Sex with the Queen (63 page)

Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark, married to a stark raving imbecile, to her ladies-in-waiting in 1771. “If I were a widow, I would marry him I loved, and give up my throne and my coun-try.”2

“From the very threshold of your Majesty’s mansion the mother of your child was pursued by spies, conspirators, and traitors . . . ,” wrote Queen Caroline of Britain to her husband George IV in 1820. “You have pursued me with hatred and scorn, and with all the means of destruction. You wrested me from my child. . . . You sent me sorrowing through the world, and even in my sorrows pursued me with unrelenting persecu-tion.”3

Sick to death of her husband, when a queen took a lover, any-thing could happen—from disgrace and death to political tri-umph. The crucial factor was the political significance of her love affair. Liaisons that benefited the state were not only toler-ated, but approved. When Queen Maria Francisca of Portugal began an affair with her brother-in-law, courtiers applauded.

Their relationship allowed power factions to trade the insane and impotent King Alfonso, who had deprived them of their rights and property and dishonored the throne, for his brother Pedro, who restored everything that had been lost, including the polish to the Portuguese crown. Moreover, by keeping the bride and merely swapping the husbands, Portugal retained the treaties and dowry that Maria Francisca had brought from France. An accusation of adultery would never be made when the adultery offered so many financial and political benefits.

With her politically brilliant lover at her side, Queen Marie of Romania guided her country through a world war and the threat of Communist revolution. As ancient European thrones toppled around her like dominoes, Marie’s throne stood firm.

Romania’s powerful elite, proud of their queen, gave her solid support. The fact that three of her five royal children were fa-thered by lovers, and not the king, mattered little in the face of the rich rewards she provided the nation.

Catherine the Great made Russia a world power, equal to France and Britain. The economy boomed; the rich got richer; 2 9 2

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

the poor were given free farmland in new southern territories.

Catherine’s people might snicker about her young lovers, but no one suggested shoving her off the throne for her lascivious im-morality. Life under her rule was just too good.

But liaisons that threatened the state were swiftly and brutally punished. When Sophia Dorothea, crown princess of Hanover, began her love affair with Count Philip von Königsmark in 1690, everyone at court knew about it, including her husband, the crown prince, and his powerful father, the elector. But it wasn’t until four years later when the princess planned to elope with the count and take her inheritance rights with her—threatening the power and wealth of Hanover—that she was dis-graced, divorced, and imprisoned, and the count murdered.

Had she remained, on the surface at least, a staunch supporter of the Hanoverian power structure, she may have been allowed to continue her love affair unhindered for years.

Many a queen was disgraced not because she threatened the state itself, but because she stood in the way of rival power fac-tions at court jockeying for position. Seething with discontent, greedy courtiers aimed to topple the queen and all her support-ers, and then grab the plum positions for themselves. Henry VIII’s queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and Caro-line Matilda of Denmark, were victims, not of their own uncon-trollable sexual desires, but of the ambitions of vicious courtiers.

Oddly, the innocent Anne Boleyn was beheaded for adultery by her powerful enemies while the guilty Caroline of Brunswick was legally cleared by her powerful friends. At European courts, it was the political machinations—not the sex—that caused a royal woman’s downfall.

T h e E n v y o f S p l e n d o r

Royals, whether venerated or denigrated, are cut from the same bolt of human fabric as their subjects. Yet the grandeur of a palace serves to exaggerate the stories that take place inside its walls. Gilded magnificence lifts joy to greater heights; mocked by surrounding splendor, pain sinks to lower depths. Certainly, c o n c l u s i o n

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royal triumphs and sorrows are more visible than those of ordi-nary people. As Elizabeth I said, “We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in sight and view of all the world.”4

Some of those stages were scaffolds, the ultimate manifesta-tion of palace politics gone awry. “Good Christian people, I am come here not to preach a sermon but to die,” said Anne Boleyn on an unbearably sweet May morning. Six years later her cousin Catherine Howard, having practiced laying her neck on the block the night before, did so on the scaffold with admirable grace. And on the way to her execution, Marie Antoinette cried,

“It is to live that requires courage, not to die.”5

The tragic saga of nine hundred years of queenly adultery is punctuated here and there with comedy. Queen Juana of Spain, having endured artificial insemination with a golden turkey baster containing drops of her impotent husband’s sperm, un-locks the bedroom door for her handsome lover. Queen Maria Carolina of Naples pulls on her long white gloves to enthrall her husband and make him forget her lovers. Caroline of Brunswick jolts about Europe in a carriage with her lover Bartolomeo Pergami, sound asleep, their hands resting lovingly on each other’s private parts.

Whether a royal woman denied herself the pleasures of illicit love, or grasped them with outstretched arms, it is safe to say that most remained unhappy despite all the pomp and grandeur of their lives.

“The
éclat
and renown of great kings are like the machines at the opera,” wrote Elizabeth Charlotte in 1701. “Seen from afar, nothing is grander and more beautiful, but if one goes backstage and takes a close look at all the ropes and wooden slats that make the machines move, they are often most ungainly and ugly.”6

Looking around Versailles Palace in 1705, she wrote, “All of this is supposed to be fun, and yet one does not see anyone hav-ing fun and senses that there is more spite than pleasure.”7

Dying of uterine cancer in 1837, Hortense de Beauharnais, former queen of the Netherlands, looked back on her life of magnificence and misery. “I have done right whenever I could, 2 9 4

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

and I hope that God will be good to me,” she sighed. “They say He is good, and yet”—she paused, summing up the single great-est theological problem of all time with great simplicity—“He lets us suffer so.”8

Seated in her splendid Kensington Palace drawing room in 1992, Princess Diana reminisced about a day when she thought of fleeing the fame and luxury of her position. “I was quite ready to give all this up,” she said.9

Even the most powerful woman of her time, Elizabeth I of En-gland, told Parliament in 1601 after forty-three years as queen that “to wear a Crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it, than it is pleasant to them that bear it. . . . The cares and trouble of a Crown I cannot resemble more fitly than to . . . bitter pills gilded over, by which they are made more acceptable and less of-fensive, which indeed are bitter and unpleasant to take.”10

Of all royal women, perhaps Josephine Bonaparte best summed up the emptiness of splendor. The forty-four-year-old empress was divorced by Napoleon in 1809 for infertility and re-placed by an eighteen-year-old Austrian princess who gave him a healthy bouncing boy within a year.

At her estate of Malmaison outside Paris, the cast-off wife liked to bring out her astonishing collection of jewels for visiting ladies to admire. Her visitors gasped in wonder at the gems—fat lustrous baroque pearls, dazzling diamonds, exquisitely faceted rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. But Josephine insisted that jewels had little value “when you reflect how unhappy I have been, although with such a rare collection at my command. At the beginning of my extraordinary life I delighted in these tri-fles. . . . I grew by degrees so tired of them that I no longer wear any except when I am in some respects compelled to do so by my rank in the world. A thousand accidents may contribute to de-prive me of these brilliant though useless objects. Do I not pos-sess the pendants of Queen Marie Antoinette? And yet am I quite sure of retaining them?”

Looking at her sparkling gems, the empress sighed and said,

“Believe me, ladies, do not envy a splendor that does not consti-tute happiness.”11

c o n c l u s i o n

2 9 5

n o t e s

i n t r o d u c t i o n

1.

Andrews, p. 161.

6.

Given-Wilson and

2.

D’Auvergne, p. 224.

Curteis, p. 20.

3.

Troyat,
Peter,
p. 193.

7.

D’Auvergne, p. 87.

4.

Levin, p. 45.

8.

De Grazia, p. 140.

5.

Ibid.

9.

Acton, p. 656.

c h a p t e r o n e : l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s 1.

Maroger, p. 125.

14.

Ibid., p. 80.

2.

Alexander, p. 44.

15.

Acton, p. 134.

3.

Forster, p. 146.

16.

Ibid., pp. 144–145.

4.

Ibid., p. 167.

17.

Louisa of Tuscany,

5.

Ibid., p. 170.

pp. 73–74.

6.

Cohen and Major,

18.

Pakula, pp. 68–69.

p. 463.

19.

Bingham, vol. I, p. 325.

7.

Forster, p. 246.

20.

Farr, p. 56.

8.

Sutherland, p. 137.

21.

Ibid., p. 110.

9.

Rosenthal, p. 260.

22.

Ibid., p. 125.

10.

Pevitt, p. 16.

23.

Memoirs of the Courts of Sweden

11.

Baily, p. 242.

and Denmark,
vol. I, p. 321.

12.

Forster, p. xviii.

24.

Ibid., p. 85.

13.

Ibid., p. xxiii.

25.

Asprey, p. 87.

2 9 7

26.

Ibid., p. 95.

35.