Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  Days later Fersen wrote that he was haunted by “the image of Louis XVI mounting the scaffold…. Often I curse the day I left Sweden, that I ever knew anything but our rocks and our firs. I would not have had, it is true, so many joys, but I’m paying dearly for them at the moment, and I would have spared myself many pains. I cry often all alone, my dear Sophie….”43

  In March 1793 Marie Antoinette had a last chance at escape—the commissioner in charge of the royal prisoners was prepared to smuggle her to the coast and put her in a boat for England. But as it was impossible to rescue her children at the same time, the queen refused to leave them behind. “I could enjoy nothing if I left my children,” she wrote, “and this idea leaves me without even a single regret.”44

  Because France had become too dangerous for him, Fersen moved to Brussels, 210 miles away from Paris, hoping to make another rescue attempt. No Scarlet Pimpernel, Fersen was frustrated at every turn. Moreover, his generosity in paying for the earlier escape was catching up with him, and he found himself living on very little money. “Never mind, it was for Her,” he wrote, “I had to.”45

  The eight-year-old dauphin, now called Louis XVII by royalists, was taken from his mother and given to a cobbler who beat him, plied him with alcohol, and tried to get him to masturbate to provide evidence against the queen’s incestuous proclivities. Having lost her son, Marie Antoinette was also separated from her daughter and taken to a different prison. Waiting at the doorstep for their prisoner, her new jailers became concerned that she did not emerge from her carriage for some time. After she finally did venture out, they looked inside and saw that the floor was coated with blood. Once in her cell, the queen kept losing alarming amounts of blood. It is likely that she was dying of uterine cancer.

  In a cold chamber with no fire, the queen began to show symptoms of tuberculosis. The sheets on her narrow bed were filthy, and she had a single dirty blanket with holes in it. Dressed in black to hide the blood, she expected to be murdered in her cell or led to her execution at any moment. One day, walking through a door she struck her head on the doorway. Asked if she were hurt, she replied, “Oh no—nothing can hurt me any more.”46

  On September 4 Fersen wrote to Sophie, “I often reproach myself even for the air I breathe when I think she is shut up in a dreadful prison. This idea is breaking my heart and poisoning my life, and I’m constantly torn between grief and rage.”47

  In October 1793 Marie Antoinette, the Austrian whore, as she was called, was charged with aiding and abetting the enemies of France to launch an invasion, which was true. Many of the letters she had had smuggled out of prison had been intercepted and decoded. To drag her despised name through the mud even further, she was also accused of sexually abusing her son, which was untrue. The terrified little boy had been beaten until he testified against her. Found guilty of all charges, she was sentenced to be guillotined.

  She was, without the aid of the guillotine, already a dying woman, eaten up by tuberculosis and cancer and the grief that fed their growth. In her final letter, she wrote to her sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, of her dead husband: “I hope to show the same firmness as he did in his last moments….”48 She continued in a mysterious passage which must have referred to Fersen: “I used to have friends. The idea of being separated from them for ever and their grief is one of the greatest sorrows I shall carry to my grave; may they know at least that I thought of them until my last moment.”49 On her prayer book she wrote, “My God, have pity on me! My eyes have no tears left to weep for you, my poor children. Adieu, adieu!”50

  Hours later, Marie Antoinette, dressed in a simple white dress with her hands tied behind her back, was loaded into a tumbrel which drove her from her prison to the foot of the guillotine. In preparation for the sharp blade, her hair had been cut. Those golden curls, once piled high with diamonds, feathers, and bows, were now a raggedy mess of dirty white tendrils. As the cart lurched forward through howling crowds, her priest said, “Have courage, Madame.” “Courage!” she almost spat. “It is to live that requires courage, not to die.”51

  She was shoved roughly up the steps. Louis would have been proud of her, for, like him, she showed no fear. Even at that moment Marie Antoinette was still the most fashionable woman in France, leading the fashion right up to the guillotine where thousands more fashionable women would follow. Moments later her head was held up by the executioner. Her body was dumped in an unmarked grave near that of her husband. It was October 16, 1793.

  Upon hearing the news that she was, at last, beyond hope of his rescue, Fersen was devastated. “I seemed to feel nothing,” he wrote in his diary.52 The next day he went out riding alone. When he returned he wrote, “That she was alone in her last moments without consolation, with no one to talk to, to give her last wishes to, is horrifying. The monsters from hell! No, without revenge, my heart will never be satisfied.”53 He kept a list of the names of the judges who had condemned her. As the years passed, he checked off the names of those who had died; with exquisite irony, most of them were guillotined.

  Two months after the queen’s execution, he wrote to Sophie of the bungled night of Varennes two years earlier: “I would have been much happier if I’d died on June 21.”54 He was not yet forty, yet his life was over. His remaining years would not be living, but existing, dragging himself reluctantly through each day, until death assuaged his pain.

  When a dejected Fersen finally returned to Stockholm, his sister handed him a scrap of paper that the queen had somehow smuggled out to Sophie shortly before her execution. “Adieu,” it said simply. “My heart is all yours.”55 A ray of light pierced the darkness of his soul; this pitiful scrap of wrinkled paper seemed to be a message from Her in heaven.

  In June 1795 another blow hit Fersen; the death in prison of the ten-year-old Louis XVII, the boy who was perhaps his son. “This event caused me real pain,” he wrote sadly. “He was the last and only interest left to me in France.”56

  In December 1795 the seventeen-year-old dauphine, Marie Antoinette’s daughter, was exchanged for French prisoners and returned to Vienna to live with her mother’s family. Fersen followed her to Vienna and tried to meet with her Austrian relatives to ask for reimbursement of his expenses for the escape to Varennes. Ignored by the imperial circle, Fersen finally left in dejection. He paid all the capital and interest—the crushing burden of one million livres—out of his inheritance.

  Before Marie Antoinette died, she destroyed most of her papers and letters. Many of Fersen’s diaries and copies of his letters to the queen were passed down in his family. But when his great-nephew Baron Rin de Klinckowstrom published Fersen’s letters in 1877—in an era of Victorian prudishness—he edited them heavily, removing most of the first and last lines where amorous expressions were likely to have been inserted. After publication Klinckowstrom burned them. By this time Marie Antoinette’s reputation had been established as sainted mother and holy martyr, and the publication of her adulterous love letters, salted with references to hot sex, would have been unthinkable.

  Fersen never married, remaining committed to his memories of love with the queen. He had a successful political career in Sweden, and in 1797 was sent as Swedish ambassador to the Congress of Rastatt to treat with Napoleon. The little Corsican, however, “refused to deal with a man who had slept with the Queen of France.”57

  The world was rapidly changing, and Fersen did not truly belong to the new one. “He who has not known Paris before 1789 has never known the true sweetness of living,” wrote the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand long years after the revolution.58 It had been an age of soft silks and powdered wigs, where sweet strains of the minuet echoed through gilded rooms flickering in candlelight, an age in which every aspect of living was an exquisite art form. This most civilized of civilizations had been drowned in a sea of blood, and after the mess had been mopped up, nothing would ever be the same. Talleyrand was not the only one to find the light harsher, the music louder, the women less grac
eful. Axel Fersen would have agreed.

  In 1810 the middle-aged Crown Prince Karl August of Sweden suddenly died of a stroke. Rumors circulated that Axel Fersen, who had disliked the prince, had in fact poisoned him. Alarmed at the growing revolt against Fersen, his friends warned him to steer clear of the funeral procession; but as grand marshal, Fersen insisted that he lead it according to custom. Halfway through the procession, a mob tore him from his carriage and bludgeoned him to death.

  Handsome Axel, who had danced so gracefully at Versailles, was now reduced to butcher’s offal in the streets. As a youth he had once written with a clear vision of his future, “I’m not one of those men who will find happiness.”59 It must have been a relief to die, to cross over the inviolable wall of separation toward Her. Lying in the street, as the lights dimmed, the cries subsided, and the pain diminished, perhaps he saw a radiant girl with golden hair who, laughing, touched his arm.

  CAROLINE MATILDA OF BRITAIN, QUEEN OF DENMARK

  “I Would Marry Him I Loved, and Give Up My Throne”

  “To be unfaithful to a husband one has been forced to marry is not a crime,” said Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark in 1770.60 And yet the penalty she would pay for her infidelity was a heavy one.

  In 1766 the fifteen-year-old British princess, great-granddaughter of Sophia Dorothea of Celle and sister of King George III, was forced to marry the seventeen-year-old King Christian VII of Denmark. Matilda—as she was known—wept when she heard of the marriage, wept all the way on the long journey from England to Copenhagen, and upon her arrival wept more when she learned that something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

  During the marriage negotiations, the Danish ambassador had advertised Christian with great praise. “The amiable character of the Prince of Denmark is universally acknowledged here,” he said.61 But in reality the amiable prince knocked over citizens in the street and beat up the night watch. “In his way of living he is regular and sober,” the ambassador continued, “eats heartily, but drinks little or no wine.”62 He neglected to mention that Christian was a staggering alcoholic by the time he hit his teens. “He is now impatient for the accomplishment of this marriage,” the ambassador continued.63 But in fact the king dreaded the accomplishment of the marriage. Christian’s “application was equal to his capacity,” George III was told. This last was, in fact, true. Both were at zero.64

  In an effort to make a man out of the delicate prince, Christian’s tutors had beaten and tortured him until he turned eleven, when he was given a kindhearted Swiss tutor named Elie Salomon François Reverdil. But by then, the damage had been done. The little prince had learned to escape from his tutors’ brutality into a fantasy world of strange dreams spiced by paranoia and sexual degradations. All of Reverdil’s patience and compassion could not coax Christian back out into the real world. When Christian was informed that his father had died and he was the new king, he eagerly inquired if that meant he would never be beaten again.

  The new monarch was unbearably bored by his royal responsibilities. No national business could be transacted without his signature, and his signature on a decree made it law immediately. In contrast to other European nations where parliaments and constitutions limited royal power, the Lex Regia of 1665 declared that Denmark was the personal property of its monarch, who held absolute unquestioned power and was accountable only to God. The Danish council was an advisory board which the king could dismiss at will. Christian VII of Denmark, idiot, whoremonger, alcoholic, had more power than any other eighteenth-century European monarch.

  The king would leave piles of state papers unread for days while he crawled around on the floor with his companions playing practical jokes. When he encountered ladies drinking tea, he would invariably push the raised cups into their faces, sometimes burning them badly. One day he dropped pastries out of his window onto the head of a visiting bishop. Another time, when his aunt was sedately sipping coffee, Christian jumped out from beneath her table, his face blackened with soot, howling like a wolf. The terrified matron tipped backward in her chair which crashed to the floor, her diamond-buckled feet waving in the air.

  This was to be the husband of England’s fairest flower. But it mattered little to the power brokers of Britain and Denmark if the groom was an alcoholic imbecile. The princess was sold off to firm up traditional ties between the two nations, to check the power of France and strengthen the Protestant religion. It was rumored that someone would have to rule Denmark through Christian, and George III hoped that his sister would be that person, pushing the dazed king firmly toward a British alliance instead of a French one.

  But Matilda had been kept far from the intriguing court of her grandfather George II. Raised in the seclusion of Kew Palace with her widowed mother and seven brothers and sisters, she had learned to raise vegetables in her little garden, to dance and embroider and speak French. This wide-eyed girl, with no political education whatsoever, was expected to rule a nation.

  When Matilda was introduced to her husband, she found a tiny boy whose head barely reached her shoulder. On the surface Christian had learned to charm. Slender and perfectly proportioned, he was like a white-wigged doll in silk stockings. His face was long and narrow with slightly protruding blue eyes. He had a long aquiline nose, a finely molded mouth, and a chiseled jaw. His high forehead gave him, ironically, a look of superior intelligence. His flaxen hair was so pale it required no white hair powder. This tiny puppet of a king, mercurial, sometimes violent, offered occasional flashes of brilliance. When calm, he was good-hearted, though often confused. He danced gracefully and could talk prettily enough, reciting poetry and theatrical speeches in between violent temper tantrums.

  Entranced by the appearance of his blushing bride, the king, in a fit of exuberance, rushed forward to embrace her. The ministers responsible for the marriage heaved a collective sigh of relief. The marriage would be a great success.

  After meeting her husband, Matilda was introduced to Dowager Queen Juliana Maria, Christian’s stepmother. The stiff matron, caked with piety, had one goal in life—that her son Prince Frederick, Christian’s younger half brother, would inherit the throne. Because Prince Frederick clearly suffered from even greater mental aberrations than his brother, Juliana would rule the country in his name. As queen, Juliana had reportedly tried to poison Christian in his nursery, but a faithful maid, seeing the queen mix something into the prince’s breakfast, threw away the noxious brew and warned the king. Juliana shrieked in protest at the accusation, but a watch was kept on Christian’s food.

  Ambition pulsated relentlessly behind Juliana’s soft smile, beneath her deceptively feminine pink silk gowns. Adept at concealing her ambition, she manifested it only in her eyes, hard sharp eyes, quick to shift from right to left to focus unblinkingly on new prey. And when Matilda arrived, Juliana saw new prey. This healthy buxom princess would, no doubt, ruin all Juliana’s plans by having children. The pious dowager queen declared she was simply delighted with Matilda, but beneath her parchment skin, her blood boiled.

  Within a few days of the wedding, Christian decided he didn’t like being married and that it was, in fact, unfashionable for a man to love his wife. He returned to the brothels of Copenhagen with his debauched friends, ripping up taverns and attacking citizens on the streets. Matilda was pointedly neglected by her new husband, the courtiers following his lead. She had not been permitted to bring a single friend from Britain into Denmark and had been forced to bid a tearful farewell to those ladies who had accompanied her from London to the Danish border. Now, all alone, the bride sat mute and dejected for days on end. Casting her glance about her magnificent rooms, she longed for the wet vegetable garden where she had cheerfully rooted and dug with her brothers and sisters.

  The French, who had initially been alarmed that Christian had married an English princess, were delighted that the marriage was off to such a bad start. “The Princess has made little impression on the King’s heart,” wrote the French ambassador gleefully
to Louis XV, “and had she been even more charming, she would have met with the same fate. For how can she please a man who quite seriously believes that it does not look well for a husband to love his wife?”65

  Christian’s ministers, looking on in despair at Matilda going to bed alone each night, informed His Majesty that the lack of an heir would convince his people he was not so much fashionable as impotent. Boasting platinum blond hair, a dazzling complexion, lovely features, and “a bosom such as few men could look on without emotion,” Matilda inspired the sexual fantasies of every man at court except her husband.66 When his friend Reverdil begged the king to treat Matilda as a wife deserved, Christian replied, “A person of royal blood seems to me—when one is in bed with her—rather worthy of respect than of love.”67

  Once, at least, the king rose to the occasion, for in April 1767 Matilda became pregnant. But Christian’s mental health was deteriorating so rapidly that Reverdil suggested a pleasant distraction, a tour of the Danish duchies, an idea which the king embraced with delight. During the royal progress, Christian met a German doctor named Johann Struensee who had been investigating mental disorders. Tall, well spoken, with a soothing and modest address, Struensee made an immediate impression on the king. Christian insisted on taking him along for the rest of the tour and, finding his company indispensable, promised him a minor post at court.

  At thirty, Struensee was a large man who carried his weight well. His well-shaped head perched solidly on broad shoulders with no sign of a neck. His was a broad face made up of refined angles, a high wide forehead, powerful cheekbones, a strong jaw and chin. His aquiline nose, far too long to be considered handsome, gave his appearance a hawkish strength. Only his lips, full and fleshy, betrayed his sensuality. He left his thick light brown hair unpowdered. Cautious, and discreet, he was graceful for his bulk, dancing and fencing well, stepping silently on agile feet.