Sex with the Queen (12 page)

1661, the cardinal, looking about his magnificent possessions, cried, “I must leave all this! I’ll never see these things again!”13

He didn’t seem to object to never seeing the queen again, how-ever.

The widowed Catherine the Great was the most generous monarch to her lovers. Over a period of thirty-four years she doled out the equivalent of more than two billion dollars in cash, pensions, palaces, works of art, fine furnishings, and serfs. In the early 1790s, an English visitor to St. Petersburg—known as the Venice of the north because of its interconnecting waterways—reported, “A party was considering which of the canals had cost the most money; when one of them archly ob-served there was not a doubt about the matter; Catherine’s Canal (this is the name of one of them) had unquestionably been the most expensive.”14

G o v e r n m e n t a n d M i l i t a r y P o s i t i o n s Unlike the royal mistress who, even if she wielded significant po-litical power behind the scenes, had no official political title, certain royal lovers were made prime minister, some of them with excellent results. For thirty years starting in 1777 the British naval officer Sir John Acton ran Naples efficiently for his mis-tress, Queen Maria Carolina. During World War I one of Eu-rope’s most capable politicians was Barbo Stirbey, lover of Queen Marie of Romania. Her husband, the weak and vacillat-ing King Ferdinand, relied on Stirbey to steer his nation through the turmoil of war and into a golden age in the 1920s.

When Ferdinand died in 1927, Stirbey ruled Romania as prime minister for Marie’s young grandson, King Michael.

But not all royal lovers were suited for the position of prime minister. With the acquiescence of her mentally deranged hus-band, King Christian VII of Denmark, in 1771 Queen Caroline Matilda made her lover, Johann von Struensee, prime minister.

Though possessed of great social vision, Struensee made so many new laws so quickly that Denmark erupted in rebellion and con-spiracy.

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

In 1792 Queen Maria Luisa of Spain made twenty-five-year-old Manuel Godoy prime minister. The queen’s lover had much to learn—upon taking up his duties he thought Russia and Prus-sia were the same country. When the saber-rattling Napoleon insisted on Spain’s support against Britain, and Britain urged Spain to fight Napoleon, poor Godoy was at a loss. For years he struggled to maintain an uneasy neutrality. But, as the late-seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, “To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the mid-dle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.”15 Drenched
and
smoked out, Godoy and the Spanish royal family spent several years in genteel imprisonment in France after Napoleon conquered Spain and put his brother Joseph on the throne.

More dangerous even than giving their lovers top political of-fices, many queens bestowed on them the highest military positions—the rank of general or field marshal—and expected them with little or no battlefield experience to lead men to war.

It was a perilous custom to appoint to such a crucial position a man whose most impressive qualifications were below the waist and not above the shoulders.

When Empress Sophie of Russia fielded an army in 1687, she appointed her lover Prince Basil Golitzin the commanding gen-eral. In vain he protested that he was a diplomat and politician, not a soldier; she refused to listen. When he returned from a disastrous campaign against the Tatars, she welcomed him back to victory paeans, though some forty thousand men had been lost to fire, suffocation, or flight, and not a single battle had been fought. Undeterred, the empress sent him to war two years later in Crimea, where Golitzin lost thirty-five thousand men.

In the 1790s Manuel Godoy was proclaimed admiral general of Spain and the Indies. He strutted impressively in his naval uniform and bicorn hat with plumes; but Godoy hated boats and open water, and whenever he went onboard to inspect a ship, he tried to quell rising nausea.

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H o n o r a r y M e d a l s

If a king gave his mistress an obscenely expensive diamond neck-lace, all other women at court would turn pea green with envy.

Naturally, such a gift was not suitable for a man; the queen’s lover wanted honorary orders for distinguished service, medals edged with dazzling diamonds and colorful fluttering ribbons.

Many of these men had never fought a battle in their lives, but still eagerly sought decorations for martial valor. Their goal was to stride through palace corridors with an entire galaxy of shim-mering stars and clanking medals on their chests.

Catherine the Great’s lover Gregory Potemkin was made a knight of the Order of St. Andrew, Russia’s highest order. He was given the Black Eagle by Prussia and the White Eagle by Poland. Denmark bestowed upon him the Order of the Ele-phant, and Sweden the St. Seraph. Joseph II of Austria made him a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Louis XV balked at giving the empress’s lover the Order of the Holy Ghost, claiming it was only for Roman Catholics, and the prudish George III flat out refused to give him the Order of the Garter. But Potemkin’s battlefield courage and political acumen made him a worthy re-cipient of such honors.

Many noble dinner guests of Caroline, Princess of Wales, protested at sitting down at the same table with her lover Bar-tolomeo Pergami, a man of humble birth. No European mon-archs wanted to bestow upon him their elite orders. In 1816 the princess took ship to Malta, where she arranged for her lover to become a knight of Malta. Then she traveled to Jerusalem, where she founded a new knighthood called the Order of Saint Caro-line, and appointed Pergami the master of the order. In Sicily she bought Pergami the small estate of Franchini, which ren-dered him a baron. The new baron Pergami della Franchini, knight of the Order of Malta, master of the Order of St. Caro-line, was now sufficiently exalted under British rules of etiquette to sit down at Caroline’s table, though guests still grumbled about his low birth.

In the late 1830s Queen Victoria’s mother, Victoire, the s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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duchess of Kent, wanted to reward her lover John Conroy. But Queen Victoria, who despised her mother’s lover, firmly blocked the path in Britain to any honors. The resourceful Vic-toire, a German princess, twisted a few arms and arranged for German principalities to give him decorations and medals. The duchess arranged for him to be called “excellency”—but only in Germany, which galled him.

The duchess further obtained an award for Conroy from Por-tugal, which included the signal honor that wherever he walked, guards preceding him would drum in his honor. But Conroy never made it to Portugal, even though he tried to organize sev-eral trips over the years—just to hear the drums.

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T H R E E

m e d i e v a l q u e e n s ,

t u d o r v i c t i m s

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

— w i l l i a m s h a k e s p e a r e

I

H u m a n na t u r e b e i n g w h a t i t i s , w e c a n a s s u m e t h a t back in the cave the mate of the powerful chief—the man who wielded a big stick to bring home mammoth meat—looked with lust upon a muscular young hunter and wondered about the size of his stick. Alas, records of Ice Age love affairs simply don’t exist.

Nor are there many records that attest to medieval queens taking lovers. Expected to reflect the virtues of the Virgin Mary, most queens probably never considered adultery as an option, no matter how horrible their husbands were. And yet, having ex-amined the emptiness of palace life and the sorrows of the mari-tal bed, well can we understand why a queen would have been unfaithful. Looking at the earliest stories of adulterous queens, 5 5

we are unsure whether to condemn their weakness or applaud their courage.

In 1109 King Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon forced his wid-owed daughter and heir, Princess Urraca, to marry Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragon. Feeling his end drawing near, Alfonso VI wanted his daughter to have the protection of a fierce warrior husband at her side. He died soon after the wedding and never saw Alfonso of Aragon and Urraca of Castile and Leon battling
each other
for decades. Though valiant on the battlefield, Alfonso was probably useless in bed; no one at court could comprehend his aversion to whores, mistresses, and women in general. Ur-raca detested her husband and soon abandoned him.