Sex with the Queen (10 page)

Some queen consorts were married to complacent husbands who permitted them not only political power in their own right, but love affairs as well. For thirty years starting in 1788 the odd ménage à trois of King Carlos IV of Spain, Queen Maria Luisa, and her lover, Manuel Godoy, lived happily together, calling themselves “the earthly trinity.”1 The king went out hunting every day, while the queen and her lover—whom the king oblig-ingly named prime minister—made love and policy. Carlos was grateful to Godoy for taking the burdens of statecraft off his shoulders so he could chase rabbits. Carlos was so devoted to hunting that one day, when he was informed that one of his chil-dren lay dying, he said, “Well, what can I do about it?” and jumped on his horse.2

Carlos had inherited his passion for the hunt from his father, Carlos III who, whenever he passed a tapestry with the figure of a horse, could not restrain himself from lifting one leg as if he were going to mount the animal and ride off. His son Ferdinand IV of Naples, brother of Carlos IV of Spain, shared the family’s genetically predisposed mania. Ferdinand permitted his wife, Queen Maria Carolina, to rule his nation with her lover Sir John Acton, readily nodding agreement to most of their political recommendations so that he could race back to the fields.

When Carlos was visiting Ferdinand in 1821 and fell deathly ill, a messenger was sent to recall Ferdinand from the hunt. The king refused. “Either my brother will die, or he will recover,” he said. “In the first case, what will it matter to him whether I amused myself hunting or not? In the second, being a crack 4 0

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sportsman himself he will be delighted to see me return with a good bag of game to cheer his convalescence.”3 Carlos died with-out his brother, but with Ferdinand’s name on his lips.

Those royal women who possessed power—whether by birthright, widowhood, or as a gift from husbands who wanted to go hunting—flaunted their love affairs. These women rewarded their lovers as generously as kings rewarded their mistresses. But powerless royal women were forced to hide their affairs. Their lovers not only received no financial benefits; far worse, they lived under the threat of torture and execution if the affair be-came public.

T h e S k i l l o f S u b t e r f u g e Fed up with her husband and palace life, the powerless queen consort who decided to take a lover could resort to tried-and-true stratagems to hide the affair.

We must bear in mind that royalty almost never had a moment alone. Even on the chamber pot, servants would be in attendance to lift up the heavy skirt or knee-length jacket, and hand the soft piece of cotton used for cleaning the body. At night, if a royal couple desired intimacy, they might send their servants to sleep in the antechamber or in front of the door. But royal husbands and wives had—and still have—their individual suites and often didn’t sleep together. When the king slept alone, he usually had bodyguards in the room for his protection and servants to sum-mon a doctor if he became ill or to bring him food or drink if requested.

Less likely a target of assassination, the queen, if sleeping without her husband, required waiting women in her room to provide an alibi for her virtue. A lady-in-waiting would sleep on the floor next to the royal bed or, if the queen wished another human body to warm the frosty sheets, in bed with the queen herself. Whether the queen went walking or stayed in her room reading by a crackling fire, a bevy of ladies always danced atten-dance.

A sure sign of a love affair was when the queen became partial t h e q u e e n t a k e s a l o v e r 4 1

to just one female servant at the expense of the others. Only this particular lady slept in the queen’s room at night, only she walked with her in the gardens, dressed her and bathed her and embroidered with her before the fire. If the queen reduced her retinue to just one for her private time, it usually meant that this servant was her accomplice in a love affair. Indeed, without a lady-in-waiting accomplice, a queen or princess would have found it impossible to have a lover. And if her virtue was chal-lenged, her servant would swear that she had been with the queen the entire time in question, reading the Bible.

When Henry VIII’s fifth wife, the silly teenaged Catherine Howard, had a sizzling love affair with the handsome courtier Thomas Culpeper in 1542, the assistance of her lady-in-waiting Lady Jane Rochford was invaluable. The court was frequently changing lodgings, and when the queen arrived at a palace, Lady Rochford would first spy out which apartments were connected to back doors and secret staircases. These were the apartments she would choose for the queen. Lady Rochford took messages back and forth between the lovers and sneaked Culpeper in and out of Catherine’s apartments.

In the 1690s Hereditary Princess Sophia Dorothea of Hanover relied entirely on her devoted lady-in-waiting, Eleonore de Knesebeck, to facilitate her love affair with the Swedish count Philip von Königsmark. Knesebeck wrote many of Sophia Dorothea’s love letters to the count in her own hand and received the count’s letters addressed to her. That way, if they were intercepted, it would look as if the count and Eleonore had been having the affair. When Königsmark was bold enough to venture into Sophia Dorothea’s rooms in the palace, Eleonore de Knesebeck waited by a little door leading from the palace to the garden and opened it when she heard him whistling a tune called “The Spanish Follies.” She then led him up a hidden staircase directly to the princess’s bedchamber.

It was easier for a royal woman to have lovers when she was not under the intense scrutiny of thousands of eyes at the palace.

Napoleon’s sister Pauline, Princess Borghese, evaded her brother’s prudish gaze by claiming ill health and rumbling about s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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the health spas of Europe looking for a cure. Though she never found a cure, she did find vigorous sex from numerous lovers.

In 1807 at the health spa of Plombières, Pauline fell head over heels in love with the aristocratic comte Auguste de Forbin. The intensity of her passion seemed to consume her very flesh; she fell ill from the violence of it and could not eat or sleep. A gyne-cologist was sent for who made the following report: “Her habit-ual and constant state is one of uterine excitement and if this state is continued and prolonged it can become alarming.”4 To calm down her uterus, Pauline was forced to give up her lover, at least officially.

Clucking loudly about her need for improved health, she sent away most of her servants and rumbled over rutted roads nearly five hundred miles to the tiny spa town of Gréoulx, where the comte de Forbin had a castle. For months they lived quietly, spending most of each day in bed. But Napoleon’s eagle eye turned for a moment from the field of war and searched out his rebellious sister. He forced the poor count to join the French army.

A century later Crown Princess Marie of Romania visited her mother at various locales throughout Germany, including health spas, her lovers secretly following her. Here were no spies paid by grouchy King Carol to report her every move, as there were at her palace in Bucharest. Twice Marie became pregnant during long visits to her mother, with her husband hundreds of miles away in Romania. The first pregnancy likely ended in a miscar-riage, and the second pregnancy resulted in her third child, Princess Marie.

Taking the waters was a much-used strategy not only for lovers’ trysts, but also when the result of a tryst was due to arrive nine months later. A woman in her third trimester of pregnancy would announce she was unwell—suffering from dropsy, per-haps, an illness which resulted in swelling—and needed to drink the restorative waters of a particular spa. She would choose one conveniently far from home, where she would be less likely to run into acquaintances. The journey there, in easy stages, might take a month. Once at the spa—where she would go incognito—t h e q u e e n t a k e s a l o v e r 4 3

she would have the child and arrange to give it away. If she was fortunate, her lover’s relatives would agree to take the child and raise it as their own. After the birth, she would socialize more, take the waters, and return home slender and radiating good health. The magical waters had worked.

In 1811 Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Empress Josephine, found herself pregnant by her lover, a handsome sol-dier named Charles de Flahaut. Hortense had not lived with her husband, Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, for years.

Though Napoleon had made them king and queen of the Netherlands in 1806, Hortense reaped little benefit from her exalted status. King Louis forced his wife to remain in her rooms—which smelled of sewage and overlooked a graveyard—while he enjoyed palace entertainments.

Exposure of her pregnancy would have meant a public di-vorce, a shattered reputation, and the loss of her children with Louis. Luckily, the fashions of the times hid her expanding belly. In a high-waisted gown, with a large shawl draped around her, she hosted a party to celebrate Napoleon’s birthday two weeks before her child was born, and no one guessed her condi-tion. Right before the birth, Hortense visited a health spa with Charles where she had the child. Her son was whisked away to Charles’s accommodating mother, so at least Hortense obtained news of him as he grew up.

Visiting a health spa was an alibi so frequently used by women with inconvenient pregnancies that the invalid visitor who really did hope for improved health was often credited upon her re-turn home with having given birth to a bastard. Sometimes even a long illness inside the palace itself gave rise to rumors of preg-nancy. When George III’s daughter Princess Amelia died in 1810

of tuberculosis, it was said she had given up the ghost bearing twins.

Elizabeth I’s 1562 smallpox attack—which almost killed her—led to stories that she had been not ill, but had given birth to a love child with her virile suitor Robert Dudley. Foreign courts, hearing stories of Elizabeth’s daughter, were eager to arrange a marriage with her; even though illegitimate, the child would 4 4

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