Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  After the nuptial celebrations in France, Edward sent all of the wedding gifts he had received from his father-in-law King Philip—gold rings and other jewels—back home to Gaveston as a present, which infuriated the French court. When the bride and groom landed in England, Edward leapt off the gangplank and ran into the arms of the waiting Gaveston. The new queen was left to clamber down the plank as best she could. At the coronation, it was Gaveston and not Isabella who seemed to be guest of honor. Edward had tapestries made for the coronation bearing not the arms of Edward and Isabella, as tradition demanded, but the arms of Edward and Gaveston, as if Edward had made Gaveston his queen.

  The child-queen, unsure of herself at a foreign court, put up with the relationship but must have been relieved when four years later jealous barons, many of whom had lost their lands and castles to Gaveston, murdered him. The king became devoted to his wife and allowed her to rule England for him. But in 1320, after eight years of marital peace, Edward chose another favorite, actually two favorites, father and son, Hugh Le Despenser the Elder and Hugh Le Despenser the Younger. Though the facts are murky, it is assumed that the king was having an affair only with the son, and the father was a close political adviser exploiting the relationship to reap advantages for the family. In 1321, as the Le Despensers’ star rose, Isabella’s faded. The new favorites convinced the king to decrease her authority, honors, and income.

  But this time Isabella was no longer a meek child. At twenty-five, she had ruled a nation for almost a decade and was not about to put up with another of her husband’s lovers robbing her. On a visit to her family in France, Isabella took a powerful lover who would help her wage war against her husband. Roger Mortimer, in his early forties, had been one of Edward’s successful generals against the Scots. But when the king confiscated his lands and castles, Mortimer became his deadliest enemy. Confined to the Tower of London, Mortimer arranged to have the guards drugged, rappelled down the battlements on a rope, swam the Thames, and escaped to France.

  We can imagine that first night when Queen Isabella let Mortimer into her room. She had known only the smooth girlish hands of Edward upon her; in their most intimate joining her husband must have fantasized that he was actually making love to Piers Gaveston. And now this heated warrior took her, roughly at first, then tenderly. And he never, ever, imagined she was a man.

  They made love at night and war during the day. Isabella began to dress as a widow and publicly proclaimed, “Someone has come between my husband and myself….I protest that I will not return until this intruder has been removed but, discarding my marriage garment, I shall assume the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this Pharisee.”7

  Armed with foreign troops, Isabella and Mortimer invaded England. Edward II and the Le Despensers fled but were soon captured. The favorites were hanged, cut down still alive, their bowels were cut out, their arms and legs hacked off, and their body parts fed to wild dogs.

  It was one thing for Isabella to execute the hated Le Despensers, quite another to murder an anointed king and her husband. Shakespeare summed up the feeling when he wrote, “Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off an anointed king.” Isabella locked Edward up, forced him to abdicate, and had her fifteen-year-old son proclaimed Edward III. Because her son was young, she ruled England with Mortimer, flinging aside her widow’s weeds. But Mortimer was, after all, a heterosexual version of Gaveston and the Le Despensers. Greedy, arrogant, and ambitious, he, too, confiscated estates from their rightful owners.

  Public support shifted back in favor of the deposed king who, sitting in his cell, wrote self-pitying poetry. “And call me a crownless King,” he opined, “a laughing stock to all.”8 Despite his wretched condition, he still posed a threat to Isabella and Mortimer, especially after two failed rescue attempts by his supporters. In 1327 Edward was murdered in his cell, supposedly by a red-hot poker being thrust up his anus inside a cow’s horn, so no one would see any marks, or as one chronicler put it, “slain with a hot spit put thro the secret place posterial.”9 Isabella and Mortimer were not only detested tyrants. Now they had murdered a king.

  In 1330 the eighteen-year-old Edward III eyed Mortimer’s increasing arrogance with concern. The young king was worried that his mother’s lover would have him murdered as well and reign in his stead, perhaps hoping to found his own dynasty with Isabella, who was still only thirty-four years old. Together with numerous barons robbed by Mortimer, Edward had him arrested. He was hanged, and the grieving Isabella remained in genteel confinement for two years before she was completely rehabilitated as Queen Mother. All her sins were thrown onto the shade of Roger Mortimer.

  Perhaps to make up for the misdeeds of the past, Isabella became quite pious, frequently visiting saints’ shrines. In her lavish apartments songbirds sang their sweet melodies, and minstrels played courtly tunes. For the Saint George’s Day celebrations in 1358, shortly before her death at the age of sixty-two, she wore a circlet of gold on her head, belts of silk studded with silver, eighteen hundred pearls (probably seed pearls), and three hundred rubies. She was buried, oddly enough, in her wedding gown, holding the casket of her husband’s heart, which she had never truly possessed while he was alive.

  JUANA OF PORTUGAL, QUEEN OF CASTILE: THE GOLDEN TURKEY BASTER

  While Edward II fathered four children with Isabella, another early king thought to be homosexual, Enrique IV of Castile, could not rise to the occasion with either of his two wives, no matter how hard he tried. Yet this resourceful monarch came up with a novel plan—an early form of artificial insemination.

  A large shambling man, painfully shy and eternally forlorn, Enrique had gorgeous golden hair and dreamy blue-green eyes which contrasted strangely with his huge yellow horses’ teeth and a flat crooked nose, broken in a childhood accident. He rarely bathed, perhaps because he had a bizarre fascination for repulsive odors.

  While still heir to the throne, the fifteen-year-old Enrique was married to Princess Blanca of Navarre, daughter of King Juan of Aragon, in 1440. When the couple was put to bed, heralds stood guard at the door ready to blast their trumpets when the bloody sheets were brought out. Three notaries sat next to the bed, quills poised to record the first shriek or moan as proof of consummation. Stripped of her white nightgown, Blanca slid between the sheets. Enrique entered and slipped in beside her. The bed curtains were closed. The notaries seated themselves, leaning forward, listening intently. The candles burned down, guttering in the deadly silence of the room. The notaries shifted uneasily on the hard bench.

  Outside waited crowds of courtiers, as well as Enrique’s father, King Juan II. But no bloody sheet came out as proof. Nothing happened. Finally the notaries gave up and went to bed. One report related, “The Princess remained exactly as she had been born.”10

  Many hoped that with time the fifteen-year-old prince would fulfill his connubial duties; perhaps his youth and the frayed nerves of the wedding night had frightened him. But the months went by, and then the years, and no bloody sheet ever emerged. Some whispered that the prince was homosexual, and indeed he kept company with men known to be gay.

  It was a somber event indeed when the ruler of a Spanish kingdom—Castile, Leon, Aragon, Galicia, or Valencia—died without an heir. Fractious neighboring kingdoms, all jockeying for superiority, were eager to swoop down upon his realm and claim it for themselves. When, after thirteen years of marriage, Blanca still remained a virgin, the archbishop of Toledo moved to annul the marriage on the grounds of nonconsummation.

  Blanca shamefacedly took the stand and swore she was still a virgin. She underwent a physical examination by honorable matrons who declared her to be as “whole as the day she was born.”11 She was sent back to her father, who was furious with her for not being able to rouse her husband to his bedtime duties.

  When doctors examined Enrique, they found that His Majesty’s “penis was thin and weak at the base, but huge at the head, with the result that he could not have an
erection.”12 He began to be known as “Enrique the Impotent.”

  But the king did not agree that he was hopelessly incapable of making love to a woman. A new wife was needed, he claimed. Clearly his penis had been bewitched with regard to Blanca, but he had hopes that he could be aroused with a different woman and could sire an heir. As soon as he became king in 1454, Enrique ordered a new bride, Princess Juana of Portugal. The sixteen-year-old princess had flashing dark eyes, long black hair, and tawny skin. She was sleek, sinuous, and flirtatious. Freshly scrubbed and scented after her journey, she must have been revolted when she met her groom, tall and hunched and hulking, smelling of sweat and horse.

  After the wedding ceremony, the royal couple entered the bedchamber. The king had fortified himself with the Viagra of the time, broth of bulls’ testicles mixed with powder of porcupine quills. He refused to allow notaries in the room. No sheet showing that night, he announced. But it was all in vain because, once more, it was reported that “the King and Queen slept in the same bed, and the Queen remained as intact as she had arrived.”13

  Desperate for an heir, Enrique attempted a crude type of artificial insemination. The king was masturbated—by whom records don’t say, perhaps by a doctor. The bit of ejaculate coaxed out of him, which was described as “watery,” was inserted by means of a kind of golden turkey baster into the queen, who was lying in bed with her legs in the air. It must have been horribly humiliating for both.

  In 1461 the queen was pregnant. Enrique was delighted, thrilled; finally he had proved himself a man. The golden turkey baster had worked, and, although it had not been accomplished in the usual way, he was going to have a child. But courtiers merely snickered. They knew the queen had been allowing a handsome young courtier, Beltran de la Cueva, into her chamber. In February a little girl was born, a princess named Juana after her mother, but whom Castilian courtiers and soon all of Europe nicknamed “La Beltraneja” after her real father. And indeed she was his spitting image.

  The king later divorced his erring wife, who continued to get pregnant long after Enrique had stopped trying the golden turkey baster trick. Enrique named his younger half sister Isabel of Castile as his heir. The two of them signed a joint document proclaiming that Queen Juana “had not used her person cleanly as complies with the service of the king nor her own.”14 Isabel married Prince Ferdinand of Aragon, and together they launched Columbus into the New World. They also launched the inconvenient princess Juana la Beltraneja into a convent where she could make no claims on their throne.

  ANNE BOLEYN, QUEEN OF ENGLAND

  “She Excelled Them All”

  It is ironic that the most famous queen ever executed for adultery was wholly innocent. The raven-haired Anne Boleyn, though she was vicious and vengeful and had a heart like a chunk of ice and a tongue as sharp and tearing as a meat cleaver, had always been faithful to her marriage bed. But it was never sex alone that did in a queen, even if Anne had been guilty. It was politics.

  In 1526 Henry VIII, casting about court for a new mistress, fell passionately in love with Anne, the nineteen-year-old niece of the powerful Howard clan. Ambitious in a world where women held little power, Anne realized that as royal mistress she could whisper suggestions into the king’s ear after lovemaking, seeds that often took root and bore fruit. But her older sister Mary, blond and soft and pretty, had been Henry VIII’s mistress and was cast aside like used goods. No. Anne would never stand for that.

  And then she looked at the queen, old and barren at forty-one, hobbled with arthritis, her waist thick from years of fruitless childbearing. Henry had not slept with Queen Catherine, a Spanish princess, in years. All the queen’s children, except a useless girl, had died at birth. Why should Henry not divorce his barren wife and marry young fertile Anne to beget sons? Queen Anne. Ah, that would be power indeed.

  At thirty-five, Henry was at his physical peak. He stood six foot one, a giant for his time. He was powerful in his physique, and though he had gained weight recently he carried it magnificently beneath his padded, broad-shouldered coats. He had short red-gold hair and a cropped beard. His ice blue eyes were small, intense, and never missed a thing.

  Henry was the quintessential Renaissance man. He played the lute, the virginals (an early kind of organ), the recorder, and the harp. He wrote music, sang, and pirouetted gracefully on the dance floor. He spoke four languages fluently, composed poetry and music, and pursued astronomy and science. An avid sportsman, he rode, jousted, threw spears, bowled, and played tennis. Henry was a man of keen intellect, deep religious devotion, and outbursts of vicious cruelty. He was an utterly selfish man who could not bear to hear he would not get his way. And now he wanted his way with Anne Boleyn. And ambitious Anne wanted her way with him.

  But to keep the king interested for the years it would take to unharness himself from Queen Catherine, Anne had to awaken his desires without assuaging them. And so she became his mistress in all things but sex. Vivacious Anne offered Henry friendship, entertainment, witty conversation, challenging political dialog, and theological debates. She danced, sang, played the lute, hunted with him, and organized tournaments and pageants for his amusement. Anne held out the promise of incredible sex and numerous sons to her overheated monarch, if only he would divorce his faithful queen and marry her.

  Like many royal mistresses before and since, Anne was no classic beauty but made up for it with charm and personality—she made a room crackle with life by simply stepping into it. A palace servant remembered Anne “for her excellent grace and behavior.” Another wrote, “Albeit in beauty she was to many inferior, but for behavior, manner, attire and tongue, she excelled them all, for she had been brought up in France.”15 Her greatest asset was her rapid-fire wit. Conversing with Anne was akin to fencing, the thrusts and retreats of sharp blades.

  The Venetian ambassador wrote, “Madame Anne is not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English king’s great appetite and her eyes, which are black and beautiful.”16 Her unbounded self-confidence made her seem beautiful, though her skin was a bit sallow, her chest a bit flat.

  Anne led the fashions at Henry’s court, trading in the tight wrist-length sleeves for wide sleeves hanging down to the knee. She rejected the unattractive peaked gable headdress for the lovely crescent-shaped French cap. Anne wore rich gowns of royal purple, a color reserved for royalty, embroidered with silver and gold and studded with precious gems.

  Her life as queen-in-all-but-name at the numerous Tudor royal palaces was luxurious. The magnificence of the king was manifested in his lodgings, apparel, barges, and coaches. Royal rooms were decorated with elegant tapestries in vivid colors, elaborately carved tables, and chairs upholstered in velvet. Anne sat in the queen’s chair of estate at royal events and presided over great feasts. Her huge four-poster bed boasted gold fringe from Venice and gold tassels from Florence. She accompanied the king as he went on his rounds to the various royal palaces—often thirty trips a year.

  The court’s absence allowed the staff to clean out a residence, wash the walls of urine, sweep out the flea-ridden rushes on the floor, and allow the water supply in palace wells to build up. Henry was one of the few premodern rulers who abhorred dirt. He issued edicts prohibiting urinating in hallways and throwing food on floors. Peeing in the king’s cooking hearth was strictly forbidden. Palace officials painted large red crosses on outside walls that were frequent targets of urination in the hopes that no one would want to desecrate such a holy symbol. They were often disappointed.

  Henry made sure his palaces had conduit systems, a spring-fed early type of plumbing which used lead pipes to bring water to kitchens, fountains, fishponds, and gardens and had the added value of flushing out the sewers beneath the palace. The royal family, and the most important courtiers, had running water in their own rooms, though it was not usually heated. Henry VIII’s bath at Hampton Co
urt, however, had water piped in hot from a stove in the room next door. Despite Henry’s momentous efforts to achieve cleanliness, he was often pestered by fleas and lice, and he usually wore a piece of fur to bed in the hopes that the critters would jump on the fur and not on the king.

  But the unprecedented cleanliness and luxury of Henry’s court were not enough for Anne. She had a political agenda. At Anne’s goading, Henry exiled his devoted wife to a drafty castle where she would die, and he publicly proclaimed his daughter, Princess Mary, a bastard. He then broke from the Catholic Church, putting to death all subjects who would not recognize him as head of the Church of England. He tossed monks and nuns into the streets and grabbed church properties for himself. Time-honored political alliances were shattered, new ones were forged. Like a puppeteer, this not pretty daughter of the minor nobility held the strings to the kings and queens and cardinals of Europe, the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor and, by lifting a finger, made them dance.

  Only after six years, when Henry’s divorce from Catherine was well under way and Anne the acknowledged fiancée, did she finally accept Henry into her bed. After so many years of waiting we can imagine the blessed release of that first night, the taste of her skin, the feel of his weight, the cries of pure delight in the dark. It was a providential coupling for England. Anne cleverly became pregnant immediately with the greatest monarch the nation would ever have. Desperate for a son, Henry wanted to make sure the prince Anne was carrying would be born within the sacred bonds of marriage, an undisputed legal heir. He secretly married Anne in January 1533.

  A century after Henry VIII, the earl of Sandwich said, “He that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head.”17 Very soon after his second marriage, Henry must have felt as if he had indeed clapped such a hat upon his head. Anne Boleyn stubbornly gave him a princess—the future Queen Elizabeth— instead of a prince. Nor was the new queen popular with the English people. There were so few cheers during Anne’s 1533 coronation that it resembled “a funeral rather than a pageant,” wrote the Spanish ambassador.18