In 1768 Archduchess Maria Carolina of Austria boarded the gaily bedecked vessel that would transport her to reign over Naples with the husband she had already married by proxy. Looking out across the sea, the fifteen-year-old declared she would be far better off if someone would only throw her in.
King Ferdinand IV, her seventeen-year-old groom, was often covered with herpes lesions which his doctors considered to be a sign of rude good health. He had received almost no education; his brothers were incurably insane, and his tutors feared that any mental effort would topple Ferdinand over the edge as well. The king loved to pinch his courtiers’ rear ends and put marmalade in their hats when they weren’t looking. He would go to sea with the fishermen of Naples and sell his catch at a market stall, haggling with buyers over the price and loudly cursing them.
On the morning after his wedding to Maria Carolina, King Ferdinand was asked how he had enjoyed his bride. Shaking his head, the king reported, “She sleeps as if she had been killed, and sweats like a pig.”15
After eating a meal in public—a special event where the monarch sat alone on a platform surrounded by gawking spectators of all classes—Ferdinand would then call for his chamber pot and, to the delight of his audience, defecate proudly. Aside from public meals, the king insisted on company whenever he heeded the call of Nature. In 1771 Maria Carolina’s brother Joseph II of Austria visited the Neapolitan monarchs and was perplexed to receive an invitation to accompany the king to his chamber pot after dinner.
“I found him on this throne with lowered breeches,” Joseph wrote to his family in Vienna, “surrounded by five or six valets, chamberlains and others. We made conversation for more than half an hour, and I believe he would be there still if a terrible stench had not convinced us that all was over. He did not fail to describe the details and even wished to show them to us; and without more ado, his breeches down, he ran with the smelly pot in one hand after two of his gentlemen, who took to their heels. I retired quietly to my sister’s, without being able to relate how this scene ended, and if they got off with only a good scare.”16
The luxurious trains and opulent steamboats of the Victorian era resulted in young royals at least meeting each other before agreeing to marry. Even so, most marriages were unhappy. In 1891 Princess Louisa of Tuscany married Prince Frederick Augustus, the heir to the Saxon throne. The prince won Louisa over with his gentle manner and striking blond good looks. Yet years later, disenchanted, she wrote in her memoirs, “Although every princess doubtless at some time dreams of an ideal Prince Charming, she rarely meets him, and she usually marries some one quite different from the hero of her girlhood’s dreams.”17
SEX WITH THE KING
While palace life was no bed of roses, a queen’s sex life, that most intimate aspect of a woman’s relationship with her husband, was sometimes downright horrifying. Many a princess was completely unacquainted with her wedding-night duties and surprised when the strange man she had just married climbed on top of her and started to poke her painfully.
In 1797 the eighteen-year-old Princess Frederica Dorothea of Baden married the nineteen-year-old King Gustavus IV of Sweden. She was ceremoniously placed in bed with her new husband, and the guests withdrew. But a few moments later the bride raced out of the bedroom screaming and flew into the arms of her ladies-in-waiting who were assembled in an outer room. She had just learned what would be required of her and refused to take part in it. It took several weeks before the bride could be persuaded to return to the rough embraces of her husband.
When thirteen-year-old Margaret Tudor bedded the thirty-year-old James IV of Scotland in 1503, she found to her horror not only that her husband jumped on top of her and poked her, but that he wore an iron chain around his waist, which he never took off, and to which each year he added another link for his sins. We can imagine how the rusty links felt on her tender flesh.
In 1893 the seventeen-year-old Marie of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, was flummoxed by what her husband the crown prince of Romania did to her on her wedding night. “In my immature way I tried to respond to his passion but I hungered and thirsted for something more,” she wrote years later in her memoirs. “There was an empty feeling about it all, I still seemed to be waiting for something that did not come.” She cried for weeks afterward. “Often I had to smother my mouth in my pillow not to call out with grief and longing—Mamma… Mamma… Mamma!”18 When she started to throw up in the mornings, she thought she was dying. No one had told her how a woman became pregnant.
Undoubtedly the worst case of undesired sex endured by a queen occurred in 1714 when the twenty-six-year-old Maria Luisa of Savoy lay dying of tuberculosis, her tortured lungs rasping as blood trickled from her lips. Her husband, King Philip V of Spain, was devastated at the thought of her death—not because he would miss his beloved wife, but because he would miss sex. The king was a devout Catholic who thought he would go to hell for having sex outside of marriage. He knew that after his wife died he would have to remain celibate for a decent amount of time before he could remarry.
So instead of mourning his wife’s passing in prayer at her bedside, as her illness worsened he jumped in bed with her and humped her several times a day. The queen endured his exertions with admirable patience, probably because she knew she wouldn’t have to put up with them much longer. Finally, after the priests administered last rites, and the death rattle rose in her throat, the king tried to jump in bed one last time and was only with difficulty restrained.
ROYAL IMPOTENCE
Many royal wives, steeling themselves for the duties of their wedding night, were surprised to find they had no bedtime duties at all; their husbands were hopelessly impotent.
In 1615 the nervous twitching fourteen-year-old King Louis XIII of France married his cousin, a beautiful hazel-eyed Spanish princess. The daughter and granddaughter of Austrian archduchesses who had married Spanish kings, the princess was known as Anne of Austria. After the wedding banquet, the king, to the utter astonishment of the guests, ambled out of the dining hall back to his own chambers. His mother had to convince him to leave his bed and sleep in that of his wife. “My son,” she pleaded, “it is not sufficient to be married; you must come and see the queen your wife, who is waiting for you.”19
The king obediently stayed for two hours in bed with his wife, and then stood up, put on his slippers, and shuffled back to his own room. The years passed, and both king and queen remained virgins. To all advice upon the subject, the king replied that there was no reason to be in a hurry, and that he could not take too much care of his health. Yet the royal marriage, which ratified a precarious treaty between France and Spain, was not valid until consummation. Both nations and the Vatican—which wanted a strong alliance between the two most powerful Catholic countries in Europe—fretted over the situation. In 1618 Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio wrote the pope that he had advised the king to take up masturbation as a means of preparing himself for marital sex, but the king’s confessor prohibited him from committing such a sin.
Finally, when the king was eighteen, late one night his adviser the duc de Luynes begged him to go to the queen and finally consummate the marriage. When the king began to cry, the duke picked him up and carried the sobbing monarch to the queen’s chamber, with the royal valet solemnly holding a candle to light the way. Once in bed, Louis stayed for three hours and did his royal duty. But still, sex was intermittent over the years and the king did not seem to particularly enjoy the business.
In December 1637 the king, setting out from the Louvre for his palace of Saint-Maur, was delayed by a terrible storm. As his bed and bed linens had been sent ahead, he found himself in the embarrassing position of returning to the Louvre and unexpectedly dropping in on his wife, who possessed the only bed fit for a king. Given a choice between the freezing rain and howling wind, or the horrors of the queen’s bed which he had not shared for seven years, Louis resolutely chose the storm, but his bedraggled valets finally convinced him to tak
e shelter. It was a fortuitous rainstorm for France. Nine months later, after twenty-three years of marriage, the future Louis XIV was born. Perhaps it is no surprise that as soon as Louis XIII died in 1643, his merry widow, deprived of sex for the greater part of three decades, took the polished, virile Cardinal Jules Mazarin as her lover for the greater part of the following two decades.
In 1769 the sixteen-year-old crown prince of France, the future Louis XVI, married the most beautiful princess in Europe, the fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette of Austria. Heavy, clumsy, and painfully shy, on his wedding night Louis found himself in bed with a dazzling blue-eyed blonde—all golden curls and golden curves—and froze with fear. But the prince’s impotence was not completely psychological in nature. Louis suffered from phimosis, an unnatural elongation of the foreskin which permitted erections but prevented intercourse.
Three years after the wedding, Louis’s exasperated grandfather King Louis XV—who had rarely gone a day without sex since he was fifteen—ordered the court physician to give the couple sex education lessons. Louis was put on diets to render him more virile, but they only made him fatter. In a desperate attempt to arouse the prince, advisers lined the corridor leading to his wife’s bedroom with pornographic prints and obscene paintings. But all such steps were futile, as were efforts to persuade the prince to undergo circumcision. In a day and age when anesthesia was a stiff glass of whiskey, and some 25 percent of wounds resulted in infection and death, surely we cannot blame him.
Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Austro-Hungarian empress Maria Theresa, who had borne no less than sixteen children, was so alarmed at her daughter’s situation that she sent her son and coruler, Joseph II, to talk to Louis. From Versailles on June 9, 1777, Joseph wrote home, “Her situation with the king is very odd; he is only two-thirds of a husband, and although he loves her, he fears her more…. Just imagine, in his marital bed—here is the secret—he has strong, well-conditioned erections; he introduces the member, stays there without moving for perhaps two minutes, withdraws without ejaculating but still erect, and says goodnight; this is incomprehensible because with all that he sometimes has nightly emissions, but once in place and going at it, never, and he’s satisfied. He says plainly that he does it all purely from a sense of duty but never for pleasure; oh, if only I could have been there, I would have taken care of him; he should be whipped so that he would ejaculate out of sheer rage like a donkey.”20
In 1778 Louis submitted to circumcision for the good of the realm. His physician must have washed his hands and instruments thoroughly before the operation because the prince sailed through it. He was able to have sex with his wife a few weeks later, though he never got the hang of lovemaking. Marie Antoinette found him physically repulsive and, after giving him a daughter and son, began a torrid affair with an elegant young Swedish nobleman, Count Axel Fersen.
The queen’s son with Louis died young, and it is likely that her second son, who later became known as Louis XVII, was actually the child of her lover, born exactly nine months after Fersen visited Versailles. “The Queen was delivered of the Duc de Normandie at half-past seven,” Louis reported in his diary. “Everything happened just as to my son (the Dauphin).”21 The entry seemed to indicate that Louis did not believe the child was his. “One of the most handsome children one could ever see,” said one courtier about the queen’s third child, which in and of itself cast doubt as to his paternity.22
GAY KINGS
Many European princes were gay, yet this did not prevent them from fulfilling their marital duties. Married in 1308 to a French princess, the English king Edward II fathered four royal children, although he spent most of his life in love with other men.
The transvestite Philippe, duc d’Orléans, launched six children into the world with two wives, although the clanking saints’ medallions he tied to his private parts before the act may have helped. In 1614 James I of England fell head over heels in love with young George Villiers; the king made him master of the horse, an earl, a marquess, a duke, and lord high admiral. Yet James could proudly point out that he had made his wife, a Danish princess, pregnant no less than nine times.
But not all gay princes could force themselves to have sex with their wives. Gustavus III of Sweden was so disgusted at the thought of sex with a woman that he didn’t even want to try. “This prince did not pay homage at the shrine of Venus” was the polite explanation of a contemporary.23 Nonetheless, he married Princess Sophia Magdalena of Denmark in 1766. When a Swedish artist visited the Copenhagen court of Christian VII in 1769, the king asked after the health of his sister. “She was as happy as any woman who had been married nearly three years and yet remained a virgin” was the reply.24
Yet the queen’s barrenness was a perplexing problem to Gustavus who urgently needed an heir to stabilize his tottering throne. Powerful nobles, stripped of their rights by the king, threatened rebellion, and it was easier to topple a monarch without an heir. Rumor had it that after eleven years of marriage, the king hit upon an excellent idea.
He had seen his neglected virgin queen exchanging glances with a sophisticated courtier, Count Adolph Frederick Munck. According to the story that raced like wildfire through the Swedish court—the king insisted that the two begin an affair. When they hesitated—such treason could result not only in dishonor but also in dismemberment—Gustavus wrote down his request in his own hand and gave both his wife and the count a copy. It was also rumored that his wife, though acting the role of queen until her death, insisted upon a quiet divorce and immediately married Count Munck so no charge of treason could be preferred against her if the king changed his mind.
Within a year after her reported liaison with Count Munck began, Sophia Magdalena gave birth to the future Gustavus IV. The king was absolutely delighted to have an heir—apparently without soiling himself in bed with a woman—and attended council meetings with his wife’s illegitimate child sitting on his shoulders.
Frederick the Great of Prussia, the most renowned warrior king of Europe, was haunted by rumors of his bisexuality after his father chopped off the head of the man who supposedly seduced him as a teenager. Whether Frederick had sex with men is not entirely certain. What is certain is that in 1733 the nineteen-year-old prince was horrified to learn that his father insisted he marry a dumpy German princess, Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern. “I have always wanted to distinguish myself by the sword and have not wanted to obtain royal favor by any other means,” the crown prince huffed. “Now I will have only the duty to fuck. I pity this poor person, for she will be one more unhappy princess in the world.”25
“I believe that anyone who allows himself to be bossed by a woman is the biggest asshole in the world and unworthy of being called a man,” he added. “Love can never be forced. I love sex but in a very fickle way; I like the immediate pleasure, but afterward I despise it. Judge then if I am the stuff from which one makes good husbands…. I shall marry, but after that, goodbye and good luck.”26
After a few halfhearted attempts at lovemaking produced no pregnancy, when Frederick became king he stuck Queen Elizabeth in a country house where she grew fat, raised dogs, and tried to make do with the pitiful allowance he sent her; for his part, he returned to his favorite pastimes of waging war and playing the flute. Out of respect, however, Frederick kindly arranged to have dinner with his wife once a year.
THE JOYS OF CHILDREN
Royal children belong not to their parents but to the state. Until the twentieth century, a royal mother was not permitted to nurse her children or to have much say in their education or even in their marriages.
In September 1754 the future Catherine the Great finally gave Russia its longed-for heir, Paul. Empress Elizabeth scooped up the infant gleefully and raced away with him, courtiers running behind her. Catherine was left alone with a servant woman who refused to change her sticky bloody sheets or get her a glass of water, fearing the empress might disapprove. Catherine was not permitted to see her child or even ask after hi
m, as that would imply she did not trust the empress to provide adequately for him. By the time Catherine became empress in her own right in 1762, she and Paul were strangers and soon found they heartily detested each other.
Marie, crown princess of Romania, was forbidden by her husband’s uncle, King Carol I, to nurse her first child, Prince Carol, despite her repeated pleas. Carol’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, who despised Marie, hired a bone-dry German governess named Miss Winter to turn young Prince Carol against his mother. Miss Winter forced the prince to drop his mother from his nightly prayers and even barred the door to Carol’s sickroom when he was deathly ill until Marie rudely shoved her out of the way. When Carol was in his early teens, his tutor had homosexual designs on him and may have seduced him. His mother could do nothing. “I could never get my own child without scenes and explanations,” Marie lamented to a relative.27
Similarly, Elizabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, had no control over her children’s education. In 1689 her husband wanted to appoint one of his lovers, the marquis d’Effiat, tutor to their thirteen-year-old son Philippe. But Madame, as she was called, howled in protest, “For there is no doubt that there is no greater sodomist in France than he, and that it would be a bad beginning for a young prince to start his life with the worst debauchery imaginable.” To which her husband gravely replied “that he had to admit that d’Effiat used to be debauched and loved the boys, but that he had corrected himself of this vice many years ago.”28
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