Free Sex with the Queen by Eleanor Herman

in the country.
    One day in the 1620s a young Roman named Giulio Mazarini—the future Cardinal Mazarin of France—was losing money at cards and cried out, “Oh, what an ass is man without money!”12
    But when in 1643 he became the lover of the widowed queen regent Anne, mother of the young Louis XIV, Mazarin was never again an ass, at least in financial terms. He possessed a li-brary of forty thousand books—the king himself had only ten thousand. The cardinal had the finest horses in his stables and rare breeds of dogs in his kennels. His palace in Paris had a grand double staircase, three huge entrances, several inner courtyards, a beautiful garden, and the best collection of art in France. With exquisite taste, he had brought the color, warmth, and elegance of Rome to the chill of Paris. He sent to the Vati-can for artists to make frescoes and imported the finest carriages from Italy. His furniture was made of lapis lazuli, mother of pearl, gold, silver, ebony, and tortoiseshell. His statues were of alabaster, his bed of ivory. He wore only the finest linen, the most costly perfumes.
    By applying clever cost-cutting measures, by 1648 he had saved the government of France the eye-popping sum of forty-two million livres, but reportedly rewarded himself with half that amount. In addition, he received 60,000 livres for taking charge of the king’s education, 20,000 for the post of minister, 6,000 for being a council member, 18,000 as a cardinal, and 110,000 as a pension from the queen. He owned twenty-one abbeys, which were worth 468,330 livres. On his deathbed in t h e q u e e n t a k e s a l o v e r 4 9

    1661, the cardinal, looking about his magnificent possessions, cried, “I must leave all this! I’ll never see these things again!”13
    He didn’t seem to object to never seeing the queen again, how-ever.
    The widowed Catherine the Great was the most generous monarch to her lovers. Over a period of thirty-four years she doled out the equivalent of more than two billion dollars in cash, pensions, palaces, works of art, fine furnishings, and serfs. In the early 1790s, an English visitor to St. Petersburg—known as the Venice of the north because of its interconnecting waterways—reported, “A party was considering which of the canals had cost the most money; when one of them archly ob-served there was not a doubt about the matter; Catherine’s Canal (this is the name of one of them) had unquestionably been the most expensive.”14
    G o v e r n m e n t a n d M i l i t a r y P o s i t i o n s Unlike the royal mistress who, even if she wielded significant po-litical power behind the scenes, had no official political title, certain royal lovers were made prime minister, some of them with excellent results. For thirty years starting in 1777 the British naval officer Sir John Acton ran Naples efficiently for his mis-tress, Queen Maria Carolina. During World War I one of Eu-rope’s most capable politicians was Barbo Stirbey, lover of Queen Marie of Romania. Her husband, the weak and vacillat-ing King Ferdinand, relied on Stirbey to steer his nation through the turmoil of war and into a golden age in the 1920s.
    When Ferdinand died in 1927, Stirbey ruled Romania as prime minister for Marie’s young grandson, King Michael.
    But not all royal lovers were suited for the position of prime minister. With the acquiescence of her mentally deranged hus-band, King Christian VII of Denmark, in 1771 Queen Caroline Matilda made her lover, Johann von Struensee, prime minister.
    Though possessed of great social vision, Struensee made so many new laws so quickly that Denmark erupted in rebellion and con-spiracy.
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    In 1792 Queen Maria Luisa of Spain made twenty-five-year-old Manuel Godoy prime minister. The queen’s lover had much to learn—upon taking up his duties he thought Russia and Prus-sia were the same country. When the saber-rattling Napoleon insisted on Spain’s support against Britain,