Sex with the Queen (3 page)

flesh-and-blood woman with faults and foibles, not as a chiseled stone statue interceding with God. But the intertwined images of Virgin Mary and queen had been hammered into the social sub-conscious for a thousand years and, though less pivotal in daily life, still existed. As both Virgin and queen had borne a princely savior with a sacred father, a queen whose behavior cast doubt upon the paternity of her son must have left a sour taste in the mouth of many a good Christian.

T h e S a n c t i f i e d S u b s t a n c e Royal blood was almost always passed down from kingly father to princely son—via a uterus where the child incubated for nine months. The strict refusal of that uterus to harbor any but royal seed was of the utmost importance to keeping the bloodline pure. It was the myth of royal blood that kept kings seated firmly on their thrones, prevented civil war, held foreign invaders at bay, and kept a superstitious people groveling before their monarch and paying the exorbitant taxes he required.

The myth started long ago when, shrouded by the mists of time, a bold warrior rode into battle swinging his sword and conquered his enemies. Chosen king by his grateful admirers, he continued to destroy adversaries, appease a wrathful deity, and rule with wisdom—sure signs that he was God’s chosen.

Grasping at the mirage of immortality on earth, the aging monarch wanted to ensure that a part of him—his own flesh and blood—would rule after his death. But what if the king’s son was sickly, effeminate, weak-minded? How to convince the people that they must accept this poor specimen of manhood as their king rather than choosing instead a fearless warrior from a rival family?

And so the myth was born which declared that the king’s con-nection with God, his divine right to rule, was manifested in his blood—rather than his intelligence, looks, or temperament—and could be passed on to future generations. True, the myth of royal blood often ensured a stable transition of power from fa-ther to son instead of a bloody fracas of maces and battle-axes to s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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determine who would be the new king. But it also resulted in countless insane monarchs, dribbling onto their chins and cack-ling, while millions of subjects bowed down to them in worship-ful reverence. Insane they might be, but that sacred stuff coursing through their veins, the mystical royal blood, made them better than anyone else, made them God’s chosen to rule.

A scientific means of establishing paternity was not developed until the blood test of 1927. Until then, to ensure that the next generation of royals possessed the sanctified substance, the queen had to maintain strict fidelity to her husband. The an-cient double standard—men rutting with mistresses while their wives sewed altar cloths—was rooted not in misogyny, but in biol-ogy.

“Consider of what importance to society the chastity of women is,” said the renowned wit and scholar Dr. Samuel John-son, who wrote the first English dictionary in 1757. “Upon that all the property in the world depends. We hang a thief for steal-ing a sheep, but the unchastity of a woman transfers sheep, and farm, and all from the right owner.”6

In 1695 Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Charlotte, the duchesse d’Orléans, wrote, “Where in the world is a prince to be found who loves his wife only, and has no one else? If their wives on that account were to lead the same kind of life that they do, no one could be sure that their children were the true heirs.”

Referring to a young relative who had committed adultery, she added, “Doesn’t this Duchess know that a wife’s honor consists in giving herself to nobody but her husband, whereas for the husband there is no shame in having mistresses but only in being made a cuckold?”7

Considering the emphasis on the royal bloodline, it is ironic that courts were littered, not just with the king’s bastards, but with the queen’s bastards as well; in her case these were children who bore the name of the kingly house, children who married into other royal families based on ancestry they did not, in fact, possess. With regard to royal children, the only consideration more important than their kingly blood was the monarch’s self-interest. Many kings acknowledged children they knew had been i n t r o d u c t i o n

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fathered by someone else. Often, kings did not want to cast doubt on the paternity of older children they knew to be their own. In the case where the king could not father children, some-times court factions heartily desired the queen to bear bastards in order to stabilize the throne and cement their own interests.

Fortunately, the queen’s complete and utter disillusionment with her husband usually set in after the birth of the heir. And so it was not deemed worthwhile to lose international prestige, throw the nation into tumult, and question the paternity of all royal children, simply to deny the one cuckoo in the robin’s nest. In the early nineteenth century, the last son of King John VI and Queen Carlota Joaquina of Portugal was extremely good-looking and slender—unlike either of his parents—and happened to be the spitting image of the handsome gardener at the queen’s country retreat. Other than a few snickers behind painted fans, no one said a word.

More recently, the love affairs of Diana, Princess of Wales, created doubt about the paternity of her second son, Prince Harry, born in 1984. When Prince Charles first glanced at his newborn, he expressed alarm at the child’s red hair. Diana often spoke of this moment as the point where her marriage was over.

Charles, who had been hoping for a daughter, was disappointed that his wife had presented him with another boy, and worse, that the child had red hair, which Charles disliked. There is, however, a different way of interpreting Charles’s irritation at his son’s hair color. If he had suspected that Diana had been hav-ing an affair with a red-haired man, then his reaction would have been quite understandable.

Fingers often point to Captain James Hewitt, the charming carrot-topped lady-killer who confessed to having a five-year af-fair with the princess starting in 1986, a year and a half after Harry’s birth. Yet there are rumors that the two met each other before Diana’s 1981 wedding and denied the earlier date to pro-tect their son, poor illegitimate Harry.

If Prince Harry had slipped into the world blessed with blond or dark locks, there probably would have been no unflattering speculation about his paternity. Red hair pops up unexpectedly s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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in families, often skipping several generations. Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, has red hair and freckles. Moreover, if we get beyond the hair color and youthful good looks of Prince Harry, we can detect small narrow eyes, large flapping ears, and a wide mouth, the unfortunate hereditary traits of the Windsors.

But the rumor is just too good for tabloids to ignore. In De-cember 2002 two newspapers reported that a competing paper had hired a pretty girl, a “honey trap,” to seduce Harry and pluck a hair—we can assume from his head—to be sent for DNA analysis. Stories abound of tabloid investigators taking sheets off the hotel beds of Prince Harry and James Hewitt, of fishing used tissues out of public trash cans, of stealing coffee cups with minute particles of lip detritus, of swabbing drops of sweat from polo gear in a locker room.

The British antimonarchy group ThroneOut is calling for all members of the royal family, who occupy their positions based solely on heredity, to take DNA tests. The royal family’s response to these requests has been dignified silence, and reports indicate they are guarding their DNA more jealously than the crown jew-els themselves.

Yet it is only a matter of time before a servant or acquaintance does acquire a hair, a coffee cup, or a bedsheet and hands it over for analysis. Modern science is now able to provide answers to the question marks of paternity that have punctuated history from the dawn of time. And the truth may not be what royal families want to hear.

A c c u s a t i o n s o f A d u l t e r y —a P o w e r f u l W e a p o n It was never adultery alone that did in a queen, or the fact that she did not resemble the Virgin Mary, or that she had polluted the royal bloodline. It was politics.

If the queen followed the traditional pattern of bearing chil-dren, embroidering altar cloths, and interceding for the poor—pious duties that the Virgin Mary would likely have approved of—even if she took a lover she was usually left in peace. There i n t r o d u c t i o n

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was rarely reason to shoot down a political nonentity at court.

But an intelligent ambitious woman who spoke her mind and built up a faction was always open to the accusation of adultery by her political rivals, whether the accusation was true or fabricated.

Adultery charges offered the accuser many benefits. The very mention of adultery suddenly cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the offspring of a suspected queen, possibly rendering them un-fit for the throne and opening the door to other ambitious candidates—usually the accusers themselves.

In 830 Queen Judith of the Franks, the second wife of King Louis the Pious, found herself accused of adultery with a hand-some court chamberlain. The accusers were her husband’s three sons by his first marriage who feared that Judith would influence their aging father to name her son, Charles, as his heir. Bristling with weapons, the three brothers forced their father to abdicate and imprisoned Judith in a convent. We don’t know if the queen committed adultery or not; we do know that the missiles of her enemies hit their mark and she was removed.

In those cases where a powerful man was accused of being the queen’s lover, we must assume that he and the queen had formed a faction that threatened other groups at court; whether or not the pair was in fact committing adultery was not the crucial question.

In such a case, the powerful queen could be imprisoned in a con-vent, and her threatening lover executed, exiled, or imprisoned, his friends and relatives collapsing in the wake of his own disgrace.

Very neatly, aiming only one poisoned dart at the queen, her en-emy could remove the entire rival power base at court.

In 887 Queen Richardis of the East Franks, wife of King Charles the Fat, was accused of adultery with Bishop Liutward of Vercelli, the king’s powerful archchancellor. It was the custom at the time for an accused woman to defend her honor by walking over burning plowshares. If she emerged unharmed, God was protecting her because she was innocent. Only the guilty, it was assumed, would be burned to a crisp. Richardis came through the ordeal unscathed, retired to a convent, and was later made a saint. But her enemies had successfully removed her.