With regards to Diana’s dating Dodi, Charles told a reporter, “I’m happy if she’s happy.”33
But Diana was not happy. No amount of food, or sex, or fame, or shopping could ever fill the gaping wound in her psyche for very long. A good friend of Diana’s who spoke with her the day she died came away from the conversation with the distinct impression Diana was eager to dump Dodi, even as he was eager to propose.
It was not only with her lovers that Diana had problems. Throughout the 1990s Diana grew increasingly suspicious of her friends and staff to the point of paranoia. She dropped most of her friends one by one, believing they had leaked stories about her to the press or had somehow profited from her friendship. She never confronted them about her suspicions and simply refused ever to talk to them again. Many women expressed shock that their good friend Princess Diana had cut them dead with no explanation.
Palace employees soon learned that working for Diana involved looking into a pair of smiling blue eyes and feeling a stiletto sink into their backs. According to her private secretary of eight years, Patrick Jephson, Diana was vindictive, paranoid, manipulative, and cruel. She often threw important memos in the trash and claimed she had never seen them. Her staff soon learned to make copies of all memos, noting down the date and time they were placed on her desk. She frequently took sudden irrational dislikes to loyal employees and refused to speak to them until they quit in frustration.
By early 1996 she was sending macabre messages to her employees’ pagers, messages claiming knowledge of their disloyalty to her and of their supposed extramarital love affairs. When accused of sending the messages, the princess denied it vehemently, her blue eyes wide and innocent. Buckingham Palace, acutely aware of Diana’s nasty tricks on her employees, often smoothed the path for them to find other positions by giving them glowing recommendations.
If Diana became increasingly unhinged over time, it was not because she suffered all the tribulations of earlier crown princesses; we could hardly call her alone and impoverished at a foreign court. Living in her native land, surrounded by friends and family, in close and loving contact with her children, Diana received a truly royal allowance and wallowed in luxury. Yet she suffered one ancient lament of many princess brides—her husband didn’t love her, hadn’t wanted to marry her, rarely slept with her, and far preferred his mistress.
In her own way, Diana was heroic, even in her self-imposed victimhood. Suffering inconceivable emotional pain, Diana did not meekly go to bed and pull the covers over her head. Bristling at perceived injustice, the awkward girl who couldn’t graduate from high school rolled up her sleeves and took on formidable enemies: the royal family, the Buckingham Palace “firm,” the detested Camilla, even the entire British press when they weren’t cooperating with her efforts to increase her popularity or vilify her enemies. She was defiant; at all costs she would fight for what she believed to be right. On one occasion Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, asked Diana if she gambled. “Not with cards,” came the reply, “but with life.”34
Throughout her life, the world held a strange fascination for Diana’s body: her virginity, her pregnancies, her sexuality, her bulimia, the clothes draped on her tanned, well-toned flesh. In a Paris tunnel on August 31, 1997, that body lay inert and bleeding next to the mangled corpse of Dodi Fayed, still the object of global fascination as photographers snapped away at it. She had gambled with life, and with men, and lost.
CONCLUSION
The Politics of Adultery
Titles are shadows and crowns are empty things.
—DANIEL DEFOE
FOR NEARLY NINE HUNDRED YEARS—FROM THE DAY QUEEN Urraca of Castile and Leon first rode into battle beside her lover Pedro Gonzalez until the last ride of Diana and Dodi—the fates of adulterous royal women have been as diverse as the women themselves. The common themes among these women were unhappy marriages and empty lives. Indeed, the seeds of a queen’s adultery were sown in negotiations for her marriage to a man unsuited in temperament and education.
“No hour of the day passes when I do not desire your death and wish that you were hanged…,” the spirited Marguerite-Louise of France wrote to her husband, the somber and melancholy grand duke Cosimo de Medici in 1680.1
“How fortunate you are, to marry where you wish!” sighed Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark, married to a stark raving imbecile, to her ladies-in-waiting in 1771. “If I were a widow, I would marry him I loved, and give up my throne and my country.”2
“From the very threshold of your Majesty’s mansion the mother of your child was pursued by spies, conspirators, and traitors…,” wrote Queen Caroline of Britain to her husband George IV in 1820. “You have pursued me with hatred and scorn, and with all the means of destruction. You wrested me from my child….You sent me sorrowing through the world, and even in my sorrows pursued me with unrelenting persecution.”3
Sick to death of her husband, when a queen took a lover, anything could happen—from disgrace and death to political triumph. The crucial factor was the political significance of her love affair. Liaisons that benefited the state were not only tolerated, but approved. When Queen Maria Francisca of Portugal began an affair with her brother-in-law, courtiers applauded. Their relationship allowed power factions to trade the insane and impotent King Alfonso, who had deprived them of their rights and property and dishonored the throne, for his brother Pedro, who restored everything that had been lost, including the polish to the Portuguese crown. Moreover, by keeping the bride and merely swapping the husbands, Portugal retained the treaties and dowry that Maria Francisca had brought from France. An accusation of adultery would never be made when the adultery offered so many financial and political benefits.
With her politically brilliant lover at her side, Queen Marie of Romania guided her country through a world war and the threat of Communist revolution. As ancient European thrones toppled around her like dominoes, Marie’s throne stood firm. Romania’s powerful elite, proud of their queen, gave her solid support. The fact that three of her five royal children were fathered by lovers, and not the king, mattered little in the face of the rich rewards she provided the nation.
Catherine the Great made Russia a world power, equal to France and Britain. The economy boomed; the rich got richer; the poor were given free farmland in new southern territories. Catherine’s people might snicker about her young lovers, but no one suggested shoving her off the throne for her lascivious immorality. Life under her rule was just too good.
But liaisons that threatened the state were swiftly and brutally punished. When Sophia Dorothea, crown princess of Hanover, began her love affair with Count Philip von Königsmark in 1690, everyone at court knew about it, including her husband, the crown prince, and his powerful father, the elector. But it wasn’t until four years later when the princess planned to elope with the count and take her inheritance rights with her— threatening the power and wealth of Hanover—that she was disgraced, divorced, and imprisoned, and the count murdered. Had she remained, on the surface at least, a staunch supporter of the Hanoverian power structure, she may have been allowed to continue her love affair unhindered for years.
Many a queen was disgraced not because she threatened the state itself, but because she stood in the way of rival power factions at court jockeying for position. Seething with discontent, greedy courtiers aimed to topple the queen and all her supporters, and then grab the plum positions for themselves. Henry VIII’s queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and Caroline Matilda of Denmark, were victims, not of their own uncontrollable sexual desires, but of the ambitions of vicious courtiers.
Oddly, the innocent Anne Boleyn was beheaded for adultery by her powerful enemies while the guilty Caroline of Brunswick was legally cleared by her powerful friends. At European courts, it was the political machinations—not the sex—that caused a royal woman’s downfall.
THE ENVY OF SPLENDOR
Royals, whether venerated or denigrated, are cut from the same b
olt of human fabric as their subjects. Yet the grandeur of a palace serves to exaggerate the stories that take place inside its walls. Gilded magnificence lifts joy to greater heights; mocked by surrounding splendor, pain sinks to lower depths. Certainly, royal triumphs and sorrows are more visible than those of ordinary people. As Elizabeth I said, “We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in sight and view of all the world.”4
Some of those stages were scaffolds, the ultimate manifestation of palace politics gone awry. “Good Christian people, I am come here not to preach a sermon but to die,” said Anne Boleyn on an unbearably sweet May morning. Six years later her cousin Catherine Howard, having practiced laying her neck on the block the night before, did so on the scaffold with admirable grace. And on the way to her execution, Marie Antoinette cried, “It is to live that requires courage, not to die.”5
The tragic saga of nine hundred years of queenly adultery is punctuated here and there with comedy. Queen Juana of Spain, having endured artificial insemination with a golden turkey baster containing drops of her impotent husband’s sperm, unlocks the bedroom door for her handsome lover. Queen Maria Carolina of Naples pulls on her long white gloves to enthrall her husband and make him forget her lovers. Caroline of Brunswick jolts about Europe in a carriage with her lover Bartolomeo Pergami, sound asleep, their hands resting lovingly on each other’s private parts.
Whether a royal woman denied herself the pleasures of illicit love, or grasped them with outstretched arms, it is safe to say that most remained unhappy despite all the pomp and grandeur of their lives.
“The éclat and renown of great kings are like the machines at the opera,” wrote Elizabeth Charlotte in 1701. “Seen from afar, nothing is grander and more beautiful, but if one goes backstage and takes a close look at all the ropes and wooden slats that make the machines move, they are often most ungainly and ugly.”6
Looking around Versailles Palace in 1705, she wrote, “All of this is supposed to be fun, and yet one does not see anyone having fun and senses that there is more spite than pleasure.”7
Dying of uterine cancer in 1837, Hortense de Beauharnais, former queen of the Netherlands, looked back on her life of magnificence and misery. “I have done right whenever I could, and I hope that God will be good to me,” she sighed. “They say He is good, and yet”—she paused, summing up the single greatest theological problem of all time with great simplicity—“He lets us suffer so.”8
Seated in her splendid Kensington Palace drawing room in 1992, Princess Diana reminisced about a day when she thought of fleeing the fame and luxury of her position. “I was quite ready to give all this up,” she said.9
Even the most powerful woman of her time, Elizabeth I of England, told Parliament in 1601 after forty-three years as queen that “to wear a Crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it, than it is pleasant to them that bear it….The cares and trouble of a Crown I cannot resemble more fitly than to… bitter pills gilded over, by which they are made more acceptable and less offensive, which indeed are bitter and unpleasant to take.”10
Of all royal women, perhaps Josephine Bonaparte best summed up the emptiness of splendor. The forty-four-year-old empress was divorced by Napoleon in 1809 for infertility and replaced by an eighteen-year-old Austrian princess who gave him a healthy bouncing boy within a year.
At her estate of Malmaison outside Paris, the cast-off wife liked to bring out her astonishing collection of jewels for visiting ladies to admire. Her visitors gasped in wonder at the gems—fat lustrous baroque pearls, dazzling diamonds, exquisitely faceted rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. But Josephine insisted that jewels had little value “when you reflect how unhappy I have been, although with such a rare collection at my command. At the beginning of my extraordinary life I delighted in these trifles….I grew by degrees so tired of them that I no longer wear any except when I am in some respects compelled to do so by my rank in the world. A thousand accidents may contribute to deprive me of these brilliant though useless objects. Do I not possess the pendants of Queen Marie Antoinette? And yet am I quite sure of retaining them?”
Looking at her sparkling gems, the empress sighed and said, “Believe me, ladies, do not envy a splendor that does not constitute happiness.”11
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Andrews,
2. D’Auvergne,
3. Troyat, Peter,
4. Levin,
5. Ibid.
6. Given-Wilson and Curteis,
7. D’Auvergne,
8. De Grazia,
9. Acton,
CHAPTER ONE: LIFE BEHIND PALACE WALLS
1. Maroger,
2. Alexander,
3. Forster,
4. Ibid.,
5. Ibid.,
6. Cohen and Major,
7. Forster,
8. Sutherland,
9. Rosenthal,
10. Pevitt,
11. Baily,
12. Forster,
13. Ibid.,
14. Ibid.,
15. Acton,
16. Ibid.,
17. Louisa of Tuscany,
18. Pakula,
19. Bingham, vol. I,
20. Farr,
21. Ibid.,
22. Ibid.,
23. Memoirs of the Courts of Sweden and Denmark, vol. I,
24. Ibid.,
25. Asprey,
26. Ibid.,
27. Quinlan,
28. Forster,
29. Ibid.,
30. Ibid.,
31. Ibid.,
32. Battifol,
33. Quinlan,
34. Freer, vol. II,
35. Ibid.,
36. Ibid.,
37. Forster,
38. Ibid.,
39. Ibid.,
40. Ibid.,
41. Ibid.,
42. Moote,
CHAPTER TWO: THE QUEEN TAKES A LOVER
1. Bergamini,
2. Chastenet,
3. Acton,
4. Weiner,
5. Levin,
6. Iremonger,
7. Ibid.,
8. Ibid.,
9. Williams,
10. Weiner,
11. Hewitt,
12. Cronin, Louis XIV,
13. Ibid.,
14. Alexander,
15. McKay,
CHAPTER THREE: MEDIEVAL QUEENS, TUDOR VICTIMS
1. Kelly,
2. Ibid.,
3. Weir, Eleanor,
4. Kelly,
5. Weir, Eleanor,
6. Doherty,
7. Ibid.,
8. Ibid.,
9. Cohen and Major,
10. Miller,
11. Ibid.,
12. Ibid.,
13. Ibid.,
14. Liss,
15. Ives,
16. Warnicke,
17. Somerset,
18. Weir, Court,
19. Ives,
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.,
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.,
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.,
27. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
28. Starkey,
29. Ibid.
30. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
31. Ibid.,
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Acworth,
36. Weir, Henry VIII,
37. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
38. Ibid.,
39. Ibid.,
40. Ibid.,
41. Ibid.,
42. Ibid.,
43. Acworth,
44. Weir, Court,
45. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
46. Acworth,
47. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
48. Ibid.,
49. Ibid.,
50. Ibid.,
51. Weir, Court,
52. Starkey,
53. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
54. Ibid.,
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.,
&nbs
p; 57. Ibid.,
58. Acworth,
59. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
60. Ibid.,
61. Ibid.,
62. Ibid.,
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.,
65. Ibid.,
66. Acworth,
CHAPTER FOUR: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: ESCAPE FROM THE GILDED CAGE
1. Gribble, Portugal,
2. Ibid.,
3. Ibid.,
4. Ibid.,
5. Rodocanachi,
6. Ibid.,
7. Ibid.,
8. Cardini,
9. Wilkins, Uncrowned Queen , vol. I,
10. Ibid.,
11. Ibid.,
12. Morand,
13. Ibid.,
14. Ibid.,
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.,
17. Ibid.,
18. Wilkins, Uncrowned Queen, vol. II,
19. Ibid.,
20. Morand,
21. Wilkins, Uncrowned Queen, vol. I,
22. Ibid., vol. II,
23. Morand,
24. Wilkins, Uncrowned Queen, vol. I,
25. Ibid.,
26. Morand,
27. Wilkins, Uncrowned Queen, vol. I,
28. Ibid.,
29. Ibid.,
30. Ibid., vol. II,
31. Morand,
32. Ibid.,
33. Ibid.,
34. Wilkins, Uncrowned Queen, vol. I,
35. Morand,
36. Ibid.,
37. Wilkins, Uncrowned Queen, vol. II,
38. Morand,
39. Colburn, vol. I,
40. Wilkins, Uncrowned Queen, vol. II,
41. Ibid., vol. I,
42. Morand,
43. Ibid.,
44. Ibid.,
45. Ibid.,
46. Wilkins, Uncrowned Queen, vol. I,
CHAPTER FIVE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIA: THE UNCHASTE EMPRESSES
1. Troyat, Catherine,
2. Troyat, Peter,
3. Longworth,
4. Ibid.,
5. Ibid.,
6. Ibid.,
Sex with the Queen Page 32