The king was sinking rapidly. The doctors pulled out all the stops. It was time to exercise the most sophisticated techniques known to modern practitioners. They drilled holes in the royal noggin to drain off the bad humors. But it was no use. Five days after treatment began, “The Merry Monarch” breathed his last, apologizing for taking so long to die, and thanking his physicians for the heroic efforts to save him.
6
A Look of Detachment
Charles II left lots of bastards when he died, but no legitimate heirs to succeed him on the throne. This didn’t stop his eldest son, James, Duke of Monmouth, from making an armed grab for the crown anyway. The revolt was a flop, easily squashed by the forces of Monmouth’s uncle, King James II, who ordered his ambitious nephew beheaded. What happened next is an irresistible tale, frequently told by the Yeoman Warders at the Tower of London.
After the duke’s execution, someone remembered that no official portrait of him existed. Treasonous bastard though he may have been, he was still the son of a king and it seemed only proper that his image be preserved. With his head now hacked off, it would be difficult for Monmouth to pose for an artist. But not impossible. All it took was a little ingenuity. The severed head was simply sewn back on the body, which was then propped up for its sitting. It should be noted for the record that certain authorities dispute the Beefeaters’ story of the reattached head, but what fun are they?
7
Eat Your Heart Out
When a king of France died, he was subject to a fairly rigorous post-mortem. His body was sliced open from throat to hips, after which his internal organs were removed and preserved. This ritual wasn’t so bad. After all, it was part of an old tradition going back to the ancient Egyptians. The procedure took an odd twist with Louis XIV, however. While the hearts of most French kings were placed in gilded urns to rest for eternity, the Sun King’s ended up in the stomach of an English eccentric. Or so the story goes.
Blame it on the French Revolution. Sure, Louis XIV had been dead for decades before the popular uprising even started, but he was royal, and as his descendent Louis XVI discovered on the guillotine, royalty wasn’t going over very well at the time. Even dead royalty. At the Cathedral of St. Denis, an angry mob raided the tomb of the king who had gloriously wallowed in absolute monarchy for more than half a century.39 They stole his embalmed heart.
The organ was then sold to an English nobleman, Lord Harcourt, who in turn sold it to the dean of Westminster, Rev. William Buckland. When the good dean died, the heart passed by inheritance to his son, Francis Buckland. Frank, as he was called by his friends, was a scientifically minded man, but nevertheless a bit bizarre. He was among the founders of the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals in the United Kingdom, whose goal it was to import and raise exotic animals to increase the national food supply.
For a while Buckland was satisfied devouring kangaroo, ostrich, and the like, but soon his palate became more adventurous. Almost anything organic would do. And here’s where Louis XIV’s heart came in. According to one report, Buckland produced the dried organ at dinner one evening. “I have eaten many strange things in my lifetime,” a startled guest recalled him saying, “but I have never before eaten the heart of a king.”
In a few gulps, the Sun King became a gourmet snack.
8
Royal Flush
George II never did get much respect. Although he was a brave warrior—the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle, in fact—the German-born king seemed unable to shake the aura of absurdity that surrounded him. His British subjects, led by his own son, laughed at his thick accent, stifling court, and drooling lechery.40 Even his death in 1760 lacked dignity. Poor George died straining on the toilet.
9
A Lot Off the Top
Marie Antoinette’s enduring reputation for decadent extravagance is not entirely unearned. Even if she never actually dismissed reports of widespread bread shortages with the infamous line, “Let them eat cake,” her lavish lifestyle nevertheless flew smack in the face of the abject poverty and hunger that surrounded her. The puffed and powdered queen blithely ignored the misery, immersing herself instead in a cycle of elaborate ceremony, obsessive spending, and absurd fashion.
“The queen is a pretty woman,” her brother, the Austrian emperor Joseph II, wrote during a visit to France in 1777, “but she is empty-headed, unable as yet to find her advantage, and wastes her days running from dissipation to dissipation, some of which are perfectly allowable but nonetheless dangerous because they prevent her from having the thoughts she needs so badly.”
Maybe it was the big hair. Piles and piles of it. The enormous coiffures the queen so fancied—hours spent in their construction, reaching several feet high, and elaborately decorated with fruits, feathers, jewels, and figurines—seemed to sum up her entire vacuous existence. The head that carried this frivolous mass would eventually be lopped off amid the screeches of revolutionary madness, but it was the degrading existence Marie Antoinette was forced to endure just prior to her public execution that offered the starkest contrast to her former life as France’s over-pampered queen.
Whereas she once amused herself amid the glitter and luxury of Versailles with hundreds of fawning nobles eagerly competing to attend to her every whim, she was now held in a blackened prison cell that dripped with moisture and was kept frigid in the absence of a fireplace. The rich gowns and adornments were all gone, replaced by a single frayed black dress. Deprived of her children, or even the comfort of a single candle at night, the former queen—now known as prisoner number 280—suffered illness and severe anxiety all alone on a narrow, filthy cot.
She was taken from her cell to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal, which was an utter travesty. Absurd accusations of murder, treason, and even incest with her own son were hurled at “the Austrian Bitch,” as she was called, without any consideration for the truth. It was here, however, that the once flighty and spoiled queen proved her mettle. She addressed the court with dignity and honor, seeming to transcend the deadly spectacle that engulfed her.
“One saw sadness in the faces of the honest spectators,” an eyewitness of the trial recorded, “and madness in the eyes of the crowd of men and women placed in the room by design—madness which, more than once, gave way to emotions of pity and admiration. The accusers and judges did not succeed in hiding their anger, or the involuntary confusion they felt at the Queen’s noble firmness.”
The preordained verdict was death—the same fate her husband Louis XVI had met nine months earlier.41 The ex-queen was brought back to her miserable cell to await the guillotine. On the appointed day, October 16, 1793, she sent farewells to her children and in her prayer book wrote, “My God have pity on me! My eyes have no more tears to shed for you, my poor children. Adieu. Adieu!”
She then had to prepare herself for the execution scheduled for midday. When she was queen, Marie Antoinette always had a giddy coterie on hand as she picked out the day’s wardrobe and took her luxurious bath behind a screen for modesty. Now there was only one woman assigned to her. Bleeding heavily, she asked the maid to stand in front of her while she undressed and changed her soiled undergarments. “The [guard] came up to us at once,” the woman recalled, “and, standing by the headrest, watched her change. She put her fichu up to cover her shoulders, and with great sweetness said to the young man, ‘In the name of decency, monsieur, let me change my linen in private.’ ” The guard, claiming he had orders to watch the prisoner’s every movement, refused to look away, so the former queen was forced to take off her stained petticoat with as much modesty as she could manage and stuff it into a chink in the wall.
Soon it was time to go. The executioner, who happened to be the son of the man who had beheaded Louis XVI, came in to tie up her hands and cut off her hair. She had hoped that she would be carried to the execution site in a coach, as her husband had been, but saw when she left the prison that a cart awaited her—a cart used to carry comm
on criminals to their deaths. Feeling her bowels loosen, the former queen of France had to request that her hands be unbound so she could relieve herself against the prison wall.
Riding backwards on the cart to the Place de la Revolution, she stoically endured the jeers of the inflamed crowds that lined the route. It was a festive occasion all around. In the square where the guillotine stood, people were selling fruits and wine to the excited onlookers who closed in around the scaffold to watch “the Widow Capet” lose her head.
In the middle of this horrific circus, Marie Antoinette—looking old well beyond her years, with her white hair shorn—remained calm and dignified. Accidentally stepping on the executioner’s foot as she ascended the scaffold, she apologized gently. “Pardon, monsieur. I did not mean to do it.” She was then tied down on the beheading machine and the wooden collar was snapped around her neck. In an instant the head was severed and held aloft for all to see. The crowd roared its approval.
10
The Case of the Purloined Penis
A man deserves some measure of dignity when he dies, but Napoleon Bonaparte seems to have ended up a few inches short. If the provenance of the small, shriveled object preserved in a New York hospital is correct, the little emperor is buried in Paris without a key part of his anatomy.
While age has obviously taken its toll on the missing member, which is about the size of a pinkie finger, there apparently wasn’t much to begin with. “His reproductive organs were small and apparently atrophied,” a physician attending Napoleon’s autopsy in 1821 later noted. “He is said to have been impotent for some time before he died.”
It was after this autopsy, performed on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, where Napoleon had been exiled under British military supervision after plunging most of Europe into war, that a Corsican chaplain named Vignali reportedly swiped the imperial penis with a quick slice of the knife. “Voila! I have it!” he is said to have written.
The cleric’s motivation was simple, according to New York urologist and Napoleon collector John Lattimer, who now owns the dried-up piece of history and keeps it preserved in its own little casket. Napoleon was abusive and insulting to his fellow Corsican, typical behavior for the obnoxious emperor, and Vignali became enraged.
“The Corsicans are a very emotional lot,” notes Lattimer, who says Vignali would have had time “to get his revenge and nip off his bit” after the autopsy was over. In the tropical heat, Lattimer offers from experience that the stench from the post-mortem would have been almost unbearable. As soon as the body was sewn back up, the British officers overseeing the procedure would have been glad to take their leave, allowing a brief opportunity for Vignali to emasculate the emperor.
As to whether the tiny object in his possession is the real thing, Lattimer has no doubt. It was part of a larger collection of Napoleonana, ownership of which can be traced right back to Vignali. “I have not seen anything that undermines its credibility,” he says. “There are no obvious holes in the continuity of ownership.”
The doctor has treated Napoleon’s most private of parts with utmost respect since he acquired it in the early 1970s. He never puts it on display and will not allow it to be photographed. He even offered to return it to the Invalides in Paris, where Napoleon is buried, but has not received an official response so far. Perhaps the French are not eager to acknowledge, as The Washington Post so eloquently put it, that “their noble heritage may derive, in part, from a legacy that is not so much gilded, but gelded.”
11
Extreme Overkill
The Bolsheviks ended three hundred years of Romanov rule in Russia when they murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918, but they were not especially proud of the way they did it. Many details of the killings remained shameful state secrets for decades, giving rise to rumors that some members of the family may have actually survived the slaughter. Romantic legends and clever imposters would further obscure the truth. It was only after the fall of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union that the complete picture started to emerge. Long-hidden reports of chief executioner Yakov Yurovsky, the discovery of the Romanovs’ bones, and major advances in forensic science all served to expose just how hideous these murders really were.
During the night of October 16-17, 1918, the deposed emperor and his family were wakened, told to dress and to assemble quickly in the basement of the mansion in the Siberian town of Ekaterinburg, where they had been kept prisoners for the past seventy-eight days. On the walls, filthy graffiti mocked the doomed family as they walked by. Nicholas carried his only son, thirteen-year-old Alexis, who was crippled by hemophilia. The tsar was followed by his ailing wife, Empress Alexandra, and his four beautiful daughters: Olga, twenty-two; Tatiana, twenty-one; Marie, nineteen; and, carrying her pet spaniel, Anastasia, seventeen. Accompanying the family were four loyal members of the staff who had stayed with them during their imprisonment: Nicholas’s personal physician, Dr. Botkin, and his valet, Alouzy Trupp; Alexandra’s maid, Anna Demidova; and the cook, Ivan Kharitonov.
Arriving in the designated room, suspecting nothing, the group was told to line up against a wall to have their picture taken. But instead of a photographer, twelve armed men entered the room. Yurovsky, the lead executioner, stood in front of the tsar and read from a piece of paper. “In view of the fact that your [German] relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia,” he declared, “the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.”
Stunned, Nicholas barely had time to react before Yurovsky shot him dead at point blank range. With that, the rest of the men started firing wildly. Empress Alexandra, who had been sitting in a chair provided for her, died instantly, as did the eldest daughter, Olga, the doctor, and two of the staff.
For the others, however, death did not come so quickly. The killers were shocked to find their bullets ricocheting off the three other daughters, the tsarevitch, and the maid, Demidova. Confused, they attacked them with bayonets, which failed to penetrate, causing the executioners to stab them all the more ferociously. The tsarevitch was brutally kicked in the head and shot twice in the ear. The bloody and gunsmoke-filled room was then quiet as the killers started carrying the bodies out in sheets. Suddenly, one of the daughters stirred and cried out. The men quickly set on her, savagely attacking her until she was still.
The bodies were tossed in a waiting truck and taken to an abandoned mine shaft about twelve miles away. Near the site, the corpses were unloaded and undressed. Immediately it became clear why the bullets and bayonets had been so ineffective on some of them. Sewn into corsets and other undergarments were row upon row of diamonds that had helped deflect the onslaught. “No one is responsible for their death agonies but themselves,” Yurovsky recorded. “There turned out to be eighteen pounds of such valuables. By the way, their greed turned out to be so great that on Alexandra Fyodorovna there was a simply huge piece of gold wire bent into the shape of a bracelet of around a pound in weight. All these valuables were immediately ripped out so that we wouldn’t have to drag the bloody clothing with us.”
As their clothes were burned, the naked bodies were laid out on the grass. The once beautiful faces of the daughters were now unrecognizable after having been smashed and battered by rifle butts. Some of them were violated. “I felt the empress myself and she was warm,” one of the killers said. “Now I can die in peace because I have squeezed the empress’s———,” said another. The last word was deleted from the report.
All the bodies were then tossed into the mine shaft. Yurovsky dropped in several hand grenades to collapse the structure, but they were largely ineffective. He soon realized that the burial site was too exposed and subject to discovery by the approaching White Army, which was loyal to the tsar and from whom the Bolsheviks wished to keep the murders hidden. It was decided that the corpses of the Romanovs and their staff would have to be moved. Yurovsky returned to the site and ordered the mangled bodies pulled out of the shaft. All the White Army
investigators later found there were bits and pieces of the family’s possessions, including a child’s military belt buckle, which the tsarevitch had worn, and the decaying corpse of Anastasia’s pet dog. They also found a severed finger thought to have been Alexandra’s.
Yurovsky moved the bodies to a more remote location. Two were burned, one of which was Alexis. Scientists differ on whether the other was Anastasia or Marie. The rest were tossed into a hastily dug grave. Yurovsky attempted to disfigure them further by pouring on sulfuric acid. When the bones were discovered decades later, scientists examining them were shocked at how much damage had been so brutally inflicted on them. Faces had been completely crushed and bones looked like a truck had rolled over them. Dr. Ludmilla Koryakova had exhumed plenty of skeletons in the course of her work. “But never,” she told the Sunday Times, “so many that were so badly damaged—so violated. I was ill.”
On July 17, 1998, eighty years after the murders, the remains of the Romanov family and staff were finally laid to rest at the eighteenth-century Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, a mausoleum for the tsars since the time of Peter the Great. Russian president Boris Yeltsin paid tribute to the family with a stirring apology. “All these years, we were silent about this horrible crime,” he said. “Those who perpetrated this crime and those who for decades have been finding excuses for it are guilty. All of us are guilty. One cannot lie to oneself and explain away wanton cruelty as political necessity. . . . We are all responsible to the historic memory of the people. That’s why I should come here as a person and as president. I bow my head before the victims of a senseless murder.”
A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens Page 22