Royal Babylon (24 page)

         

Quite the most sinister of all King George III's sons was Queen Victoria's father, the sadistic Edward Duke of Kent, who was, according to the court diarist Charles Greville, “the greatest rascal that ever went unhung.” Edward was the strongest and most physically imposing of George III's sons and made a career as a soldier, often boasting that he would outlive all his
brothers because he lived a tough army life while they were all wasted by debauchery. He may have been less dissipated than his brothers in some respects but he had other vices to compensate.

The Duke was a vicious bully who believed that the only way to lick a soldier into shape was to flog him into submission. The added bonus for the Duke was that he was sexually aroused by the sight of men being whipped, which unfortunately also made him wet his trousers. Consequently, he quickly made his mark as a brutal and tyrannical disciplinarian who would thrash his soldiers at the drop of a hat, and the number of floggings in the Duke's regiment went up roughly in line with his laundry bill.

The Duke was sent to Gibraltar as Colonel of the Royal Fusiliers. It was there that he first earned his nickname, “the Beast,” and his reputation as the most hated man in the British army. From 5
A
.
M
. every day he thrashed, marched and drilled his men into the ground. The slightest mistake by any of his soldiers would turn the Duke into a seething psychopath. Naturally, the floggings multiplied. When news filtered back to England that the Gibraltar garrison was at the point of mutiny, the darkly disturbed Duke was quietly removed and sent to Canada.

Unfortunately he had learned nothing from his mistakes at Gibraltar and viewed his new posting as a fresh opportunity to inflict even more unnecessary cruelty. Once again he drove his troops to the very brink of mutiny with a regime of outrageous punishments. In Canada he also renewed his acquaintance with a French-Canadian prostitute, Madame Julie de St. Laurent. She had originally been procured to provide sexual services for
him in Gibraltar in 1790. The Duke's relationship with his “French Lady,” as she became known to the family, developed into something deeper than a business relationship as they stayed together for the best part of thirty years.

In 1802 the Duke was bizarrely returned to Gibraltar, this time as Governor-General. On the barren rock there was little for his dispirited Royal Fusiliers to do except drink, so it was only a matter of time before the Flogging Duke banned alcohol. To any sane man, the danger of mutiny would have been obvious. One day, one of the frequent desertions from the Duke's garrison resulted in a soldier being caught. The Duke sentenced him to the maximum number of lashings the army rule book would allow—one short of a thousand. This time the troops mutinied. Many men lost their lives; many more were seriously wounded. Three ringleaders were executed; others were flogged. The Duke was quickly recalled to England, lucky to have escaped with his life.

Madame St. Laurent was distressed to read an article in the
Morning Chronicle
about her boyfriend's duty to marry and provide an heir, as the rest of the British royal family were having some difficulty in doing so. The Duke was perfectly content with his existing arrangement, but a wife within the terms of the Royal Marriages Act and the consequently increased share of the Civil List was a career move he was unable to resist. Madame St. Laurent was pensioned off with a lump-sum settlement.

The Duke of Kent had nearly as much trouble finding a bride as William IV. Eventually, a short list of two prospective brides was drawn up, from which Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, the thirty-one-year-old widow of the Prince of
Leiningen-Dachsburg-Hardenburg, was selected. They lived at Leiningen for the sake of economy, but the Duke borrowed
£
5,000 to bring his wife home so that their baby could be born in England. She gave birth to a daughter, and they named her Victoria.

The Tragic History of the Fairy-tale Monarchy

         

         

THE PRIVATE WITTELSBACH
family archives in Munich contain over forty leather-bound volumes detailing the full medical history of Otto I, King of Bavaria from 1886 to 1913. Although Otto spent his entire reign locked up in Castle Fürstenried guarded by a few medical attendants, he remains one of the unsung heroes in the pantheon of royal mental instability. King Otto was as mad as the next monarch, and had the documentation to prove it. Unfortunately, in this case the next monarch happened to be his brother Ludwig. The uncelebrated Otto was at least as crazy as Ludwig and probably a great deal crazier, but, while his big brother was busy altering the Bavarian skyline and organizing pan-European bank robberies, Otto's illness manifested itself in the relatively anonymous pursuits of barking like a dog, pulling faces, shouting abuse and occasionally taking potshots at people with a rifle through his bedroom window.

The history of Bavaria's monarchy is the story of the Wittelsbachs, Europe's most dysfunctional royal family. Their unbroken rule of Bavaria, which spanned more than 700 years from 1140 to 1918, despite mental instability spanning forty generations, gave them blood ties with almost every other royal family in Europe, including Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Spain, France, Austria, Prussia and Portugal. Three of them became kings of Sweden. They were related to the British royal family via King George I's mother. In the late nineteenth century, the Bavarian Wittelsbachs also inherited the Jacobite claim to the throne of England.

Every now and then the confluence of Wittelsbach blood with that of one of Europe's other mentally unstable ruling families had infamous and unfortunate consequences. One of the most dramatic examples of this occurred in eighteenth-century Spain with the accession of the oversexed madman King Philip V: part Wittelsbach, part Bourbon. It was in the nineteenth century, however, that Wittelsbach family eccentricity most strikingly tripped over the borderline into insanity. The history of the Wittelsbachs during this period is shot through with madness and violent death. At least twenty members of the Bavarian royal family and their collateral branches were insane.

         

The first Wittelsbach to assume the title King of Bavaria was Ludwig II's great-grandfather Maximilian I. He lived a drab and uneventful life by Wittelsbach standards, unlike his eldest son, Ludwig I. Maximilian's heir was thirty-nine years old and already eccentric when he came to the throne, a stone-deaf, shabby, parsimonious little man, generally considered by his subjects to be a
harmless lunatic. He was often seen wandering the streets of Munich late at night with his highly idiosyncratic zigzagging walk, wearing tatty threadbare clothes, carrying a battered umbrella—which was considered a great novelty at the time. Most of Bavaria's historically significant buildings owe their existence to the generosity, the religious devotion or the insanity of a Wittelsbach. Ludwig I built extensively and was responsible for Munich's Feldherrnhalle, the Alte Pinakothek and the Ludwigsbrücke.

One of Ludwig's eccentricities was his lifelong hobby of composing outstandingly bad poetry. His muse compelled him to put every experience he ever had, no matter how trivial or mundane, down in rhyme. Once when the King was badly gored by a bull in Italy, he sat down and recorded the event in rhyming couplets. The string of actresses he bedded throughout his reign were all to discover that the only gifts the tightfisted old King was likely to lavish on them were reams of execrable poetry.

His wife, Queen Theresa, was by repute outstandingly attractive. The King was a lover of great beauty, especially when it occurred in women other than his wife. He commissioned a series of thirty-six portraits of beautiful women and used them to decorate the walls of his palace at Nymphenburg. The subjects of his Schönheits Galerie were not famous or aristocratic: they were just women he fancied, irrespective of class, from countesses to laundry women, from actresses to chambermaids, even women he had passed on the street.

After years of dedicated marital infidelity, the odd but otherwise unremarkable King suddenly achieved notoriety by making a fool of himself over an Irish dancer young enough to be his granddaughter. Ludwig was sixty-one years old when he met Lola Montez. She was twenty-eight, a dazzling raven-haired femme fatale with an assumed name, an invented
background (she claimed she was twenty-two and born to Spanish nobility) and a string of famous lovers behind her, including Franz Liszt. It was said that Lola introduced herself to the old King one day by ripping open her bodice and revealing her breasts. The story is probably apocryphal, but her general effect on the aging King's libido was nonetheless seismic.

Ms. Montez was acknowledged as one of the most beautiful women in Europe. Her elderly lover on the other hand had few teeth, less hair, and a disproportionately large head which drew attention to a huge cyst in the middle of his forehead. Ludwig pledged his undying love to Lola in long poems and fatally started to seek her opinion on important matters of state. Since Ludwig had never bothered to hide his personal indiscretions, his subjects soon got to know of the affair. At any other time the press would have turned a blind eye to his obsession with the nubile Lola, but this was 1848, the year of European revolution. The King's mistress became a convenient focus of unrest. The press called her “the Apocalyptic Whore.”

King Ludwig was subsequently forced by pressure from the mob and his ministers to banish her from the country; some suggested she went willingly to escape another burst of the King's poetry. Soon afterward, Ludwig was driven to declare his abdication in favor of his son Maximilian. Ludwig never met his Lola again, but continued to harass her with his love poems by mail. He outlived her and died in 1868 aged eighty-two.

         

Ludwig's eldest son, King Maximilian II, and his daughter-in-law Queen Marie were first cousins—an unwise arrangement,
as there were many known cases of mental instability on both sides of the family. Maximilian built extensively and brought many prominent scientists and artists to Munich. He also suffered from severe headaches, flogged his children and kept them so hungry that they sometimes had to beg food from the servants. Otherwise he was in a lot better shape than his sister Princess Alexandra, who had become the star turn at Wittelsbach family reunions thanks to her sincere and unwaverable conviction that she had accidentally swallowed a grand piano made of glass. Another of her idiosyncrasies was her desire to wear white at all times, which was perhaps just as well, for poor Aunt Alexandra was to spend a large part of her confused life in a straitjacket.

Ludwig II's Prussian mother, Marie, was seventeen when she married. When it later became apparent that both of her sons were insane, the Wittelsbach family closed ranks, looked around for someone else to blame, and pointed the finger at Marie, alleging that she had brought a streak of Prussian madness into the family. Her cousin Frederick William IV had recently died insane, the latest example of insanity in the Hohenzollern bloodline. One of her ancestors, the Landgrave Ludwig IX of Hesse-Darmstadt, was also mad, and both he and his daughter Karoline experienced hallucinations. The Landgrave and his unfortunate daughter were also noted for their peculiar nocturnal lifestyles. It was of course a fairly outrageous accusation: compared to the Wittelsbachs, Marie's side of the family was almost boringly conventional.

Queen Marie had good reason to be concerned for her two young sons, Ludwig and Otto. She was aware of the family history of madness and inbreeding, which she had recently and carelessly contributed to, and if she ever forgot about it there
was always her sister-in-law Alexandra to remind her. She grew more concerned when Ludwig took to dressing up as a nun. When Ludwig was fourteen years old he complained of strange voices in his head. The court doctor reassured the Queen that he would grow out of it. When he was sixteen, Ludwig was allowed to see a performance of Wagner's
Lohengrin
. His tutor noted that Ludwig was so moved by the experience that he almost became hysterical: a portent of things to come. He was a sensitive and highly strung child, but there were no other obvious signs of peculiarity, although it was thought prudent at one stage to deprive young Ludwig of the company of his pet tortoise, with the enigmatic explanation that the boy was becoming rather too fond of it.

Of all Europe's insane monarchs few have ever achieved the sobriquet “mad.” One of the best known was the unhinged Spanish Queen Juana la Loca (“the Mad”), who had a complete mental breakdown when her faithless and mostly absent husband died. She made up for lost time by insisting on keeping his embalmed body by her side, even at the dining table and in bed at night—a trial for those around her at the best of times, and especially during the summer. But the most famous of all was King Ludwig II.

The mythical Ludwig has become something of a cult. To some he was an innocent romantic, a misunderstood creative genius who suddenly discovered himself with untold wealth and power but little sense of responsibility to go with it—a nineteenth-century rock star, a royal Keith Moon. To others Ludwig was God's gift to tourism—he is now marketed as a benevolent latter-day Walt Disney. A recent German Tourist Board promotional campaign is typical: “Once upon a time in a faraway land there lived a king called Ludwig, whose dearest
wish was to make all his subjects happy, so he built them fairy-tale castles.”

These fanciful interpretations of Ludwig are far from accurate. The collection of architectural follies that over a million people a year pay to visit are monuments to schizophrenia, the work of a man whose mental decay was accelerated by a softening of the brain caused by cerebral syphilis. As for his wish to make people happy, Ludwig had no time for people at all, especially his Bavarian subjects. During the last eleven years of his reign he didn't make a single public appearance. He was a miserably self-obsessed misanthrope who despised his countrymen, a king who confessed that he couldn't even bear sleeping in air contaminated by commoners.

In 1864 Maximilian II died and Bavaria found itself with a new king, barely eighteen years old. At first everyone was fascinated by the young monarch. His ministers thought him bright, although immature. His Minister of Justice, Eduard von Bomhard, was the first to hint that the young King might have a screw loose when he noted that Ludwig was “mentally gifted in the highest degree, but the contents of his mind are stored in a totally disordered fashion.”

Ludwig's appearance was best described as theatrical. He was self-conscious about his looks to the point of narcissism. He wore a stylised goatee beard and his hair long. His headful of carefully arranged brown curls was attended to daily and at great length by his court barber: without this regular coiffure, the King claimed, he couldn't eat. He was very tall, and moved slowly with a mannered, sweeping gait. As he walked he jerked his knees very high, then stamped his feet down on the ground. When he visited Versailles, Ludwig attracted a crowd of French
youths who followed him down the street imitating his walk, and were promptly arrested. This slightly surreal general appearance was enhanced by the huge fur coat that Ludwig always wore outdoors, even in summer.

In the early days Ludwig was hugely popular with his people, especially his female subjects. His immaculate grooming and flamboyant style earned him the nickname “King Charming.” Women adored him, wrote him sonnets, sent him flowers, and swooned as he swept past in his coach. He was curiously unmoved by these displays of affection, because for one thing he was far too self-obsessed to even notice, and for another he was homosexual.

Ludwig suppressed his sexuality for most of his life. It was not until he was in his late thirties that he began openly sleeping with his male servants. He embarked on a long-lasting affair with one Alfonso Wecker, who was to eventually betray Ludwig by giving evidence to a commission investigating the King's sanity. Wecker also testified that Ludwig liked to watch young soldiers being whipped. The King also had a long and intimate relationship with Prince Paul von Thurn und Taxis, which ended when the latter married a commoner. Another of the King's lovers, a twenty-six-year-old equerry named Richard Hornig, eventually married as well.