Royal Babylon (8 page)

If everything had gone according to plan, Princess Elizabeth's marriage to Phillipos Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg would have marked the last time a princess of the British royal family lost her virginity to a distant cousin. However, the subsequent disastrous marriages of the Queen's children may force the House of Windsor to reconsider whether it is yet safe to let their sons and daughters loose on partners they are not already related to.

Mental instability as a direct result of genetic malformation due to chronic inbreeding existed until recent times. As the constitutional crisis in nineteenth-century Bavaria demonstrated, inherited insanity is one of the obvious pitfalls of absolute monarchy, as quite often one madman was removed from the throne in order to substitute another. Nowhere were the disastrous biological events which have warped European history more apparent than in the House of Habsburg, rulers in central Europe from the thirteenth century until World War I.

         

The Habsburgs suffered from a monstrous genetic mutation as a result of generations of inbreeding. The disorder known as
acocephaly produces distinctive physical and mental abnormalities, in this case the famous “Habsburg Lip,” first noticed in the mid-fifteenth century. In the sufferer, the lower jaw protrudes so that the lower teeth lie in front of the upper ones and the mouth often hangs open. The Habsburg Lip became even more frequent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs interbred so frequently that they tied reef knots in their bloodlines.

Emperor Ferdinand I's parents were first cousins. His father, the Emperor Francis, had an abnormally large sexual appetite and married four times. He was known as the “wife killer” because according to family legend he had finished the first three off with his awesome libido. He advised his son Ferdinand I to “Rule, and change nothing.” Ferdinand was born with a hydrocephalic head, and grew up to be epileptic. He could just about sign his own name but was otherwise incapable of performing the simplest of tasks. His tongue was too large for his mouth—another inherited Habsburg defect—and he found it virtually impossible to string a sentence together. The historian A. J. P. Taylor recorded that Ferdinand's only known coherent remark on any subject was “I am the Emperor, and I want dumplings.” The Emperor's idea of a good time was to wedge his backside in a wastepaper basket and roll around the floor in it. Indeed, on encountering Ferdinand, the Russian Czarina Alexandra wrote in her diary, “I had heard so much about him, about his small shrunken ugly figure and his huge head void of any expression except that of stupidity, but the reality beggared all description.” The Austrian statesman Metternich described him as “a lump of putty.”

Nineteenth-century medical science wrongly believed that epilepsy was hereditary, and it was therefore with some
astonishment that the rest of Europe received the news that the Emperor's physicians had allowed him to marry and attempt to produce an heir. The unfortunate bride was twenty-eight-year-old Sardinian Princess Maria Anna. There were no children: during the wedding night alone he had five epileptic attacks. Although more or less everyone in Vienna was aware that the Emperor was backward, he was regarded with sympathy and affection by his people for most of his thirteen-year reign. When revolution broke out in 1848, however, men in white coats whisked him away from Vienna to Olmütz in Moravia, and persuaded him to abdicate in favor of his eighteen-year-old nephew Franz Joseph. Ferdinand died in 1875 in his eighty-third year.

         

Spain suffered more than most from the genetic mutation of inbreeding. Although the royal line was predominantly Bourbon, the debilitated Habsburg blood also ran profusely through the veins of the Spanish royal family. King Philip IV fathered fifteen children by his two wives. All of these Spanish Princes and Princesses, unlike his numerous healthy bastard offspring, were born physically degenerate and most did not live to see their fourth birthdays. In his successor, Charles II, centuries of inbred Habsburg physical and mental abnormality combined to reveal the laws of genetics at their cruelest. A sickly four-year-old when he succeeded his father, he reigned for thirty-five years, mad, illiterate, incapable of governing, living his life in complete ignorance of even the basic geography of the empire he ruled. He had been a virtual invalid from the day he was born. When he came to the throne he was still being breast-fed by relays of fourteen
wet nurses. His Habsburg underbite was so enormously pronounced that he could barely use his jaws to chew food; his tongue was so big that his speech was unintelligible. The King's condition was also degenerative: by the time he was in his late thirties his legs were too weak to carry him, and he was an emaciated, mentally ill wreck. As he grew older he also succumbed to bouts of madness with increasing frequency. He had himself exorcised as it was believed he was possessed by a devil: hence he became known as Charles “The Bewitched.” These exorcisms apparently gave him some temporary relief. As the attacks grew worse the whole Spanish court became preoccupied with witchcraft, to the great amusement of Spain's neighbors.

In spite of his physical and mental incapacity, his station naturally required that he should be married and sire children to secure the future of the Spanish state. A “volunteer” was found in the French Princess Marie Louise, a niece of Louis XIV. It seems that Louis had been forewarned that the King of Spain was physically monstrous and that his poor seventeen-year-old niece was in for a nasty surprise, but the Sun King gave his blessing to the marriage anyway because he thought the union would favor French interests. Marie Louise did her best as a dutiful wife, but Charles was incapable of fatherhood. In 1689 she died, childless, after a riding accident. When she had been dead for about ten years he insisted on seeing her corpse. He descended by torchlight into the royal vaults beneath the church where several generations of Spanish kings and queens lay. He took one look at his first wife's remains and ran screaming from the vault, and it was said that he was permanently crazed from that day on. The King spent the rest of his reign being led like a prize chimpanzee from one ceremonial function to another.

In 1770 Charles II died heirless and the Spanish Empire passed to Philip Anjou, the grandson of Louis XIV of France, thus plunging Europe into thirteen years of bloody war. Thousands died on the battlefields of Europe before the great powers finally accepted him as Philip V of Spain by the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713.

         

Genetically speaking, King Philip V had little going for him. Charles II was the last Spanish king of pure Habsburg descent, but the Habsburg legacy was to linger on in the Spanish bloodline for generations. Apart from Philip's Habsburg blood, which was obvious from his long, melancholy features and jutting jawline, his mother, Mary Anne, was a Bavarian Wittelsbach and his father was a Bourbon. The result of this blue-blood cocktail was that for nearly half a century Spain was ruled by a mentally unbalanced sex maniac.

Philip was unfeasibly oversexed even by Bourbon standards. Only two things mattered to him—sex and God. On the one hand he was a complete and utter slave to his libido, and on the other he was a religious maniac. The combination of the two meant that he spent most of his life darting between his bed and the confessional. According to his minister Alberoni, all he needed in life was “a couch and a woman.” Unfortunately, as the King's deeply held Catholic views would not allow him to take mistresses, his wives bore the full brunt of his libido.

King Philip V married twice. His first wife, Queen Maria Luisa, died aged twenty-six after a long illness. She was only
fourteen years old when they married but she handled her new husband with an astuteness which belied her tender years. To teach him a lesson after they were married, she made him wait two whole days before she would let him sleep with her. Philip's grandfather Louis XIV let it be known that he considered this a gross insult to Bourbon manhood.

The King's first serious mental breakdown occurred in 1717. He shut himself away for days, refusing to see anyone except the Queen, and only then when he required sexual intercourse. Philip complained to his doctors that he was being consumed by a fire from within his stomach. His doctors examined him but found no sign of illness and advised that the King was suffering from delusions. By this time, Philip had convinced himself that he was dying in mortal sin. The King was aware of the history of mental instability on both sides of his family and arrived at the conclusion that he too was going mad and was unfit to govern. After seeking divine inspiration, he decided to pass over the reins of government to someone else before his mind went completely. In January 1724 the King of Spain, to the astonishment of every court in Europe, suddenly abdicated in favor of his seventeen-year-old son Louis I.

After a reign of only eight months, however, Louis was suddenly dead from smallpox, naming his father as successor. King Philip V resumed the throne very reluctantly. Throughout his brief, eccentric retirement he had taken to dressing up as a humble Franciscan friar, but had otherwise managed to retain all the trappings of luxury he had enjoyed as King. As before, the burden of responsibility caused him to have a mental breakdown. Although only thirty-eight years old, Philip was stooped, shrunken and bowlegged, shambling around the palace like
an octogenarian. The French ambassador reported back to Versailles that the Spanish King's sexual addiction had wrecked his health and driven him to madness.

By 1727 his mental state had deteriorated so completely that his second wife effectively took over the rule of Spain. King Philip refused to change his clothes and wandered around the palace clad only in filthy, stinking rags, his hair long and wild. He believed that his personal filthiness was the only thing holding him together and that he would die if he changed his clothes. He bit chunks out of his arms and hands, and through the night alternately screamed and sang. Philip took on a permanently vacant expression and lapsed into lethargy, hardly ever eating, lying motionless in his own excrement for days on end in complete silence. On July 9, 1746, His Catholic Majesty's miserable life was brought to an abrupt end by a massive stroke.

         

The only surviving son of Philip V, by his first marriage to Maria Luisa of Savoy, the vacant and pasty-faced Ferdinand VI, became king at the age of thirty-three. He was severely paranoid and lived in constant dread of assassination. Eventually he too became completely insane. Like his father, he was addicted to sex and became a slave to his short, very plain wife, Queen Barbara of Braganza, daughter of Portugal's King John V. Queen Barbara was also a neurotic and lived in constant fear of being left a penniless widow. Her confidence that she would outlive her husband was, however, misplaced. In 1757 she took to her bed in terrible pain and became covered in boils. She
died after a horrible and lingering eleven-month illness. It was discovered that her private apartment was crammed to the ceiling with Spanish currency which she had stashed away to see her through a comfortable widowhood.

With his Queen dead, Ferdinand's mental state went quickly downhill. He alternately starved himself and binged on food, and randomly attacked his servants. The last few months of his life were marked by a series of increasingly desperate suicide attempts. He tried cutting his wrists with scissors, hanging himself with bedsheets, and strangling himself with table napkins. When all else failed he begged his doctors to give him poison. King Ferdinand died in his sleep of natural causes aged forty-six.

By and large, genetics took a holiday with King Charles III, ruler of Spain from 1759 to 1788. He inherited the Bourbon family nose, which cast a shadow over his mouthful of rotten teeth, but was otherwise a dull but perfectly sane king. Charles III was lucky to have escaped the effects of tainted heredity, but the family curse skipped just one generation and struck at his children. His eldest son and heir, Philip the Duke of Cabaria, was a raving psychopath, subject to fits from infancy and mentally unstable by the age of twelve. The King had him examined by specialists and declared insane, and had the law changed so that he could be removed from the line of succession.

The Duke lived on until he was thirty years old, stalking the Spanish court like a royal Jack the Ripper. A team of chamberlains was detailed to watch him round the clock, and special care was taken to keep him away from women. On a few occasions, however, he eluded his keepers and attacked and raped female courtiers. During his more placid moments, his favorite
form of amusement was to have one of his hands held up by an attendant while increasingly larger gloves, up to sixteen pairs at a time, were placed on his hand one over the other. In 1777 he died of smallpox after the King refused on religious grounds to allow him to be vaccinated.

Charles III's preoccupation with the family's inbreeding and his concern for the mental health of his offspring led him to make some well-intentioned but unfortunate decisions about their upbringing. The King of Spain gave express instructions to the royal tutors that none of his children, especially his second and third eldest sons, should be mentally exerted in case it put too great a strain on their minds and tipped them over the edge. This regime more or less guaranteed that both of them grew up to be ill-educated morons who between them ruled most of southern Europe, the elder as King of Spain, the younger as King of Naples and the Two Sicilies.

The younger son, King Ferdinand, spent his days leapfrogging, fondling the ladies of court, and shrieking obscenities at the top of his unusually high-pitched voice. When the Emperor Joseph II of Austria attended a court ball at the Palazzo Reale in 1769, he found the young King to be “a complete idiot.” In a letter home he described an incident he encountered in the palace. The King and Queen, accompanied by two chamberlains, were making a dignified approach to an antechamber, where they were awaited by several officials, when Ferdinand suddenly began to gallop around the room, kicking out at his courtiers. When the King wanted to play, Joseph discovered, the whole court was expected to join in. Soon the entire throng, including elderly men and quite senior ministers, were galloping through the corridors of the Neopolitan court.
The French ambassador, who unhappily found himself in the path of Ferdinand, received a punch in the face and his nose collided with a wall.