Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  After twenty years of estrangement, separation, and an eventual divorce, by 1605 Margot and Henri had become good friends. No longer just king of tiny Navarre, Margot’s former husband had inherited the crown of France and become King Henri IV. Moving to Paris to live off her ex-husband’s largesse, the fat, aging fifty-three-year-old queen took men into her bed who were barely out of their teens. Alighting from her carriage one day with her lover the sieur de Saint-Julien, another admirer called Vermont shot his rival in the head and killed him. Vermont was hanged, and the queen collected two more hearts for the tin boxes rattling beneath her petticoat. She also insisted that the king buy her a new house, as she couldn’t possibly remain in the one where the murder had been committed.

  Soon after Margot moved to a house with less murderous memories, a jealous suitor ran her lover Bajaumont through with a sword in church. Visiting his ex-wife one day, the king saw her waiting women and asked them to pray for the recuperation of Bajaumont, for which he would reward them with New Year’s gifts. “For, if he were to die,” said the king, “ventre Saint-Gris! It would cost me a great deal more, since I should have to buy her a new house in place of this one, where she would never consent to remain.”9

  Though Henri shrugged off his ex-wife’s love affairs with a joke, when Peter the Great found out his former spouse had a lover, the czar was not amused. Peter had divorced his pious aristocratic wife, Queen Eudoxia, in 1698 and put her in a convent. Allowed to come and go as she wished, and to receive visitors, by 1718 Eudoxia was having a love affair with Stefan Glebov, a Russian military official.

  When Peter found out about the affair, he prepared a special punishment for Glebov. He was beaten and burned; his ribs were broken and his flesh torn out with red-hot pincers. But even that wasn’t a sufficient expression of Peter’s wrath. The czar had Glebov impaled through the rectum on a stake several feet high. Because the weather was bitterly cold, it was feared that Glebov would freeze to death mercifully quickly. So he was dressed in a fur hat, coat, and boots. He was impaled at three o’clock in the afternoon and lasted in excruciating pain until 7:30 the following evening. His corpse remained on the stake for months.

  “It is dangerous to love princesses,” said Laure d’Abrantès, a good friend of Napoleon’s promiscuous sisters.10 And indeed the emperor, seeing handsome admirers dancing attendance on Queen Elise of Tuscany, Queen Caroline of Naples, and Princess Pauline Borghese of Rome, routinely sent the amorous young men to the front. Though it was a gentler punishment than impalement, beheading, or hanging, many never returned.

  Penalties still exist today. In 1991 James Hewitt, who was the lover of Diana, Princess of Wales, was drummed out of his army career for failing three exams by 1 percent each. “I was not so naïve as to think that the authorities didn’t discuss my situation with regard to the heir to the throne,” he huffed in his biography Love and War. “It would be much more convenient for all concerned if I simply resigned my commission.”11 Though, looking back on the fates of other men diving into forbidden royal beds, it could have been worse.

  “OH, WHAT AN ASS IS MAN WITHOUT MONEY!”

  Not all royal lovers risked torture and death. It was far safer—and more profitable—to love a queen who ruled in her own right, or a consort who boasted a complacent husband.

  The background of Manuel Godoy, lover of Queen Maria Luisa of Spain, was modest; he came from a rural area of Spain known for its swineherds, which earned him the nickname El Choricero—the Sausage Man. Given the titles duque de Alcudia, grandee of Spain, and Prince of the Peace, Godoy took precedence over every man in the country except his good friend King Carlos and the heir to the throne. Godoy was given large estates in Granada and the shocking income of one million reales a year. Suddenly the Sausage Man was the richest private individual in the country.

  One day in the 1620s a young Roman named Giulio Mazarini—the future Cardinal Mazarin of France—was losing money at cards and cried out, “Oh, what an ass is man without money!”12

  But when in 1643 he became the lover of the widowed queen regent Anne, mother of the young Louis XIV, Mazarin was never again an ass, at least in financial terms. He possessed a library of forty thousand books—the king himself had only ten thousand. The cardinal had the finest horses in his stables and rare breeds of dogs in his kennels. His palace in Paris had a grand double staircase, three huge entrances, several inner courtyards, a beautiful garden, and the best collection of art in France. With exquisite taste, he had brought the color, warmth, and elegance of Rome to the chill of Paris. He sent to the Vatican for artists to make frescoes and imported the finest carriages from Italy. His furniture was made of lapis lazuli, mother of pearl, gold, silver, ebony, and tortoiseshell. His statues were of alabaster, his bed of ivory. He wore only the finest linen, the most costly perfumes.

  By applying clever cost-cutting measures, by 1648 he had saved the government of France the eye-popping sum of forty-two million livres, but reportedly rewarded himself with half that amount. In addition, he received 60,000 livres for taking charge of the king’s education, 20,000 for the post of minister, 6,000 for being a council member, 18,000 as a cardinal, and 110,000 as a pension from the queen. He owned twenty-one abbeys, which were worth 468,330 livres. On his deathbed in 1661, the cardinal, looking about his magnificent possessions, cried, “I must leave all this! I’ll never see these things again!”13 He didn’t seem to object to never seeing the queen again, however.

  The widowed Catherine the Great was the most generous monarch to her lovers. Over a period of thirty-four years she doled out the equivalent of more than two billion dollars in cash, pensions, palaces, works of art, fine furnishings, and serfs. In the early 1790s, an English visitor to St. Petersburg— known as the Venice of the north because of its interconnecting waterways—reported, “A party was considering which of the canals had cost the most money; when one of them archly observed there was not a doubt about the matter; Catherine’s Canal (this is the name of one of them) had unquestionably been the most expensive.”14

  GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY POSITIONS

  Unlike the royal mistress who, even if she wielded significant political power behind the scenes, had no official political title, certain royal lovers were made prime minister, some of them with excellent results. For thirty years starting in 1777 the British naval officer Sir John Acton ran Naples efficiently for his mistress, Queen Maria Carolina. During World War I one of Europe’s most capable politicians was Barbo Stirbey, lover of Queen Marie of Romania. Her husband, the weak and vacillating King Ferdinand, relied on Stirbey to steer his nation through the turmoil of war and into a golden age in the 1920s. When Ferdinand died in 1927, Stirbey ruled Romania as prime minister for Marie’s young grandson, King Michael.

  But not all royal lovers were suited for the position of prime minister. With the acquiescence of her mentally deranged husband, King Christian VII of Denmark, in 1771 Queen Caroline Matilda made her lover, Johann von Struensee, prime minister. Though possessed of great social vision, Struensee made so many new laws so quickly that Denmark erupted in rebellion and conspiracy.

  In 1792 Queen Maria Luisa of Spain made twenty-five-year-old Manuel Godoy prime minister. The queen’s lover had much to learn—upon taking up his duties he thought Russia and Prussia were the same country. When the saber-rattling Napoleon insisted on Spain’s support against Britain, and Britain urged Spain to fight Napoleon, poor Godoy was at a loss. For years he struggled to maintain an uneasy neutrality. But, as the late-seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, “To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the middle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.”15 Drenched and smoked out, Godoy and the Spanish royal family spent several years in genteel imprisonment in France after Napoleon conquered Spain and put his brother Joseph on the throne.

  More dangerous even than giving their lovers top political offices, many queens bestowed on them the highest military positio
ns—the rank of general or field marshal—and expected them with little or no battlefield experience to lead men to war. It was a perilous custom to appoint to such a crucial position a man whose most impressive qualifications were below the waist and not above the shoulders.

  When Empress Sophie of Russia fielded an army in 1687, she appointed her lover Prince Basil Golitzin the commanding general. In vain he protested that he was a diplomat and politician, not a soldier; she refused to listen. When he returned from a disastrous campaign against the Tatars, she welcomed him back to victory paeans, though some forty thousand men had been lost to fire, suffocation, or flight, and not a single battle had been fought. Undeterred, the empress sent him to war two years later in Crimea, where Golitzin lost thirty-five thousand men.

  In the 1790s Manuel Godoy was proclaimed admiral general of Spain and the Indies. He strutted impressively in his naval uniform and bicorn hat with plumes; but Godoy hated boats and open water, and whenever he went onboard to inspect a ship, he tried to quell rising nausea.

  HONORARY MEDALS

  If a king gave his mistress an obscenely expensive diamond necklace, all other women at court would turn pea green with envy. Naturally, such a gift was not suitable for a man; the queen’s lover wanted honorary orders for distinguished service, medals edged with dazzling diamonds and colorful fluttering ribbons. Many of these men had never fought a battle in their lives, but still eagerly sought decorations for martial valor. Their goal was to stride through palace corridors with an entire galaxy of shimmering stars and clanking medals on their chests.

  Catherine the Great’s lover Gregory Potemkin was made a knight of the Order of St. Andrew, Russia’s highest order. He was given the Black Eagle by Prussia and the White Eagle by Poland. Denmark bestowed upon him the Order of the Elephant, and Sweden the St. Seraph. Joseph II of Austria made him a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Louis XV balked at giving the empress’s lover the Order of the Holy Ghost, claiming it was only for Roman Catholics, and the prudish George III flat out refused to give him the Order of the Garter. But Potemkin’s battlefield courage and political acumen made him a worthy recipient of such honors.

  Many noble dinner guests of Caroline, Princess of Wales, protested at sitting down at the same table with her lover Bartolomeo Pergami, a man of humble birth. No European monarchs wanted to bestow upon him their elite orders. In 1816 the princess took ship to Malta, where she arranged for her lover to become a knight of Malta. Then she traveled to Jerusalem, where she founded a new knighthood called the Order of Saint Caroline, and appointed Pergami the master of the order. In Sicily she bought Pergami the small estate of Franchini, which rendered him a baron. The new baron Pergami della Franchini, knight of the Order of Malta, master of the Order of St. Caroline, was now sufficiently exalted under British rules of etiquette to sit down at Caroline’s table, though guests still grumbled about his low birth.

  In the late 1830s Queen Victoria’s mother, Victoire, the duchess of Kent, wanted to reward her lover John Conroy. But Queen Victoria, who despised her mother’s lover, firmly blocked the path in Britain to any honors. The resourceful Victoire, a German princess, twisted a few arms and arranged for German principalities to give him decorations and medals. The duchess arranged for him to be called “excellency”—but only in Germany, which galled him.

  The duchess further obtained an award for Conroy from Portugal, which included the signal honor that wherever he walked, guards preceding him would drum in his honor. But Conroy never made it to Portugal, even though he tried to organize several trips over the years—just to hear the drums.

  3. MEDIEVAL QUEENS, TUDOR VICTIMS

  Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  HUMAN NATURE BEING WHAT IT IS, WE CAN ASSUME THAT back in the cave the mate of the powerful chief—the man who wielded a big stick to bring home mammoth meat—looked with lust upon a muscular young hunter and wondered about the size of his stick. Alas, records of Ice Age love affairs simply don’t exist.

  Nor are there many records that attest to medieval queens taking lovers. Expected to reflect the virtues of the Virgin Mary, most queens probably never considered adultery as an option, no matter how horrible their husbands were. And yet, having examined the emptiness of palace life and the sorrows of the marital bed, well can we understand why a queen would have been unfaithful. Looking at the earliest stories of adulterous queens, we are unsure whether to condemn their weakness or applaud their courage.

  In 1109 King Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon forced his widowed daughter and heir, Princess Urraca, to marry Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragon. Feeling his end drawing near, Alfonso VI wanted his daughter to have the protection of a fierce warrior

  husband at her side. He died soon after the wedding and never saw Alfonso of Aragon and Urraca of Castile and Leon battling each other for decades. Though valiant on the battlefield, Alfonso was probably useless in bed; no one at court could comprehend his aversion to whores, mistresses, and women in general. Urraca detested her husband and soon abandoned him.

  But Urraca had little need of Alfonso on the battlefield. She hopped on a horse herself and spent thirteen campaign seasons out of her seventeen years’ rule waging war against unruly neighbors. Her top military commander was her lover Pedro Gonzalez, a powerful noble, whom she bore at least two illegitimate children. The queen died at the age of forty-six, giving birth to twins, some said, though no one knows. Records of the life of this intriguing woman are few and far between.

  ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE, QUEEN OF FRANCE

  “I Find I Have Wed a Monk”

  When eighteen-year-old Louis VII of France married the spirited fifteen-year-old Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1137, he would have gladly bedded her often, but his priests prevented it. Young as she was, she sized up her husband’s band of bleating clerics at a glance and dismissed them as worthless. They sized her up, too, and were alarmed; they had wielded unlimited power over the impressionable young king. Now this power was threatened by a headstrong girl whom Louis deeply loved. The renowned abbot Bernard of Clairvaux wrote the king that he was under the “counsel of the devil,” the devil being Queen Eleanor.1

  Louis’s priests often pulled the king out of his marital bed, leaving Eleanor seething with anger amongst the pillows. As a result of the priests’ interventions, in a decade of marriage, Eleanor gave her husband only one child—a useless girl. “I thought to have married a king,” she snarled, “but find I have wed a monk.”2

  When a penitent Louis VII vowed to go on crusade in 1146 to atone for his sins, Eleanor, bored to tears in her dark cold palace in muddy Paris, insisted on accompanying him. Various reports credited her with dressing as an Amazon in a silver breastplate as the cavalcade crossed the Hungarian plains. Once in the Holy Land, Eleanor probably had a rollicking affair with her uncle, the virile warrior Raymond of Poitiers who had claimed the kingdom of Antioch as his own. Thirty years after her visit to Antioch, the chronicler William of Tyre wrote, “Her conduct before and after this time showed her to be far from circumspect. Contrary to her royal dignity, she disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.”3

  When King Louis was ready to move on to Jerusalem, Eleanor told her husband that he might do as he pleased but she would stay behind with Uncle Raymond. Stunned, Louis asked her the reason behind her eagerness to abandon him. Eleanor supposedly retorted, “Why do I renounce you? Because of your fecklessness. You are not worth a rotten pear.”4

  Weak and ineffectual, Louis didn’t know what to do. But his advisers convinced the king, “It would be a lasting shame to the kingdom of the Franks if, in addition to all the other disasters, it was reported that the King had been deserted by his wife, or robbed of her.”5 Despite her probable adultery, Eleanor would be kept as queen as a matter of prestige, as well as for the rich lands she brought to France, lands which would depart with her in the event of a divorce.

  When a signal was given for the French
army to move out, the queen was scooped up in the middle of the night, slung over a horse, and forced to continue on crusade as a dutiful wife. She never saw her swaggering uncle again. Soon after her inglorious departure, he fell in battle against the Saracens, who plated his skull with silver and made it into a drinking cup.

  In 1152 Louis gave in to Eleanor’s pleas for a divorce on the grounds of consanguinity; they were fourth cousins, too closely related to a common ancestor to be legally married in the eyes of the church without a special dispensation. The real reason for a divorce, of course, was never consanguinity, which was a convenient excuse to end an unbearable marriage in a church that officially did not permit divorce. In Eleanor’s case the real reason was that she had not given her husband a son.

  Two months after her divorce she married the future Henry II of England, upon whom she bestowed her rich dower lands of Aquitaine as well as five sons and three daughters. Though more is known about Eleanor of Aquitaine than Urraca of Castile and Leon, much of her story was first written down decades after it occurred, often by scribes with political motivations for making her look good or evil and is, as such, suspect.

  ISABELLA OF FRANCE, QUEEN OF ENGLAND

  “Someone Has Come Between My Husband and Myself”

  Far better records exist for Isabella of France, who in 1308 at the age of twelve married the handsome twenty-four-year-old Edward II of England. At the time of the wedding Edward had already been in love with another man, Piers Gaveston, for a decade. According to a contemporary chronicler, “As soon as the King’s son saw him, he fell so much in love that he entered upon an enduring compact with him.”6