Royal Babylon (27 page)

For twenty-seven years after Ludwig's death, Otto reigned in name only from his cell in Castle Fürstenried, while his uncle Luitpold took charge of Bavaria as Prinzregent. Prinzregent Luitpold interfered little in the day-to-day running of the kingdom, leaving state affairs in the hands of his ministers, and during this period Bavaria enjoyed unprecedented growth and stability. A discreet veil of silence was thrown over the mad King. He was indulged with a mock court comprising guards, doctors and jailers who always addressed him as “Your Majesty.” Otto spent his days growing enormously fat and playing with his toys. It was said that the King's screams could occasionally be heard outside the castle. Three years after he ceased to be King, Otto died aged sixty-eight.

         

King Ludwig III, Luitpold's son, was already elderly and in poor health when he came to the throne in 1913, and was the last Bavarian monarch. After World War I, Bavaria was declared a workers' republic. The royal family fled Munich on the advice of the new government, which could not guarantee their safety. After 783 years in power, the rule of the Wittelsbach family in Bavaria was at an end.

Royal titles still exist in Germany, although they no longer carry any legal status. In 1945, monarchist sympathizers formed a movement to put Rupprecht, King Ludwig III's son, on to
the throne, but nothing came of it. Rupprecht died in 1955, and the Wittelsbach claim now resides with his grandson Franz. The Wittelsbach family still counts approximately fifty members, among them Kaltenbach brewery owner Prince Luitpold von Bayern.

The Rise of the House of Saxe-Coburg

         

         

ONE DAY, WHILE
Queen Victoria was boring a minor Prussian royal on the subject of marriage, she advised that it was not wise to dig too deeply into the royal families of Europe because one would discover many “black spots.” In her case it would have revealed more of a black hole.

While the obvious points have often been made about the disastrous effects of the decadent Hanoverian heritage on the genetic makeup of the British royal family, a fact often overlooked is that Queen Victoria and her descendants were equally the products of an even more extraordinarily debauched German family, the Saxe-Coburgs. They were an obscure clan of Saxon princelings who ruled over a poor and insignificant German principality, one of thirty-nine similar domains which existed in northern Europe in the eighteenth century, but in their relentless and occasionally comical crusade to aggrandize
their family name they hawked their sons and daughters, nieces and nephews around the courts of Europe with all the subtlety of time-share salesmen. They became, in effect, Europe's first professional dating agency for monarchs.

By the time of King Edward VII's accession in 1901, four European thrones were occupied by the male descendants of the House of Saxe-Coburg, a statistic that caused Germany's Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to sneer that they were “the stud farm of Europe.” If the Saxe-Coburgs were nothing more than royal breeding stock, they at least injected a bit of German industry and strength of character into the veins of the main ruling houses, who had shown themselves to be good only at churning out a procession of fat libertines. Unfortunately the Coburg DNA also carried a few less welcome traits.

         

The Saxe-Coburg lust for glory began with the Duchess Augusta, grandmother of Queen Victoria and her husband, Albert the Prince Consort. The old Duchess was insanely ambitious for her three sons and four daughters and she spent a lifetime scheming how to get them married into the biggest and best courts in Europe. The eldest of Augusta's sons, Duke Ernest, was the father of Prince Albert.

The Duke had a violent temper and an extraordinary lifestyle. “There are few deviations from morality or convention,” wrote his biographer Giles St. Aubyn, “that he had not pioneered.” Ernest spent much of his youth randomly seducing mistresses by the dozen, siring bastards both at home and
abroad. His sister Juliane had married into the Russian royal family, and the Duke found a firm friend in his new brother-in-law, the sinister and brutal Grand Duke Constantine, a grandson of Catherine the Great. It was said that the Dukes Ernest and Constantine amused themselves by kicking hussars to death and firing live rats from cannons in the Marble Palace.

He was a huge embarrassment to his elderly mother, who eventually persuaded him to settle down and produce a legitimate son, if only to prevent Saxe-Coburg from passing to the heirs of his younger married brothers. Duke Ernest was subsequently wed to his pretty sixteen-year-old cousin Louise, daughter of Duke Augustus of Saxe-Coburg-Altenburg, and she gave him two sons, Ernest Junior and Albert.

Neither married life nor fatherhood dulled the Duke's rapacious appetites, and within two years of Albert's birth he had returned to the regular company of prostitutes. His wife, a vivacious but very lonely young woman, was discovered having an affair with an army officer. Ernest cited his wife's adultery as grounds for a divorce, and in 1824 Louise was banished from court, leaving four-year-old Albert without a mother. Seven years later she died of cancer, aged thirty-one. In 1832 Ernest was married again, this time to his own niece, Mary.

Duke Ernest's burgeoning reputation throughout Europe as an unscrupulous rake reached a hiatus when one of his earlier affairs returned to haunt him. In Paris the Duke had seduced a sixteen-year-old French girl, Pauline Panam. He smuggled her into Coburg dressed as a boy and kept her hidden in a safe house where he could meet her when the fancy took him. Within a year she was pregnant with his child, another Ernest Junior. When the Duke grew tired of his Lolita, both she and his child were discarded.

But the Duke had not heard the last of Miss Panam. Inconveniently, she became a successful actress, known in Paris as “La Belle Grecque.” Her fame enabled her to travel extensively and soon she found herself on first-name terms with some of the most powerful men in Europe. Wherever she went she made sure that everyone heard about her terrible treatment at the hands of the vile Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and she would point to his bastard, poor little Ernest Junior, who was naturally always in tow. Her story attracted a considerable amount of sympathy.

Duke Ernest decided to silence his ex-mistress. His first plan was to kidnap his illegitimate son and threaten Pauline Panam that she would never see the boy again unless she joined a convent and remained quiet about her past. When this plot failed he tried to arrange for their deaths in a fake coach accident, but both mother and son survived.

The old Duke of Saxe-Coburg continued to be a major source of embarrassment long after his son married Queen Victoria. He stayed on in London after Prince Albert's wedding in 1840 and scandalized the royal household by attempting to seduce most of Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting. The old Duke Ernest was not the only unwanted guest at the British royal wedding. Prince Albert's degenerate older brother, Ernest, also stayed on for about three months after the event, and fell seriously ill with venereal disease while he was under the Queen's roof.

The Prince Consort's brother, Ernest, very nearly became Queen Victoria's husband, for it was he, rather than Albert, who was the original marriage candidate proposed by their father. A senior Anglican churchman who met Ernest said later that the only thing that could ever increase his liking for Albert
was the thought of what would have happened to England if Victoria had married Ernest. The “clown from Coburg,” as Albert's brother came to be known, was a profoundly ugly man with a large underbite and bloodshot eyes, which gave him the appearance of a bulldog with a hangover. In time, Albert's brother revealed himself to have an even greater talent for profligacy than his father. Ernest progressed from molesting his servant girls to an adulthood given over more or less entirely to indiscriminate adultery and lavish spending on his droves of mistresses. No woman was safe from his advances. Married diplomats were advised to leave young or pretty wives at home if they had to visit his court.

In 1842 Ernest was married to Princess Alexandrine of Baden, a once pretty woman who in later years sported a gray beard. Although Ernest infected her with his syphilis and generally treated her ungallantly, she remained strangely loyal to her husband, always referring to him as her “dearly beloved, good Ernest.” When he died in 1893, Alexandrine even gave financial support to his most recent mistress. Even more magnanimous was her instruction that the little park villa that her late husband had openly used as a love nest to seduce a long line of girlfriends should become a shrine and be left exactly as it was, on the grounds that Ernest had spent some of his happiest hours there.

         

Prince Albert and his brother had an uncle Leopold, the youngest of Duchess Augusta's three sons. He had been briefly married to Princess Charlotte, the only legitimate heir of
George IV, but had seen his chance of sitting on the British throne as Prince Consort vanish when his young bride died in childbirth. Before his marriage to Charlotte he had been virtually penniless. When he arrived in London for the victory celebrations after Waterloo he stayed in rented lodgings over a butcher's shop in Marylebone High Street. At his wedding at Carlton House, when Leopold promised to endow his bride with all his worldly goods, Princess Charlotte burst out laughing. Parliament voted him a share in a joint income of
£
60,000, and a pension of
£
50,000 a year if he outlived the Princess. After her funeral Leopold returned to Germany wifeless, but with his pockets lined by the British taxpayers and his appetite for the good life whetted by his brief membership of the British royal family.

Leopold was by far the most nakedly ambitious of the Duchess Augusta's sons. With a Saxe-Coburg single-mindedness, he determined to regain royal status for himself and his family. In order to do that he needed to acquire a throne, and he didn't particularly care where it came from. In early-nineteenth-century Europe, this was by no means an unrealistic ambition for a young duke to have. The new map of Europe, redrawn in the aftermath of the Napoleonic and Balkan Wars, had created many opportunities for minor royals with the right political connections. When the throne of Greece became vacant, Leopold was the first to send in his C.V. On this occasion, however, his application failed. He had better luck when the Great Powers met in London in 1830 to consider the future of the newly unified Belgium. They were turned down by Louis Philippe's son the Duc de Nemours, but found in Leopold a willing second choice. As the new and ostentatiously styled King of the Belgians, Leopold found himself in an excellent
position from which to build an empire for the House of Saxe-Coburg.

Leopold was a little man who wore a feather boa and three-inch heels. His androgynous appearance belied the fact that he was a compulsive womanizer. In 1832 he married for the second time, to Louise, a daughter of France's Louis Philippe. His new wife, although very young, suffered frequently from poor health, and found that she was unable to satisfy her oversexed husband or keep him remotely faithful. When Leopold took to openly sleeping with her ladies-in-waiting, she chose to overlook his behavior with some relief. Her husband had also somehow managed to convince her that by taking lovers he was doing her a big favor.

The King continued to sate his appetites wherever, and whenever, he could, and there was never any shortage of Belgian mistresses willing to accommodate him. His most enduring affair was with the young Arcadie Claret de Viescourt, who liked to flaunt her position in public, even when it meant having her coach pelted with rotten vegetables on the streets of Brussels. The King maneuvered her into his palace by arranging for her to be married to one of his stewards, and she took the title Madame Meyer von Eppinghoven. The steward was then persuaded to make himself scarce. Arcadie gave Leopold two sons. Although he was infamously parsimonious (according to one mistress, Karoline Bauer, the King went to bed with two little clamps between his back teeth to prevent wear on the enamel while he slept), he always made generous provision for his bastards: illegitimate daughters were taken care of by arranged marriages, and sons received diplomatic postings or army commissions.

In his youth, Leopold was regarded as both handsome and
virile, but he aged prematurely. His physical decline accelerated at an alarming rate as he took on a cadaverous appearance, but he refused to grow old gracefully: he painted his sunken cheeks with rouge, penciled in his eyebrows and hid his bald head under a jet-black wig. Leopold spent the last couple of years in agony with a bladder stone. The pain was so severe that he had to sleep upright, wedged between two horsehair mattresses. But to the bitter end he continued to surround himself with his small harem of mistresses. The stone was finally crushed by the celebrated urologist to the crowned heads of Europe, Sir Henry Thompson, but Leopold was soon dead, in the thirty-fourth year of his reign, aged seventy-five.

Leopold is generally regarded as the midwife of the modern British monarchy, for as uncle to both Prince Albert and Queen Victoria he was the matchmaker and architect of their wedding. Although Leopold had seen his own chance of becoming Prince Consort cruelly snatched away from him by the death of his first wife, he had never given up on the idea of installing a close male relative on the British throne. His favorite nephew, Albert, was effectively groomed to succeed where he had failed. Leopold and his mentor, Baron Stockmar, headhunted Victoria as a future bride for Albert with almost military precision.