Sex with the Queen (5 page)

Elizabeth Charlotte also suffered from the extremes of weather. “The heat is so great that the oldest people cannot say they have ever experienced anything like it,” she reported in July 1707. “Yesterday everyone kept to his room in his shirt until seven at night; one constantly had to change shirts; I changed mine eight times in one day, and it was as if they had been dipped into water. At table too people keep mopping their faces.”4

“The cold here is so fierce that it fairly defies description,”

she wrote in January 1709. “I am sitting by a roaring fire . . .

and still I am shivering with cold and can barely hold the pen. . . . The wine freezes in the bottles.”5

Nor had palace sanitation evolved to a high level. In the early eighteenth century, the duc de Saint-Simon wrote, “The royal apartments at Versailles are the last word in inconvenience, with back views over the privies and other dark and evil smelling places.”6

“How would it be possible to prevent men from pissing in the streets?” lamented Elizabeth Charlotte in 1720. “In fact it is a wonder that there are not entire rivers of piss, considering the huge numbers of people living in Paris.”7 But hygiene inside the palace was no better than in the streets. English visitors to Ver-sailles were shocked to find the most elegant courtiers spitting on the floor and urinating in the corners.

Even life in a modern palace is not what we would imagine.

The British royal family insists on cost-saving measures that would be laughed at by a middle-class family. In 1981 Diana, Princess of Wales, was baffled to find Her Majesty Queen Eliza-beth II of Great Britain wandering around Buckingham Palace at night turning off lights to save on the electric bill. When the princess complained of the chilly rooms in the Scottish estate of Balmoral, the queen politely suggested she put on another sweater. When royal toes poke through socks, servants darn them rather than throwing them out and buying new. Dirty bedsheets are reversed to get both sides soiled before being laundered. And s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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when Paul Burrell, who later became Princess Diana’s butler, started working at Buckingham Palace, he was given a musty uni-form that had first seen service under George III, when he was fighting the American Revolution.

T h e B r i d e g r o o m

A princess usually discovered that her greatest discomfort was not the weather, or the insects, or the smell of human waste, or the puzzling thriftiness of her royal in-laws, but the husband she was forced to wed. The purpose of a royal bride was to produce royal babies. “I want to marry a womb,” said Napoleon.8 Other monarchs, though shuddering at the little Corsican’s indelicacy, would have agreed with his sentiments. A princess was valued primarily not for her education, her personality, her good works, or even her beauty, but for her uterus.

Because she was regarded as a body part rather than a person, a princess found that her feelings were usually disregarded.

Politicians, pushing their candidates for groom sight unseen, tried to cram their selections down a princess’s throat. A Prus-sian minister, hoping to persuade Frederick the Great’s sister, Princess Wilhelmina, to accept a marriage candidate in 1727, grandly declared, “Great princesses are born to be sacrificed for the welfare of the state.”

When the princess objected that she had never met the pro-posed bridegroom, the minister gravely replied, “As you are not acquainted with him, Madam, you cannot possibly have any aversion for him.”9

Until the mid-nineteenth century, most princesses never met their husbands until
after
they were married by proxy, ceremonies held in two locales, the home cities of the affianced pair. In each ceremony, a person of honorable character stood in for the missing bride or groom and went through a church wedding, giving or receiving a ring.

Oddly, the proxy wedding ceremony was followed by a proxy bedding ceremony, in which the bride and her stand-in groom would meet in the royal four-poster bed, with all the wedding l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s 1 7

guests crowding around to watch. Wearing an ornate ruffled nightdress, the bride would lie down. The stand-in groom, fully clothed, would remove his boots and stockings, lie down beside the bride, and touch her bare foot with his. And in this way was a proxy marriage consummated.

A proxy wedding offered many advantages. It ratified the dowry, trade agreements, militar y alliances, and treaties before the bride set out. Moreover, the honor of the princess was as-sured: she would be traveling out of her native land as a mar-ried woman to meet her husband. It held the added benefit that the groom, should he be revolted by the first sight of his new wife, or the bride, disgusted by the looks of her husband, could not return the goods. A second marriage ceremony was held with both bride and groom taking part, but after the proxy wedding it was too late to get out of the marriage without legal difficulty.

In 1672 the twenty-year-old Princess Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate set off from her home in Heidelberg to meet the husband she had already married by proxy, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, the transvestite brother of Louis XIV of France.

Throughout the journey, the bride wept bitterly. She had heard of her husband’s proclivity for young men, and the ru-mor that one of his lovers had poisoned his first wife in a fit of jealousy.

When the bride and groom met, they took one look at each other and gasped. She saw a long aristocratic nose emerging from a huge frizzy black wig, diamond earrings, cascading rows of lace and ruffles, dozens of clanking bracelets, beribboned pantaloons, and high-heeled shoes. The prince saw a flat broad face, freshly scrubbed from her journey, tiny blue pig eyes, and a broad German rear end. He whispered to his gentlemen, “Oh!

How can I sleep with that?”10

Once lodged in Versailles, Elizabeth Charlotte found that the golden magnificence of her new home did nothing to assuage her raw pain. “Between ourselves I was stuck here against my will,”

she lamented to her beloved aunt, Duchess Sophia of Hanover.

“Here I must live, and here I must die, whether I like it or not.”11

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On occasion, over the decades, she thought of “simply running away” from her horrible husband and the vicious malice at court.12 Though sometimes she grew feisty and, squaring her shoulders, resolutely declared, “He who dies of threats must be buried with donkey farts.”13

As Elizabeth Charlotte and her husband, who was called Mon-sieur, grew older, he alienated her by giving her gowns and jewelry to his male lovers. Away from court rituals, in the privacy of their elegant Versailles apartment, they often found they had nothing to say to each other. She wrote Duchess Sophia about an evening she had spent with her husband and their grown children. “After a long silence,” she recalled, “Monsieur, who did not consider us good enough company to talk to us, made a great loud fart, by your leave, turned toward me, and said, ‘What is that, Madame?’ I turned my behind toward him, let out one of the selfsame tone, and said, ‘That’s what it is, Monsieur.’ My son said, ‘If that’s all it is, I can do as well as Monsieur and Madame,’ and he also let go of a good one. . . . These are princely conversations. . . .”14

In 1768 Archduchess Maria Carolina of Austria boarded the gaily bedecked vessel that would transport her to reign over Naples with the husband she had already married by proxy.

Looking out across the sea, the fifteen-year-old declared she would be far better off if someone would only throw her in.

King Ferdinand IV, her seventeen-year-old groom, was of-ten covered with herpes lesions which his doctors considered to be a sign of rude good health. He had received almost no educa-tion; his brothers were incurably insane, and his tutors feared that any mental effort would topple Ferdinand over the edge as well. The king loved to pinch his courtiers’ rear ends and put marmalade in their hats when they weren’t looking. He would go to sea with the fishermen of Naples and sell his catch at a market stall, haggling with buyers over the price and loudly cursing them.

On the morning after his wedding to Maria Carolina, King Ferdinand was asked how he had enjoyed his bride. Shaking his head, the king reported, “She sleeps as if she had been killed, and sweats like a pig.”15

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After eating a meal in public—a special event where the monarch sat alone on a platform surrounded by gawking specta-tors of all classes—Ferdinand would then call for his chamber pot and, to the delight of his audience, defecate proudly. Aside from public meals, the king insisted on company whenever he heeded the call of Nature. In 1771 Maria Carolina’s brother Joseph II of Austria visited the Neapolitan monarchs and was perplexed to receive an invitation to accompany the king to his chamber pot after dinner.

“I found him on this throne with lowered breeches,” Joseph wrote to his family in Vienna, “surrounded by five or six valets, chamberlains and others. We made conversation for more than half an hour, and I believe he would be there still if a terrible stench had not convinced us that all was over. He did not fail to describe the details and even wished to show them to us; and without more ado, his breeches down, he ran with the smelly pot in one hand after two of his gentlemen, who took to their heels.

I retired quietly to my sister’s, without being able to relate how this scene ended, and if they got off with only a good scare.”16

The luxurious trains and opulent steamboats of the Victo-rian era resulted in young royals at least meeting each other before agreeing to marry. Even so, most marriages were un-happy. In 1891 Princess Louisa of Tuscany married Prince Frederick Augustus, the heir to the Saxon throne. The prince won Louisa over with his gentle manner and striking blond good looks. Yet years later, disenchanted, she wrote in her memoirs, “Although every princess doubtless at some time dreams of an ideal Prince Charming, she rarely meets him, and she usually marries some one quite different from the hero of her girlhood’s dreams.”17

S e x w i t h t h e K i n g

While palace life was no bed of roses, a queen’s sex life, that most intimate aspect of a woman’s relationship with her husband, was sometimes downright horrifying. Many a princess was com-pletely unacquainted with her wedding-night duties and sur-2 0