Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy
Page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword
THE ANGEVINS 1154–1216
HENRY II - 1133-1189 RULED 1154-1189
THE PLANTAGENETS 1216–1399
EDWARD II - 1284-1327 RULED 1307-1327
LANCASTER 1399–1471 AND YORK 1461–85
EDWARD IV - 1442-1483 RULED 1461-1470 AND 1471-1483
THE TUDORS 1485–1603
MARY TUDOR - 1496-1533 Queen of France 1514-1515 and Charles Brandon 1484-1545
HENRY VIII - 1491-1547 RULED 1509-1547
ELIZABETH I - 1533-1603 RULED 1558-1603
THE STUARTS 1603–1714
MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS - 1542-1587 MONARCH OF SCOTLAND 1542-1567 QUEEN CONSORT OF ...
JAMES I OF ENGLAND AND IRELAND (ALSO JAMES VI OF SCOTLAND) - 1566-1625 RULED ...
CHARLES II - 1630-1685 RULED 1660-1685
JAMES II OF ENGLAND/ JAMES VII OF SCOTLAND - 1633-1701 RULED 1685-1688 (DEPOSED)
WILLIAM AND MARY - WILLIAM III 1650-1702 AND MARY II 1662-1694 RULED ( JOINTLY ...
ANNE - 1665-1714 RULED 1702-1714
THE HANOVERS 1714–1901
GEORGE I - 1660-1727 RULED 1714-1727
GEORGE II - 1683-1760 RULED 1727-1760
GEORGE IV - 1762-1830 REGENT 1811-1820 KING 1820-1830
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, PRINCESS OF WALES - 1768–1821 QUEEN OF ENGLAND ...
FREDERICK, DUKE OF YORK - 1763-1827 and Mary Anne Clarke 1776-1852
WILLIAM IV - 1765–1837 RULED 1830–1837 and Dorothy Jordan 1761–1816
VICTORIA - 1819-1901 RULED 1837-1901 (GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND) EMPRESS OF ...
SAXE-COBURG-GOTHA 1901–1910
EDWARD VII - 1841-1910 RULED 1901-1910 KING OF THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT ...
THE WINDSORS 1910–
EDWARD VIII - 1894-1972 RULED JANUARY 20 TO DECEMBER 11, 1936 (ABDICATED)
CHARLES, PRINCE OF WALES
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
COPYRIGHT
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First published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, June 2008
Copyright © Leslie Carroll, 2008
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Carroll, Leslie.
Royal affairs: a lusty romp through the extramarital adventures that rocked the British
monarchy/Leslie Carroll.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1440634772
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For my loving, patient, wildly supportive, and remarkably understanding husband, Scott, who endured my devoting nearly every waking hour of our first half year of marriage to a book on adultery
Foreword
Sex and power have always gone hand in glove, and monarchs have been merry throughout history. Nothing can bring down a government—not even high treason—like a good sex scandal. Nowadays people yawn through newspaper accounts of civil warfare, economic downturns, even reports of appalling corporate greed. But give them a juicy sex scandal peppered with high and mighty protagonists, and it’s the first story readers turn to. We can never seem to get enough of them.
Americans, in particular, enjoy a collective love affair with monarchies—probably because we don’t have one, and can sanctimoniously feel superior to those benighted blighters who God and birthright have placed above the peons of their respective nations, yet who still manage to be more than human. Americans have “Hollywood royalty” instead, or myriad professional sports stars, pop icons, and politicians who behave badly. But nothing seems to be quite as alluring as a royal affair.
We’re hopelessly hooked because these people with titles straight out of fairy tales or romance novels are behaving humanly, yet at the same time they remain larger than life. The royals have the same desires and passions as the rest of us, but the consequences of their choices are bigger—and in some cases, disastrous.
How did their spouses feel about their amorous romps? Most of the time the kings’ wives were “queen consorts”—queens only by virtue of their marriage—not “regnant” queens who ruled the realm in their own right by virtue of succession, such as Elizabeth I, Anne, or Victoria. Queen consorts were expected to put up and shut up when the king strayed from the conjugal bed, and to produce the requisite heir and a spare that would guarantee the healthy succession of the kingdom.
Most marriages, especially royal ones, were primarily political and economic alliances, so it’s hard to vilify these imperial adulterers for seeking sexual satisfaction outside the marital bed. And, given the state of hygiene at the time, one might imagine that an unattractive spouse was made all the more repulsive by an inattention to such delicacies. When in 1795 the future George IV was introduced to his betrothed, the odiferous, piggy-looking Caroline of Brunswick, he exclaimed to the Earl of Malmesbury, “Harris, I am not very well, pray get me a glass of brandy.” The prince remained drunk for the next three days until he was dragged to the altar.
A third factor might account for all the debauchery. Any ninth-grade science student can discourse on the dangers of marrying one’s first cousin, yet during the past thousand years or so, there was so much intermarriage among the royal houses that many of these inbred monarchs were mentally unbalanced to one degree or another, giving new meaning to the phrase “mad for love.”
Throughout the centuries, royal affairs have engendered substantially more than salacious gossip. Often they have caused bloodshed. For example, Edward II’s homosexual affairs with Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser the Younger infuriated his barons and alienated his wife, Queen Isabella, who decided to have an extramarital affair of her own. The vicious cycle of adultery, murder, and betrayal resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy, the king’s imprisonment, and quite possib
ly, his assassination.
The unholy trinity of sex and politics is incomplete without religion. And a study of the extramarital affairs of Great Britain’s royals also ends up chronicling the journey of the realm’s religious history. Henry VIII’s passion for Anne Boleyn culminated not only in their marriage but in a brand-new faith that created a lasting schism with the Church of Rome, and led to hundreds of years of strife and violence among Catholics, Protestants, and Puritans that would have a lasting impact on millions of lives.
It wasn’t possible within the confines of this volume to spotlight every single monarch or to include each royal tryst, particularly when some sovereigns were such serial adulterers that one wonders how they had time to attend to affairs of state. Their conquests alone could fill volumes. The scuffling of silk slippers on the back stairs of Charles II’s royal apartments was apparently so frequent that the king maintained a pair of discreet gatekeepers to control the flow of traffic.
And what of the mistresses? During the earlier, and more brutal, eras of British history, a woman didn’t have much (if any) choice if the king exercised his droit de seigneur and decided to take her to bed. Often, girls were little more than adolescents when their ambitious parents shoved them under the monarch’s nose. However, most of the mistresses in Royal Affairs were not innocent victims of a parent’s political agenda or a monarch’s rampaging lust. They were clever, accomplished, often ambitious women, not always in the first bloom of youth and not always baseborn, who cannily parlayed the only thing they had—their bodies—into extravagant wealth and notoriety, if not outright fame. In many cases, their royal bastards were ennobled by the king, making excellent marriages and living far better than their mothers could have otherwise provided. Eventually taking their place in the House of Lords, the mistresses’ illegitimate sons went on to become the decision makers who shaped an empire and spawned the richest and most powerful families in Britain.
A delicious little incident that attests to the staying power and influence of a royal mistress occurred during the reign of King George I, when the Duchess of Portsmouth (Charles II’s French mistress Louise de Kéroualle), the Countess of Dorchester (a former mistress of James II), and the Countess of Orkney (William III’s mistress Elizabeth Villiers Hamilton) all met at the same reception. The Countess of Orkney, known for her rapier wit, regarded her compatriots and quipped, “Who would have thought that we three whores should meet here?”
Incongruous as it may sound, England’s trajectory from absolute to constitutional monarchy can be traced through the history of its sovereigns’ sex scandals. Rough justice and kangaroo courts once dispatched any dissenters from the royal agenda; when an absolute monarch who ruled by divine right shouted “Off with her head!” it tended to take care of matters.
As time went on, the power of the public, from Parliament to the press, steadily eroded the sovereign’s supremacy, until, by the mid-1930s, King Edward VIII, a constitutional monarch with limited input in the workings of the government, felt compelled to abdicate, believing that the tide of public opinion was against his love match. In fact, suppressed by the press, the very opposite attitude was true.
One thing is for certain: Marriage vows be damned, royals are just as randy now as they ever were. Is such behavior traceable to centuries of inbreeding or is it their sense of noblesse oblige?
From Henry II’s blatant disregard of international treaties and alliances in favor of his young French mistress to Edward VIII’s abdication for the woman he loved; from Henry VIII beheading his adulterous wives on Tower Green to Charles and Diana discussing their extramarital infidelities on national television, the world has in fact come a long way. Or has it? In the history of royal scandals is writ the ever-evolving story of our own society.
THE ANGEVINS 1154–1216
HENRY II
1133-1189 RULED 1154-1189
BORN IN ANJOU, FRANCE, HENRY II WAS THE FIRST KING of the Angevin dynasty, a strong ruler who corralled the fractious English barons into submission and created a powerful government. Ambitious, intelligent, and rash often to the point of ruthlessness, he survived wars and rebellions, becoming one of the most successful monarchs of the Middle Ages—the greatest king England ever knew, according to the twentieth-century prime minister Winston Churchill.
Henry’s mother was the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I, who had a claim to the English throne as the granddaughter of William the Conqueror. During Henry II’s youth, the crown was in dispute. The King of England, Stephen of Blois, also a grandchild of William, claimed that his predecessor, his uncle Henry I, had willed it to him on his deathbed; and therefore, his heirs should inherit the throne. But Matilda had the backing of many of the local nobles, and men with broadswords and hundreds of knights at their disposal have a way of being very threatening. By the 1153 Treaty of Wallingford, an agreement was signed between Stephen and Matilda, granting her son, Henry II, the rights of succession.
Henry was crowned King of England on December 19, 1154, adding to his new realm Normandy (which he acquired on the death of his father in 1151), and Aquitaine, acquired through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine on May 18, 1152. At the time, what we think of as France was only one of several territories in that geographical region, many of which were won and lost over the centuries by English monarchs.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was the divorced wife of the French king Louis VII. She bore Henry eight children, but their sons scrabbled like wolf cubs for primacy in their father’s realm, in some cases aided and abetted by their mother to challenge Henry for the crown.
The gravel-voiced, red-haired, freckled-faced Henry was a passionate, highly political animal, capable of farseeing policies when even his most trusted advisers were blinkered. For example, it was Henry who recognized the need to guarantee the safety of the Jews in his kingdom—not because he cared a fig for their religion, but because he needed their money and their talent, particularly in matters of finance.
During his reign, jury trials were initiated, and monetary payments replaced military service as the prime duty of a vassal to his king.
Henry II was a strong king and an excellent warrior, but his temper could often get the best of him. He is probably best known for his quarrel with his former chancellor and most trusted friend, Archbishop Thomas à Becket, over the issue of clerical privilege. When Henry mused aloud that Becket had become a nuisance, exclaiming, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” four of his retainers unfortunately took him seriously. When they murdered Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170, and proudly reported their deed to the king, the devastated Henry rued his words and assumed the mantle of guilt almost as if he had wielded the broadsword himself.
In June 1189, with the assistance of King Philip Augustus of France, Henry’s oldest surviving son, the illustrious crusader known as Richard the Lionheart, routed Henry’s army at Le Mans. On July 4, near Azay-le-Rideau, the ailing king was forced to accept a humiliating peace treaty. Two days later, he died. He was buried in the abbey church of Fontevrault. In 1204, Eleanor died at the age of eighty-two and joined him there. Their son succeeded him on the throne as Richard I.
HENRY II and Rosamund de Clifford 1150-1176
Rosamund de Clifford, sometimes called “the Rose of the World,” was the daughter of Walter de Clifford, who was one of Henry II’s marchers. (The marches comprised three earldoms set up along the English-Welsh border to protect the king’s lands.) Clifford was actively involved in one of the king’s military campaigns when his sixteen-year-old daughter and his sire crossed paths.
Henry was a notorious ladies’ man, but his affair with Rosamund turned out to be much more than a passing fancy. In fact, she was considered his Grand Passion, and their royal affair would last for a decade, until Rosamund’s death in 1176. News traveled slowly in the twelfth century—or perhaps gossips got their tongues cut out—because the public did not learn of the king’s long-standing liaison with Rosamund de Clifford unt
il 1174, eight years after they fell in love. Henry’s court, however, was well aware of the affair.
Gerald of Wales, a contemporary chronicler, most certainly did not approve of the royal liaison, writing, “The king, who before this had been a secret adulterer, now became a notorious one, consorting openly and shamelessly, not with the Rose of the World, as she was falsely and most frivolously styled, but, more truly, with the Rose of an impure man.”
And yet Henry seemed impervious to the scratches of his detractors’ quills. Ruling by divine right and possessing a sense of noblesse oblige in the extreme, he cheerfully fornicated away with little regard for the opinions of others. There were no tabloids at the time, and in any case not enough people could read for such slights to dent either his popularity or his power. And his power, not to mention his temper, could be more than somewhat violent.
Rosamund de Clifford’s royal affair with Henry II successfully unhinged the most intransigent woman of the era, Henry’s queen, the steely and brilliant Eleanor of Aquitaine. She bitterly referred to her rival as “the fair Rosamund.”
Henry was Eleanor’s second husband. In her mid-teens she had been married off to the French king, her cousin, Louis VII. But she successfully petitioned to have the marriage annulled due to consanguinity in the fourth degree—although one of the real reasons was sexual incompatibility.
In 1152, just six weeks after her annulment had been granted, the spirited Eleanor married the highly sexed Henry II, bringing England the duchy of Aquitaine in the bargain. The highly influential Eleanor bore Henry five sons and three daughters in thirteen years; introduced to England the Court of Love, with its high-flown emphasis on chivalry, poetry, and music; and was an active participant in matters of state.
But by the end of 1166, when Eleanor gave birth to her eighth child, she may have felt like an old cow. Henry’s new infatuation with a sixteen-year-old Welsh blonde set her teeth on edge. Understandably, the forty-four-year-old queen resented the relationship, as most women would if their husbands had found someone younger and more nubile, someone without stretch marks and too much knowledge of his flaws.