“Bah! Maman,” Philippe quipped, “in the night all cats are gray.”42
3. Rivals for a King’s Love—The Mistress and the Queen
Never has a woman who loves her husband liked his whore.
IN 1726 QUEEN SOPHIA DOROTHEA OF PRUSSIA, ADVISING HER daughter Wilhelmina on a possible marriage to Prince Frederick William of England, remarked that the young man was “a good-natured prince, kind-hearted but very foolish. If you will have sense enough to tolerate his mistresses, you will be able to do what you like with him.”1
A princess, trained from birth for the lofty role she would play as queen, understood the likelihood of her future husband’s keeping a mistress. She had only to look about her own court to see the mistresses of her father, uncles, and brothers.
And yet the blushing royal bride invariably hoped her husband would be the exception; her husband would disport himself only in the sacred bower of Hymen, never returning to the sullied bed of Jezebel. Almost as invariably, she was disappointed.
Raised as a hothouse flower, a princess was rudely plucked from her native soil and tossed into a cold foreign land where she would, over time, wilt. Blinded by tears, she boarded the gaily bedecked vessel to take her to her new country, knowing she would probably never see her parents, sisters, brothers, or friends again. Heart pounding with fear, she would disembark in a country where she could barely understand the language. To the jubilant ringing of church bells and the hearty crackling of bonfires, she would be taken to a court with alien customs, fashions, and politics.
Initially, the princess bride, the new queen, was the blazing star of the court. Courtiers bowed and scraped before her, gave her expensive gifts, made pretty compliments, scurried behind her. But when the drum roll of the wedding festivities died down, the church bells were silenced, and the bonfires turned to ash, scheming courtiers usually grouped themselves around the king’s dashing mistress rather than his dull foreign queen.
For all her vaunted position, the queen was at the mercy of her husband’s whims as much as any woman in the kingdom. The king alone decided whether his wife would enjoy spacious royal apartments at the heart of the palace or cramped cold rooms in a distant wing. The king chose as her ladies-in-waiting either the young and radiant or the old and withered. The king determined whether she would live in luxurious splendor or pinch-fisted penury. The king instructed her either to attend royal events—balls, feasts, garden parties, theatrical performances—or to remain sequestered in her rooms.
Courtiers aped the king’s treatment of the queen. If he treated her with respect, so did they. If he ignored and insulted her, so did they. If the queen was to remain a significant presence at court, she required her husband’s staunch support.
The king’s support for his wife, however, was often conditional, depending on how well the queen treated his mistress.
“He is my lord”
“It is easier to make peace in Europe than between two women,” lamented Louis XIV in the 1670s.2 History, before and after the Sun King, proved him correct.
Legend has it that in 1176 fifty-four-year-old Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine poisoned the beautiful young mistress of her husband, Henry II of England. Or stabbed her. Or drowned her in her bath. No one is certain, though the legend probably arose from the obvious hatred Eleanor bore Rosamund de Clifford, who was no mere sex partner, but the queen’s rival at court. What is certain is that prickly Eleanor, bristling at her husband’s flagrant adulteries, plotted to overthrow Henry. Dressed as a man to escape her husband’s wrath, Eleanor was captured fleeing on horseback and spent the last sixteen years of Henry’s life in prison.
Life was easier for the queen who could meekly accept her husband’s philandering. In the 1440s Queen Marie of France remained on good terms with Agnes Sorel, the mistress of her husband, Charles VII. A Flemish visitor to the court pitied the plain queen, ferret-faced with large, frightened eyes and a long, inquisitive nose. Marie, who had never been close to pretty even at the peak of her youth, endured the golden loveliness of her husband’s mistress at her side most of the time. The queen, the visitor wrote, was forced “to see her rival walk beside her and remain near her every day, to have her household in the King’s palace, to enjoy the company and all the gatherings of the lords and the nobility, to appear before her, to possess more beautiful bedclothes, better rings and jewels, enjoy a better table and better everything. And with all this she must not only put up, but rather make it seem a pleasure.”3
While pious Queen Marie always wore black after four of her fourteen children died, Agnes led the fashions at court. The courtier Jean Juvenal des Ursins was perturbed by what he considered indecency and sniffed that the king should not allow necklines so low that nipples and breasts were exposed. But apparently the king liked this fashion, as he made no move to ban it.
Marie, uncomplaining, devoted herself to her household, her religious duties, and her offspring. “He is my lord, he has authority over all my actions and I over none,” the devoted wife repeated dutifully.4 It would be a useful motto for queens in the centuries to come.
“The Contempt of the world”
On a gentle May morning in 1662, the ship carrying twenty-three-year-old Catherine Braganza, princess of Portugal, entered Portsmouth harbor. Though no great beauty and a Catholic to boot, Catherine had been chosen as the wife of King Charles II for the rich dowry she trailed in her wake—the cession of Bombay and Tangier, which would open up India to England.
Standing on the ship’s deck, tiny brunette Catherine was all hope and eagerness and fear. Hope that she would be a good queen, a beloved wife, a happy mother. Eagerness to meet her husband—handsome, swarthy Charles. Fear of finding herself cast adrift on foreign shores without her family.
But in addition to hope, eagerness, and fear, Catherine came to England armed with steely resolve. She had promised her mother, Portugal’s fierce queen regent, that she would never, ever tolerate Charles’s infamous mistress, Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, at her court. Her mother had lectured Catherine about this auburn-haired hussy who brazenly betrayed a good husband, raped the treasury, had given the king one royal bastard nine months after their liaison began, and was already pregnant again.
Sir John Reresby, who officially welcomed the princess in Portsmouth, announced with some misgivings that Catherine “had nothing visible about her capable to make the King forget his inclinations to the Countess of Castlemaine, the finest woman of her age.”5 And indeed, as church bells rang in London to announce the bride’s arrival on English soil, Charles remained in London dining with his stunning and very pregnant mistress. As his bride waited in Portsmouth and bonfires were lit across the country, Charles spent every spare moment with Lady Castlemaine for six days straight.
By the time Charles finally bestirred himself to ride to Portsmouth, poor Catherine, humiliated with waiting, was ill of a fever. When Charles was introduced to his bride, he was shocked less at her buckteeth than at her hairdo, dressed in the Iberian style of corkscrews projecting horizontally from either side of her head and then hanging like sausages down to her shoulders. “At first sight,” Charles told a friend, “I thought they had brought me a bat instead of a woman.”6