Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Royal Sex

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Why did kings and queens have spectators on their wedding night? Was sex always just for the love of their country and the want of an heir, or were some royals into different kinks?And what about outside marriage? From an official mistress who does not have sex with the king, to one who put laxatives in her rival’s food, what does it take to get and keep this position?Kate is Betwixt the royal Sheets with bestselling author Eleanor Herman to find out the nitty gritty from the royal bedchambers.This episode includes archive clips from Sixty Glorious Years, 1938 and The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933.Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Matt Peaty.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. A warning, as always, this episode, we will be discussing things of an adult nature, as you would expect. But if that isn't your cup of tea, feel free to tune out now. No one is allowed nail the king's marriage bid once it's been made ready. Will thou, Victoria, have this man Albert to thy wedded husband, who live together after God's ordinance in the holiest state of matrimony? me a primness and properness, with chastity and purity of royal weddings.

Do we ever really consider the royals getting down and dirty? Well, I suppose we do. But with the business of airs to consider, what do you find behind the bedroom doors of our historic royals? I'm Kate Lister, and today we are getting betwixt the royal sheets. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect confidence of whatever my wife. my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the body. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Hello and welcome back to betwixt this sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Madame de Pompadour, Edward the 7th, Henry 8th, Marie Antoinette. These people were the toast of the court. They may have been powerful because they were sexy,

or maybe they were sexy because they were powerful. To a lot of people, they were both. Charlotte and Sophie went out and about to ask the British public which historic royal they would crown the sexiest. Charles II, we've got the same style, I'll go with him. Maybe you like Queen Victoria and any youth? The first name is probably my head is Mary Queen of Scots, but I don't know why. My answer is my answer to have.

The only answer I have is Albert, because he's played by that really fit guy in the young Victoria. Rupert Fiends, finds him. To talk about royal traditions, affairs and sexually transmitted illnesses, I'm joined by Eleanor Herman, bestselling author of Sex with Kings, Sex with Queens, and a Whole Lot More. Let's get into it. Oh, well, welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, Eleanor Harmon. I am such a huge fan of your books, Sex with Kings and Sex with Queens.

I just, I'm going to try really hard not to fan girl all over you, because I do. just adored them. I'm so glad that you are here. Oh, thank you so much. It's really a delight to be here and talk about all those things that happened in palaces betwixt the sheets. Honestly, I'm so thrilled that you're here. To take us through this, there isn't anybody better. So we are thinking today about royal sex, royal sexual indiscretions. Just what happens betwixt the royal sheets between the most expensive sheets that you can get, right? And I think it's particularly interesting royal sex because it's not like any other sex. That doesn't mean I know personally, but it's the kind of sex where there's a public interest in this that's beyond just, oh, a bit of gossip.

Like, nations have vested, or did have vested interests in this. Yes, indeed they did. They had interest certainly in the king's sex with the queen to see what progeny might appear. but there was also interest in the king's love affair with his royal mistress because many of these women were extraordinarily powerful. Madame de Pompadour in the mid-18th century, actually ran the Seven Years' War against Frederick the Great of Prussia, and she appointed ambassadors and generals,

and she pretty much ran the show. So, yes, there was great national interest in who the king was sleeping with. The power that goes with that is colossal. isn't it? Well, it is. And some kings like Louis the 14th, he was known for his bevy of fragrant mistresses. He did not allow them to have any political power. But they had a tremendous power when it came to, you know, the arts and literature, and they sponsored playwrights and musical composers, and they led the fashion. So even there, these women had a great deal of influence. I definitely want to talk to you about the mistresses, and I'm limbering up to them

because they're my favourite. But we'll start with the Queen. I think that the Queen kind of, like she's not thought of in the same kind of sexy, fun, seductive. We're hey, loads of jewelry and let's have a great time as the mistresses are. She's the wife with a really important job. And her job throughout history has been to produce an air. That was it.

The Queen, poor woman, usually started off as a 14 or 15-year-old princess, dragged out of her home, never to see her homeland or her relatives again. thrown into this foreign land. A lot of times she didn't know the language. It might be a different religion. They usually send her friends and ladies and waitings home because they were making trouble.

And the queen was really nothing more than a walking uterus with a crown on her head. It was all about whether she could produce children. She was supposed to shut the hell up, sew shirts for the poor, pray, just be very pious and quiet. And many times, you know, the king, He would grow to respect her or love her as a friend,

but there were very few true marriages of love between kings and queens. This is a business arrangement, isn't it really? It was definitely a business arrangement and for the production of heirs and treaties and alliances with foreign nations. But, you know, picture this young girl goes to a foreign land, and her husband, she's usually already married by proxy, so they had two different ceremonies in two different countries, because it was seen as unseemly for a young woman of royal blood to travel without being married, you see? So they'd get married before they'd met each other?

Yes, they were already married. So the deed was done. They couldn't say, at the first, Louis XIV's brother, when he met his wife, she was already his wife, was a rather robust German princess. And he was a gay fop with exquisite taste. Oh, it's going well. And he looked at this plump woman with a scrubbed face and a very, plain dress and he said behind his fan to one of his male lovers,

Mondeur, how can I sleep with that? So, oh no, oh no. And the queen, or all royal women really, were lucky. As long as their husband could have sex with a woman, some of them could not. They imagine how hard it was for these poor men as well. Many of them were also in love with their mistresses. Some of them were syphilic.

They were so inbred, they were impotent. I mean, you know, this poor girl would a woman. there to find a whole bunch of horrors awaiting her. It's a pubescent nightmare, isn't it? This is just awful. So I'm sort of getting in the sense that a lot of this conjugal royal rights was probably not the thing that they wanted to be doing. So how did the courtiers and people surrounding them make sure that they did have sex?

Were there people in the room? Were they watching them have sex? There was a rather archaic ritual on the wedding night where the archbishop and the nobles, the ministers would, they would put the bride and groom together in the bed by a candlelight, and they would sit there and watch as the marriage was supposedly consummated, which I'm sure it wasn't really consummated. I think the bride was coaxed at a certain point to squeak and to cry out.

And then they could all agree the marriage was consummated and leave the room, you know, sprinkling holy water. and then the bride and groom could get to real business. So this poor teenage girl was told at a certain point to go, ooh, that hurts, and then they'd be like, that's it. I imagine. Oh, my, it just doesn't get, it's just not sexy, is it? That's just, it's horrific.

Wow, that is, okay, just in the middle of this, have you come across many examples in your research of royal husbands and wives who really did love each other, that it wasn't this kind of like, look, you've just got to do it. Just lie back, think of England, France, Spain, whatever it is, and just do it. George II of England and his wife, Caroline, really adored each other. Now, that didn't stop him from having mistresses.

By that point in history, you know, everyone was trying to copy France, which had the world, they had invented the idea of an official position at court named Matresenitre, the royal mistress, and they did it with great aplombes. And so it's really funny to look at the English and the Germans trying to emulate the French. And they did so very badly. I mean, they just always sounds about right. They botched everything, you know.

And so George II felt like he had to have a mistress if he was going to be seen as a virile man. And so he picked one who was one of his wife's ladies in waiting and was a very nice woman. As a matter of fact, the queen did not want him to get rid of her. At a certain point, he was bored with her. and said, you know, I'm going to get rid of her. And the queen was afraid if they got rid of this poor woman that he would get some sexy, ambitious young thing who would be unkind to the queen and start power struggles at court.

And so she convinced him to keep this poor woman on. Oh, my goodness. The position of royal mistress, pun intended, that is it wasn't just the king shagging around, was it? Like this was a job. This was an actual court role, a position. Yes, it was, depending upon the nation. It started in France with Francois I, Francis I first, in the 1520s. And then it continued. It spread to England, certainly with the court of Charles II, Nell Gwynn and all of his wonderful and colorful mistresses. And it pretty much spread across Europe. And, you know, depending upon each king, you know, these women would have a great deal of political power or perhaps. just power over the arts.

Wow. I mean, that's a hell of a job ambition, right? A careers day at school. That's the definition of, I'm going to shack my way to the top. Be the royal mistress. The reason I started researching sex with kings to begin with was because I was just interested in a time and place where a group of people are told, no, you can't do that,

you can't be that, not possible. And you had these bright, well-educated, ambitious women, and some of them wanted political party. They couldn't run for mayor of London. They couldn't attend Cambridge University. And so the only option for them was to shag the king and see what power and wealth they could amass. And the riches were just unheard of.

Many of them cashed out after a few years the king would, you know, once the women were, say, 30, 35, they were too old. And so he'd go for a 16-year-old. But he would make his retiring mistress a duchess and give her a chest of jewels and lands that were farmed and castles. And so it was very renumerative. Well played ladies. I've researched a lot of the history of commercial sex, sex for money. And one of the things that I keep coming back to is that it's one of the only careers option throughout history that has that level of social mobility.

That a woman could be born like Nell Gwynn was in abject poverty and die the mystery. of the king, his favorites, titled, I can't think of any other option that had that level of social mobility. Not that, like, it only happened to a precious few, but. Well, you know, now, Gwyn, because of her low birth, her mother ran a body house and apparently stumbled into a gutter, which has water in it, and she was so drunk she drowned. So this is poor Nell Gwyn's mother. But because of her low birth, she was not elevated to the official royal mistress. She was part of a revolving harem and Charles absolutely loved her for her sense of humor. She was pretty much illiterate, but she was so hilariously funny. One of the royal mistresses,

one of the noble ones, was very proud that she had a new carriage with eight white horses and she drove it up and down in front of Nelgwin's house to say, ha ha, the king gave me this and you didn't get one. next morning, now put on some old raggedy clothes, rented an ox cart, and drove it back and forth in front of the mistress's house, crying, whores to market, ho! Because she kept telling these women, yep, you're rich and you're noble, but you're a hor just like I am, so, you know, don't get all snooty about that. Oh, Nell, that is such a power move. The more I hear about that woman, the more I just adore her.

That's, like, she completely embraced what she was. played the absolute best hand that she could. Well, she did. And another of my favorite Nell stories was one of the royal mistresses came to Nell's house for dinner and said, oh, I'm sleeping with the king tonight. And Nell hadn't been invited. So Nell put a laxative in her dinner. And she was on the chamber pot all night.

So the king called for Nell. Oh, my God. See, she knows what she's doing. And so one of the questions that I really wanted to ask you is because I think about this a lot. So if I was to transplant you back in time and you were to open a school for aspiring royal mistresses, let's just say. What tips would you give? What makes a successful royal mistress? Because some of them absolutely nail it, like Nell Gwyn does, and some of them come an absolute cropper. There are examples of royal mistresses being poisoned, of being run out of the country, of dying in poverty.

So what, it seems like it's a really fine line that these ladies are walking. What makes for a good royal mistress? What would you tell them? What I found in my research was really a shocker. You think of royal mistresses and you think of a young, sexy, gorgeous woman. And while certainly, your looks and sex appeal would attract the king's attention, it would not hold him. The most successful royal mistresses were just jolly good company. You know, the king had the stress of the world on his shoulders.

You know, war and peace and famine and drought and a bank-orpeach. and a bankrupt treasure, all of this. And at the end of the day, he wanted to retire to some comfortable rooms with a charming woman who could make him laugh. You know, Madame de Pompadour worked with the postmaster at Versailles Palace, and they opened up all of the courtier's letters before they were sent out

and those coming in. She got to read them, and she picked the funniest gossip that the Duke of So-and-So has hemorrhoids. And so she would have these letters waiting for, him and they would roar with laughter. My school would be to teach the women just to be charming and good company. See, I'm taking notes at the moment. I hope everyone else is as well.

But absolutely, now that you've just said that, I'm now thinking back over what I've read about royal mistresses. And you see this coming up again and again is that they were good looking ish, but they were witty and funny and sharp. And that's what they had going for them. Over the long run, yes. You know, the king might find a beautiful woman. He would have the official mistress,

and sometimes he had like a second layer of three or four, you know, semi-mistresses. Like Charles II. But the ones that lasted did so because of their charm and the ease and comfort they offered the king. The funny thing about Madame de Pompadour, who's really the poster child for royal mistresses, she lasted almost 20 years until her death, is that she actually, after a few years,

she developed a chronic yeast infection. And there was no medication at the time to, you know, today you pop a couple of pills. Woo, it's gone. But, you know, sex was very painful for her. And so she kept her official position, the palaces in Versailles, her income, her servants, by arranging for young, very young, like 13, 14, 15 years old. These days the king would be put in jail. But he had a taste for that.

and she made sure that they were uneducated, that they could barely read and write, and they were from a very bad background. So he would have a fling with them and then they'd be gone, that they would be no threat to her position. Wow. Because I suppose it's quite a precarious position, really, isn't it, mistress? Because you can be dismissed. It's not like the wife. You can be dismissed at any moment. And you have dozens, if not hundreds of women vying every day.

to have you dismissed. And there were, you know, all kinds of rumors spread around that, oh, the mistress has a venereal disease. Or, you know, there were various groups that, you know, for political reasons or religious reasons, wanted to get rid of her. I think it was a horrible job. You know, if it had been me, I would be mistress for two or three years, get my castle and my sack of jewels and just, you know, head to hell out of there. I think it killed Madame de Pompadour. You know, she had a series of miscarriages. the king was very selfish and would never let her recuperate,

whether she was feverish, bleeding, whatever. She had to put on her diamond earrings, a smile on her face, her court gown, and have dinner with him and amuse him. And she never threw in the towel and said, okay, I'm done. Why don't we let one of these younger women do this?

It's not really all that fun anyway. So she died at 43. You know, I think she was just exhausted. She never took care of her health. Oh, when you say it like that, I'm kind of coming around to thinking the Queen's had the easy job. No, the Queen's had a lousy job too. I mean, the problem with being the Queen is that you could not retire to your estate in the country.

Oh, that's a good point. You're stuck there, and the Queen was, you know, maybe there was a certain amount of respect, but that's not where the power was. So all of the important people were, you know, paying court to the King and his mistress and not to you. And if the King wanted to put you in a drafty tower of the past, you'd have to go there. I mean the one thing I like about the royal mistress is that they did have the freedom to come and go if they wanted. Wow. Eleanor and I will be back to talk more royal sex after this.

Was there any equivalent for queens? Did queens, I mean they must have done, they must have had lovers. It was never an official, you know, the royal jigolo to the queen. But is there evidence of that? Were they just better at being secretive about it? I don't know if they were better. don't know if they were better. I wrote sex with the queen, hoping that I might find eight or ten queens who had love affairs. And what I found was there were dozens. But, you know, because of queen's reputation, a woman's reputation was based on her chastity and her loyalty to her husband. This was never trumpeted the way it was with kings. To be virile, they had to have

mistresses. So it was kept more quiet. In many cases, if she had given the king a couple of heirs, he didn't mind particularly if she had lovers because, you know, he had his lovers, and if it kept her happy, who cares? You know, there were a couple of gay kings. When was a king of Sweden in the 1790s, he could not bear the thought of touching a woman. So after eight years of marriage, she's still virgin, and the country was growing restless because they needed an air that he actually insisted that she had an affair. And so she had two little boys, and he's like, woo, I'm a father. and everyone was happy. Now, there was only one court where there was the position of the official jigolo. Oh, hello, right. Okay. And that was Catherine the Great. Of course.

Of course it was Mama Catherine. Tell me about Catherine the Great and her jigalos. Well, Catherine was an impoverished German prince. I mean, she wasn't even Russian, and she went there at about 15 to marry the crazy, syphilitic heir to the Russian throne. Sexy. who at a certain point when he became czar was going to kill her. He had this horrible hatred of her.

And so she ended up having him killed and seizing power herself, even though she's not even Russian. But she was so brilliant. And she was a widow. So she would have a lover for five, six, seven years. And then for whatever reason, he would either die or he would get married. And she was very generous. She'd give, you know, huge estates as a wedding gift.

And then she would choose another one. Now, the lovers kept staying about the same age, say, $25. 30 and she kept getting older. It's Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes. By the end, you know, it looked like they were really quite a strange couple, but she refused to be a hypocrite, you know, and to pretend that she was this chaste woman. And she said that the men are doing it.

I mean, who cares, you know? And she never allowed off-colored jokes, you know, at court or at table, you know, but she had a lover at night. And the men were so horrified, first of all, that a female woman, ruler was so incredibly successful. And secondly, I think they were afraid their wives would all take after her and start, you know, having their own lover. So they invented the horse story. Yeah, do you want to explain a little bit about that just for anyone who's unfamiliar with the horse story? I think most people probably know it. I mean, unfortunately, they've so sullied her reputation that

when anyone these days hears the name Catherine the Great, they immediately say, oh, the horse story. So the story was that she was so lewd and a nymphomaniac that she would have sex with horses and that one day when she was, what, 67, her servants were cantilevering a horse down on top of her to penetrate her when the ropes broke and the horse fell on her and crushed her, which was just a disgusting, wildly inaccurate story. She died of a stroke. the woman doesn't need to be having sex with horses. She can afford to kick that up a notch, can't you?

She can afford a harrow. She can certainly afford a better suspension system for a horse than the one that's been alleged. Now, that's a good point I hadn't thought of. What's really interesting about Kat, there's so many things that are interesting about Kath and the Great, but you get this reoccurring that when you have a female in a position of power, a queen, there are attacks on her sexuality to make her appear loosened, slutty and debauched and perverted and you see it with Cleopatra and Catherine the Great and

Anne Boleyn of course yes Anne Boleyn in particular you know she was beheaded for allegedly having sex with five men including her own brother though of course she she never did however she was inconvenient politically you know because of her the religion was reformed they left the Catholic Church and she also wanted to change alliances from Spain to France and you know so there were a lot of people at court very much against her. And so when her husband, Henry the 8th, his eye started wandering, you know, a plot was created to take off her head. And he didn't even question that he's like, oh, good, and he was on to the next wife. I read somewhere that he sent for the executioner from France before she'd even had her trial. Oh, yes, yes, it was a foregone

conclusion that she was going to be executed. And so Anne did not fit the bill of, of your typical queen who sat there and embroidered and prayed. I mean, she had broken up a royal marriage. It's also interesting to look at her daughter, who was, in fact, the crowned monarch, not the consort. And Elizabeth I never married. And of course, particularly the English enemies in Spain, Philip II, spread rumors that she was a very loose woman,

and she had illegitimate children and all of these lovers, and she did love to flirt. She often said she couldn't understand how her reputation was so tarnished. She always had 13, 15 women with her day and night. She said, you know, I live on a stage. I'm never alone. I cannot understand how people have so bad an opinion about me. She advertised herself as the Virgin Queen, didn't she?

Which is a fabulous PR move. Do you think that she was or do you think that she had secret lovers? You know, I think she might have been. And the only lover who I think they may have had a physical relationship was Robert Dudley early on. The first couple of years, he was married, and then his wife was found at the bottom of her stairs with a broken neck, and they thought the queen had done it. So at that point, she couldn't marry him. But soon after that, she developed smallpox, and it really looked like she was dying. And so, you know, on her deathbed, she swore that she had never been his lover.

And back then a deathbed confession is pretty much like a modern lie detector test because you're convinced you're going to see God soon and all of your lies are going to weigh against you and maybe send you to hell. So that one piece I thought was interesting. But after him, I don't think she had any lovers. And that just might have been a smart move. It just, it seems like they're an awful lot of trouble, right? Well, they are trouble.

And I think her smartest move was not to marry. Yeah, definitely. You know, when she first became queen, her counselors, didn't want her to see. sit in the meetings or meet with the ambassadors. They said, you just wait till you get a husband and then, you know, he'll work with us. And she said, oh, hell no. You know, like I'm in charge of this country, not you. Oh, well done, Lizzie. I've got such respect for that. I really do. But just while we're sort of on the subject of royal diseases, talk to me a bit about sort of the history, because one of the things that I keep thinking about is that if you're supposed to have sex with the king, you're supposed to

make babies, there's no protected sex, even rudimentary condoms at the time. So venereal disease must have been a real issue. I mean, was that something that's recorded in the archives? Oh, yes, it is. Charles II, you know, he always had so many women of all levels in society, let's say, and he gave venereal disease to his mistress, Louise de Carrol, and she made him pay her two enormously expensive necklaces, one of pearls and one of diamonds, to reimburse her for the venereal disease.

disease. Wow. You know, somehow she got over it. I mean, I guess there are times where it just goes into remission and she lived to be in her 80s. However, Nell Gwynn also got it. And, you know, she had a stroke at 37, I mean, which could be a result. You know, why would you have a stroke at 37? She was a slender little thing. Was it syphilis? The king was spreading around. Yeah, I'm not sure. You know, they didn't have the test back then. So it was either syphilis or gonorrhea or something. But it could have killed Nellgren, so yes, it was rampant. Wow. And what about other records? Like, I'm thinking of Queen Victoria's son who's known as Dirty Bertie? Oh, yes, but by then they had condoms, you see, by the late 1800s. As a matter of fact, the first condom manufacturer in

the UK had the picture of the Prince of Wales on the box. No, oh, that's, I assume that that was an actual royal patronage. I don't know, but it's hilariously funny and very appropriate when you think about it. I mean, he put it about, didn't he? He was, if it stayed still long enough, he would have a go at it. Well, he would. And, you know, when you look at these royal families, it's just so sad. I mean, because I think most people really tried their best and meant well, but Queen Victoria would not give her son anything to do. Why wouldn't she have him in on her council meetings, why wouldn't she educate him about how to run the country? I mean, she could have died at any moment. Back then, you just never knew, right? And so he just became a,

you know, a waste role. And I think with, you know, different parentage, he could have been effective man in his earlier years. Wow. Something, because I'm always wary about judging the past through our own modern lens, but it's interesting to look back at the behavior of very, very powerful people and think, how would they have fared today in the Me Too movement? Not well, I don't think, quite a lot of them. No, absolutely not. At this day and age, we still need a Me Too movement, hundreds of years after all of this, right?

One thing I've always been interested in doing when researching history is looking at the deathbeds because we all have one. Yep. Like Louis XIV, who, you know, for his ideas of grandeur, and he lived to be, was he 77, really, old for the time. He said he wished he had spent his life more wisely and he had created all those unnecessary wars in Europe, you know, for his ideas of personal grandeur. And so it got me to thinking

about my own deathbed. You know, it's something I would advise everyone. A picture you're 87 years old and you know you don't have more than a few days or hours. I mean, looking back on your life, what would you wish that you had done differently? And so that actually has led me into different paths than I otherwise would have taken. That's really interesting, and I'm definitely going to do that now. So of the kind of the deathbed testimony, the records that you found, which ones were you sort of most surprised by,

or which ones stood out for you? You know, there was a royal mistress named Agnes Sorrell. She was the mistress of Charles I seventh of France, and most people know him as the king that Joan of Arc helped. And she was only about 28. Two books ago, The Royal Art of Poison, researchers actually found out she had been poisoned with mercury by her enemies at court.

But, you know, she had all of this power and all of this wealth, and she's lying there in the bed. She's just, you know, soiling herself. And she says, it is a little thing and soiled and smelling of frailty. and she died. Those were her last words. And I think she was talking about, you know, her physical body and this material life. And that one really, really got me. Agnes Sorrell, they excavated her body, didn't they? And they've reconstructed her face from her school. And she's so beautiful. Like, the really striking face. And they found that she was eaten up by worms in her intestines. That's less sexy. Yes. Well, I think so many people,

had worms back then. A few years ago, French archaeologists were digging up the old latrine pits in the Louvre Palace. So between the 1300s and the, I guess, 16, 1700s, you know, they're looking down there and there are remains of worms, I mean, in every, in every soil layer. And the horrible thing about worms is that sometimes they would come out of your mouth. Oh, I didn't know that. Yes. Okay. But I guess, it was pretty standard at court. So she had worms. They found evidence of worms in her, the urn.

And the thing is that they would treat worms with something called fernwood. I guess it's a plant and a teeny tiny bit of mercury, which, you know, mercury would poison, you know, small organisms. And sometimes it was effective. Sometimes it worked for syphilis, say. But they found like 150,000 times the amount of mercury that she should have had. which is why they knew that she had been poisoned. Worms and Mercury, that is a sorry end, one of the most powerful women in Europe at the time, isn't it?

This is why I would, you know, having written the royal art of poison, I would never want to go back in time, not even to a ball at Versailles. Because I come back with worms, smallpox, head lice. I mean, it's just not going to be worse. It's so, whenever you're watching historical dramas and you're watching them, like the character,

have sex or you seduce one another and you just I'm sitting there thinking but they would have stunk people were conscious of how they smelled and they wanted to be clean but the standards and what they had available to them were vastly different and the diseases were rife like you said like where are the nits where's the the terrible breath where's the body hair that you never seem to see on recreations well walking through um one of the royal palaces today like versa or windsor or whatever. You see the beauty, but you don't smell the stench, right? And every room had overflowing chamber pots in it. And worse than that, it's certain courts, the courtiers would just drop their pants and do their business on the floor or on the stairwell or in the hearth and then expect the servants

to clean it up. And a lot of times the servants were like, oh, I'm not cleaning that up. And so it would just stay there and people would have to walk around, you know, in the corridors of the palaces. I found, records in England and France from the 17th and 18th century of people describing just the filth when Catherine of Braganza who was the the queen of Charles II came over from Portugal in the 1660s you know she was this very young naive girl raised in a convent one of the reports back to Portugal said that that Catherine and her ladies were shocked they couldn't turn a corner without seeing great English pricks battering against every wall. Oh, no.

Oh, that's, I mean, it's just like the more you talk about it, the more horrendous it sounds is that royal sex isn't like, you know, you see in the TV and the movies, it's smelly and it's gross and it's perfunctory and punctual and organized and all of these things. I mean, did the king and queen sleep in separate beds? Did they always sleep in the same bed? Oh, each one had their own apartment. So each would have a sweeter room. Sometimes, like in Tudor times, they were often one above the other.

So the queen might have the ground floor, and then the king would be above her, and then there might be a staircase in between. Sometimes in other palaces, they were different wings. But they were sort of matching where you'd have a bedroom and like an audience, chamber and a parlor. Yeah. And then they would agree on a certain night to come together. Oh, that's how it worked. Okay. So there wasn't like, like you sent a memo or you sent a messenger from one end of the palace to the other. This was an organized sex night. We're having sex now. That's, that's what that worked. It would be organized. But I suppose it had to be, right?

But is it kind of a myth that there were lots of people in the room at the same time? I mean, I know you said that there was the initiation ceremony, but there's, there was so many servants that would have stood around. Would they have vacated the royal chamber? Yeah, I think you needed time to organize it because the king and queen might have had 10 or 12 people that would spend the night in the room on on pallets. If it was cold, the queen might have a lady in waiting in the bed to keep her warm. And the king, you know, as well would have his servant. So all of these people had to organize where they were going to be that night. And I imagine that there would have been guards posted at each door. And perhaps the king would, I don't know,

ring a bell or call out that you know you can come in now so that they would have someone you know if the king and queen were going to sleep like really sleep in the bed that there would be someone at the foot of the bed a guard but probably after the sex it sounds less and less sexy the more I talk to you about this but just to kind of finish up what I'd love to know is what's your favorite royal love story and who from your research did you just come away thinking, you absolute scumbag, because it's so wide-ranging your research, everything from Holland and Spain, it's just fantastic. You've covered so many stories. Who stood out? Who are the heroes and the villains? Oh, gosh, there are so many. You know, I think my favorite royal mistress

was Madame de Pompadour because, yes, she was ambitious, and there's nothing wrong with a woman being ambitious. You know, it's fine for men, but somehow not fine for women. And she was very bright. But above all, she was kind. You know, the king had had a variety of mistresses by the time he latched onto her, four sisters from the same family, if you can believe it. And, you know, they had not been kind to the queen. That's a Christmas, isn't it? Wow, okay.

These other women had been very unkind to the queen who was several years older than the king, and she was this plump Polish princess and not very charming or smart, and she was just heard. and Madame de Pompadour was so kind to her and had her rooms redecorated and all of this religious art that the queen liked and always showed her the greatest respect. I really like the kindness story.

Now I'm trying to think of the worst ones. Oh, I know a good one. Bianca Capello was the mistress of Grand Duke, Francesco of Tuscany in the 1500s, and he was married, to an Austrian archduchess that he never cared for. And so the two of them had an affair, and the archduchess wasn't that healthy. Every time she sneezed, I think Bianca's hopes soared

because she got the Archduke to say he was going to marry her, you know, if she had a son when his wife died, you know, hopefully that would be sooner rather than later. So Bianca had had a child when she was about 16, and she could never have another one. So now she's in her 30s. So she hires three healthy peasant women who are pregnant around the same date, thinking that one of them will surely be a boy.

And one of them is. And then she pretend she's pregnant, but she doesn't let anyone touch her because she's, you know, very sensitive to that. And her main servant smuggles the baby in in a basket while she's screaming and in labor and has sent the doctor away. And then she lets them all in and, oh, here's the baby. And so she... Oh my God.

That is that commitment to that particular role. The Grand Duke accepted it. And, you know, the story got out. The maid servant talked and then later she was murdered. It was a real problem because the Grand Duke's brother was a cardinal. And it looks like he poisoned both of them because he was afraid that this little boy was not related to the archducle family at all would inherit the throne. So he poisoned his. brother and his sister-in-law, and then he made this poor kid a knight of Malta who was sworn

to vows of chastity. He could not contract a legal marriage. So that's how he solved that. But I thought that was really quite a strategy, you know, to get yourself into the palace as the Grand Duchess. Oh my, I mean, that is some epic planning or a lie that got wildly out of hand, isn't it? Yeah. And that makes me wonder, has that ever been successfully done before? We just don't know. Well, I think it's clear that some queens have had progeny that were not the kings. Oh. I think it's clear, yeah. I mean, there's so much at stake.

I can understand the desperation there that you've got to have a baby if you're going to keep this position and this role and this money, basically. And, you know, before DNA testing, no one could really be sure. How did you? Right? Absolutely. Just, you know, keep the child in the shade quite a lot and just keep having people repeating.

Absolutely. It looks absolutely the spit of you. Oh, it's been so, so lovely to talk to you. And I honestly, please go and read Elder's books because they are just absolutely wonderful and fantastic. And thank you so much for taking us betwixt the royal sheets. Thank you, Kate. I really enjoyed it. I hope you've enjoyed a stroll for the Royal Bedroom.

Thank you so much to Eleanor Herman for joining me today. If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. In the next few weeks, we've got episode. on vasectomies, corsets and a whole lot more. Head to our channel to check out some previous episodes on shoes, Tudor sex and all kinds of historical smut. This episode was produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie G.

Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.