Sex with the Queen (6 page)

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

prised when the strange man she had just married climbed on top of her and started to poke her painfully.

In 1797 the eighteen-year-old Princess Frederica Dorothea of Baden married the nineteen-year-old King Gustavus IV of Sweden. She was ceremoniously placed in bed with her new hus-band, and the guests withdrew. But a few moments later the bride raced out of the bedroom screaming and flew into the arms of her ladies-in-waiting who were assembled in an outer room.

She had just learned what would be required of her and refused to take part in it. It took several weeks before the bride could be persuaded to return to the rough embraces of her husband.

When thirteen-year-old Margaret Tudor bedded the thirty-year-old James IV of Scotland in 1503, she found to her horror not only that her husband jumped on top of her and poked her, but that he wore an iron chain around his waist, which he never took off, and to which each year he added another link for his sins. We can imagine how the rusty links felt on her tender flesh.

In 1893 the seventeen-year-old Marie of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, was flummoxed by what her husband the crown prince of Romania did to her on her wedding night.

“In my immature way I tried to respond to his passion but I hun-gered and thirsted for something more,” she wrote years later in her memoirs. “There was an empty feeling about it all, I still seemed to be waiting for something that did not come.” She cried for weeks afterward. “Often I had to smother my mouth in my pillow not to call out with grief and longing—Mamma . . .

Mamma . . . Mamma!”18 When she started to throw up in the mornings, she thought she was dying. No one had told her how a woman became pregnant.

Undoubtedly the worst case of undesired sex endured by a queen occurred in 1714 when the twenty-six-year-old Maria Luisa of Savoy lay dying of tuberculosis, her tortured lungs rasp-ing as blood trickled from her lips. Her husband, King Philip V

of Spain, was devastated at the thought of her death—not because he would miss his beloved wife, but because he would miss sex.

The king was a devout Catholic who thought he would go to hell for having sex outside of marriage. He knew that after his wife l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s 2 1

died he would have to remain celibate for a decent amount of time before he could remarry.

So instead of mourning his wife’s passing in prayer at her bedside, as her illness worsened he jumped in bed with her and humped her several times a day. The queen endured his exer-tions with admirable patience, probably because she knew she wouldn’t have to put up with them much longer. Finally, after the priests administered last rites, and the death rattle rose in her throat, the king tried to jump in bed one last time and was only with difficulty restrained.

R o y a l I m p o t e n c e

Many royal wives, steeling themselves for the duties of their wed-ding night, were surprised to find they had no bedtime duties at all; their husbands were hopelessly impotent.

In 1615 the nervous twitching fourteen-year-old King Louis XIII of France married his cousin, a beautiful hazel-eyed Span-ish princess. The daughter and granddaughter of Austrian arch-duchesses who had married Spanish kings, the princess was known as Anne of Austria. After the wedding banquet, the king, to the utter astonishment of the guests, ambled out of the dining hall back to his own chambers. His mother had to convince him to leave his bed and sleep in that of his wife. “My son,” she pleaded, “it is not sufficient to be married; you must come and see the queen your wife, who is waiting for you.”19

The king obediently stayed for two hours in bed with his wife, and then stood up, put on his slippers, and shuffled back to his own room. The years passed, and both king and queen remained virgins. To all advice upon the subject, the king replied that there was no reason to be in a hurry, and that he could not take too much care of his health. Yet the royal marriage, which rati-fied a precarious treaty between France and Spain, was not valid until consummation. Both nations and the Vatican—which wanted a strong alliance between the two most powerful Catholic countries in Europe—fretted over the situation. In 1618 Cardi-nal Guido Bentivoglio wrote the pope that he had advised the s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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king to take up masturbation as a means of preparing himself for marital sex, but the king’s confessor prohibited him from com-mitting such a sin.

Finally, when the king was eighteen, late one night his adviser the duc de Luynes begged him to go to the queen and finally consummate the marriage. When the king began to cry, the duke picked him up and carried the sobbing monarch to the queen’s chamber, with the royal valet solemnly holding a candle to light the way. Once in bed, Louis stayed for three hours and did his royal duty. But still, sex was intermittent over the years and the king did not seem to particularly enjoy the business.

In December 1637 the king, setting out from the Louvre for his palace of Saint-Maur, was delayed by a terrible storm. As his bed and bed linens had been sent ahead, he found himself in the embarrassing position of returning to the Louvre and unexpect-edly dropping in on his wife, who possessed the only bed fit for a king. Given a choice between the freezing rain and howling wind, or the horrors of the queen’s bed which he had not shared for seven years, Louis resolutely chose the storm, but his bedrag-gled valets finally convinced him to take shelter. It was a fortu-itous rainstorm for France. Nine months later, after twenty-three years of marriage, the future Louis XIV was born. Perhaps it is no surprise that as soon as Louis XIII died in 1643, his merry widow, deprived of sex for the greater part of three decades, took the polished, virile Cardinal Jules Mazarin as her lover for the greater part of the following two decades.

In 1769 the sixteen-year-old crown prince of France, the fu-ture Louis XVI, married the most beautiful princess in Europe, the fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette of Austria. Heavy, clumsy, and painfully shy, on his wedding night Louis found himself in bed with a dazzling blue-eyed blonde—all golden curls and golden curves—and froze with fear. But the prince’s impo-tence was not completely psychological in nature. Louis suffered from phimosis, an unnatural elongation of the foreskin which permitted erections but prevented intercourse.

Three years after the wedding, Louis’s exasperated grandfa-ther King Louis XV—who had rarely gone a day without sex l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s 2 3

since he was fifteen—ordered the court physician to give the couple sex education lessons. Louis was put on diets to render him more virile, but they only made him fatter. In a desperate attempt to arouse the prince, advisers lined the corridor leading to his wife’s bedroom with pornographic prints and obscene paintings. But all such steps were futile, as were efforts to per-suade the prince to undergo circumcision. In a day and age when anesthesia was a stiff glass of whiskey, and some 25 percent of wounds resulted in infection and death, surely we cannot blame him.

Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Austro-Hungarian empress Maria Theresa, who had borne no less than sixteen children, was so alarmed at her daughter’s situation that she sent her son and coruler, Joseph II, to talk to Louis. From Versailles on June 9, 1777, Joseph wrote home, “Her situation with the king is very odd; he is only two-thirds of a husband, and although he loves her, he fears her more. . . . Just imagine, in his marital bed—here is the secret—he has strong, well-conditioned erections; he introduces the member, stays there without moving for perhaps two minutes, withdraws without ejaculating but still erect, and says goodnight; this is incomprehensible because with all that he sometimes has nightly emissions, but once in place and going at it, never, and he’s satisfied. He says plainly that he does it all purely from a sense of duty but never for pleasure; oh, if only I could have been there, I would have taken care of him; he should be whipped so that he would ejaculate out of sheer rage like a donkey.”20

In 1778 Louis submitted to circumcision for the good of the realm. His physician must have washed his hands and instru-ments thoroughly before the operation because the prince sailed through it. He was able to have sex with his wife a few weeks later, though he never got the hang of lovemaking. Marie Antoinette found him physically repulsive and, after giving him a daughter and son, began a torrid affair with an elegant young Swedish no-bleman, Count Axel Fersen.

The queen’s son with Louis died young, and it is likely that her second son, who later became known as Louis XVII, was ac-s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n 2 4

tually the child of her lover, born exactly nine months after Fersen visited Versailles. “The Queen was delivered of the Duc de Normandie at half-past seven,” Louis reported in his diary.

“Everything happened just as to my son (the Dauphin).”21 The entry seemed to indicate that Louis did not believe the child was his. “One of the most handsome children one could ever see,”

said one courtier about the queen’s third child, which in and of itself cast doubt as to his paternity.22

G a y K i n g s