Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (2 page)
Read Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Online
Authors: Leslie Carroll
AND
Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame Scarron, marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719)
AND
Philipp Christoph von Königsmark (1665–1694)
AND
Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour (1721–1764)
AND
Jeanne Bécu, comtesse du Barry (1743–1793)
C
ATHERINE
THE
G
REAT
(C
ATHERINE
II)
AND
C
AROLINE
M
ATHILDE
AND
Johann Friedrich Struensee (1737–1772)
AND
Count Axel von Fersen (1755–1810)
As Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, from
1804–1814
and for 3 months in the spring of 1815
AND
AND
G
EORGE
VI
AND
Elizabeth Bowes Lyon (1900–2002)
AND
Catherine Elizabeth Middleton (b. 1982)
“…my heart is loath to remain even one hour without love.”
—Catherine II of Russia (Catherine the Great),
February 21, 1774
ROYAL ROMANCES
Foreword
ro·mance
\rō-′man(t)s; rə ′rōֽ\
n.
1.
a.
A love affair.
b.
Ardent emotional attachment or involvement between people; love.
c.
A strong, sometimes short-lived attachment, fascination, or enthusiasm for something.
2.
A mysterious or fascinating quality or appeal, as of something adventurous, heroic, or strangely beautiful.
ro·manced, ro·mancing, ro·manc·es
v. tr. Informal
1.
To make love to; court or woo.
2.
To have a love affair with.
In fairy tales, royal romances are those happily-ever-afters that involve an unmarried pair of lovers, big dresses, shimmering jewels, and nights of untold ecstasy, although you won’t find that last bit in any of the Disney adaptations.
Real-life royal romances, however, are somewhat different: same gowns and jewels, same nights of fevered passion—but rarely enjoyed with one’s own spouse. Indeed, many of the royals featured in the fourteen romances profiled in this volume fell in love
with someone else
after they were already married to their consort or to the reigning monarch. In this book, there are a couple of exceptions: Louis XV of France and Russia’s Catherine the Great were widowed at the
time of their respective liaisons with the comtesse du Barry and Grigory Potemkin. Rare indeed is the marital love match, such as the union of George VI and Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the parents of Queen Elizabeth II (and featured in the 2010 film
The King’s Speech
), and that of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William of Wales and the former Catherine Middleton.
One of the romances profiled here was a great
affaire de coeur
that may have crossed the line into the realm of the physical. The nature of their relationship remains hotly debated, with many historians insisting that it was no more than a chaste and pure, unconsummated passion in the grand tradition of medieval chivalry. Scholars can agree on one point, however, which is that Axel von Fersen more than once risked his life to save Marie Antoinette’s.
At the other end of the sexual spectrum, some of the monarchs whose romances fill these pages were serial debauchers, the Bourbon kings Louis XIV and his great-grandson Louis XV being legendarily priapic. Louis XV even took his pleasure with nubile young girls in a mansion kept strictly for their own amusement known as the Parc-aux-Cerfs. But few of these bed warmers had the staying power of a Madame de Maintenon or a Pompadour. For that, a royal mistress needed brains and talents that could be plied beyond the bedchamber. She had to amuse the king, she could never appear tired or bored in his presence, and she had to be a true partner in every way—a meeting of minds and hearts, bodies and souls.
In a world where marriages were arranged for political and dynastic reasons, the lover in a true royal romance is the person the sovereign or consort would likely have selected as a spouse, had he or she been permitted the choice. Yet in one rare instance, the relationship between Louis XIV and the marquise de Maintenon resulted in a marriage, albeit a morganatic one—a legal union where the lover remained uncrowned and any children would have no rights of succession. It is also believed by many historians that Catherine the Great clandestinely wed Potemkin.
Several of the paramours in
Royal Romances
were perceived as the powers behind their respective lovers’ thrones. Agnès Sorel was a beautiful blond medieval life coach, less famous than Joan of Arc, but more effective in spurring Charles VII to victory over the English.
Diane de Poitiers cosigned state documents with Henri II. Madame de Montespan was nicknamed “the real queen of France.” And to be a “Pompadour” referred to a royal mistress who appeared to be running the country. Caroline Mathilde was the youngest sister of George III of England, dispatched to Denmark at the age of fifteen to wed a king who was madder than her brother ever would be. She eventually embarked on a torrid romance with a commoner, her husband’s physician; the pair of them seized the reins of power and overhauled the kingdom. And the overweening influence of the tempestuous dancer Lola Montez toppled the monarchy of Ludwig I of Bavaria.
As for the two marriages profiled toward the end of the book, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, who became queen of England in the wake of a constitutional crisis and boosted British morale during the kingdom’s darkest hours of the twentieth century, was far more than a mere consort. She was her husband’s full partner and an indispensable and indefatigable helpmeet. Prince William’s wife, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, with her beauty, elegance, and charm, in addition to her education, appears to have been cast in the same mold.
The lovers, mistresses, and wives in these pages are graced with a combination of qualities that rendered them utterly irresistible to their royal paramours. The romances are of the passionate, heart-stopping, I-can’t-live-without-you/you-are-the-air-I-breathe variety. However, the adulterous liaisons caused no end of heartbreak to the third wheel in the relationship—the straying sovereign’s spouse. The queen was invariably left embarrassed by the public role played by the royal favorite and by her husband’s passion for her. Queens were traditionally expected to produce an heir to the throne and to remain quiet, pious, and philanthropic, and to stay out of the limelight. But Catherine de Medici, in particular, was one consort who was pathetically in love with her husband, Henri II. She was deeply humiliated by his outsize devotion to his much older
maîtresse en titre
, or official mistress (a formal role at court that the French invented), the cool blond Diane de Poitiers.
Sometimes, what was good for the gander was good for the goose—or so the goose thought, until she got cooked! Sophia
Dorothea of Celle was the wife of George Ludwig of Hanover, the future George I of England. He was enjoying two simultaneous affairs, so Sophia Dorothea indulged in a lurid romance of her own with a dashing Swedish mercenary, Philipp Christoph von Königsmark. Things did not end happily for either of them.
But many of the royal romances featured in this book infuriated, upset, mortified, and disgruntled more than the sovereign’s consort. From Potemkin to Lola Montez, and several others in between, including the bewitching (literally, perhaps) Athénaïs de Montespan and Mesdames de Pompadour and du Barry, these lovers captivated their royal paramours to such an extent that the power they wielded, over both sovereign and kingdom, became immense. And from the monarchs’ ministers and courtiers to their relatives to his subjects and the country’s often hypocritical clerics came the hue and cry that the royal favorite’s influence with the ruler was the ruination of the nation. Sex as a weapon was never perceived as more dangerous, or more alluring.
But there is also something to be said for the maternal “Don’t worry, darling; I’ll never let you down” kind of love as well, for that, too, has its appeal. Henri II, who never knew a mother’s affection, fell passionately in love with Diane de Poitiers, a woman nearly twenty years his senior. The marquise de Maintenon had a few years on the Sun King, and, although she was hardly old enough to be his mother, had a maturing influence on him. Potemkin was a decade younger than the libidinous Empress of all the Russias. And Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, though five years younger than the Duke of York, the future George VI, was a steadying influence on her spouse, who had never wished to assume the throne.
Catherine Elizabeth Middleton’s marriage on April 29, 2011, to the dashing Prince William was of historical significance; she was the first true commoner (one not of noble birth and aristocratic lineage) to wed an heir to the English throne since Anne Hyde clandestinely married the Duke of York in 1660. The story of William and Kate is a genuine royal romance for the twenty-first century, a modern fairy tale absent cynicism and brimming with hope for the future, where the girl gets her prince and becomes a fully respected partner in his life. She shops for her own big dresses, sometimes on the High Street
with discount coupons, and even wears them more than once, just like the rest of us.
As for the shimmering jewels…well, one day the duchess will have access to the rather glamorous collection in the Tower of London. The pomp and circumstance connected with centuries of tradition does have certain undeniable advantages.
C
HARLES
VII
1403–1461
R
ULED
F
RANCE
: 1422–1461
A
t the time, some people believed it had taken a miracle to spur Charles VII to his destiny, but the real impetus may have come not from the illiterate virgin Joan of Arc who heard heavenly voices, but from his beautiful and pragmatic paramour.
Charles was the fifth son born to the clinically insane Charles VI of the royal House of Valois and his wife and queen, the flirtatious Isabeau of Bavaria. When they wed in 1385, Charles’s father was seventeen and his mother was in her fourteenth year. After all four of his older brothers died young, Charles became dauphin, the heir to the throne of France, which at the time was one of several regions located within the country as we now know it. But inheriting the crown would hardly be a pro forma matter of waiting for his father to die.
On St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, 1415, after exhorting his troops to surge once more into the breach, England’s Henry V achieved a massive victory at Agincourt, littering the battlefield with the flower of French chivalry and claiming the title of king of France. To cement his claim, Henry V wed Catherine of Valois, the daughter of the mad Charles VI.
Catherine’s brother, the future Charles VII, faced threats from within France’s borders as well. Not long after he inherited the title of dauphin, in May 1418 he was compelled to flee Paris when his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, invaded the city with his personal army. Charles planned a reconciliation with the duke the following year, meeting him on September 10, 1419, on the bridge at Montereau. Whether at Charles’s instigation or not, his men murdered the
duke. Rather than securing his power, the murder forced Charles to flee once again, this time to the city of Bourges.