Eleanor Herman - Sex with the Queen

It was difficult for many to believe that the lovely twenty-five-year-old princess had had sex with an unattractive fifty-six-year-old palace official, disfigured by a huge red birthmark across half his face. Ironically, George III and his wife, Queen Charlotte, fiercely guarded the virtue of their six daughters, so much so that they didn’t want them even to marry. They kept their grown daughters in a kind of harem, with only a few male servants, all of whom were old and repulsive.

The political diarist Charles Greville reported, “The only reason why people doubted Garth’s being the father was that he was a hideous old devil, old enough to be her father, and with a great claret mark on his face—which is no argument at all, for women fall in love with anything….There they (the princesses) were secluded from the world, mixing with few people, their passions boiling over, and ready to fall into the hands of the first man whom circumstances enabled to get at them.” 6

The morning after the birth, Princess Sophia’s medical attendant announced that his patient had had a sudden remarkable recovery and “would be completely restored to health after a short period of rest and quiet retirement.” 7

“The old King never knew it,” Greville continued, and indeed for decades the king had slipped into and out of madness, often enjoying impassioned conversations with trees and politely shaking their branches as if they were hands. “The Court was at Weymouth when she was big with child. She was said to be dropsical, and then suddenly recovered. They told the King that she was cured by roast beef, and this he swallowed, and used to tell it to people, all of whom knew the truth, as ‘a very extraordinary thing.’” 8

An amorous courtier, if he carefully considered the risks before making love to a queen consort, may have found his interest in the lady shrinking. Possible penalties included exquisitely slow torture and a lingering death.

In the early thirteenth century King John of England, fearing that his wife, Isabella, was having affairs, supposedly hanged the suspected lovers from her bedpost and allowed her to find them dangling there.

In the early fourteenth century three knights seduced the wives of the three royal princes of France, sons of King Philip the Fair. The princesses were imprisoned, but their lovers were strapped to huge wheels which were spun while executioners shattered their limbs with iron bars.

Catherine Howard was merely beheaded with one swift stroke in 1542, but her lover Francis Dereham was hanged until nearly unconscious, cut down, and his private parts lopped off and burned before his eyes. He was then cut open and his intestines pulled out as he watched. Finally, he was beheaded. His rotting head adorned Tower Bridge; his body parts were nailed to other buildings.

Even when the husband didn’t mind his wife conducting amorous intrigues, a queen’s lover sometimes faced mortal danger. After marrying the beautiful dark-haired Margot de Valois in 1572, Henri, king of Navarre, welcomed her love affairs, as it allowed him ample opportunity to pursue his countless mistresses. But if Margot’s husband didn’t mind her behavior, her brother, King Henri III of France, minded very much indeed, and had some of her lovers beheaded, hanged, ambushed, and wounded. In addition, some of Margot’s lovers killed one another in fits of jealous rage. Margot reportedly collected the embalmed hearts of her lovers and put them into small silver boxes, which she hung inside her hoopskirt on chains. Over the years, she built up quite a collection.

After twenty years of estrangement, separation, and an eventual divorce, by 1605 Margot and Henri had become good friends. No longer just king of tiny Navarre, Margot’s former husband had inherited the crown of France and become King Henri IV. Moving to Paris to live off her ex-husband’s largesse, the fat, aging fifty-three-year-old queen took men into her bed who were barely out of their teens. Alighting from her carriage one day with her lover the sieur de Saint-Julien, another admirer called Vermont shot his rival in the head and killed him. Vermont was hanged, and the queen collected two more hearts for the tin boxes rattling beneath her petticoat. She also insisted that the king buy her a new house, as she couldn’t possibly remain in the one where the murder had been committed.

Soon after Margot moved to a house with less murderous memories, a jealous suitor ran her lover Bajaumont through with a sword in church. Visiting his ex-wife one day, the king saw her waiting women and asked them to pray for the recuperation of Bajaumont, for which he would reward them with New Year’s gifts. “For, if he were to die,” said the king, “ ventre Saint-Gris ! It would cost me a great deal more, since I should have to buy her a new house in place of this one, where she would never consent to remain.” 9

Though Henri shrugged off his ex-wife’s love affairs with a joke, when Peter the Great found out his former spouse had a lover, the czar was not amused. Peter had divorced his pious aristocratic wife, Queen Eudoxia, in 1698 and put her in a convent. Allowed to come and go as she wished, and to receive visitors, by 1718 Eudoxia was having a love affair with Stefan Glebov, a Russian military official.

When Peter found out about the affair, he prepared a special punishment for Glebov. He was beaten and burned; his ribs were broken and his flesh torn out with red-hot pincers. But even that wasn’t a sufficient expression of Peter’s wrath. The czar had Glebov impaled through the rectum on a stake several feet high. Because the weather was bitterly cold, it was feared that Glebov would freeze to death mercifully quickly. So he was dressed in a fur hat, coat, and boots. He was impaled at three o’clock in the afternoon and lasted in excruciating pain until 7:30 the following evening. His corpse remained on the stake for months.

“It is dangerous to love princesses,” said Laure d’Abrantès, a good friend of Napoleon’s promiscuous sisters. 10And indeed the emperor, seeing handsome admirers dancing attendance on Queen Elise of Tuscany, Queen Caroline of Naples, and Princess Pauline Borghese of Rome, routinely sent the amorous young men to the front. Though it was a gentler punishment than impalement, beheading, or hanging, many never returned.

Penalties still exist today. In 1991 James Hewitt, who was the lover of Diana, Princess of Wales, was drummed out of his army career for failing three exams by 1 percent each. “I was not so naïve as to think that the authorities didn’t discuss my situation with regard to the heir to the throne,” he huffed in his biography Love and War. “It would be much more convenient for all concerned if I simply resigned my commission.” 11Though, looking back on the fates of other men diving into forbidden royal beds, it could have been worse.

Not all royal lovers risked torture and death. It was far safer—and more profitable—to love a queen who ruled in her own right, or a consort who boasted a complacent husband.

The background of Manuel Godoy, lover of Queen Maria Luisa of Spain, was modest; he came from a rural area of Spain known for its swineherds, which earned him the nickname El Choricero—the Sausage Man. Given the titles duque de Alcudia, grandee of Spain, and Prince of the Peace, Godoy took precedence over every man in the country except his good friend King Carlos and the heir to the throne. Godoy was given large estates in Granada and the shocking income of one million reales a year. Suddenly the Sausage Man was the richest private individual in the country.

One day in the 1620s a young Roman named Giulio Mazarini—the future Cardinal Mazarin of France—was losing money at cards and cried out, “Oh, what an ass is man without money!” 12