A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens Read Free Page B

had their turn, too.

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    England Swings
     
     
    T he British are rarely associated with blazing sensuality. Stiff upper lips, maybe, but that’s about the extent of it. Considering the rich and nuanced sexual proclivities of a millennium’s worth of British monarchs, this bland reputation hardly seems deserved.
    Those meeting King Edward IV in the late fifteenth century often found him surprisingly affable and unaffected. “He was so genial in his greeting,” noted contemporary chronicler Domenico Mancini, “that when he saw a newcomer bewildered by his regal appearance and royal pomp, he would give him courage to speak by laying a kindly hand on his shoulder.” Maybe this was true for the guys. Most women, however, experienced something entirely different when they encountered the tall, handsome monarch.
    “He was licentious in the extreme,” Mancini reported. “It was said that he behaved very badly towards numerous women after seducing them because, as soon as he grew tired with the affair, much against their will he would pass the ladies on to other courtiers. He pursued indiscriminately married and unmarried, noble and low-born, though he never raped them. He overcame them all by money and promises and then, having had them, he got rid of them.” It would be interesting to know how exactly Mancini defined rape, given his account of how King Edward threatened Elizabeth Woodville with a dagger when she had the audacity to resist him before they were married.
     
    By royal standards of the time, Edward IV’s grandson, Henry VIII, had relatively few mistresses. That’s because he married most of them. Henry seems to have had a thing for the hired help, creating one hell of a hostile work environment. His second wife, Anne Boleyn (whose sister Henry also slept with) had been a lady-in-waiting to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, while his third wife, Jane Seymour, had served both the first and the second. Then he met and fell in love with his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, while she was working for his fourth, Anne of Cleves. Two of these former employees would lose their heads. 3
     
    Sex and violent death were as closely intertwined in the psyche of Henry’s younger daughter, Elizabeth I, as sleeping and dreaming. She was not yet three years old when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed for adultery, and she was nine when her young stepmother, Catherine Howard, was dragged away screaming to her own date with the headsman.
    As a teenager, Elizabeth enjoyed the flirtatious attentions of Thomas Seymour—her first stepmother’s brother who had married her last stepmother, Katherine Parr, after the death of Henry VIII in 1547. Seymour was beheaded, too, in part for his attempts to seduce her. Little wonder, then, that Elizabeth decided to stay single.
    Despite her much lauded spinsterhood, a sexually charged aura attached itself to “The Virgin Queen” for most of her glorious reign. Elizabeth had an enduring passion for one Robert Dudley, going back to the days when they were both held prisoner in the Tower of London by her sister “Bloody” Mary I. As soon as she ascended the throne in 1558, the young, red-headed queen made Dudley her Master of the Horse, and eventually Earl of Leicester. She ordered his apartments at court moved closer to hers and flirted with him in public while enthusiastically extolling his virtues of body and mind. The Spanish ambassador reported that “Lord Robert has come so much into favor that he does whatever he pleases with affairs and it is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.”
    This was a couple of centuries before Catherine the Great came to Russia’s throne, and a time when female monarchs were rare and their sexuality expected to be beyond reproach. But the inevitable gossip arising from her dalliances with Lord Robert didn’t faze this virgin queen in the least. When her old governess, Katherine Ashley, begged Elizabeth to be more