Carroll - Notorious royal marriages: a juicy journey through nine centuries of dynasty, destiny, and desire

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Table of Contents

PRAISE FOR

Royal Affairs

Carroll... has a true talent for weaving fascinating narratives. Her entertaining writing style makes this one book you do not want to put down. Entertaining, impeccably researched, and extremely well written, it will appeal to all readers with an interest in British history. Library Journal

There are lots [of] royal romps cataloged in this entertaining, enormously readable book. Las Vegas Review-Journal

Carroll offers... insight behind the closed doors of the last thousand years of Englands busiest bed-hopping and head-lopping kings and queens.Book Fetish

An eminently readable, lusciously lascivious smorgasbord of the lewd, bizarre, and sometimes illegal sexual behavior of past and present members of royalty... a voyeuristic thrill that not even the best of todays erotica can top.

Curled Up with a Good Book

ALSO BY LESLIE CARROLL

Royal Affairs

For my darling and devoted husband, Scott,
From Kleines Frachen with ein Kuss

I love you, those three words have my life in them.

The State of Princes... in matters of marriage [is] far of
worse sort than the condition of poor men. For Princes take
as is brought them by others, and poor men be commonly
at their own device and liberty.

Anthony Denny, Member of the Kings Privy Chamber and chief body servant to Henry VIII, 1540

Foreword

Everyone loves a royal wedding. Except, perhaps, the bride and groom. Throughout history, most royal marriages were arranged affairs, brokered for diplomatic and dynastic reasons, and often when the prospective spouses were mere children. The perfect royal marriage brought territorial gains to the ruling dynastys side (usually the grooms) and cemented alliances between families and regions. It was of little consequence that the spouses often didnt meet until their wedding day. Or that they had been in love with someone else and were now compelled to abandon all hope of the personal happiness or emotional fulfillment that might have come from nuptial bliss with another. There is no I in dynasty.

In general, there was one primary goal of a royal marriage: to beget an heir. And for a good part of the past millennium, when much of Western Europe was embroiled in perpetual warfare, it was believed that only a male heir would be able to defend and hold the throne, although a female could legally inherit the throne in England and Scotland. During more martial eras, royal wives who managed to produce only daughtersKatherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, for examplewere disposed of by their autocratic spouse, powerless to challenge his authority. If execution was no longer an option to ending a problematic or infertile marriage, there was always divorce. Napoleon Bonaparte divorced his first wife, Josephine de Beauharnais, because she failed to bear him a son.

With so many marriages being little more than dynastic alliances, how did these royals manage to survive their arranged nuptials and make their peace with the world into which they were born? Or did they? Precious few of the notorious royal marriages profiled in this book began as love matchesalthough they didnt necessarily stay that way. And for several centuries, if things werent working out, the monarch might play the all-purpose, get-out-of-marriage-free card known as a papal dispensation on the grounds of consanguinity. In other words, plenty of unions were sundered after cousins who had received a dispensation to marry in the first place suddenly decided to become appalled and repulsed by how closely they were related when it became expedient to wed another.

With so many intriguing relationships, choosing whose stories to omit was nearly as difficult as selecting which ones to include. Within this volume are some of the worlds most famous royal unions, as they affected and were affected by the historical and political events of the times; it is not intended to provide an overview of world history, to probe with great depth the wars and revolutions that gripped Europe for centuries, or to present full biographies of the principals.

Comparing the selection of a marriage partner to fishing for an eelthat staple of Renaissance dietsSir Thomas Mores father commented that it was as if ye should put your hand into a blind bag full of snakes and eels together, seven snakes for one eel.

In these pages are the snakes as well as the eelsthe disastrous unions and the delightful ones; the martyrs to marriage and the iconoclasts who barely took their vows seriously; the saintly and the suffering; the rebels and the renegadesall of whom took the phrases I do and I will and ran as far as they could go with them, exploring and embracing the broad spectrum of passion, power, and possibilities far beyond the royal bedchamber.

LOUIS VII 1120-1180

RULED AS CO-KING OF FRANCE: 1131-1137

RULED AS KING: 1137-1180

and

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE
1122-1204

married 1137-1152

I thought I married a king, but I find I have married a monk.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, on her husband, Louis VII of France

WHATS IN A NAME? WELL, WHEN YOUR MATERNAL GRANDMOTHERS is the Countess Dangerosa, one might easily speculate that you, too, could spell Trouble.

The Countess Dangerosa was the mistress of Eleanor of Aquitaines grandfather the lusty Duke William IX of Aquitaine, whose bawdy ballads garnered him the reputation as the first known troubadour. Eleanor was the eldest daughter of the dukes son (also named William) and Dangerosas daughter Aenor, by her first husband. After Duke William X died of dysentery on Good Friday, April 9, 1137, the fifteen-year-old Eleanor became Europes richest heiress, inheriting much of what now comprises western and southern Franceincluding the regions of Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony.

According to Richard de Poitevin, writing in the 1170s, Eleanor was brought up in delicacy and reared in abundance of all delights, living in the bosom of wealth. She was quite the catch, even if shed been a bit spoiled as a girl. Headstrong, willful, high-spirited, and exceptionally intelligent, she was also an acknowledged beauty. Although no physical description of her survives, Eleanors father and grandfather were both redheads.

Twelfth-century Western Europe was a feudal society. The king was the ultimate overlord, at the apex of a pyramid of power. Dukes and counts were his vassals, but had vassals of their own in the local barons, whose vassals included knights, and so on down the social food chain. It was also an era in which might made right. If a count or baron could take a neighboring castleor countyor dukedomby force and hold it, it became his.

Things werent much different where women were concerned. Marriage by abduction was a popular way to get a bride. Aenor, about whom little is known, died when Eleanor was only eight years old, so the orphaned teen was at the mercy of predatory nobles who would think nothing of rape as a substitute for an engagement ring. But Eleanors father left her lands in trust to his own overlord, King Louis VI of France, until such time as she married, with the tacit understanding that Eleanor would be wed to Louiss heir.

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