Sex with the Queen (41 page)

With mine own tears I wash away my balm,

With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;
All pomp and majesty I do forswear.

— w i l l i a m s h a k e s p e a r e

I

T h e e i g h t e e n t h c e n t u ry wa s a s e a o f f e m a l e d e b au c h -ery dotted with islands of prudery. To avoid tainting her cher-ished purity, Queen Charlotte of Great Britain banned from court those individuals who had the merest whiff of scandal at-tached to their names. As a result, the smallness of her court was outdone only by its dullness. This plain-faced German princess gave her husband, George III, fifteen children, and luckily for her, George was equally horrified at the thought of adultery.

Many courtiers pointed sadly to this unnatural fidelity to an ugly wife as the cause of the king’s madness; in 1788 George began foaming at the mouth as he shrieked his obscene desires for the queen’s maids of honor.

Empress Maria Theresa of Austria was not so fortunate in the 1 8 7

fidelity of her husband. Though Francis of Lorraine, Holy Ro-man Emperor, regularly did his duty by the empress, giving her sixteen children, he had a proclivity for actresses and ladies-in-waiting. Hoping to dampen her husband’s enthusiasm for other women, in 1747 the empress formed the Chastity Commission to investigate reports of adulterous sexual activity. After six months and a handful of convictions of prostitutes, dancers, and their customers, the commission was laughed out of existence. Fran-cis’s diddling continued unabated.

Russia, first and foremost, was the land where female sover-eigns openly enjoyed the sexual prowess of strapping young men. But by the latter part of the eighteenth century, western European queens were following suit.

M a r i a L u i s a o f P a r m a ,

Q u e e n o f S p a i n

“The Earthly Trinity”

When the future Carlos IV of Spain married the fourteen-year-old Maria Luisa of Parma in 1765, she almost immediately began having affairs with courtiers. Her husband seemed uncon-cerned, but his outraged father, King Carlos III, exiled every man upon whom the princess’s eyes alighted with favor. On one occasion the prince begged his father to bring the young man back because “his wife Luisa was quite unhappy without him, as he used to amuse her amazingly.” “Booby!” the king snapped, turning away in disgust.1 Under his breath he added, “All of them alike—all of them whores!”2

Maria Luisa heaved a sigh of relief when old King Carlos died in 1788; he had been prepared to exile to a remote province her most recent lover, a spirited eighteen-year-old guardsman named Manuel Godoy. The latest object of the queen’s affec-tions was tall and strongly built, with a shock of thick black hair, dreamy dark eyes, and cheeks so naturally rosy that many incor-rectly believed he wore rouge. There was a sensual, sleepy look to him that absolutely inflamed women. Now, with such a compli-1 8 8

s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

ant husband as king, Maria Luisa could keep Godoy by her side and have sex with him whenever she wanted.

At twenty-seven, the newly minted queen had dark auburn hair and large black eyes sparkling with sensuality. She was nei-ther ugly nor beautiful; with her alert expression, thin lips, and long flared nose, she rather looked like an attractive dog. Her sex drive was insatiable, and the only man who ever came close to satisfying her was Manuel Godoy, who was reported to be a roar-ing lion in bed. As a reward for services rendered to Spain, the queen had her husband make Godoy prime minister and give him the exultant title Prince of the Peace.

Over time, both Godoy and Maria Luisa took other lovers and quarreled heartily about them, yet still maintained their sexual relationship. Once during a procession the favorite actually slapped the queen’s face. The king, walking ahead, turned around to ask what the noise was, and the queen merely mur-mured that she had dropped a book.

When the queen took on a new lover named Manuel Mallo, King Carlos, seeing Mallo in a beautiful carriage pulled by four magnificent horses, wondered aloud how the fellow could afford to keep such a splendid equipage. Godoy replied loudly enough so the queen could hear him, “Sire, Mallo doesn’t have a penny in the world, but everyone knows that he is kept by an old and ugly woman who robs her husband to pay him.” When the king burst out laughing and asked the queen her opinion, she said haltingly, “Oh, well, Carlos, you know how Manuel is always jok-ing.”3

In 1796, after a particularly stormy scene, Maria Luisa reluc-tantly agreed to appoint Godoy’s new mistress, the sleek and sin-uous Josephina Tudo, as her lady-in-waiting. But Godoy, not satisfied with his luscious mistress and powerful queen, had even greater ambitions. He tried to arrange a marriage with Madame Royale, the daughter of the late Marie Antoinette. When Haps-burg laughter at this suggestion echoed all the way from Vienna to Madrid—stopping at every court in between—Godoy had to make do with the king’s cousin Maria Theresa of Bourbon, the countess of Chinchon. Though married to a Bourbon, Godoy e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 1 8 9

brazenly advertised that he was maintaining a ménage à trois and received guests at dinner with his wife sitting on his right and his mistress on his left.

Nor did Godoy limit his amorous adventures to the queen, his wife, and his mistress. He engaged in sex with women who threw themselves at him during his evening receptions. “A girl arriving with her mother always went in to the Minister without her,” reported the French ambassador J. M. Alguier. “Those who went in came out again with heightened color and rumpled dresses, which they would then smooth down in full view of everybody. . . . Every evening the same scene was enacted in the very palace itself, the Court looking on and the Queen’s apart-ments being not twenty yards away; the latter would rage and scream and threaten, only in the end to admit herself beaten.”4

Observers at the time and historians ever since have won-dered how the king could remain unconcerned about the love affair his wife so openly conducted with Godoy. Some courtiers believed that he was actually unaware of it. The French ambassa-dor reported, “The thing that must strike those most who watch Charles IV in the bosom of his Court is his blindness where the conduct of the Queen is concerned. He knows nothing, sees nothing, suspects nothing. . . . Neither the warnings he has re-ceived in writing nor the intrigues going on all around him, nor the marks of favor lacking both pretext and precedent, nor the attentions which violate all usage and decency, nor even the exis-tence of two children who bear, as is obvious to all, a striking re-semblance to the Prince of the Peace—nothing has availed to open the King’s eyes.”5

King Carlos, Queen Maria Luisa, and Godoy called them-selves “the earthly trinity.” In 1808 after a palace revolt which made Crown Prince Ferdinand king of Spain, the trinity and the new king raced to France, both sides hoping to get Napoleon’s support. But the emperor promptly put the whole squabbling group in elegant French confinement for several years, while Napoleon’s brother Joseph climbed onto the vacant throne of Spain. After Napoleon’s demise, Ferdinand once again became king. The trinity, meanwhile, had retired to Italy.

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The queen’s love affair with Godoy lasted thirty-one years until her death in 1819. When Maria Luisa breathed her last, it was Godoy at her side, not her husband, who was visiting his brother, the king of Naples to go hunting. Within days of her death, Carlos himself gave up the ghost.

Godoy was devastated. He had lost both royal patrons within a fortnight; at fifty-one he was hale and hearty with expensive tastes and no money. Maria Luisa had left him a generous inher-itance, but her son, King Ferdinand VII—who had always hated his mother’s lover—forced him to renounce it. However, Ferdi-nand, bristling at the thought of Godoy holding the title Prince of the Peace, offered him a large sum of money to give it back to the Spanish crown. Godoy agreed.

In his last years Godoy gravitated to Paris, that magnet for older men with money and an eye for the ladies. The country boy who had conquered a queen and ruled a nation was now an el-derly gentleman with white whiskers and a jaunty walk. Only his voluptuous lips and dreamy eyes were the same. He died in 1851

at the age of eighty-four.

M a r i a C a r o l i n a o f A u s t r i a , Q u e e n o f N a p l e s :

t h e W h i t e G l o v e T r i c k

Oddly similar to his brother, King Carlos of Spain, King Ferdi-nand of Naples cared little about his wife’s lovers as long as he could chase stags. His wife, Maria Carolina, an Austrian arch-duchess and sister of Marie Antoinette, had dark blue eyes, chestnut hair, and an unquenchable thirst for politics. In her quest for political power, she was fortunate that her husband had a strange sexual fetish for her arms. She could convince him to do anything she wanted by slowly removing her long white gloves.

According to Count Roger de Damas, “His brain becomes ex-alted when he sees a glove well stretched over a beautifully shaped arm. It is a mania he has always had and which has never varied.

How many affairs of the greatest importance have I seen settled by the Queen’s care to pull her gloves over her pretty arms while e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 1 9 1