Sex with the Queen (21 page)

The princess found not only his theatrical performances lackluster, but also his sexual performance. After a full month of marriage, “The prince only rendered his marital duty to her three times,” the Florentine bishop wrote to the French minister Nicolas Fouquet. “On all other evenings he sent a valet to her chambers saying he would not require her services that evening.

Her French ladies-in-waiting expressed surprise at such com-pliments.” The bride’s sister explained, “This small show of ea-gerness made her put her back up and became the pretext for sour wrangling.”7

Perhaps as punishment for her husband’s lack of ardor, or the fact that she had been forced against her will to marry him in the first place, Marguerite lavishly spent his money. Her cook was ordered to obtain the most expensive meats; her kitchen cost more for one day’s meals than the grand duke spent in ten.

When a merchant showed her dozens of costly bolts of fabric, she took them all and told him to send the bill to her father-in-law.

Leaving the palace empty-handed, the ecstatic merchant—suddenly rich—ran into the grand duke and thanked him pro-fusely for his generosity.

As retribution for her wild spending and bad temper, Grand Duke Ferdinand ordered home Marguerite’s retinue of French ladies. As revenge, she gave the women some of the most dazzling crown jewels of Tuscany to smuggle back to France. Only with difficulty were they retrieved.

When a royal woman wished to leave the palace, protocol de-manded that she obtain permission from her husband, order the royal carriage and the entourage of cavalry to escort her, and climb in with her ladies-in-waiting. But Marguerite took to coming and going as she pleased, simply walking out of the palace alone and disappearing for hours. Her father-in-law put s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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bolts on all her apartment doors, even those leading to the gar-dens, and set spies among her staff. She was allowed to emerge from her prison for two purposes—promenades along country paths just outside Florence and court events.

Marguerite used court events as opportunities to insult her husband, stating loudly that he not only made a terrible prince, he would make a terrible stable boy, and that she would rather roast in hell without him than luxuriate in paradise with him. As chastisement, the grand duke sent her to a lonely hunting lodge in the swamps, with forty soldiers and six horsemen to follow her wherever she went to make sure she did not run away. But Mar-guerite ran so fast, so far, for so many hours, that upon their re-turn to the palace the soldiers were seen gasping for breath and clutching their sides in pain.

When Marguerite caught malaria, she claimed the royal fam-ily of Tuscany was trying to murder her, but that she would, in fact, rather die than return to her husband. Louis XIV asked the pope to threaten excommunication if Marguerite persisted, and the pontiff sent her a harsh letter. She didn’t fear hell, she replied. She was already living in it.

It is, perhaps, a miracle that in nine years Marguerite gave birth to three children. Furious each time she learned that she was pregnant, she tried to induce a miscarriage by vigorous rid-ing. When she was forbidden access to the stables, she insisted on exhausting walks for hours in the gardens. When these, too, were prohibited, she tried to starve herself to death, but her hunger proved greater than her resolve.

Much to Duke Cosimo’s dismay, Charles of Lorraine visited Florence frequently. Over the years the duchess took lowborn lovers and was even thought to have invited strapping Gypsy youths into her bed. Duke Cosimo averted his eyes to men of negligible rank; but when he found a steamy love letter from Charles of Lorraine, he was aghast at her betrayal with a worthy rival.

In 1670 Grand Duke Ferdinand died. Cosimo was now grand duke and Marguerite grand duchess. But despite all the glory of her new position, by 1672 Marguerite had had enough. While t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 9 5

visiting a Tuscan town, she wrote her husband that she would never return to him. She informed Louis XIV that there was no point in continuing the marriage—both she and her husband had committed adultery at least fifty times. Abandoning her three children, she wanted permission to return to Paris where she could have fun. But Louis XIV did not want her back in France as solid proof of a humiliating French failure at the Tuscan court. And the Tuscans
did
want her in Tuscany as their grand duchess, not a Tuscan failure at the French court. Louis in-formed her that if a French princess left her husband to return to France, her new home would be the Bastille.

By sheer strength of will, the indomitable Marguerite finally got her way. Exhausted by her wrangling, in 1675 Louis XIV and Grand Duke Cosimo III decided she could return to France if she lived quietly in a Paris convent away from court. But Mar-guerite was not the kind of woman to live quietly in a convent.

She left the convent at will, attending parties at court and ridi-culing her husband and the entire Tuscan nation to the de-lighted laughter of French courtiers. She ran up huge bills which her husband was expected to pay. And she took her pick of lovers from among servants, stable boys, and the wandering fortune-tellers who visited her.

“No hour of the day passes when I do not desire your death and wish that you were hanged . . . ,” she informed Cosimo in what must be one of the nastiest letters ever written. “What ag-gravates me most of all is that we shall both go to the devil and then I shall have the torment of seeing you even there. . . . I swear by what I loathe above all else, that is yourself, that I shall make a pact with the devil to enrage you and to escape your mad-ness. Enough is enough, I shall engage in any extravagance I so wish in order to bring you unhappiness. . . . If you think you can get me to come back to you, this will never happen, and if I came back to you, beware! Because you would never die but by my hand.”8

When a strict new prioress at the convent prevented her from coming and going at will, Marguerite set fire to the building as an excuse to move out. Servants reported one day seeing the s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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grand duchess of Tuscany chase the prioress around the convent with an axe in one hand and a pistol in the other, swearing that she would kill her. An exasperated Louis XIV finally forbade her coming to court. Marguerite continued spewing her venom at the Medici family and the Tuscan people until her death at the age of seventy-six in 1721. She was one of the few princesses ever to break free from the slavery of an unhappy marriage, and she had done so only through a fearless toxic nastiness that verged on the psychotic.

Princesses better natured than Marguerite had a harder time breaking their chains. Most never tried at all and attempted to find joy in their children and peace in prayer. Those who did seek escape often paid a heavy penalty.

S o p h i a D o r o t h e a o f C e l l e , H e r e d i t a r y P r i n c e s s o f H a n o v e r : t h e P r i s o n e r o f A h l d e n

As Shakespeare wrote, “The fittest time to corrupt a man’s wife is when she’s fallen out with her husband.”

After six miserable years of marriage, Hereditary Princess Sophia Dorothea of Hanover had definitely fallen out with her husband, Hereditary Prince George Louis, and was ripe for cor-ruption.

On March 1, 1688, the twenty-six-year-old Swedish merce-nary Philip Christoph, count of Königsmark, charged into a ballroom at the Leine Palace and commandeered her heart. A swaggering man of military bearing, he swept her a low bow, flashed a winning smile, and asked if she recalled that many years earlier they had briefly played together at her father’s little court of Celle.

Königsmark’s father had brought him to Celle to receive mil-itary training at the age of sixteen. He had flirted with the pretty little princess, pulled her sled over the snow, and traced with her their names on steamy palace windows with the words
Forget me not
.

But soon he had been called to new training at other courts. In the intervening years he had launched a successful career as t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 9 7

rakehell adventurer, fearless soldier, and irresistible seducer of women, bouncing around the courts and battlefields of Europe.

Standing before him once again, her Serene Highness didn’t answer. Perhaps, remembering those happy carefree days before her terrible marriage, a sob rose in her throat and tears welled in her eyes, and it was all she could do to force them back down.

The threads of Sophia Dorothea’s unhappy fate were woven years before her birth. Her father, George William, next in line to become duke of Hanover, had been appalled at the royal bride selected for him. Princess Sophia, daughter of the Palatine king of Bohemia, was a humorless intellectual who steeped herself in daily doses of philosophy. Her handsome mannish face and loud critical voice absolutely terrified George William.

Hemmed in on all sides, in 1658 the unfortunate groom de-cided to cede his inheritance to his younger brother, Ernst Au-gust, if only he would take the unpalatable bride along with it.

His ambitious brother was delighted, as long as George William signed a document promising he would never marry and sire ri-val heirs. On the surface, at least, Princess Sophia accepted philosophically the fact that she had been handed over like an unwanted bundle of clothes from one bridegroom to the next.

But hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and the spurned princess, who had been deeply in love with George William, felt herself very scorned indeed.

Accepting the tiny duchy of Celle as his kingdom in return for the large domain of Hanover, at first George William con-tented himself with patronizing prostitutes on his yearly visits to Carnival in Venice. But in 1665 George William fell violently in love with a penniless but dazzling Huguenot refugee, Eleonore d’Olbreuse, a woman of dark bouncing curls, pretty pink rib-bons, and soft smiles, the exact opposite of the frightening Sophia. To keep his promise to his brother, George William married her morganatically, a union which was sanctioned by the church but did not bestow legitimacy or inheritance rights on the children.