Royal Babylon (9 page)

Ferdinand insisted on having a crowd around to keep him amused while he labored on the toilet. The Emperor Joseph related: “We made conversation for more than an hour, and I believe we would still be there if a terrible stench had not convinced us that all was over.” Joseph then declined an offer to view the fruits of Ferdinand's labors. The King's wife, Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette, ruled the kingdom in everything but name until she herself went mad on hearing of her sister's bloody death at the hands of the French revolutionaries.

The disastrous and tyrannical King of Spain Ferdinand VII was known for his sadism and his religious bigotry. In a royal family renowned for their congenital ugliness, Ferdinand was known to be outstandingly hideous. He was married four times, twice to his own nieces. Three of his wives died young, two of them in highly suspicious circumstances. His first wife, his consumptive niece Antonia, died aged twenty-two and was rumored to have been murdered by her mother-in-law. The second wife, Isabel, died in childbirth aged twenty. His third wife, Maria Josepha, was a religious fanatic who never put down her rosary beads for long enough to procreate, and also died suspiciously, aged twenty-six. During her lying in state, her face quickly turned black, hinting strongly at the possibility of arsenic poisoning.

The King's first three wives had all failed to produce a male heir. By the time Ferdinand was in his forties and was ready to marry for the fourth time, he was already an old man, crippled with gout, massively obese and prone to fits. His fourth wife
was another niece half his age, the precocious Maria Christina, daughter of King Francis I of Naples. The Neopolitan prisons, it was said, were full of young men who had dared flirt with the young Princess. The marriage did not produce the required male heir, but two daughters. When Ferdinand VII died, Maria Christina took to throwing extremely lavish court balls, but always invoiced her guests for the food and drink they consumed.

Ferdinand VII had announced that his daughter Isabel should become Queen after he died, a decision which plunged Spain into seven years of bloody civil war. There was some confusion as to whether or not a female was allowed to succeed to the Spanish throne. The first Bourbon king of Spain, Philip V, had introduced Salic Law, which prevented women from succeeding. When his son became King he reversed this law, but for one reason or another didn't bother to make it public. Queen Isabel was later married to both her first cousin and her nephew on the same day—not difficult for a Bourbon because they happened to be one and the same person, the homosexual Duke Francis of Cadiz. Their son King Alphonso XII later compounded the inbreeding problem by marrying his first cousin Maria.

         

The English traveler and diarist William Beckford arrived at the Portuguese court in 1794, just as the Queen was having one of her turns: Beckford reported “the most horrible, the most agonizing shrieks .  .  . inflicting upon me a sensation of horror such as I never felt before.”

Through generations of intermarrying, the Portuguese royal family had become one of the most dangerously inbred in Europe. The situation took a considerable turn for the worse in 1760 when King Joseph decided to have his daughter and heir to the throne, Maria, incestuously married to her half-wit uncle Pedro. The flawed logic behind this peculiar arrangement was that the Portuguese crown would be kept securely in the family. One of the more obvious results was that the House of Braganza became even further corrupted by inbreeding.

In 1777, the old King Joseph died and Portugal found itself ruled by young Queen Maria, already displaying signs of incipient insanity, and her feeble-minded husband, King Pedro III. In 1786 Pedro died and, thanks to the complicated domestic arrangement ordained by the late King, Maria found herself in the unusual position of mourning the double loss of a husband and an uncle who shared the same coffin.

Two years later, a smallpox epidemic carried away several people who were close to Queen Maria—her confessor and a few of her immediate family, including her son José. The latter loss could have been avoided if only she hadn't forbidden her son to be inoculated. It was generally believed that the combined shock of these deaths tipped her mind completely over the edge. Queen Maria took to wearing children's clothes and became violently unstable.

The Braganza family felt it necessary to send to London for a specialist in the treatment of insanity, and the “expert” they chose was the Reverend Francis Willis, fresh from his inept but apparently successful treatment of George III. Willis demanded and received a consultancy fee of
£
10,000. Needless to say, none of his advice worked. The Portuguese people were kept in ignorance about the Queen's condition, and in 1807 she was
quietly smuggled off to Brazil so that her subjects wouldn't discover that insanity had once again struck their royal family.

When Maria died she was succeeded by her second son, King John VI. He was a very ugly, fat little man, and a martyr to his piles, while everyone else within spitting distance was a martyr to his abysmal table manners. The new King's heredity was heavily stacked against him from the start, and the Portuguese court held its breath, fearing that the new King might also be mad. As the fruit of an incestuous relationship between his mad mother and a half-wit father, who also happened to be his grandfather's brother, he was entitled to be confused, but King John took it all in his stride. When someone dared suggest to him that he was a little strange, the King shrugged—“How can I help it? I have Braganza blood in my veins. I take after my ancestors.”

His wife was the ugly Charlotte, a daughter of the Spanish court. She demonstrated the touching bond which had grown between them by attempting on several occasions to have her husband declared mad and locked up. Unfortunately for Queen Charlotte, although King John VI was weak and inept he wasn't, strictly speaking, certifiably insane. He was, however, prone to frequent mental breakdowns, which he tried to pass off as a “fear of horses.” Although his mental processes were always suspect, conclusive proof that the King wasn't clinically insane came in 1808, when he displayed a keen sense of self-preservation and fled to Brazil on a Portuguese man o' war at the first hint of trouble from Napoleon's armies.

The Secret of Royal Adultery

         

         

IN MOST EUROPEAN
courts, charades always came a poor second to adultery. Frederick, an eighteenth-century hereditary prince of Baden-Durlach, had around 160
Gartenmagdlein
(“Garden Girls”) for his pleasure. They were dressed in hussar uniforms and, when they made a mistake during their exercises, the Duke liked to punish them personally. Just over a hundred years ago, the Victorian constitutional expert and royal apologist Walter Bagehot argued that it was unreasonable of us to expect royalty to behave otherwise: “It is not rational to expect the best virtue where temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of human life.”

         

When King Augustus II of Poland lay on his deathbed in 1733, his last words were “My whole life has been an unceasing sin—God have mercy on me.” From anyone else this could be considered a touch melodramatic, but not from the behemoth of royal adulterers. The king of whom it was said he “left no stern unturned” was known to his subjects as Augustus “the Strong” for his exceptional physical size and strength, his gluttony, his drinking prowess and his lechery, but most of all for his astonishing virility. Over a period of half a century he fathered 365 bastards, give or take a dozen. It is probably only fair to record that there was also one legitimate heir.

Augustus presided over an enormous warren of concubines. Some enjoyed official status; others he preferred to keep quiet about—his own daughter, the Countess Orzelska, for example. One of his favorites was the Swedish Countess Aurora of Königsmark; another was Fatima, a captured Turkish slave girl. Some of his more ambitious mistresses negotiated legal contracts and annual salaries for themselves: one earned herself a large palace in Dresden.

Karl Ludwig von Pollnitz's book,
The Amorous Adventures of Augustus the Strong
, records that the most unusual of all his many conquests was his liaison with the jilted mistress of the British ambassador to Saxony. What made this affair so remarkable was that she was the only woman the King failed to impregnate in half a century of indiscriminate sexual congress.

Although Augustus the Strong's libido was one of the great marvels of the age, it didn't go down well with his Polish subjects, who were outraged by his private life, nor with his wife,
Eberdine, daughter of a German margrave. She was so disgusted and embarrassed by his flagrant infidelities that she refused to set foot in Poland throughout her husband's reign. He was also a fairly disastrous king because, unlike his spermatozoa, his political ventures rarely produced a result.

Try as he might, Augustus found it impossible to keep track of his bastards. Some argued that the King didn't try quite hard enough—if you were going to give him the benefit of the doubt you'd have to say that his incestuous relationships with at least one of his daughters was down to sloppy bookkeeping rather than deliberate bad taste. Augustus the Strong's progeny went on to populate most of Europe and some of them became famous in their own right, including Maurice de Saxe and his daughter George Sand.

         

The Hanoverian kings sired a whole string of bastards, although no one came near to equaling the personal record set by Charles II, who fathered about twenty illegitimate children, of whom fourteen were acknowledged by him. George IV accepted paternity of only three illegitimate sons throughout his life. He was also widely credited with, but refused to acknowledge the existence of, a daughter by a boardinghouse keeper from Weymouth, Mrs. Mary Lewis. It was only because of his terrible state of health that there weren't many more—after years of alcoholic and gluttonous excess he had become a grossly flatulent wreck and was rendered prematurely impotent. In ten years, William IV fathered ten illegitimate children, five sons and five daughters, by an Irish actress, plus a child by
another woman, identity not known. His greedy and ungrateful bastards, known as the little Fitzclarences, dogged him to the end of his days.

The last reigning British monarch to acknowledge a bastard was Queen Elizabeth II's great-grandfather Edward VII, but it was widely rumored that the Queen's uncle, Edward VIII, fathered at least one illegitimate son by the wife of one of his best friends. The child in later years openly boasted of his uncanny physical resemblance to the then Duke of Windsor. Given the amount of recreational sex still indulged in by the male line of the British royal family, the fact that there haven't been any more recent cases of royal illegitimacy says more about the effectiveness of modern birth control than anything else.

         

Southern European monarchs in particular found it difficult to reconcile their sex lives with their religious beliefs. The mad Spanish King Philip IV fathered about thirty bastards, but being a good Catholic always felt bad about it. Spain's King Philip V made astonishing demands on his wife by insisting that she sleep with him three times a day for the whole of their marriage, but always atoned for his abnormal sexual urges by yelling for his confessor every time he'd had sex in case he died suddenly in eternal damnation. France's King Louis XV didn't see any conflict between his debauchery and his sincere religious convictions. Before he penetrated his adolescent whores in his exclusive brothel, the Parc du Cerfs, the King would demand that they kneel and pray beside him. Louis would pray silently that this time he wouldn't be visited with the dreaded syphilis.

King John V, Portugal's self-styled “Most Faithful King,” was anything but. He considered himself an extremely pious man and his lifelong passion for the Catholic Church led him to lavish ruinous amounts of money on religious establishments. Portugal should have become rich from the discovery of Brazilian gold in the eighteenth century. Instead the people got poorer and poorer while the King squandered his country's wealth on fantastic follies, most of them religious: the chapel of St. Roque, for example, was built then taken to pieces and reassembled in Lisbon. When he wasn't building solid-gold coaches, he was perpetually endowing monasteries; eventually Portugal had about eight thousand of them. By the time of his death in 1750, one in every ten Portuguese was either a monk or a nun.

John V found a unique way of combining his two greatest, but on the face of it mutually exclusive, interests—namely prayer and sex—by copulating with nuns. The King had long-standing and quite open sexual relationships with nuns of Odivelas Convent, an arrangement that was widely known and talked about. His charity work in the nunnery resulted in the birth of three illegitimate sons, known as “the children of Palhava” after the palace in Lisbon where they grew up: Antonio, born in 1714 to a French nun; Gaspar, born in 1716, who became an archbishop; and José, born in 1720, who went on to become Grand Inquisitor.

         

More often than not, the Bourbon name was synonymous with debauchery. Nearly all of the great Bourbon monarchs were
known for their extraordinary appetites. The greatest of them all, the Sun King, Louis XIV, was only five feet and four inches tall, but his libido was twelve feet tall in its stockinged feet. He strutted around clutching his golden snuff box, devouring food and women like a latter-day Elvis Presley. He employed every artificial aid in the known world to make him look taller, including six-inch red high heels and a twelve-inch-high, full-bottomed periwig, either of which could have accounted for his extraordinary gait: maintaining his balance, let alone his dignity, was a daily trial.

Apart from near the very end of his life, when the promise of death suddenly made him very God-fearing, Louis XIV was utterly promiscuous and very easily pleased. If one of his four official mistresses wasn't available he would seduce any female within easy reach. If a mistress kept him waiting he would molest her ladies-in-waiting. Pretty chambermaids strayed too near to the tiny King at their peril because he was likely to launch himself at them without warning.

During his wife's first pregnancy he took a fancy to her seventeen-year-old lady-in-waiting, the blond, club-footed Madame de Soubisse. The affair lasted for several years: the King didn't completely go off her until her front teeth went black and fell out. She later fell seriously ill with a glandular disease known as “King's Evil.” This was the name given to scrofula, or tuberculosis of the lymph glands, which causes swellings in the neck and was originally associated with Edward the Confessor. It was believed that all royals could cure the disease by touch. In England “touching” died out with George I, but it was still practiced by the French monarchy until the middle of the nineteenth century. Madame de Soubisse's illness was not, it was noted, for want of being touched by the King.

The King's affairs followed a predictable pattern. When he grew tired of his current mistress he would extend his search for a replacement no further than her immediate circle of friends and acquaintances, including her servants. Louis was at one time enamored of his new sister-in-law, the buxom Austrian Princess Henrietta. Even at Versailles, where marital fidelity was a novelty, the King's carnal interest in his own brother's wife was beyond the limits of acceptability. When his infatuation became too obvious and began to attract adverse comment, he pretended that he was having an affair with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Louise de La Vallière. The King's mother, however, saw through his ploy and warned him to keep out of his sister-in-law's bed or risk a major court scandal. King Louis decided to cut his losses by sleeping with Louise the diversionary lady-in-waiting. She was to introduce him to his long-standing mistress, Madame de Montespan, and she in turn led him to her replacement, Madame de Maintenon.

Louis XIV's relentless sexual activity produced an unusually large brood of illegitimates, who became a massive drain on the French treasury. Sibling rivalry at Versailles often spilled over into factional in-fighting. Louis also bucked the system by having his bastards married into the legitimate royal family, thus polluting the true Bourbon bloodline. The King's nepotism was deeply resented in the French court.

In 1686 Louis XIV endured a terrible operation for anal fistulas. Twice he was sliced open without any form of anesthetic. The press releases said, as they always did of kings, that he endured the operation heroically. A group of French nuns at the cloister of Saint-Cyr heard of his recovery and celebrated by writing a song, “Dieu Sauvez le Roi.” A traveling Englishman heard the tune, copied it down, and when he got home
translated it into “God Save the King”: thus the British National Anthem evolved from a hymn written to celebrate a successful operation on the French King's derrière.

         

Louis XIV had seven illegitimate children by the grubby Madame de Montespan, a formidable woman with an equally formidable personal-hygiene problem. She was the King's regular mistress for thirteen years, but she had to work hard at keeping him. When Louis met her she was said to be a sensational beauty, dark and sensuous. Later she dyed her hair blond to keep up with the fashion. She already had two children by her first husband, so she dieted hard, unusually for the time, and had her body massaged for two or three hours a day to keep her figure. A regular bath, however, was not part of the beauty treatment. As sleeping with the King was an ambition shared by almost every woman in the court, one of the accepted occupational hazards attached to the enviable status of
maîtresse en titre
was a large number of enemies. Madame de Montespan's savage tongue and vile temper helped attract more than the usual amount of venom. Inevitably, the King began to grow weary of her. She was found, however, to be a poor loser who would try anything to retain her position, including black magic. It was said that she held a Black Mass during which a baby was sacrificed over her naked body. Sadly there was nothing she could do—not even feeding the King toad excrement as an aphrodisiac—that could prevent her inexorable slide toward redundancy. By the time she lost him to his eventual second wife, she had grown almost as fat as the King: her thigh
was said to have been as thick as a man's waist. Madame de Montespan ended her days in a convent.

About twelve months after the Queen died, Louis secretly married a friend of his mistress, a matronly widow in her forties named Madame de Maintenon. Louis XIV had a habit of granting audiences to people while he was sitting on his close-stool: some visitors, including the English ambassador Lord Portland, even regarded it as a special honor to be received by the Sun King in this manner. Louis announced his betrothal to his second wife while in the middle of a bowel movement.

He was attracted to her statuesque figure, but what he found even more attractive was that she refused to sleep with him. For Louis this was an irresistible novelty: women did not play hard to get with the King. His new morganatic wife was accepted by the royal family, many of them quietly relieved that perhaps at last in old age the King had given up on his relentless philandering and was settling down to become a model husband. The truth was less romantic. True love hadn't slowed him up; syphilis, however, had.