When the English ambassador visited Matilda and told her of her lover’s execution, she fainted, and upon being revived, sat numbly in her chair for several hours, a bloodless marble statue of a queen, unmoving, unfeeling. But after her initial shock and grief, there were practical considerations to attend to. Matilda needed to find a place to live in refined disgrace. With the Danish people clamoring in the streets for Matilda to replace Juliana as queen regent, the old queen was suddenly eager for the young queen to leave Danish soil.
Matilda assumed that she would return home to a quiet life in England, back to digging in her garden, perhaps, with friendly faces, English faces, around her. When Queen Charlotte refused to have an adulteress living on her territory, contaminating the purity of her young daughters, George decided to keep his sister in his German dominion of Hanover. And so Matilda heard that she would be going to Celle, to a palace that had remained empty for nearly seventy years since the death of Sophia Dorothea’s father in 1704.
Matilda was eager to leave the chilled ramparts of Kronborg. For weeks her eyes were fixed on the gray and gloomy sea, looking for the English ship that would take her away from the country she now despised. Finally, three ships were spotted. But Matilda’s elation was tempered by the knowledge that she must part with her daughter, Louise Augusta. This child, now acknowledged as a Danish princess, was property of the Crown. She would have a privileged life, but no mother.
For three days Matilda spent every moment playing with her daughter. But she could not bring herself to say that final farewell. At the hour of departure, she kept kissing the child good-bye, then turned around to pick her up and kiss her again. The little girl cooed, thinking it a delightful game. But Matilda knew it was unlikely that she would ever see her daughter again, that the child may very well be raised to despise her mother’s memory. Finally forced to leave, Matilda cried, “Let me go. Now I have nothing! Nothing!”93 She staggered down the hall, outside the castle, and onto the ship, and the ship’s cannon, proudly announcing the boarding of a royal princess of Britain, drowned out her piteous sobs.
On her sad journey, Matilda had no idea of the growing support for her in three nations. Many British subjects despised George III for abandoning his sister, a victim of jackals at an evil court. Heedless of her adultery, the Danes angled to get her back to replace the wicked Juliana as regent. The German town of Celle offered her a festive welcome as if she were still a queen.
In Celle, Matilda led a quiet but active life. She gave card parties, plied her needle, attended church, and worked with her gardeners. Riding no longer attracted her—it reminded her too much of Struensee—and the lack of exercise resulted in a tremendous weight gain. Though many noticed a deep sadness lurking just beneath her pleasant demeanor, she never complained and always tried to be cheerful. Receiving no news of her own children, she gave parties for the town children and adopted an orphan, a four-year-old girl named Sophie, whom she took into the palace to live with her. Little did she know that a group of conspirators was plotting her return to power.
Gloating and vindictive, Juliana had made many enemies; powerful groups were agitating for Matilda to replace her and needed to make her aware of their plans. But surrounded by spies, Matilda was hard to reach. Finally a twenty-two-year-old conspirator named Nathaniel Wraxall presented himself as a traveling Englishman and was allowed to meet her. In whispers he informed her of the plot, to which she immediately agreed. Wraxall then left for London in a futile attempt to get official support from George III.
When Wraxall again visited Matilda, she declared herself ready at a moment’s notice to go to Copenhagen and take up the government—if she obtained at least written permission from George III to leave Celle. When she and the conspirators had entered Copenhagen, they would sneak into the palace, find Christian, and have him sign a paper authorizing their coup. As the interview ended, Wraxall noticed that Matilda looked astonishingly beautiful in her crimson satin gown, her powdered hair coiffed high. Perhaps hope for the future had given a sparkle to her eye, a flush to her cheeks. She was halfway out the door when she paused and looked as if she were about to speak. Then she turned around and disappeared.
Wraxall set off once again for London just as an epidemic— scarlet fever or typhus—broke out in Celle. Matilda’s young page died, and the next evening Matilda suddenly jumped up and announced that she would see the boy’s body before burial. Her attendants begged her not to—viewing the body of an epidemic victim was often an indirect means of committing suicide—but Matilda raced to the room where the child was laid out and stood next to the open casket.
The next day her adopted daughter, Sophie, became ill. Terribly distressed at the possible loss of another child, Matilda paced for hours in her garden. She returned to her rooms exhausted, and over dinner developed a sore throat and fever. Her physicians believed she would recover, but she seemed to have no will to live. Perhaps she had hoped to catch the infection after all. On May 11, 1775, she was told that little Sophie was out of danger. “Then I can die happy,” she said, closing her eyes.94 She never opened them again. Within days she was dead. She was twenty-three.
It was an easy, simple death after a life of insanity, adultery, betrayal, and imprisonment. Her pastor wrote, “I never remember so easy a dissolution, or one in which death lost all its terrors…. She fell asleep like a tired traveler.”95
And so Matilda found her freedom, but not in the way the conspirators had intended. Upon hearing the news of her death, Dowager Queen Juliana attended a ball that evening. In London, Wraxall was devastated to hear the news; he had been stewing for weeks in the hopes that he could meet privately with George III, but the king had made no response to his urgent requests.
When Matilda’s son, Frederick, was sixteen—two years past the time Juliana was legally obligated to hand over her power—he grabbed his imbecile father and made him sign a document appointing him, Frederick, regent. There was quite a scuffle among Juliana’s supporters trying to pry the little imbecile king from the strong grip of the crown prince, but Matilda’s son won the day. King Frederick VI ruled as one of Denmark’s best-loved monarchs. Juliana retired from court and died in 1796, and for many years visitors spat on her grave.
Hearing of his sister’s death, George III refused her request to repose in Westminster Abbey next to her ancestors. But perhaps, after all, it is more appropriate that she lies next to Sophia Dorothea in St. Mary’s Church crypt of Celle.
7. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: AUDACITY AND OUTRAGE
Of all my lands is nothing left me but my body’s length?
Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And live we how we can, yet die we must.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
THE NAPOLEONIC QUEEN
“Liberty Is in Her Mouth, Equality in Her Heart and Fraternity in Her Garters”
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE PRIZED FEMALE CHASTITY JUST A LITTLE BELOW military might. It was his great misfortune to have two wives who betrayed him—Josephine before he became emperor, and the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise after his abdication—as well as three sisters and a stepdaughter who embarrassed him with their love affairs.
While Napoleon was still a rising general, he fell desperately in love with Josephine de Beauharnais, a charming widowed aristocrat rescued from the jaws of the guillotine when the revolutionary government fell a day before her scheduled execution. Napoleon pressed her to marry him, and Josephine, knowing that her fading looks and rotten teeth signaled the end of her lucrative career as a high-class prostitute, reluctantly agreed. She told friends that she “had to overcome a feeling of repugnance before I could bring myself to marry ‘the little general.’”1
On campaign, Napoleon wrote her passionate love letters. Mentioning her “little Black Forest,” he wrote, “I kiss it a thousand times and I await impatiently the moment of being inside.”2
But Napoleon was not the only man wandering around in the little Black Forest. When her husband was fig
hting in Italy, Josephine had a torrid affair with a lusty aide-de-camp named Hippolyte Charles, a muscular young man with dancing blue eyes and bouncing black curls. In July 1798 the Paris gossip reached Napoleon, who was now waging war in Egypt. Absolutely devastated, he openly took mistresses himself. When he returned home the following year he was prepared to divorce her. Faced with her abject pleas for mercy, he forgave her, content merely to torture her with recounting details of his mistresses’ private parts for the rest of their marriage.
In 1811, having divorced Josephine to marry the eighteen-year-old Hapsburg archduchess Marie Louise, Napoleon finally had the son Josephine could never provide him. But in 1814, toppled from his self-made throne, Napoleon waited impatiently on the island of Elba for his wife to join him. Emperor Francis II of Austria, horrified that his daughter would remain tethered to the bane of Europe, sent an attractive equerry to bring her back to Vienna—by way of several luxurious spas where revitalizing waters helped love blossom, if not health. The emperor’s plan worked perfectly. Marie Louise bore General Adam von Neipperg three illegitimate children in secrecy. As soon as Napoleon died in 1821, she married her lover.
Napoleon’s sister Elise, whom he made queen of Tuscany, took poets and artists as lovers, but with enough discretion so as not to ruffle the imperial plumage. However, his sister Caroline, whom he made queen of Naples, was less discreet. English newspapers reported, “Liberty is in her mouth, equality in her heart and fraternity in her garters.”3
Pauline, the most beautiful Bonaparte sister, caused Napoleon the greatest irritation. Bored with life as the wife of Roman prince Camillo Borghese—who was unsatisfying in bed and perhaps gay—Pauline agitated to return to the delights of Paris. Napoleon refused and Pauline plotted her revenge. She commissioned the renowned sculptor Antonio Canova to make a statue of herself, posing languishing on a chaise lounge almost naked, wearing only a thin veneer of drapery over her hips, her breasts thrusting proudly outward. Europe was scandalized, and thrilled. Napoleon was furious, and Pauline was delighted at his fury. Having advertised her wares in the form of the statue, she could now take her pick of Europe’s most hot-blooded men, and soon there was a revolving door into her bedroom—elegant courtiers, soldiers throbbing with virility, famous actors, and talented musicians.
Even Josephine’s blushing daughter, Hortense, wretchedly married to Napoleon’s brother King Louis of the Netherlands, bore two illegitimate children. The child born in 1809—who grew up to become Emperor Napoleon III of France—Hortense pawned off on Louis, who vociferously denied to the pope and all the courts of Europe that the child was his. Realizing she couldn’t foist the next one on her husband, in 1811 she had a child in secrecy who was raised by her lover’s mother.
Napoleon’s irritation at his female relatives, however, was tempered by his delight in watching his fiercest enemy, Britain’s prince regent, suffering the messiest, most scandalous marriage of any monarch ever.
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, QUEEN OF BRITAIN
“I Never Did Commit Adultery but Once”
In 1795 the British envoy Lord Malmesbury traveled to the German duchy of Brunswick to escort Princess Caroline to London as the bride of George, Prince of Wales. Thirty-two-year-old George had agreed to marry a German princess only because he was up to his ears in debt, and Parliament offered him a substantial bribe if he would finally do his royal duty and wed. He had, in fact, already married a devout Catholic widow, Maria Fitzherbert, who had refused him sex outside of matrimony. The marriage was secret; if the heir to the British throne was known to have wed a Catholic, he would have lost his inheritance. Pushed into a corner by his debts, George decided to commit bigamy.
Taking in the princess at a glance, Malmesbury was alarmed. Though pretty in a frowzy-blonde way, Caroline didn’t care about her attire. She prided herself on dressing quickly, throwing on any old garments that were soiled, ripped, and didn’t match. Her stockings, Malmesbury reported sadly, were “never well washed, or changed often enough.”4 He was forced to introduce her to a bar of soap and a toothbrush. Malmesbury shuddered when he thought of the fastidious, fashionable prince who awaited her, the prince who spent hours each morning on his toilette, carefully bathing, shaving, and coiffing himself, then sometimes spending another hour fastening his starched white cravat just so.
Malmesbury was further alarmed when the duke of Brunswick confessed his concern at his daughter becoming Princess of Wales. The duke begged Malmesbury to instruct her “not to ask questions, and, above all, not to be free in giving opinions of persons and things aloud.”5 Both men were worried by “the apparent facility of Princess Caroline’s character—her want of reflection and substance—(we) agree that with a steady man she would do vastly well, but with one of a different description, there are great risks.”6 Both knew that George, Prince of Wales, was a far cry from steady.
On April 3, 1795, Prince George stood apprehensively in a drawing room of St. James’s Palace, waiting to be introduced to his bride. When he first saw her, he was so traumatized by her looks and demeanor that he wiped his brow, whispered “I am not well,” and called for a stiff drink. Malmesbury suggested that perhaps a glass of water would be more helpful.7
But the prince said with an oath, “No; I will go directly to the queen,” and stumbled away.8 When Malmesbury returned to the princess, she asked, “Is the prince always like that? I find him very fat and not nearly so handsome as his portrait.”9
Indeed George, tall, blond, and blue-eyed, would have been devastatingly handsome if he had been able to control his appetite. But the spoiled prince was unable to deny himself anything—a glass of wine, a pork chop, a woman, an expensive mansion. His excesses had spoiled his finances and were already spoiling his looks.
Given George’s revulsion for the bride, the wedding could easily have been called off; they had not been married by proxy. But there were, after all, pressing debts to pay. As the prince walked up the aisle, Lord Peniston Melbourne wrote, he “was like a man doing a thing in desperation,” as if he were “going to execution, and he was quite drunk.” Other wedding guests noticed that the groom had “manifestly had recourse to wine or spirits.”10
George managed to rise to the occasion with his wife three times during the first two nights of marriage. He wrote a friend, “She showed… such marks of filth both in the fore and hind part of her… that she turned my stomach and from that moment I made a vow never to touch her again.”11 For her part, the princess later told a friend, “Judge what it was to have a drunken husband on one’s wedding day, and one who passed the greatest part of his bridal night under the grate, where he fell and where I left him.”12
Fortunately for George, he had already made Caroline pregnant during his halfhearted efforts. Caroline was dumbfounded to learn of her condition; she expressed profound surprise that such a speedy and insignificant coupling would produce a child. As for George, he was delighted that an heir was on the way, and he never did touch Caroline again.
George exulted in torturing his pregnant wife; he locked her in her rooms while he went all over town socializing with his mistress Lady Jersey. He gave Caroline no money for expenses and insisted that Lady Jersey, who went out of her way to be obnoxious to his wife, eat dinner with her every night. Finding that Caroline delighted in spending time with her newborn, Princess Charlotte, George had the child taken away from her.
When Caroline complained, George called her “the vilest wretch this world was ever cursed with, who I cannot feel more disgust for from her personal nastiness than I do from her entire want of principle,” and further described her as “a very monster of iniquity.”13
When the king, fearing the rising scandal, suggested a reconciliation, and Caroline seemed willing, George declared that he must have a separation, adding that he would “rather see toads and vipers crawling over his victuals than sit at the same table with her!!!”14
The couple separated and Caroline went to live in a large home at Blackheat
h near London. She and the prince saw each other a few times a year at palace events and rarely spoke. By 1799 the princess, giving up all pretenses of loyalty to the husband who had so publicly abandoned her, was flirting openly with ministers and courtiers who visited her there. She had an affair with a junior minister, George Canning, the famous artist Sir Thomas Lawrence, the naval hero Sir Sidney Smith, and another naval officer, Captain Thomas Manby.
The Prince of Wales, who had set spies on his wife, was well aware of Caroline’s love affairs. Moreover, among the several poor children she looked after was an infant named Willy Austin whom she had adopted in 1802 and whom some believed was, in fact, her own. In 1805 Caroline was informed that she was being investigated for a “charge of high treason, committed in the infamous crime of adultery.”15 Her household staff was led away to be questioned.
On the witness stand, one of Caroline’s servants asserted that he had found Sir Sidney Smith wandering around the house at three or four A.M. On another occasion the servant was surprised to find Sir Sidney in the house at ten A.M., though no one had let him in that morning. But surely the worst testimony came from Caroline’s former footman, Samuel Roberts, who solemnly asserted, “The Princess is very fond of fucking.”16
One witness, Lord Francis Moira, spoke of a box that a friend of Captain Manby’s had opened at the captain’s lodging. Inside he saw a portrait of the Princess of Wales “with many souvenirs hanging to it,” including a leather bag holding “hair of a particular description and such as his friend said he had been married too long not to know that it came from no woman’s head.”17 One of the commissioners suggested good-naturedly that the hair in the bag be compared with the suspected source of the hair, and only then could it be admitted as evidence. Naturally, this did not take place.
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