Royal Babylon (13 page)

In England in the late 1840s he slept with a succession of actresses, most famously Elisa Felix, who under her stage name Rachel was one of Europe's best-known actresses. She boasted that she had slept with almost every prominent man in London. In 1847 Louis Napoleon and Miss Felix were in a first-class train compartment traveling from London to Birmingham, with his cousin “Plon-Plon.” During the journey his cousin fell asleep. He awoke to see Louis and the actress fornicating on the seat opposite him, but judiciously closed his eyes.

One of Louis Napoleon's most rewarding relationships was formed with a blond English courtesan who subsequently financed his election to the French Presidency. Elizabeth Ann Haryet, also known as Mrs. Howard, was the
twenty-four-year-old daughter of a Brighton cobbler. At one time she was the mistress of the jockey Jem Mason, rider of the winning horse in the 1839 Grand National. Later she had a son by a major in the Life Guards, and slept with at least three other titled English gentlemen, the Duke of Beaufort, the Earl of Chesterfield and the Earl of Malmesbury. By the time she met Louis Napoleon she had acquired a large fortune through various generous financial settlements from her ex-boyfriends.

Louis Napoleon installed her in a house in Berkeley Street, not far from his own residence in St. James's, and as soon as he became President of France he took her with him and put her up in a house near the Elysée Palace. He was still sleeping with her when he suddenly announced his forthcoming engagement to Eugénie. The first his English mistress knew about it was when she casually picked up a copy of a newspaper in a hotel lobby on the morning the news broke. She dashed back to her home to find that Louis Napoleon's secret police had already ransacked her rooms to make sure that there was nothing incriminating that could link him to her.

While his wife was pregnant with their son, the Emperor embarked on his most scandalous affair yet, taking a nineteen-year-old Italian mistress, the Comtesse de Castiglione. She was said to be Europe's most accomplished and most beautiful courtesan. The English Lord Hertford, allegedly the most tightfisted man in Paris, paid her a million francs (about
$
30,000) for the pleasure of one night in bed with her, providing she promised to indulge his every whim. As a result she was confined to bed for three days. Thereafter they gave each other a wide berth, it was said, out of mutual respect.

Napoleon gave his Comtesse a new pearl necklace worth
about half a million francs and a monthly salary of 50,000 francs. Little did he suspect that his new mistress was spying on behalf of her boyfriend, the Italian King Victor Emmanuel II, and the Italian government. The plan worked perfectly in every detail but one. The frothy Comtesse neither knew nor wanted to know anything about politics, and although she made considerable inroads into Louis Napoleon's bank balance she failed to extract any useful information or exert one iota of influence over his policies.

Louis Napoleon's health was undermined by his unflagging sex life, but he had a few other problems besides, including neuralgia, sciatica, dyspepsia, insomnia, gonorrhea and syphilis. He was in agony for much of the time from a combination of rheumatism and the stone in his bladder. The Emperor had some success in keeping his health problems a secret from the press, and even from his wife, who didn't find out the true extent of his illnesses until after he was dead. Before the Battle of Sedan in 1870, he had his cheeks carefully rouged so that his men couldn't see he was white with fear and ravaged with dysentery. He commanded with towels stuffed inside his breeches to act as king-size nappies. He was too ill to attend the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and so Eugénie, who also happened to be the cousin of Ferdinand de Lesseps, stood in for him. The royal doctors tried to explain the Emperor's nonappearance at this prestigious event by claiming that he had rheumatism. Napoleon soldiered on with his bladder stone, stubbornly refusing the urologist's probe.

His poor health further restricted his performances in bed. One mistress, the Marquise Taisey-Chatenoy, left a detailed description of his seduction technique, beginning with his
ludicrous appearance at the foot of her bed in the middle of the night “looking rather insignificant in mauve silk pajamas.” The Marquise continued, “There follows a period of brief 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.”

Absolute Power in Hohenzollern Germany and Romanov Russia

         

         

THE HOUSE OF
Hohenzollern, the royal family of Prussia, and ultimately kaisers of Germany, believed in a family ghost. According to legend a “white lady” would appear before the head of the household when it was time for him to die. One night, Frederick of Prussia's mad young wife charged headfirst through the glass door to his bedroom and appeared before him in her white underclothes splattered in blood. The old King took her for the family ghost, had a heart attack and died a few days later. The Queen, a complete lunatic, had to be maintained at huge expense for another twenty years.

Although the British royal family was blighted by mental illness it was by and large a personal, rather than a political, tragedy. As constitutional monarchs, the amount of damage they could do was limited: executive power lay in the hands of politicians and prime ministers. Elsewhere in Europe the circumstances
were not quite so fortunate. The last official act of Prussia's King Frederick William IV, just before he was officially declared insane, was to consider and ratify thirteen death sentences. The private trauma of George III and his relatives pales into insignificance beside the mental problems of the Houses of Hohenzollern and Romanov, problems which were often harbingers of great political calamity.

Apart from blood ties, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs had much in common. The most charismatic figure of each dynasty, King Frederick and Czar Peter, each known by the epithet “Great,” were both driven by deep-seated personality disorders. Some of the key figures in both families suffered from a rare condition known as paradomania—an unhealthy obsession with militaria. Both dynasties ended within a couple of years of each other while in the custody of two of their weakest and most ineffective rulers, both of whom were cousins of King George V.

         

The home and birthplace of the Hohenzollern dynasty was the frontier region or “Mark” of Brandenburg, an area of about 10,000 square miles of northeastern Germany. At the turn of the seventeenth century, they were still minor rulers of a relatively obscure little principality, looked down upon by neighboring royal households. Within a couple of centuries, however, the upstart Hohenzollerns had transformed their homeland into the most powerful state in Europe, thanks to a knack for awesome administrative efficiency and a disproportionately huge standing army.

A study of any European monarchy would reveal a few
kings and queens with bizarre behavioral problems, but the Hohenzollerns had a remarkable capacity for breeding psychopaths and madmen. The first member of the House of Hohenzollern to take the name King of Prussia, Frederick I, was a dwarfish hunchback who tried to disguise his physical deformity by wearing high-heeled shoes and growing his curly hair long over his hump. Frederick was unlucky in love. His first marriage ended after four years with the death of his twenty-two-year-old wife, Elizabeth. His second wife was Sophia Dorothea, the Hanoverian sister of King George I. She died in her thirty-eighth year. Their son, the Crown Prince Frederick William, married another member of the British royal family, his first cousin Sophia Dorothea, sister of George II.

Crown Prince Frederick William was at first a major disappointment in the business of producing heirs. Although he and his wife fornicated “night and day” to secure the succession, the few sons that they were able to produce all died young. Frederick I had serious doubts about his son's ability to sire a healthy male heir and feared that he could go to his grave with the Hohenzollern succession in doubt. At the age of fifty-one the sickly and weak old King decided to take matters into his own hands: he came out of “retirement” to rut for Prussia. Frederick I remarried again, this time to a German princess less than half his age, Sophia Louise of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. As it turned out, the old King's noble act of self-sacrifice wasn't necessary. His concerns about the Crown Prince's procreative abilities dissolved as his daughter-in-law went on to produce a string of children—fourteen of them in all, including a healthy male heir apparent.

Unfortunately for the King, his new young bride very quickly went mad and ran raving around the palace. Frederick,
by now a frail, tired and white-haired little man, tried to keep out of her way as much as possible and simply let her get on with it, although it killed him in the end.

         

Frederick's son, the darkly psychopathic Frederick William I, “the drill master of Europe,” was a dangerous sadist known to posterity for his freakish army of giants and the way he terrorized everyone, including his own children. Some historians believe that the King inherited the genetic disorder porphyria from his mother, Sophia Charlotte. Like King George III, Frederick William was afflicted with a variety of prolonged illnesses, including gout, piles, migraine and terrible stomach cramps. Unlike George III, whose illness was sporadic until he succumbed to senile dementia, Frederick William was a seething, raging bully for almost his entire life, highly unpredictable and potentially murderous. Although he was very short, he weighed nearly 280 pounds and had a 102-inch waist. He knew that his blotchy, purple-brown features and his wild bulging eyes gave him a truly menacing appearance, and he played up to it by deliberately smearing bacon fat on his face, apparently to make it look more weather-beaten and intimidating.

Most feared was the King's ever-present rattan stick, which he used to thrash anyone in sight: on the streets of Berlin he would smash passersby in the face. Anyone who attempted to defend themselves risked provoking even more anger and possible death. The city became deserted as people fled at news of the crazed King's approach. Once he caught hold of a terrified
man who was too slow to get away and asked him why he was running. When the poor man truthfully replied that he was afraid, the King screamed, “You are supposed to love me, scum!” Then he laid into the man with his stick.

The King was vicious but fair: everyone got the same treatment, including members of his own household. At mealtimes he threw plates and cutlery and attacked his servants. He starved his children or spat in their food. He beat and degraded his son Prince Frederick, often in front of the servants. When the Prince rebelled, the King taught him a lesson by forcing him to watch the execution of his best friend, then ordered that the severed head and body be left to lie for hours beneath his son's window to let the message sink in.

As his reign continued he became progressively more violent. By his side he kept two pistols loaded with salt which he would fire at his servants if they didn't move quickly enough. One valet had his eye shot out; another was crippled. His courtiers were so fearful of him that when one of them was summoned to the King's private quarters he dropped dead with fright. The King's punishment on the parade ground was even more intimidating. One of his army majors, humiliated by a thrashing from the King, drew his gun and shot himself through the head. Frederick William regularly drank phenomenal amounts of beer, and when he was drunk he amused himself by taunting his court fool, named Gündling. The inebriated King and his cronies would play practical jokes on Gündling, or would beat him up, torture him and even set fire to him. One of their favorite drunken pranks was to throw Gündling from the castle walls into the moat below. One winter's day they threw him over the side, too drunk to notice that the moat was frozen, and cheered as Gündling bounced on the ice. When the
poor court fool finally expired aged fifty-eight, the King had his former employee amusingly pickled inside a wine cask and buried in the castle grounds.

Frederick William despised all forms of art, culture or finery. On a state visit to the court of the Saxon King Augustus II he smashed an entire Meissen dinner service on a whim. As soon as his father was buried he ripped down all of his fine palace draperies and curtains and threw out the most expensive furniture and carpets. He was a dedicated Francophobe at a time when France dominated European culture. Prussian noblemen copied everything in the French style, including buildings, furniture, clothes and food. The King let his noblemen know exactly what he thought about their precious fashions by dressing criminals up in the finest French clothes before he hanged them.

Apart from beer, the King's only pleasure, and chief obsession, in life was his regiment of very tall grenadiers known as the Potsdam Giant Guards. The minimum height requirement for the Potsdam regiment was six feet, although most were over seven feet and the tallest were almost nine feet tall. All of them wore special pointed headgear which sometimes reached a height of ten feet. Height was the only criterion; many of them were mentally infirm. Frederick William was insanely proud of his Potsdam Giant Guards. Wherever he traveled, his giants would march alongside his carriage holding hands over the top of it. His favorite giants were immortalized in life-size oil paintings. When one exceptionally tall Norwegian grenadier died, the King had him sculpted in marble.

The recruits were press-ganged from his own country, or were bought or kidnapped from all over the world. The Prussian King was prepared to spend any amount of money,
and go to any length, even at the risk of war, in his pursuit of tall men. His army of recruiting agents had instructions to use whatever force was necessary. A giant carpenter was once tricked into lying down in a box then found himself locked inside and shipped to Potsdam. As his captor had forgotten to drill air holes in the box, however, the carpenter was found dead on arrival. The King was furious: the agent who captured him was charged with causing the loss of a recruit and imprisoned for life.

Even foreign diplomats weren't safe from King Frederick William's press gang. An exceptionally tall Austrian diplomat was seized in Hanover, but was able to escape. An Irish giant called Kirkman was kidnapped on the streets of London and delivered to Potsdam at a cost to Frederick William of a thousand pounds. A tall priest was kidnapped from Italy in the middle of Mass, and a monk was spirited away from a monastery in Rome. They kidnapped Portuguese, Hungarians, Slavs, Russians, Englishmen, Turks, even Ethiopians and Americans. They were men of every profession, including doctors, lawyers, accountants and teachers. The rest of Europe observed the King's hobby with amusement until his agents began to trespass on their soil. One of Frederick William's less reputable tactics was to induce tall men in the armies of foreign countries to desert.

Many of his recruits, however, were gifts from other European courts. Whenever the King went on a state visit he would broadly hint that the sort of farewell gift he would most appreciate would be a giant or two. The Austrian and Russian courts were particularly obliging benefactors. Peter the Great, another great admirer of freaks, sent the Prussian King hundreds of Russians, all over six feet four inches. Other European courts found that they had hit upon a novel method of bribing
Frederick William. Tall men became diplomatic bargaining chips as word spread through diplomatic circles that the King of Prussia would agree to virtually anything if you gave him a few tall freaks. The British government persuaded him to sign a pact that was highly biased in their favor by slipping him a “gift” of fifteen very tall Irishmen. The Saxon Foreign Minister sent Frederick William a birthday present of two expensive Turkish pipes and a load of high-grade tobacco. The package was delivered by a seven-foot-tall messenger complete with a note which contained a birthday greeting—at the bottom it read, “PS, keep the delivery boy.”

The King acquired an eight-foot-tall Swede from Augustus the Strong of Saxony. Frederick William was delighted with his new plaything, but was frustrated when the Swede turned out to be so mentally infirm that he couldn't be drilled, despite many beatings. The King despaired and threw him out of the guards, probably the only time that anyone ever left the Potsdam Grenadiers freely. The poor childlike giant drifted into Berlin, where, unable to support himself, he died a beggar on the streets.