Princesses Behaving Badly (32 page)

William was busy with other things, so he just signed his name to the amorous replies penned by his brother and best friend, Louis. Despite using an epistolary surrogate, William
did
want to marry Anna—her position and wealth made the match exceptionally attractive. The two were wed in August 1561, during a weeklong bacchanal that included a jousting tournament and a public bedding (a charming custom in which bride and
groom were conveyed to their chamber by jovial wedding guests, dumped into bed amid much ribald joking, and left to consummate the marriage while folks sniggered outside the door). The 5,500 guests drank 3,600 buckets of wine and 1,600 barrels of beer. At one point during the celebrations, William confided to Anna’s aunt that he wanted his young bride to concern herself with dancing and French novels, not sewing and religious education. The electoress was shocked and prophesied that allowing Anna such freedom would prove her undoing.

Anna did come to a bad end, but it probably wasn’t French novels and dancing that got her there. By 1565, whatever had been sweet in the couple’s four-year marriage had completely soured. Everyone from aristocratic gossips to Antwerp housewives referred to Anna as William’s “domestic curse.” One biographer writing in the 1940s noted that “even the bitterest propagandists, who stopped at nothing to blacken William, could find no word to whiten his wife.”

With twenty-first-century hindsight, it’s pretty clear that Anna was mentally ill and that the vast amounts of alcohol she consumed, coupled with her social position, exacerbated the condition. She careened from melancholic weeping to reckless hilarity. She often threatened to kill herself and went without eating or speaking to anyone, shutting herself in her room and rocking back and forth. Or she’d go manic and tear off with her entourage of “lewd” friends to Spa, a town southeast of Liège. While there, she’d spend buckets of money she didn’t have and then wail that her husband was trying to poison her when he demanded she come home. When she was home, she abused William’s children from his previous marriage so much that he was forced to send them away.

Anna was a mean drunk. Once, while staying at a family castle during one of her last pregnancies, she raged against her hosts for trying to keep her from drinking wine. Even at a time when women routinely consumed alcohol during pregnancy, family members feared Anna’s bouts of liquor-infused abandon would harm the fetus. Not that Anna seemed to care. She’d lost two children just days after their births, and though her third, a son, seemed likely to live, she was unable to express any affection for him. Still, despite her erratic behavior and inability to be a mother, Anna did her duty and gave William a respectable five children.

Anna was also bizarrely jealous. She loved to make scenes and was known to imply that William was involved in some sort of sordid, possibly sexual, relationship with his brother. One count recalled a disastrous evening during which Anna spent the entire meal abusing her husband for what she claimed was his social inferiority; once she finished that harangue, she started in on his sexual inadequacies. After such outbursts, Anna could be dramatically sorry, offering tearful apologies to her beleaguered husband, who by then knew better than to believe them.

By 1568, Anna’s behavior had become intolerable. She seemed to genuinely hate William, who, to his credit, frequently tried to reconcile with her. Once, when she was living in grotesque extravagance in Cologne, a messenger arrived with a letter from him asking her to come home. In front of a crowd, she tore the note to pieces, stamped on it, and screamed that she’d sooner see him dead and buried than return.

After the birth of their last child, Anna broke with William completely. She took off with Johannes Rubens, a middle-aged lawyer who was married and had children of his own. The couple was eventually found shacking up outside Cologne in 1571. Though she initially tried to deny the affair, the evidence was rapidly growing—she was unmistakably pregnant with her lover’s child. Rubens confessed, causing Anna to pitch one of her trademark fits. She demanded that William kill both her and her lover, as was his right. Rubens, unsurprisingly, was not a fan of this idea; perhaps more surprisingly, neither was his wife, who pleaded for her wayward husband’s life.

William declined to execute either of them. After all, beheading a princess of Saxony, mad though she was, was politically unpalatable. (For the history of art, too, this decision proved fortunate: Johannes Rubens would one day father Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish baroque painter.) Johannes and his forgiving wife raised his daughter by Anna, likely sparing the child a lifetime of unhappiness.

Anna, however, was not so lucky. William divorced her in 1571 and never set eyes on her again. The divorce was kept secret, and she was taken into
custody by her family. Her manic behavior only intensified. She was never left alone and, by 1572, was treated to twice-weekly sermons from local preachers, in the hope that divine intervention might inspire her to step off her wicked path. It’s a mark of the times that Anna was never perceived as anything other than willfully bad, guilty of a “stubborn, petrified malice.” The treatment she received toward the end of her life mirrored that of other mentally ill individuals at that time: enforced isolation in abominable conditions, punctuated by frequent applications of religion.

In 1575, Anna was moved to her family home in Dresden. She was kept locked in two rooms with bricked-up windows; the door had only a small iron-gated opening for the delivery of food. Not surprisingly, her condition worsened. She complained of not being fed enough and drank huge quantities of olive oil for reasons known only to her. She was also tortured by hallucinations. She raved that people were trying to kill her, that she’d murdered her own children, that her daughters had been sexually involved with their father. She foamed at the mouth and talked gibberish “as if she were crazy.” In 1576, she attacked a local man with knives, “raging and foolish as if she were possessed.” She died in 1577, at the age of 33.

Sadly, some of Anna’s children may have inherited their mother’s wellspring of insanity, or perhaps they had been damaged by such a fraught upbringing. Emilia, William and Anna’s youngest child, went the most spectacularly off the rails. She was arrested as a “madwoman,” screamed at anyone near her, and attempted suicide several times before her death in 1629.

Anna of Saxony was by no means the only certifiable princess in European history. With consanguinity no barrier to marriage in the Continent’s royal houses, inherited mental disorders were perpetuated, and the bizarre semipublic social positions into which unstable people were often thrust probably didn’t help. But not all who were supposed to be mad really were. Madness, it seems, has its perks.

P
RINCESS
A
LEXANDRA
A
MELIE OF
B
AVARIA

The daughter of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, Princess Alexandra Amelie was the only one of her nine siblings who never married. Her father put off would-be suitors by claiming she was in fragile health. But her health wasn’t the only thing fragile about Alexandra. At age 23, the pretty, dark-haired princess was found walking slowly, carefully, bow-leggedly down the corridors of the royal palace. When questioned by her worried parents, she claimed that as a little girl she had swallowed a full-size glass grand piano. The princess was worried that if she bumped into something, the piano inside her would shatter and leave her in bloody shreds.

Glass delusions were a frequent symptom of melancholy, the pre-psychology catchall diagnosis of mental illnesses that endured into the nineteenth century. Sufferers sometimes believed that part or even all of their bodies were made of the material. In the fourteenth century, for example, Charles VI of France thought he had glass internal organs, and to protect them he had iron ribs inserted into his clothes.

Alexandra’s behavior was odd in other ways as well. She would only wear white and was obsessed with cleanliness; certain sights and smells disturbed her. Gossips claimed that she also believed she had a sofa in her head. In 1850, Alexandra was reportedly treated in a mental institution in Germany. She spent much of her adult life in a convent, where she was made an abbess, probably by virtue of her social station. She later had a career as a writer of children’s stories. She died in 1875, at age 49.

C
OUNTESS
E
LIZABETH
B
ATHORY OF
H
UNGARY

On December 29, 1610, Count George Thurzo, accompanied by an armed phalanx of soldiers, seized a small castle in northwest Hungary. Searching the grounds, they found the body of a young woman, recently dead and covered with bruises, rope burns, and cuts. In a dank dungeon, they found another woman, nearly dead from the festering wounds all over her body. And there were others, the count wrote to his wife in a hastily scrawled note on December 30, “that damned woman was keeping for torture.”

“That damned woman” was Countess Elizabeth Bathory, princess of Hungary and one of the most powerful aristocrats in sixteenth-century Europe. A mass murderess, the story goes, she believed that bathing in the blood of young maidens would maintain her youth. This is probably just myth, but Elizabeth was undoubtedly cruel, sadistic, amoral, and insane.

The number of women and young girls she either killed or tortured—by beating, biting, burning, branding, cutting, and starving them, as well as forcing them to stand naked in freezing streams in the middle of winter—is unclear. Her servants, four people named as accomplices by an investigating commission, claimed they’d been party to between 36 and 50 murders. Later witnesses put the number as high as 650, though that figure is likely an exaggeration.

How Elizabeth could have killed so many women and gotten away with it for so long is mindboggling. But at that time in Hungary, the feudal pact between the classes was lethally imbalanced. Masters had all the power and few obligations to their serfs. Where a serf could be executed for stealing, a member of the aristocracy could literally get away with murder, provided that the victim was of sufficiently low rank. Cruelty of the kind Elizabeth practiced on her servants was not unheard of—savage beatings for trivial or imagined offenses were the prerogative of the ruling class. What’s more, Elizabeth was spectacularly powerful, second only to the king.

In public life, Elizabeth was a doting mother and a strong political force, even after the death of her husband, the reportedly cruel Count of Nadasdy. It appears that her murderous activities came to light only about 1609, when she began preying on noblewomen; in fact, most of the victims named in court testimonies were related to Elizabeth by blood or marriage. Though she had a reputation as a hard taskmistress, she enjoyed a steady supply of young noblewomen from poor families—years of war had left many families with more daughters than they could marry off.

Despite the stunning charges against her, not to mention the political factions who would have loved to see her executed, Elizabeth was never convicted of any crime. Three of her servants/accomplices were executed, as was a local woman accused of being a witch in Elizabeth’s service. Elizabeth
was
punished, however, but it was her family, not a court, that decided to incarcerate her. She was locked in her bedchamber, the door bricked up, with only a small slot for delivering meals. She died on August 21, 1614.

M
ARIA
I
OF
P
ORTUGAL

Queen Maria I of Portugal, whose madness was of a religious inclination, terrified the residents of her palace by moaning “Ai, Jesus, Jesus!” at all hours of the day and night.

But she wasn’t always like that. Born in 1734, Maria inherited the throne from her father in 1777. Her first act was to kick out the marquis of Pomba, whom her father had allowed free rein to imprison and execute members of the nobility whenever he felt threatened. From then on, she was regarded as a wise queen. And even when faced with the deaths of five loved ones within three months, in 1788, she bore up with grace and strength. But in 1791, heredity caught up with her.

Maria came from a long line of anxious, twitchy, mentally ill royals. Her grandfather, Philip V of Spain, was tortured by the belief that he was being consumed by fire from within; he refused to cut his hair or toenails and claimed that his feet were different sizes. Her uncle, Ferdinand VI, refused to wash or shave, banged his head against the wall for hours, and refused all solid foods. And Maria’s father was plagued by claustrophobia, the result of surviving a massive earthquake that destroyed his palace and killed more than 100,000 people. From an early age, Maria had what contemporaries termed a “gloomy temperament” and was “subject to nervous afflictions,” anxiety attacks, and fears for her eternal soul.

With the death of Maria’s confessor, a quiet man who could calm her fears, a new priest was appointed to safeguard her. A man of the cloth of the hellfire and damnation variety, he could not have been less suited to the task, only fueling Maria’s anxieties that she and her loved ones were doomed. The revolution in not-too-distant France, which had stripped the Bourbon king of his powers, also did little to soothe her terror. In 1789, she banned the editor of the
Lisbon Gazette
from printing any more stories about the bloodshed abroad.

By October 1791, Maria was plagued by nightly panics that kept her from sleeping; she complained of pains in her stomach and throat and refused to eat. Two months later, doctors were called to treat her worsening condition with a good bleeding. The experience only terrified the poor queen even more.

On February 2, 1792, Maria began howling during an opera performance. That week her foreign minister wrote to the Portuguese ambassador to England: “It is with great sadness that I inform you that Her Majesty is suffering from a melancholic affliction which has descended into insanity, into what is feared to be a total frenzy.” The minister asked for Dr. Francis Willis, the famous Lincolnshire doctor who attended the unfortunate King George III of Britain during his bouts of insanity. Willis could claim success—he had “cured” the king at his private asylum after only a few months (though George III would go permanently mad in 1811). While waiting for Willis to arrive, court physicians treated Maria the only way they knew how: she was bled, forcibly dunked in waters at a therapeutic spa, and, because she refused medicine orally, held down and given enemas. When Willis arrived, he demanded full control over the queen’s treatment, for which the Portuguese crown paid £20,000 (more than $1.5 million in today’s currency). His brutal regimen was no more enlightened than that of the court doctors, although he did suggest a reprieve from the daily masses and religious pageantry that seemed to exacerbate her condition.