Sex with the Queen (20 page)

Because the marriage remained unconsummated, Prince Pe-dro and the queen were keenly aware of the possibility of an an-nulment. And if the marriage were annulled, perhaps they could receive a papal dispensation and marry each other. If Alfonso were put away for mental incompetence, they could rule Portu-gal. To this end they formed their own faction at court—the anti- Alfonso faction—and started winning powerful courtiers over to their side. For Alfonso was no better a king than he was a hus-band; his cruel favorites acted with impunity, and the country was swiftly falling into a state of anarchy. The queen’s relation-ship with Pedro offered political advantages to the nobles who t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 8 9

encouraged it. No outraged accusations of adultery would echo through the Portuguese court to condemn the queen.

Alfonso, fascinated by sex despite his impotence, often hired talented prostitutes to climb into his bed and stimulate him as best they could. When he had had enough, he invited his friends, who had been watching, to jump into bed and finish the busi-ness. The king received a certain satisfaction from watching oth-ers reach climax even if he could not.

The queen, unconcerned by her husband’s pathetic escapades with whores, was deeply concerned that he seemed desirous of doing the same thing with her—playing with her and then calling in his favorites to finish the job so she would become pregnant.

A pregnancy would solve all his problems; he would remain king, a virile potent king, and eclipse the despised Pedro for-ever.

Beginning in April 1667 Alfonso continually solicited Maria Francisca to visit him in his apartments late at night in the com-pany of two of his lusty favorites. According to custom, if the king wanted to sleep with the queen at night, he went to
her
apartments, with her ladies hovering nearby, never the other way around. Suspecting what he had in mind, the queen politely re-fused to visit him in his apartments. His face red with rage, Al-fonso put his hand on his sword and vowed that if she did not come of her own accord within twenty-four hours, he would drag her to his bed or have her carried there by four of his atten-dants.

Maria Francisca, never knowing when she would be carted into the king’s rooms and raped, finally had enough. On No-vember 22, 1667, she retired to a convent and sent word to Al-fonso that she considered the marriage null and void due to nonconsummation after sixteen months. As soon as the king re-ceived the letter, he raced to the convent to drag her out. When the doors were not opened despite his furious knocking, Alfonso called for axes to break them down. At that point Prince Pedro arrived with a large retinue of armed men vowing to defend the queen, and the defeated monarch rode slowly home.

Alfonso’s worst nightmare had come true. When he waddled 9 0

s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

back to the palace, he was taken prisoner and admitted his impo-tence under questioning. The bishop of Lisbon decreed the marriage null and void.

When the queen wrote the council asking permission to re-turn home with her dowry, the councilors presented themselves at the convent door with hats in their hands and tears in their eyes, begging her not to abandon the realm. And besides, they had already spent the dowry. Exactly as she had foreseen, they implored her to marry Pedro and stay on as their queen. Every-one admired the way she had deftly handled her idiot husband.

Portugal needed such a queen. The council went to Pedro and begged him to marry Maria Francisca for the good of the nation.

The prince gallantly replied that he would. But when they asked him to accept the throne as well, Pedro refused. As a matter of honor, he would not become king as long as his brother lived, but would rule for him as regent.

Alfonso was placed in genteel confinement. When the de-posed monarch learned that his marriage had been annulled and his bride handed over to Pedro, he said, “Ah, well! I don’t doubt that my poor brother will soon regret having been mixed up with this disagreeable Frenchwoman as much as I do.”1

Maria Francisca had gotten the man she wanted, kept her po-sition as Portugal’s highest lady, and nine months after the wed-ding gave birth to a daughter. Despite her happiness, she never forgave her former husband and reveled in disparaging him.

“After getting drunk according to his wont,” she wrote her sister,

“he fell with his head in a basin of water, where he would cer-tainly have been drowned if someone had not promptly pulled him out; but though he lives as a brute beast, he lives, and that is sufficient to keep us always anxious and exposed to the malice of our enemies.”2 Like Maria Francisca, many Portuguese feared that if Alfonso escaped, he would round up his former favorites, punish those who had deposed him and wreak havoc in the realm.

Though poison never passed Alfonso’s lips, Pedro made sure that plenty of alcohol did, in the hopes that his brother would drink himself to death. One day, however, Alfonso pledged t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 9 1

himself to sobriety, much to the irritation of the Portuguese government. The ambassador of Savoy wrote that Alfonso’s Je-suit jailer had spoken of his regained health with “evident re-gret.”3

But in the end it was food, not liquor, that did him in. With nothing to do, the prisoner grew fatter than ever. He could barely rise from his bed and had difficulty fitting through a doorway. According to some reports, walking became such an ordeal that he would lie down on the floor and call for an atten-dant to roll him down the hallway. After fifteen years’ confine-ment he died of a stroke in 1683 at the age of forty. Pedro and Maria Francisca became king and queen in name as well as in fact.

The Portuguese prided themselves on the fact that Alfonso had lived so many years after his abdication despite the threat he posed. “If these things had happened in Spain,” a Jesuit priest cheerfully pointed out to the ambassador of Savoy, “the King of Portugal would not have lasted so long; but here we are good Christians.”4

M a r g u e r i t e - L o u i s e o f F r a n c e , G r a n d D u c h e s s o f T u s c a n y

“You Would Never Die but by My Hand”

The one royal woman to escape her marital prison without the sudden blessing of widowhood or annulment was Marguerite- Louise d’Orléans, the first cousin of Louis XIV. In 1661, at the age of sixteen, the princess was married by proxy to Duke Cosimo de Medici, heir to the Tuscan throne of his father, Grand Duke Ferdinand II. The bride was petite, voluptuous, and boasted sparkling turquoise eyes and chestnut ringlets.

When marriage negotiations had commenced three years earlier, the prospective groom was struck with wonder by her portrait, and she was suitably impressed by his.

But by the time the marriage contract was signed, Marguerite had fallen deeply in love with her cousin, Prince Charles of Lor-s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n 9 2

raine. A swashbuckling soldier, the eighteen-year-old stormed Versailles with the irresistible aroma of gunpowder wafting about him. The young man, recently captured on the field of battle, could boast of having just been released from a Spanish prison.

Of royal blood, Charles would have made an acceptable bride-groom for a French princess.

But Louis XIV had already signed the marriage documents with the court of Tuscany. Refusing to go back on his word and lose his royal dignity, he forced his cousin to fulfill his contrac-tual obligations. Marguerite, however, was born with an uncon-trollable temperament ill-suited to her royal position. Even as a child, she did not accept refusals meekly. Once, when she was told she could not go riding, she broke down the stable door, soundly cursing the grooms who stood by helplessly, grabbed a saddle, and threw it on the horse herself. Neither would she ac-cept her marriage obediently. When the groom sent her an enormous diamond engagement ring, to show her disdain of her future husband, Marguerite gave it to one of her ladies-in-waiting.

En route to her new realm, the bride dawdled, insisting on staying longer in various cities than planned, intentionally up-setting the elaborate preparations made for her along the way and her grand welcome to Tuscany. When she finally met her groom, she wished that she had dawdled longer. Instead of the attractive prince depicted in the portrait, Marguerite’s husband had bulging eyes, a jutting chin, thick wavy red lips, and large deformed ears that poked through his long curly hair. The un-appealing head topped a thick squat body.

Worse than his physical appearance was his personality—

“melancholy and somber,” according to the bishop of Marseille.5 Cosimo spent most of his time on his knees in front of an altar, praying. His new wife, however, “is all gallantry; she likes nothing more than singing, dancing and giving parties,”

according to the envoy of the republic of Luca. “The prince is all gravity,” wrote the papal nuncio, “but the princess loves nothing more than laughing.”6 It was agreed that never were two charac-ters so vastly different in temperament and education.

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Marguerite cast a disapproving glance around the rather moldy grandeur of Florence. When asked how she liked her new land, she invariably replied that she would rather be back in France. Cosimo gave splendid balls, sumptuous feasts, ballets, and plays to entertain his bride, but nothing, she sniffed, could compare to the splendor of those held at the court of Versailles.