Sex with Kings (14 page)

The new mistress having been chosen, the cabal had only to make the king and countess fall into each other's arms. They first went to work on Madame Denhoff, using her mother to counter any qualms she might have about betraying her husband to become a royal mistress. Fortunately, Madame Denhoff readily agreed to the plan.

The cabal knew the king would be more difficult. “A brisk and lively disposition could only captivate him,” wrote his biographer, “and this was the chief quality Madame Denhoff was deficient in, who with a dull, heavy air affected the modesty of a virgin, which was directly opposite to the character the King required of his mistresses.” The advisers “were sensible that she would not suit their monarch's fancy, but knew no lady at Court more proper to propose to him.”
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Augustus expressed a hearty interest at seeing the beauty so lauded by his friends but was predictably disappointed at their first meeting. He “liked not her dancing” and “his heart could not yet be affected by her beauty.” By this time he had figured out that his ministers wanted him to take a new mistress. He
told one, “I am to be forced to love but till they find me a better than Madame Denhoff, I doubt whether I shall be unfaithful to Madame Cosel.”
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Undaunted, the king's advisers threw him so often into the company of Madame Denhoff—who cast him “tender and languishing looks”—that slowly his heart became “enslaved.”
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But back in Dresden, Madame Cosel's spies informed her of her rival. No sooner had she dropped a son than she got in a carriage to Warsaw to confront her faithless lover. Madame Denhoff's supporters, hearing that the imperious mistress was on her way to foil their carefully laid plans, decided her arrival in Warsaw must be prevented at all costs. They quickly advised Madame Denhoff to create a scene that evening, pretending to be afraid for her life if Madame Cosel arrived in Warsaw.

Shedding a great many crocodile tears, Madame Denhoff told Augustus she would leave town rather than face her violent rival. Accordingly, the king gave orders to prevent Madame Cosel from entering the town. True to her reputation, when Madame Cosel was approaching Warsaw and given the message that she must turn back on the king's orders, she took out a pistol and threatened to shoot the messenger if he tried to prevent her from going ahead. She was finally persuaded to go home rather than risk the royal displeasure, and instead seek to win back the king's love upon his return to Dresden.

But the political cabal made sure that reconciliation was impossible. The king allowed his former mistress to live in luxurious retirement, giving her Pillnitz Palace. But Madame Cosel was not one to live peacefully. After political intrigues against Augustus, she fled to Berlin, where the king of Prussia seized her and returned her to Saxony. Augustus, finally realizing she would always stir up trouble, locked her in a fortress despite her shrill cries for clemency. There she remained even after his death in 1733, until her own death in 1765, after forty-nine years of genteel imprisonment.

Sprightly Nell Gwynn, a comic actress born and bred in the London gutters, maintained her place in the harem of Charles II for nearly two decades despite bitter rivalry from duchesses and countesses. In 1667 seventeen-year-old Nell graduated from selling oranges in the theater pit to performing leading parts on stage. Shortly thereafter, she received her first invitation to Whitehall Palace to entertain at royal parties. The French ambassador reported to Louis XIV that Charles laughed to see her “buffooneries.”
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Though we can assume she began sleeping with the king around this time, she was not given a full-time position as royal mistress with its honors and financial rewards. Whatever remuneration Charles gave her was little enough, as Nell didn't quit the stage for nearly three years. After she had given the king a son in 1670, Nell went back to the theater in protest. She wanted all her fans to know how shabbily Charles was treating her in comparison with his higher-born mistresses. Her ploy worked. After Charles moved her into a modest town house, bought her furniture, and agreed to pay for her living expenses, she retired from the stage.

Nell's low birth was a severe handicap. The tempestuous Lady Castlemaine, whom Charles had recently created the duchess of Cleveland, was losing her influence after a decade as royal mistress; but instead of making spunky Nell a duchess and installing her in the palace, Charles started casting about for a nobly born woman. Even among the lowborn London performers, Nell had a strong rival in Moll Davis, a charming singer and dancer.

The competition between Nell and Moll Davis grew fierce. The king
bought
a fine house for Moll whereas he only rented one for Nell. He lavished Moll with horses, a carriage, and valuable jewelry. Feeling miffed, Nell invited her rival to lunch on the day Moll had an evening rendezvous with Charles. Nell put a strong laxative in Moll's food, and afflicted with painful diarrhea, the poor woman spent the evening with a chamber pot instead of the king.

In 1671, Louise de Kéroualle, the twenty-two-year-old French-born lady-in-waiting to the queen, finally relented and allowed the king to crack open the glass of her virginity. Though tending toward frigidity, she had a strong hold over him and offered the education and courtly polish which Nell utterly lacked. With Lady Castlemaine now languishing on the sidelines, Louise became the king's
maîtresse-en-titre.
But if her powerful position at court was a bed of roses, the thorn that came with it was Nell Gwynn.

In 1674 Louise had her portrait painted in a white smock, one breast exposed, leaning on pillows against a background of draperies, with her young son hovering as Cupid. Nell went to the same artist, posed in the same smock with the same background, had her two sons hovering as Cupid with ridiculous grins, and the king pictured in the background looking at her longingly.

Louise formed the affected habit of donning mourning whenever a great personage in France died, as if to show she were a near relation. Nell couldn't resist poking fun at this, swearing that she would don mourning when the next khan of Tartary died. Nell said, “She claims that everyone in France is her relation; the moment some great one dies she puts on mourning. Well! If she is of such high quality, why does she play the whore? She ought to die of shame. As for me, it's my profession. I do not pretend to anything else.”
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Nell loved to point out that for all her rivals' blue blood, they were the king's whores just the same as she, a sentiment these noble ladies trembled to hear. One day she called on Lady Castlemaine and felt snubbed by her coolness. Nell “clapped her on the shoulder and said she presumed that persons of one trade loved not one another!”
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To put Nell in her place, Lady Castlemaine drove her luxurious new coach drawn by six horses back and forth in front of Nell's house—the king had never given Nell anything half so valuable. The following day Nell drove a broken-down cart pulled by six oxen in front of Barbara's house, crying, “Whores to market, ho!”
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Nell offered Charles what his other mistresses could not—bawdy
jokes and unfailing good humor. One day the king, Nell, and several others went fishing. Charles grew frustrated that he was not catching anything. Nell had someone distract him while she tied fried smelt—which had been in their picnic basket—to his line and threw it back in the water. When the king returned, Nell suggested he check his line. To his surprise he found that he had indeed caught a fish—a fried fish.

In addition to her practical jokes, Nell had a great talent for biting mimicry. Bishop Burnet noted that “she acted all persons in so lively a manner and was such a constant diversion to the King that even a new mistress could not drive her away.”
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Nell especially loved to mimic Louise's lisping French accent for the king's entertainment.

When Charles graced Louise with the titles of Baroness Petersfield, countess of Farnham, and duchess of Portsmouth at one stroke, Nell was livid. All she had of the royal largesse was a rented house, a few sticks of furniture, and some pin money. When she asked the king to do more for her and their two sons, he pleaded poverty caused by the war with France. To which Nell replied hotly, “I will tell you how you shall never want. Send the French [Louise de Kéroualle] into France again, set me on the stage again, and lock up your own cod-piece.”
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If Louise was a Goliath of noble birth, fine manners, and political power, Nell was a little David slinging stones with deadly accuracy. One day soon after her ennoblement, Louise ran into Nell and condescendingly admired her fine dress. “Nelly,” she cooed, “you are grown rich, I believe, by your dress; why, woman, you are fine enough to be a queen.” To which Nell replied tartly, “You are entirely right, Madam. And I am whore enough to be a duchess.”
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Another story relates that one evening Nell, the king, and Louise were partaking of a painful supper together. In a rare effort at wit, Louise said she could make three chickens out of the two set before them on the table. “There's one,” she said, “and there's two, and one and two makes three.”
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Nell then lifted one chicken onto the King's plate, the second onto her own, and suggested that Louise eat the third one.

Bereft of anything resembling a sense of humor, sluggish Louise was utterly incapable of parrying Nell's biting one-liners. Skewered alive, her only defense was to call upon every ounce of her formidable dignity.

Sometimes even Charles enjoyed jabbing the humorless and defenseless Louise. The French ambassador reported that the king had provoked Louise by “drinking twice in 24 hours to the health of Nell Gwynn” who “still made the Duchess of Portsmouth the butt of her tickling sarcasms.”
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By 1674 Moll Davis had retired and Lady Castlemaine had moved to France. These changes in the royal harem made no difference to Nell, but Louise de Kéroualle was delighted with her virtual free run of the palace. Her delight was short-lived, however. Soon a new rival appeared on the scene: hot-blooded, raven-haired Hortense Mancini, duchess of Mazarin. The king was soon heatedly pursuing the sensual seductress who had enjoyed affairs with the handsomest men and most beautiful women in Europe. Louise, prone to melodrama, became thin and pale, moping and weeping almost constantly. Now it was Nell's turn to don black weeds. The actress, who knew how to ride out Charles's infatuations, said she mourned for the “weeping willow” and her dead hopes.
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Sometimes fighting her rival's intrigues was more than Louise could bear. One evening Honoré Courtin, the French ambassador, visited her and found her shattered by the strain. “The mistress wept bitterly,” he wrote in his dispatch to Louis XIV. “Sighs and sobs strangled her words. Indeed I have never seen so sad a sight, so moving. I remained with her till midnight, and tried in every way to restore her courage and make her understand how essential it was to her position that she should hide her suffering.”
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Courtiers loved to witness the equivalent of a seventeenth-century female mud-wrestling bout, and clapped their ring-bedecked hands together in glee at the thought of it. By the end of the year, the king's fiery passion for Hortense was waning because of her flagrant infidelity—she even had an affair with Anne
Palmer, Charles's teenage bastard daughter with Lady Castlemaine. The sleekly insinuating Hortense, however, was permitted to remain officially in his harem.

While most men dream of a woman who plays the lady in the parlor and the whore in bed, Charles effortlessly attained this fantasy by spending his days with cold, refined Louise and his evenings with lusty, bouncing Nell. Try as she might, Louise could not expel Nell from the game. Sexually restrained to begin with, Louise had caught a virulent strain of venereal disease from Charles in 1674 which caused her untold suffering for months. She made Charles repay her in the form of two magnificent necklaces, one diamond and the other pearl, but was warned by doctors never again to have sexual relations with the king. It is a testament to Charles's love for Louise that he kept her as his official mistress with little or no sex. But there were the king's sexual needs to be met, and Nell was more than happy to provide these services.

One day Nell stopped by the apartments of Hortense Mancini and found Louise de Kéroualle there with her close friend the French ambassador. It was an odd group. Lady Harvey reported, “I do not suppose that in all England it would be possible to get together three women more obnoxious to one another.”
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Before Nell could prick Louise with her pointed barbs, the duchess haughtily swept out of the room. Nell turned to the ambassador and demanded to know why the king of France “did not send presents to her instead of to the weeping willow who had just gone out?”
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She said Louis XIV would spend his money more wisely in sending her gifts, as King Charles preferred her to Louise. As a matter of fact, he had sex with her—Nell—every night! The ambassador mumbled, turned red, and cringed.