Sex with the Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

girlhood’s dreams.”17
    S e x w i t h t h e K i n g
    While palace life was no bed of roses, a queen’s sex life, that most intimate aspect of a woman’s relationship with her husband, was sometimes downright horrifying. Many a princess was com-pletely unacquainted with her wedding-night duties and sur-2 0
    s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

    prised when the strange man she had just married climbed on top of her and started to poke her painfully.
    In 1797 the eighteen-year-old Princess Frederica Dorothea of Baden married the nineteen-year-old King Gustavus IV of Sweden. She was ceremoniously placed in bed with her new hus-band, and the guests withdrew. But a few moments later the bride raced out of the bedroom screaming and flew into the arms of her ladies-in-waiting who were assembled in an outer room.
    She had just learned what would be required of her and refused to take part in it. It took several weeks before the bride could be persuaded to return to the rough embraces of her husband.
    When thirteen-year-old Margaret Tudor bedded the thirty-year-old James IV of Scotland in 1503, she found to her horror not only that her husband jumped on top of her and poked her, but that he wore an iron chain around his waist, which he never took off, and to which each year he added another link for his sins. We can imagine how the rusty links felt on her tender flesh.
    In 1893 the seventeen-year-old Marie of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, was flummoxed by what her husband the crown prince of Romania did to her on her wedding night.
    “In my immature way I tried to respond to his passion but I hun-gered and thirsted for something more,” she wrote years later in her memoirs. “There was an empty feeling about it all, I still seemed to be waiting for something that did not come.” She cried for weeks afterward. “Often I had to smother my mouth in my pillow not to call out with grief and longing—Mamma . . .
    Mamma . . . Mamma!”18 When she started to throw up in the mornings, she thought she was dying. No one had told her how a woman became pregnant.
    Undoubtedly the worst case of undesired sex endured by a queen occurred in 1714 when the twenty-six-year-old Maria Luisa of Savoy lay dying of tuberculosis, her tortured lungs rasp-ing as blood trickled from her lips. Her husband, King Philip V
    of Spain, was devastated at the thought of her death—not because he would miss his beloved wife, but because he would miss sex.
    The king was a devout Catholic who thought he would go to hell for having sex outside of marriage. He knew that after his wife l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s 2 1

    died he would have to remain celibate for a decent amount of time before he could remarry.
    So instead of mourning his wife’s passing in prayer at her bedside, as her illness worsened he jumped in bed with her and humped her several times a day. The queen endured his exer-tions with admirable patience, probably because she knew she wouldn’t have to put up with them much longer. Finally, after the priests administered last rites, and the death rattle rose in her throat, the king tried to jump in bed one last time and was only with difficulty restrained.
    R o y a l I m p o t e n c e
    Many royal wives, steeling themselves for the duties of their wed-ding night, were surprised to find they had no bedtime duties at all; their husbands were hopelessly impotent.
    In 1615 the nervous twitching fourteen-year-old King Louis XIII of France married his cousin, a beautiful hazel-eyed Span-ish princess. The daughter and granddaughter of Austrian arch-duchesses who had married Spanish kings, the princess was known as Anne of Austria. After the wedding banquet, the king, to the utter astonishment of the guests, ambled out of the dining hall back to his own chambers. His mother had to convince him to leave his bed and sleep in that of his wife. “My son,” she pleaded, “it is not sufficient to be married; you must come and see the queen