Sex with Kings (20 page)

After gentle Henrietta's retirement, George II's next mistress, Lady Deloraine, unsettled the queen and court. The new favorite was a mincing, scheming little jade who boasted every time the king made love to her. One day Lord Walpole remarked how much he regretted that Lady Deloraine was the king's choice. But Lord Hervey replied, “If she got the ear of anyone in power, it might be of very bad consequence, but since 'tis only the King, I think it of no great signification.”
²⁶

After the queen's death, George assuaged his grief by sending now and then for Lady Deloraine, even though she had taken to drinking strong Spanish wine and offended the king with the stink of it. Afraid of Lady Deloraine's political meddling, the prime minister decided it would be best to bring over from Hanover the king's German mistress, Madame Walmoden, who seemed politically innocuous. In the meantime, he shrugged off the king's sporadic encounters with that little minx Deloraine. “People must wear old gloves until they can get new,” he sighed.
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To the king's delight, Madame Walmoden came over. To her delight, she was created the duchess of Yarmouth. To the ministers' delight, she did not interfere with politics. Gradually, however, Lady Yarmouth became a conduit of political influence between the king and his ministers, and a wholly beneficial one. She informed the ministers of the right time to approach the king with important matters and how to broach them. She prevented the more irritating politicians from upsetting George.

The French, studying the influence of the English king's mistress, found she suffered in comparison to their own
Madame de Pompadour. A French nobleman in London wrote to Paris sneeringly, “Whereas Madame de Pompadour shares the absolute power of Louis XV, Lady Yarmouth shares the absolute impotence of George II.”
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Unlike Louis XV, who encouraged his mistress to make political appointments, George was outraged when he learned that then secretary of state William Pitt had requested an interview with Lady Yarmouth to discuss his candidates for various positions. “Mr. Pitt shall not go to that channel anymore,” the king thundered. “She does not meddle and shall not meddle.”
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But if the king remained stubbornly oblivious of his mistress's political influence, his courtiers did not. As the wit Lord Chesterfield noted, Lady Yarmouth must be seen as the keystone of His Majesty's opinion, “for even the wisest man, like the chameleon, takes…the hue of what he is often
upon.
”
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W
E CAN ONLY WONDER HOW WOMEN'S LOT IN
W
ESTERN SOCIETY
would have improved during the past four thousand years had Genesis blamed seductive Adam for tempting innocent Eve with a banana. But since it was Eve who gave Adam the apple, Sinful Woman became a fair target for tempting Virtuous Man from the straight and narrow path with her sexual wiles.

This was doubly true for a royal mistress. Whereas most women conducted their illicit affairs hidden from public view, maintaining an outward image of chaste propriety, by virtue of her very position the royal mistress was known by all the world to be having sex with a man not her husband. Moreover, however dissatisfied a nation may have been with its king, it was treason to
speak so, and the mistress was a far likelier target of wrath among the people and discontent at court.

Often a royal mistress could not win in the stern court of public opinion no matter what she did. If she bore the king children, she was a harlot bringing expensive bastards into the world. If she did not, she was even worse—a barren harlot. If she was beautiful, her beauty was a gift from the devil to inflame the hapless monarch. If she was plain, the king deserved better. If she lived opulently, she was selfishly spending the poor people's taxes. If she lived simply, she was detracting from the king's glory.

Mistresses from powerful noble families often meddled in politics and turned their relatives into a political faction, causing strife at court. For this reason, some kings avoided the snares of lovely countesses and breathtaking duchesses and sought out mistresses born as commoners. Such women were far more grateful for blessings bestowed and less adept at intrigue. Commoners usually applauded the rise of one of their own, but those born with blue blood pulsating nobly through purple veins turned green with jealousy when an outsider invaded the Holy of Holies.

Native-born mistresses were better tolerated than imports, who were often, and sometimes rightly, suspected as foreign spies. In 1736, when George II insisted on bringing over a German mistress, his English subjects wanted to know why he couldn't content himself with an English whore. After all, they said, “There are enough of them to be had and they are cheaper.”
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Louis XIV's brilliant mistress Madame de Montespan was disliked by court and populace alike for her vainglorious spending and imperious attitude. She encouraged the king to build palaces, create gardens, and give lavish entertainments. The court, and French life that aped the court, buzzed with music, dancing, fireworks, gambling, the rustle of colorful silks, and the sparkle of priceless gems.

During her thirteen-year tenure, this Red Whore of Babylon was considered a drain on the royal treasury, a burden on the backs of the working poor. Hearing of her sordid reputation, German troops marching past her in a military parade shouted,
“Königs Hure! Hure!”
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Unable to understand German, Madame de Montespan asked another spectator what the soldiers were yelling and was informed that they had been calling her the “king's whore.” Unfazed, later that evening she told the king that while she had enjoyed the parade she wished the Germans were not so painfully precise in calling everything by its proper name.

Once she was dismissed, Louis secretly married the pious Madame de Maintenon, who had all the virtues the French disliked and none of the vices they admired. Suddenly public opinion veered back in Madame de Montespan's favor. The French wanted their king, and their court, to dazzle the world. They missed the balls, fetes, masquerades. To follow the new fashions, many courtiers traded in dice for rosaries and romance novels for Bibles, but it didn't mean they liked it. As Louis XIV's sister-in-law Elizabeth Charlotte, the duchesse d'Orléans, wrote of Madame de Maintenon, “Not all the King's mistresses together did as much harm as she!”
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Madame de Pompadour, despite her generosity and encouragement of French art and industry, was the subject of harsh lampoons and barbed poems throughout her tenure. Many courtiers were simply jealous that Louis XV had chosen a woman of the middle class for the honor, and they poked cruel fun at her background and her maiden name, Poisson, which means “fish” in French. She once found under her napkin at her dining table a poem accusing her of having venereal disease. Away from the poisoned elegance of court, the French populace enjoyed poking fun at her in taverns and tacking up nasty verses on the lampposts.

Upon her arrival at Versailles, the nobles looked down their long aristocratic noses at her and sniffed. “She is excessively
common,” the comte de Maurepas wrote, “a bourgeoise out of her place, who will displace all the world if one cannot manage to displace her.”
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Similarly, the duc de Luyne scoffed, “She will probably be just a passing fancy and not a proper mistress.”
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Her enemies at court delighted in spreading word among the common people of Madame de Pompadour's extravagance, wildly inflating the money she spent. When she set up a tiny theater in Versailles for the king's amusement, word got out in Paris that it had cost an exorbitant sum wrung from them in the form of taxes. When she visited Paris—her childhood home and a place she far preferred to Versailles—her carriage was pelted with eggs and mud, and she was hissed and booed and even threatened with death.

But it was not until Madame de Pompadour took charge of running the Seven Years' War beginning in 1757 that she was truly reviled. Some two hundred thousand Frenchmen were killed or wounded, the national treasury was bled dry, taxes were raised. Madame de Pompadour found herself the recipient of frequent death threats, some mysteriously appearing on the mantelpiece of her apartment.

The detested royal mistress slipped into a profound depression and suffered from insomnia, which she deadened with drugs. When peace was declared in 1763, France lost most of its possessions. The French people did not blame King Louis the Well-Beloved for the devastating losses, but his devilish mistress. Madame de Pompadour, whose health had never been robust, suffered greatly from the barbs and pricks of her unpopularity. “If I die,” she sighed, “it will be of grief.”
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She died the following year.

Parisians greeted her death with a jeering verse:

Madame de Pompadour's successor, Jeanne du Barry, started off her career as royal courtesan with a dreadful handicap—she had been an infamous Parisian prostitute with whom many of the king's ministers and courtiers had had sex.

To become
maîtresse-en-titre,
Madame du Barry had to be presented officially at court by a noblewoman. And here was the difficulty—no noblewoman would be caught dead facilitating the prostitute's intrusion into their privileged sphere. Finally the king convinced the impoverished comtesse de Béarn to accept the job by paying off her debts and promoting her sons serving in the armed forces.

The day of the presentation ceremony, however, the well-bribed comtesse de Béarn lost her nerve, knowing that if she went through with it no one at court would ever speak to her again. Limping pitifully, she claimed to have sprained her ankle so badly she could hardly walk. Many thought that if she had in fact hurt herself, the injury had been intentional. The ceremony was canceled, to the delight of Versailles courtiers and the French populace.

Under intense pressure from the king and Madame du Barry's cabal, three months later the comtesse de Béarn kept her part of the bargain and presented the royal mistress at Versailles. The rooms were packed with courtiers hoping to witness an utter failure. Madame du Barry was late, but when she did arrive even her most bitter enemies gasped at her beauty. She was wearing one hundred thousand livres worth of diamond jewelry and a court gown of silver and gold cloth, with huge panniers and a long sweeping train which she managed gracefully to kick out of the way to make her three backward curtsies. If they had hoped to see an oafish street urchin, they were disappointed. Madame du Barry's graceful refinement was equal to that of the most inbred duchess.

Nevertheless, for much of her six-year tenure as mistress, Madame du Barry was ostracized by courtiers. When she sat down at a card table, the other seats remained eerily empty.
When she gave a party, no one came. Finally, the king ordered courtiers to attend her parties.

Her greatest challenge came when the king's grandson, the future Louis XVI, received as his bride the fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette, daughter of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. Strong-willed, beautiful, and charming, the new dauphine stole the king's heart and despised Jeanne du Barry. She demanded that she, as dauphine, be the first lady at court, and snubbed the king's mistress socially, despite gentle remonstrances from Louis. Courtiers enjoyed this spectacle of two females—a highborn princess and a prostitute—duking it out for the king's affections.

Finally, after two years Marie Antoinette's refusal to say even a word to the favorite became an international scandal. The king, Empress Maria Theresa, and the Austrian ambassador to France finally prevailed on the dauphine to say publicly a few polite words to Madame du Barry. At a carefully orchestrated event, the chastened princess coolly remarked to the
maîtresse-entitre,
“There are a lot of people today at Versailles.”
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The king and his mistress were gushingly grateful. Strained relations between Austria and France were improved, but Marie Antoinette's hatred of Madame du Barry intensified. She was never invited to join the dauphine's youthful, fun-loving entourage, which soon became the center of court social life.

Madame de Pompadour, detested toward the end, was now sanctified by the white pall of virtue that death often brings to the departed no matter how scandalous their earthly sins. The living, however, are doomed to suffer for their transgressions, and a former prostitute gracing the gilded halls of Versailles revolted the French populace. Writing pornographic poetry and bawdy songs about the favorite became a new national pastime. During her final months as royal mistress in 1774, Madame du Barry had become so unpopular that she feared entering Paris. Mobs, who called her the “Royal Whore,” attacked her carriage. They saw her lavish lifestyle as the cause of high unemployment, staggering taxes, and a shortage of bread. One courtier wrote
that her entertainments “were carried to such an indecent pitch of luxury as to insult the poverty of the people.”
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For many years after the king's death, Madame du Barry lived a quiet life in a country manor outside of Versailles. Rich from her tenure as royal mistress, she entertained visitors from across Europe who came to look at the face that had bewitched a king. A Versailles courtier enjoying her hospitality told her apologetically, “There was no hatred but we all wanted to have your place.”
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When Charles II was invited to ascend the English throne in 1660, his riotous living was a charming contrast to a decade of the deadly dull Puritan Protectorate. But within a few years, many God-fearing Englishmen decried the debauchery of the court, protesting—perhaps with a bit too much ardor—that the king wasted time with his mistresses “feeling and kissing them naked all over their bodies in bed.”
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Charles's first royal mistress, Lady Castlemaine, often experienced the stabs of public anger. “Give the King the Countess of Castlemaine and he cares not what the nation suffers,” they said.
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After the birth of her fourth child by the king in as many years, some English subjects thought that enough was enough. One evening as she was walking across St. James Park she was accosted by three men who called her a vile whore and reminded her that two hundred years earlier Jane Shore, the mistress of King Edward IV, had died alone and detested on a pile of manure.

In 1665 while staying with the court in Oxford, Lady Castlemaine gave birth to her fifth child and soon after found an insulting verse nailed to her door in Latin and English, referring to the punishment of ducking immoral women in water:

The king posted a reward of one thousand pounds to find the perpetrators, but no one came forward.

In 1668 a group of London apprentices pulled down some infamous brothels and threatened to pull down the biggest brothel of all, Whitehall Palace, home of King Charles. Soon after, a mock petition was published titled “Petition of the Poor Whores to the Most Splendid, Illustrious, Serene and Eminent Lady of Pleasure, the Countess of Castlemaine,” begging for her influence on their behalf for “a trade wherein your Ladyship has great experience.”
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As Lady Castlemaine stormed and raged, someone then published a “Gracious Answer” to the poor whores, purportedly written by none other than the king's mistress herself.