Sex with the Queen (13 page)

But Urraca had little need of Alfonso on the battlefield. She hopped on a horse herself and spent thirteen campaign seasons out of her seventeen years’ rule waging war against unruly neigh-bors. Her top military commander was her lover Pedro Gonza-lez, a powerful noble, whom she bore at least two illegitimate children. The queen died at the age of forty-six, giving birth to twins, some said, though no one knows. Records of the life of this intriguing woman are few and far between.

E l e a n o r o f A q u i t a i n e ,

Q u e e n o f F r a n c e

“I Find I Have Wed a Monk”

When eighteen-year-old Louis VII of France married the spir-ited fifteen-year-old Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1137, he would have gladly bedded her often, but his priests prevented it. Young as she was, she sized up her husband’s band of bleating clerics at a glance and dismissed them as worthless. They sized her up, too, and were alarmed; they had wielded unlimited power over the impressionable young king. Now this power was threatened by a headstrong girl whom Louis deeply loved. The renowned abbot Bernard of Clairvaux wrote the king that he was under the

“counsel of the devil,” the devil being Queen Eleanor.1

Louis’s priests often pulled the king out of his marital bed, s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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leaving Eleanor seething with anger amongst the pillows. As a re-sult of the priests’ interventions, in a decade of marriage, Eleanor gave her husband only one child—a useless girl. “I thought to have married a king,” she snarled, “but find I have wed a monk.”2

When a penitent Louis VII vowed to go on crusade in 1146 to atone for his sins, Eleanor, bored to tears in her dark cold palace in muddy Paris, insisted on accompanying him. Various reports credited her with dressing as an Amazon in a silver breastplate as the cavalcade crossed the Hungarian plains. Once in the Holy Land, Eleanor probably had a rollicking affair with her uncle, the virile warrior Raymond of Poitiers who had claimed the kingdom of Antioch as his own. Thirty years after her visit to Antioch, the chronicler William of Tyre wrote, “Her conduct before and after this time showed her to be far from circum-spect. Contrary to her royal dignity, she disregarded her mar-riage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.”3

When King Louis was ready to move on to Jerusalem, Eleanor told her husband that he might do as he pleased but she would stay behind with Uncle Raymond. Stunned, Louis asked her the reason behind her eagerness to abandon him. Eleanor suppos-edly retorted, “Why do I renounce you? Because of your feck-lessness. You are not worth a rotten pear.”4

Weak and ineffectual, Louis didn’t know what to do. But his advisers convinced the king, “It would be a lasting shame to the kingdom of the Franks if, in addition to all the other disasters, it was reported that the King had been deserted by his wife, or robbed of her.”5 Despite her probable adultery, Eleanor would be kept as queen as a matter of prestige, as well as for the rich lands she brought to France, lands which would depart with her in the event of a divorce.

When a signal was given for the French army to move out, the queen was scooped up in the middle of the night, slung over a horse, and forced to continue on crusade as a dutiful wife. She never saw her swaggering uncle again. Soon after her inglorious departure, he fell in battle against the Saracens, who plated his skull with silver and made it into a drinking cup.

m e d i e v a l q u e e n s , t u d o r v i c t i m s 5 7

In 1152 Louis gave in to Eleanor’s pleas for a divorce on the grounds of consanguinity; they were fourth cousins, too closely related to a common ancestor to be legally married in the eyes of the church without a special dispensation. The real reason for a divorce, of course, was never consanguinity, which was a conve-nient excuse to end an unbearable marriage in a church that of-ficially did not permit divorce. In Eleanor’s case the real reason was that she had not given her husband a son.

Two months after her divorce she married the future Henry II of England, upon whom she bestowed her rich dower lands of Aquitaine as well as five sons and three daughters. Though more is known about Eleanor of Aquitaine than Urraca of Castile and Leon, much of her story was first written down decades after it occurred, often by scribes with political motivations for making her look good or evil and is, as such, suspect.

I s a b e l l a o f F r a n c e ,

Q u e e n o f E n g l a n d

“Someone Has Come Between My Husband and Myself ”

Far better records exist for Isabella of France, who in 1308 at the age of twelve married the handsome twenty-four-year-old Ed-ward II of England. At the time of the wedding Edward had al-ready been in love with another man, Piers Gaveston, for a decade. According to a contemporary chronicler, “As soon as the King’s son saw him, he fell so much in love that he entered upon an enduring compact with him.”6

After the nuptial celebrations in France, Edward sent all of the wedding gifts he had received from his father-in-law King Philip—gold rings and other jewels—back home to Gaveston as a present, which infuriated the French court. When the bride and groom landed in England, Edward leapt off the gangplank and ran into the arms of the waiting Gaveston. The new queen was left to clamber down the plank as best she could. At the corona-tion, it was Gaveston and not Isabella who seemed to be guest of honor. Edward had tapestries made for the coronation bearing s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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not the arms of Edward and Isabella, as tradition demanded, but the arms of Edward and Gaveston, as if Edward had made Gaves-ton his queen.

The child-queen, unsure of herself at a foreign court, put up with the relationship but must have been relieved when four years later jealous barons, many of whom had lost their lands and castles to Gaveston, murdered him. The king became devoted to his wife and allowed her to rule England for him. But in 1320, after eight years of marital peace, Edward chose another favorite, actually two favorites, father and son, Hugh Le Despenser the Elder and Hugh Le Despenser the Younger. Though the facts are murky, it is assumed that the king was having an affair only with the son, and the father was a close political adviser exploiting the relationship to reap advantages for the family. In 1321, as the Le Despensers’ star rose, Isabella’s faded. The new favorites con-vinced the king to decrease her authority, honors, and income.

But this time Isabella was no longer a meek child. At twenty-five, she had ruled a nation for almost a decade and was not about to put up with another of her husband’s lovers robbing her. On a visit to her family in France, Isabella took a powerful lover who would help her wage war against her husband. Roger Mortimer, in his early forties, had been one of Edward’s suc-cessful generals against the Scots. But when the king confiscated his lands and castles, Mortimer became his deadliest enemy.

Confined to the Tower of London, Mortimer arranged to have the guards drugged, rappelled down the battlements on a rope, swam the Thames, and escaped to France.

We can imagine that first night when Queen Isabella let Mor-timer into her room. She had known only the smooth girlish hands of Edward upon her; in their most intimate joining her husband must have fantasized that he was actually making love to Piers Gaveston. And now this heated warrior took her, roughly at first, then tenderly. And he never, ever, imagined she was a man.

They made love at night and war during the day. Isabella be-gan to dress as a widow and publicly proclaimed, “Someone has come between my husband and myself. . . . I protest that I will not return until this intruder has been removed but, discarding m e d i e v a l q u e e n s , t u d o r v i c t i m s 5 9

my marriage garment, I shall assume the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this Pharisee.”7

Armed with foreign troops, Isabella and Mortimer invaded England. Edward II and the Le Despensers fled but were soon captured. The favorites were hanged, cut down still alive, their bowels were cut out, their arms and legs hacked off, and their body parts fed to wild dogs.

It was one thing for Isabella to execute the hated Le De-spensers, quite another to murder an anointed king and her husband. Shakespeare summed up the feeling when he wrote,

“Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off an anointed king.” Isabella locked Edward up, forced him to abdi-cate, and had her fifteen-year-old son proclaimed Edward III.

Because her son was young, she ruled England with Mortimer, flinging aside her widow’s weeds. But Mortimer was, after all, a heterosexual version of Gaveston and the Le Despensers. Greedy, arrogant, and ambitious, he, too, confiscated estates from their rightful owners.

Public support shifted back in favor of the deposed king who, sitting in his cell, wrote self-pitying poetry. “And call me a crownless King,” he opined, “a laughing stock to all.”8 Despite his wretched condition, he still posed a threat to Isabella and Mortimer, especially after two failed rescue attempts by his sup-porters. In 1327 Edward was murdered in his cell, supposedly by a red-hot poker being thrust up his anus inside a cow’s horn, so no one would see any marks, or as one chronicler put it, “slain with a hot spit put thro the secret place posterial.”9 Isabella and Mortimer were not only detested tyrants. Now they had mur-dered a king.

In 1330 the eighteen-year-old Edward III eyed Mortimer’s increasing arrogance with concern. The young king was worried that his mother’s lover would have him murdered as well and reign in his stead, perhaps hoping to found his own dynasty with Isabella, who was still only thirty-four years old. Together with numerous barons robbed by Mortimer, Edward had him ar-rested. He was hanged, and the grieving Isabella remained in genteel confinement for two years before she was completely re-6 0

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