Royal Babylon (3 page)

         

Divorces within any social group in the eighteenth century were extremely rare everywhere in Europe. In Britain, divorce required an Act of Parliament, although it was impossible for a woman to sue for divorce because a man's adultery was not considered sufficient grounds. There is, however, nothing in the British constitution to prevent a divorcé from becoming king, or a king from becoming a divorcé—the Church of England was invented as a convenience by Henry VIII to allow his successors to do precisely that.

When the middle-aged King George I arrived from Hanover to claim the British throne, his new subjects couldn't help noticing that he hadn't brought his wife with him. In fact, George had discovered that, while he was in bed with his mother's lady-in-waiting, his wife, Sophia, was secretly sleeping with a Swedish count, Philip Cristoph von Konigsmarck, behind his back. She even had the bad taste to write letters to her
lover that made unfavorable comparisons about George's performance in bed. George intercepted and read some of the letters, including one which mentioned that Sophia prayed nightly that her fat husband would die in battle. He divorced her in 1694 and had her locked up in a German castle, where she remained for the next thirty-two years—more than half her life.

Her paramour fared worse: years later his body was found chopped to pieces under her dressing room. It was strongly rumored that George was involved. The King never mentioned his wife's name again and his children were banned from discussing their mother or the divorce. When the King heard about his ex-wife's death, he went to watch a play, then set out to attend her burial with one of his mistresses in tow. He forbade anyone to mourn her or even acknowledge her death. It was never really made clear why he felt it necessary to be quite so vindictive toward his ex-wife, although it may simply have been that he wanted revenge because she had infected him with gonorrhea.

George IV's later attempts to divorce Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel would have succeeded had his wife not been represented by such skillful lawyers. Prinny (as George was known) nearly fainted when he first clapped eyes on her, and after their wedding night they went their own separate ways, never once attempting to disguise their mutual hatred. When Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821, a messenger rushed to inform the King, “Your Majesty, your greatest enemy is dead.” George replied, “Is she, by God?”

Despite Prinny's problems, and compared to elsewhere in Europe, the British establishment's attitude to legal separation was relatively relaxed. Queen Victoria personally sanctioned the divorce of her granddaughter Princess Marie-Louise from Prince Aribert of Anhalt. For the rest of Europe's royal families,
however, divorce was unattainable. When a Belgian princess attempted to break free from her brutal and perverted husband, she was confined to a sanatorium because her family were prepared to see her certified insane rather than contemplate the odium of royal divorce.

         

Until the eighteenth century, Russia used a unique method of securing the succession that did not rigidly exclude non-royals. The Czar's bride was selected from his country's most beautiful maidens, who were summoned to the Kremlin and subjected to
smotrinya
, an intimate internal and external examination which was a cross between a beauty pageant and a customs body search. Girls who didn't pass muster were one by one dumped outside the Kremlin gates.

The Russian royal family accepted adultery as a way of life, but their position on divorce was more orthodox. Nicholas II's mother, the Dowager Empress Dagmar, considered that the death of a close relative was infinitely preferable to the disgrace of legal separation. Her daughter the Grand Duchess Olga was forced into a marriage of convenience with the homosexual Prince Peter of Oldenburg. When she was twenty-two, the Grand Duchess met a Russian army officer, Nicholas Koulikovsky, and they began a passionate and indiscreet affair.

Her husband was not in the least bothered about his wife's infidelity. The one thing that he would never agree to, however, was divorce, because it would blacken the family name. Prince Peter had another suggestion: why didn't his wife's boyfriend move in and live with them? Thus, with the consent
of all parties, a
ménage à trois
was established in the royal household. The fact that two men, one a homosexual, were now cohabiting with a Russian grand duchess was thought to be considerably less scandalous than legal separation.

The Romanovs' idea of a real scandal involved the Czar's brother Michael, who shocked his family by living with his twice-divorced mistress. When Michael later revealed that he had secretly married her, the Russian royal family were mortified. The Dowager Empress prayed that news of the marriage would never get out or she would never be able to show her face in public again.

Czar Peter the Great found his own way round the problem of divorce. When he became bored with his first wife, Eudoxia, he simply had her shut away in a convent: thus at the age of twenty-six the Czarina became Sister Helen, a penniless nun. Although they were never legally separated, the Czar reasoned that, since his discarded spouse was now a “bride of Christ,” she couldn't be the Czar's wife as well and he was therefore quite free to remarry. For Peter this extraordinary leap of logic was the perfect solution to his marital problem and no one was prepared to argue any differently.

The Czar's plan, however, was not designed to work in anyone else's favor, as his first wife was to discover later. After eighteen years in the convent, Eudoxia, over forty years old and a little worse for wear and tear after braving several Russian winters in a spartan convent cell, fell in love with an army captain by the name of Stepan Glebov. He took pity on her and brought her furs to make her cell a little warmer. Eudoxia, still technically a bride of Christ, albeit a reluctant conscript, became Glebov's lover. They made no attempt to conceal their affair in the convent and Eudoxia bribed the other nuns to make
themselves scarce while they copulated in her cell. Glebov thought that sleeping with an ex-czarina, even a toothless and arthritic ex-czarina, would not do his career prospects any harm at all. He couldn't have been more horribly mistaken.

Peter the Great heard of the affair and achieved the sort of U-turn that only a psychopathic six-foot-five-inch czar could get away with. He announced that, even though he hadn't clapped eyes on Eudoxia for eighteen years and had himself long since remarried, she had never legally ceased to be his wife, and her boyfriend was therefore guilty of adultery. To hammer the point home, the next day at precisely 3
P
.
M
. a wooden stake was driven into Glebov's rectum. He lingered on in agony until the evening of the following day. Eudoxia escaped relatively lightly: she was ordered to be whipped by monks in front of the other nuns, then shipped off to an even more remote convent.

         

The business of royal procreation was far too important to be left to chance, and sex education for the male line was mandatory. The boyhood sexual experiences of the kings of France were documented in the minutest of detail. We know from the records of the French court physician, Monsieur Hérouard, that the young Louis XIII groped his governess in bed and showed off erections “which went up and down like a drawbridge.” Louis was married at fourteen and placed in bed with his wife by his mother, to whom he returned an hour later “with his cock all red.”

King George I's parents found a mistress for him when he was just sixteen years old, as was the royal custom of the day.
She was five years older, relatively disease free, and could be relied upon to go quietly when it was time for the Prince to get married. For the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, court ritual in the Hofburg was so restrictive that there was no possibility of his ever going out to find a girl of his own. When he was eighteen, his mother arranged for his “official instructor” to go out and select a healthy-looking Bohemian peasant girl for Franz to practice on. A deal was struck with the girl's parents—she was to be married to a minor court official and would receive a large dowry if she would go to bed with the young Prince. The event was carefully stage-managed to give Franz Josef the impression that he had met the girl by chance and seduced her. We don't know whether he ever got to find out about his mother's deception, although many years later he had a chance meeting with her at a court function but wasn't allowed to speak to her.

The formal sex education of Franz Josef's son was different but no less extraordinary. In 1871 the thirteen-year-old Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf was taken by his tutor and two doctors to a fish-breeding farm in Salzburg, whereupon they explained to him the facts of life. When he was seventeen, the task of initiating the Crown Prince was entrusted to a close friend of his father, Captain Karl Karnauer, who made discreet arrangements with the owner of a Viennese brothel to introduce him to a carefully selected, healthy young girl. Rudolf would have found this highly amusing. What the Emperor Franz Josef and Captain Karnauer didn't know but half the women of Vienna did was that the Crown Prince's virginity was already ancient history.

Princesses rarely received any such instruction in the
mysteries of sex. The second Queen of Belgium, a former Habsburg Archduchess, Marie Henrietta, had the misfortune of marrying one of the nineteenth century's most debauched monarchs, and went to bed with him for the first time without any idea of what might be expected of her. “If God hears my prayers,” she confided to a friend after her wedding night, “I shall not go on living much longer.”

It might have been expected that Marie Henrietta would pass on the benefit of her experience to her two daughters, but the Queen neither explained the facts of life to the two Belgian Princesses nor did anything else to prepare them for the loss of their virginity. The eldest daughter, Louise, was betrothed at the age of seventeen to the voluptuary Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg, fourteen years her senior and the owner of one of central Europe's biggest collections of pornography. Louise went to her wedding bed armed only with instructions to submit to her husband's wishes. Her husband's wishes turned out to be such a shock to her that when he got up in the night to use the lavatory she threw a coat over her nightgown, fled downstairs, then dashed outside and hid in one of the palace greenhouses. A palace sentry found her cowering behind some shrubbery at dawn and led her back to bed.

In 1898 a nineteen-year-old German royal, Duchess Marie of Mecklenburg, became pregnant by the footman whose job it was to bring a night lamp into her bedroom. Her parents, after allowing their daughter to reach this age in complete ignorance of the facts of life, kicked her out of the castle. The scandal touched most of northern Europe's royal families because most of them were related. The concept of a royal princess consenting to sleep with a footman was quite beyond the British royal
family: Queen Victoria said the girl must have been drugged with chloroform; the Duke of York's explanation was that she must have been hypnotized.

         

Catherine the Great had about as much say in her choice of husband as most princesses did in the eighteenth century. At the age of fourteen she was summoned to St. Petersburg and informed that she had been selected to wed the heir to the Russian throne, the Empress Elizabeth's nephew, Grand Duke Peter, a short and profoundly ugly German teenager said to closely resemble a monkey. Catherine found him so repulsive that the mere thought of spending her life with him made her feel physically sick, but she was ambitious enough to keep her thoughts, and her last meal, to herself. During their engagement, Peter fell ill twice, first with measles, and later with smallpox. When it was safe for Catherine to meet him again, she found two sunken eyes staring at her from his skull-like and hideously scarred face. Most of his hair had fallen out and, as what little remained had been shaved off, he sported a large, ill-fitting wig that made him look even more deformed. Catherine congratulated him on his recovery, then went away and fainted.

When the royal couple married, she was sixteen years old and Peter barely a year older. She had no idea of the basic differences between males and females. Catherine consulted her ladies-in-waiting for advice. Amazingly, although the sole topic of conversation was gossip about the routine adultery in the Russian court, not one of them had the faintest idea what sexual intercourse involved either. None the wiser, Catherine
decided to ask her mother, who quickly gave her a smack round the ear for asking such disgusting questions.

Catherine need not have worried. On the night of the wedding, she retired to their nuptial suite in wide-eyed ignorance of what might follow, dreading Peter's arrival. Hours later, her new husband crashed into bed dead drunk and lay corpse-like beside her.

In fact, the Grand Duke Peter found his collection of toys a much bigger attraction than his wife, preferring to play with his wooden soldiers, miniature cannons and toy fortresses under the bedclothes. While Peter fought battles under the sheets, imitating the sound of blazing cannons, his virgin wife, owner of the most hyperactive libido in the known world, lay motionless beside him. Later, Peter took to rearing hunting dogs in his bedroom, and soon Catherine found herself sharing their bed with ten spaniels.

Peter was incapable of sexual intercourse because he, like the young Louis XVI, suffered from phimosis. A simple circumcision would have corrected the problem, but the cowardly Grand Duke decided that celibacy was a much more attractive proposition. After years of sexless marriage, one day he drank himself into oblivion and finally consented to go under the surgeon's scalpel. The operation passed off without a hitch, but, to test that everything was in full working order, the Empress Elizabeth decided to organize a “trial run” for her nephew. A volunteer was found in the form of a poor widow, one Madame Groot, who duly allowed herself to be defiled by the ugly Romanov in anticipation of a large reward from the Empress. In fact she received not one single ruble. Ten years too late, Peter finally fulfilled his obligation and slept with his wife. It was an ordeal for both parties, especially for Catherine,
who by this time was quite heavily pregnant by her lover, Serge Saltykov. Nevertheless, she had little trouble convincing her stupid husband that he was taking her virginity. This was the only time that Catherine and Peter had any sort of conjugal relationship. It is little wonder that she later opted for strangulation rather than marriage guidance.