Sex with Kings

by Eleanor Herman

  The day of the presentation ceremony, however, the well-bribed comtesse de Béarn lost her nerve, knowing that if she went through with it no one at court would ever speak to her again. Limping pitifully, she claimed to have sprained her ankle so badly she could hardly walk. Many thought that if she had in fact hurt herself, the injury had been intentional. The ceremony was canceled, to the delight of Versailles courtiers and the French populace.

  Under intense pressure from the king and Madame du Barry’s cabal, three months later the comtesse de Béarn kept her part of the bargain and presented the royal mistress at Versailles. The rooms were packed with courtiers hoping to witness an utter failure. Madame du Barry was late, but when she did arrive even her most bitter enemies gasped at her beauty. She was wearing one hundred thousand livres worth of diamond jewelry and a court gown of silver and gold cloth, with huge panniers and a long sweeping train which she managed gracefully to kick out of the way to make her three backward curtsies. If they had hoped to see an oafish street urchin, they were disappointed. Madame du Barry’s graceful refinement was equal to that of the most inbred duchess.

  Nevertheless, for much of her six-year tenure as mistress, Madame du Barry was ostracized by courtiers. When she sat down at a card table, the other seats remained eerily empty. When she gave a party, no one came. Finally, the king ordered courtiers to attend her parties.

  Her greatest challenge came when the king’s grandson, the future Louis XVI, received as his bride the fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette, daughter of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. Strong-willed, beautiful, and charming, the new dauphine stole the king’s heart and despised Jeanne du Barry. She demanded that she, as dauphine, be the first lady at court, and snubbed the king’s mistress socially, despite gentle remonstrances from Louis. Courtiers enjoyed this spectacle of two females—a highborn princess and a prostitute—duking it out for the king’s affections.

  Finally, after two years Marie Antoinette’s refusal to say even a word to the favorite became an international scandal. The king, Empress Maria Theresa, and the Austrian ambassador to France finally prevailed on the dauphine to say publicly a few polite words to Madame du Barry. At a carefully orchestrated event, the chastened princess coolly remarked to the maîtresse-entitre, “There are a lot of people today at Versailles.”8 The king and his mistress were gushingly grateful. Strained relations between Austria and France were improved, but Marie Antoinette’s hatred of Madame du Barry intensified. She was never invited to join the dauphine’s youthful, fun-loving entourage, which soon became the center of court social life.

  Madame de Pompadour, detested toward the end, was now sanctified by the white pall of virtue that death often brings to the departed no matter how scandalous their earthly sins. The living, however, are doomed to suffer for their transgressions, and a former prostitute gracing the gilded halls of Versailles revolted the French populace. Writing pornographic poetry and bawdy songs about the favorite became a new national pastime. During her final months as royal mistress in 1774, Madame du Barry had become so unpopular that she feared entering Paris. Mobs, who called her the “Royal Whore,” attacked her carriage. They saw her lavish lifestyle as the cause of high unemployment, staggering taxes, and a shortage of bread. One courtier wrote that her entertainments “were carried to such an indecent pitch of luxury as to insult the poverty of the people.”9

  For many years after the king’s death, Madame du Barry lived a quiet life in a country manor outside of Versailles. Rich from her tenure as royal mistress, she entertained visitors from across Europe who came to look at the face that had bewitched a king. A Versailles courtier enjoying her hospitality told her apologetically, “There was no hatred but we all wanted to have your place.”10

  “I am the Protestant whore”

  When Charles II was invited to ascend the English throne in 1660, his riotous living was a charming contrast to a decade of the deadly dull Puritan Protectorate. But within a few years, many God-fearing Englishmen decried the debauchery of the court, protesting—perhaps with a bit too much ardor—that the king wasted time with his mistresses “feeling and kissing them naked all over their bodies in bed.”11

  Charles’s first royal mistress, Lady Castlemaine, often experienced the stabs of public anger. “Give the King the Countess of Castlemaine and he cares not what the nation suffers,” they said.12 After the birth of her fourth child by the king in as many years, some English subjects thought that enough was enough. One evening as she was walking across St. James Park she was accosted by three men who called her a vile whore and reminded her that two hundred years earlier Jane Shore, the mistress of King Edward IV, had died alone and detested on a pile of manure.

  In 1665 while staying with the court in Oxford, Lady Castlemaine gave birth to her fifth child and soon after found an insulting verse nailed to her door in Latin and English, referring to the punishment of ducking immoral women in water:

  The reason why she is not duck’d?

  Because by Caesar she is fucked.13

  The king posted a reward of one thousand pounds to find the perpetrators, but no one came forward.

  In 1668 a group of London apprentices pulled down some infamous brothels and threatened to pull down the biggest brothel of all, Whitehall Palace, home of King Charles. Soon after, a mock petition was published titled “Petition of the Poor Whores to the Most Splendid, Illustrious, Serene and Eminent Lady of Pleasure, the Countess of Castlemaine,” begging for her influence on their behalf for “a trade wherein your Ladyship has great experience.”14 As Lady Castlemaine stormed and raged, someone then published a “Gracious Answer” to the poor whores, purportedly written by none other than the king’s mistress herself.

  Lady Castlemaine’s replacement, Louise de Kéroualle, was known to be an avid supporter of French policy, no matter what disadvantages it might offer England, and an agent for French king Louis XIV. The English people were appalled at their king’s giving her English citizenship and granting her ducal honors. They deeply resented in wartime the cash, jewels, and subsidies he laid at her feet. One day Louise found the following rhyme tacked to the door of her palace apartments:

  Within this place a bed’s appointed

  For a French bitch and God’s annointed.15

  Louise had the misfortune to be a Catholic mistress in a strongly Protestant country during a time when religious hatred was flaring. King Charles’s mother was Catholic, his younger brother James had converted, and it was suspected—rightly—that Charles himself was a secret Catholic. The Protestant populace lived in fear of regressing to the age, only 120 years earlier, when Bloody Mary burned heretics in the marketplace.

  Englishmen were infuriated by the idea of a foreign Catholic mistress whispering blandishments into the ear of their wavering king. They looked back wistfully to the time of Lady Castlemaine, remarking with pride that she had been the best whore of all—delivering countless royal bastards, cleverly bleeding the treasury dry, and boasting English birth to boot.

  Matters came to a head in 1680 with a firestorm of riots between Catholics and Protestants in the streets. The pope was burned in effigy almost daily. The French ambassador wrote Louis XIV that the new Parliament would demand Louise’s exile from court, and that she would very likely be imprisoned in the Tower and possibly executed. Protestant leaders attempted to charge Louise with being a common whore before a grand jury. Luckily for Louise, the judge threw the case out of court.

  If English commoners were shocked at Charles’s choice of Louise de Kéroualle, courtiers were more shocked at the advent of lowborn Nell Gwynn. The earl of Arlington, one of the king’s ministers, told the French ambassador that “it was well for the King’s good servants that His Majesty should have a fancy for Mademoiselle Kéroualle, who was not of an evil disposition and was a lady. It was better to have dealings with her than with lewd and bouncing orange-girls and actresses, of whom no man could take the measure.”16

  Many noblewomen who welcomed Char
les’s other mistresses with open arms refused outright to have Nell among their company because of her base birth. The dowager duchess of Richmond told the king that she “could not abide to converse with Nell,” to which the monarch replied that “those he lay with were fit company for the greatest woman in the land.”17

  Commoners, on the other hand, felt that if Charles had to have a mistress, it should be a Protestant Englishwoman like Nell rather than an aristocratic French papist like Louise de Kéroualle. Many of the lower and middle classes admired Nell for dragging herself out of the gutter and through talent, hard work, and humor making a lady of herself.

  By the time of the Catholic Panic in the late 1670s and early 1680s, Nell clearly came out on top in the public opinion poll. She was thought to be a “good commonwealth’s woman,” a Protestant who had never “to make her own private gains endeavored the ruin of a nation.”18 Louise de Kéroualle, on the other hand, was certainly a spy for their historical enemy France and the pope. Stuffing her money bags with their taxes, she became known as one of “Pharaoh’s lean kine” who had “almost devoured a nation.”19

  One day Nell’s carriage was encircled by a mob who thought it belonged to Louise de Kéroualle and threatened to overturn it. Nell stuck her head out the window and cried, “Pray, good people, be civil, I am the Protestant whore.”20 In response, the laughing mob blessed her and bid her be on her way.

  “Kill me if you dare!”

  In 1848 Lola Montez was so unpopular in Bavaria that she precipitated a revolution. In late 1846 the dancer had visited Munich with the intention of staying a week or two and pulling in some money for her performances. But she enchanted the elderly King Ludwig, who convinced her to stay on as his special friend. The Munich citizens were not blind to their ruler’s frequent visits to the dancer’s hotel. Whipping out binoculars, they studied her closely in the special opera box she had convinced Ludwig to give her.

  As always, the populace was not so much concerned with their monarch’s sexual morality, but with the political influences exerted on him by an outside source. This woman was no German, as Ludwig’s others had been. Worse, Lola had no clear nationality at all, claiming to be a Spaniard in order to hide her true identity. Born in Ireland, raised in India, married in England and divorced there for adultery, Lola spoke a little Spanish with an Irish-British accent. Who was she? If she was indeed working for a foreign government, which one was it?

  Worse than her uncertain nationality and political agenda was Lola’s uniquely bad temper. Petulant, fiery, uncontrollable, she frequently slapped and punched shop owners and people on the street who she felt had insulted her. One day, as she walked the streets of Munich, her huge black dog bit a deliveryman’s foot. Reaching for a club to protect himself, the poor man was struck hard several times by the king’s mistress. A crowd formed and chased Lola into a silver shop. As darkness fell, and some four hundred incensed citizens yelled for her in front of the shop, Lola escaped down a ladder in the back.

  The seats near Lola’s theater box were usually empty, as no one wanted to be seen near her. During the plays, when Ludwig would abandon his wife, children, and royal guests to visit her, Lola remained seated while the king stood, a shocking breach of protocol.

  People in the street jostled her and called her rude names. Boys threw horse manure at her. Though Lola was far from a typical damsel in distress, these incidents soon attracted a group of university students which acted as a personal bodyguard. Her admirers formed their own fraternity, the Alemannia, named for an ancient German tribe, and wore a distinctive red cap.

  With Ludwig’s money, Lola treated the Alemannen to wild drinking parties—some said orgies—at her stately house. At one dinner, the students, carousing around wearing no pants, carried Lola on their shoulders and knocked her unconscious on a chandelier. The arrogance of the few dozen Alemannen outraged the other two thousand university students, who began to whistle and catcall whenever a red cap appeared in view. When Lola’s fraternity boys would attend lectures, the other students would rise and leave. On some occasions, two or three Alemannen would sit alone in a large lecture hall.

  Annoyed by the constant reports of disruptions, Ludwig decided to close the university for a semester. A riot ensued, students and ordinary citizens chasing the Alemannen and battling with them in the streets. Lola, hearing about it, threw herself into the midst of the fray with characteristic fearlessness. But she was soon recognized and chased, pelted with manure, and knocked to the ground. She made her way to a church, where the priest promptly threw her out. Finally, several gendarmes encircled her and helped her escape to the royal palace.

  Hundreds of protesters stormed the police headquarters, tore up the paving stones, and broke every window in the building. The following day, protests continued. To defuse the ticking time bomb, the city commandant announced to a crowd that Lola Montez would be leaving the city within an hour. Delighted, the mob ran to her house to witness the royal whore’s departure. But the statement was false. Lola ran outside with a gun and dared them to kill her. When a hail of stones was the reply, she cried, “Here I am! Kill me if you dare!”21

  Worried that Lola’s foolhardiness would indeed get her killed, her coachman and a lieutenant harnessed her horses to a carriage and threw her inside. The coachman sprang on top and whipped the horses through the jeering crowd. Against her will, Lola left Munich.

  Within a few days, Lola, dressed as a man and wearing a false beard, sneaked into Munich and managed to visit Ludwig briefly to secure her financial future. She and Ludwig arranged to meet in Switzerland a few weeks later when things calmed down. But word flew through the city that Lola had visited, and angry crowds, hearing that she was hiding in this building or that, would surround them and threaten to tear them apart.

  In the midst of the uproar, Ludwig abdicated the throne, hoping to leave Bavaria and go to his Lola. But Bavarian citizens, furious that he would escape with state funds and crown jewels for his whore, grew riotous when word spread of his intended trip. His son, the new king, begged Ludwig to stay in Bavaria or else he, too, might lose the throne. Despite several efforts over the next two years to meet, the pair were always thwarted. And slowly, as reports filtered in about Lola’s lifestyle, Ludwig’s heart hardened against her. And he looked back wistfully on his blinding, foolish dream of love.

  But the revolutions of 1848 were the last convulsions of the French Revolution. By the late nineteenth century, Western Europe had settled into a more polite form of civilization where society could not be roiled by anything as boring as a king’s mistress. When Edward VII became king of Great Britain in 1901, he was labeled “King Edward the Caresser,” a pun on his saintly ancestor King Edward the Confessor. Englishmen roared with laughter when they heard a story first reported by a naval officer on the royal yacht who, walking by the porthole of Edward’s cabin, heard him cry, “Stop calling me Sir and put another cushion under your back.”22

  9. The Fruits of Sin—Royal Bastards

  This making of bastards great

  And duchessing every whore

  The Surplus and Treasury cheat

  Hath made me damnably poor.

  —1680s POEM ABOUT CHARLES II

  MORE VALUABLE THAN A TIARA OF DIAMONDS, A LARGE BELLY was the greatest proof of the king’s affections. A child bound the king to his mistress long after her disgrace or retirement and usually ensured her a lifetime of generous pensions. It is no wonder that most European courts were littered with royal bastards.

  It was generally accepted that bastards were more intelligent and better looking than legitimate children. The belief was that intercourse between a man and his mistress was truly an act of love, or at least genuine desire. And in that moment of conception, the passions of love and desire mingled to form a more impressive child than those wrung from forced copulation. Louis XIV, distressed that five of his six legitimate children died young, while so many of his bastards thrived, was informed by his doctors that he
had given his best juice to his mistresses, leaving the queen with only the dregs of the glass. The truth was that compulsory marital sex between inbred cousins often produced another genetically inferior generation, with the poor health, plodding intelligence, and grim appearance of their parents.

  One day in the 1670s Louis XIV’s Queen Marie-Thérèse, mother of a prince just as dull and unattractive as herself, grew quite peeved when she heard courtiers raving about the king’s adorable, precocious sons with Madame de Montespan. “Everybody goes into ecstasies about those children while Monsieur le Dauphin is never even mentioned,” she complained.1

  In addition to superior intelligence and looks, royal bastards were less arrogant than their legitimate half siblings, who sauntered about court prickly with the pride of their fully royal birth. Bastards had no official position other than what their father chose to bestow on them and usually offered him a fierce loyalty in return for his generosity. When Henry II of England lay dying in 1189, of all his children, only his bastard son Geoffrey Plantagenet sat by his side. Henry’s surviving legitimate sons, John and Richard, had allied themselves with the king of France and were rebelling against their father. “You alone have proved yourself my lawful and true son,” Henry grumbled. “My other sons are really the bastards.”2

  The Love of Kings and Bastards

  The king often loved his bastards far better than the princes and princesses coerced from his loins in the marriage bed. Nothing devastated Henri IV of France so much as seeing how his heir, the dauphin, was the spitting image of his mother, the unloved Queen Marie de Medici. According to a nobleman, soon after the birth of Henri’s bastard with Henriette d’Entragues, the king said that this child was “finer than that of the Queen, who resembles the Medici, being swarthy and fat.” When the queen was told of the king’s comment, “she wept bitterly.”3 As his bastard son grew up, Henri would point to him and say, “See how good-natured this son is and how much he resembles me. He is not a stubborn child like the Dauphin.”4