Ten

Death of the King

I am as one who is left alone at a banquet,
the lights dead and the flowers faded.

—EDWARD ROBERT BULWER, FIRST EARL OF LYTTON

DEATH IN HIS BLACK ROBES WAS A FREQUENT VISITOR TO royal palaces in centuries past. The highest in the land were often struck down at the peak of their youth and power. A member of the court or royal family could be dancing one night, dead the next.

Even kings must die. Inevitably, the day came when Death, gaunt and hollow-eyed, began to pluck with clawlike fingers at the monarch’s soul, patiently plucking until in shrieking agony it tore through bone and sinew. Now indeed was no time for fond memories of candlelit lovemaking, of hazy wine-filled nights, of women’s lips and breasts and thighs. Not now, as the king prepared to walk into the gulf alone. For the first time in his life he would be truly alone, with no retinue of fawning courtiers or mincing ministers to strew rose petals in his path. In the end he was crownless, reduced in stature to that of the scurviest beggar, worth no more than any other human soul fleeing rancid human flesh.

Looking Death in the face after a reign of seventy years, Louis XIV soberly reflected, “We do what we choose while we are alive, but when we are dead we have less power than the lowliest individual.”¹

The king’s protection of his mistress ceased with the beating of his heart; sometimes, in a desperate fit of repentance, earlier. The mistress was often barred entrance into his sick chamber by angry relatives, unless of course the king had a contagious disease such as smallpox, in which case she would be expected to nurse him. Even if she did make it to the deathbed to bid her lover farewell, she was sent away before the priest came to administer last rites. To the dying monarch, his mistress had become a living accusation of mortal sin, and he was not permitted to sully his newly cleansed soul by even looking at her.

There was no one less pitied than the courtesan of a dead king. Her carefully constructed position—which had been upheld only at the king’s insistence—suddenly collapsed, flinging her far below ordinary mortals. She was rarely permitted the right of the poorest citizen to participate in her lover’s funeral obsequies or visit the body lying in state.

Retribution from the royal family for perceived insults was often swift and merciless. While former mistresses, long since dismissed by the deceased monarch, were forgotten and permitted to rusticate gracefully, it was the king’s final mistress who bore the full resentment of the royal family, courtiers, and commoners. In 1350 when Alfonso XI of Castile died of the black plague, his mistress Leonor de Guzman was imprisoned by Alfonso’s long-ignored wife Queen Maria and murdered in her cell by the queen’s express order.

The following century was only slightly more civilized. After the death of Edward IV of England in 1483, court and public opinion were so violently hostile to his final mistress, Jane Shore, that she was forced to march through London wearing the white shroud and dunce cap of a penitent, holding a candle. Though there is evidence that she survived another forty years, a legend sprung up that she died on a dunghill, pelted by stones, and many subsequent royal mistresses were heartily wished the death of Jane Shore.

The new king, usually the son of the former monarch, often ached to punish the woman who had hurt his mother the queen. Charles VII’s son and heir Louis often bristled at the insults offered his long-suffering mother by his father’s mistress Agnes Sorel. One day in 1444, Louis, running into Agnes, cried, “By our Lord’s passion, this woman is the cause of all our misfortunes,” and punched her in the face.² Perhaps it was lucky for Agnes that she predeceased her royal lover; one cannot imagine a peaceful existence for her under Louis XI.

In 1760, as King George II of England lay dying, his beloved mistress was nowhere near his deathbed. Lady Yarmouth, who knew the future George III was no admirer of hers, was quietly stuffing ten thousand pounds into a strongbox to take back to her native land of Hanover, where young George couldn’t get her.

Upon hearing of a monarch’s serious illness, friends deserted his mistress in waves in an effort to ingratiate themselves with the future king. Madame de Pompadour experienced this in 1757, when a madman stabbed Louis XV as he entered his carriage at Versailles. Though superficial, the wound in his side was bloody, and Louis thought death was imminent. Madame de Pompadour, whose rooms were always filled with simpering courtiers, suddenly found fewer visitors, and those with gloating faces. “They came to see how she took it,” wrote her lady’s maid.³ Her enemy the marquis d’Argenson could not conceal his glee when he reported, “She pretends not to feel her disgrace, but little by little people are forsaking her.”⁴

Crying, deserted, the royal mistress packed her bags and prepared to flee to her safe haven in Paris in the event of the king’s death. But after several days Louis, rallying, grabbed a cane, called “Don’t you come” to his son, and hobbled down the private staircase to her rooms.⁵ Madame de Pompadour’s position was once more secure, and the obsequious courtiers once again waited in her antechamber for an audience.

Death was a friend of sorts to a long-betrayed queen, serving up her husband cold on a platter, all hers for the first time since their honeymoon. She knew where he was, and he was in no position to escape her clutches to visit a mistress. The few days between the king’s death and his burial were often sacred to his neglected wife, and the last thing she wanted was his mistress to soil the sanctity.

Shortly after Edward VII’s death in 1910, his widow Queen Alexandra invited her friend Lord Esher to take one last look at the king’s body before the funeral. He was perplexed by her smiling gaiety until he realized this was the first time in nearly fifty years of marriage that Alexandra completely possessed her husband with no competition in sight. “After all,” she said over the corpse, “he always loved me best.”⁶

“Bitterness…will be but sweetness
beside my great loss”

In 1559 Diane de Poitiers, the most powerful woman in France, lost everything in an instant when a wooden lance shattered the visor and pierced the eye of her lover Henri II in a joust. Both Diane and Queen Catherine had been cheering in the stands for the king when the accident occurred. As Henri’s limp body was carried away, blood gushing from his smashed visor and splinters driven deeply into his brain, his unloved queen became monarch in name and fact, ruling for her young son.

Diane tried to push her way through the crowds to see Henri but could not. He was carried on a litter to the palace, where she was barred admittance. Inconsolable, she returned to her house in Paris and tried desperately to get word of the king’s condition. None was brought to her. She could not know that her dying lover called out her name unceasingly, but Queen Catherine refused to send for her. Finally, fate had delivered full possession of the wayward king to his neglected wife, and she was not about to share it with the detested Diane.

The king endured several days of agony as surgeons probed his shattered eye socket. The queen coldly had four condemned criminals beheaded so their skulls could be probed in a fruitless effort to save her husband.

Ten days after the accident the queen sent a messenger to Diane demanding the crown jewels Henri had given her. Diane asked quietly, “Is the King dead?” The messenger replied that death was not far off. Diane responded, “So long as there remains a breath of life in him I wish my enemies to know that I do not fear them. As yet there is no one who can command me. I am still of good courage. But when he is dead I do not want to live after him, and all the bitterness that one could wish me will be but sweetness beside my great loss.”⁷

Two days later the king died, and another messenger was sent to Diane to retrieve the crown jewels and the keys to the king’s cabinets and desk. Diane returned a box containing the jewels and keys, as well as an inventory of its contents and a personal letter to the queen asking her pardon.

Diane was not permitted to attend Henri’s funeral but watched the procession pass under the window of her Paris house. Then she sat down and waited to be arrested. But the guards never came for her. Diane had ruled France prudently for the twelve years of Henri’s reign and could not be accused of treason. Perhaps more important, she had married her two daughters into families that were powerful allies of the queen. Catherine satisfied herself with claiming Chenonceaux, the fairy-tale castle Henri had given Diane, and defacing the countless “HD” ciphers Henri had placed all over his many châteaus. She either had them removed and burned or hired a wood carver to turn them into an “HC.”

Diane retired to the château of Anet, which she had inherited from her long-dead husband. Devoting her last years to good works, she built a hospital and a home for unwed mothers, orphans, and widows. She left money to several convents for Masses to be said for her soul. In 1566, seven years after Henri’s death, she died quietly after a brief illness at the age of sixty-five, still lovely. One courtier wrote, “It is sad that earth should hide that beautiful body.”⁸

“Let not poor Nelly starve”

Unlike most kings, who left behind a single declared mistress on their deaths, Charles II left behind a harem in 1685. His two principal mistresses met with very different fates.

As the fifty-five-year-old king lay dying of a stroke, possibly the result of syphilis, it was Louise de Kéroualle who provided Charles with a last great service. One of the few who knew him to be a secret Catholic who, for political reasons, had never officially converted, she wanted him to receive the sacrament and last rites according to the Catholic Church. He had refused the Protestant sacrament on his deathbed, and no one was certain why—except Louise and his brother James. But James was lost in the fog of thought that descends when one is about to become king.

Louise felt herself forbidden by decency to visit the king’s chamber, where the unhappy queen kept vigil. She went instead to the French ambassador and requested that he speak with James and find a priest. According to the ambassador, she said, “Go and tell him that I have implored you to warn him to consider what can be done to save the King, his brother’s, soul.”⁹ James, recollecting his duty, visited Charles at once and asked him if he should send for a priest, to which the king replied, “For God’s sake, brother, do, and lose no time!”¹⁰

Shortly thereafter, up the secret staircase, the same way the prostitutes had crept to visit the king, came a priest, who administered the last rites. Afterward, Charles said of Louise, “I have always loved her, and I die loving her.”¹¹

Upon hearing the news of Charles’s death, a panicked Louise found sanctuary in the house of the French ambassador. Knowing she had never been popular, had meddled in politics, and was hated as a Whig, a papist, and a foreign spy, Louise feared the new government as well as the mob. She tried to sail for France at once. King James, fearing the wrath of her powerful protector Louis XIV, ensured her safety and guaranteed her a pension of three thousand pounds a year. But he also demanded that she stay in England to pay her creditors and return certain of the crown jewels in her possession.

Smoothing down her ruffled feathers, Louise returned to court squawking for the pensions Charles had awarded her—nineteen thousand pounds yearly as his mistress as well as twenty-five thousand a year from the Irish revenue. James allowed her to keep the nineteen thousand but pocketed the twenty-five thousand himself. Six months after Charles’s death, she sailed for France in an armada stuffed with her possessions—two hundred thousand gold francs, oaken chests of jewels and plate, furniture, coaches, sedan chairs, and works of art.

Used to living extravagantly and gambling wildly, Louise soon parted ways with her riches. Pressed by creditors, she bounced between London and Versailles, clamoring for pensions from both nations for services rendered, and usually obtaining them. But Charles’s death had forced her from the stage; in one instant she went from leading lady to reluctant spectator. Much to her chagrin, for nearly fifty years she lived as an interesting artifact from a bygone reign, still attractive but indisputably irrelevant. The initial virulent bout of venereal disease she had caught from the king seems never to have returned. She died in 1734 at the age of eighty-five.

Unlike Louise de Kéroualle, Nell Gwynn’s pensions were set up to end upon Charles’s death. She had no ducal estates or income in perpetuity. As Charles lay dying, he must have wished he had rewarded her better for her seventeen years of faithful service. “Let not poor Nelly starve,” Charles implored his brother James shortly before he expired.¹²

Nell suffered financial problems immediately after Charles’s death. Her creditors, a variety of shopkeepers with whom she had kept large accounts, beat against her door demanding payment. Initially King James turned a deaf ear to her urgent pleas for assistance. While Nell owned numerous valuable properties, they were entailed to her son with Charles and she was not permitted to sell them.

Finally, Nell mortgaged some of her properties and borrowed against her jewels and plate to obtain cash to pay the creditors. She believed that James would honor his brother’s deathbed request. She was right—three months after Charles’s death, James sent Nell cash for her most pressing needs and promises of additional help. By the end of the year he had paid numerous merchants’ bills and given her an additional twenty-three hundred pounds in cash. Most important, in January 1686 James settled on Nell an annual pension of fifteen hundred pounds—a fraction of what she had received from Charles, but enough to live on comfortably as a private person.

In the two years after Charles’s death, Nell enjoyed her life in London. She visited friends, gave dinner parties, and went to the theater. Over the years she had spells of illness but usually bounced back quickly. It is likely that Nell had caught from Charles the same venereal disease that Louise had, but in Nell’s case it slowly hardened her arteries and increased her blood pressure.

In March 1687, Nell had a stroke. She seemed to be slowly recuperating when two months later she suffered one even more devastating. Paralyzed, she lay in her great silver bed, the one royal Charles had christened so many times, and there she breathed her last at the age of thirty-seven.

“More in need of pity than anyone else”

It was not Madame de Pompadour but her successor, Madame du Barry, who had the misfortune to lose Louis XV to death while she was still maîtresse-en-titre.

At sixty-four the king, who had always enjoyed a morbid fascination with dead bodies, caught smallpox after examining the coffin of a girl about to be buried. His face, covered with boils, turned the color of bronze, and he suffered horribly.

After Madame du Barry had nursed her royal lover through the ravages of the disease at great risk to herself, she was dismissed from the stench of sweat and putrefaction so the king could receive absolution for his earthly sins. When the king, roused from a feverish sleep, asked for her and was told she had left, he asked, “What, already?” and wept.¹³ Before administering the comforting rites, the priests forced the dying monarch to sign a letter imprisoning his faithful mistress in the moldering convent of the Pont aux Dames. The faithless lover, trembling before the gates of hell, signed the despicable document.

The new king, young Louis XVI, at his wife’s prodding, banished everyone with the name of du Barry from court, and many relatives who had been the objects of her bounty quickly changed their names. But Marie Antoinette’s mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, reproached her daughter for gloating over an “unfortunate creature who had lost everything and was more in need of pity than anyone else.”¹⁴

As Louis’s stinking corpse, packed with aromatic herbs into a lead casket, was carried to its final resting place, the former favorite went with a heavy heart to her imprisonment. A few loyal friends at court arranged for her to have a maid and a wagonload of plain furniture—a bed, a couple of chairs, a little rug, and a screen to shield her from drafts. Armed with these small comforts Madame du Barry was confined to a narrow room in a dank thousand-year-old convent.

Though the nuns were scandalized to have such a notorious woman in their midst—some were afraid that even looking at her would blemish their souls—they soon grew to admire Madame du Barry’s pleasing ways. Her convent education assisted her in falling right into place. She gladly helped with chores, was never late to prayers, and within weeks of her incarceration had wrapped the prudish nuns around her little finger. A year later, when she was released, they wept as her wagon rumbled away.

She was initially banished from coming within ten leagues of both Paris and Versailles, but her exile was soon lifted, and she returned to the small château of Louveciennes, outside Versailles, which her royal lover had given her. She became the patroness of the neighborhood, dispensing charity to the poor and sick and entertaining lavishly.

But Jeanne du Barry was not destined to live out her life in bourgeois luxury. The French peasants who starved while she played with the king had long memories. In 1789 her world began to fall apart. The Bastille fell, Louis XVI was guillotined, and Madame du Barry’s lover the duc de Brissac was torn apart on the streets, his head affixed to a pike. Sweet, naive, and stupid, Madame du Barry lived in a fantasy world at Louveciennes. She ordered statues for the garden, gowns for herself, new furnishings. When her jewels were stolen and turned up in London, she obtained papers from the revolutionary government to sail to England to identify the items. At a time when thousands were trying to escape France by any means to avoid the guillotine, Madame du Barry sailed back to France. She returned to her château to soak in scented baths and meet with her dressmaker.

But shortly after her return Madame du Barry was taken prisoner, found guilty of trumped-up charges of treason and espionage, and sentenced to be guillotined. She made a bargain with her executioners—she would tell them where all her valuables at Louveciennes were hidden in return for her life. For three hours they dutifully recorded her statements about jewels buried in the garden, silver concealed in the pond, paintings secreted in the old mill.

And then they sent the man to cut her hair and bind her hands. Fainting, this king’s darling was loaded onto a tumbrel with other prisoners. Moaning and sobbing, she was forcibly dragged up the steps to the guillotine, crying, “You are going to hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!”¹⁵

As her shorn head fell into the basket, a cry went up of “Vive la révolution!” The most beautiful woman in Europe, the last great maîtresse-en-titre, was dumped in an unmarked grave beside other victims of the French Revolution.

“Take that woman away out of my sight”

While touring Italy in 1796 Wilhelmine Rietz, countess of Lichtenau, was informed that her lover of twenty-six years, King Frederick William II of Prussia, was dangerously ill. A high-level official wrote her that “only the presence of Countess Lichtenau could perhaps save the King, who was anxious to see her.”¹⁶ She set out at once for Berlin.

Upon her return, Wilhelmine found the king greatly altered by his severe illness. Upon seeing his beloved companion, however, he began to feel better at once. She nursed Frederick William faithfully, arranging for plays to be performed in his sickroom, instructing the cooks to prepare his favorite meals. The pain-ravaged king was irritable unless his countess was by his side. Most courtiers agreed that she prolonged his life.

But after eighteen months of gradual recuperation his condition worsened, and it became obvious to all that he was dying. Wilhelmine’s friends recommended that she flee the country with her jewels worth 50,000 crowns, and her drafts upon the Bank of England, worth another £120,000. But Wilhelmine was literally faithful until death. She wanted to be there, at her lover’s side, at the moment of passing. Only then would she look to her own concerns.

Frederick William’s legs swelled horribly. Plays and music were no longer appropriate diversions for the dying man. Wilhelmine brought in courtiers whose conversation amused him. She read to him from books he found interesting. As the king’s agonies increased, Wilhelmine fell into convulsions. The doctors in attendance advised her to return home and get some rest. They would notify her if the king either improved or deteriorated. Drained, Wilhelmine complied. When she approached the crown prince, Frederick William’s twenty-seven-year-old son and heir, he cried, “Take that woman away out of my sight.”¹⁷ It was a sign of things to come.

The crown prince had word sent to Wilhelmine that his father was doing well to prevent her from returning. And so King Frederick William II, at the last, strode into the abyss without her hand in his.

Wallowing in a bed of sorrow, Wilhelmine soon learned that additional blows awaited her. Friends disappeared overnight. No one called to console her. Her own servants abused her. Worse, the new king sent agents to search her house for state papers and demanded the keys to her desk and cupboards. The papers so sought after proved to be romantic poems, songs, and love letters.

Nonetheless, three days after the king’s death she was put under house arrest. Her ailing mother was removed, along with her faithful maid. Her frightened children threw themselves into her arms but were dragged away. For six weeks soldiers guarded Wilhelmine as she remained alone inside her shuttered house mourning her lost lover. Finally, the commission investigating her crimes permitted her a two-hour daily walk. When she walked near her lover’s palace, she burst into tears.

Wilhelmine was charged with numerous crimes, including taking rings from the fingers of the dying king, as well as a large diamond known as the Solitaire. In response, Wilhelmine described the cabinet in the king’s bedroom where the Solitaire and other jewelry could be found. She had removed the rings at the king’s request so he could wash his hands. Afterward, when she wanted to put them back on, she noticed how swollen Frederick William’s fingers had become. Not wishing to alarm him, she deposited them in the cabinet.

Wilhelmine languished under house arrest a total of three months from the day of Frederick William’s death. Finally, a messenger visited her one evening with the decision of Frederick William III. She was permitted to retain any furniture and jewelry the dead king had given her and keep a small pension of four thousand talers a year. However, she would trade her country estate and Berlin palace for a fortress prison in Silesia. Without shedding a tear, she packed her bags and left immediately.

But Wilhelmine had some influential friends willing to stand up for her against the tide of royal displeasure. They reminded the new king of how poorly Louis XVI’s treatment of Madame du Barry had reflected on him. A friend of hers, the Italian poet Filistri, frequently cautioned the new king about dishonoring his father’s memory. He also set to work on the queen mother—the dead king’s neglected wife—the young queen, the princes, and the ministers to free Wilhelmine from her fortress. After only two months’ incarceration she was set free. A few years later Napoleon, visiting the court of Berlin, interested himself in her case and, hearing that she was living in great poverty, persuaded Frederick William III to return a part of her confiscated fortune.

But the chastened mistress did not go quietly into retirement; she had a series of lovers. At the age of fifty she married a young artist, who left her only two years later. She moved to Vienna and then to Paris, and died in obscurity in 1822 at the age of sixty-eight.

“I was never a Pompadour,
still less a Maintenon”

Because of her age and the length of her relationship with Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef, Katharina Schratt was accorded the greatest deference upon the death of her lover. She had assuaged his grief in 1889 when his only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, murdered his seventeen-year-old mistress, Maria Vetsera, and committed suicide at the royal hunting lodge of Mayerling. She had been his only solace when his beloved wife, the empress Elizabeth, was assassinated in 1898. And for thirty-three years she had comforted him as his unwieldy empire fell apart at the seams.

In 1916, when the emperor expired at the age of eighty-six, his mistress was sixty-six. No longer the tempting actress the emperor had first seen in the imperial theater, Katharina had grown stout and matronly. During World War I, good-hearted Katharina opened a hospital for wounded soldiers, personally supervising the preparation of nourishing food, which was becoming increasingly difficult to find.

During her visits to the widowed emperor, the two were seen tottering around the garden. Sometimes she read imperial documents to him, as his eyes were failing. She soothed the shattered little man who had borne an empire on his slender shoulders for nearly seventy years, sinking now under the weight of a world war.

As soon as the emperor died, Katharina was called to the palace. She cut two white roses from her greenhouse and took a carriage the short distance. Her former enemy, the emperor’s daughter Archduchess Valerie, ran to her weeping, thanking her for her lifetime of care of her father. Katharina entered the death chamber, saw Franz Josef on his narrow bed, his body shrunken and empty without its spark, and placed the roses in his folded hands.

With the real estate and jewels she had earned as imperial mistress Katharina supported her family and dependents in the awful period between the wars. Known for her generosity, she took in numerous dogs abandoned by owners who were no longer able to feed them.

In the 1930s journalists pestered her for a statement about her relationship with the late emperor. Publishers begged her to write her memoirs. Katharina would always reply, “I am an actress not a writer and I have nothing to say, for I was never a Pompadour, still less a Maintenon.”¹⁸

One day when she was eighty-six, Katharina—who had lived in the glittering twilight of the Habsburg Empire, a time of horse-drawn carriages, elegant waltzes, and bustled ball gowns—looked out her window and saw Hitler’s motorcade in a triumphant procession through Vienna, passing right in front of her home. Finally, fifty-six years after becoming imperial mistress, Katharina made a political statement. She pulled down all the blinds.

“What is to become of me?”

In 1910 sixty-eight-year-old King Edward VII lay dying, his ox-like constitution finally broken by a lifetime of dissipation. Hearing the news, his mistress Alice Keppel rifled through her papers to retrieve a letter he had written her eight years earlier after he had recovered from a severe attack of appendicitis—during which her path to the sickroom had been firmly barred by Queen Alexandra. In this letter the king requested that Alice be allowed to visit him should he suffer a serious illness again.

And so, permitted but unwanted, Alice slipped into the death room, sat next to the dying monarch, and stroked his hand. Alexandra looked out the window, turning her slender royal back on this touching scene between her husband and his mistress. Edward whispered hoarsely to his wife, “You must kiss her. You must kiss Alice.”¹⁹ We can imagine the revulsion with which the queen presented her marble lips. Such revulsion, in fact, that she later denied the kiss had been bestowed.

When Edward lapsed into a coma, Alexandra took aside Sir Francis Laking, the king’s friend, and instructed him, “Get that woman away.” Alice grew hysterical and refused to leave her lover’s side. As she was being dragged from the room she cried, “I never did any harm. There was nothing wrong between us. What is to become of me?”²⁰

With the door safely shut, in the presence of her husband’s corpse, Alexandra finally vented to Sir Francis the feelings she had sealed in for nearly five decades. “I would not have kissed her, if he had not bade me,” the queen cried. “But I would have done anything he asked of me. Twelve years ago, when I was so angry about Lady Warwick, and the King expostulated with me and said I should get him into the divorce court, I told him once for all that he might have all the women he wished, and I would not say a word; and I have done everything since that he desired me to do about them. He was the whole of my life and, now he is dead, nothing matters.”²¹

Having composed herself, Alice returned home and reported to all her friends that Queen Alexandra had not only kissed her but had assured her that the royal family would look after her, a statement denied by all other deathbed witnesses. Alice went in full mourning to Edward’s funeral, swathed in floor-length black veils and plumed with black ostrich feathers like his widow, but slipped into the chapel by a side door. After the period of mourning, Alice decided that her disappearance might be appreciated by the new king. With her ill-gotten gains, Alice took her husband and children on a two-year tour of India and China. When they returned to England, the family entertained lavishly.

In 1936, sixty-seven-year-old Alice was lunching at the Ritz in London when an announcement was made that King Edward VIII was abdicating to marry his mistress, Wallis Warfield Simpson. She winced. “Things were done much better in my day,” she sniffed loudly.²²