Sex with the Queen
Eleanor Herman
In this follow-up to her bestselling Sex with Kings, Eleanor Herman reveals the truth about what goes on behind the closed door of a queen’s boudoir. Impeccably researched, filled with page-turning romance, passion, and scandal, Sex with the Queen explores the scintillating sexual lives of some of our most beloved and infamous female rulers.
She was the queen, living in an opulent palace, wearing lavish gowns and dazzling jewels. She was envied, admired, and revered. She was also miserable, having been forced to marry a foreign prince sight unseen, a royal ogre who was sadistic, foaming at the mouth, physically repulsive, mentally incompetent, or sexually impotent—and in some cases all of the above.
How did queens find happiness? In courts bristling with testosterone—swashbuckling generals, polished courtiers, and virile cardinals—many royal women had love affairs.
Anne Boleyn flirted with courtiers; Catherine Howard slept with one. Henry VIII had both of them beheaded.
Catherine the Great had her idiot husband murdered, and ruled the Russian empire with a long list of sexy young favorites.
Marie Antoinette fell in love with the handsome Swedish count Axel Fersen, who tried valiantly to rescue her from the guillotine.
Empress Alexandra of Russia found emotional solace in the mad monk Rasputin. Her behavior was the spark that set off the firestorm of the Russian revolution.
Princess Diana gave up her palace bodyguard to enjoy countless love affairs, which tragically led to her early death.
When a queen became sick to death of her husband and took a lover, anything could happen—from disgrace and death to political victory. Some kings imprisoned erring wives for life; other monarchs obligingly named the queen's lover prime minister.
The crucial factor deciding the fate of an unfaithful queen was the love affair's implications in terms of power, money, and factional rivalry. At European courts, it was the politics—not the sex—that caused a royal woman's tragedy—or her ultimate triumph.
Eleanor Herman
SEX WITH THE QUEEN
900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics
To my husband, Michael Dyment.
If all queens had been married to a prince like you, they would never have committed adultery.
INTRODUCTION
That wife alone unsullied credit wins Whose virtues can atone her husband’s sins. Thus, while the man has other nymphs in view, It suits the woman to be doubly true.
—RICHARD SHERIDAN
VIRILE KINGS, CHASTE QUEENS
LUSCIOUS MISTRESSES GRACED THE BEDS OF MOST EUROPEAN kings for hundreds of years, pocketing eye-popping salaries and sometimes ruling nations. Indeed, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the position of royal mistress was almost as official as that of prime minister. She influenced the arts, charmed foreign ambassadors, and appointed ministers. Her rooms were often grander than those of the queen, her gowns more gorgeous, her jewels more dazzling.
While adultery was never lauded, judgment was often mute when the king took a mistress; he had been forced for political reasons to marry an unattractive, awkward foreign princess with whom he had absolutely nothing in common. In 1662 the tall, swarthy Charles II of England wed the tiny bucktoothed Princess Catherine of Portugal. Much to his bride’s chagrin, Charles refused to give up his highly sexed auburn-haired mistress, Barbara, Lady Castlemaine.
Charles explained that “he was no atheist but he could not think God would make a man miserable for taking a little pleasure out of the way.”1 Over the years, Charles took a great deal of pleasure out of the way—the darkly elegant Frenchwoman Louise de Kéroualle, the spunky actress Nell Gwynn, the sleekly bisexual Italian Hortense Mancini, and many more.
In 1660 the handsome Louis XIV of France married his first cousin, Princess Marie-Thérèse of Spain, the dwarfish byproduct of generations of inbreeding. Though spared the drooling insanity which had plagued many of her ancestors, Marie-Thérèse had a limited understanding and found herself adrift in the most witty, polished court in Europe. Louis placated himself first with the shy pretty Louise de La Vallière. After seven years he found himself racing into the arms of Athénaïs de Montespan, a magnificent tawny lioness who kept him ensnared for thirteen years. He enjoyed numerous lesser mistresses, however, including the tall redheaded princesse de Soubise, and the breathtaking blonde Marie-Angélique de Fontanges.
In 1725, at the age of fifteen, Louis XV married the dowdy twenty-two-year-old Polish princess Marie Leczinska for her family’s renowned fertility. Her own father, King Stanislaus, proclaimed Marie to be one of the two dullest queens in Europe, the other dull queen being his own wife. Marie spent her mornings in prayer, her afternoons doing embroidery, and her evenings playing cards. Her husband, who grew into a witty and cultured bon vivant, remained faithful for eight years, after which he chose four sisters as his mistresses, followed by the cultured Madame de Pompadour, and lastly the talented prostitute Madame du Barry.
Princesses were raised to accept their future husbands’ philandering with admirable nonchalance. When the heir to the French throne, Charles-Ferdinand, the duc de Berry, was assassinated in 1820, his wife, Duchess Marie Caroline, was pregnant. Visiting a certain city a few months after her husband’s death, she was appealed to by twenty poor women, each one claiming also to be carrying the dead duke’s child and asking for alms. Duchess Marie Caroline paused, considered, and replied, “It is quite possible. My husband spent a whole week in this neighborhood at the time in question.”2
In 1717 Czar Peter the Great of Russia and his wife, the good-natured Empress Catherine, toured the European capitals. At the court of Prussia, Princess Wilhelmina wrote of the empress, “She had with her a retinue of four hundred so-called ladies…. Almost every one of these creatures carried a richly dressed child in her arms, and when asked if the child were hers, replied, bowing and scraping after the Russian fashion: ‘The Czar did me the honor to give me this child.’”3
Where was the queen, we might wonder, as her husband laughed, and flirted, and planned political strategy with his mistress? Perhaps she was fulfilling her primary duty for the nation—belching forth as many royal children as her overwrought uterus could bear. Most likely she was on her knees in prayer, interceding with God for the prosperity of her adopted country. Or she was carrying out the queen’s traditional tasks of dispensing charity to the poor and mercy to the condemned. And when all else failed, there was always embroidery, an art at which neglected queens usually excelled. The majority of queens would never have dreamed of paying their straying husbands back in kind by jumping in the sack with a dashing courtier. If these queens never won their husbands’ ardor, they at least earned their respect.
But not all European queens were dull and pious and married to handsome clever husbands. In dozens of instances, the exact opposite was true. Beautiful intelligent princesses were forced into marriage with royal ogres—sadistic, foaming at the mouth, physically repulsive, mentally retarded, or sexually impotent— and in some cases all of the above. Casting about a court bristling with testosterone in the most delectable shapes, many queens glanced quickly back at their embroidery and said a Hail Mary to ward off temptation. Many another stared hard and, heart racing, threw down her embroidery, dropped her rosary on the floor, and chose a lover.
The queen’s choice often fell on a swashbuckling general, virility in boots, whose manly stride across polished parquet floors made her weak-kneed with desire. A witty courtier, his masculinity varnished with a sparkling layer of elegance, often won the queen’s heart. Perhaps she would select a brilliant politician whose cunning insight would help her gain control of the nation; oddly, som
e of these politicians were draped in the robes of a bishop or cardinal. One empress found her lover in the church choir; she was thunderstruck by a young Adonis with the voice of an angel and quickly got him out of the house of God and into her royal four-poster.
VIRGIN AND QUEEN
While kings felt compelled to take mistresses to enhance their virile royal image, queens, on the other hand, were supposed to emulate the mother of Christ. Chastity, mercy, patience, and obedience—these were the qualities expected of a queen.
As early as the fifth century, the image of the Virgin, Mother of the Savior of the World, became blurred with the image of the queen, mother of the savior of the realm. Both Virgin and queen were often portrayed holding a baby. The Virgin morphed into the Queen of Heaven and was often painted wearing a crown and coronation robes—though it is safe to assume that Mary, wife of a Judean carpenter, never possessed any such luxuries. The earthly queen was often depicted bestowing the heavenly blessing of the Virgin, as if she were the Virgin herself.
To compound the parallel images, by the Middle Ages queens’ marriages, coronations, and burials were made to fall on dates sacred to the Virgin Mary. Surely no queen personified the Virgin as closely as Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) who was, ironically, Protestant. Elizabeth was truly a virgin—we think. It is possible she had an affair as a young queen with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, but those suitors of later years, Sir Walter Raleigh; Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex; Sir Thomas Heneage; and Sir Christopher Hatton, were admirers held firmly at arm’s length.
This virgin queen replaced the dazzling images of Mary with dazzling images of herself. Courtiers, who a generation earlier had worshiped images of the Virgin Queen of Heaven, now bowed down before images of the virgin queen of England. Elizabeth even borrowed symbols traditionally associated with Jesus’s mother in religious art—the moon, the phoenix, the ermine, and the pearl. English subjects felt it was no coincidence that Elizabeth was born on September 7, the eve of the Feast of the Virgin, and died on March 24, the eve of the Annunciation of the Virgin.
Though Elizabeth most closely resembled the Virgin Mary in her probable physical virginity as well as her iconography, her single state confounded all of Europe. The ideal was to be like the Virgin, not be a virgin. Many didn’t fall for the virgin story at all; they said the queen did not marry because she refused to confine her lusts to one man. While some protested a bit too much about Elizabeth’s insatiable desires, claiming she even had sex with certain foreigners who were known to have enormous private parts, others declared the poor queen never married because she suffered from a genital deformity which prevented sex and childbearing. The Venetian ambassador in France heard that her menstrual cycle flowed out of one of her legs rather than the usual place.
Most likely, the queen’s single state was due neither to frigidity nor nymphomania nor deformity. The tragic fates of her mother and stepmothers at Henry VIII’s hands must have nurtured a horror of marriage that grew like a cancer in her belly. She once told the ambassador to the duchy of Württemberg, “I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.”4 To the French envoy she stated, “When I think of marriage, it is as though my heart were being dragged out of my vitals.”5
By the time of Elizabeth’s death in the early seventeenth century, virgin worship was less prominent in those countries which remained Catholic after the Reformation. The result was a more secular, relaxed lifestyle, in which the queen was viewed as a flesh-and-blood woman with faults and foibles, not as a chiseled stone statue interceding with God. But the intertwined images of Virgin Mary and queen had been hammered into the social subconscious for a thousand years and, though less pivotal in daily life, still existed. As both Virgin and queen had borne a princely savior with a sacred father, a queen whose behavior cast doubt upon the paternity of her son must have left a sour taste in the mouth of many a good Christian.
THE SANCTIFIED SUBSTANCE
Royal blood was almost always passed down from kingly father to princely son—via a uterus where the child incubated for nine months. The strict refusal of that uterus to harbor any but royal seed was of the utmost importance to keeping the bloodline pure. It was the myth of royal blood that kept kings seated firmly on their thrones, prevented civil war, held foreign invaders at bay, and kept a superstitious people groveling before their monarch and paying the exorbitant taxes he required.
The myth started long ago when, shrouded by the mists of time, a bold warrior rode into battle swinging his sword and conquered his enemies. Chosen king by his grateful admirers, he continued to destroy adversaries, appease a wrathful deity, and rule with wisdom—sure signs that he was God’s chosen. Grasping at the mirage of immortality on earth, the aging monarch wanted to ensure that a part of him—his own flesh and blood—would rule after his death. But what if the king’s son was sickly, effeminate, weak-minded? How to convince the people that they must accept this poor specimen of manhood as their king rather than choosing instead a fearless warrior from a rival family?
And so the myth was born which declared that the king’s connection with God, his divine right to rule, was manifested in his blood—rather than his intelligence, looks, or temperament—and could be passed on to future generations. True, the myth of royal blood often ensured a stable transition of power from father to son instead of a bloody fracas of maces and battle-axes to determine who would be the new king. But it also resulted in countless insane monarchs, dribbling onto their chins and cackling, while millions of subjects bowed down to them in worshipful reverence. Insane they might be, but that sacred stuff coursing through their veins, the mystical royal blood, made them better than anyone else, made them God’s chosen to rule.
A scientific means of establishing paternity was not developed until the blood test of 1927. Until then, to ensure that the next generation of royals possessed the sanctified substance, the queen had to maintain strict fidelity to her husband. The ancient double standard—men rutting with mistresses while their wives sewed altar cloths—was rooted not in misogyny, but in biology.
“Consider of what importance to society the chastity of women is,” said the renowned wit and scholar Dr. Samuel Johnson, who wrote the first English dictionary in 1757. “Upon that all the property in the world depends. We hang a thief for stealing a sheep, but the unchastity of a woman transfers sheep, and farm, and all from the right owner.”6
In 1695 Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Charlotte, the duchesse d’Orléans, wrote, “Where in the world is a prince to be found who loves his wife only, and has no one else? If their wives on that account were to lead the same kind of life that they do, no one could be sure that their children were the true heirs.” Referring to a young relative who had committed adultery, she added, “Doesn’t this Duchess know that a wife’s honor consists in giving herself to nobody but her husband, whereas for the husband there is no shame in having mistresses but only in being made a cuckold?”7
Considering the emphasis on the royal bloodline, it is ironic that courts were littered, not just with the king’s bastards, but with the queen’s bastards as well; in her case these were children who bore the name of the kingly house, children who married into other royal families based on ancestry they did not, in fact, possess. With regard to royal children, the only consideration more important than their kingly blood was the monarch’s self-interest. Many kings acknowledged children they knew had been fathered by someone else. Often, kings did not want to cast doubt on the paternity of older children they knew to be their own. In the case where the king could not father children, sometimes court factions heartily desired the queen to bear bastards in order to stabilize the throne and cement their own interests.
Fortunately, the queen’s complete and utter disillusionment with her husband usually set in after the birth of the heir. And so it was not deemed worthwhile to lose international prestige, throw the nation into tumult, and question the paternity of all royal children, simpl
y to deny the one cuckoo in the robin’s nest. In the early nineteenth century, the last son of King John VI and Queen Carlota Joaquina of Portugal was extremely good-looking and slender—unlike either of his parents—and happened to be the spitting image of the handsome gardener at the queen’s country retreat. Other than a few snickers behind painted fans, no one said a word.
More recently, the love affairs of Diana, Princess of Wales, created doubt about the paternity of her second son, Prince Harry, born in 1984. When Prince Charles first glanced at his newborn, he expressed alarm at the child’s red hair. Diana often spoke of this moment as the point where her marriage was over. Charles, who had been hoping for a daughter, was disappointed that his wife had presented him with another boy, and worse, that the child had red hair, which Charles disliked. There is, however, a different way of interpreting Charles’s irritation at his son’s hair color. If he had suspected that Diana had been having an affair with a red-haired man, then his reaction would have been quite understandable.
Fingers often point to Captain James Hewitt, the charming carrot-topped lady-killer who confessed to having a five-year affair with the princess starting in 1986, a year and a half after Harry’s birth. Yet there are rumors that the two met each other before Diana’s 1981 wedding and denied the earlier date to protect their son, poor illegitimate Harry.
If Prince Harry had slipped into the world blessed with blond or dark locks, there probably would have been no unflattering speculation about his paternity. Red hair pops up unexpectedly in families, often skipping several generations. Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, has red hair and freckles. Moreover, if we get beyond the hair color and youthful good looks of Prince Harry, we can detect small narrow eyes, large flapping ears, and a wide mouth, the unfortunate hereditary traits of the Windsors.
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