Eleanor Herman: Sex with the Queen

Fingers often point to Captain James Hewitt, the charming carrot-topped lady-killer who confessed to having a five-year affair with the princess starting in 1986, a year and a half after Harry’s birth. Yet there are rumors that the two met each other before Diana’s 1981 wedding and denied the earlier date to protect their son, poor illegitimate Harry.

If Prince Harry had slipped into the world blessed with blond or dark locks, there probably would have been no unflattering speculation about his paternity. Red hair pops up unexpectedly in families, often skipping several generations. Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, has red hair and freckles. Moreover, if we get beyond the hair color and youthful good looks of Prince Harry, we can detect small narrow eyes, large flapping ears, and a wide mouth, the unfortunate hereditary traits of the Windsors.

But the rumor is just too good for tabloids to ignore. In December 2002 two newspapers reported that a competing paper had hired a pretty girl, a “honey trap,” to seduce Harry and pluck a hair—we can assume from his head—to be sent for DNA analysis. Stories abound of tabloid investigators taking sheets off the hotel beds of Prince Harry and James Hewitt, of fishing used tissues out of public trash cans, of stealing coffee cups with minute particles of lip detritus, of swabbing drops of sweat from polo gear in a locker room.

The British antimonarchy group ThroneOut is calling for all members of the royal family, who occupy their positions based solely on heredity, to take DNA tests. The royal family’s response to these requests has been dignified silence, and reports indicate they are guarding their DNA more jealously than the crown jewels themselves.

Yet it is only a matter of time before a servant or acquaintance does acquire a hair, a coffee cup, or a bedsheet and hands it over for analysis. Modern science is now able to provide answers to the question marks of paternity that have punctuated history from the dawn of time. And the truth may not be what royal families want to hear.

It was never adultery alone that did in a queen, or the fact that she did not resemble the Virgin Mary, or that she had polluted the royal bloodline. It was politics.

If the queen followed the traditional pattern of bearing children, embroidering altar cloths, and interceding for the poor— pious duties that the Virgin Mary would likely have approved of—even if she took a lover she was usually left in peace. There was rarely reason to shoot down a political nonentity at court. But an intelligent ambitious woman who spoke her mind and built up a faction was always open to the accusation of adultery by her political rivals, whether the accusation was true or fabricated.

Adultery charges offered the accuser many benefits. The very mention of adultery suddenly cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the offspring of a suspected queen, possibly rendering them unfit for the throne and opening the door to other ambitious candidates—usually the accusers themselves.

In 830 Queen Judith of the Franks, the second wife of King Louis the Pious, found herself accused of adultery with a handsome court chamberlain. The accusers were her husband’s three sons by his first marriage who feared that Judith would influence their aging father to name her son, Charles, as his heir. Bristling with weapons, the three brothers forced their father to abdicate and imprisoned Judith in a convent. We don’t know if the queen committed adultery or not; we do know that the missiles of her enemies hit their mark and she was removed.

In those cases where a powerful man was accused of being the queen’s lover, we must assume that he and the queen had formed a faction that threatened other groups at court; whether or not the pair was in fact committing adultery was not the crucial question. In such a case, the powerful queen could be imprisoned in a convent, and her threatening lover executed, exiled, or imprisoned, his friends and relatives collapsing in the wake of his own disgrace. Very neatly, aiming only one poisoned dart at the queen, her enemy could remove the entire rival power base at court.

In 887 Queen Richardis of the East Franks, wife of King Charles the Fat, was accused of adultery with Bishop Liutward of Vercelli, the king’s powerful archchancellor. It was the custom at the time for an accused woman to defend her honor by walking over burning plowshares. If she emerged unharmed, God was protecting her because she was innocent. Only the guilty, it was assumed, would be burned to a crisp. Richardis came through the ordeal unscathed, retired to a convent, and was later made a saint. But her enemies had successfully removed her.

Character assassination which had proved so effective in the ninth century was alive and well a thousand years later. Napoleon, who hated the virtuous and beautiful Queen Louise of Prussia for egging her apathetic husband on to defend his country against the French, twisted her admiration for Czar Alexander of Russia into a slanderous story. The handsome blond czar had visited Prussia in 1805 and an instant bond sprang up between the czar and the queen. When French troops marched into the vacated royal palace in Potsdam, Napoleon was delighted to find Alexander’s portrait hanging in the queen’s bedroom. He did all he could to tarnish the lady’s unblemished reputation and make her bumbling husband, King Frederick William III, look like a cuckold. Stories of the pious queen’s sordid affair with the czar haunt her memory to this day.

It was harder for Napoleon to blacken the reputation of Louise’s aunt, Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, who had had numerous affairs with courtiers and a decades-long affair with her top minister. What outraged the prudish French emperor received only a shrug and a wink from the rowdy Neapolitans.

Stymied in his efforts to ruin the queen’s reputation, Napoleon invented the story of a lesbian affair between Maria Carolina and her friend Emma, Lady Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador and later the mistress of Admiral Horatio Nelson. Emma, the conqueror learned, would tiptoe up a secret stairway to the queen’s apartments, probably to deliver dispatches from British allies or perhaps just to avoid palace protocol and enjoy a cup of coffee. But Napoleon saw the secret staircase as proof of unnatural vice. Unfortunately for the French emperor, his dart did not hit home; the raucous Neapolitans were equally undisturbed by rumors of the queen’s lesbianism.

Some Italians gladly strangled erring wives with silken ribbons, but many more were cavalier about sexual escapades. When the theocrat Savonarola, who had held a moral stranglehold over the sex lives of Florentines, was burned at the stake in 1498, one high-level magistrate, eyeing the rising flames of the pyre, heaved a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank God,” he grunted. “Now we can return to our sodomy.” 8

Indeed, of all European nations, the king, court, and country of Naples was the least disturbed by stories of queenly adultery. When a stroke felled the sixty-one-year-old queen Maria Carolina in her sleep in 1814, her husband, King Ferdinand, loudly proclaimed that his forty-four years of marriage had been nothing short of martyrdom, and within two months he married his young mistress. Ferdinand’s son, the hereditary prince, sharply rebuked him for marrying a woman known to have enjoyed so many lovers. But the king, laughing, replied, “Think of your mamma, my boy!” 9

PRINCESSES WERE RAISED TO BE DEVOUT, OBEDIENT, AND faithful. When sent to meet their new husbands, they set off with every intention of retaining these vital qualities in their new lives. What happened over the years that made so many of them lose their religion, their obedience, and their fidelity?