When George’s son Prince George of Hanover, the future George II (1683–1760), took an English mistress, his elderly grandmother applauded it as an excellent means of improving his knowledge of the language. Some twenty years later, Lord Hervey described King George II’s relationship with the same woman, Mrs. Howard, as one of form more than passion. The king “seemed to look upon a mistress rather as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince than an addition to his pleasures as a man, and thus only pretended to distinguish what it was evident he overlooked and affected to caress what it was manifest he did not love.”8 The king was heard to call his faithful mistress “an old, dull, deaf, peevish beast.”9
Once again, things were handled with far greater style on the southern side of the English Channel. George’s contemporary Louis XV (1710–1774) installed Madame de Pompadour as maîtresse-en-titre in 1745. Beautiful, gracious, brilliant, and kind, Madame de Pompadour practically ruled France for nineteen years. She encouraged artists and writers, produced plays in which she sang and danced, invested in French industry, designed châteaus, cut gems, made engravings, experimented in horticulture, and ran the army during the Seven Years’ War.
But at the height of her power she warily eyed the approaching storm. “After us, the deluge,” she said, though it was not Madame de Pompadour but her successor, Madame du Barry, whose pretty powdered head rolled onto the straw-covered scaffold.10 In France palaces were ransacked and burned. The tombs of kings and courtiers were cracked open and plundered, the bones strewn about. With the sudden crashing force of a guillotine, the French Revolution severed the power of royal mistresses across Europe as its effects rippled like waves in all directions. The lavish self-indulgence of a civilization was indeed deluged, drowned in a sea of wine-dark blood. Gone with it was the glorification of a fallen woman bedecked in crown jewels.
In the wake of the Revolution, though customs had changed, the sexual needs of kings had not. Royal mistresses continued aplenty, but those doomed to live in the mediocrity of the nineteenth century expected far less than their more fortunate predecessors. They would not be created duchesses or countesses, given palaces and castles, eye-popping incomes, a seat on the council, and a magnificent suite of rooms at the palace. The nineteenth-century royal mistress hoped for a nice house in town, a few pieces of jewelry, a credit line at the most fashionable dressmaker, and the overwhelming aroma of power that got her invited to all the best parties.
Ludwig I of Bavaria (1786–1868) bucked this trend and paid dearly for it. In 1847 he forced his unwilling parliament to create his nasty mistress Lola Montez the countess of Landsfeld. Within months he had a revolution on his hands; Lola was chased out of town by an angry mob, and Ludwig abdicated. If Lola had tried her ploy seventy years earlier, she would likely have succeeded.
Before the French Revolution, newspapers were carefully censored, and no ungenerous reference to the king was permitted. Lampoons—verses tacked up on lampposts—flourished, and were ripped off and read in taverns by delighted citizens. Many lampoons ridiculed the king’s mistress. But with the advent of the free press in the nineteenth century, newspaper headlines trumpeted the latest royal scandal. Ribald cartoons portrayed fat and aging monarchs in bed with their greedy mistresses. Royals became more circumspect with regards to illicit liaisons. Their behavior modification went only so far as appearances, however. Adulterous royal sex was as frequent as ever, just hidden under a colorless pall of respectable hypocrisy.
In 1900 the aging Belgian king Leopold II (1835–1909) often walked in public gardens with his sixteen-year-old mistress, Caroline Delacroix. But when a cabinet minister approached him, Caroline was expected to fall meekly behind and pretend to be a sister of one of the king’s aides-de-camp.
Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Edward VII (1841–1910), conducted his affairs so skillfully that many people were convinced the ladies were merely good friends and that any other speculation was slanderous. Edward visited his lady friends in the afternoon for tea, when their husbands were out on business—or visiting their own mistresses—and would never think of returning home inconveniently.
The sexual revolution of the twentieth century bypassed European royal families, who clung to Victorian traditions with one hand and gripped the scepter with the other. Those dynasties fortunate enough to withstand the rising tide of democracy kept their mistresses firmly in the background, with one major exception. Like his ancestor Henry VIII, King Edward VIII of Great Britain (1894–1972) bungled things by insisting on marrying his mistress, Wallis Warfield Simpson. Unlike Henry, Edward didn’t cut off his wife’s head—though in time perhaps he would have liked to—but it can be said he cut off his own. Public outrage, which had been muted by the gallows and the stake in Henry’s time, resulted in Edward’s abdication.
Prince Charles of Great Britain’s love for his old flame Camilla Parker-Bowles ripped apart his marriage to Princess Diana and astonished the world. Traditionally, princes married ugly but suitable virgins and took beautiful mistresses. But when Charles deserted the preternatural radiance of Diana in favor of the fox-and-hounds plainness of Camilla, the public howled in ridicule.
From the dawn of time, power has been a mighty aphrodisiac. Royal mistresses, whether vaunted or concealed, have always existed, and will always exist. “Nothing has been more fatal to men, and to great men, than the letting themselves go to the forbidden love of women,” lamented the aging James II of England (1633–1701). “Of all the vices it is the most bewitching and harder to be mastered if it be not crushed in the very bud.”11 But like James, most kings did not crush the forbidden love of women in the bud, only when it had withered on the stalk.
1. One Sex with the King
When there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.
WE PICTURE THE ROYAL MISTRESS AS, FIRST AND FOREMOST, a sexual creature. She has a heaving bosom, a knowing smile, eyes sparkling with desire. Ready to fling her velvet skirts above her head at a moment’s notice, she offers irresistible delights to a lecherous monarch. The entreaties of his anguished family, the bishop’s admonitions, his own sense of royal sin and guilt, are useless against the mistress’s enticements when compared to those of the woodenly chaste queen.
Indeed, the horrifying state of most royal marriages created the space for royal mistresses to thrive. A prince’s marriage, celebrated with lavish ceremony, was usually nothing more than a personal catastrophe for the two victims kneeling at the altar. The purpose of a royal marriage was not the happiness of husband and wife, or good sex, or even basic compatibility. The production of princes was the sole purpose, and if the bride trailed treaties and riches in her wake, so much the better.
Napoleon, franker than most monarchs, stated, “I want to marry a womb.”1 And indeed most royal brides were considered to be nothing more than a walking uterus with a crown on top and skirts on the bottom.
Disaster at the Altar
Princesses were brought up from birth to be chaste almost to the point of frigidity, thereby ensuring legitimate heirs. While virtue could be taught, beauty could not. Ambassadors, selling the goods sight unseen to a prospective royal husband, inflated the looks of the princess with hyperbolic praise, often bringing a flattering portrait as evidence.