A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens

by Farquhar, Michael

  As the pope lingered on his bed, unable to swallow, his face turned the color of mulberry and his skin started to peel off. The fat of his belly liquified, while his bowels bled. Alexander finally died after hours of agony, but the indignity he faced was only just beginning. As the pope’s blackened corpse started to putrefy, the tongue swelled and forced open the mouth, which, according to Burchard, was foaming like a kettle over a fire. The bloated body, growing as wide as it was long, finally burst, emitting sulphurous fumes from every orifice. It was, the Venetian ambassador wrote, “the ugliest, most monstrous and horrible dead body that was ever seen, without any form or likeness of humanity.” The same could be said of the Church that was by now ripe for Reformation.

  11

  Indulge Me If You Will

  Pope Leo X ignored all the signs of the Church fraying around him. He was too busy having fun. “Now I can really enjoy myself,” the pope wrote to his cousin right after his election in 1513. And indeed he did. A lavish entertainer, Leo spent enormous sums on food, wine, and after-dinner diversions. He loved the company of young men, indulging in “those pleasures which cannot, with decency, be mentioned,” as the Florentine statesman Francesco Guicciardini wrote. Maybe that’s why this pope never had any “nephews.”

  He was a grand patron of the arts, who “would have been a perfect pope,” one contemporary historian wrote, “if to these [artistic] accomplishments he had added even the slightest knowledge of religion.” This assessment of Leo’s spirituality was not entirely fair, however. After all, he was sensitive enough to know that he could never order a Christian to execute a cardinal who had conspired against him. In a great display of piety, he hired a Muslim to do the job.

  Leo had elaborate building plans to monumentalize his papacy. The greatest of all was the rebuilding of St. Peter’s, which had been razed by his predecessor Julius II. He wanted the new structure to be the biggest and grandest church in all the world. His ambitions, however, required a constant influx of cash, and Leo was always short. To remedy the situation, he settled on an age-old papal prerogative—the sale of indulgences to fill his coffers.

  The notion that people could actually buy their way into heaven by paying off the pope enraged a German monk by the name of Martin Luther. In an act of bold defiance against this form of papal abuse, Luther took a hammer and nailed his Ninety-Five Theses Upon Indulgences to the doors of the cathedral at Wittenberg in 1517. “The Pope’s wealth far exceeds that of all other men,” Luther wrote. “Why does he not build the Church of St. Peter with his own money instead of the money of poor Christians?” Leo X recognized the danger to the papacy Luther represented, excommunicating him and ordering him burned in effigy, but he died without doing anything to reform the Church that was continuing to unravel by dissent.

  12

  In the Ghetto

  Unlike Leo, Paul IV wasn’t about to sit around the Vatican pleasuring himself while kings and commoners alike gave Rome the collective finger. Elected at age seventy-nine, this vile-tempered, foul-mouthed Vicar of Christ was probably too old—and way too mean—to enjoy himself anyway. Instead, this pope was a fierce reactionary determined to reassert the supreme power of the papacy.

  Paul started with a little house cleaning. He was so disgusted by the nudes Michelangelo had created in the Sistine Chapel that he ordered clothes painted on a swath of them. The artist who completed this task, Daniele da Volterra, became known as “The Britches Maker.” In his fury at the Reformation that was sweeping Christendom, Paul reignited the fires of the Roman Inquisition. Often presiding over heresy trials himself, the pope dared anyone to challenge him or his authority. Even Ignatius Loyola, the great soldier turned saint, “trembled in every bone” at the thought of crossing Paul.

  In his drive to maintain orthodoxy, the pope created the Index of Forbidden Books, a landmark in thought control that would linger well into the twentieth century. Among the first entries were the works of the Dutch scholar Erasmus and all Bibles not written in Latin. In time, authors added to the list would include everyone from Boccaccio to Galileo, who was persecuted by Pope Urban VIII in the next century for daring to suggest that the earth revolved around the sun—not the other way around.

  As much as Paul IV hated dissent, though, he hated Jews even more. While the papacy had never been a model of tolerance—cursing the Jews for having killed Christ—Paul took to persecuting them with an unprecedented ferocity. In a preview of Nazi policy still almost four hundred years away, he herded all the Jews of Rome into ghettos and forced them to sell their property to Christians at ridiculously low prices. He also ordered them to wear distinctive yellow headgear and forbade them to marry Christians or attend to them as physicians. Jewish synagogues were destroyed and sacred texts burned.

  And though he was the most despised pope of the century—upon his death in 1559, joyful crowds rampaged through Rome smashing his statues—Paul IV’s legacy of intolerance lingered for centuries. It took a far greater pope in the twentieth century to begin to atone for all the hatred and injustice that had been sown. “The Mark of Cain is stamped upon our foreheads,” the gentle and beloved Pope John XXIII wrote in a prayer. “Across the centuries, our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, and shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy Love. Forgive us, Lord, for the curse we falsely attributed to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.”

  PART IX

  Death Be Not Dignified

  For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

  —Richard II, Act III, scene ii

  All things must pass, it is true, but it seems the Grim Reaper got a little giddy when it came to swatting down royalty. With all that pomp and pretense just begging to be punctured, how could he resist? Certainly Death was diabolically inventive in the variety of undignified demises he concocted for his royal victims, but, clever as he was, there were some notable occasions when the Great Leveler truly outdid himself.

  At bottom, Edward II meets a ghastly end.

  1

  A Tight Squeeze

  William the Conqueror was an impressive figure at the turn of the last millennium, a fearsome warrior whose life seemed to be one spectacular triumph after another. He defied the taint of illegitimacy at an early age—back when they still called him William the Bastard—to become the Duke of Normandy. Out-maneuvering dangerous relatives, subduing restless nobles, and checking the territorial ambitions of neighboring states, Duke William consolidated his power and then set his sights on Britain. There he easily defeated the English King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and became the first of the long line of monarchs who have ruled Britain ever since. But two decades later he died, and things didn’t go so well after that.

  With his last breath in 1087, the once awesome ruler was instantly transformed into a bloated corpse destined for a series of indignities he could never have imagined during his lifetime. Actually, the humiliation began shortly before William expired—with the wound that killed him. While fighting in France, the warrior king was felled not by an enemy’s ax or sword, but by his own saddle—gouged on its horn when his horse reared at a burning ruin. History does not record exactly where on his person William was ruptured. One can only imagine.

  The stricken king was taken by his retainers to the priory of Saint-Gervais, where he died several days later. With their sovereign dead, William’s loyal companions immediately raced off to secure their own interests, leaving the body alone with the servants. William the Conqueror was now ripe for the picking. Seizing the opportunity, the greedy staff started hauling away all his possessions, even his clothes, and the dead king was left on the floor nearly naked.

  The Norman chronicler Ordericus Vitalis recorded the whole ghastly episode a generation later: “Behold this mighty prince who was lately obsequiously obeyed by more than a hundred thousand men in arms, and at whose nod nations trembled, was now stri
pped by his own attendants, in a house which was not his own, and left on the bare ground from early morn to almost noon.”

  And yet the ordeal wasn’t over. Eventually King William’s body was collected by a group of monks and given a funeral. When it came time to place the corpse in its coffin, however, the gathered were stunned to find it didn’t quite fit. William had to be crammed in. He had grown a bit obese after his glory days, so this was difficult. Suddenly the church was filled with a horrible stench. Ordericus Vitalis concludes the story: “His corpulent stomach, fattened with so many delicacies, shamefully burst, to give a lesson, both to the prudent and the thoughtless, on what is the end of fleshy glory.”

  2

  A Royal Pain in the Ass

  Tall, strong, and golden-haired, Edward II looked every inch the medieval ideal of kingly splendor. And were it not for his penchant for perfumed male lovers and the utter contempt he felt for his wife and his royal duties, the image might have been complete. As it stood, though, this English king spent most of his time fawning over one Piers Gaveston, whom Edward’s ma-cho father, Edward I, had banished from the kingdom during the previous reign for unseemly behavior with his son.

  Showering Gaveston with land, titles, and sexual treats when he inherited the throne in 1307, King Edward managed to alienate his queen, Isabella of France, and England’s most powerful magnates. Isabella could not have been too pleased, in fact, when Edward gave Gaveston all their wedding presents and indicated from the beginning that he far preferred Gaveston’s bed to hers. And the nobles found it more than a little irritating that the king ignored them while bestowing fortune and honors upon this upstart who openly mocked them.

  Fed up, the barons wrenched Gaveston away from the king and chopped off his head. Like an oversexed hydra, however, new favorites immediately sprang up in his place. Now it was Isabella who had finally had enough. Fleeing to her native France, the queen took herself a lover, Roger Mortimer, and raised an army to invade her wayward husband’s kingdom.

  In September 1326, they arrived in England without meeting any resistance. The king was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Edward III, and was kept starving in the dungeon of Berkeley Castle. Isabella and Mortimer wanted Edward dead, but killed in a way that would leave no mark on his body. Accordingly, he met a ghastly demise involving the insertion of a red-hot iron poker.

  3

  Spinning in Her Grave

  As the last of Henry VIII’s six wives, Katherine Parr was fortunate enough to outlive the dangerously fickle old king. Afterwards, she even got to marry the love of her life, Thomas Seymour, who happened to be her late husband’s former brother-in-law. Life was bliss for the thirty-nine-year-old Queen Dowager, but it was suddenly cut short soon after she gave birth to her only child in 1547. Though she was interred at the chapel of her Sudely Castle estate, she would not rest in peace for centuries to come.

  The chapel holding Katherine Parr’s remains began to fall into neglect after some years, and by the 1700s it had crumbled to such an extent that no one was really sure where exactly the late queen rested. Then, in 1782, the occupant of the Sudely property, a man named John Lucas, came across her coffin amidst the rubble of the old chapel. His morbid curiosity overwhelming any respect he may have had for dead royalty, Lucas hacked open the casket. In it he found the almost perfectly preserved remains of the queen who had been dead for more than two hundred years.

  The pristine corpse didn’t retain its freshness for long, though. People were reporting a sickening stench emanating from it a year later. A stone slab was placed on the tomb to discourage further sightseeing, but ten years after that, Queen Katherine was disturbed yet again. A group of drunken men decided she needed a proper burial and proceeded to dig a grave. Unfortunately, they tossed her in upside down.

  In the early nineteenth century, the ivy-choked tomb was rediscovered. This time it was sealed shut once and for all. A marble effigy of the queen was placed in the restored chapel at Sudely, and an altar there was dedicated to her memory. Nearly three centuries after her death, Katherine Parr was finally at rest.

  4

  Strike Three

  Mary Queen of Scots had a real knack for getting herself into trouble. She married a jerk just because he looked good, and then eloped with the chief suspect in his murder.38 After abdicating the throne and fleeing her disgusted Scottish subjects, she was kept prisoner in England by her cousin Elizabeth I for almost twenty years. During this time she was involved in no fewer than four dangerous plots designed to free her and place her on the English throne, one of which finally sealed her doom. It seems the Scottish queen was a genius at making bad choices. Still, no matter what kind of mess Mary had made of her life, it didn’t compare to the mess an inexperienced executioner made of her.

  After Queen Elizabeth reluctantly signed her cousin’s death warrant, events moved quickly. None of her counselors wanted the English queen, who despaired at the idea of executing a fellow monarch, to suddenly change her mind as she often did. On the morning of February 8, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was led into the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle. Eyes straight ahead, back rigid, and head held high, she paused at the foot of the steps leading to the black-draped scaffold upon which she was to die. Her once magnificent looks had faded with age and years of imprisonment, but she still radiated royal dignity.

  Reaching the platform, the forty-four-year-old queen was directed to sit in a chair as the warrant of her execution was read aloud. Looking about the Great Hall, she saw the crowd gathered to witness her demise. More than one hundred people were riveted by the unfolding spectacle. Nearby was the hooded executioner dressed entirely in black, the instrument of his trade lying on the floor.

  As she faced the block where she was to lose her head, Mary saw herself as a martyr for her Catholic faith and she was proud. Suddenly, though, a man emerged from the crowd and interrupted the moment. “I am the Dean of Peterborough!” he shouted. “It is not too late to embrace the true faith! Yea, the Reformed Religion, which hath . . .” Mary, taken aback, interjected calmly, saying: “Good Mister Dean, trouble not yourself any more about this matter. I was born in this religion, have lived in this religion, and am resolved to die in this religion.”

  As the dean continued his exhortation, Mary turned away and prayed quietly in Latin. The headsman stepped forward and knelt before her. “Forgive me,” he said, as decorum required. “I forgive you and all the world with all my heart,” she answered gently, “for I hope this death will make an end to all my troubles.”

  Wishful thinking.

  Rising, the executioner offered to help the queen disrobe in preparation for the ax. Declining politely, Mary turned instead to her ladies-in-waiting for assistance. They unbuttoned her black gown, revealing a vibrant crimson one underneath. Her veil and headdress were removed and set on a nearby stool. Taking out a gold-bordered handkerchief, she handed it to one of her ladies, whose hands were trembling so much that Mary had to help secure it as her blindfold.

  Someone then led the queen to the block and helped her to kneel on the cushion before it. She reached out, groping for the cold wood, and placed her neck on it. “Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,” she whispered in Latin, as the executioner raised his ax and brought it down hard.

  THWACK!

  A groan was heard coming from the victim. To his horror, the executioner had missed his target, grazing the side of the queen’s skull instead. “Sweet Jesus,” she was heard to mutter before the ax was lifted again. This time it nearly severed neck from body. Angry and exasperated, the executioner sawed through the remaining flesh. The head rolled away, while the body fell on its back, gushing blood. “God save Queen Elizabeth,” the executioner shouted as he grasped the severed head by the hair and raised it to the crowd. Suddenly, it fell and rolled away, leaving in his hand only a red wig. Onlookers gasped, seeing the gray-haired head, suddenly old, facing them, lips still moving.

  The executioner then lifted the que
en’s dress to remove her garters, his time-honored prerogative, but was startled as a small dog emerged from the folds. Mary’s pet, Geddon, had been hidden in the dress. The little dog rushed to the corpse and circled, confused and distraught, then began to howl. The Protestant dean who had earlier confronted Mary leapt to the platform and pushed the dog’s face into the pool of blood. “Remember what [John] Knox prophesied about the dogs drinking her blood!” he screeched. “Drink, you cur!” But Geddon resisted, instead sinking his teeth into the dean’s hand.

  Mary’s head was displayed on a velvet cushion before an open window at Fotheringhay Castle. Her crucifix, prayer book, bloodstained clothes, the execution block and anything she had touched were taken to the courtyard and burned, obliterating all traces of the mutilated queen.

  5

  Prescription for Disaster

  After Charles II suffered what was probably a minor stroke in 1685, twelve physicians were summoned to the royal chambers and immediately set upon a course intended to rid the English king’s body of all poisons. They extracted a full quart of his blood. They drained him of liquids by administering powerful emetics and enemas. Charles, not surprisingly, remained ill.

  The doctors were on top of the situation, though. Over the next few days, they shaved the king’s scalp and singed it with burning irons, filled his nose with sneezing powder, covered him with hot plasters and then ripped them off. After Charles complained of a sore throat, body aches, and cold sweats, the medics rubbed his feet with a mixture of resin and pigeon feces.