The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  In the years that followed, the Prince made it difficult for Caroline to see their daughter; exasperated, she left for the Continent, returning to Britain only after George III died in January 1820 and her husband succeeded him. Any hopes that Caroline may have had that she would be welcomed back as his queen were swiftly dashed. George banned her from his coronation, held at Westminster Abbey on 19th July 1821, and when she turned up regardless, she was sent away by prizefighters dressed as pages. This was like a death blow to the unfortunate Caroline: she was taken ill while watching a performance at Drury Lane Theatre a few days later and, to George’s apparent delight, died on 7th August.

  In addition to his well-documented liaisons with Fitzherbert and Robinson, and Ladies Jersey, Hertford and Conyngham, George had at least thirteen other mistresses as well as very many other short-lived affairs. Yet Fitzherbert appear to have been the only woman to whom he was ever sincerely attached: when he died in 1830, it was with her portrait around his neck.

  Many of George IV’s Continental contemporaries also had unhappy marriages, even if they did not go quite as disastrously wrong as his. An example was Léopold I, the first king of the Belgians. Although devoted to the unfortunate Princess Charlotte and distraught at her death in childbirth, relations were far cooler with his second wife, Louise, daughter of Louis Philippe, the king of France, whom he married, largely out of dynastic considerations, in 1832. Some twenty-two years his junior, the young Princess, who was aged just twenty when they married, found sex with her husband a terrible chore. “I am indifferent to his caresses, and to his familiarity… I put up with them, I allow it to happen, but I find ‌it more repugnant than pleasing.”4 Although this did not prevent the couple from having four children over the following eight years, Léopold sought his pleasure elsewhere.

  The marriage of his son, also called Léopold, was even more of a disaster. The Duke of Brabant, as he was known at the time, was most likely still a virgin when his father married him in August 1853 at just eighteen to Marie-Henriette de Habsburg-Lorraine, the daughter of Archduke Joseph of Austria. Again, the motivations were dynastic, but they were a poor match: a tall, scrawny adolescent with a large nose, who was likened somewhat cruelly by some contemporaries to a “stick of asparagus”, the future Léopold II was quiet, solitary and sullen. Beautiful, if a little plump, Marie-Henriette was an extrovert tomboy who loved music, especially wild Gypsy tunes, playing cards and horses, which she rode Magyar-style at great speed.

  Léopold would have preferred her elder sister, Elisabeth, but was not given the choice. Writing to his parents from Vienna, he described his future wife as “a bit fat and not very pretty, though without being ugly”. Marie-Henriette, who had been dreaming of a very different Prince Charming, told her half-brother, Stephan, before leaving for Brussels, that she felt “like a nurse going to tend a patient with consumption”. It was, said Madame Metternich, a match between “a stable boy and a nun, the nun ‌being the Duke of Brabant”.5

  The marriage got off to a predictably poor start after the couple set up home together in Brussels. Like her mother-in-law before her, Marie-Henriette quickly lost her gaiety and spontaneity. Withdrawing into herself, she established a menagerie of ponies, horses, dogs, parrots and even camels and llamas. “If God hears my prayers, I shall not go on living much longer,” she wrote to a friend in Vienna ‌a month after her marriage.6

  The couple’s incompatibility was immediately obvious to all. The Duchess of Dino commented that Marie-Henriette had a “very sad manner”: “I pity also the young Duke, for they are two children ‌who only got married reluctantly.”7 Léopold and Marie-Henriette’s failure to do their duty and produce an heir also became a matter of concern – especially to Queen Victoria, who took an interest in the family. “Leo does not demonstrate the slightest feeling of love or admiration for Marie, or any woman,” she wrote despairingly to the young Prince’s father. To try to improve matters, she had her husband, Albert, write to the future Belgian king to encourage him to be a better husband. In one letter, written in April 1857, almost four years after they had married, he urged the young couple “to love each other with greater ‌passion than displayed so far”.8

  It seemed to work: the following February, Marie-Henriette gave birth to the first of four children. Unfortunately, the only boy among them – also named, of course, Léopold – died aged just nine after falling in a pond at Laeken. Léopold was forced to accept that it would be his brother Philippe’s son who would eventually succeed him – and like many monarchs before him, he knew who was to blame: his wife. Marie-Henriette was understandably upset. “What can we do against the will of God?” she asked in a letter ‌to Adrien Goffinet, a confidant.9

  Their marriage effectively over, Marie-Henriette, now aged thirty-six, withdrew almost completely from court life, spending most of her time at a house she bought in the health resort of Spa in the Ardennes, where she devoted herself to breeding dogs and horses – and to Pierre Chazal, the minister of war. He was as fond of animals as she was; he had once owned a park with zebras and kept a monkey in his living room – and so presumably did not much mind the smell of animals that observers reported hung around the Queen. After Chazal returned to his native south of France in 1871, he was replaced in her affections by Henri Hardy, the young royal veterinarian, who looked after her when she was ill. “Treat me as if I were a horse,” ‌Marie-Henriette used to tell him.10 The full misery of her life was revealed only in letters published a few weeks after her death in September 1902 in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt and reproduced in the New York Times. “I am an unhappy woman,” she had written in September 1853, just a month after her marriage. “God is my only support. If God will hear my prayer, ‌I will not live longer.”11

  There were similar tales of marital woe elsewhere in Europe. Especially unhappy, even by royal standards, was the Dutch king Willem III’s first marriage in June 1839, to his cousin Sophie, daughter of King Wilhelm I of Württemberg and Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna of Russia. The problem was not just her husband’s much publicized philandering, which led the New York Times to brand him after his death as “dissolute and lustful” and “the ‌greatest debauchee of the age”,12 but also the fact that, intellectually, Sophie was far superior to the King, who was described by Queen Victoria, with whom she corresponded, as an uneducated farmer. Sophie made this widely known, suggesting she should be regent in his place. Although half-Russian herself, she also had a prickly relationship with her Russian mother-in-law, Anna Pavlovna, who had been completely against the marriage. After bearing her husband three sons – none of whom lived long enough to become king – Sophie tried to separate from him – but was refused permission. From 1855 the couple lived apart and she spent much of her time in Stuttgart with her own family. When Sophie died in 1877, she was buried in her wedding dress, because, in her own view, her life had ended on the day she married.

  Willem, by now aged sixty, wasted little time mourning his late wife. A few months after her death, he announced his intention to marry Eléonore d’Ambre, a French opera singer, whom he ennobled as Countess d’Ambroise – without government consent. When the Dutch government objected, he settled instead for Princess Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont, a small German principality, who was forty-one years his junior. Despite the age difference the marriage appears to have been a happy one, enduring for the remaining eleven years of his life.

  While death was, in most cases, the only way of getting rid of an unwanted spouse, divorce, as Henry VIII had shown with two of his wives, was occasionally a solution – at least in Denmark. The future King Christian VIII learnt three years after marrying his cousin, Charlotte Frederikke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in 1806 that she was having an affair with her voice teacher, the composer Édouard du Puy. Retribution was swift: the marriage was dissolved, and Charlotte Frederikke was banished to Jutland and forbidden from ever seeing her son Frederik again.

  The boy, who was to reign as Frederik VII from 1848 until 18
63, grew up to have his share of marital difficulties. When he was twenty, long before coming to the throne, he married his second cousin, Vilhelmine, youngest daughter of the then king, Frederik VI. It was not a happy union: he was unfaithful and ruthless towards his wife and finally crossed the line one evening when he got drunk in her bedroom and threatened her. It was too much for the King, who banished him to Jægerspris Castle and demanded a divorce for his daughter. It came through in 1837. Frederik’s second marriage, with Duchess Caroline of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1841, was also a failure, ending in divorce five years later. Such divorces were the exception, though; most royal couples remained married, at least in name.

  Once a royal marriage had taken place, the aim was clear: to produce a legitimate heir, preferably a male one. The birth itself became an official occasion, governed by its own rules and procedures.

  In Britain, following the so-called “warming-pan incident” of 1688, when Mary of Modena, second wife of King James II, was accused of substituting a changeling smuggled in a warming pan for her own stillborn child, a minister of the crown was required to attend all royal births as an independent witness. The practice survived well into the twentieth century and was not abolished until the time of the birth of Prince Charles in 1948.

  One son was not enough, especially in those countries – the majority – that did not allow queens regnant. In those days of high infant mortality, several were needed to be sure of producing a male heir who would survive through childhood. Léopold II was not the only king to bury his son and see the throne pass instead through his brother’s line. Carl XV of Sweden and Norway, who reigned from 1859 until 1872, lost his only son Prince Carl Oscar to pneumonia at just fifteen months, after doctors prescribed a cold bath as a cure for his measles. Carl XV was then succeeded by his younger brother, Oscar. His Dutch contemporary, Willem III, meanwhile, buried three sons before siring the future Queen Wilhelmina at the age of sixty-three – even though the rules of succession had to be altered in order to allow a woman to come to the throne.

  The most unfortunate was Denmark’s Frederik VI – or rather his wife, Marie Sophie Frederikke of Hesse-Kassel, who bore eight children only to lose six of them as babies. The two who survived were girls and therefore barred from the throne – as were the four children the King had by his mistress, Frederikke Dannemand. So when Frederik died in 1839, he was succeeded by his cousin, Christian VIII.

  Once the heir was born and succession assured, most monarchs lived separate lives from their wives, almost certainly sleeping in a different bedroom or even palace. Often a glowering and unhappy presence, she could not be removed without threatening a diplomatic incident with the country of her birth.

  Kings would then seek solace in the arms of other women, some of whom then became permanent features at court. The heyday of the mistress was undoubtedly pre-revolutionary France. François I, who ruled from 1515 to 1547, is believed to have been the first monarch to appoint his favourite as maîtresse-en-titre, a quasi-official title that came with expectations of an apartment in the palace, jewels and a steady income. Some of the women who went on to assume the title accumulated considerable power: Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, better known as Madame de Montespan, was widely considered the true queen of France for the influence that she exerted over Louis XIV in the late 1660s and 1670s – which came to an end when she was accused of involvement in a series of suspicious poisonings. Almost a century later, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry exerted an equally powerful influence over Louis XV.

  Far from a dirty secret, a mistress was an essential trapping of royal life elsewhere in Europe too. Louis XIV’s cousin, Charles II of Britain, was one of the few monarchs to have several mistresses simultaneously – among them Nell Gwynn and Lady Castlemaine – who between them bore him at least a dozen children (while his marriage with Catherine of Braganza of Portugal remained without issue). When Augustus the Strong of Saxony became king of Poland in 1697, he was advised that in order to become a “complete monarch” he should take a mistress in Warsaw to complement the one he already had in Germany. Failure to do so, he was told, would upset his new Polish subjects.

  Presumably with Charles’s example in mind, George, the elector of Hanover, brought two mistresses – one tall and thin, the other short and fat, and both surprisingly ugly – with him from Germany when he succeeded to the British throne in 1714. His son, who was to succeed him as George II in 1727, also took a mistress, although more out of a sense of duty than passion. The King, wrote the memoirist Lord Hervey, “seemed to look upon a mistress rather as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince than as an addition to his pleasures as a man, and thus only pretended to distinguish what it was evident he overlooked and affected to caress what it was ‌manifest he did not love.”13

  By the nineteenth century changing sexual mores meant that such a formal system of mistresses no longer seemed appropriate. Yet princes were still forced by their parents, often at an early age, into a loveless marriage for the sake of the dynasty, and only a few could bring themselves to embrace monogamy completely. A particular favourite for short dalliances were actresses, who were invariably beautiful and often available. And if the relationship became more serious they could be married to a suitable husband in order to provide a veneer of respectability. Other royal males preferred high-born women who were already married.

  In both cases the husbands of such royal conquests – who became known as maris complaisants – were required to turn a blind eye to their wife’s extramarital adventures. The reward for playing the cuckold could be a job or an honour or a curious kind of prestige that came from the knowledge among fellow aristocrats that your wife was being bedded by the King. Often, they were simply too busy with their own affairs to be worried about what their wife was up to.

  It proved an enduring model. There is no better modern-day example of such a triangle than the romance that Prince Charles carried on with the then Camilla Parker Bowles while he was married to Diana, Princess of Wales, and she to Andrew Parker Bowles. Diana minded considerably, but Parker Bowles, pursing his own relationships with other women, apparently did not.

  Léopold I of Belgium took several mistresses, most of them much younger than himself: the most celebrated among them was Arcadie Claret, the beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter of a French army officer whom the King met in 1844 when he was fifty-four. Infatuated with her from the start, Léopold married her to Frédéric Meyer, a young army officer, and installed her in an hôtel de maître in the Rue Royale in Brussels, close to the royal palace.

  The King made little attempt to hide his relationship, appearing with his young mistress at the theatre and other events, much to the anger of the Belgian public, who whistled and even pelted the windows of her home in Brussels with rotten vegetables. In November 1849 she bore him a son, who was named Georges-Frédéric – Georges being the King’s second name. Matters became simpler in October the following year when his wife Louise died of tuberculosis, aged just thirty-eight; Léopold could now be more open about his relationship with Arcadie, installing her in the Château du Stuyvenberg near Laeken, which he bought for her. It was here on 25th September that she gave birth to his second child, named Chrétien, Léopold’s third name. When the King died in 1865 after a long illness, the last word he uttered was not Arcadie but Charlotte – although it was not known whether he meant his English first wife or his daughter of the same name.

  Léopold’s son, meanwhile, had already started seeking pleasure elsewhere early during his unhappy marriage with the unfortunate Marie-Henriette. Although introduced to carnal pleasures only relatively late, Léopold II soon developed his father’s passion for sex, which vied with his obsession with the Congo and with money. “My nature requires manifold encounters with the fair sex,” he confided to his diary. “I do not ‌understand how clerics can live.”14

  Among his many mistresses was Marguerite d’Estève, known as “Margot, the Queen o
f the Congo”, who kept a salon on Brussels’s prestigious Avenue Louise. There were others in Nice and other fashionable resorts of the time. The King had a particular passion for chambermaids, shop girls and chocolatières, the young women who sold chocolate in salons de thé, all of whom were sent away weighed down with presents.

  In later life Léopold was also a frequent visitor to Paris nightclubs, where expensive prostitutes with pseudo-aristocratic names catered to the needs of affluent clients. He was especially fond of Émilienne d’Alençon, who, along with Liane de Pougy and Caroline “La Belle” Otero, were known as the “Trois Grâces” or, more appropriately, the “Grandes Horizontales”. More shocking were the allegations of paedophilia made during a court case in London in 1885. A former servant at a “disorderly house” owned by a Mrs Mary Jeffries testified that the King paid £800 a year for a supply of young virgins, aged ten to fifteen, to be ‌sent to him in Brussels.15 William Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, then wrote a series of articles in which he claimed a hundred girls were sold each year. Mrs Jeffries herself admitted having had a young girl delivered to the royal yacht Alberta when it was moored on the Thames during one of the King’s visits. Léopold did not seem troubled by the affair, which was barely mentioned in the Belgian press.

  Then, in the summer of 1900, Léopold began what was to prove a highly controversial relationship with Blanche Delacroix, a young French woman. He was already sixty-five and Blanche just seventeen: he was taken by her youth and beauty; she was dazzled by his wealth and position. She had been living with Antoine-Emmanuel Durrieux, a sea captain eighteen years her senior whom she had met during her voyage from Argentina, where she had been living for the previous few years, but was quick to see the attraction of a royal liaison. Léopold, feeling unloved by his own family and needing someone to nurse him in old age, made her his permanent mistress. He shared his vast fortune with her, showering her with expensive jewels – including a diamond necklace worth 75,000 francs – and properties: he renovated for her Villa Vandenborght, near his palace in Laeken – even building a special walkway over the road to link the grounds of their two homes – and bought her the Villa Caroline, in Ostend, which was connected to his Chalet Royal by an underground tunnel, and the Château de Balincourt, in Arronville in the Val-d’Oise, which had silver bathtubs and a bed adorned with gold under a vast canopy of handmade Belgian lace.