Free Sex with the Queen by Eleanor Herman Page A

and Britain urged Spain to fight Napoleon, poor Godoy was at a loss. For years he struggled to maintain an uneasy neutrality. But, as the late-seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, “To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the mid-dle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.”15 Drenched and smoked out, Godoy and the Spanish royal family spent several years in genteel imprisonment in France after Napoleon conquered Spain and put his brother Joseph on the throne.
    More dangerous even than giving their lovers top political of-fices, many queens bestowed on them the highest military positions—the rank of general or field marshal—and expected them with little or no battlefield experience to lead men to war.
    It was a perilous custom to appoint to such a crucial position a man whose most impressive qualifications were below the waist and not above the shoulders.
    When Empress Sophie of Russia fielded an army in 1687, she appointed her lover Prince Basil Golitzin the commanding gen-eral. In vain he protested that he was a diplomat and politician, not a soldier; she refused to listen. When he returned from a disastrous campaign against the Tatars, she welcomed him back to victory paeans, though some forty thousand men had been lost to fire, suffocation, or flight, and not a single battle had been fought. Undeterred, the empress sent him to war two years later in Crimea, where Golitzin lost thirty-five thousand men.
    In the 1790s Manuel Godoy was proclaimed admiral general of Spain and the Indies. He strutted impressively in his naval uniform and bicorn hat with plumes; but Godoy hated boats and open water, and whenever he went onboard to inspect a ship, he tried to quell rising nausea.
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    H o n o r a r y M e d a l s
    If a king gave his mistress an obscenely expensive diamond neck-lace, all other women at court would turn pea green with envy.
    Naturally, such a gift was not suitable for a man; the queen’s lover wanted honorary orders for distinguished service, medals edged with dazzling diamonds and colorful fluttering ribbons.
    Many of these men had never fought a battle in their lives, but still eagerly sought decorations for martial valor. Their goal was to stride through palace corridors with an entire galaxy of shim-mering stars and clanking medals on their chests.
    Catherine the Great’s lover Gregory Potemkin was made a knight of the Order of St. Andrew, Russia’s highest order. He was given the Black Eagle by Prussia and the White Eagle by Poland. Denmark bestowed upon him the Order of the Ele-phant, and Sweden the St. Seraph. Joseph II of Austria made him a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Louis XV balked at giving the empress’s lover the Order of the Holy Ghost, claiming it was only for Roman Catholics, and the prudish George III flat out refused to give him the Order of the Garter. But Potemkin’s battlefield courage and political acumen made him a worthy re-cipient of such honors.
    Many noble dinner guests of Caroline, Princess of Wales, protested at sitting down at the same table with her lover Bar-tolomeo Pergami, a man of humble birth. No European mon-archs wanted to bestow upon him their elite orders. In 1816 the princess took ship to Malta, where she arranged for her lover to become a knight of Malta. Then she traveled to Jerusalem, where she founded a new knighthood called the Order of Saint Caro-line, and appointed Pergami the master of the order. In Sicily she bought Pergami the small estate of Franchini, which ren-dered him a baron. The new baron Pergami della Franchini, knight of the Order of Malta, master of the Order of St. Caro-line, was now sufficiently exalted under British rules of etiquette to sit down at Caroline’s table, though guests still grumbled about his low birth.
    In the late 1830s Queen Victoria’s mother, Victoire, the s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n
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    duchess of