The fiasco of the coronation had finally crushed the unflappable Caroline. Her stomach had been troubling her for months. Within days of her defeat she suffered an obstruction and inflammation of the bowels and her doctors soon concluded that she was dying. When informed of this, she calmly instructed that her body rest not in England, the land where she had never truly rested, but be returned to Brunswick with a simple plate affixed to her coffin: “Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England.”40 She died on August 7, 1821.
With regard to her love affairs, Caroline once quipped, “I never did commit adultery but once, and I have repented of it ever since. It was with the husband of Mrs. Fitzherbert.”41
ISABELLA II, QUEEN OF SPAIN
The Lust That Lost the Throne
In the 1820s, when the convulsions of the French Revolution and its aftermath had subsided, Europeans looked around and didn’t like what they saw—thirty years of bloodshed, war, suffering, and shocking immorality personified by Maria Luisa of Spain, Maria Carolina of Naples, Napoleon’s three sisters, and the rowdy Queen Caroline of Britain. Unable to control the political upheavals of nations, they realized that one aspect of life they could control was family life. A tidy home harboring a sturdy husband, a chaste and motherly wife, and several bouncing rosy-cheeked children. Yes! That was much better than guillotines, marches on Russia, and the disgusting licentiousness of men and women of the preceding generation.
Since human nature had not changed along with human morals, male adultery was not to be given up, but to be kept politely concealed to avoid causing scandal or hurting the wife’s feelings. The husband, pretending to visit a gentlemen’s club, would instead visit his mistress and no one would be the wiser. The wife, of course, would not commit adultery at all. The ideal woman didn’t even enjoy sex with her husband, but sacrificed herself now and then upon the altar of wifely duty.
While those in former centuries often shrugged off female adultery, especially if the adulteress had reformed her ways, the nineteenth-century woman, once fallen, could never hope to redeem herself socially. If she was repentant, God might forgive her, but society never would.
In 1846 the sixteen-year-old Queen Isabella II was forced to marry her cousin, the twenty-four-year-old Don Francisco d’Assisi, duque de Cadiz. The bridegroom had a shrill falsetto voice and was thought unfit to marry, a polite way of saying he was homosexual. Don Francisco was slightly built with a faint trace of moustache, and he moved strangely, like a mechanical doll. He had a feminine fascination for perfume, jewels, and fine fabrics. His frequent baths were eyed with suspicion. What normal man would insist on being so clean? Pale-faced and dark-haired, his features were attractive enough, and he was certainly elegant. But an observer could detect not the faintest trace of testosterone. The royal doctor, having examined the prince, declared optimistically that he did not think him impotent.
Isabella’s mother Queen Cristina told the French ambassador, “To be sure, you have seen him, you have heard him; his hips, his movements, his sweet little voice. Is it not a little disturbing, a little strange?”42
Isabella was devastated to hear the choice and said she would be happy to marry Francisco if only he were a man. Seeing the virile Spanish grandees swashbuckling about court, she could not help but compare them with her weak, skinny, effeminate husband-to-be. Wallowing in tears, the little queen at first absolutely refused the marriage but was finally bullied into it by her ministers. Neither was Don Francisco pleased that he, who was disgusted at the thought of sex with a girl, would have to satisfy the seething passions of a fat giddy teenager.
For the wedding ceremony, the groom’s sunken chest and narrow shoulders had been carefully padded to lend his figure a bit more dignity. When the priest declared they were one flesh, both the bride and groom were sobbing loudly.
The queen later recalled, “What shall I say of a man who on his wedding night wore more lace than I?”43 Over the years Isabella had several children whose paternity was attributed to various Spanish officials, military men, and a strolling player. Her son the future Alfonso XII was reportedly fathered by an American dental assistant. But at each baptism, Don Francisco proudly held the infant aloft on a silver salver, the traditional gesture of acknowledging a child as his own.
Though Don Francisco’s position was humiliating, he sometimes managed to view it with humor. When the queen’s troops were sent to control a mob, Isabella bravely announced, “If I were a man, I would myself lead my soldiers to the fray.” To which her husband reportedly quipped, “And so would I if I were a man.”44
But if her husband accepted her infidelities, the Spanish people did not. In 1868 popular unrest forced her to find sanctuary in France. The outraged Spaniards, who had tolerated Queen Maria Luisa’s Manuel Godoy eighty years earlier, refused to tolerate Isabella’s Carlos Marfori, the son of a cook whom the queen appointed governor of Madrid and chief of the royal household. Times had changed.
In their Paris exile, the ill-matched royal couple dropped all pretenses and separated. The slovenly Isabella took countless lovers, and the dapper Francisco raised countless poodles, all named after his wife’s lovers. He took up landscape painting and gave elegant dinner parties. The former king and queen saw each other only on their birthdays when, over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, they would enjoy a good chat which inevitably degenerated into a raging argument over past grievances. They would part in anger until the next birthday when they would do it all over again. On his deathbed at the age of eighty, Francisco insisted that Isabella stay far away from him so he could die in peace.
VICTORIA, QUEEN OF BRITAIN
Mrs. Brown
In contrast to the scandals of Queen Isabella II of Spain, the marital devotion of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Great Britain created a sense of reverence and respect among their people. Sexual fidelity, domestic pleasures, an ever-increasing nursery, as well as tireless devotion to state affairs—these were qualities the British pointed to with pride in their sovereign. The queen’s one affair of the heart was platonic, as all Victorian love affairs were supposed to be.
After the sudden death in 1861 of her beloved Albert at the age of forty-two, the queen, deeply depressed, withdrew from society. And society, after being deprived of the monarch’s presence for several years, withdrew its approval of the queen. After three years of brooding in black, Victoria was roused from her torpor by a towering specimen of testosterone in a kilt.
John Brown, a farmer’s son, had worked as a groom for over a decade at Balmoral Castle in Scotland where the royal family vacationed every August. In 1864, when Victoria’s doctor advised her to take up riding to lose weight, it was John Brown who took her out every afternoon. The queen developed quite a crush on the handsome Scot. His eyes were as blue as a clear Scottish sky, his face as chiseled as the rocky granite outcrops of the Highlands, his hair and beard a curly red-gold. Perhaps Brown’s best feature was his gorgeous muscular legs, perfectly formed, strong and sinewy, flashing beneath his kilt.
The dour widow, in her eternal black silk, her gray hair scraped up tightly in a knot on her head revealing pendulous jowls, inspired terror and trepidation among her own children. But when Brown spoke with all the bluntness of his race, the queen loved it. He told her she was getting fat, and she chuckled. “Hoots, then, wumman,” he yelled, while fixing the strap of her bonnet, “can ye no hold yerr head up.”45
Once, when the queen met Brown for her daily ride, he cried, “What are ye daeing with that auld black dress on again? It’s green-moulded.”46 Victoria, black silks rustling over her enormous crinoline, promptly went to her room to change her gown.
By February 1865 she decided Brown could never leave her side. She created a new post for him, “The Queen’s Highland Servant,” a position in which he would take orders only from the queen herself. His menial tasks—cleaning her boots and looking after her dogs—were given to other, lesser servants.
His sudden rise in the world had a
corresponding effect on his arrogance; he routinely outraged the dukes and lords who served the queen. On one occasion Brown, poking his head into a palace billiard room, cast his icy blue gaze on the assembled courtiers and cried, “All what’s here dines with the Queen.”47 He was even impudent to the most powerful ministers, once cutting off Prime Minister William Gladstone with “Ye’ve said enough.”48
One day at Balmoral, Brown stomped into the room of the queen’s assistant private secretary, Arthur Bigge, and informed him, “You’ll no be going fishing. Her Majesty thinks it’s about time ye did some work.”49
The queen’s devotion to this ruffian completely confounded genteel courtiers. The moment they complained about him, Victoria would send them packing. They were forced to accept John Brown, but not without grumbling.
In 1866 Lord Edward Derby scolded, “Long solitary rides, in secluded parts of the park; constant attendance upon her in her room; private messages sent by him to persons of rank… everything shows that she has selected this man for a kind of friendship which is absurd and unbecoming in her position.”50
Queen Victoria’s daughters, kept at arm’s length by the imperious personage who was their mother, realized that Brown enjoyed an intimacy with her that they never knew. Shrugging, they laughingly called Brown “Mama’s lover.”51
Brown became known as “the Queen’s stallion.”52 Rumors circulated that the queen was pregnant with his child but that this was no sin—the two had secretly married. Many referred to the queen—out of her hearing, of course—as “Mrs. Brown.”53
It is likely that Victoria flaunted her devotion to Brown because their relationship was purely platonic, and as such, she had nothing to hide. She even told him that no one loved him more than she, and he gruffly replied he felt the same about her.
When riding out, Brown sat solidly on her carriage box, strong as Samson, eagle eyes searching the crowds for any threat to the queen. He steadied runaway horses, once grabbed a pistol from an assailant’s hand, and picked her up in his strong arms when the carriage overturned. He stood guard at her office door, barring the way for those who would disturb her.
In March 1883 John Brown woke up at Windsor Castle feverish and with a swelling on his face. When he died a few days later, the queen was inconsolable. It was almost like losing Albert all over again.
“I have lost my dearest best friend who no-one in this World can ever replace,” she wrote to her grandson. To Brown’s sister-in-law she wrote, “Weep with me for we all have lost the best, the truest heart that ever beat. My grief is unbounded, dreadful and I know not how to bear it, or how to believe it is possible….Dear, dear John—my dearest best friend to whom I could say everything & who always protected me so kindly…. I have no strong arm now.”54
Years before her death in 1901, the queen had arranged her funeral to the last detail and extracted a promise from her friend Sir James Reid that a photo of John Brown, and a lock of his hair, be placed in her left hand. Reid, not wishing to shock the family who were coming in for the final viewing, discreetly placed flowers over the hand so no one would see that Queen Victoria was being expedited to eternity with a photo of her rumored lover, the surly Scot.
8. THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY
For what is wedlock forced but a hell,
an age of discord and continual strife?
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
THE END OF AN ERA
BY THE TIME OF VICTORIA’S DEATH IN 1901 WOMEN WERE agitating for equality. Many were attending college and even pursuing careers. Suffragettes marched for voting rights. The life of average citizens had greatly improved over that of their ancestors. Indeed, citizens now lived better than any king or queen could have imagined only a century earlier. Even modest homes boasted plumbing, heating, and electricity. Trolleys and trains whisked passengers across town for pennies. Laws had become more humane and just, and most working people earned a wage that kept them comfortable.
But life in the palace had not essentially changed in centuries. Though palaces, too, boasted electricity and plumbing, daily life had ossified over time and still revolved around age-encrusted ceremonies. If health care had improved, the deadly viruses of envy, greed, and revenge—the main ingredients of every royal court since the dawn of time—were all still thriving. And there was little room for self-expression, individuality, or personal choice, shocking new concepts heartily enjoyed by the masses. Princesses of the late nineteenth century could look with envy on daughters of wealthy merchants who chose their friends, hobbies, and husbands according to their own inclinations—young women who wallowed in luxury on a palatial scale, without the ancient residue of moldy hatred and mildewed greed.
Royal brides of the late Victorian period began to expect more from marriage. No longer the passive brood mares of earlier generations, these women actually insisted on happiness in their married lives. And, if their husbands couldn’t provide it, they would find lovers to make life in the gilded cage more enjoyable.
Two late-nineteenth-century princesses—Louisa of Tuscany, who married Prince Frederick Augustus of Saxony, and Marie of Edinburgh, who married Prince Ferdinand of Romania—were faced with palace oppression, weak husbands, and nasty elderly monarchs. Both reacted in the same way—by taking lovers. But the more impulsive of the two would lose her marriage, her children, and her name, falling into obscurity. The more intelligent would manipulate her way to becoming a great queen ruling a crucial nation in times of the most challenging adversity.
A third princess yoked to a weak and vacillating monarch fell under the hypnotizing spell of a man so hated he unleashed a firestorm that destroyed her family and her country.
LOUISA OF TUSCANY, CROWN PRINCESS OF SAXONY
“Harmless Friendships”
Ninety years before Lady Diana Spencer burst onto the international scene as wife of the future king of Great Britain, a Hapsburg princess started along a similar path of popular acclaim and personal tragedy.
At the age of twenty-one Princess Louisa of Tuscany was considered a prime candidate for a royal marriage, even though her father had lost his duchy decades earlier when the Italian kingdoms were unified into one. She boasted Hapsburg blood, dark blond hair, and sparkling brown eyes; a slender yet shapely figure; and a bubbly personality. Though no great beauty, the princess was wooed by numerous princes. Of all her suitors, she preferred the handsome twenty-six-year-old Prince Frederick Augustus of Saxony, tall, blond, and blue-eyed.
Similar to “Shy Di” before she married Prince Charles, Louisa played her part as a sweet and modest young woman throughout the courtship. The prince and his family did not know that beneath Louisa’s beaming countenance lurked a soul seething with dissatisfaction.
Louisa’s parents, who had fallen so irrevocably from grandeur into mediocrity, were thrilled that their daughter would be the future queen of Saxony. They pressed her to accept the suit and, smitten by the dancing blue eyes of the prince, she agreed. But Louisa almost immediately regretted it. “For the first time in my life I felt the dreadful ‘trapped’ sensation that I afterwards experienced so much,” she wrote, “and I cried bitterly when I contrasted my position with that of other girls, who were, I imagined, not precipitated into matrimony, but were allowed a more liberal choice of a husband than a poor princess.”1
In Dresden, Louisa came not as a queen but as a princess. Indeed, her husband was not even crown prince yet. King Albert, childless, would be followed by his curmudgeonly brother Crown Prince George, and only upon George’s death would his son, Frederick Augustus, become king. Until then, Louisa was at the mercy of her father-in-law and his brother.
Louisa’s in-laws were dour, humorless, and critical. Courtiers bowed and scraped and clicked their heels, then spied and plotted against various members of the royal family. Most servants were spies paid by one faction or another, taking crumpled letters out of wastepaper baskets, listening at doors, or peeping through keyholes.
; To the great dismay of her in-laws, the stylish princess became immensely popular with the Saxon people. Women slavishly copied her gowns. Whenever the royal family went out in their carriages, it was hers that drew the most cheers, the greatest applause. Louisa never failed to stick her head out the window and wave, or hold up one of her children to the crowd. Her unpopular father-in-law became green with envy. “What a bid you make for popularity, Louisa,” George growled.2
Louisa fulfilled her duties as royal brood mare. She had the great distinction of presenting Saxony with two male heirs within a single calendar year. On January 15, 1893, she gave birth to George, and on December 31 to Frederick Christian. She had a third son, Ernest, in 1896, followed by Margaret in 1900 and Maria-Alix in 1901.
Despite the joy she had in her growing nursery, Louisa was terribly unhappy in the palace. Her grumpy father-in-law pricked her daily with insinuations, insults, and the withdrawal of privileges, and in return she threw violent temper tantrums. Sputtering in fear before the anger of his father, Prince Frederick Augustus never rushed to his wife’s defense. Tempestuous, rash, and volatile, Louisa had the spirit to fight her many battles, but she fought them alone.
By the late 1890s her bitterness at palace life and her disappointment at her husband’s weakness had resulted in flirtations with other men, which she called “harmless friendships” in her memoirs.3 Events proved, however, that they were far more than that.
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