Sex with the Queen (2 page)

I

V i r i l e K i n g s , C h a s t e Q u e e n s L u s c i o u s m i s t r e s s e s g r a c e d t h e b e d s o f m o s t E u r o p e a n kings for hundreds of years, pocketing eye-popping salaries and sometimes ruling nations. Indeed, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the position of royal mistress was almost as official as that of prime minister. She influenced the arts, charmed foreign ambassadors, and appointed ministers. Her rooms were often grander than those of the queen, her gowns more gorgeous, her jewels more dazzling.

While adultery was never lauded, judgment was often mute when the king took a mistress; he had been forced for political reasons to marry an unattractive, awkward foreign princess with whom he had absolutely nothing in common. In 1662 the tall, swarthy Charles II of England wed the tiny bucktoothed Princess 1

Catherine of Portugal. Much to his bride’s chagrin, Charles re-fused to give up his highly sexed auburn-haired mistress, Bar-bara, Lady Castlemaine.

Charles explained that “he was no atheist but he could not think God would make a man miserable for taking a little plea-sure out of the way.”1 Over the years, Charles took a great deal of pleasure out of the way—the darkly elegant Frenchwoman Louise de Kéroualle, the spunky actress Nell Gwynn, the sleekly bisexual Italian Hortense Mancini, and many more.

In 1660 the handsome Louis XIV of France married his first cousin, Princess Marie-Thérèse of Spain, the dwarfish by-product of generations of inbreeding. Though spared the drool-ing insanity which had plagued many of her ancestors, Marie-Thérèse had a limited understanding and found herself adrift in the most witty, polished court in Europe. Louis pla-cated himself first with the shy pretty Louise de La Vallière. Af-ter seven years he found himself racing into the arms of Athénaïs de Montespan, a magnificent tawny lioness who kept him en-snared for thirteen years. He enjoyed numerous lesser mis-tresses, however, including the tall redheaded princesse de Soubise, and the breathtaking blonde Marie-Angélique de Fontanges.

In 1725, at the age of fifteen, Louis XV married the dowdy twenty-two-year-old Polish princess Marie Leczinska for her family’s renowned fertility. Her own father, King Stanislaus, proclaimed Marie to be one of the two dullest queens in Europe, the other dull queen being his own wife. Marie spent her morn-ings in prayer, her afternoons doing embroidery, and her eve-nings playing cards. Her husband, who grew into a witty and cultured bon vivant, remained faithful for eight years, after which he chose four sisters as his mistresses, followed by the cul-tured Madame de Pompadour, and lastly the talented prostitute Madame du Barry.

Princesses were raised to accept their future husbands’ phi-landering with admirable nonchalance. When the heir to the French throne, Charles-Ferdinand, the duc de Berry, was assas-sinated in 1820, his wife, Duchess Marie Caroline, was preg-s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n 2

nant. Visiting a certain city a few months after her husband’s death, she was appealed to by twenty poor women, each one claiming also to be carrying the dead duke’s child and asking for alms. Duchess Marie Caroline paused, considered, and replied,

“It is quite possible. My husband spent a whole week in this neighborhood at the time in question.”2

In 1717 Czar Peter the Great of Russia and his wife, the good-natured Empress Catherine, toured the European capitals. At the court of Prussia, Princess Wilhelmina wrote of the empress,

“She had with her a retinue of four hundred so-called ladies. . . . Almost every one of these creatures carried a richly dressed child in her arms, and when asked if the child were hers, replied, bowing and scraping after the Russian fashion: ‘The Czar did me the honor to give me this child.’ ”3

Where was the queen, we might wonder, as her husband laughed, and flirted, and planned political strategy with his mis-tress? Perhaps she was fulfilling her primary duty for the nation—belching forth as many royal children as her over-wrought uterus could bear. Most likely she was on her knees in prayer, interceding with God for the prosperity of her adopted country. Or she was carrying out the queen’s traditional tasks of dispensing charity to the poor and mercy to the condemned.

And when all else failed, there was always embroidery, an art at which neglected queens usually excelled. The majority of queens would never have dreamed of paying their straying husbands back in kind by jumping in the sack with a dashing courtier. If these queens never won their husbands’ ardor, they at least earned their
respect.

But not all European queens were dull and pious and married to handsome clever husbands. In dozens of instances, the exact opposite was true. Beautiful intelligent princesses were forced into marriage with royal ogres—sadistic, foaming at the mouth, physically repulsive, mentally retarded, or sexually impotent—and in some cases all of the above. Casting about a court bristling with testosterone in the most delectable shapes, many queens glanced quickly back at their embroidery and said a Hail Mary to ward off temptation. Many another stared hard and, heart i n t r o d u c t i o n

3

racing, threw down her embroidery, dropped her rosary on the floor, and chose a lover.

The queen’s choice often fell on a swashbuckling general, virility in boots, whose manly stride across polished parquet floors made her weak-kneed with desire. A witty courtier, his masculinity varnished with a sparkling layer of elegance, often won the queen’s heart. Perhaps she would select a brilliant politician whose cunning insight would help her gain control of the nation; oddly, some of these politicians were draped in the robes of a bishop or cardinal. One empress found her lover in the church choir; she was thunderstruck by a young Adonis with the voice of an angel and quickly got him out of the house of God and into her royal four-poster.

V i r g i n a n d Q u e e n

While kings felt compelled to take mistresses to enhance their virile royal image, queens, on the other hand, were supposed to emulate the mother of Christ. Chastity, mercy, patience, and obedience—these were the qualities expected of a queen.

As early as the fifth century, the image of the Virgin, Mother of the Savior of the World, became blurred with the image of the queen, mother of the savior of the realm. Both Virgin and queen were often portrayed holding a baby. The Virgin morphed into the Queen of Heaven and was often painted wearing a crown and coronation robes—though it is safe to assume that Mary, wife of a Judean carpenter, never possessed any such luxuries. The earthly queen was often depicted bestowing the heavenly blessing of the Virgin, as if she were the Virgin herself.

To compound the parallel images, by the Middle Ages queens’ marriages, coronations, and burials were made to fall on dates sacred to the Virgin Mary. Surely no queen personified the Virgin as closely as Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) who was, ironically, Protestant. Elizabeth was truly a virgin—we think. It is possible she had an affair as a young queen with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, but those suitors of later years, Sir Walter Raleigh; Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex; Sir Thomas Heneage; s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

4

and Sir Christopher Hatton, were admirers held firmly at arm’s length.

This virgin queen replaced the dazzling images of Mary with dazzling images of herself. Courtiers, who a generation earlier had worshiped images of the Virgin Queen of Heaven, now bowed down before images of the virgin queen of England.

Elizabeth even borrowed symbols traditionally associated with Jesus’s mother in religious art—the moon, the phoenix, the er-mine, and the pearl. English subjects felt it was no coincidence that Elizabeth was born on September 7, the eve of the Feast of the Virgin, and died on March 24, the eve of the Annunciation of the Virgin.

Though Elizabeth most closely resembled the Virgin Mary in her probable physical virginity as well as her iconography, her single state confounded all of Europe. The ideal was to be
like
the Virgin, not
be
a virgin. Many didn’t fall for the virgin story at all; they said the queen did not marry because she refused to confine her lusts to one man. While some protested a bit too much about Elizabeth’s insatiable desires, claiming she even had sex with cer-tain foreigners who were known to have enormous private parts, others declared the poor queen never married because she suf-fered from a genital deformity which prevented sex and child-bearing. The Venetian ambassador in France heard that her menstrual cycle flowed out of one of her legs rather than the usual place.

Most likely, the queen’s single state was due neither to frigid-ity nor nymphomania nor deformity. The tragic fates of her mother and stepmothers at Henry VIII’s hands must have nur-tured a horror of marriage that grew like a cancer in her belly.

She once told the ambassador to the duchy of Württemberg, “I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.”4

To the French envoy she stated, “When I think of marriage, it is as though my heart were being dragged out of my vitals.”5

By the time of Elizabeth’s death in the early seventeenth cen-tury, virgin worship was less prominent in those countries which remained Catholic after the Reformation. The result was a more secular, relaxed lifestyle, in which the queen was viewed as a i n t r o d u c t i o n

5