In addition to legitimizing their bastard children, kings often ennobled them, creating a string of infant counts and countesses, dukes and duchesses. While royal bastards were not considered suitable marriage partners for foreign royalty, they were highly sought after in marriage by noble families of the same nationality—thus mixing their blood with the sacred blood of the king. Because of the frequent marriage of bastard dukes and duchesses into established noble families, most of European nobility today is directly related to royal children born on the wrong side of the blanket.
Speaking of Charles II, the courtier George Villiers remarked, “A king is supposed to be a father to his people and Charles certainly was father to a good many of them.”8 Charles acknowledged fourteen bastards—nine sons and five daughters. He created six dukedoms and one earldom for his bastard sons, and made four of the daughters countesses. So many of his illegitimate sons were called Charles that he, like Henri IV before him, had a hard time keeping them straight. Charles kept a keen eye on young heirs and heiresses for his bastards and arranged for them to marry as children—some as young as five years old—to make sure the mouthwatering fortunes didn’t slip away.
The fierce rivalry among royal mistresses often extended to the honors the king bestowed on their children. In 1674 Louise de Kéroualle was delighted to learn that Charles II had created her two-year-old son Charles the duke of Richmond. But her joy was almost immediately tempered by the news that he had also named Barbara, Lady Castlemaine’s eleven-year-old son Henry the duke of Grafton, and Barbara was demanding that her son have precedence. Officially, precedence was given to the duke whose patent was first signed. Both women hammered poor Charles, who lamely suggested that the patents be signed at precisely the same moment; but neither would hear of it.
Both patents were made out bearing the same date but required a signature by Lord Treasurer Danby to be effective. Danby was planning to leave the next morning for Bath, and Lady Castlemaine instructed her agent to wait upon him very early, before he departed. Louise, however, heard that he had changed plans and would depart the night before. Her agent handed the patent to Danby as he was getting into his coach, and he obligingly went into his house to sign it. The next morning, when Lady Castlemaine’s agent arrived, he found that Louise’s son would always have precedence over Lady Castlemaine’s. It is amusing to picture the blazing fury of the defeated mistress when she heard the news.
Because of her low birth, Nell Gwynn’s sons were not included in these fits of generosity. Nell sadly informed her two boys that they “were princes by their father for their elevation, but they had a whore to their mother for their humiliation.”9 One day in 1676 when Charles came to visit, Nell, frustrated by years of waiting for the king to honor her sons, called out to her six-year-old, “Come hither, you little bastard!” When Charles scolded her, she said, “I have no better name to call him by.” Laughing, Charles replied. “Then I must give him one,” and soon after made the boy the earl of Burford.10 After another eight years of Nell’s lobbying, cajoling, and begging, Charles made him the duke of St. Albans. The handsome thirteen-year-old was given splendid apartments in Whitehall Palace and an annual allowance of fifteen hundred pounds. A lucrative marriage was arranged for him with a young heiress. The duke of St. Albans later served his country as ambassador to France.
Pushed into War, Sold into Marriage
While seventeenth-century royal bastards could generally count on a dukedom, their counterparts in the rough-and-tumble medieval world stood a good chance of winning a throne. William the Conqueror, the valiant bastard son of Robert the Devil, duke of Normandy, took up his sword and vanquished English troops in 1066; nearly a thousand years later, his more refined descendant Elizabeth II serenely wears the crown. In twelfth-and thirteenth-century Norway royal bastards were handed the throne when their fathers died without legitimate sons. In the fourteenth century, royal bastards established dynasties in Portugal and Castile. It is ironic that the Renaissance, which ushered in the power of royal mistresses, suppressed the possibilities for their sons. The medieval world, forged by maces and battle axes, boasted few laws of marriage, divorce, and legitimacy compared to the civilized, refined society of later centuries.
It should come as no surprise that some royal bastards of the Renaissance and the Baroque era looked back wistfully to earlier centuries, when courageous bastards could win a kingdom for themselves. James, duke of Monmouth, the favorite son of Charles II, plotted to grab the throne of England. His father had no legitimate children, and Charles’s brother and heir, James, was detested for being Catholic. After Charles’s death in 1685, the popular duke raised troops and fought against James II. Monmouth was captured sleeping in a ditch and beheaded at the command of his uncle.
Many bastard sons, recognizing the foolhardiness of battling for a throne, found honor and glory fighting on behalf of royal fathers and half brothers. Don Juan of Austria (1547–1578), illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Barbara Blomberg, became an admiral, clearing the seas of pirates and vanquishing the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto for his half brother Philip II.
Maurice, Count de Saxe (1696–1750), bastard son of Augustus the Strong of Saxony and Aurora von Königsmarck, became a great general and military theorist. James Fitzjames, the marshal duke of Berwick (1670–1734), the son of James II of England and his mistress Arabella Churchill, became a general and fought victoriously first for his exiled father and then for his cousin Louis XIV. During the War of the Austrian Succession, when the duke was sixty-four, a cannonball took off his head in a burst of glory.
While the illegitimate sons of kings often won glory on the battlefield, the daughters were used as marriage pawns to placate unruly but powerful noble families. Louis XIV married two of his bastard daughters into the Condé clan, a powerful family with a history of treason going back several generations. Louise-Françoise, Mademoiselle de Nantes, daughter of the king and Madame de Montespan, was only twelve when she married a Condé, a seventeen-year-old dwarf with an enormous head. Because of the bride’s tender age, consummation of the marriage would have to wait two or three years. But Madame de Montespan, grasping greedily at such a brilliant match and fearing the marriage might fall through before consummation, pushed for her daughter to lose her virginity that very night.
The groom’s family was equally pleased at such a close connection to the king, though they insisted that sex wait. Madame de Caylus wrote, “The nuptials were celebrated at Versailles in the King’s state apartments…with a glorious illumination of the gardens and with all that magnificence of which the King was capable. The Grand Condé [the groom’s grandfather] and his son left nothing undone to signal their delight in the consummation of the betrothal which they had made every effort to bring about.”11
The Strangest Bastard of All
The oddest case on record of a royal bastard was that of Don Antonio de Medici, the son—and yet not the son—of Archduke Francesco de Medici of Tuscany and his mistress Bianca Cappello. In 1576 Bianca had been a royal mistress for a full decade but had never conceived. Archduchess Johanna had provided her husband with several useless girls, and Francesco promised his mistress that if she gave him a son he would marry her and make her archduchess as soon as his unloved wife, always in precarious health, breathed her last. This longed-for son, legitimized through marriage, might very well inherit the throne.