Years later, after Henri II’s death in 1559,2 Catherine wrote of her true feelings regarding the humiliating situation with her husband and his mistress. “I was hospitable to [Diane]; he was the king; yet even so I always let him know that it was to my great regret; for never has a woman who loves her husband liked his whore; for even though this is an ugly word for us to use, one cannot call her anything else.”
Given the atmosphere in which they grew up, it’s not surprising that some of Henri and Catherine’s children were a little unconventional when it came to sex. Henri III, who succeeded his father and two brothers in the Valois line of French kings, was an ostentatious transvestite who surrounded himself with an obsequious band of gay young men the French scathingly called mignons. The king and his male harem loved nothing more than dressing up and prancing around Paris in lace and ruffles, with long curls flowing from under dainty little caps. On special occasions, Henri dolled himself up magnificently, dripping with diamonds and swathed in silk. “One did not know whether it was a woman king or a man queen,” a bewildered observer said at the time.
Historians have noted the peculiar affection Catherine de Medici had for her son Henri. The formidable woman the French came to call “Madame Serpente,” had consolidated her power after the death of her husband and, with three sons in a row reigning as kings of France, became history’s ultimate Queen Mother. An avid disciple of Machiavelli’s blueprint for power, The Prince, she considered her fellow Florentine almost a personal guru.
With a daunting combination of guile, treachery, and shrewd intelligence, this plump matron in her habitual black dress was ruthless in the struggle to maintain her family’s power. Yet while Catherine orchestrated the lives of all of her other children, using them as pawns to achieve her political ends, Henri was special. Her devotion to him, in fact, bordered on the incestuous. She was certainly indulgent of his flamboyant lifestyle, even arranging lavish orgies for his royal pleasure. Henri, however, was completely controlled by his mignons, some of whom wielded enormous power. Fights often broke out among the perfumed favorites—sometimes to the death—as they vied for the king’s affections.
Despite her overwhelming maternal devotion, Catherine was left out of the loop. With the kingdom shredded by religious wars, the government coffers empty and an attack by neighboring Spain a looming threat, Catherine begged for Henri’s attention to the desperate situation she was trying so hard to remedy for him. “Things are in a worse state than they are thought to be,” the ailing Queen Mother wrote in one of many long letters to the king while traveling around France in a vain attempt to generate support for him. “I beg you to control your finances very carefully in order to raise money for your service without having to rob your people, for you are on the brink of a general revolt . . . and whoever tells you otherwise deceives you.”
All Catherine’s tireless efforts on her beloved son’s behalf were ignored, causing her no end of distress. King Henri was far too busy with his mignons to listen to his mother’s barrage of pleas and warnings. The “King of Trifles,” as his disgusted subjects called him, was more interested in finding new ways to entertain the boys than he was in the fate of France. There were occasions, though, when Henri was entirely overcome by a violent revulsion to his habitual frivolity. During these times he transformed himself into a religious fanatic—publicly flogging himself, walking barefoot in bizarre religious processions, and outfitting himself in monk’s clothes with a rosary of small ivory skulls hanging from his waist. “I am frightened that everything is not golden here,” Ougier de Busbecq wrote after witnessing the demonstration of Henri’s unconventional piety.
During several of his manic bouts of religion, the king made pilgrimages to Chartres on foot, begging the Virgin Mary to give him a son and heir. Alas, even the Mother of God couldn’t help him there. While he loved dressing up his wife, Queen Louise, doing her makeup and playing with her hair, he was rarely up to the task of sleeping with her.
Occupying almost as much of Henri III’s time as his pretty boys and his alternating episodes of penance was his intense feud with his beautiful sister, Marguerite. Margot, as she was known, had a voracious appetite for men. Dating her, however, was often deadly, thanks to her despised brother. Actually, it was several members of the Valois royal family who arranged to make Margot’s active love life lethal.
She was the youngest and most magnificent of the three daughters of Henri II and Catherine de Medici. When she was nineteen, her ambitious mother married her off to her Bourbon cousin, King Henry of Navarre. It was a cynical political match intended to shore up relations with the tiny kingdom wedged between France and Spain. Even if the newlyweds had loved one another, which they clearly did not, any happiness they might have shared was shattered only days after the wedding.
Margot’s mother had been involved in a plot to assassinate a Huguenot leader. The murder was planned for just after the wedding, but the scheme failed. Fearing her role in it would be discovered and lead to a violent Protestant revolt, Catherine and her son (King Charles IX, who ruled just before Henri III) secretly initiated a sweeping slaughter of Huguenots who had gathered in Paris to celebrate the union of the Catholic French princess and the Protestant king of Navarre. The event, which became infamous as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, was quite a wedding present. Although Margot, now queen of Navarre, was able to save her new husband from being murdered in the bloody frenzy, he was held prisoner in Paris, a situation that did not enhance the couple’s already tenuous relationship. Both Margot and Henry were extraordinarily passionate people—just not for each other.
Desperate for satisfaction, Queen Margot took on the first of her many doomed lovers not long after she was married. His name was Joseph de Boniface de la Molle and her family hated him. Accused of conspiracy against King Charles IX, La Molle was hideously tortured. His fingernails were torn off and his bones crushed. He was then beheaded, but not before sending salutations to Margot from the scaffold. It was said that the distraught queen secretly ordered her lover’s head removed from public display and brought to her for burial.
After La Molle’s execution, Margot acquired several more lovers who were lucky enough to narrowly avoid her family’s wrath. Then, wishing to escape her brother Henri, now king of France, and her estranged husband, the king of Navarre, Margot moved to the French town of Agen. Seeing the glamorous queen for the first time, a young officer by the name of Aubiac was entranced. “Let me be hanged,” he exclaimed, “if I might only once sleep with that woman!” He would soon get both his wishes.
When the town of Agen was ransacked by the king’s forces, Aubiac helped Margot escape. At some point they became lovers, for which he would pay dearly. After Aubiac was captured, Henri III announced that the Queen Mother had begged him to have Margot’s lover “hung in the presence of this miserable woman, in the courtyard of the Castle of Usson, so that plenty of people may see him.” The unfortunate lover was hung, upside down. Before he had even ceased breathing, Aubiac was cut down, tossed into a grave and buried alive.
Don Juan of Austria had once said of Margot: “She looks more like a goddess of Heaven than a princess of earth. Her charms are better suited to ruin men than to save them. Her beauty was sent to damn us.” A succession of ill-fated lovers was proving Don Juan remarkably prescient.
Over time, Margot’s once breathtaking beauty was fading, but then so was her tyrannical family. After the death of her mother and the assassination of her brother, Henri, both in 1589, she was the last of the Valois line. As French law barred women from inheriting the throne, it went to the nearest male relative. He happened to be Margot’s long estranged husband, who became King Henry IV. With him began the Bourbon line of French kings. A genuine friendship developed between the childless couple and, for a fat settlement, Margot agreed to divorce Henry so he could remarry and start a family.
Obese and heavily made up as she aged, often sporting a little blonde wig, Margot started to look like a
caricature of her former self. As she reveled in her freedom, her libido became exaggerated as well. Where once only noble gentlemen shared her bed, now she had her way with a series of virile young nobodies, among them the son of a local coppersmith, a shepherd, a strolling musician, and a son of a carpenter. The ex-queen took good care of her men, giving them positions and titles, and even sometimes arranging advantageous marriages for them. One, however, made her mad when he proved too devoted a husband to the maid she had chosen for him, leaving poor Margot out in the cold.
The French monarchy reached its glorious pinnacle during the long reign of Henry IV’s grandson, Louis XIV (1643-1715), only to sputter out completely in the years following Louis XVI’s execution in 1793. If Louis XV—who reigned in between—had any idea he was occupying a throne teetering toward collapse, he wasn’t about to let that ruin a good time. And a good time for Louis meant massive amounts of sex.
Successfully conquering a boyhood shyness around women, Louis XV became so insatiable that he had a private bordello established for himself at Versailles. This ensured a woman would be available whenever he needed one, which was most of the time. While over the years Louis had a number of official mistresses installed at court—including most famously Madame Pompadour, who wielded enormous power due to her influence on the king, and Madame Du Barry, a former prostitute plucked from obscurity to service him in splendor—they weren’t always enough to satisfy this monarch’s unrelenting libido. Certainly his homely and uninspiring Polish queen, Marie Leczinska, wasn’t up to the task. She pooped out after giving Louis ten children in ten years.
At one point during the king’s priapic career, he went through five sisters in succession—most of them already married. “Is it faithlessness or constancy to choose an entire family?” went a popular verse of the time. The first of the sisters, Madame de Mailly, was Louis XV’s very first mistress. After she had initiated the king to the pleasures of adultery, she made the mistake of inviting her sister to court. “You bore me,” Louis sniffed as he unceremoniously dismissed Madame de Mailly and replaced her with her sister, Madame de Vintimille. This one only had a brief tenure with Madame de Vintimille dying less than a year later while giving birth to the king’s bastard. She was replaced by yet another sister, Madame de la Tournelle, who was somewhat wiser than her siblings. She demanded the title of duchess, a large apartment in Versailles, an unlimited allowance, public pregnancies, legitimatized bastards, and the exile of her already discarded sister, Madame de Mailly. She got everything she requested, but perhaps forgot to ask for protection from two more sisters waiting in the wings. They had their turn, too.
3
England Swings
The British are rarely associated with blazing sensuality. Stiff upper lips, maybe, but that’s about the extent of it. Considering the rich and nuanced sexual proclivities of a millennium’s worth of British monarchs, this bland reputation hardly seems deserved.
Those meeting King Edward IV in the late fifteenth century often found him surprisingly affable and unaffected. “He was so genial in his greeting,” noted contemporary chronicler Domenico Mancini, “that when he saw a newcomer bewildered by his regal appearance and royal pomp, he would give him courage to speak by laying a kindly hand on his shoulder.” Maybe this was true for the guys. Most women, however, experienced something entirely different when they encountered the tall, handsome monarch.
“He was licentious in the extreme,” Mancini reported. “It was said that he behaved very badly towards numerous women after seducing them because, as soon as he grew tired with the affair, much against their will he would pass the ladies on to other courtiers. He pursued indiscriminately married and unmarried, noble and low-born, though he never raped them. He overcame them all by money and promises and then, having had them, he got rid of them.” It would be interesting to know how exactly Mancini defined rape, given his account of how King Edward threatened Elizabeth Woodville with a dagger when she had the audacity to resist him before they were married.
By royal standards of the time, Edward IV’s grandson, Henry VIII, had relatively few mistresses. That’s because he married most of them. Henry seems to have had a thing for the hired help, creating one hell of a hostile work environment. His second wife, Anne Boleyn (whose sister Henry also slept with) had been a lady-in-waiting to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, while his third wife, Jane Seymour, had served both the first and the second. Then he met and fell in love with his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, while she was working for his fourth, Anne of Cleves. Two of these former employees would lose their heads.3
Sex and violent death were as closely intertwined in the psyche of Henry’s younger daughter, Elizabeth I, as sleeping and dreaming. She was not yet three years old when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed for adultery, and she was nine when her young stepmother, Catherine Howard, was dragged away screaming to her own date with the headsman.
As a teenager, Elizabeth enjoyed the flirtatious attentions of Thomas Seymour—her first stepmother’s brother who had married her last stepmother, Katherine Parr, after the death of Henry VIII in 1547. Seymour was beheaded, too, in part for his attempts to seduce her. Little wonder, then, that Elizabeth decided to stay single.
Despite her much lauded spinsterhood, a sexually charged aura attached itself to “The Virgin Queen” for most of her glorious reign. Elizabeth had an enduring passion for one Robert Dudley, going back to the days when they were both held prisoner in the Tower of London by her sister “Bloody” Mary I. As soon as she ascended the throne in 1558, the young, red-headed queen made Dudley her Master of the Horse, and eventually Earl of Leicester. She ordered his apartments at court moved closer to hers and flirted with him in public while enthusiastically extolling his virtues of body and mind. The Spanish ambassador reported that “Lord Robert has come so much into favor that he does whatever he pleases with affairs and it is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.”
This was a couple of centuries before Catherine the Great came to Russia’s throne, and a time when female monarchs were rare and their sexuality expected to be beyond reproach. But the inevitable gossip arising from her dalliances with Lord Robert didn’t faze this virgin queen in the least. When her old governess, Katherine Ashley, begged Elizabeth to be more circumspect in her dealings with her favorite, she denied any misbehavior by irritably pointing out the attendants who surrounded her at all times and made any secret dalliance nearly impossible. “Although,” she concluded in a proud snit, “if I had the will . . . I do not know of anyone who could forbid me!”
Indeed, at twenty-five, the new queen was enjoying the intoxicating sensation of being free for the first time in her life to do exactly as she pleased. And although she was determined never to marry—or risk pregnancy by a fully realized affair—she was happy to wallow in the overtly sexual company of her handsome Master of the Horse, wagging tongues be damned. The fact that Dudley was married and came from humble origins with a tainted family history4 posed no obstacle to the increasingly scandalous affair. Even the suspicious death of his wife, who ended up at the bottom of a stairway with a broken neck, was only a temporary damper. In fact, the intense relationship with the queen lasted until his death in 1588.
Devoted as she was to him, though, Dudley was by no means the only man in Elizabeth’s life. She basked in the attention of foreign princes seeking her hand, and of increasingly younger courtiers like Sir Walter Ralegh and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex (Dudley’s stepson), all of whom professed to worship her. Through it all, the queen played the wily coquette, absorbing all the professions of love yet never committing to anyone.
Inheriting the tremendous vanity of her father Henry VIII, she encouraged the ritualized cult that surrounded her as she grew older. Flattery was the name of the game and Elizabeth’s suitors played to win, rhapsodizing endlessly about her magnificent beauty and glorious majesty. The courting rituals grew rather pathetic as the queen reached the end of
her forty-four-year reign. Balding, with blackening teeth from too much sugar consumption and thick, white pancake makeup to cover her smallpox-scarred face, she was hardly England’s rarest beauty. Yet the rewards were potentially great enough for men to attempt to convince her that she was.
Elizabeth’s cousin and heir, James I, also reveled in the attention received from handsome young courtiers. One of his favorites was George Villiers, whom he gave the title of Duke of Buckingham. A contemporary wrote about the king’s relationship with Buckingham and his predecessor in the king’s affections, Robert Carr, Lord Somerset: “Now, as no other reason appeared in favour of their choyce but handsomenesse, so the love the King shewed was as amorously conveyed as if he had mistaken their sex, and thought them ladies; which I have seene Sommerset and Buckingham labour to resemble in effiminatenesse of their dressings; though in W[horeson] lookes and wanton gestures, they exceeded any part of woman kind my conversation did ever cope with all.”
It is perhaps ironic that those fundamentalists repulsed by homosexuality would condemn King James by citing the very Bible that bears his name. In any event, his preference for men was not uncommon among British kings. William II, Richard I—the lion-hearted hero-king of the Robin Hood legends—and Edward II were all reputed to have been gay.
Charles II, King James’s grandson, was anything but gay. He had a fleet of paramours that help explain his moniker, “The Merry Monarch.” He wasn’t choosy either, drawing his lovers from all levels of society and siring scads of bastards by them. “A king is supposed to be the father of his people and Charles certainly was father to a good many of them,” noted George Villiers, son of the first Duke of Buckingham. Yet while his many mistresses bore him lots of children, his queen, alas, could not. With no legitimate heir to succeed Charles upon his death, the crown passed to his brother, James II, in 1685.
A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens Page 2