When there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

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." 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.

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." 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."

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!"

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."

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."

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."

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.' " 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."

"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." 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."

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. 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."

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." 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!"

But the most mismatched couple of all was without a doubt Louis XIV's brother, Philippe, duc d'Orléans, called "Monsieur," a transvestite who much preferred male lovers to female, and Elizabeth Charlotte, daughter of the elector of the Palatinate. Many at the French court sneered at an alliance with the elector, a man so poor he had to have his shoes patched. But German princesses were renowned for their fertility. Moreover, since the groom's lover the chevalier de Lorraine was suspected of poisoning Monsieur's beautiful first wife Princess Henrietta of England in a fit of jealousy, Louis XIV decided that an ugly second wife would stand a better chance of survival.

In 1670 when the hopeful bride arrived in France to meet the husband she had already married by proxy, she found an effeminate fop wearing rouge, diamond earrings, cascading rows of lace and ruffles, dozens of clanking bracelets, beribboned pantaloons, and high-heeled shoes. His face was submerged in a frizzy black wig, and waves of his cologne almost suffocated her. When introduced, Monsieur swept into a bow, taking in at a glance his bride's broad, good-natured German face, freshly scrubbed from her journey, her broad German rear end, and clothing of such rustic simplicity that her new French ladies-in-waiting were appalled. The horrified groom whispered to his gentlemen, "Oh! how can I sleep with that?"

Rising from her curtsy, the bride was so shocked at her new husband's appearance that she couldn't utter a word of her prepared speech. She finally managed to force a smile. We can hear her muttering to herself behind a painted fan, "Oh! How can I sleep with that?"

Elizabeth Charlotte endured a great deal during her thirty-year marriage that most royal brides were spared. Monsieur insisted on applying makeup to her face -- perhaps in the hopes of rendering it more attractive -- which she immediately scrubbed off. He often irked her by stealing her dresses and diamonds for himself and his male lovers. He enjoyed breaking wind -- though perhaps that was the only thing they had in common. Elizabeth Charlotte, not wanting to touch him as she slept, positioned herself so far to the edge of the bed that she often fell off, waking up with a start.

It is a testament to this couple's royal self-discipline that the marriage produced three children, though the clanking saints' medallions that Monsieur tied to his private parts may have had something to do with it. When he finally called a halt to unwelcome sexual relations, Elizabeth Charlotte was tempted to tell his lovers, "You are welcome to gobble the peas; I don't like them."

Sex with the King

In contrast to a prince's forced performance with his wife, we can imagine his more enjoyable relations with his mistress -- the tender foreplay, the artistic technique, the frenzied culmination, the drowsy contented aftermath. Imagine we must, for history has bequeathed us relatively few records of the sex lives of kings and their mistresses. Most sexually suggestive letters written by the enflamed pair were burned in the lifetime of their recipients -- sometimes in the last moments of life -- or shortly afterward by embarrassed relatives. A few such letters remain to titillate us, as well as numerous stories that shed light on the sexual relationships between kings and mistresses.

Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, described her royal lover Charles II as being magnificently endowed, prompting her friend Lord Rochester to write:

Nor are his high desires above his strength
His scepter and his prick are of a length.

Hearing this couplet, Louis XIV's mistress the princesse de Monaco remarked that while Louis's power was great, his "scepter" was small compared to that of his royal cousin across the English Channel.

In the 1540s the future Henri II of France was so enthralled with his strawberry blonde mistress Diane de Poitiers that he had little appetite for his plain brown wife, the dauphine, Catherine de Medici. Studious Catherine was described by one ambassador as a fine woman when her face was veiled, and her face when unveiled resembled nothing so much as a plank of wood. She had been selected as Henri's bride only because of her close relationship with the pope and a rich dowry including several cities, jewels, horses, and furnishings. In 1542 after nine years of marriage Henri and Catherine had produced no children, not even a pregnancy.

Though eighteen years older than her royal lover, Diane kept immaculate care of herself and was far sexier than the dauphine. Slender and athletic, Diane began each day with a bracing ride on horseback for up to three hours. Ever mindful of her clear white skin, she always wore a black velvet mask outside, daily drank a mixture containing gold, and bathed in asses' milk and cold water. Terrified of wrinkles, Diane slept sitting up on pillows. Her beauty regimen worked. Henri made love to Diane almost every night and left his wife alone in her cold bed.

The penalty for a barren princess was often annulment, banishment, and life in a convent. Diane, while no great friend of Catherine's, was pleased that she was dull and plain and had absolutely no influence over her husband. Diane feared a new alliance, a beautiful foreign princess who would win Henri's heart away from her. Better, she resolved, to assist Catherine in bearing an heir.

On appointed nights, Diane would begin the lovemaking session getting Henri incredibly aroused, then send him upstairs to his wife's room to finish the job. Having done his dynastic duty, the prince would go back downstairs to fall asleep in Diane's arms. Soon after this practice began, Catherine became pregnant and bore a healthy son. Henri rewarded his mistress "for the good and commendable services" she had done for the dauphine.

Intelligent Catherine did not understand what her husband saw in his aging mistress. Curious, she had an Italian carpenter drill two holes in her floor, directly above Diane's bedroom. She and her lady's maid would watch Henri and Diane make love in the flickering shadows of the fire, roll off the bed, and exhaust their passion on the floor. Catherine was astonished at the great gentleness Henri showed Diane and, weeping, told her lady-in-waiting that he had "never used her so well."

The lovely hazel-eyed Madame de Pompadour, who became Louis XV's mistress in 1745, opined that she was used too well. For the poster child of royal mistresses had a disturbing secret -- she was frigid. There is some evidence that indicates she suffered from a chronic vaginal infection with a foul white discharge, for which there was no cure at the time. "I have acquired a cold sea-bird," lamented Louis XV. Sometimes he was so disappointed in her performance that he would leave her bed without the usual good-bye kiss.

Louis XV had a voracious sexual appetite and enjoyed lovemaking several times a day. But his mistress, always teetering somewhere between sickness and health, quickly became exhausted and had to pretend she was enjoying his exertions. We can picture her, a silken woman on satin sheets, her nakedness warmed by the candles' glow, waiting for the king to be finished.

Hoping to stimulate her libido, Madame de Pompadour began to experiment with a diet of celery, truffles, and vanilla that only succeeded in harming her health. One day when her friend the duchesse de Brancas expressed concern, the royal mistress burst into tears and said, "I'm terrified of not pleasing the King anymore and of losing him. You know, men attach a great deal of importance to certain things and I, unfortunately for me, am very cold by nature. I thought I might warm myself up if I went on a diet to heat the blood.... You don't know what happened last week, the King said it was too hot, an excuse to spend half the night on my sofa. He'll get tired of me and find somebody else."

The duchess sagely advised her friend, "But your diet won't stop him, and it will kill you. No, you must make yourself indispensable to the King by always being nice to him. Don't rebuff him, of course, at these other moments, but just let time do its work and in the end he'll be tied to you forever by force of habit."

If Madame de Pompadour had lost her position when she stopped having sex with the king, she would have been out of a job by sometime in the early 1750s. As it was, she skillfully changed their love affair into a deep friendship, becoming an astute political adviser and one-woman entertainment committee.

It is ironic that Louis XV's principal mistress when he was a young man -- Madame de Pompadour -- was frigid, and his mistress when he was old -- Madame du Barry -- was one of the most talented prostitutes of her day. Or perhaps not. While still young, Louis relied on Madame de Pompadour's devotion, charm, and intelligence, and got his sexual relief elsewhere. As an aging monarch trembling before the gates of death, he had little need of intelligence. He wanted frequent athletic sex to convince him he was still alive. As he aged, he had difficulty finding women who aroused him, until he met the enthusiastic Parisian prostitute he made his final mistress.

Jeanne du Barry walked into Louis's life at the right time for both of them. If she had been a few years earlier, under the firm reign of Madame de Pompadour, she would have been a mere fling. As it was, her arrival some four years after Madame de Pompadour's premature death brought a melancholy monarch back to life and created for herself a career she had never dreamed of.

The duc de Richelieu, an aging roué, had enjoyed the beautiful blonde so much that he recommended her to the jaded king. After their first sexual encounter, the king told the duke, "I am delighted with your Jeanne. She is the only woman in France who has managed to make me forget that I am sixty."

But instead of bedding her and sending her away, as he had all the others, he kept her around. Almost apologetically he said to his friend the duc d'Ayen that he had "discovered some pleasures entirely new to him." In reply, the duke sniffed, "That, Sire, is because you have never been to a brothel."

The king had been led to believe that Jeanne was a respectable married woman who had enjoyed a few affairs with noblemen and bankers. His faithful valet and longtime procurer, Lebel -- alarmed at the king's inclination for so inappropriate a woman -- finally told Louis during his morning toilette that Jeanne's sexual talents were the result of years of professional training, that she didn't even offer the respectable cover of being married. We can picture Louis, being powdered and perfumed, with a regal wave of the hand ordering Lebel to shut his mouth and find the woman a suitable husband. Reeling from the shock, Lebel -- who had served the king for most of his life -- died soon after.

Court physicians admonished Louis that his mistress was too young for him and suggested that an older woman might be better for his heart. But this was not a recommendation likely to win the king's agreement. Meanwhile, some courtiers said they had never seen Louis in better health -- he seemed younger and more energetic than he had been in years.

But a few weeks before his death, the sixty-four-year-old monarch realized that even Jeanne was losing her ability to arouse him. He confided to his doctor, "I am growing old and it is time I reined in the horses." The doctor immediately responded, "Sire, it is not a question of reining them in. It would be better they were taken out of harness."

The aging monarch, facing death and the divine judgment he knew could not be far off, sometimes suffered bitter pangs of remorse for his carnal sins and refused to see his mistress. But these twinges of conscience were soon replaced by other twinges, and Louis found himself once more in her shapely white arms. The king's hot-blooded Bourbon temperament lasted, literally, until the moment of death. Even as his putrefying body was riddled with smallpox, Louis stretched forth a pus-ravaged hand to fumble his mistress's enticing breasts.

Perhaps Louis XV got his relentless libido from his predecessor, Louis XIV, who burdened his mistresses not only with his ravenous sexual needs but, worse, with his infinite fertility. Louise de La Vallière gave birth to four children in seven years. Her successor, the brilliant Athénaïs de Montespan, bore seven children in nine years. Dour Madame de Maintenon was past menopause when she secretly married Louis, but at the age of seventy-five she complained to her priest that the king insisted on sex every day, sometimes several times. The priest replied that as God had appointed her to keep the king from sinning, she must simply endure it. It was believed that a too frequent indulgence in sex gave men "gout, constipation, bad breath and a red nose," all of which Louis suffered from, but not enough to curb his appetite.

While sex between even the lustiest pair usually fizzled after a few years, Czar Alexander II (1818-1881) and his pretty brunette mistress Katia Dolguruky enjoyed a passionate sex life throughout a fifteen-year relationship that ended only with his death. Though profoundly stupid, Katia was thirty years younger than Alexander and adored lovemaking. In 1870 the czar wrote her, "What I felt within me you saw for yourself, just as I saw what was happening to you. That was why we clenched each other like hungry cats both in the morning and in the afternoon, and it was sweet to the verge of madness, so that even now I want to squeal for joy and I am still saturated in all my being."

In 1876 the czar's health seemed to be failing. He was examined by the court physician who could find no illness and indicated diplomatically that the fifty-eight-year-old czar was suffering from exhaustion and "excesses in sexual relations." But this medical opinion did not deter the czar. Soon after, he wrote Katia, "I enjoyed our love-making madly, and am still all steeped in it. You are so tempting, it is impossible to resist! There is no word for this delirium."

The same year, as Katia prepared to deliver her third child, she lamented the fact that she would not be able to have sex for some time after the birth. "I feel so heavy," she wrote, "but I am not grumbling because it is my fault, and I confess I cannot be without your fountain, which I love so, and therefore after my six weeks are over I count on renewing my injections."

The love affairs of Napoleon III (1808-1873) were not nearly as satisfying. The emperor's libido had forced him to marry the only woman who had refused to have sex with him, Eugénie de Montijo, the beautiful daughter of a petty Spanish grandee. One wit said that Napoleon III had become emperor by election, but Eugénie became empress by erection.

But when Napoleon discovered that his wife's virtue was, in fact, frigidity, he roamed the court like a lion sniffing for prey, prowling the ballrooms on sexual hunting expeditions. In the 1860s, now in his fifties, the emperor was unable to sustain foreplay and dove into his pleasure with little concern for his partners.

The marquise de Taisey-Châtenoy endured one of these encounters after having made a rendezvous with the emperor during a ball at the Tuileries. After midnight, he arrived in her bedroom in mauve pajamas looking faintly ridiculous. She reported, "There follows a brief period of physical exertion, during which he breathes heavily and the wax on the ends of his mustaches melts, causing them to droop, and finally a hasty withdrawal, leaving the Marquise unimpressed and unsatisfied."

A journalist and acquaintance of the imperial family Jules de Goncourt wrote, "When a woman is brought into the Tuileries, she is undressed in one room, then goes nude to another room where the Emperor, also nude, awaits her. [The chamberlain] who is in charge, gives her the following instruction: You may kiss His Majesty on any part of his person except the face."

One woman, the wife of a court official, sought a private audience with the emperor to discuss her husband's career. She reported that she "did not even have time to make a token protest before he laid hold of me in an intimate place.... It all happens so quickly that even the staunchest principles are rendered powerless."

Some of Napoleon's predatory expeditions were completely unsuccessful. One evening the lecherous emperor entered a dimly lit drawing room, sat down on a sofa next to a fetching creature in an ornate gown, slipped his hand beneath the skirt to find a shapely leg within a silk stocking, and pinched it. The bishop of Nancy stood up bellowing in protest.

The kinkiest sexual relationship on record between monarch and mistress was that of raven-haired Lola Montez and Ludwig I of Bavaria. Ludwig developed an obsession with the dancer's feet. In her exile, he wrote her, "I take your feet into my mouth, where I have never had any others, that would have been repugnant to me, but with you, it's just the opposite." And another letter, "I want to take your feet in my mouth, at once, without giving you time to wash them after you've arrived from a trip."

Their letters indicated that Lola performed oral sex on Ludwig, and at other times he masturbated as he sucked on her feet. It is likely that these practices occurred in lieu of sexual intercourse, which Lola had with the king on only a handful of occasions. Perhaps she had little sexual attraction for a man thirty-four years her senior with a knob growing in the middle of his forehead. She often excused herself from intercourse on the grounds of menstruation, poor health, or the danger of pregnancy.

In addition, during their fifteen-month relationship in Munich, Ludwig would ask her to wear pieces of flannel in two places next to her skin -- we can only imagine which two places -- and give them to him. Later, during her exile, he made the same request and she sent him the flannel she had worn. He particularly wanted to know which side of the flannel had been against her skin, as he would wear this side next to his. He insisted on knowing if she had worn the flannel in both places.

During Lola's exile, she sent Ludwig a letter with a little circle she had drawn to represent her mouth for him to kiss. Ludwig replied, "The drawing in your letter that is meant to represent your mouth (each time I give it a kiss), I took at first to represent your cuño [vagina], and my jarajo [penis] began to get erect. As much pleasure as your mouth has given me, your cuño would have pleased me greatly. I give kisses to one and to the other."

By all accounts Lillie Langtry and the future Edward VII of Great Britain had a lusty sex life. Edward was stunned in 1877 when he first saw the long-legged, voluptuous redhead who walked "like a beautiful hound set upon its feet." He quickly made her his first official mistress, and for three years they were almost inseparable. Lillie related that one day the prince said to her, "I've spent enough on you to buy a battleship." To which she tartly replied, "And you've spent enough in me to float one."

Copyright © 2004 by Eleanor Herman