Léopold wooed his young mistress in Cap Ferrat, a spectacularly beautiful but still wild area on the Côte d’Azur, where he bought more than a dozen plots of land after visiting his daughter Clémentine in 1895. It was here in 1902 that he was to build the Villa Léopolda, an extraordinary home whose later owners were to include the Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli and the Jewish-Lebanese financier Edmond Safra – and, after his death in a suspicious fire in Monaco in 1999, his widow Lily.
Far from prying eyes, this was the ideal place for an illicit affair. Léopold installed Blanche in a villa called Radiana, deep in the middle of lush vegetation, where she was effectively his prisoner. Every evening, equipped with a dim lantern, he would make his way to the house along a little path hidden by the trees. Officially he went to play cards, but the gardener of the Léopolda had orders to deliver a basket of fresh flowers every day.
Although Léopold was by now a widower, the relationship earned wide disapproval – and provided fodder for the caricaturists – much as his father’s liaison with Arcadie Claret had done sixty years earlier. Such criticism intensified after Delacroix had two children, both sons: Lucien, born in February 1906, and Philippe, born in October the following year. Whether the King, now aged seventy-two, was actually Philippe’s father is not clear – even though he was encouraged to see that the newborn baby had a deformed hand, something of a hereditary trait of the Coburgs. Blanche was rewarded for the birth of Lucien by being ennobled as the baroness de Vaughan. The two boys were to be treated rather more generously than Delphine Boël would be by King Albert II almost a century later: Lucien became the duke of Tervuren and his younger brother the count of Ravenstein.
By this time Blanche, who had begun to dominate the ageing King, had resumed her relationship with Durrieux, her former boyfriend and pimp; on one occasion Léopold came across the two of them together during a visit to Villa Vandenborght. Blanche tried to explain Durrieux away as his brother. Whether or not Léopold believed her is not clear, but he tolerated the man’s presence near his mistress and at court, prompting Socialist pamphlets to talk of “an indecent triangular relationship”. Catholic opinion was also outraged: on one occasion the King was confronted in Ostend by a priest. “Sire, I have heard rumours that you have a concubine,” he told him. “Good Heavens, Father,” Léopold replied. “I have heard the same rumours about you, but I don’t believe them.”
Léopold contemplated abdicating in favour of his nephew Albert and spending the last of his days with his mistress, whose ennobling had brought more criticism. Then, in December 1909, moments before he had a serious operation on his intestine, which he feared he might not survive, he married Blanche in a secret religious ceremony, with the benediction of Pope Pius X. Léopold was dressed in white; his bride wore a black silk robe. The King called her “ma veuve” (“my widow”).
Such a ceremony – similar to his great-nephew Léopold III’s clandestine wartime marriage to Lilian Baels – may have made it possible for the King to make peace with the clergy, but still did not make Blanche his queen or allow either of their sons to succeed him. That would have required a civil ceremony. In any case, he died just two days after the operation. Nevertheless, Blanche, who remained with him until the end – just as his father’s mistress, Arcadie, had done six decades earlier – still enjoyed a substantial inheritance. The following August she married Durrieux, who had wisely remained in touch and even allowed himself to be registered as the father of her sons. The ceremony was held at the unusual hour of 6.30 in the morning to shake off the paparazzi. They divorced three years later.
There were similar goings-on elsewhere in Europe: Oscar I, who ruled Sweden and Norway from 1844 until his death fifteen years later, effectively led parallel lives. Although initially happily married to his Italian-born queen, Joséphine, who bore him five children in rapid succession, he was unfaithful to her almost from the start – chiefly with Emilie Högquist, a prominent actress whom he set up in a luxurious apartment close to the royal palace. Oscar was said to spend alternate nights with his wife and with Emilie, who bore him two sons – who became jokingly known as “the princes of Laponia” (Lappland). Before marrying, he had fathered another child with a lady-in-waiting to the former queen.
Joséphine, a devout Catholic who risked the displeasure of her husband’s subjects by refusing to convert to Protestantism, was deeply wounded by such infidelity. In her diary she wrote of her bitterness that a woman was expected to suffer a husband’s unfaithfulness “in silence”. Their eldest son, who succeeded Oscar as Carl XV in 1859, shared his father’s predilection for actresses, having a brief affair with Elise Hwasser, the leading theatre star of her age, before moving on to another actress, Hanna Styrell, who had a daughter by him. Carl’s younger brother, who succeeded him as Oscar II in 1872, had similar tastes.
In Britain, the future King Edward VII, a decade Oscar’s junior, notched up an even more impressive record of romantic conquests in his long stint as prince of Wales, earning himself the nickname of Edward the Caresser – much to the lasting displeasure of his mother, Queen Victoria, who contrasted the debauched behaviour of her son, known in the family as Bertie, with the moral probity of her beloved late husband, Albert.
At the insistence of the Queen, who was keen her son should settle down, Edward married in 1863, at the age of just twenty-two, Princess Alexandra, the daughter of the future King Christian IX of Denmark, who was elegant and beautiful but increasingly deaf. In the eight years that followed Alexandra bore him six children, but this did little to prevent the Prince of Wales from seeking his pleasures elsewhere; he was a frequent visitor to Le Chabanais, an exclusive brothel in Paris – one room contained a large copper bathtub with an ornate figurehead, half woman and half swan, in which he liked to bathe in champagne with prostitutes. The increasingly overweight prince also had himself built a special siège d’amour that allowed easy access for oral sex and other forms of entertainment with several partners.
While Le Chabanais was far from the prying eyes of the press, Edward also took a number of mistresses back in Britain – at least thirteen of them, by one count – many of whom were married. Prominent among his early loves were two well-known actresses: the French-born Sarah Bernhardt and the British Lillie Langtry, known as the Jersey Lilly, whose portrait by Millais in 1878 drew crowds to the Royal Academy. Another liaison was with Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie. In 1889 he met “Daisy” Greville, Countess of Warwick, his “Darling Daisy” and perhaps the first real love of his life, with whom he had a relationship that lasted a decade. Unknown to the Prince, however, the Countess, who was married, was also having an affair with Lord Charles Beresford, Edward’s former aide-de-camp, by whom she became pregnant. When she wrote to the Prince to inform him of this, she was swiftly replaced in his affections by Alice Keppel, twenty-eight years his junior, whose daughter, Sonia, was widely believed to be a product of the relationship.
The discreet Keppel was widely considered a positive influence on Edward, and this continued after he became king in 1901. Such was the enduring nature of their romance that she was with him in Biarritz in March 1910 when he suffered the heart attack that precipitated his death two months later. Although less keen on Keppel than on some of her husband’s other mistresses, Alexandra reluctantly agreed to allow her to Buckingham Palace to take her final leave of him.
A quarter of a century later, on hearing that her late lover’s grandson Edward VIII was renouncing the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, Keppel remarked “things were done much better in my day”. In one of those neat twists of history – or an illustration perhaps of the narrow circles in which royalty moved – Keppel was the great-grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles.
Alice’s husband, George Keppel, the consummate mari complaisant, appears to have accepted his wife’s liaison with the King, who used to visit their home at teatime when George was out – thereby avoiding potential embarrassment all around. The husbands of his other married mistresses
were equally accommodating – with the notable exception of Sir Charles Mordaunt, who arrived home unexpectedly early from a salmon-fishing trip in Norway in summer 1869 to find his twenty-one-year-old wife Harriet entertaining the Prince of Wales at the family seat, Walton Hall, in Warwickshire. The result was an uncomfortable divorce case in which Edward was called as witness – though thankfully not a co-respondent. Even so, it was the first time for centuries that a member of the royal family had been required to give evidence in court.
The naming of the Prince in connection with such a murky affair was immensely damaging – and provided useful fuel for a rapidly emerging republican movement. Harriet’s family, keen to protect their good name, had her certified insane and committed to an asylum, where she spent the remaining thirty-six years of her life. For his part Edward was free to continue his philandering, although he had to endure boos from the crowds and a severe telling-off from his mother.
While Edward VII’s tastes were strictly heterosexual, several kings also took male lovers – though such was the imperative of producing an heir that most also had sex with women, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Willem II of Holland, beaten to the tragic Princess Charlotte of Britain by Léopold I, certainly appears to have been in this category, and in 1819 was blackmailed over what Cornelis van Maanen, the Dutch minister of justice, described as his “shameful and unnatural lusts”.
Even more curious was the case of King Gustaf V, who reigned in Sweden for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Several years after his death in October 1950 came a bizarre postscript: Kurt Haijby, a petty thief who had killed a policemen during a jailbreak, said that in 1912, when he was a fifteen-year-old boy scout, he had been seduced by the King during an audience. Furthermore, Haijby claimed to have been the King’s lover between 1936 and 1947 – a tribute if nothing else to the sexual powers of Gustaf, who would have been in his late eighties at the end of their relationship.
A subsequent investigation found it was not impossible for the incident to have taken place, but that it could not have occurred in the way described by Haijby – at neither the 1912 audience nor another twenty years later had he ever been alone with the King. Intriguingly, though, it emerged that the royal court had paid Haijby one hundred and seventy thousand Swedish kronor for his silence in the 1930s and then, in 1938, after he was arrested for child sex abuse and put into custody at the asylum of Beckomberga, he was offered four hundred kronor a month if he left Sweden and kept quiet about his accusations. Haijby accepted the deal – only to return after the war.
Gustaf’s German-born wife Victoria appears to have had long since given up on her loveless marriage. In the early 1890s she had had an affair with Gustaf von Blixen-Finecke, her husband’s equerry. Later she developed a close relationship with her personal physician Axel Munthe, with whom she used to winter on Capri.16
There were also instances of other, more complicated domestic set-ups – though few could compare with that of Christian VII, who became king of Denmark in 1766, a few weeks before his seventeenth birthday, and lived for a few years in a bizarre ménage à trois with his wife Caroline Matilda, the sister of George III, and her German doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee.
Married a few months after he came to the throne, Christian, who showed early signs of mental instability, exhibited little interest in his wife, preferring a twenty-one-year-old prostitute nicknamed Støvlet-Cathrine (“Boots”-Catherine) with whom he had a number of adventures before she was arrested and deported to Hamburg. Then in 1767, while travelling in the Duchy of Schleswig, he met Struensee, who at thirty was more than a decade his senior. Christian was impressed by the doctor – especially by his ability to cure his hangovers and depression – and brought him back to Copenhagen with the promise of a minor post at court. The dashing German doctor made even more of an impression on Caroline Matilda, becoming her lover, and used his power over the royal couple to become increasingly influential at court. By the summer of 1771 he had acquired dictatorial powers and appointed himself minister of state, whereupon, inspired by the Enlightenment thinkers of the day, he embarked on a programme of reforms intended to modernize Denmark.
Scandalizing opinion, the three of them would often walk or ride in a carriage together and Struensee would eat several times a week with the King and Queen in the royal apartments. To avoid stiff court etiquette, they moved to the palace of Hirschholm, on an island not far from Copenhagen. The King, whose mental state was deteriorating sharply, appeared happy with the arrangement – even after his queen gave birth to a daughter who was almost certainly her lover’s. Their unusual relationship was doomed, however. Struensee’s reforms, although potentially beneficial to Denmark, were often hastily introduced and upset a number of vested interests. The German had also made a powerful enemy in Christian’s stepmother, Queen Juliane Marie, who had one goal in life: ensuring that her own son, Prince Frederik, Christian’s younger half-brother, should one day inherit the throne.
Armed with evidence of Caroline Matilda’s infidelity collected by several of her servants, Juliane Marie organized a group of conspirators, many of them nobles unhappy at Struensee’s reforms. They struck in January 1772 in the early hours of the morning after a masked ball at court, arresting both Struensee and Caroline Matilda. Both lovers were tricked into confessing their adultery: Struensee was sentenced to death and was executed, together with Count Enevold Brandt, one of his allies, at Øster Fælled on 28th April in front of thousands of Copenhageners. Both Struensee and Brandt first had their right hands cut off and then, after the execution, their severed heads were held up for the crowd. Then the bodies were cut into parts and put on wheels, and the heads and hands impaled on stakes.
Caroline Matilda was allowed to live, but barred from seeing her children. She had hoped to return to her native England, but her sister-in-law, Queen Charlotte, refused to welcome back an adulteress and she was sent into exile in a palace in George III’s dominion of Hanover. Christian, unaware of what had happened, demanded to see his wife and friend – only to learn to his horror that he had divorced Caroline Matilda and personally signed Struensee’s death warrant.
Caroline Matilda died in 1775. Nine years later, her son, now sixteen, forced his father to sign a document under which he would become regent, taking from Juliane the powers she had plotted so hard to acquire for herself. He finally came to the throne in 1808 as Frederik VI, going on to become one of the country’s best-loved monarchs.
Complicated marital set-ups seem to have been something of a Danish speciality. After his second divorce, Frederik VII, the next monarch but one, shocked society in 1850, at the age of forty-one, by concluding a morganatic marriage with Louise Rasmussen, a ballet dancer later ennobled as Countess Danner. Their relationship may also not have been entirely what it seemed: both the King and Rasmussen appeared to have been involved in a love triangle with Carl Berling, founder of the newspaper Berlingske Tidende, by whom she had a son. Berling later became chamberlain and all three lived in the palace until 1861. In a further twist it has also been claimed that Frederik, long assumed to have been infertile, actually fathered a son in 1843 by Else Maria Guldborg Pedersen, with whom he had an affair after the breakdown of his first two marriages.
The future King Carlos IV of Spain was also apparently tolerant of the sexual peccadilloes of his wife, Maria Luisa of Parma, who was aged just fourteen when he married her in 1765. She went on to have a series of affairs with courtiers, most notably with Manuel de Godoy, the tall, strongly built son of an aristocratic but impoverished army colonel, who had an enormous appetite for women. Godoy did not confine his attentions to the Queen, however: he married María Teresa de Borbón, the King’s cousin, had a mistress, whom he obliged the Queen to take on as a lady-in-waiting, and embarked on a string of other casual affairs. Maria Luisa made little attempt to hide her relationship with Godoy – baffling contemporary observers. “The thing that must strike those most who watch Carlos IV in the bosom
of his court is his blindness where the conduct of the Queen is concerned,” observed the French ambassador.17 The King, it seemed, was almost the only one at court who didn’t recognize the striking resemblance of two of Maria Luisa’s fourteen children to Godoy.
Obsessed with hunting and collecting clocks, Carlos, a timid character dominated by his wife, may simply not have cared. Either way, far from being punished, Godoy was made prime minister, and accompanied the royal couple when they went into exile in France in 1808. Carlos and his wife lived with Godoy, his daughter Carlota Luisa, his mistress Pepita and their sons – although Godoy’s wife, María Teresa, presumably despairing of her husband’s infidelities, had long since left him.
More than a century later, when another Spanish king, Alfonso XIII, the grandfather of Juan Carlos, the current monarch, went into exile, initially in Paris, he became concerned by the closeness of his queen, Victoria Eugenie, to the Duke of Lécera and his wife, the Duchess, thought to be a lesbian. When Victoria Eugenie remonstrated with him over one of his affairs, he taunted her over her relationship with the couple, declaring, “I choose them and never want to see your ugly face again.”18
The Great Survivors Page 18