingham Palace at night turning off lights to save on the electric bill. When the princess complained of the chilly rooms in the Scottish estate of Balmoral, the queen politely suggested she put on another sweater. When royal toes poke through socks, servants darn them rather than throwing them out and buying new. Dirty bedsheets are reversed to get both sides soiled before being laundered. And when Paul Burrell, who later became Princess Diana’s butler, started working at Buckingham Palace, he was given a musty uniform that had first seen service under George III, when he was fighting the American Revolution.

  THE BRIDEGROOM

  A princess usually discovered that her greatest discomfort was not the weather, or the insects, or the smell of human waste, or the puzzling thriftiness of her royal in-laws, but the husband she was forced to wed. The purpose of a royal bride was to produce royal babies. “I want to marry a womb,” said Napoleon.8 Other monarchs, though shuddering at the little Corsican’s indelicacy, would have agreed with his sentiments. A princess was valued primarily not for her education, her personality, her good works, or even her beauty, but for her uterus.

  Because she was regarded as a body part rather than a person, a princess found that her feelings were usually disregarded. Politicians, pushing their candidates for groom sight unseen, tried to cram their selections down a princess’s throat. A Prussian minister, hoping to persuade Frederick the Great’s sister, Princess Wilhelmina, to accept a marriage candidate in 1727, grandly declared, “Great princesses are born to be sacrificed for the welfare of the state.”

  When the princess objected that she had never met the proposed bridegroom, the minister gravely replied, “As you are not acquainted with him, Madam, you cannot possibly have any aversion for him.”9

  Until the mid-nineteenth century, most princesses never met their husbands until after they were married by proxy, ceremonies held in two locales, the home cities of the affianced pair. In each ceremony, a person of honorable character stood in for the missing bride or groom and went through a church wedding, giving or receiving a ring.

  Oddly, the proxy wedding ceremony was followed by a proxy bedding ceremony, in which the bride and her stand-in groom would meet in the royal four-poster bed, with all the wedding guests crowding around to watch. Wearing an ornate ruffled nightdress, the bride would lie down. The stand-in groom, fully clothed, would remove his boots and stockings, lie down beside the bride, and touch her bare foot with his. And in this way was a proxy marriage consummated.

  A proxy wedding offered many advantages. It ratified the dowry, trade agreements, military alliances, and treaties before the bride set out. Moreover, the honor of the princess was assured: she would be traveling out of her native land as a married woman to meet her husband. It held the added benefit that the groom, should he be revolted by the first sight of his new wife, or the bride, disgusted by the looks of her husband, could not return the goods. A second marriage ceremony was held with both bride and groom taking part, but after the proxy wedding it was too late to get out of the marriage without legal difficulty.

  In 1672 the twenty-year-old Princess Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate set off from her home in Heidelberg to meet the husband she
had already married by proxy, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, the transvestite brother of Louis XIV of France. Throughout the journey, the bride wept bitterly. She had heard of her husband’s proclivity for young men, and the rumor that one of his lovers had poisoned his first wife in a fit of jealousy.

  When the bride and groom met, they took one look at each other and gasped. She saw a long aristocratic nose emerging from a huge frizzy black wig, diamond earrings, cascading rows of lace and ruffles, dozens of clanking bracelets, beribboned pantaloons, and high-heeled shoes. The prince saw a flat broad face, freshly scrubbed from her journey, tiny blue pig eyes, and a broad German rear end. He whispered to his gentlemen, “Oh! How can I sleep with that?”10

  Once lodged in Versailles, Elizabeth Charlotte found that the golden magnificence of her new home did nothing to assuage her raw pain. “Between ourselves I was stuck here against my will,” she lamented to her beloved aunt, Duchess Sophia of Hanover. “Here I must live, and here I must die, whether I like it or not.”11On occasion, over the decades, she thought of “simply running away” from her horrible husband and the vicious malice at court.12 Though sometimes she grew feisty and, squaring her shoulders, resolutely declared, “He who dies of threats must be buried with donkey farts.”13

  As Elizabeth Charlotte and her husband, who was called Monsieur, grew older, he alienated her by giving her gowns and jewelry to his male lovers. Away from court rituals, in the privacy of their elegant Versailles apartment, they often found they had nothing to say to each other. She wrote Duchess Sophia about an evening she had spent with her husband and their grown children. “After a long silence,” she recalled, “Monsieur, who did not consider us good enough company to talk to us, made a great loud fart, by your leave, turned toward me, and said, ‘What is that, Madame?’ I turned my behind toward him, let out one of the selfsame tone, and said, ‘That’s what it is, Monsieur.’ My son said, ‘If that’s all it is, I can do as well as Monsieur and Madame,’ and he also let go of a good one….These are princely conversations….”14