Sex with the Queen (14 page)

habilitated as Queen Mother. All her sins were thrown onto the shade of Roger Mortimer.

Perhaps to make up for the misdeeds of the past, Isabella became quite pious, frequently visiting saints’ shrines. In her lavish apartments songbirds sang their sweet melodies, and min-strels played courtly tunes. For the Saint George’s Day celebra-tions in 1358, shortly before her death at the age of sixty-two, she wore a circlet of gold on her head, belts of silk studded with sil-ver, eighteen hundred pearls (probably seed pearls), and three hundred rubies. She was buried, oddly enough, in her wedding gown, holding the casket of her husband’s heart, which she had never truly possessed while he was alive.

J u a n a o f P o r t u g a l , Q u e e n o f C a s t i l e : T h e G o l d e n T u r k e y B a s t e r While Edward II fathered four children with Isabella, another early king thought to be homosexual, Enrique IV of Castile, could not rise to the occasion with either of his two wives, no matter how hard he tried. Yet this resourceful monarch came up with a novel plan—an early form of artificial insemination.

A large shambling man, painfully shy and eternally forlorn, Enrique had gorgeous golden hair and dreamy blue-green eyes which contrasted strangely with his huge yellow horses’ teeth and a flat crooked nose, broken in a childhood accident. He rarely bathed, perhaps because he had a bizarre fascination for repul-sive odors.

While still heir to the throne, the fifteen-year-old Enrique was married to Princess Blanca of Navarre, daughter of King Juan of Aragon, in 1440. When the couple was put to bed, her-alds stood guard at the door ready to blast their trumpets when the bloody sheets were brought out. Three notaries sat next to the bed, quills poised to record the first shriek or moan as proof of consummation. Stripped of her white nightgown, Blanca slid between the sheets. Enrique entered and slipped in beside her.

The bed curtains were closed. The notaries seated themselves, leaning forward, listening intently. The candles burned down, 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 6 1

guttering in the deadly silence of the room. The notaries shifted uneasily on the hard bench.

Outside waited crowds of courtiers, as well as Enrique’s fa-ther, King Juan II. But no bloody sheet came out as proof.

Nothing happened. Finally the notaries gave up and went to bed.

One report related, “The Princess remained exactly as she had been born.”10

Many hoped that with time the fifteen-year-old prince would fulfill his connubial duties; perhaps his youth and the frayed nerves of the wedding night had frightened him. But the months went by, and then the years, and no bloody sheet
ever
emerged.

Some whispered that the prince was homosexual, and indeed he kept company with men known to be gay.

It was a somber event indeed when the ruler of a Spanish kingdom—Castile, Leon, Aragon, Galicia, or Valencia—died without an heir. Fractious neighboring kingdoms, all jockeying for superiority, were eager to swoop down upon his realm and claim it for themselves. When, after thirteen years of marriage, Blanca still remained a virgin, the archbishop of Toledo moved to annul the marriage on the grounds of nonconsummation.

Blanca shamefacedly took the stand and swore she was still a virgin. She underwent a physical examination by honorable ma-trons who declared her to be as “whole as the day she was born.”11

She was sent back to her father, who was furious with her for not being able to rouse her husband to his bedtime duties.

When doctors examined Enrique, they found that His Majesty’s “penis was thin and weak at the base, but huge at the head, with the result that he could not have an erection.”12 He began to be known as “Enrique the Impotent.”

But the king did not agree that he was hopelessly incapable of making love to a woman. A new wife was needed, he claimed.

Clearly his penis had been bewitched with regard to Blanca, but he had hopes that he could be aroused with a different woman and could sire an heir. As soon as he became king in 1454, En-rique ordered a new bride, Princess Juana of Portugal. The sixteen-year-old princess had flashing dark eyes, long black hair, and tawny skin. She was sleek, sinuous, and flirtatious. Freshly s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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scrubbed and scented after her journey, she must have been re-volted when she met her groom, tall and hunched and hulking, smelling of sweat and horse.

After the wedding ceremony, the royal couple entered the bedchamber. The king had fortified himself with the Viagra of the time, broth of bulls’ testicles mixed with powder of porcupine quills. He refused to allow notaries in the room. No sheet show-ing that night, he announced. But it was all in vain because, once more, it was reported that “the King and Queen slept in the same bed, and the Queen remained as intact as she had arrived.”13

Desperate for an heir, Enrique attempted a crude type of ar-tificial insemination. The king was masturbated—by whom rec-ords don’t say, perhaps by a doctor. The bit of ejaculate coaxed out of him, which was described as “watery,” was inserted by means of a kind of golden turkey baster into the queen, who was lying in bed with her legs in the air. It must have been horribly humiliating for both.

In 1461 the queen was pregnant. Enrique was delighted, thrilled; finally he had proved himself a man. The golden turkey baster had worked, and, although it had not been accomplished in the usual way, he was going to have a child. But courtiers merely snickered. They knew the queen had been allowing a handsome young courtier, Beltran de la Cueva, into her cham-ber. In February a little girl was born, a princess named Juana after her mother, but whom Castilian courtiers and soon all of Europe nicknamed “La Beltraneja” after her real father. And indeed she was his spitting image.

The king later divorced his erring wife, who continued to get pregnant long after Enrique had stopped trying the golden turkey baster trick. Enrique named his younger half sister Isabel of Castile as his heir. The two of them signed a joint document proclaiming that Queen Juana “had not used her person cleanly as complies with the service of the king nor her own.”14 Isabel married Prince Ferdinand of Aragon, and together they launched Columbus into the New World. They also launched the inconvenient princess Juana la Beltraneja into a convent where she could make no claims on their throne.

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 6 3

A n n e B o l e y n , Q u e e n o f E n g l a n d

“She Excelled Them All”

It is ironic that the most famous queen ever executed for adul-tery was wholly innocent. The raven-haired Anne Boleyn, though she was vicious and vengeful and had a heart like a chunk of ice and a tongue as sharp and tearing as a meat cleaver, had always been faithful to her marriage bed. But it was never sex alone that did in a queen, even if Anne had been guilty. It was politics.

In 1526 Henry VIII, casting about court for a new mistress, fell passionately in love with Anne, the nineteen-year-old niece of the powerful Howard clan. Ambitious in a world where women held little power, Anne realized that as royal mistress she could whisper suggestions into the king’s ear after lovemaking, seeds that often took root and bore fruit. But her older sister Mary, blond and soft and pretty, had been Henry VIII’s mistress and was cast aside like used goods. No. Anne would never stand for that.

And then she looked at the queen, old and barren at forty-one, hobbled with arthritis, her waist thick from years of fruitless childbearing. Henry had not slept with Queen Catherine, a Spanish princess, in years. All the queen’s children, except a useless girl, had died at birth. Why should Henry not divorce his barren wife and marry young fertile Anne to beget sons? Queen Anne. Ah, that would be power indeed.

At thirty-five, Henry was at his physical peak. He stood six foot one, a giant for his time. He was powerful in his physique, and though he had gained weight recently he carried it magnifi-cently beneath his padded, broad-shouldered coats. He had short red-gold hair and a cropped beard. His ice blue eyes were small, intense, and never missed a thing.

Henry was the quintessential Renaissance man. He played the lute, the virginals (an early kind of organ), the recorder, and the harp. He wrote music, sang, and pirouetted gracefully on the dance floor. He spoke four languages fluently, composed poetry and music, and pursued astronomy and science. An avid s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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sportsman, he rode, jousted, threw spears, bowled, and played tennis. Henry was a man of keen intellect, deep religious devo-tion, and outbursts of vicious cruelty. He was an utterly selfish man who could not bear to hear he would not get his way. And now he wanted his way with Anne Boleyn. And ambitious Anne wanted her way with him.

But to keep the king interested for the years it would take to unharness himself from Queen Catherine, Anne had to awaken his desires without assuaging them. And so she became his mis-tress in all things but sex. Vivacious Anne offered Henry friend-ship, entertainment, witty conversation, challenging political dialog, and theological debates. She danced, sang, played the lute, hunted with him, and organized tournaments and pageants for his amusement. Anne held out the promise of incredible sex and numerous sons to her overheated monarch, if only he would divorce his faithful queen and marry her.

Like many royal mistresses before and since, Anne was no classic beauty but made up for it with charm and personality—she made a room crackle with life by simply stepping into it. A palace servant remembered Anne “for her excellent grace and behav-ior.” Another wrote, “Albeit in beauty she was to many inferior, but for behavior, manner, attire and tongue, she excelled them all, for she had been brought up in France.”15 Her greatest asset was her rapid-fire wit. Conversing with Anne was akin to fenc-ing, the thrusts and retreats of sharp blades.

The Venetian ambassador wrote, “Madame Anne is not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English king’s great ap-petite and her eyes, which are black and beautiful.”16 Her un-bounded self-confidence made her seem beautiful, though her skin was a bit sallow, her chest a bit flat.