In 1540 Henry VIII was duped by the portrait trick in his search for a fourth wife. He wanted to cement an alliance with France and wrote François I asking for suggestions. François graciously replied with the names and portraits of five noble ladies. But Henry was not satisfied. “By God,” he said, studying the flat, unblinking faces on canvas, “I trust no one but myself. The thing touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time before deciding.”2 He wanted to hold a kind of royal beauty pageant at the English-owned town of Calais on the north coast of France where he would personally select the winner after close inspection.
The French ambassador replied acidly that perhaps Henry should sleep with all five in turn and marry the best performer. François sneeringly remarked, “It is not the custom in France to send damsels of that rank and of such noble and princely families to be passed in review as if they were hackneys [whores] for sale.”3
Chastened, Henry returned to perusing portraits and decided on a Protestant alliance based on a lovely likeness of Anne of Cleves. But when the royal bridegroom met Anne he was shocked at how little resemblance there was between this hulking, pockmarked Valkyrie and the dainty, smooth-faced woman in the portrait. The king was “struck with consternation when he was shown the Queen” and had never been “so much dismayed in his life as to see a lady so far unlike what had been represented.” He roared, “I see nothing in this woman as men report of her, and I marvel that wise men would make such report as they have done.” He continued, “Whom shall men trust? I promise you I see no such thing as hath been shown me of her, by pictures and report. I am ashamed that men have praised her as they have done—and I love her not!”4
Try as he might, the king could not extricate himself from the marriage to his “Flanders mare,” as he dubbed Anne. The duchy of Cleves would be offended if Henry returned the goods. Two days before the wedding, Henry grumbled, “If it were not that she had come so far into my realm, and the great preparations and state that my people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world and of driving her brother into the arms of the Emperor and the French King, I would not now marry her. But now it is too far gone, wherefore I am sorry.”5
Henry went to his wedding with less grace than many of his victims had gone to their executions. On the way to the chapel, he opined to his counselors, “My lords, if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do what I must do this day for any earthly thing.”6
The wedding night was a fiasco. The morning after, when Lord Thomas Cromwell, who had arranged the wedding, nervously asked Henry how he had enjoyed his bride, the king thundered, “Surely, my lord, I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse! She is nothing fair, and have very evil smells about her. I took her to be no maid by reason of the looseness of her breasts and other tokens, which, when I felt them, strake me so to the heart, that I had neither will nor courage to prove the rest. I can have none appetite for displeasant airs. I have left her as good a maid as I found her.” The rest of the day he told everyone who would listen that “he had found her body disordered and indisposed to excite and provoke any lust in him.”7
True to the double standard of the time, no one asked Anne what she thought of the king’s appearance. Her royal bridegroom boasted a fifty-seven-inch waist and a festering ulcer on his leg. Anne was quickly divorced and glad to depart with her head still on her shoulders. But Lord Cromwell felt the full force of Henry’s wrath in the form of an ax cleaving his neck.
Through debacles like these, everyone soon learned that portraits lied. In 1680 Louis XIV ordered Bavarian princess Maria Anna Christina as a bride for his son and heir. The lovely portrait carted about the court was irrelevant compared to the marriage treaty. According to Madame de Sévigné, as the bride was approaching, “the King was so curious to know what she looked like that he sent Sanguin [his chief butler] whom he knows to be a truthful man and no flatterer. ‘Sire,’ that man told him, ‘once you get over the first impression, you will be delighted.’”8 The unhappy couple managed to catapult three children into the world before the neglected wife died.
Even less fortunate with his Bavarian princess was the future Joseph II of Austria (1741–1790). In 1765 Joseph found his bride Princess Josepha so loathsome he was unable to consummate the marriage. “Her figure is short,” he reported bitterly, “thickset and without a vestige of charm. Her face is covered with spots and pimples. Her teeth are horrible.”9
“They want me to have children,” he lamented in another letter. “How can one have them? If I could put the tip of my finger on the tiniest part of her body which was not covered by pimples, I would try to have a child.”10 Joseph was not grieved when his young wife died of smallpox shortly after the wedding.
Not all princes agreed to be slaughtered on the altar of Hymen for the good of the state. In the 1670s the future James II of England found himself widowed with no son and cast about Europe for an attractive young wife. Louis XIV, hoping to seat a Frenchwoman on the English throne, evidently had difficulties finding a candidate both beautiful and virtuous at the court of Versailles. Finally, deciding that a wife’s appearance could be of no great significance, Louis pushed forward a noble but repulsive French widow, Madame de Guise. The French minister Louvois wrote to England hopefully, “If the Duke of York is desirous of a wife in order to have children, he cannot make a better choice than Madame de Guise, who has been pregnant three times in two years, and whose birth, wealth, and prospects of fecundity appear to me to atone for her want of beauty.”11
James declined the offer, and the disappointed French ambassador wrote scoffingly to his king that the duke of York insisted on finding a beautiful wife. Madame de Guise and her fecundity were dropped. James married the loveliest princess in Europe, fifteen-year-old Mary of Modena, a tall, slender, ravishing brunette with whom he fell deeply in love.
The future George IV of Great Britain (1762–1830) had avoided putting his neck in the noose for years but finally, ham-strung by debts, was bribed to marry Princess Caroline of Brunswick by his royal father and Parliament. George, a dandy who spent hours tying his cravat, was poorly suited to the good-natured but ill-mannered princess, who had no regard for dress or personal hygiene.
When the prince was first introduced to his newly arrived bride, he was so thunderstruck with terror at her appearance that he wiped his brow, whispered, “I am not well,” and called for brandy to quell a fit of faintness.12 Neither was the bride well pleased with her groom. After George had stumbled away, Caroline said to her lady-in-waiting, “Is the Prince always like that? I find him very fat and not nearly so handsome as his portrait.”13
George managed to rise to the occasion with his wife three times during the first two nights of marriage. He wrote to a friend, “She showed…such marks of filth both in the fore and hind part of her…that she turned my stomach and from that moment I made a vow never to touch her again.”14 Fortunately for George, he had already made Caroline pregnant during his halfhearted efforts. With the birth of an heir the pressure was off, and George never did touch her again. In 1821 the British people were treated to a rare sight—prizefighters hired by the new king barring the doors of Westminster Abbey as Caroline bellowed that she be allowed in and crowned alongside her estranged husband. The same year, when Napoleon expired, the king was informed that his “greatest enemy” was dead. George’s face was suffused with joy as he exclaimed, “Is she, by God!”15