MORE VALUABLE THAN A TIARA OF DIAMONDS, A LARGE BELLY was the greatest proof of the king’s affections. A child bound the king to his mistress long after her disgrace or retirement and usually ensured her a lifetime of generous pensions. It is no wonder that most European courts were littered with royal bastards.
It was generally accepted that bastards were more intelligent and better looking than legitimate children. The belief was that intercourse between a man and his mistress was truly an act of love, or at least genuine desire. And in that moment of conception, the passions of love and desire mingled to form a more impressive child than those wrung from forced copulation. Louis XIV, distressed that five of his six legitimate children died young, while so many of his bastards thrived, was informed by his doctors that he had given his best juice to his mistresses, leaving the queen with only the dregs of the glass. The truth was that compulsory marital sex between inbred cousins often produced another genetically inferior generation, with the poor health, plodding intelligence, and grim appearance of their parents.
One day in the 1670s Louis XIV’s Queen Marie-Thérèse, mother of a prince just as dull and unattractive as herself, grew quite peeved when she heard courtiers raving about the king’s adorable, precocious sons with Madame de Montespan. “Everybody goes into ecstasies about those children while Monsieur le Dauphin is never even mentioned,” she complained.1
In addition to superior intelligence and looks, royal bastards were less arrogant than their legitimate half siblings, who sauntered about court prickly with the pride of their fully royal birth. Bastards had no official position other than what their father chose to bestow on them and usually offered him a fierce loyalty in return for his generosity. When Henry II of England lay dying in 1189, of all his children, only his bastard son Geoffrey Plantagenet sat by his side. Henry’s surviving legitimate sons, John and Richard, had allied themselves with the king of France and were rebelling against their father. “You alone have proved yourself my lawful and true son,” Henry grumbled. “My other sons are really the bastards.”2
The Love of Kings and Bastards
The king often loved his bastards far better than the princes and princesses coerced from his loins in the marriage bed. Nothing devastated Henri IV of France so much as seeing how his heir, the dauphin, was the spitting image of his mother, the unloved Queen Marie de Medici. According to a nobleman, soon after the birth of Henri’s bastard with Henriette d’Entragues, the king said that this child was “finer than that of the Queen, who resembles the Medici, being swarthy and fat.” When the queen was told of the king’s comment, “she wept bitterly.”3 As his bastard son grew up, Henri would point to him and say, “See how good-natured this son is and how much he resembles me. He is not a stubborn child like the Dauphin.”4
Henri’s court physician, Dr. Hérouard, wrote, “The Queen can’t understand how…the King…can give more caresses to the bastards than to the legitimate children…[and fears that] all the world will think that they are more loved by their father than the Queen’s children.”5
When the royal family’s coach overturned in a flash flood while crossing a river in 1606, Henri grabbed César, his twelve-year-old bastard son with Gabrielle d’Estrées, and raced with him to safety, leaving the rest of the family in danger of drowning. We can picture fat Queen Marie, sputtering water, sinking in her heavy velvets into the muddy current, watching the back of her husband race away from her to carefully deposit his bastard on shore. The queen was fished out by a courtier, who dragged her to safety by the hair. She rewarded the courtier with a casket of jewels, an annual pension, and the position of captain of the Queen’s Guards. But she never forgave her husband.
Much to Marie’s dismay, Henri IV insisted on raising his eight bastards by various mistresses in the royal nursery along with his six legitimate children. At first Henriette d’Entragues, who had obtained a written promise of marriage from the king and considered herself his true wife, refused to allow her child to join the nursery. “I will not,” she stormed, “allow my son to be in the company of all those bastards!”6 Eventually Henri insisted, hoping that daily contact would result in brotherly love among the children rather than bitter rivalry. The king visited his brood frequently but had a hard time keeping them straight. He wrote a list that he kept in his pocket describing the children, detailing their names, ages, and mothers.
Many royal bastards, well loved by the king, disliked their mothers, who lived in a state of full or partial disgrace. Louis XIV’s son with Madame de Montespan, the duc du Maine, had developed infantile paralysis at the age of three which left him with a limp, a tragedy of incalculable proportions in that world of exquisite grace and howling ridicule called Versailles. The duke blamed his mother for this calamity and never forgave her for her subsequent coldness to him. In 1691 the duke was so thrilled when he heard the king had finally exiled her from court that he insisted on taking the news to his mother himself. Within an hour of her sudden departure, he had all her baggage sent after her to Paris. He then ordered her furniture thrown out the windows onto the courtyard below lest she come back to fetch it. The duke immediately took over her prime apartments for himself.
Similarly, the son of Charles II and Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, was close to his father but disliked his mother. When the king died in 1685 Louise took fourteen-year-old Charles to France, where she compelled this staunch young Protestant to convert to Catholicism. At nineteen Charles fled to England—rumor said with his mother’s jewels—bounced back to the Protestant religion, married an English noblewoman, and took his place in the House of Lords—devastating his very French, very Catholic mother.
The saddest case was that of the actress Dorothy Jordan. Her ten children with the future William IV allowed her to die alone in exile and poverty while they were attending parties with their royal father. Their mother had become an embarrassment, but high society welcomed them with open arms when accompanied by William. All eight of the ten children who married did so into English nobility, living lives of luxury and conveniently forgetting that their mother was buried in a pauper’s grave in France.
Legitimate Bastards
Kings usually legitimized these offspring by royal decree. This legitimization was an official recognition of fatherhood, leaving the children bastards, but bastards with high expectations. In 1360 King Pedro of Portugal wanted to legitimize his children with his mistress Inez de Castro, whom he had married after their births. The pope declared that the children could be legitimate only if their mother was crowned queen—and Inez had died five years earlier. Undeterred, King Pedro dug her up, dressed her skeleton in regal robes, and had it placed in a chair in the cathedral and crowned in an elaborate ceremony which all the nobles were forced to attend. After that no one protested when he legitimized the children.
By the sixteenth century Europe had become somewhat more civilized. When Henri IV of France wanted to legitimize his son with Gabrielle d’Estrées in 1594, he merely issued documents proclaiming César his son. “We accord to him these letters,” Henri wrote, “inasmuch as the stigma that is attached to the birth of our son excludes him from all hopes of succeeding to this our Crown…. His state would be but a poor one, were it not for this, his legitimation, whereby he is rendered capable of receiving all the gifts and benefits which may be conferred on him both by us and others.”7