Sex with the Queen (51 page)

In Celle, Matilda led a quiet but active life. She gave card par-ties, plied her needle, attended church, and worked with her gardeners. Riding no longer attracted her—it reminded her too much of Struensee—and the lack of exercise resulted in a tremendous weight gain. Though many noticed a deep sadness lurking just beneath her pleasant demeanor, she never com-plained and always tried to be cheerful. Receiving no news of her own children, she gave parties for the town children and adopted an orphan, a four-year-old girl named Sophie, whom she took into the palace to live with her. Little did she know that a group of conspirators was plotting her return to power.

Gloating and vindictive, Juliana had made many enemies; powerful groups were agitating for Matilda to replace her and needed to make her aware of their plans. But surrounded by spies, Matilda was hard to reach. Finally a twenty-two-year-old conspirator named Nathaniel Wraxall presented himself as a traveling Englishman and was allowed to meet her. In whispers he informed her of the plot, to which she immediately agreed.

Wraxall then left for London in a futile attempt to get official support from George III.

When Wraxall again visited Matilda, she declared herself ready at a moment’s notice to go to Copenhagen and take up the government—if she obtained at least written permission from George III to leave Celle. When she and the conspirators had en-tered Copenhagen, they would sneak into the palace, find Christian, and have him sign a paper authorizing their coup. As the interview ended, Wraxall noticed that Matilda looked aston-ishingly beautiful in her crimson satin gown, her powdered hair coiffed high. Perhaps hope for the future had given a sparkle to her eye, a flush to her cheeks. She was halfway out the door when she paused and looked as if she were about to speak. Then she turned around and disappeared.

Wraxall set off once again for London just as an epidemic—scarlet fever or typhus—broke out in Celle. Matilda’s young page died, and the next evening Matilda suddenly jumped up and an-nounced that she would see the boy’s body before burial. Her at-tendants begged her not to—viewing the body of an epidemic e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 2 3 3

victim was often an indirect means of committing suicide—but Matilda raced to the room where the child was laid out and stood next to the open casket.

The next day her adopted daughter, Sophie, became ill. Ter-ribly distressed at the possible loss of another child, Matilda paced for hours in her garden. She returned to her rooms ex-hausted, and over dinner developed a sore throat and fever. Her physicians believed she would recover, but she seemed to have no will to live. Perhaps she had hoped to catch the infection after all. On May 11, 1775, she was told that little Sophie was out of danger. “Then I can die happy,” she said, closing her eyes.94 She never opened them again. Within days she was dead. She was twenty-three.

It was an easy, simple death after a life of insanity, adultery, betrayal, and imprisonment. Her pastor wrote, “I never remem-ber so easy a dissolution, or one in which death lost all its ter-rors. . . . She fell asleep like a tired traveler.”95

And so Matilda found her freedom, but not in the way the conspirators had intended. Upon hearing the news of her death, Dowager Queen Juliana attended a ball that evening. In London, Wraxall was devastated to hear the news; he had been stewing for weeks in the hopes that he could meet privately with George III, but the king had made no response to his urgent requests.

When Matilda’s son, Frederick, was sixteen—two years past the time Juliana was legally obligated to hand over her power—he grabbed his imbecile father and made him sign a document ap-pointing him, Frederick, regent. There was quite a scuffle among Juliana’s supporters trying to pry the little imbecile king from the strong grip of the crown prince, but Matilda’s son won the day. King Frederick VI ruled as one of Denmark’s best-loved monarchs. Juliana retired from court and died in 1796, and for many years visitors spat on her grave.

Hearing of his sister’s death, George III refused her request to repose in Westminster Abbey next to her ancestors. But per-haps, after all, it is more appropriate that she lies next to Sophia Dorothea in St. Mary’s Church crypt of Celle.

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S E V E N

t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y : a u d a c i t y a n d o u t r a g e

Of all my lands is nothing left me but my body’s length?

Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?

And live we how we can, yet die we must.

— w i l l i a m s h a k e s p e a r e

I

T h e N a p o l e o n i c Q u e e n

“Liberty Is in Her Mouth,

Equality in Her Heart and Fraternity in Her Garters”

Napoleon Bonaparte prized female chastity just a little below military might. It was his great misfortune to have two wives who betrayed him—Josephine before he became emperor, and the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise after his abdication—as well as three sisters and a stepdaughter who embarrassed him with their love affairs.

While Napoleon was still a rising general, he fell desperately in love with Josephine de Beauharnais, a charming widowed aristocrat rescued from the jaws of the guillotine when the revo-lutionary government fell a day before her scheduled execution.

Napoleon pressed her to marry him, and Josephine, knowing that her fading looks and rotten teeth signaled the end of her lu-crative career as a high-class prostitute, reluctantly agreed. She 2 3 5

told friends that she “had to overcome a feeling of repugnance before I could bring myself to marry ‘the little general.’ ”1

On campaign, Napoleon wrote her passionate love letters.

Mentioning her “little Black Forest,” he wrote, “I kiss it a thou-sand times and I await impatiently the moment of being inside.”2

But Napoleon was not the only man wandering around in the little Black Forest. When her husband was fighting in Italy, Josephine had a torrid affair with a lusty aide-de-camp named Hippolyte Charles, a muscular young man with dancing blue eyes and bouncing black curls. In July 1798 the Paris gossip reached Napoleon, who was now waging war in Egypt. Absolutely devastated, he openly took mistresses himself. When he returned home the following year he was prepared to divorce her. Faced with her abject pleas for mercy, he forgave her, content merely to torture her with recounting details of his mistresses’ private parts for the rest of their marriage.

In 1811, having divorced Josephine to marry the eighteen-year-old Hapsburg archduchess Marie Louise, Napoleon finally had the son Josephine could never provide him. But in 1814, toppled from his self-made throne, Napoleon waited impa-tiently on the island of Elba for his wife to join him. Emperor Francis II of Austria, horrified that his daughter would remain tethered to the bane of Europe, sent an attractive equerry to bring her back to Vienna—by way of several luxurious spas where revitalizing waters helped love blossom, if not health. The em-peror’s plan worked perfectly. Marie Louise bore General Adam von Neipperg three illegitimate children in secrecy. As soon as Napoleon died in 1821, she married her lover.

Napoleon’s sister Elise, whom he made queen of Tuscany, took poets and artists as lovers, but with enough discretion so as not to ruffle the imperial plumage. However, his sister Caroline, whom he made queen of Naples, was less discreet. English news-papers reported, “Liberty is in her mouth, equality in her heart and fraternity in her garters.”3

Pauline, the most beautiful Bonaparte sister, caused Napoleon the greatest irritation. Bored with life as the wife of Roman prince Camillo Borghese—who was unsatisfying in bed 2 3 6

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and perhaps gay—Pauline agitated to return to the delights of Paris. Napoleon refused and Pauline plotted her revenge. She commissioned the renowned sculptor Antonio Canova to make a statue of herself, posing languishing on a chaise lounge almost naked, wearing only a thin veneer of drapery over her hips, her breasts thrusting proudly outward. Europe was scandalized, and thrilled. Napoleon was furious, and Pauline was delighted at his fury. Having advertised her wares in the form of the statue, she could now take her pick of Europe’s most hot-blooded men, and soon there was a revolving door into her bedroom—elegant courtiers, soldiers throbbing with virility, famous actors, and talented musicians.

Even Josephine’s blushing daughter, Hortense, wretchedly married to Napoleon’s brother King Louis of the Netherlands, bore two illegitimate children. The child born in 1809—who grew up to become Emperor Napoleon III of France—Hortense pawned off on Louis, who vociferously denied to the pope and all the courts of Europe that the child was his. Realizing she couldn’t foist the next one on her husband, in 1811 she had a child in secrecy who was raised by her lover’s mother.

Napoleon’s irritation at his female relatives, however, was tempered by his delight in watching his fiercest enemy, Britain’s prince regent, suffering the messiest, most scandalous marriage of any monarch ever.

C a r o l i n e o f B r u n s w i c k ,

Q u e e n o f B r i t a i n

“I Never Did Commit Adulter y but Once”

In 1795 the British envoy Lord Malmesbury traveled to the Ger-man duchy of Brunswick to escort Princess Caroline to London as the bride of George, Prince of Wales. Thirty-two-year-old George had agreed to marry a German princess only because he was up to his ears in debt, and Parliament offered him a sub-stantial bribe if he would finally do his royal duty and wed. He had, in fact, already married a devout Catholic widow, Maria t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y

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