This making of bastards great
And duchessing every whore
The Surplus and Treasury cheat
Hath made me damnably poor.
—1680S POEM ABOUT CHARLES II
MORE VALUABLE THAN A TIARA OF DIAMONDS, A LARGE BELLY was the greatest proof of the king’s affections. A child bound the king to his mistress long after her disgrace or retirement and usually ensured her a lifetime of generous pensions. It is no wonder that most European courts were littered with royal bastards.
It was generally accepted that bastards were more intelligent and better looking than legitimate children. The belief was that intercourse between a man and his mistress was truly an act of love, or at least genuine desire. And in that moment of conception, the passions of love and desire mingled to form a more impressive child than those wrung from forced copulation. Louis XIV, distressed that five of his six legitimate children died young, while so many of his bastards thrived, was informed by his doctors that he had given his best juice to his mistresses, leaving the queen with only the dregs of the glass. The truth was that compulsory marital sex between inbred cousins often produced another genetically inferior generation, with the poor health, plodding intelligence, and grim appearance of their parents.
One day in the 1670s Louis XIV’s Queen Marie-Thérèse, mother of a prince just as dull and unattractive as herself, grew quite peeved when she heard courtiers raving about the king’s adorable, precocious sons with Madame de Montespan. “Everybody goes into ecstasies about those children while Monsieur le Dauphin is never even mentioned,” she complained.1
In addition to superior intelligence and looks, royal bastards were less arrogant than their legitimate half siblings, who sauntered about court prickly with the pride of their fully royal birth. Bastards had no official position other than what their father chose to bestow on them and usually offered him a fierce loyalty in return for his generosity. When Henry II of England lay dying in 1189, of all his children, only his bastard son Geoffrey Plantagenet sat by his side. Henry’s surviving legitimate sons, John and Richard, had allied themselves with the king of France and were rebelling against their father. “You alone have proved yourself my lawful and true son,” Henry grumbled. “My other sons are really the bastards.”2
The king often loved his bastards far better than the princes and princesses coerced from his loins in the marriage bed. Nothing devastated Henri IV of France so much as seeing how his heir, the dauphin, was the spitting image of his mother, the unloved Queen Marie de Medici. According to a nobleman, soon after the birth of Henri’s bastard with Henriette d’Entragues, the king said that this child was “finer than that of the Queen, who resembles the Medici, being swarthy and fat.” When the queen was told of the king’s comment, “she wept bitterly.”3 As his bastard son grew up, Henri would point to him and say, “See how good-natured this son is and how much he resembles me. He is not a stubborn child like the Dauphin.”4
Henri’s court physician, Dr. Hérouard, wrote, “The Queen can’t understand how…the King…can give more caresses to the bastards than to the legitimate children…[and fears that] all the world will think that they are more loved by their father than the Queen’s children.”5
When the royal family’s coach overturned in a flash flood while crossing a river in 1606, Henri grabbed César, his twelve-year-old bastard son with Gabrielle d’Estrées, and raced with him to safety, leaving the rest of the family in danger of drowning. We can picture fat Queen Marie, sputtering water, sinking in her heavy velvets into the muddy current, watching the back of her husband race away from her to carefully deposit his bastard on shore. The queen was fished out by a courtier, who dragged her to safety by the hair. She rewarded the courtier with a casket of jewels, an annual pension, and the position of captain of the Queen’s Guards. But she never forgave her husband.
Much to Marie’s dismay, Henri IV insisted on raising his eight bastards by various mistresses in the royal nursery along with his six legitimate children. At first Henriette d’Entragues, who had obtained a written promise of marriage from the king and considered herself his true wife, refused to allow her child to join the nursery. “I will not,” she stormed, “allow my son to be in the company of all those bastards!”6 Eventually Henri insisted, hoping that daily contact would result in brotherly love among the children rather than bitter rivalry. The king visited his brood frequently but had a hard time keeping them straight. He wrote a list that he kept in his pocket describing the children, detailing their names, ages, and mothers.
Many royal bastards, well loved by the king, disliked their mothers, who lived in a state of full or partial disgrace. Louis XIV’s son with Madame de Montespan, the duc du Maine, had developed infantile paralysis at the age of three which left him with a limp, a tragedy of incalculable proportions in that world of exquisite grace and howling ridicule called Versailles. The duke blamed his mother for this calamity and never forgave her for her subsequent coldness to him. In 1691 the duke was so thrilled when he heard the king had finally exiled her from court that he insisted on taking the news to his mother himself. Within an hour of her sudden departure, he had all her baggage sent after her to Paris. He then ordered her furniture thrown out the windows onto the courtyard below lest she come back to fetch it. The duke immediately took over her prime apartments for himself.
Similarly, the son of Charles II and Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, was close to his father but disliked his mother. When the king died in 1685 Louise took fourteen-year-old Charles to France, where she compelled this staunch young Protestant to convert to Catholicism. At nineteen Charles fled to England—rumor said with his mother’s jewels—bounced back to the Protestant religion, married an English noblewoman, and took his place in the House of Lords—devastating his very French, very Catholic mother.
The saddest case was that of the actress Dorothy Jordan. Her ten children with the future William IV allowed her to die alone in exile and poverty while they were attending parties with their royal father. Their mother had become an embarrassment, but high society welcomed them with open arms when accompanied by William. All eight of the ten children who married did so into English nobility, living lives of luxury and conveniently forgetting that their mother was buried in a pauper’s grave in France.
Kings usually legitimized these offspring by royal decree. This legitimization was an official recognition of fatherhood, leaving the children bastards, but bastards with high expectations. In 1360 King Pedro of Portugal wanted to legitimize his children with his mistress Inez de Castro, whom he had married after their births. The pope declared that the children could be legitimate only if their mother was crowned queen—and Inez had died five years earlier. Undeterred, King Pedro dug her up, dressed her skeleton in regal robes, and had it placed in a chair in the cathedral and crowned in an elaborate ceremony which all the nobles were forced to attend. After that no one protested when he legitimized the children.
By the sixteenth century Europe had become somewhat more civilized. When Henri IV of France wanted to legitimize his son with Gabrielle d’Estrées in 1594, he merely issued documents proclaiming César his son. “We accord to him these letters,” Henri wrote, “inasmuch as the stigma that is attached to the birth of our son excludes him from all hopes of succeeding to this our Crown…. His state would be but a poor one, were it not for this, his legitimation, whereby he is rendered capable of receiving all the gifts and benefits which may be conferred on him both by us and others.”7
In addition to legitimizing their bastard children, kings often ennobled them, creating a string of infant counts and countesses, dukes and duchesses. While royal bastards were not considered suitable marriage partners for foreign royalty, they were highly sought after in marriage by noble families of the same nationality—thus mixing their blood with the sacred blood of the king. Because of the frequent marriage of bastard dukes and duchesses into established noble families, most of European nobility today is directly related to royal children born on the wrong side of the blanket.
Speaking of Charles II, the courtier George Villiers remarked, “A king is supposed to be a father to his people and Charles certainly was father to a good many of them.”8 Charles acknowledged fourteen bastards—nine sons and five daughters. He created six dukedoms and one earldom for his bastard sons, and made four of the daughters countesses. So many of his illegitimate sons were called Charles that he, like Henri IV before him, had a hard time keeping them straight. Charles kept a keen eye on young heirs and heiresses for his bastards and arranged for them to marry as children—some as young as five years old—to make sure the mouthwatering fortunes didn’t slip away.
The fierce rivalry among royal mistresses often extended to the honors the king bestowed on their children. In 1674 Louise de Kéroualle was delighted to learn that Charles II had created her two-year-old son Charles the duke of Richmond. But her joy was almost immediately tempered by the news that he had also named Barbara, Lady Castlemaine’s eleven-year-old son Henry the duke of Grafton, and Barbara was demanding that her son have precedence. Officially, precedence was given to the duke whose patent was first signed. Both women hammered poor Charles, who lamely suggested that the patents be signed at precisely the same moment; but neither would hear of it.
Both patents were made out bearing the same date but required a signature by Lord Treasurer Danby to be effective. Danby was planning to leave the next morning for Bath, and Lady Castlemaine instructed her agent to wait upon him very early, before he departed. Louise, however, heard that he had changed plans and would depart the night before. Her agent handed the patent to Danby as he was getting into his coach, and he obligingly went into his house to sign it. The next morning, when Lady Castlemaine’s agent arrived, he found that Louise’s son would always have precedence over Lady Castlemaine’s. It is amusing to picture the blazing fury of the defeated mistress when she heard the news.
Because of her low birth, Nell Gwynn’s sons were not included in these fits of generosity. Nell sadly informed her two boys that they “were princes by their father for their elevation, but they had a whore to their mother for their humiliation.”9 One day in 1676 when Charles came to visit, Nell, frustrated by years of waiting for the king to honor her sons, called out to her six-year-old, “Come hither, you little bastard!” When Charles scolded her, she said, “I have no better name to call him by.” Laughing, Charles replied. “Then I must give him one,” and soon after made the boy the earl of Burford.10 After another eight years of Nell’s lobbying, cajoling, and begging, Charles made him the duke of St. Albans. The handsome thirteen-year-old was given splendid apartments in Whitehall Palace and an annual allowance of fifteen hundred pounds. A lucrative marriage was arranged for him with a young heiress. The duke of St. Albans later served his country as ambassador to France.
While seventeenth-century royal bastards could generally count on a dukedom, their counterparts in the rough-and-tumble medieval world stood a good chance of winning a throne. William the Conqueror, the valiant bastard son of Robert the Devil, duke of Normandy, took up his sword and vanquished English troops in 1066; nearly a thousand years later, his more refined descendant Elizabeth II serenely wears the crown. In twelfth-and thirteenth-century Norway royal bastards were handed the throne when their fathers died without legitimate sons. In the fourteenth century, royal bastards established dynasties in Portugal and Castile. It is ironic that the Renaissance, which ushered in the power of royal mistresses, suppressed the possibilities for their sons. The medieval world, forged by maces and battle axes, boasted few laws of marriage, divorce, and legitimacy compared to the civilized, refined society of later centuries.
It should come as no surprise that some royal bastards of the Renaissance and the Baroque era looked back wistfully to earlier centuries, when courageous bastards could win a kingdom for themselves. James, duke of Monmouth, the favorite son of Charles II, plotted to grab the throne of England. His father had no legitimate children, and Charles’s brother and heir, James, was detested for being Catholic. After Charles’s death in 1685, the popular duke raised troops and fought against James II. Monmouth was captured sleeping in a ditch and beheaded at the command of his uncle.
Many bastard sons, recognizing the foolhardiness of battling for a throne, found honor and glory fighting on behalf of royal fathers and half brothers. Don Juan of Austria (1547–1578), illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Barbara Blomberg, became an admiral, clearing the seas of pirates and vanquishing the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto for his half brother Philip II.
Maurice, Count de Saxe (1696–1750), bastard son of Augustus the Strong of Saxony and Aurora von Königsmarck, became a great general and military theorist. James Fitzjames, the marshal duke of Berwick (1670–1734), the son of James II of England and his mistress Arabella Churchill, became a general and fought victoriously first for his exiled father and then for his cousin Louis XIV. During the War of the Austrian Succession, when the duke was sixty-four, a cannonball took off his head in a burst of glory.
While the illegitimate sons of kings often won glory on the battlefield, the daughters were used as marriage pawns to placate unruly but powerful noble families. Louis XIV married two of his bastard daughters into the Condé clan, a powerful family with a history of treason going back several generations. Louise-Françoise, Mademoiselle de Nantes, daughter of the king and Madame de Montespan, was only twelve when she married a Condé, a seventeen-year-old dwarf with an enormous head. Because of the bride’s tender age, consummation of the marriage would have to wait two or three years. But Madame de Montespan, grasping greedily at such a brilliant match and fearing the marriage might fall through before consummation, pushed for her daughter to lose her virginity that very night.
The groom’s family was equally pleased at such a close connection to the king, though they insisted that sex wait. Madame de Caylus wrote, “The nuptials were celebrated at Versailles in the King’s state apartments…with a glorious illumination of the gardens and with all that magnificence of which the King was capable. The Grand Condé [the groom’s grandfather] and his son left nothing undone to signal their delight in the consummation of the betrothal which they had made every effort to bring about.”11
The oddest case on record of a royal bastard was that of Don Antonio de Medici, the son—and yet not the son—of Archduke Francesco de Medici of Tuscany and his mistress Bianca Cappello. In 1576 Bianca had been a royal mistress for a full decade but had never conceived. Archduchess Johanna had provided her husband with several useless girls, and Francesco promised his mistress that if she gave him a son he would marry her and make her archduchess as soon as his unloved wife, always in precarious health, breathed her last. This longed-for son, legitimized through marriage, might very well inherit the throne.
Not one to accept defeat, Bianca seized on a bold measure to give Francesco the son he wanted. She sent an accomplice to choose three unmarried pregnant women in need, believing that surely one of the three would have a son, and housed them at her expense in different parts of the city. Bianca then proudly announced to a delighted Francesco that she was finally pregnant. She began padding her gowns and would not let her lover touch her for fear of disturbing her pregnancy.
Two of the women produced girls, much to Bianca’s dismay, and were paid off. The third woman, Lucia, chosen for her health and beauty, gave birth to a boy. Immediately upon hearing this, Bianca pretended to go into labor, rending the air with cries of pretended pain. Francesco, hearing the news, raced to comfort her and brought with him his court physician. The baby, who had been unceremoniously nabbed from his mother and brought to Bianca’s house in a basket of goods, remained hidden until he could be smuggled into the safety of her four-poster bed with curtains drawn.
The labor lasted many hours until Francesco gave up and returned to the palace. His doctor, however, remained to assist with the birth. When the doctor, who had not been permitted to touch or examine Bianca during her gut-wrenching performance, saw her old serving woman Santi bring in the basket through the garden, he understood what was happening. He tactfully obliged when Bianca instructed him to bring her wine. Upon returning, he was presented with Bianca’s newborn child.
And the real mother? Lucia, deprived of her child and still bleeding, was forced to go on horseback on a long journey to Bologna with Gazzi, Bianca’s humpbacked doctor, who had cared for her during her pregnancy. Gazzi obtained a position for her as wet nurse to a wealthy family under an assumed name and told her the whole story. Her son, whom Bianca and Francesco named Antonio, would have a brilliant life. But Lucia feared the Medicis would not hesitate to silence her to protect the secret of Antonio’s birth. For twelve years she wandered around Italy using false names, always looking over her shoulder for a Medici dagger.
Soon after Antonio’s birth, Archduchess Johanna finally gave her husband a son and heir, and temporarily at least, Antonio’s importance shrank. Meanwhile Santi, Bianca’s accomplice in the phony birth, began to blackmail Bianca. While on a journey with other servants, Santi was attacked and knifed by mysterious bandits who ignored the others in her party. Santi died—we must conclude she was murdered at Bianca’s instigation—but not before confessing the whole story to a priest.
Archduchess Johanna died in 1578, and as she lay cooling in the grave, Francesco married Bianca. Rumors about Antonio’s strange birth flew on swift wings, even as Europe reeled from the news that the archduke had married his mistress and crowned her. Francesco, Bianca, and Antonio became the butt of sneering jokes across Europe.
When the boy was two years old, Bianca knew that stories of his birth had reached Francesco’s ears. Since he had a legitimate son, there seemed little reason to keep the lie about Antonio alive. And so she disclosed her secret as an amusing joke she had played to make him happy. Francesco, content in his legitimate son, accepted her explanation. However, he continued to raise Antonio as his son. He must have grown to love the boy, and moreover, he didn’t want to become the laughingstock of Europe by admitting that his mistress had foisted a stranger’s bastard upon him as his son.
When Francesco’s only legitimate son died at the age of four in 1582, Bianca pushed to have Antonio created heir to the throne. Francesco asked permission from King Philip II of Spain, who wielded great power over the Italian states. It was a shocking request, especially as most of the world knew the child’s unique history. With great diplomacy, Philip consented to having the child elevated to prince of Capestrano of the kingdom of Naples, but not heir to the throne of Tuscany.
Without waiting for Philip’s response, Francesco legitimized Antonio in a completely illegal maneuver, presented him to his legislative advisory group, the Council of two hundred, as his son, and ordered that he should be addressed as His Highness. He sent the child out in a coach accompanied by an escort of the German Guard, a privilege reserved for princes. The Tuscan people were appalled. Legitimate Medicis had become bad enough, but to foist on them as their prince a commoner’s bastard—without a drop of Medici blood—was to foment rebellion.
Francesco’s brother Ferdinando, the legitimate heir to the throne, was afraid that Francesco would convince King Philip to recognize Antonio and support him with Spanish firepower. He kept a watchful eye on Bianca and loathed her more than ever.
Both Francesco and Bianca died within a few hours of each other in 1587, apparently from a malarial infection, though many whispered of poison. Ferdinando, the new archduke, immediately stripped eleven-year-old Antonio of all titles and possessions and refused to acknowledge him as his nephew. But the next day Ferdinando, having flexed his muscle and shown the boy’s true position, returned all his magnificent estates. He promised to protect and honor him as long as he remained a faithful subject. A loving guardian, Ferdinando personally arranged an excellent education for the boy.
Hearing of the deaths of Bianca and Francesco, Antonio’s mother, Lucia, ventured back to Florence and, at archduke Ferdinando’s instigation, was reunited with her son. Ferdinando, seeking to avoid a future generation of spurious heirs claiming the Medici throne, forced Antonio to become a Knight of Malta, an order whose members were unable to contract a legally valid marriage. Antonio lived rich and successful and died in 1626, so ending the story of the royal bastard who almost inherited a throne—without a single drop of royal blood.