Doomed Queens (36 page)

CAUTIONARY MORAL

Knowing when to surrender
can save your life.

1775

aroline Matilda was the youngest sister of George III of England; their father had died several months before her birth in 1751, leaving him in charge of raising her. When Caroline reached the fecund age of sixteen, King George trundled her off to become queen of Denmark. Unfortunately no one bothered to warn her that there was something rotten in Denmark—her fiancé, Christian VII.

From his earliest childhood, there was something weird about Christian. While other kids were playing with toys, Christian stared catatonically at his hands. Obsessed with having a perfect body, he unbuttoned his shirt in public to check his six-pack. The king became stranger as he grew older. He liked to pretend that he was a criminal in need of corporal punishment; other times, he wore disguises in public, where he picked brawls and indulged in kinky sex with prostitutes. In his darker moments, Christian babbled nonsense and shouted about killing himself and others.

In other words, Christian was stark raving mad. All this wouldn’t have been so bad, except he did not want to be king of Denmark.

Enter Caroline. Predictably, she was appalled at the dismal marriage her brother had arranged for her. But instead of running home to England—she was too furious for that—she embraced Denmark as its regent. King Christian did not mind her taking over. Instead, he liked it—it fueled his fantasies of female domination, a fact not lost on his dismayed courtiers.

Thoughout all this, Queen Caroline did not neglect her royal duty. She managed to conceive an heir of Christian, Frederick, who was born in 1768. After this, Christian considered his job done and the queen was left to follow her own pleasures as she wished. Which she did—Caroline developed a crush on Christian’s doctor, Johann Friedrich Struensee, that she quickly consummated. Their passionate affair became an open secret that the king either didn’t notice or care two hoots about. Nor did he blink when Caroline gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, whom she claimed was his.

Caroline during
le scandale grand
at the grand age of twenty.

The Danish lovebirds could have continued singing indefinitely, but Struensee got all Rousseauesque on Caroline. The good doctor fancied himself a philosopher humanist. With the king incapacitated, Struensee used his position with the queen to push some of his more radical ideas into law and name himself de facto head of state.

The Danish people were not amused. A plot was launched in 1772 to overthrow Caroline and Struensee’s rule, headed by Christian’s dowager stepmother, Juliana Marie. The conspirators used the pageantry of a masquerade ball to conceal their plans. Caroline was too distracted by wine and song to notice what was going on until it was too late—she and Struensee were arrested that night, never to see each other again.

Caroline was imprisoned in a castle at Elsinore, where another mad Dane reputedly lived. Her children were taken away from her and her marriage to Christian dissolved. Struensee’s fate was far less kind. He was convicted of treason and ultimately drawn and quartered.

Eventually Caroline was released from prison. Instead of going home to England, she settled in Celle, Germany. There she plotted her return to Denmark to regain her throne and her children. Alas, all her plans were brought to a close after she succumbed to scarlet fever in 1775. Too bad there wasn’t a doctor in the house.

CAUTIONARY MORAL

Don’t look to your doctor to heal your disappointments.

1793

irst things first: Marie Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake.” Those words were attributed to an earlier French queen, Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Sun King Louis XIV. By 1767—a year in which Marie Antoinette was still an innocent German-speaking twelve-year-old in Austria—this quote had been bandied about enough that the philosopher Rousseau included it in his
Confessions
: “I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, ‘Then let them eat pastry!’”

But these facts did not dissuade
citoyens
of eighteenth-century France from inflating “let them eat cake” into a poisoned soufflé to shove down Marie Antoinette’s diamond-adorned throat. The truth is that, in times of turmoil, people look for a scapegoat to sacrifice. Marie Antoinette just happened to be the French Revolution’s favorite It girl.

To be fair, Marie Antoinette lived in a world in which she was expected to obey her husband as if he were God, to spill forth children as if she were Eve—and to accept that aristocrats ate cake while peasants had no bread. After all, it was divine will and all that.

Marie in better days.

Marie was born to be oblivious in 1755. She was the fifteenth child of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, who raised the pretty little archduchess to be a tasty linzer torte on the pastry shelf of European princesses. The empress did not let her linger past her expiration date. She married off Marie two months after her first menstruation in 1770 to Louis-Auguste, the future king of France. She was only fourteen.

Marie did her best to adapt to the sophisticated French court, but she was ill prepared. Originally an older sister was intended as Louis’s queen and had been educated accordingly; an outbreak of smallpox bumped her from Maria Theresa’s dynastic lineup. Instead, the empress beefed up Marie’s lackluster studies to include French history and informed the girl to go forth and procreate for France: “If one is to consider only the greatness of your position, you are the happiest of your sisters and all princesses.”

But happiness was elusive for Marie, though she did her best to win her husband’s favor. Louis-Auguste may have been next in line to the throne, but he was a porcine-visaged geek who preferred hunting and carpentry to romancing the fair sex. Their marriage remained unconsummated for seven years, during which time Marie endured malicious gossip at court, an unattentive husband, and monthly letters from her mother nagging her about her maidenhead. Marie wept as she saw other ladies of the court grow big with child. Upon hearing that one had suffered a stillbirth, she confessed, “Even though it is terrible, I still wish it had been me in her place.”

The problem, however, lay with Louis, not Marie—and no amount of Viagra would have helped. Louis suffered from phimosis, a deformation of the foreskin that made sex excruciating for him. The only cure was circumcision, a dangerous operation in an age lacking anesthesia and antibiotics.

To distract herself from bed, birthing, and beyond, Marie frenetically indulged in retail therapy. Feathers, gowns, coiffures, and diamonds became her favored objects of desire. She stayed up all night gambling, racking up the royal debt in the process. When the pleasures of materialism proved ineffective, she turned to the consolation of philosophy. A reading of that old scamp Rousseau convinced Marie that salvation lay in nature. She planted gardens and built the
petit hameau
, a faux village on the grounds of Versailles, where she and her friends could play out their rustic fantasies.