Blonde, large-boned Queen Caroline of England certainly followed the pudding-and-turnip trend. Rather than nobly suffering her husband’s infidelities as a crown of thorns on the head of a martyred queen, Caroline once told a courtier that, as regards her husband’s mistresses, “She was sorry for the scandal it gave others, but for herself she minded it no more than his going to the close stool [toilet].”14
While still prince of Hanover, Caroline’s husband, the future George II of England, took as his first mistress thirty-year-old Henrietta Howard, pretty, pleasant, and discreet. One courtier described Henrietta as “civil to everybody, friendly to many, and unjust to none.”15 Caroline was relieved at George’s choice. While the typical wife bore the greatest malice toward her husband’s first mistress, sensible Caroline knew that Henrietta would not plunder the treasury, snub her when she became queen, angle for political power, or sow disruptive intrigues at court.
As Queen Caroline’s friend Lord Hervey described it, “The Queen, knowing the vanity of her husband’s temper, and that he must have some woman for the world to believe he lay with, wisely suffered one to remain in that situation whom she despised and had got the better of, for fear of making room for a successor whom he might really love, and that might get the better of her.”16
Like most other royal mistresses, Henrietta became a lady-in-waiting to the queen. Unlike others, however, Henrietta’s position was not especially envied. Plump, red-faced George, renowned for tearing off his wig and kicking it across the floor when angry, bucked the trend by loving his wife and tolerating his mistress. Although he believed Caroline to be the most beautiful, intelligent, and charming woman in the world, he also considered a mistress to be an indispensable accessory of a monarch, along with the crown and scepter. George pointedly visited Henrietta every evening for several hours and locked the door. Courtiers speculated crudely about their sex life—one wit compared George to a mill horse plodding around its unending track—and most agreed that they usually spent the time playing cards.
By 1722, in her early forties, Henrietta was growing prematurely deaf. As she had primarily pleased George by being a good audience, he now began to grow impatient with her disability. For Henrietta, however, her deafness may have been a blessing, relieving the daily monotony of listening to George.
George became so irritated with his mistress that on one occasion, as Henrietta tied a kerchief around Caroline’s neck, George snatched it off. “Because you have an ugly neck yourself you love to hide the Queen’s,” he raged.17
But George, a man of habit, did not dismiss his mistress. Then in 1729 Henrietta’s husband, having been estranged from his wife for fifteen years, decided he could no longer live with his humiliation and ordered her back to her conjugal duties. He obtained a warrant from the lord chief justice permitting him to seize her wherever and whenever she should be found. Hearing this, Henrietta hid in the palace day and night. The queen, alarmed that the king no longer wanted Henrietta and Henrietta’s husband did, intrigued to keep her in the palace. If Henrietta should go, George would feel required to select another official mistress, and the next one might not be so tractable.
When the brutish Mr. Howard—often angry, rarely sober—accosted the queen’s carriage and threatened to pluck out his wife, Caroline knew something must be done. One suggestion was to bribe Howard with twelve hundred pounds a year to leave his wife in peace, to which the queen remarked she found it a bit hard to not only keep her husband’s “trulls under my roof, but pay them, too.”18
George gallantly stepped in and paid the twelve hundred pounds a year, which was undoubtedly what Mr. Howard had hoped for in making such a fuss. As Lord Hervey reported, Mr. Howard was required to sign a document for Henrietta swearing that “for the future to give her as little trouble in the capacity of husband as he had ever given her pleasure. And so this affair ended, the King paying 1200 pounds a year for the possession of what he did not want to enjoy, and Mr. Howard receiving them, for relinquishing what he would have been sorry to keep.”19
By 1734, George was snubbing Henrietta for her friendships with several prominent men, including the poet Alexander Pope, whose sarcastic political verses were critical of the king. When Caroline spoke to George about his rude treatment of Henrietta, he angrily replied, “What the devil did you mean by trying to make an old, dull, deaf, peevish beast stay and plague me when I had so good an opportunity of getting rid of her!”20
And so ended a relationship of twenty years. The old, dull, deaf, and peevish beast suddenly found herself a widow and soon remarried. When the queen informed him of the marriage, George laughed that “my old mistress has married that old rake George Berkeley, and I am very glad of it. I would not make such a gift to my friends, and when my enemies rob me, please God it will always be in this manner.”21 Not a very gallant way to bid farewell to a lover of such long standing, but Henrietta was well rid of him and had the last laugh. She enjoyed a very happy marriage with that old rake George Berkeley, who was, in fact, a dozen years younger than his blushing bride. Henrietta survived her second husband by twenty years, living in comfort in the country.
As Caroline had feared, Henrietta was replaced by younger, prettier, more manipulating mistresses. Dying from an umbilical rupture in 1737, wrapped in towels as her intestines spilled out, the queen, sensible to the end, suggested that George remarry. But the king, heartbroken, hovering near her bed in her last agonizing moments, swore he would have only mistresses and never remarry.
“Oh, my God!” the dying queen said in French, with characteristic practicality, “that won’t make any difference!”22
“That whore will be the death of me”
Louis XIV, the most powerful man in Europe, suffered his own share of disputes between his wife and his mistresses. In 1660 at the age of twenty-two the handsome young king married the infanta Marie-Thérèse of Spain, a short, dwarflike product of generations of inbreeding. Fortunately for the queen, she did not suffer the insanity and physical handicaps of her relatives Juana the Mad, John the Imbecile, and Isabella the Insane. Her only debility was a childlike simplicity—though even this was cruelly ridiculed in the sophisticated world of Versailles.
Marie-Thérèse never learned to speak French well, and her new subjects found her coarse Spanish accent irritating. She had no idea of politics, literature, or witty conversation and preferred to spend hours playing cards. Courtiers patiently waited for a seat at the queen’s card table, which almost amounted to winning the lottery, as she would invariably bet high and play poorly. Primi Visconti reported that “the Queen’s losses provide the poor Princess d’Elbeuf with her sole means of support.”23
Louis was faithful to his devoted wife for a full year before he began flirting with his brother’s wife, Princess Henrietta of England. To distract him from such an unfortunate choice, Louis’s mother, the dowager queen Anne, planted a trio of fresh young things in his path. These three graces wore special heron plumes in their hair and were placed prominently near him at banquets.
The ruse worked better than his mother had hoped. The king fell head over heels in love with one of them, Louise de La Vallière, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a petty nobleman. She had ash-blonde hair, dazzling white skin, and large blue eyes. One leg was a bit shorter than the other, so she wore specially made heels. Most attractive to the young king was her genuine mantle of innocence and kindness, of piety and modesty.