Category Archives: Royalty

1498: French king dies in squalor after bumping head

Charles VIII (1470-1498) was a French king of the late 15th century. The eldest son of the conniving, reclusive and unpopular Louis XI, 13-year-old Charles became king in August 1483.

Contemporary chroniclers described the young prince as pleasant and likeable (he was later dubbed “Charles the Affable”). But a few more critical writers suggested he was too flighty, impatient and ambitious to make a wise monarch. Charles was also physically ungainly, an attribute that may have contributed to his death. According to the court official and chronicler Philippe de Commines,

Charles died in his 28th year – after bumping his head while rushing to watch a game of tennis:

“On April 7th, being the eve of Palm Sunday, [he] took his queen by the hand and led her out of the chamber to a place where she had never been before, to see others play at jeu de paume [real tennis] in the castle ditch. They entered into the Haquelebac Gallery… known as the nastiest corner of the castle, crumbling at its entrance, and everyone did piss there that would. The king, though not a tall man, knocked his head [on the door frame] as he entered.”

After spending some time watching the tennis and chatting to courtiers, Charles apparently collapsed. According to Commines, the king was attended by physicians who insisted he not be moved. Instead, the ailing monarch was laid on a makeshift bed made of timber slats, where he spent his final hours of life:

“It was around two [PM] when he collapsed and he lay motionless until eleven at night… The king was laid upon a crude bed and he never left it until he died, which was nine hours later… Thus died that great and powerful monarch, in a sordid and filthy place.”

Charles VIII died without issue, having lost three infant sons and a daughter to illness in the previous four years. The French throne passed to his cousin, Louis of Orleans, who became Louis XII and ruled for 17 years. As was customary for the time, the new king also married Charles’ 21-year-old widow, Anne of Brittany.

Source: The Memoirs of Philip de Commines, Lord of Argenton, vol. 2, 1497-1501. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1835: Madman tries to kill the French king – with 20 guns at once

assassination — The messy aftermath of the “infernal machine”

In July 1835, assassins targeted the French king, Louis-Philippe, as he reviewed troops in Paris. News of the attempt on the king’s life was conveyed by telegram to the French ambassador:

“An atrocious act was attempted this morning during the review [of troops]. The King of the French was not touched, although his horse was killed. None of the Princes were wounded. The Duke of Treviso was killed. Several guards, aides-de-camp and National Guardsmen were killed or wounded. The deed was committed by means of an infernal machine placed behind a window… Paris is quiet and indignant.”

The leader of this bizarre assassination attempt was Giuseppe Marco Fieschi. A former soldier and serial thief, Fieschi served several years’ hard labour in his native Corsica before escaping to Paris.

Once in the capital, Fieschi took up with political radicals and began to plot the king’s murder. But unlike John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, Fieschi and his accomplices left nothing to chance. They designed and constructed their “infernal machine”: a battery of 20 muskets attached to a wooden frame, all rigged to fire simultaneously.

The machine was aimed at the royal party from an elevated window overlooking the Boulevard du Temple. The firing of the “infernal machine” proved devastating: it killed 18 soldiers, including a marshal and former prime minister. Louis-Philippe and other royals were not seriously injured, however, one shot grazed the king’s temple and another struck his horse.

The backfiring from the “infernal machine” also took its toll on Fieschi, who was hit in the head with shrapnel and badly burned. He was quickly captured and given medical attention, then put on trial for attempted regicide. Fieschi and two of his accomplices were guillotined in February 1836.

Source: Telegram to the French ambassador in London, July 28th 1835. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1188: Irish kings are crowned in a bath of horse soup

Gerallt Gyrmo, or Gerald of Wales, was a prominent clergyman, theologian and diarist of the late 12th and early 13th centuries. Educated in England and France, Gerald became chaplain to Henry II in the mid-1180s. He also accompanied the future King John, then a teenager, on a tour of Ireland.

In his 1188 manuscript Topographica Hibernica, Gerald wrote at length about his experiences on the Emerald Isle. In keeping with English sentiments of the time, his views of Ireland and its people were almost wholly negative. He described the Irish as a race of “rude people… living like beasts”, “given to treachery more than any other nation”, “frightfully ugly”, “adulterous and incestuous” and “foully corrupted by perverse habits”.

Their only civilised talent, Gerald writes, is:

“..playing upon musical instruments, in which they are incomparably more skilful than any other nation I have ever seen… In their musical concerts they do not sing in unison like the inhabitants of other countries but in many different parts… who all at length unite with organic melody.”

One of the more fanciful accounts in Gerald’s work, not witnessed by him but recounted as fact, was a ceremony for crowning Irish kings:

“The whole people are gathered in one place, a white mare is led into the midst of them… he who is to be inaugurated… comes before the people on all fours… The mare being immediately killed and cut in pieces and boiled, a bath is prepared for [the king] from the broth. Sitting in this, he eats of the flesh which is brought to him, the people partaking of it also. He is also required to drink of the broth in which he is bathed, not drawing it in any vessel but lapping it with his mouth. These unrighteous rites being duly accomplished, his royal authority and dominion are ratified.”

Source: Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), Topographica Hibernica, 1188. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1648: Charles I organises lavatory sexual liaison

In late 1647, King Charles I was detained in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. For more than a year the deposed king attempted to recover his throne – first by organising a counter-revolution, then by negotiating with parliament.

Charles also found time to initiate a sexual affair with Jane Whorwood, the stepdaughter of a prominent Scottish royalist. Whorwood was a married 36-year-old with bright red hair; according to contemporary accounts her face was scarred by smallpox but she was otherwise “well fashioned”.

From April 1648, the king and his mistress exchanged dozens of coded messages. According to letters deciphered by the historian Sarah Poynting, Charles told Jane Whorwood:

“There is one way possible that you may get a swiving [shagging] from me… you must excuse my plain expressions… you may be conveyed into the stool-room [lavatory] which is within my bedchamber while I am at dinner; by which means I shall have five hours to embrace and nip you.”

Source: Cited in Sarah Poynting, ‘Deciphering the King: Charles I’s Letters to Jane Whorwood’, Seventeenth Century, vol.21, 2006. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1876: Tsar’s mistress misses his “fountain” and its “injections”

Yekaterina ‘Katia’ Dolgorukova became the mistress of Tsar Alexander II in 1866, after the Russian emperor paid a series of visits to her finishing school. Alexander was 47, Katia was just 18. Four years later, the tsar installed Katia in apartments close to the Winter Palace. She used a secret passageway to enter Alexander’s quarters for passionate and sometimes torrid bouts of “bingerle” (their code word for sex). Alexander sometimes sketched Katia in the nude after which, according to his letters, they “clenched each other like hungry cats”.

The pair paused their affair in 1876 after the premature death of their third illegitimate child. Alexander’s doctors were also concerned that the tsar’s active sex life was having a detrimental impact on his health. During this period of abstinence, Alexander and Katia exchanged a series of emotionally charged and sometimes erotic letters, the latter writing:

“I feel so heavy but I am not grumbling because it is my fault. And I confess that I cannot be without your fountain, which I love so… After my six weeks are over, I count on renewing my injections.”

Alexander and Katia married morganatically in July 1880 following the death of his wife, Marie of Hesse. Nine months later Alexander II was assassinated in St Petersburg, his legs blown off by a bomb hurled by anarchists. Katia and their three children watched the late tsar’s funeral from an alcove; they were not permitted onto the floor of the church.

Source: Letter dated November 30th 1876, cited in Alexandre Tarsaize, Katia: Wife before God, 1970. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1478: Waiting crowd shown the newborn prince and his testicles

Philip, the future king of Castile, was born on June 22nd 1478. The following day Margaret of York, the child’s godmother, carried baby Philip into the market square in Bruges, where a large crowd had gathered. According to a Flemish chronicler Margaret proudly stripped the baby and showed him to the crowd:

“…She took his testicles in her hands and spoke: ‘Children, see here your newborn lord Philip, from the emperor’s side’. The crowd, seeing that it was a son, was overwhelmingly happy, thanking and praising our beloved God that he had granted them a young prince.”

Margaret’s display was a response to rumours, circulated by agents of French king Louis XI, that baby Philip was actually a girl. Philip became King of Castile shortly before his 28th birthday but died suddenly just three months later. His obsessive and unstable wife Joanna, who at the time of Philip’s death was pregnant with their sixth child, became even more erratic. She refused to surrender Philip’s body for burial, keeping it in her apartments for several months. According to some chroniclers, she sometimes opened Philip’s casket to kiss and stroke his corpse.

Source: Cited in W. Appe Alberts, Dit sijn die wonderlijke oorloghen van den doorluchtigen hoochgheboren prince, &tc., 1978. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1741: Teenage princess has “monstrous flummey bubbies”

Just after his election to parliament in 1741, English writer Horace Walpole penned a letter to Lord Lincoln in which he commented on the development of Louisa, the 16-year-old daughter of George II. Walpole declares quite matter-of-factly that the princess’ large breasts might prove a temptation for the widowed king:

“Princess Louisa is grown so fat and, like the [late] queen, has such a monstrous pair of flummey bubbies that I really think it indecent for her to live with her father…”

Princess Louisa and her “flummey bubbies” married Prince Frederick of Denmark two years after Walpole’s letter. Their eight-year marriage yielded six pregnancies, the last of which killed her.

Source: Letter from Horace Walpole to Lord Lincoln, October 1st 1741. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1505: King seeks report on potential wife’s breasts

In 1505, the 46-year-old Henry VII, after spending two years as a widower, began to consider remarriage. One potential wife suggested by Henry’s courtiers was Joanna of Naples, 25, whose own husband had died a few weeks into their marriage.

Curious about the young Italian, Henry sent two envoys to Naples with orders to procure “a portrait of the young queen”. They were also issued with a 24-point list of “instructions for taking a survey of her person”, which required information about Joanna’s face, figure, complexion, personality, eating habits and financial position. Some of Henry’s specifics are quoted below, along with the written comments of his envoys:

[Henry] “…Mark the favour of her visage, whether she be painted or no, whether she be fat or lean, sharp or round…”

[Envoys] “As far as we can perceive or know she is not painted, and the favour of her visage is after her stature – of very good compass and amiable, and somewhat round and fat…”

[Henry] “Mark whether her neck be long or short.”

[Envoys] Her neck is comely, not misshapen, nor very short nor very long, but her neck seemeth to be shorter because her breasts be full and somewhat big…”

[Henry] “Mark her breasts, whether they be big or small.”

[Envoys] “They be somewhat great and full… they were trussed somewhat high, after the manner of the country, it caused them to seem much fuller…”

[Henry] “Mark whether any hair appear upon her lip.”

[Envoys] “She hath none.”

Henry was impressed enough with the report but the union did not proceed, most likely due to political considerations. Henry VII died in 1509 without remarrying.

Source: Document cited in Henry Bacon, The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry The Seventh, 1622. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

c.1648: The British king ever fiddling about his crotch

The Court and Character of King James I was probably written by an unknown author in the 1640s. It appeared in print toward the end of that decade.

Though presenting as an objective history of James’ reign, it is little more than an instrument of political assassination, attacking the king’s appearance, health, masculinity and judgement. It implies homosexual tendencies, claiming that the former king liked to surround himself “with young faces and smooth chins”. It suggests that James was physically feeble, if not deformed.

It also says of his physical appearance and mannerisms:

“His tongue too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak full in the mouth and made him drink very uncomely, as if eating his drink… His skin was as soft as taffeta sarsnet, which felt so because he never washed his hands… His legs were very weak, having had (as was though) some foul play in his youth, or rather because he was born, that he was not able to stand at seven years of age, that weakness made him ever leaning on other men’s shoulders… His walk was ever circular [and] his fingers, in that walk, fiddling about his codpiece.”

Authorship of The Court and Character of King James I has been attributed to Sir Anthony Weldon, an English courtier who disliked the Scottish generally and the Stuart dynasty specifically. Several modern historians are sceptical of Weldon’s involvement, however.

Source: Anthony Weldon (attrib.), The Court and Character of King James I, c.1684. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.