Sex with the Queen (9 page)

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Louis XIV himself became involved and forbade the duc de Lor-raine to sit on a chair with arms, signaling a dignity equal to that of Monsieur, whose dignity as a son of France was incomparably greater. However, the duc de Lorraine refused to admit he was worthy of less dignity than that given him by the emperor. And so the visit was called off, and Elizabeth Charlotte did not see her daughter for nearly two decades.

Q u e e n l y F i n a n c e s

While commoners envied the luxuries of royal women, the fact was that many princesses had less spending money than a farmer’s wife. In 1666 King Alfonso VI of Portugal denied his French-born queen money for her household expenses and re-fused to give her the fifty thousand francs she had been promised as her wedding portion. Unable to pay her servants or buy her-self a new gown, Queen Maria Francisca was often seen sobbing loudly into a handkerchief.

In the 1840s the thrifty King Ludwig I of Bavaria made his wife, Queen Therese, wear threadbare dresses to the opera, the same opera where his greedy mistress, Lola Montez, arrived shining in a diamond tiara, necklace, brooch, earrings, bracelets, and rings—gifts from the king.

Despite her exalted position as the highest-ranking woman in France after the death of Louis XIV’s queen in 1683, Elizabeth Charlotte suffered for decades from her husband’s stinginess.

“All he has in his head are his young fellows,” she wrote, “with whom he wants to gorge and guzzle all night long, and he gives them huge sums of money; nothing is too much or too costly for these boys. Meanwhile, his children and I barely have what we need. Whenever I need shirts or sheets it means no end of beg-ging, yet at the same time he gives 10,000
talers
to La Carte [a lover] so that he can buy his linens in Flanders.”37

Not only did Monsieur refuse to give his wife spending money, he even raided her rooms and took the wedding gifts she had brought from Germany. “One day he came in,” Elizabeth Charlotte huffed in a letter to her aunt, “and, despite my urgent l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s 3 5

pleading, gathered up all the silver dishes from Heidelberg and some other silverware that decorated my room and looked quite pretty, had them melted down and pocketed all the money him-self; he did not even leave me one poor little box in which to put my kerchiefs.”38

In 1697, desperate for funds, she asked the king if the money she had brought as dowry from the Palatinate twenty-five years earlier was hers. The king replied “that, yes, it is, but that Mon-sieur is
maître de la communauté
, who as long as he lives can dispose of it as he sees fit and that there is nothing I can do about it. . . .

What annoys me most is that I see with my own eyes that my money is being spent so badly and on such despicable people.”39

S t a t e - o f - t h e - A r t H e a l t h C a r e While today’s wealthy can afford health care unimaginable to the poor and uninsured, in centuries past the exact opposite was true. State-of-the-art health care involved frequent bleeding, and the administration of pukes and purges—medicines result-ing in violent vomiting and diarrhea. Many patients were killed not by the original illness but by the expensive ministrations of a highly respected doctor. The poor, on the other hand, could not afford doctors. Rest, hot soup, and fresh air often revived them.

Anne of Austria, the mother of Louis XIV, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1665. Over the period of a year, with no painkillers and no antibiotics to prevent infection, her breast was removed one slice at a time with a knife and fork, as if it were a roast being carved. Perhaps it was a mercy when, after suffering untold agony, she finally died.

One day as a teenager, after suffering weeks from a decayed tooth, the future Catherine the Great agreed to have it pulled.

A “surgeon” came to her room armed with a pair of pliers and yanked out the offending tooth—and a chunk of jawbone as well.

Blood gushed all over her gown. The swelling and pain were so shocking that Catherine did not leave her room for a month, and even when the swelling went down, the dentist’s five fingers s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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were imprinted in blue and yellow bruises at the bottom of her cheek.

Elizabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, came from hearty German stock and hated the Versailles doctors. Whenever she heard that Louis XIV was sending doctors to attend her, she bolted the gilded doors to her room and refused to emerge until she was well. She believed the best antidote to illness was a vigor-ous two-hour walk in her gardens regardless of the weather, fol-lowed by a stout German beer and some spicy sausages.

“Here no child is safe,” she wrote a friend back in Germany in 1672, “for the doctors here have already helped five of the Queen’s to the other world; the last one died three weeks ago, and three of Monsieur’s, as he says himself, have been expedited in the same way.”40 In 1683 she accused palace doctors of killing the wife of the heir to the throne. The princess expired “through the ignorance of the doctors, who killed her as surely as if they had thrust a dagger into her heart.”41

When royal physicians succeeded in killing almost the entire French royal family in 1712 by bleeding them to death during a measles epidemic, the nurse of the youngest prince, the two-year-old Louis, hid with him in a closet for three days until the doctors stopped their search. By the time she emerged, all other heirs to the throne were dead, and the entire future of France rested on the slender shoulders of the future Louis XV.

Though the field of medicine made tremendous strides in the second half of the nineteenth century—germs had been discov-ered under a microscope, hygiene was greatly improved, and chloroform was used as an anesthetic—some royal women were not permitted to enjoy the benefits. When Marie of Romania was due to deliver her first child in 1894, her grandmother Queen Victoria sent an English physician with instructions to adminis-ter chloroform as the pain became intense.

The Romanian priests objected heatedly, citing the Bible’s statement that women must pay for Eve’s sin by bringing forth children in pain. Romanian doctors agreed. Forcing the priests and local doctors from the room, the British doctor adminis-tered the anesthetic, anyway, much to the relief of the pain-l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s 3 7

stricken princess. But for her second delivery a year later, the Romanian royal family and the attending doctors absolutely for-bade painkillers. Marie suffered horribly.

Perhaps Louis XIII best summed up royal health care in 1643

when the forty-one-year-old monarch lay dying of a stomach complaint. Those at his deathbed marveled at the king’s ad-mirable resignation to God’s will. The king’s calm acceptance of his fate, however, vanished the moment his chief physician walked in the room. Scowling at his doctor, Louis snapped, “I would have lived much longer if it had not been for you.”42

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T W O

t h e q u e e n t a k e s a l o v e r
Women are as roses, whose fair flower

Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.

— w i l l i a m s h a k e s p e a r e

I

B e f o r e w e e m b a r k o n o u r j o u r n e y t h r o u g h n i n e c e n -turies of queenly adultery, we must first understand that there were two kinds of queens—a ruling queen and a queen consort.

If she had power in her own right—as a hereditary queen or queen regent—some at court might grumble about her love af-fairs but there was no chance of beheading or divorce. Queen Is-abella II of Spain had numerous lovers, and her poor little consort Don Francisco was in no position to say a word. Peter the Great’s daughter Empress Elizabeth, who never officially mar-ried, had four lovers at once. The spinster Queen Elizabeth I of England had passionate flirtations with courtiers, and the wid-owed Queen Victoria fell in love with her groom. But no one at 3 9

these courts dared utter a word of reproach to the hereditary monarch.

Widowhood often bestowed great power on a formerly power-less queen consort. Having suffered thirty years of malice and neglect as the wife of Louis XIII of France, the widowed Anne of Austria ruled for her young son, Louis XIV, together with her politically brilliant lover Cardinal Mazarin. Catherine the Great of Russia—who hastened herself into an early widowhood by hav-ing her husband murdered—grabbed power in her own right and took as many lovers as she wanted without fear of reprisals.