Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  “Here no child is safe,” she wrote a friend back in Germany in 1672, “for the doctors here have already helped five of the Queen’s to the other world; the last one died three weeks ago, and three of Monsieur’s, as he says himself, have been expedited in the same way.”40 In 1683 she accused palace doctors of killing the wife of the heir to the throne. The princess expired “through the ignorance of the doctors, who killed her as surely as if they had thrust a dagger into her heart.”41

  When royal physicians succeeded in killing almost the entire French royal family in 1712 by bleeding them to death during a measles epidemic, the nurse of the youngest prince, the two-year-old Louis, hid with him in a closet for three days until the doctors stopped their search. By the time she emerged, all other heirs to the throne were dead, and the entire future of France rested on the slender shoulders of the future Louis XV.

  Though the field of medicine made tremendous strides in the second half of the nineteenth century—germs had been discovered under a microscope, hygiene was greatly improved, and chloroform was used as an anesthetic—some royal women were not permitted to enjoy the benefits. When Marie of Romania was due to deliver her first child in 1894, her grandmother Queen Victoria sent an English physician with instructions to administer chloroform as the pain became intense.

  The Romanian priests objected heatedly, citing the Bible’s statement that women must pay for Eve’s sin by bringing forth children in pain. Romanian doctors agreed. Forcing the priests and local doctors from the room, the British doctor administered the anesthetic, anyway, much to the relief of the pain-stricken princess. But for her second delivery a year later, the Romanian royal family and the attending doctors absolutely forbade painkillers. Marie suffered horribly.

  Perhaps Louis XIII best summed up royal health care in 1643 when the forty-one-year-old monarch lay dying of a stomach complaint. Those at his deathbed marveled at the king’s admirable resignation to God’s will. The king’s calm acceptance of his fate, however, vanished the moment his chief physician walked in the room. Scowling at his doctor, Louis snapped, “I would have lived much longer if it had not been for you.”42

  2. THE QUEEN TAKES A LOVER

  Women are as roses, whose fair flower

  Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  BEFORE WE EMBARK ON OUR JOURNEY THROUGH NINE CENTURIES of queenly adultery, we must first understand that there were two kinds of queens—a ruling queen and a queen consort. If she had power in her own right—as a hereditary queen or queen regent—some at court might grumble about her love affairs but there was no chance of beheading or divorce. Queen Isabella II of Spain had numerous lovers, and her poor little consort Don Francisco was in no position to say a word. Peter the Great’s daughter Empress Elizabeth, who never officially married, had four lovers at once. The spinster Queen Elizabeth I of England had passionate flirtations with courtiers, and the widowed Queen Victoria fell in love with her groom. But no one at these courts dared utter a word of reproach to the hereditary monarch.

  Widowhood often bestowed great power on a formerly powerless queen consort. Having suffered thirty years of malice and neglect as the wife of Louis XIII of France, the widowed Anne of Austria ruled for her young son, Louis XIV, together with her politically brilliant lover Cardinal Mazarin. Catherine the Great of Russia—who hastened herself into an early widowhood by having her husband murdered—grabbed power in her own right and took as many lovers as she wanted without fear of reprisals.

  Some queen consorts were married to complacent husbands who permitted them not only political power in their own right, but love affairs as well. For thirty years starting in 1788 the odd ménage à trois of King Carlos IV of Spain, Queen Maria Luisa, and her lover, Manuel Godoy, lived happily together, calling themselves “the earthly trinity.”1 The king went out hunting every day, while the queen and her lover—whom the king obligingly named prime minister—made love and policy. Carlos was grateful to Godoy for taking the burdens of statecraft off his shoulders so he could chase rabbits. Carlos was so devoted to hunting that one day, when he was informed that one of his children lay dying, he said, “Well, what can I do about it?” and jumped on his horse.2

  Carlos had inherited his passion for the hunt from his father, Carlos III who, whenever he passed a tapestry with the figure of a horse, could not restrain himself from lifting one leg as if he were going to mount the animal and ride off. His son Ferdinand IV of Naples, brother of Carlos IV of Spain, shared the family’s genetically predisposed mania. Ferdinand permitted his wife, Queen Maria Carolina, to rule his nation with her lover Sir John Acton, readily nodding agreement to most of their political recommendations so that he could race back to the fields.

  When Carlos was visiting Ferdinand in 1821 and fell deathly ill, a messenger was sent to recall Ferdinand from the hunt. The king refused. “Either my brother will die, or he will recover,” he said. “In the first case, what will it matter to him whether I amused myself hunting or not? In the second, being a crack sportsman himself he will be delighted to see me return with a good bag of game to cheer his convalescence.”3 Carlos died without his brother, but with Ferdinand’s name on his lips.

  Those royal women who possessed power—whether by birthright, widowhood, or as a gift from husbands who wanted to go hunting—flaunted their love affairs. These women rewarded their lovers as generously as kings rewarded their mistresses. But powerless royal women were forced to hide their affairs. Their lovers not only received no financial benefits; far worse, they lived under the threat of torture and execution if the affair became public.

  THE SKILL OF SUBTERFUGE

  Fed up with her husband and palace life, the powerless queen consort who decided to take a lover could resort to tried-and-true stratagems to hide the affair.

  We must bear in mind that royalty almost never had a moment alone. Even on the chamber pot, servants would be in attendance to lift up the heavy skirt or knee-length jacket, and hand the soft piece of cotton used for cleaning the body. At night, if a royal couple desired intimacy, they might send their servants to sleep in the antechamber or in front of the door. But royal husbands and wives had—and still have—their individual suites and often didn’t sleep together. When the king slept alone, he usually had bodyguards in the room for his protection and servants to summon a doctor if he became ill or to bring him food or drink if requested.

  Less likely a target of assassination, the queen, if sleeping without her husband, required waiting women in her room to provide an alibi for her virtue. A lady-in-waiting would sleep on the floor next to the royal bed or, if the queen wished another human body to warm the frosty sheets, in bed with the queen herself. Whether the queen went walking or stayed in her room reading by a crackling fire, a bevy of ladies always danced attendance.

  A sure sign of a love affair was when the queen became partial to just one female servant at the expense of the others. Only this particular lady slept in the queen’s room at night, only she walked with her in the gardens, dressed her and bathed her and embroidered with her before the fire. If the queen reduced her retinue to just one for her private time, it usually meant that this servant was her accomplice in a love affair. Indeed, without a lady-in-waiting accomplice, a queen or princess would have found it impossible to have a lover. And if her virtue was challenged, her servant would swear that she had been with the queen the entire time in question, reading the Bible.

  When Henry VIII’s fifth wife, the silly teenaged Catherine Howard, had a sizzling love affair with the handsome courtier Thomas Culpeper in 1542, the assistance of her lady-in-waiting Lady Jane Rochford was invaluable. The court was frequently changing lodgings, and when the queen arrived at a palace, Lady Rochford would first spy out which apartments were connected to back doors and secret staircases. These were the apartments she would choose for the queen. Lady Rochford took messages back and forth between the lovers and sneaked Culpeper in and out of Cather
ine’s apartments.

  In the 1690s Hereditary Princess Sophia Dorothea of Hanover relied entirely on her devoted lady-in-waiting, Eleonore de Knesebeck, to facilitate her love affair with the Swedish count Philip von Königsmark. Knesebeck wrote many of Sophia Dorothea’s love letters to the count in her own hand and received the count’s letters addressed to her. That way, if they were intercepted, it would look as if the count and Eleonore had been having the affair. When Königsmark was bold enough to venture into Sophia Dorothea’s rooms in the palace, Eleonore de Knesebeck waited by a little door leading from the palace to the garden and opened it when she heard him whistling a tune called “The Spanish Follies.” She then led him up a hidden staircase directly to the princess’s bedchamber.

  It was easier for a royal woman to have lovers when she was not under the intense scrutiny of thousands of eyes at the palace. Napoleon’s sister Pauline, Princess Borghese, evaded her brother’s prudish gaze by claiming ill health and rumbling about the health spas of Europe looking for a cure. Though she never found a cure, she did find vigorous sex from numerous lovers.

  In 1807 at the health spa of Plombières, Pauline fell head over heels in love with the aristocratic comte Auguste de Forbin. The intensity of her passion seemed to consume her very flesh; she fell ill from the violence of it and could not eat or sleep. A gynecologist was sent for who made the following report: “Her habitual and constant state is one of uterine excitement and if this state is continued and prolonged it can become alarming.”4 To calm down her uterus, Pauline was forced to give up her lover, at least officially.

  Clucking loudly about her need for improved health, she sent away most of her servants and rumbled over rutted roads nearly five hundred miles to the tiny spa town of Gréoulx, where the comte de Forbin had a castle. For months they lived quietly, spending most of each day in bed. But Napoleon’s eagle eye turned for a moment from the field of war and searched out his rebellious sister. He forced the poor count to join the French army.

  A century later Crown Princess Marie of Romania visited her mother at various locales throughout Germany, including health spas, her lovers secretly following her. Here were no spies paid by grouchy King Carol to report her every move, as there were at her palace in Bucharest. Twice Marie became pregnant during long visits to her mother, with her husband hundreds of miles away in Romania. The first pregnancy likely ended in a miscarriage, and the second pregnancy resulted in her third child, Princess Marie.

  Taking the waters was a much-used strategy not only for lovers’ trysts, but also when the result of a tryst was due to arrive nine months later. A woman in her third trimester of pregnancy would announce she was unwell—suffering from dropsy, perhaps, an illness which resulted in swelling—and needed to drink the restorative waters of a particular spa. She would choose one conveniently far from home, where she would be less likely to run into acquaintances. The journey there, in easy stages, might take a month. Once at the spa—where she would go incognito— she would have the child and arrange to give it away. If she was fortunate, her lover’s relatives would agree to take the child and raise it as their own. After the birth, she would socialize more, take the waters, and return home slender and radiating good health. The magical waters had worked.

  In 1811 Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Empress Josephine, found herself pregnant by her lover, a handsome soldier named Charles de Flahaut. Hortense had not lived with her husband, Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, for years. Though Napoleon had made them king and queen of the Netherlands in 1806, Hortense reaped little benefit from her exalted status. King Louis forced his wife to remain in her rooms—which smelled of sewage and overlooked a graveyard— while he enjoyed palace entertainments.

  Exposure of her pregnancy would have meant a public divorce, a shattered reputation, and the loss of her children with Louis. Luckily, the fashions of the times hid her expanding belly. In a high-waisted gown, with a large shawl draped around her, she hosted a party to celebrate Napoleon’s birthday two weeks before her child was born, and no one guessed her condition. Right before the birth, Hortense visited a health spa with Charles where she had the child. Her son was whisked away to Charles’s accommodating mother, so at least Hortense obtained news of him as he grew up.

  Visiting a health spa was an alibi so frequently used by women with inconvenient pregnancies that the invalid visitor who really did hope for improved health was often credited upon her return home with having given birth to a bastard. Sometimes even a long illness inside the palace itself gave rise to rumors of pregnancy. When George III’s daughter Princess Amelia died in 1810 of tuberculosis, it was said she had given up the ghost bearing twins.

  Elizabeth I’s 1562 smallpox attack—which almost killed her— led to stories that she had been not ill, but had given birth to a love child with her virile suitor Robert Dudley. Foreign courts, hearing stories of Elizabeth’s daughter, were eager to arrange a marriage with her; even though illegitimate, the child would likely be named heir to the English throne. In 1575 the bishop of Padua heard that the queen had “a daughter, thirteen years of age, and that she would bestow her in marriage to someone acceptable to His Catholic Majesty (Philip II of Spain).”5 When the Spanish ambassador politely brought up the subject of betrothing Elizabeth and Dudley’s illegitimate daughter to a Hapsburg prince, however, his request was met with howls of laughter.

  In 1802 Princess Sophia, the unmarried daughter of King George III of Britain, gained a great deal of weight and claimed she was terribly ill. At the royal residence of Weymouth one night, she gave birth to a boy. The following morning her doctor brought a baby boy to the wife of the village tailor who had also delivered a son in the night. The tailor proudly announced that his wife had actually delivered twins. Oddly, the twins looked nothing alike, and one of them was wrapped in a gorgeous palace blanket embroidered with a coronet. Word got out in the village about the tailor’s royal twin, and dozens of curious people from all walks of life stopped by with alterations, offhandedly asking to see the boy and his regal blanket. When the crowds grew too large, the boy’s supposed father, General Thomas Garth, took him away from the tailor and raised him as his own.

  It was difficult for many to believe that the lovely twenty-five-year-old princess had had sex with an unattractive fifty-six-year-old palace official, disfigured by a huge red birthmark across half his face. Ironically, George III and his wife, Queen Charlotte, fiercely guarded the virtue of their six daughters, so much so that they didn’t want them even to marry. They kept their grown daughters in a kind of harem, with only a few male servants, all of whom were old and repulsive.

  The political diarist Charles Greville reported, “The only reason why people doubted Garth’s being the father was that he was a hideous old devil, old enough to be her father, and with a great claret mark on his face—which is no argument at all, for women fall in love with anything….There they (the princesses) were secluded from the world, mixing with few people, their passions boiling over, and ready to fall into the hands of the first man whom circumstances enabled to get at them.”6

  The morning after the birth, Princess Sophia’s medical attendant announced that his patient had had a sudden remarkable recovery and “would be completely restored to health after a short period of rest and quiet retirement.”7

  “The old King never knew it,” Greville continued, and indeed for decades the king had slipped into and out of madness, often enjoying impassioned conversations with trees and politely shaking their branches as if they were hands. “The Court was at Weymouth when she was big with child. She was said to be dropsical, and then suddenly recovered. They told the King that she was cured by roast beef, and this he swallowed, and used to tell it to people, all of whom knew the truth, as ‘a very extraordinary thing.’”8

  “IT IS DANGEROUS TO LOVE PRINCESSES”

  An amorous courtier, if he carefully considered the risks before making love to a queen consort, may have found his interest in the lady
shrinking. Possible penalties included exquisitely slow torture and a lingering death.

  In the early thirteenth century King John of England, fearing that his wife, Isabella, was having affairs, supposedly hanged the suspected lovers from her bedpost and allowed her to find them dangling there.

  In the early fourteenth century three knights seduced the wives of the three royal princes of France, sons of King Philip the Fair. The princesses were imprisoned, but their lovers were strapped to huge wheels which were spun while executioners shattered their limbs with iron bars.

  Catherine Howard was merely beheaded with one swift stroke in 1542, but her lover Francis Dereham was hanged until nearly unconscious, cut down, and his private parts lopped off and burned before his eyes. He was then cut open and his intestines pulled out as he watched. Finally, he was beheaded. His rotting head adorned Tower Bridge; his body parts were nailed to other buildings.

  Even when the husband didn’t mind his wife conducting amorous intrigues, a queen’s lover sometimes faced mortal danger. After marrying the beautiful dark-haired Margot de Valois in 1572, Henri, king of Navarre, welcomed her love affairs, as it allowed him ample opportunity to pursue his countless mistresses. But if Margot’s husband didn’t mind her behavior, her brother, King Henri III of France, minded very much indeed, and had some of her lovers beheaded, hanged, ambushed, and wounded. In addition, some of Margot’s lovers killed one another in fits of jealous rage. Margot reportedly collected the embalmed hearts of her lovers and put them into small silver boxes, which she hung inside her hoopskirt on chains. Over the years, she built up quite a collection.