Sex with the Queen (4 page)

Character assassination which had proved so effective in the s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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ninth century was alive and well a thousand years later.

Napoleon, who hated the virtuous and beautiful Queen Louise of Prussia for egging her apathetic husband on to defend his country against the French, twisted her admiration for Czar Alexander of Russia into a slanderous story. The handsome blond czar had visited Prussia in 1805 and an instant bond sprang up between the czar and the queen. When French troops marched into the vacated royal palace in Potsdam, Napoleon was delighted to find Alexander’s portrait hanging in the queen’s bedroom. He did all he could to tarnish the lady’s unblemished reputation and make her bumbling husband, King Frederick William III, look like a cuckold. Stories of the pious queen’s sor-did affair with the czar haunt her memory to this day.

It was harder for Napoleon to blacken the reputation of Louise’s aunt, Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, who had had numerous affairs with courtiers and a decades-long affair with her top minister. What outraged the prudish French emperor received only a shrug and a wink from the rowdy Neapolitans.

Stymied in his efforts to ruin the queen’s reputation, Napoleon invented the story of a lesbian affair between Maria Carolina and her friend Emma, Lady Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador and later the mistress of Admiral Horatio Nelson. Emma, the conqueror learned, would tiptoe up a secret stairway to the queen’s apartments, probably to deliver dis-patches from British allies or perhaps just to avoid palace proto-col and enjoy a cup of coffee. But Napoleon saw the secret staircase as proof of unnatural vice. Unfortunately for the French emperor, his dart did not hit home; the raucous Neapolitans were equally undisturbed by rumors of the queen’s lesbianism.

Some Italians gladly strangled erring wives with silken rib-bons, but many more were cavalier about sexual escapades. When the theocrat Savonarola, who had held a moral stranglehold over the sex lives of Florentines, was burned at the stake in 1498, one high-level magistrate, eyeing the rising flames of the pyre, heaved a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank God,” he grunted. “Now we can return to our sodomy.”8

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Indeed, of all European nations, the king, court, and coun-try of Naples was the least disturbed by stories of queenly adul-tery. When a stroke felled the sixty-one-year-old queen Maria Carolina in her sleep in 1814, her husband, King Ferdinand, loudly proclaimed that his forty-four years of marriage had been nothing short of martyrdom, and within two months he married his young mistress. Ferdinand’s son, the hereditary prince, sharply rebuked him for marrying a woman known to have en-joyed so many lovers. But the king, laughing, replied, “Think of your mamma, my boy!”9

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O N E

l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s
In love the heavens themselves do guide the state;
Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.

— w i l l i a m s h a k e s p e a r e

I

P r i n c e s s e s w e r e r a i s e d t o b e d e vo u t , o b e d ie n t , a n d faithful. When sent to meet their new husbands, they set off with every intention of retaining these vital qualities in their new lives. What happened over the years that made so many of them lose their religion, their obedience, and their fidelity?

When imagining the life of a princess bride, we envision op-ulent rooms boasting every comfort, efficient servants carrying out her every whim, a wardrobe of luxurious gowns, and a jewel box bursting with sparkling gems. We can hear the sweet strains of violins at a candlelit ball, smell the aroma of succulent roasted meats at the banquet table. We picture her handsome loving hus-band, her growing brood of healthy children, and envy her.

And yet the queen was often chained to a husband who didn’t 1 3

want her, didn’t even want to sleep with her. Her children were taken out of her control and raised by palace officials as property of the state. She was forced to stand by patiently while doctors killed her children by bleeding them to death.

Her servants were often spies in the pay of her enemies. Nor was her life what we would call physically comfortable, let alone luxurious. For several months a year, drafts sliced through palace rooms like knives. Rats and insects nested behind gilded walls.

Nor was the queen consort necessarily rolling in money; she pos-sessed only the funds which her husband chose to bestow upon her—in some cases, nothing.

Until the mid-nineteenth century when travel became easier, the princess sent off to wed a foreign monarch would likely never see her family again. The childhood friends and devoted servants she brought to her new country caused jealous intrigues and were often sent home as meddling intruders, leaving the princess alone and friendless.

Perhaps we will begin to comprehend why a decent God-fearing woman, cast upon a foreign shore bereft of family and friends, might jump into an adulterous affair, might seek a little love and understanding in the midst of her misery.

P a l a t i a l L u x u r y

The beauty of royal lodgings increased with the centuries. The medieval queen spent most of her time in the great hall, a large dark chamber with slits for windows and an enormous hearth.

Meals were served here, and in between meals the queen sewed with her ladies and met with subjects seeking mercy or justice.

But she was not alone in the hall; also present were the rest of the royal family, the entire court, bustling servants, and flea-bitten dogs hunting for food scraps on the rush-covered floor. There was scant furniture, and that was uncomfortable—tables, benches, and, for the queen, a stiff high-backed chair. Vivid tapestries covered the stone walls but did little to dispel the gloom.

By the Renaissance, a European queen had her own suite of s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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small, cozy wood-paneled rooms with large windows and heavy ornately carved furniture. In the baroque period, royal rooms boasted high ceilings painted with mythological scenes, gilded walls, silver-framed mirrors, and gleaming parquet floors. The dainty furniture was covered in silk or satin. Yet despite the ever-increasing grandeur of royal suites, life in the palace re-mained profoundly uncomfortable.

Catherine the Great, who arrived in Russia in 1744 as a Ger-man bride for Empress Elizabeth’s nephew and heir, suffered terribly from the cold. Russian winters, so hard on peasants, were often not much easier on royalty. Churches were unheated, and many of the palace rooms were drafty and cold despite the presence of a crackling fire. Windows did not close properly, letting icy arctic winds howl through the rooms. Many days Catherine was “blue as a plum” and numb from the cold.1 She frequently suffered colds and fevers.

At night she was often kept awake by the sounds of rats scut-tling behind the walls. Once, when a palace caught fire, Cather-ine stood outside in the street watching thousands of black rats evacuating the palace in an orderly fashion, followed by thou-sands of gray mice. She was not sorry to see that palace go; in ad-dition to the rats and mice it had been “filled with every kind of insect.”2

In the 1660s, utilizing daring feats of engineering, experts transformed a hunting lodge in a swamp into glorious Versailles Palace with an impressive system of fountains and canals. Yet for all the engineering advances of the time, no one had come up with the simple idea of window screens. Open windows allowed in a pleasant breeze, to be sure, as well as birds, squirrels, bats, and insects.

“The confounded gnats here do not let me have an hour’s sleep,” opined Elizabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, from her gilded Versailles apartments in 1702. “They have chewed me up so much that I look as if I had smallpox again. We are also plagued with wasps,” she added. “Not a day goes by that someone is not stung. A few days ago there was tremendous laughter: one of these wasps had flown under a lady’s skirt; the lady ran around l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s 1 5

like mad because the wasp was stinging her high up on the thigh, she pulled up her skirt, ran around, and cried, ‘Help! Close your eyes and take it off!’ ”3