Eleanor Herman: Sex with the Queen

When the princess objected that she had never met the proposed bridegroom, the minister gravely replied, “As you are not acquainted with him, Madam, you cannot possibly have any aversion for him.” 9

Until the mid-nineteenth century, most princesses never met their husbands until after they were married by proxy, ceremonies held in two locales, the home cities of the affianced pair. In each ceremony, a person of honorable character stood in for the missing bride or groom and went through a church wedding, giving or receiving a ring.

Oddly, the proxy wedding ceremony was followed by a proxy bedding ceremony, in which the bride and her stand-in groom would meet in the royal four-poster bed, with all the wedding guests crowding around to watch. Wearing an ornate ruffled nightdress, the bride would lie down. The stand-in groom, fully clothed, would remove his boots and stockings, lie down beside the bride, and touch her bare foot with his. And in this way was a proxy marriage consummated.

A proxy wedding offered many advantages. It ratified the dowry, trade agreements, military alliances, and treaties before the bride set out. Moreover, the honor of the princess was assured: she would be traveling out of her native land as a married woman to meet her husband. It held the added benefit that the groom, should he be revolted by the first sight of his new wife, or the bride, disgusted by the looks of her husband, could not return the goods. A second marriage ceremony was held with both bride and groom taking part, but after the proxy wedding it was too late to get out of the marriage without legal difficulty.

In 1672 the twenty-year-old Princess Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate set off from her home in Heidelberg to meet the husband she had already married by proxy, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, the transvestite brother of Louis XIV of France. Throughout the journey, the bride wept bitterly. She had heard of her husband’s proclivity for young men, and the rumor that one of his lovers had poisoned his first wife in a fit of jealousy.

When the bride and groom met, they took one look at each other and gasped. She saw a long aristocratic nose emerging from a huge frizzy black wig, diamond earrings, cascading rows of lace and ruffles, dozens of clanking bracelets, beribboned pantaloons, and high-heeled shoes. The prince saw a flat broad face, freshly scrubbed from her journey, tiny blue pig eyes, and a broad German rear end. He whispered to his gentlemen, “Oh! How can I sleep with that?” 10

Once lodged in Versailles, Elizabeth Charlotte found that the golden magnificence of her new home did nothing to assuage her raw pain. “Between ourselves I was stuck here against my will,” she lamented to her beloved aunt, Duchess Sophia of Hanover. “Here I must live, and here I must die, whether I like it or not.” 11On occasion, over the decades, she thought of “simply running away” from her horrible husband and the vicious malice at court. 12Though sometimes she grew feisty and, squaring her shoulders, resolutely declared, “He who dies of threats must be buried with donkey farts.” 13

As Elizabeth Charlotte and her husband, who was called Monsieur, grew older, he alienated her by giving her gowns and jewelry to his male lovers. Away from court rituals, in the privacy of their elegant Versailles apartment, they often found they had nothing to say to each other. She wrote Duchess Sophia about an evening she had spent with her husband and their grown children. “After a long silence,” she recalled, “Monsieur, who did not consider us good enough company to talk to us, made a great loud fart, by your leave, turned toward me, and said, ‘What is that, Madame?’ I turned my behind toward him, let out one of the selfsame tone, and said, ‘That’s what it is, Monsieur.’ My son said, ‘If that’s all it is, I can do as well as Monsieur and Madame,’ and he also let go of a good one….These are princely conversations….” 14

In 1768 Archduchess Maria Carolina of Austria boarded the gaily bedecked vessel that would transport her to reign over Naples with the husband she had already married by proxy. Looking out across the sea, the fifteen-year-old declared she would be far better off if someone would only throw her in.

King Ferdinand IV, her seventeen-year-old groom, was often covered with herpes lesions which his doctors considered to be a sign of rude good health. He had received almost no education; his brothers were incurably insane, and his tutors feared that any mental effort would topple Ferdinand over the edge as well. The king loved to pinch his courtiers’ rear ends and put marmalade in their hats when they weren’t looking. He would go to sea with the fishermen of Naples and sell his catch at a market stall, haggling with buyers over the price and loudly cursing them.

On the morning after his wedding to Maria Carolina, King Ferdinand was asked how he had enjoyed his bride. Shaking his head, the king reported, “She sleeps as if she had been killed, and sweats like a pig.” 15

After eating a meal in public—a special event where the monarch sat alone on a platform surrounded by gawking spectators of all classes—Ferdinand would then call for his chamber pot and, to the delight of his audience, defecate proudly. Aside from public meals, the king insisted on company whenever he heeded the call of Nature. In 1771 Maria Carolina’s brother Joseph II of Austria visited the Neapolitan monarchs and was perplexed to receive an invitation to accompany the king to his chamber pot after dinner.

“I found him on this throne with lowered breeches,” Joseph wrote to his family in Vienna, “surrounded by five or six valets, chamberlains and others. We made conversation for more than half an hour, and I believe he would be there still if a terrible stench had not convinced us that all was over. He did not fail to describe the details and even wished to show them to us; and without more ado, his breeches down, he ran with the smelly pot in one hand after two of his gentlemen, who took to their heels. I retired quietly to my sister’s, without being able to relate how this scene ended, and if they got off with only a good scare.” 16

The luxurious trains and opulent steamboats of the Victorian era resulted in young royals at least meeting each other before agreeing to marry. Even so, most marriages were unhappy. In 1891 Princess Louisa of Tuscany married Prince Frederick Augustus, the heir to the Saxon throne. The prince won Louisa over with his gentle manner and striking blond good looks. Yet years later, disenchanted, she wrote in her memoirs, “Although every princess doubtless at some time dreams of an ideal Prince Charming, she rarely meets him, and she usually marries some one quite different from the hero of her girlhood’s dreams.” 17

While palace life was no bed of roses, a queen’s sex life, that most intimate aspect of a woman’s relationship with her husband, was sometimes downright horrifying. Many a princess was completely unacquainted with her wedding-night duties and surprised 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 husband, 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.