Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  By then, the czar’s health had been deteriorating for years. He endured increasing immobility in his joints and spine, evidently suffering from a very painful form of arthritis. Servants carried him about in a chair. A bowel complaint bloated his body and caused it to stink. Even his testicles were swollen. According to Jerome Horsey, an English diplomat and explorer who spent considerable time at Ivan’s court, the czar had begun “grievously to swell of the cods, with which he had most horribly offended above fifty years altogether, boasting of a thousand virgins he had deflowered and thousands of children of his begetting destroyed.” Given the fact that Ivan began to take advantage of what he believed to be his royal prerogatives when he was in his midteens, the estimation of “a thousand virgins” may not be much of an exaggeration.

  Toward the end of his days, Ivan’s favorite pastime was to be carried into his treasure room, where he would spend hours amid his jewels, telling his visitors about the individual healing properties of various gemstones. In the early months of 1584, when a comet appeared in the sky with a tail in the shape of a cross, he was certain that it foretold his imminent demise. Ivan was wrong, in that he continued to live out the year, but his health diminished further during the winter of 1584. He consulted dozens of fortune-tellers from Lapland, which at the time was known for its talented prognosticators. Sixty of them were asked by Ivan’s BFF of the moment, Bogdan Belsky, to provide daily updates on the czar’s condition, and they seemed to agree that he would die on March 18, 1584. Ivan (or Bodgan—historians disagree on the source of the warning) threatened to execute all of them if he didn’t expire on cue.

  The czar spent that day as he did any other. “According to the fortune tellers, today is the day I should draw my last breath. But I feel my strength reviving. So let the imposters prepare for death themselves!” he told an aide. As the evening wore on, he gleefully looked forward to killing the bevy of astrologers—who warily reminded him that the day wasn’t over yet.

  According to legend, as Ivan set up his chess pieces, the king and queen collapsed prophetically. Moments later the czar slumped over his chessboard with a loud cry of anguish. He was carried to his bed, and like his father had done in his waning minutes, Ivan survived just long enough to be made an instant monk (but only temporarily, so that he could die a humble man), before he shuffled off his mortal coil.

  Ivan had reigned for fifty of his fifty-three years. To some, he was considered an empire builder for seeking to annex lands to the south and east (such as Kazan) and to the west (such as Livonia); but to most, he was little more than a remarkably cruel despot. Ivan’s only surviving son, the affable (and euphemistically referred to as “simple”) Feodor, became the next czar—and the puppet of his own council of advisers, particularly his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov. After Feodor’s death in 1598, the Romanov dynasty came to power. They would rule Russia until Czar Nicholas II was deposed in 1917; Nicholas and his entire family were assassinated in 1918.

  So, how “terrible” was Ivan? And was he measurably worse than some of his erstwhile successors, or even than other sovereigns of the era? For example, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I of England were known to have burned religious heretics alive. But none of Ivan’s contemporaries institutionalized brutality to such an extent or committed mass murder of whole cities and towns, as well as of entire families. And none of them tortured, maimed, and murdered their enemies for the sheer pleasure of watching them die. For viciousness and vindictiveness, Ivan trumped them all.

  In 1944, the Latvian-born film director Sergei Eisenstein brought Ivan’s life to the silver screen in the first part of a cinematic trilogy. (Part one was released in 1944, part two in 1958, and part three in 1988.) Eisenstein was criticized by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin for not showing a complete portrait of the czar (even though he lived to see only the first of the film’s three parts). “Ivan the Terrible was cruel,” Stalin admitted to Eisenstein. “You can show he was cruel. But you must show why he needed to be cruel.” To provide a bit of perspective, Stalin made “Ivan Grozny” look like a rank amateur in the slaughter department, responsible for the deaths of (depending on the source) anywhere from three million to sixty million Russians, excluding those who died in famines during his iron-fisted tenure.

  On April 23, 1953, a few weeks after Stalin’s death, Ivan’s corpse was exhumed. Threads of the monk’s cassock still clung to the skeleton. The bones were examined and found to contain traces of quicksilver and arsenic—not necessarily an indication of poisoning, as Ivan was very ill for some time before his death and many medications of the era contained those elements. Movie cameras recorded the event and after the scientists were satisfied, the despot’s remains were covered with sand and the coffin was resealed, allowing Ivan to enjoy a peace he never accorded to his victims.

  And for what it’s worth, the remains of the czar can repose in eternity, safe in the twisted knowledge that there was one thing he achieved that Stalin never could. Mass tortures and corpse counts aside, Ivan the Terrible will forever be considered Russia’s greatest royal pain.

  LETTICE KNOLLYS

  1543-1634

  IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND, THE most powerful woman in the world, with everything at your fingertips, your every desire, every whim, made manifest. Then imagine that someone you grew up with, almost but not quite like two cherries on a single stem—imagine that more than anything in the world, she wants to be you. She shares your peach-colored skin and russet hair. And she shares your blood, though she is not the daughter of a king, as you are. But she wants people’s heads to turn in a double take when her silk gowns rustle down the corridors at court, because in looks and manner she is Your Majesty’s doppelgänger, dressing herself in the sort of finery that only queens can afford. She can ape your wardrobe, but she can never wear your crown. She can’t be you, so she steals your man.

  What could be more cloying or annoying than the copycat royal pain, who usurped not with the sword, but with sexuality and psychology? War was declared and waged right under the queen’s nose, with an entire court to witness it. For the combative Tudor cousins Lettice Knollys and Queen Elizabeth it was the boudoir, and not a place like Bosworth Field, that became a battleground.

  Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Lettice Knollys’s mother was Lady Catherine Carey, the daughter of Mary Boleyn Carey, Anne’s older sister—making the two feisty and formidable redheads first cousins once removed. Therefore, technically speaking, Lettice Knollys was not a royal because she was neither the parent, sibling, nor offspring of a monarch. But she was such a royal pain, a thorn in her cousin Elizabeth’s side, that she warrants inclusion in this volume. Of course, there are people, including sixteenth-century contemporaries of the key players in this drama, who believe that Catherine Carey, born sometime around 1524, was a royal by-blow, the bastard child of Mary Boleyn and Henry VIII, which would technically make Lettice one-quarter royal.

  Soon after Elizabeth ascended the throne in November 1558, Lettice’s parents were awarded prominent positions at court. Catherine Knollys (Mary Boleyn’s married daughter), became one of Elizabeth’s senior ladies of the bedchamber, and Lettice’s father, Francis, was made vice chamberlain of Her Majesty’s household. Then in her midteens, Lettice, too, was appointed to a plum position at court as a gentlewoman of the queen’s bedchamber.

  In December 1560 she wed Walter Devereux, 2nd Viscount Hereford, who would be made 1st Earl of Essex in 1572. Lettice left court after her marriage and bore Devereux five children in quick succession, reappearing at court in 1565, when she was very pregnant with her son Robert.

  And here’s where part of the scandal begins: Even in her delicate condition, Lettice completely captivated the Earl of Leicester—the queen’s favorite, Robert Dudley. Surely it tickled Lettice on several levels to have captured his fancy. The very fact that Dudley was so adored by Elizabeth meant that all eyes at court were upon him. And if Dudley was watching Lettice,
then everyone at court was watching her, too.

  The Spanish ambassador, Diego Guzmán de Silva, who found Lettice to be one of the prettiest women at court, cheerfully sent his employer a dispatch announcing that Dudley was utterly smitten with Her Majesty’s gorgeous cousin.

  Suddenly, the redheaded viscountess was no longer the third bedchamber woman on the left, but the beauty about whom every tongue at Whitehall was buzzing. It undoubtedly thrilled her. After all, her name was being spoken in the same breath with her cousin the queen’s!

  Ten years separated the two women, and it may be safe to assume that every time Elizabeth looked at Lettice, she saw a younger, prettier, and equally proud version of herself. Lettice possessed the same dark sparkling eyes as her late great-aunt, Anne Boleyn, and the abundant auburn hair, rosebud pout, and flawless, pale complexion of the Tudors, an enviable bonus in an age of smallpox. She was seductive and knew how to use her charm to maximum effect. But among her less adorable qualities were vanity, envy, arrogance, and possessiveness—attributes that perhaps made Lettice appear even more identical to Elizabeth. Lettice had also inherited the Boleyns’ ambitious streak and saw the queen as a cousin, not as a boss. Consequently, she refused to show the deference due Elizabeth as her sovereign. In Lettice’s mind, the two women were equals. It was a war she couldn’t win, but it would never deter her from trying.

  Elizabeth wished to be magnanimous to Lettice because she was the daughter of two of her most faithful courtiers, but her young cousin’s behavior made it difficult to like her, let alone to be kind. And when the queen caught wind of Dudley’s infatuation with Lettice, she castigated him for his disloyalty to her. So Dudley endeavored to cool his ardor, but he couldn’t keep away from Lettice for long.

  Her favorite’s apparent infatuation for her look-alike kinswoman was particularly vexing to Elizabeth, because of her relationship to the parties involved. And the fact that the sexual tension between Lettice and Dudley was not only noticed by all, but was the talk of the court, infuriated the queen no end. Elizabeth was practically legendary for demonstrating precious little sympathy for other people’s romantic entanglements. Frankly, she discouraged them entirely; messy relationships got in the way of people’s duties and responsibilities at court. They were also a perpetual reminder of her own choice to be England’s bride instead of sharing a warm bed with a spouse of her own. And Lettice’s outrageous flirtation with Dudley—particularly when she was married to someone else and carrying her husband’s child—rubbed metaphorical salt into Her Majesty’s wounded ego. Small wonder that Elizabeth was reluctant to surround herself with a bevy of beautiful waiting women. It was vital that everyone in the kingdom, the world at large, and within her royal court acknowledge that she was the queen bee, and the sun around which every other planet revolved. To hold the throne and command everyone’s respect, she knew there could be no distractions, or the attention they claimed would dilute her authority. All eyes must be on her at all times; the prescribed function of her courtiers was the single-minded responsibility to serve her.

  Elizabeth engaged far fewer female attendants than any of her predecessors had done. She passive-aggressively discouraged courtiers from bringing their wives to live with them at court, by requiring them to endure cramped and unpleasant lodgings. The few married women in the royal household had obtained the queen’s permission to wed; and even so, Elizabeth considered their wedlock an unnecessary and unwanted intrusion, and made it clear that their domestic arrangements irked her. They were at court to serve her—not a husband. The single females would also have to receive Her Majesty’s permission to marry; if they wed without it, they did so at their peril. And yet, deliberately raising the topic of matrimony, Elizabeth would tease her waiting women, often to the point of torment. According to her godson, Sir John Harrington, “She did oft aske the ladies around her chamber, If they lovede to thinke of marriage”—and woe betide the lovestruck girl who answered honestly that she dreamed of becoming a bride.

  Although everyone feared the queen’s legendary Tudor temper and quaked at the possibility of incurring her wrath, because humans are human, secret marriages were made. Worse still, clandestine liaisons were furtively enjoyed under the royal eaves of various palaces, despite Elizabeth’s efforts to enforce strict morality at court. Even if a woman didn’t become pregnant, her amorous secret would soon be revealed. Times had not changed since one of Henry VIII’s courtiers had observed, “There is nothing done or spoken but it is with speed known in the court.” Even the queen herself acknowledged her complete want of privacy, remarking, “I do not live in a corner. A thousand eyes see all I do.”

  As to the queen’s personal morality, no one has ever been sure. It’s another of history’s great unsolved and highly debated mysteries as to whether her “virgin queen” persona was sincere or merely a magnificent public relations scam. Most specifical, although one can speculate on the ramifications involved, no one can state for certain whether Elizabeth ever allowed herself to consummate her notorious flirtation with the companion of her youth and lifelong favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Did she frown upon extramarital liaisons only to distract attention from her own? Or was she as pure as she claimed? At an early age, Elizabeth had forsworn the state of wedlock. It was none other than her childhood friend, “sweet bonny Robin” (as she had nicknamed young Robert Dudley), who was sitting beside the eight-year-old Elizabeth, then a former princess stripped of her birthright and legitimacy, when she resolutely announced that she would never marry. Her mother’s fall from her father’s favor was lesson enough in the fickleness and cruelty of husbands. And when little Elizabeth uttered her famous remark she had just lost another stepmother, after Henry executed his fifth wife, Kathryn Howard. Elizabeth had also seen her half sister Mary fall under the spell of the undeserving Philip of Spain, too deeply in love with her husband to acknowledge that he was, like their father, false in love as well as in politics.

  As queen, Elizabeth only begrudgingly permitted her waiting women to wed. She had a long history of punishing attendants who contracted secret marriages, particularly if they’d been careless enough to get themselves pregnant first. Bess Throckmorton had the temerity to succumb to the formidable charms of Sir Walter Raleigh, wedding the adventurer and bearing his baby. Bess was dispatched to the Tower, as was Sir Walter. Yet he was released months before his wife was liberated. And after Bess was freed, she was never again welcome at court.

  One of Elizabeth’s gentlewomen of the bedchamber, Anne Vavasour, gave birth to the Earl of Oxford’s child in the maidens’ chamber. The infant’s squalling revealed Anne’s secret and she was sent packing to the Tower when she was scarcely postpartum.

  In general, the queen came down hardest on the women whose marriages threatened Elizabeth’s security on the throne, or who had somehow crossed or angered her. By these lights, no one would transgress as greatly as Lettice—although there was a first runner-up in the How to Massively Provoke the Wrath of Her Majesty sweepstakes.

  Another lady-in-waiting—though far less brazen than Lettice—would eventually incur Elizabeth’s enmity for secretly wedding a courtier. Not only did Lady Douglas Sheffield marry without the queen’s consent, but she, too, fell for the one man who was off-limits: the Earl of Leicester.

  Also more naive than Lettice, Douglas started out with more than an unfortunate first name. In 1560, she left court to marry the 2nd Baron Sheffield. She bore him two children, but the baron died at the age of thirty in 1568. The twenty-six-year-old Douglas returned to court and was awarded the position of gentlewoman extraordinary of the privy chamber (which really meant that she was a sort of understudy, tapped to fill in for an unavailable attendant).

  However, being “a lady of great beauties,” according to one of her seventeenth-century descendants, Gervase Holles, Douglas was conspicuous enough to catch the eye of Robert Dudley.

  Despite his protestations of undying fidelity to Elizabeth, the earl clearly had a rov
ing eye and a libido that needed constant care and feeding. Douglas, her head undoubtedly turned by the attentions of such a well-placed man at court, encouraged Dudley’s flirtation; most sources date the commencement of their clandestine affair to the early 1570s. But nothing could remain a secret at court for very long, and by 1573, their liaison was the subject of widespread gossip, particularly as the earl was also seen flirting with Douglas’s nineteen-year-old sister, Frances Howard. One day Queen Elizabeth noticed the sisters quarreling and was dismayed to discover that the cause of their tiff was a sibling rivalry for Dudley’s affections.

  Douglas was content for a while to remain the earl’s secret mistress, but eventually, she fell deeply in love with him and, quite understandably, wanted more from their relationship. Dudley, however, was hedging his bets. Not only did he wish to keep their liaison under wraps in order to avoid the queen’s inevitable wrath, but he was still holding out hope that Elizabeth would finally change her mind about remaining a virgin (or at least a spinster), and consent to marry him.

  Responding to his paramour’s insistence that he make an honest woman of her, the earl wrote Douglas a letter, reiterating the conditions he had laid down from the start with regard to their affair. “I have, as you well know, long both liked and loved you,” Dudley told Douglas. However, if he agreed to marry her, he would be hazarding “the ruin of my own house,” and “mine utter overthrow.” Referring to Elizabeth, the earl added, “If I should marry, I am sure never to have favour of them that I had rather yet never have wife than lose them.”