Royal Babylon (12 page)

Alphonso plunged into an almost suicidal depression from which he never quite recovered. He regained his poise sufficiently to honor his dynastic obligations, and a year later was remarried to Maria, daughter of the star-crossed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In private, however, he submerged his grief in the beds of other women.

The King's philandering produced one of the great secret royal scandals of the nineteenth century. One of Alphonso's regular mistresses was the wife of a young army officer. The King discovered, to his irritation, that the husband was a jealous and naturally suspicious type, and so he pulled a few strings to put him permanently out of the picture. The cuckolded young officer suddenly found himself dispatched to Cuba on a series of dangerous and life-threatening assignments. Inconveniently for King Alphonso XII, the young officer survived. Worse still, someone had tipped him off as to the real reason he had been posted 3,000 miles from Madrid. He deserted and returned home. When the King next arrived at his mistress's house, he found her husband armed and waiting, intent on revenge. This time, however, Alphonso had taken the precaution of bringing along an armed bodyguard. The jealous husband was put to the sword and his body secretly disposed of.

Another of Alphonso's favorites was a dancer called Elena Sanchez, who bore him two bastards. On his deathbed, she and his wife, Maria Christina, stood side by side to pay their final respects. When the King died his wife was pregnant. The baby was born King Alphonso XIII in May 1886, under the Regency of the Queen Mother.

The boy-king grew up to be odd-looking even for a Spanish Bourbon. He was physically puny, tubercular, unnaturally pale, and in addition to his huge Bourbon nose he had a very pronounced jawline. In spite of his runtish appearance it quickly became apparent that there was very hot Bourbon blood coursing beneath his corpse-like complexion.

The Spanish court had long since decided that it was time to address the problem of the royal family's genetic stock, as too many centuries of marriage partners from Catholic southern Europe had resulted in a family that was dangerously inbred. Accordingly, in 1906 Alphonso was married to Princess Victoria of Battenberg, who had been raised in England as a Protestant and was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Although she had converted to Catholicism, the marriage to Queen Ena, as she became known, was controversial and bitterly resented by Spanish conservatives.

Although the King suffered from debilitating heart and chest conditions he was an aggressive adulterer. He surrounded himself with a gang of like-minded friends and pimps and together they cruised Madrid's brothels. According to the mistresses who kissed and told, the King was a voracious but selfish lover. His private life was an open secret at court and his conquests were discussed freely. One evening a young nobleman was about to leave a Madrid brothel when the proprietress stopped him and made an unusual request: she recognized him as an acquaintance
of the King—could he please return His Majesty's signet ring, which he'd left in the brothel the night before? The young courtier returned it discreetly to Alphonso, who made him kneel then jokingly dubbed him “Duke of Loyalty.”

King Alphonso was also a frequent visitor to Paris, where he had several people on the payroll at the Spanish Embassy whose sole job was to procure women for him and ensure he had a regular supply of fresh black satin sheets.

For all but the first two or three years of their marriage, the King and Queen lived virtually separate lives, appearing together only when protocol required it. For many female courtiers, flirting with the King was almost a reflex action. Queen Ena suffered her husband's infidelity in silence, even when he was cruelly indiscreet—his conquests included several of her ladies-in-waiting, and even her first cousin Beatrice. The King sired countless bastards, few of whom could look forward to royal patronage or any sort of acknowledgment. Alphonso had seduced a young Irish governess who was employed briefly in his court. When she became pregnant by him and gave birth to a daughter, she was simply sacked and kicked out of the royal household in disgrace.

         

Czar Peter the Great was one of history's all-time heavyweight royal adulterers. The Czar took pride in the fact that he was the father of countless bastards: he considered it part of his patriotic duty. Whenever the Czar wanted sex, his wife's ladies-in-waiting were his mainstay for instant gratification. When Peter and his wife visited Prussia in September 1717, they had in tow
about 400 ladies-in-waiting, who acted as cooks, chambermaids and washerwomen for the party. A German princess noted that about one in every four women was carrying a very well-dressed child. When pressed about the whereabouts of the fathers, each replied with a smile, “The Czar did me the honor.”

Foreign ambassadors would pretend not to notice while Peter openly fondled the breasts of his wife's ladies-in-waiting. The Prussian King Frederick William I witnessed Peter greeting his niece the Duchess of Mecklenburg. The Czar swept her up in his arms, carried her to an adjacent room, tore off her underclothes and had sex with her right there on the spot, not even bothering to shut the door to prevent her husband from watching.

Both of the Czar's wives were aware that he regularly took prostitutes as well. Unabashed, he boasted that he spent less money on his mistresses than any other monarch in Europe. When he visited France the thing he looked forward to more than anything else was the promise of the Parisienne brothels. At Versailles it was recorded that he slept with a streetwalker, upset her with his legendary stinginess, then sent her packing.

Husbands sensibly learned to turn a blind eye when it became apparent that their wives had taken the Czar's fancy. One of Peter's mistresses was married to an army captain named Tchernichov. She gave birth to seven children, and no one was quite sure, not even their mother, which were the husband's and which were the Czar's. When she gave Peter syphilis, however, the Czar was furious and instructed the husband to give her a sound whipping.

The Czar had a long-serving mistress named Mary Hamilton, a Russian-born girl descended from a Scottish family. When Peter became bored with her, she consoled herself by sleeping with several of Peter's aides. She found herself with a
series of unwanted pregnancies, which she resolved by systematic infanticide. One of Mary's lovers was a courtier named Orlov who bullied her and demanded money from her. To keep Orlov happy, she pilfered from the Czarina's jewelry collection. Mary's access to the jewels made her the prime suspect, and when she was questioned by the Czar she quickly broke down and confessed all, including the murder of the newborn babies. Peter was incensed, not because she had slain innocent children, but because it was just possible that one of them might have been his, and Mary Hamilton was duly sentenced to death. The Czar was present at the execution. He kissed her, then watched as her head was cut off by the executioner. He picked up the bloodied head, pointed out to the crowd below how expertly the axman had severed her neck, kissed her full on the lips, dropped the head in the mud and then walked away for a beer.

The Czar demanded fidelity from his wives. His second wife, the Czarina Catherine, had an affair with her husband's chamberlain, William Mons. She was indiscreet and everyone at court got to know about it except the Czar. When word of the affair finally reached him, he was both furious and sorely embarrassed. His ego would not allow him to admit that his wife had preferred to sleep with another man, and so he could not bring himself to confront her. Without any reference to the alleged adultery, Peter had his chamberlain arrested and condemned on trumped-up bribery charges. Catherine watched as Mons was beheaded, but her nerve held and she was very careful not to show the slightest sign of emotion that might betray her. The Czar was exasperated by his wife's display of inscrutability. One evening Catherine returned to her room to find her ex-lover's head pickled in alcohol in a jar by her bed. She retired to bed without flinching. Night after night, Catherine went to sleep beside her grisly bedside ornament, but
still she kept her composure. Finally Peter gave up and had the head removed. Half a century later when Catherine the Great was reorganizing Russia's Museum of Fine Art she found two jars containing the pickled heads of Mary Hamilton and William Mons, which had been on display in the gallery since 1724.

Like Peter the Great, Czar Alexander I was fêted abroad as a great enlightened liberator but feared at home as a ruthlessly oppressive autocrat. As a teenager he had been sickened by the senile sexual frolics of his grandmother Catherine the Great, but it didn't diminish his robustly healthy interest in women. Soon after he married thirteen-year-old Princess Louisa of Baden, Alexander took up with the wife of his master of the hounds, a beautiful Polish woman named Maria, who flaunted her position as the Czar's favorite mistress as blatantly as she possibly could. He also seduced the wives of two of his best friends, plus a whole string of wives of minor court officials.

The Czar's interest in women took a less healthy turn when his attentions focused on his sister. The Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna was a petite, vivacious woman with “eyes of fire and the figure of a demi-goddess,” according to one of her many admirers. Unfortunately, her greatest admirer was her brother. Alexander and his sister became almost inseparable, and when they were apart he showered her with passionate letters written in French: “I am mad about you .  .  . I love you like a madman” and “I rejoice like a maniac to be seeing you again .  .  . after having run like a man possessed, I hope to take delicious rest in your arms.”

His lust for his favorite sister ended abruptly at about the time of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, when the Czar's life took a strange and unexpected turn. He unaccountably became involved with an obscure religious cult, and surrounded himself
with shadowy “priests.” The Czar's death at the age of forty-seven was shrouded in mystery and myth. Some Romanovs believe to this day that Alexander faked his death and lived out the rest of his years as a religious mystic. According to the official version, however, he was already weakened by an acute liver condition and his doctors finished him off by giving him two enemas and applying thirty-five leeches to his neck.

When Alexander died childless, the Crown should have passed to his vicious brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, who had inherited both his insane father's looks and his sensitivity. The Grand Duke, however, committed the unpardonable royal sin of entering into a morganatic marriage, and was so widely unpopular that he was forced to waive his rights to succession, in favor of his younger brother Nicholas.

Czar Alexander's vigorous and handsome brother and eventual successor to the throne, Nicholas I, was considered to be a bit of an eccentric because he didn't take a mistress until he had been married for twenty-five years, and only then when his wife's health failed. His choice of mistress, however—one of his wife's ladies-in-waiting, Varvara Nelidova—was not in the best possible taste. His younger brother Mikhail had an even stranger relationship with his very beautiful young wife, the grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. On their wedding night, instead of escorting his new bride to the royal bedroom, he suddenly jumped on his horse and galloped off to review a guards regiment. It was, as they say, the talk of St. Petersburg.

As a young man, Czar Alexander II flirted with, and greatly impressed, Queen Victoria, and under different circumstances could even have become her husband. In 1839 the heir to the Russian throne visited England. The young Victoria was besotted with the tall, striking, twenty-year-old Romanov. When
she met him again thirty-five years later, even though he was much altered and England and Russia had fought each other in the Crimean War, Queen Victoria confessed that she had never quite lost her infatuation for him.

The Czar was certainly no Prince Albert. Alexander II managed to shock even the jaded sensibilities of the Russian court when, at the age of fifty, he suddenly ditched his loyal wife, Marie, after twenty-seven years of marriage and took up with an eighteen-year-old St. Petersburg schoolgirl named Catherine Dolkuruka. The middle-aged lovelorn Czar installed her as one of his wife's ladies-in-waiting and promised her that he would get rid of his wife at the earliest opportunity. The young mistress bore him four children over the next fourteen years, three of whom lived in the palace. This brought the Empress Marie enormous grief. When she fell terminally ill and lay alone and dying, it was said that she could hear the laughter of her husband's bastards as they played in the room above.

Russian law obliged the Czar to observe the minimum requirements of decency and good taste by waiting one full year after his wife died before he remarried. The Romanov family were shocked to discover that Czar Alexander had secretly married his young mistress within forty days after the Empress's death. There were few expressions of regret on either side of the Kremlin wall in 1881 when Alexander II was blown apart by a terrorist bomb.

         

In the nineteenth century, French court morals sank to an all-time low. However, this time the chief culprit was not a
Bourbon. Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew Louis Napoleon became Emperor of France in 1852, taking the title Napoleon III. He married a year later. His wife, Eugénie, a beautiful Spanish countess, had attempted to commit suicide after an unrequited love affair in her youth by breaking the heads off phosphorus matches and drinking them dissolved in milk. It is unlikely that the Emperor was faithful to her for more than the first six months of their twenty years of marriage.

Emperor Napoleon III was the unlikeliest of lady-killers—four feet and six inches tall, with an overly large head, little hair, one dilated eyeball, a beaky nose, a music-hall waxed mustache and a rheumatic limp. He appeared in public on horseback whenever possible because of his stumpy legs and his peculiar waddling gait, which was largely due to the fact that the Emperor wore nappies. Neither his appearance nor the testimonies of countless women to his less than extraordinary performances between the sheets dented his unwavering belief that he was an irresistible seducer.