Doomed Queens (41 page)

Meet your spouse before you marry him.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

Caroline’s story has often been compared to that of another Princess of Wales, Diana Spencer. Like Caroline, Diana found herself in a loveless marriage that became tabloid fodder. The popular princess used her celebrity to influence the press, just as Caroline did. However, Diana was far more savvy at media manipulation. Though Diana avoided poisoning on coronation day, she died tragically nonetheless—but that’s another story.

Diana had too much in common with Caroline.

1875

ying young is a good career move for composers and poets—but not for Chinese empresses. Alute, the consort of the Tongzhi emperor, died at twenty after less than three years occupying the dragon throne of the Qing dynasty. Like her European cohort Caroline of Brunswick, the cause of Alute’s premature demise remains unresolved and lends itself to a royal game of Clue. Did the empress succumb to poison in the bedroom? Starvation in the tower? Or, scariest possibility of all, suicide?

Alute’s unfortunate fate was unconsciously brought upon by herself—between her exceptional intelligence, beauty, and family position, it was impossible for her to avoid being chosen as empress. Alute was the daughter of Chong Ji, a gifted scholar who served as reader to Tongzhi. A popular story states that Chong kept Alute close to him and oversaw her education. Because of Chong’s position at court, the teenage girl was noticed by Tongzhi’s mother, the empress dowager Cixi.

A most unfortunate empress.

Cixi, better known as the Dragon Lady, ruled China as regent for Tongzhi, who became emperor at the age of five. As for Tongzhi, he enjoyed all of the privileges of royalty, but none of the responsibilities. A flop as a monarch, he expended more energy on pursuits of the flesh than his imperial duties. His inexhaustible appetites encompassed male and female prostitutes and transsexuals and possibly left him syphilitic by the age of fifteen. Frustrated at her son’s inability to settle down, the empress dowager decided marriage was the cure for her son’s worldly woes—and that Alute was the medicine of choice.

Tongzhi went along with his mother’s will and married Alute in 1872. Though she was two years older than her husband, she was far less experienced—one cringes to imagine the wedding night between the innocent empress and the sexually voracious emperor. Initially, it seemed like Alute had tamed the beast; he was enthralled by his new wife and insisted on formally accepting the responsibilities of the throne. But within six months, Tongzhi was back making the beast with two backs with everyone outside the palace. A contemporary remarked that the emperor’s skill in governing “fell short of even minimal expectation.”

Less than three years after their marriage, both were history. Tongzhi suddenly died of what was recorded as smallpox but more likely was complications of syphilis. Alute’s death came just seventy-four days after her husband’s. She was believed to be pregnant.

No one knows what—or who—caused the empress’s death. One theory suggested she was poisoned with gold leaf, a popular mode of murder at the time. The
New York Times
insinuated that her assassination was ordered for political reasons: “[T]here is little attempt to conceal the belief that the fear of complications in case her expected child should be a son led to the sacrifice of her life.” Some thought that the empress dowager blamed Alute for her son’s fatal illness and took revenge by starving her to death.

But the most logical explanation is also the saddest: Alute was pressured to commit suicide, to win honor by joining her husband in death. It was even rumored that her father smuggled opium to her for the deed.

Whatever may have occurred, the result was the same. Any power Alute might have held was passed back to her mother-in-law, who ruled China with an iron fist for another three decades.

CAUTIONARY MORAL

If your enemies outnumber you, your days may be numbered.

1898

t the fin de siècle, Vienna quivered with madness. A fascination with the subconscious, as evidenced in the work of Freud and friends, reflected a societal anxiety about what the new century might bring. Elisabeth, Duchess of Bavaria, empress of Austria, and queen of Hungary, was born about twenty years too early to enjoy the full benefits of this zeitgeist. Yet her tortured life reflected the era as accurately as any psychiatric case study—just call Elisabeth a woman ahead of her time.

Though the empress’s death would arrive in her sixtieth year at the hands of an anarchist, the sad reality was that her destiny was set by the time she turned fifteen. That was when Elisabeth, better known as Sisi, met Emperor Franz Joseph at a tea in 1852. The emperor, who was a decadent man of the world, fell in love with the innocent teenager, whose wild beauty anticipated that of a circa 1980 Brooke Shields. Franz Joseph proposed marriage soon after; Sisi blushed but accepted. Years later, the empress commented, “Marriage is an absurd arrangement. One is sold as a child at fifteen.”