A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART I - The Lust Emperors

  Chapter 1 - From Russia with Lots of Love

  Chapter 2 - French Kiss

  Chapter 3 - England Swings

  PART II - Six Royals Sinning

  Chapter 1 - Envy: If Anyone Should Oppose This Union

  Chapter 2 - Pride: Here Comes the Sun King

  Chapter 3 - Wrath: Have an Ice Day

  Chapter 4 - Gluttony: Eat, Drink, and Be Mocked

  Chapter 5 - Covetousness: Hail Mary, Full of Greed

  Chapter 6 - Sloth: An Idle Mind Is the Duchess’s Playground

  PART III - Unholy Matrimony

  Chapter 1 - Mad About You

  Chapter 2 - Until Divorce or Decapitation Do Us Part (in Six Sections)

  Chapter 3 - Head Over a Heel

  Chapter 4 - A Wedding! Let’s Celibate!

  Chapter 5 - Wails From the Vienna Wood

  Chapter 6 - A Marriage Made in Hell

  PART IV - Mom Was a Monster, Pop Was a Weasel

  Chapter 1 - How to Make a Bloody Mary

  Chapter 2 - Jane Grey’s Blues

  Chapter 3 - Hun, I Shrunk the Kid

  Chapter 4 - Peter the Not -So-Hot

  Chapter 5 - We Are Not Abused. We Are Abusive

  PART V - Royal Family Feud

  Chapter 1 - The Royal Raptors

  Chapter 2 - Crown of Thorns

  Chapter 3 - Trouble in the House of Tudor

  Chapter 4 - Shattered Sorority

  Chapter 5 - Dislike Father, Dislike Son

  Chapter 6 - In-Laws on the Outs

  Chapter 7 - The Battling Bonapartes

  PART VI - Strange Reigns

  Chapter 1 - Temper, Temper

  Chapter 2 - Swimming in a Shallow Gene Pool

  Chapter 3 - The Belle of Versailles

  Chapter 4 - A Great Mind Is a Terrible Thing

  Chapter 5 - Drool Britannia

  Chapter 6 - The Law Is an Ass

  Chapter 7 - The Eyes Have It

  PART VII - When in Rome

  Chapter 1 - The Rage of Tiberius

  Chapter 2 - Oh, God !

  Chapter 3 - I Claudius, Aren’t I?

  Chapter 4 - A Son Should Love His Mother, But . . .

  Chapter 5 - The Year of Living Dangerously

  PART VIII - Papal Vice

  Chapter 1 - Not So Dear Johns

  Chapter 2 - A Matter of Grave Consequence

  Chapter 3 - Her Holiness?

  Chapter 4 - King of Kings

  Chapter 5 - Innocent Proven Guilty

  Chapter 6 - Feel the Burn

  Chapter 7 - Papal Bully

  Chapter 8 - Will the Real Pope Please Rise?

  Chapter 9 - Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

  Chapter 10 - All the Holiness Money Can Buy

  Chapter 11 - Indulge Me If You Will

  Chapter 12 - In the Ghetto

  PART IX - Death Be Not Dignified

  Chapter 1 - A Tight Squeeze

  Chapter 2 - A Royal Pain in the Ass

  Chapter 3 - Spinning in Her Grave

  Chapter 4 - Strike Three

  Chapter 5 - Prescription for Disaster

  Chapter 6 - A Look of Detachment

  Chapter 7 - Eat Your Heart Out

  Chapter 8 - Royal Flush

  Chapter 9 - A Lot Off the Top

  Chapter 10 - The Case of the Purloined Penis

  Chapter 11 - Extreme Overkill

  Chapter 12 - It ’s Not Nice to Kill the King

  APPENDIX I - British Monarchs (1066-Present)

  APPENDIX II

  Appendix III - Russian Monarchs (1682-1917) The Romanovs

  APPENDIX IV

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A TREASURY OF ROYAL SCANDALS

  Michael Farquhar is a writer and editor at The Washington Post specializing in history. He is coauthor of The Century: History as It Happened on the Front Page of the Capital’s Newspaper, and his work has been published in The Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Reader’s Digest, and Discovery Online.

  Henry VIII

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in Penguin Books 2001

  Copyright © Michael Farquhar, 2001

  All rights reserved

  Illustration credits

  Frontispiece (ii), pages 28, 54, 100, 126, 172, 202, 260:

  The Granger Collection, New York.

  Page 2: © Leonard de Selva/CORBIS.

  Page 222: © Christel Gerstenberg/CORBIS.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-01039-6

  CIP data available

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated with love to my grandmother, Claire O’Donnell Donahue Courtney. What a life!

  All I say is, kings is kings and you got to make allowances.

  —Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Introduction

  The twentieth century was a slaughterhouse for European monarchy. Across the continent, scores of kings and queens were swept from their thrones in a frenzy of war and revolution. Those managing to cling to their crowns, meanwhile, have been rendered either faceless and bland, as in, say, Norway, or, as in Britain, regarded as little more than inane tabloid fodder.

  Maybe the decline of monarchy is for the best. After all, the notion that one individual—no matter how stupid or depraved—should by some fluke of birth hold dominion over all others is ridiculous and well past its prime. Still, there’s a void now. People with unlimited power and an inbred sense of their own superiority tended to misbehave. Royally. Democratically elected presidents and prime ministers—not to mention constitutionally constrained monarchs—simply can’t compete. Consequently, things are a lot duller these days, and what passes for scandal is almost laughable.

  So what if Charles and Diana were miserably married? He never slammed the doors of Westminster Abbey in her face, or buried pieces of her boyfriend under the floorboards of his palace. That was behavior typical of a bygone era celebrated in this treasury—a time of lusty kings and treacherous queens; of murderous tsars, insane emperors, and unholy popes (once the supreme monarchs in Europe). Toe sucking aside, Fergie and the rest of this generation’s royals can’t hold a scandal to their forbears. Not one of them has delivered anything worthy of the name, and are thus excluded from this collection.

  Some of the stories that do appear here are no doubt familiar to readers of history. But they are classics, and no anthology of royal bad behavior would be complete without them. Others have been mined from the past, largely unexposed. All of the stories showcase the rich assortment of scandals that once flourished across Eur
ope. And, thanks to the generations of royals who unwittingly created them, they remain immensely entertaining.

  Family Trees

  PART I

  The Lust Emperors

  “Lust’s passion will be served,” the French libertine and novelist Marquis de Sade once wrote. “It demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.” The Marquis might have added that this relentless vice has always been oblivious to social status. So, the whole theory behind royalty—that it conferred a certain exalted status over ordinary mortals; a place closer to God in the hierarchy of the universe—was compromised somewhat by the fact that kings and queens proved themselves to be every bit as sex-driven as the peons who served them. The only difference was that, from their positions of power, royal folk were able to serve the demands of lust more creatively and energetically than most.

  Henri III preening amongst his minions.

  1

  From Russia with Lots of Love

  Catherine the Great loved horses. She also loved sex. Contrary to popular legend, however, she never managed to unite the two passions. Still, the autocratic empress of Russia brought all the enthusiasm of a vigorous ride to her extremely busy bedroom.

  After ridding herself of her imbecile husband Peter III in 1762,1 Catherine grabbed the Russian crown and came to dominate her kingdom for the next thirty-four years. Boldly indulging herself as she grew more secure in her position, the empress consumed handsome young lovers with an appetite that sometimes shocked her contemporaries. “She’s no woman,” exclaimed one, “she’s a siren!”

  The empress relished her weakness for men, abandoning herself to a giddy romanticism that belied her cold and pragmatic rule. She loved being entertained, even into old age, by a succession of well-formed young studs eager to please her. “It is my misfortune that my heart cannot be content, even for one hour, without love,” she wrote.

  Sharing the empress’s bed brought ample rewards, not the least of which was an intimate proximity to power, but getting there wasn’t easy. A good body and a pleasant face, combined whenever possible with wit and intelligence, were merely starters. Potential lovers also had to have the right pedigree and pass a crucial test. Catherine had several ladies-in-waiting—test drivers of sorts—whose job it was to ensure that all candidates for their mistress’s bed were up to the highly demanding task of satisfying her.

  The applicants were most often supplied by the empress’s one-eyed ex-lover—the man many assumed to be her secret husband—Gregory Potemkin. She had fallen in love with this rough, hulking officer relatively early in her industrious sexual career, overcome by his brash courage, quick wit, and almost primitive sexuality. Wasting little time disposing of Alexander Vassilzhikov, her boyfriend at the time, Catherine was delighted the first night Potemkin came to her bedroom, naked under his nightshirt and ready for action. “I have parted from a certain excellent but very boring citizen,” the empress wrote to a confidante, “who has been replaced, I know not how, by one of the greatest, oddest, most amusing and original personalities of this Iron Age.”

  Because of his long greasy hair, and brutish unwashed body, many women found Potemkin repulsive. Catherine, however, reveled in his strength, charm, and sexual domination. She couldn’t get enough of this strange man who made her forget her royal dignity. Whenever they were parted, even for a few hours, she regaled him with an avalanche of feverish love notes, each peppered with at least one of her special pet names: “My marble beauty,” “my darling pet,” “my dearest doll,” “golden cock,” “lion of the jungle,” “my professional bon bon.”

  In one letter, she pretended to be shocked at the intensity of her passion and tried to get hold of herself: “I have issued strict orders to my whole body, down to the smallest hair on my head, not to show you the least sign of love. I have locked my love inside my heart and bolted it ten times, it is suffocating there, it is constrained, and I fear it may explode.” In other letters she gloried in his good company: “Darling, what comical stories you told me yesterday! I can’t stop laughing when I think of them . . . we spend four hours together without a shadow of boredom, and it is always with reluctance that I leave you. My dearest pigeon, I love you very much. You are handsome, intelligent, amusing.”

  Of course Catherine loved the sex, and in her exultation could sound much more like a bad romance novelist than the authoritarian empress of all the Russias:—“There is not a cell in my whole body that does not yearn for you, oh infidel! . . .”

  —“I thank you for yesterday’s feast. My little Grisha fed me and quenched my thirst, but not with wine. . . .”

  —“My head is like that of a cat in heat. . . .”

  —“I will be a ‘woman of fire’ for you, as you so often say. But I shall try to hide my flames.”

  Moody and temperamental, subject to bouts of black depression and fits of jealousy, Potemkin was sometimes lovingly scolded by his royal mistress: “There is a woman in the world who loves you and who has a right to a tender word from you, Imbecile, Tatar, Cossack, infidel, Muscovite, morbleu! ” The relationship was so physically intimate that Catherine did not hesitate to share even the most unflattering of ailments with him: “I have some diarrhea today, but apart from that, I am well, my adored one. . . . Do not be distressed because of my diarrhea, it cleans out the intestines.”

  There is no surviving evidence to support the rumor that Catherine secretly married Potemkin, although she often referred to him in her letters as “my beloved spouse,” or “my dearest husband.” Married or not, the relationship certainly transcended the bedroom as it evolved into a close political partnership. Catherine shared her vast kingdom with Potemkin as if he were her king. She consulted with him on all affairs of state, working closely with him on her ambitious plans to expand Russia’s borders and crush the Muslim Turks.

  The empress’s powerful lover is perhaps best remembered for the legendary “Potemkin Villages” he is said to have created for her benefit as she embarked on a grand tour of all the newly Russianized lands he had conquered for her. These “villages,” it was said, were little more than elaborate stage sets of prosperous towns, populated by cheerful serfs, all of which were quickly collapsed and set up again at the next stop on Catherine’s carefully plotted itinerary. The artificiality of the Potemkin Villages came to represent in the minds of many, Catherine’s superficial and halfhearted attempts to reform and liberalize her kingdom.

  Though the relationship with Potemkin endured until his death in 1791, the sexual intensity between them dimmed after only a few years. No longer champion of the empress’s boudoir, Potemkin resolved to retain her favor by pimping his replacements. He handpicked a steady succession of new lovers for his erstwhile mistress—all of whom paid him a handsome brokerage fee for the privilege of servicing her. There was Zavadovsky, followed by Zorich, followed by Rimsky-Korsakov, followed by Lanskoy, followed by Ermolov, followed by Mamonov and so on and on, and on.

  After being installed in the official apartment set aside for Catherine’s lovers, each new favorite was feted and adored by the passionate monarch with almost girlish enthusiasm. But each, in turn, was eventually dismissed, either for boring Catherine or breaking her heart. Few, however, left her service without a handsome settlement. When Zavadovsky was dismissed in 1776, for example, Chevalier de Corberon, the French chargé d’affaires in Russia, wrote that “He has received from Her Majesty 50,000 rubles, a pension of 5,000, and 4,000 peasants in the Ukraine, where they are worth a great deal [serfs at the time were trade-able commodities, like cattle]. . . . You must agree, my friend, that it’s not a bad line of work to be in here.”

  One ex-lover, Count Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, was even given the crown of Poland, although Catherine did eventually hack away huge chunks of his kingdom and absorb them into her own. All told, the generous payments to fallen lovers amounted to billions of dollars in today’s currency. When her friend, the French philosopher Voltaire, gently chided Catherine for inconsistency in her love aff
airs, she responded that she was, on the contrary, “absolutely faithful.”

  “To whom? To beauty, of course. Beauty alone attracts me!”

  2

  French Kiss

  Francis I was a true Renaissance monarch: warrior, grand patron of the arts, and skirt-chaser extraordinaire. This was a king who loved the ladies—lots and lots of ladies. “A court without women is a year without spring and a spring without roses,” the promiscuous French ruler once remarked. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm for plucking as many roses as possible, Francis gave his long-suffering queen a scorching case of syphilis. His son and heir, Henri II, was also a passionate adulterer. Rather than a sexually transmitted disease, though, he impetuously gave his favorite mistress, Diane de Poitiers, something else entirely: all the French crown jewels.

  Henri’s enchantment with Diane, who was old enough to be his mother, was in direct proportion to the distaste he had for his dumpy and unappealing queen, Catherine de Medici of Italy. Nevertheless, wife and mistress did develop a tenuous relationship of sorts. The queen quietly tolerated the affair, while her rival moved into the household and treated Catherine with a kind of contemptuous affection—even nursing her when she came down with scarlet fever. It was Diane who gently nudged the king out of her bed so he could sire legitimate children with his wife as duty demanded.

  Despite her general composure in light of the odd arrangement, the queen’s temper occasionally got the better of her. Once, during an argument with the king and his mistress over Henri’s policies toward her native land, Catherine disdainfully confronted Diane. “I have read the histories of this kingdom,” she informed her rival, “and I have found in them that from time to time at all periods whores have managed the business of kings.”