Free Sex with the Queen by Eleanor Herman Page B

Kent, wanted to reward her lover John Conroy. But Queen Victoria, who despised her mother’s lover, firmly blocked the path in Britain to any honors. The resourceful Vic-toire, a German princess, twisted a few arms and arranged for German principalities to give him decorations and medals. The duchess arranged for him to be called “excellency”—but only in Germany, which galled him.
    The duchess further obtained an award for Conroy from Por-tugal, which included the signal honor that wherever he walked, guards preceding him would drum in his honor. But Conroy never made it to Portugal, even though he tried to organize sev-eral trips over the years—just to hear the drums.
    t h e q u e e n t a k e s a l o v e r 5 3

    T H R E E
    m e d i e v a l q u e e n s ,
    t u d o r v i c t i m s
    Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
    — w i l l i a m s h a k e s p e a r e
    I
    H u m a n na t u r e b e i n g w h a t i t i s , w e c a n a s s u m e t h a t back in the cave the mate of the powerful chief—the man who wielded a big stick to bring home mammoth meat—looked with lust upon a muscular young hunter and wondered about the size of his stick. Alas, records of Ice Age love affairs simply don’t exist.
    Nor are there many records that attest to medieval queens taking lovers. Expected to reflect the virtues of the Virgin Mary, most queens probably never considered adultery as an option, no matter how horrible their husbands were. And yet, having ex-amined the emptiness of palace life and the sorrows of the mari-tal bed, well can we understand why a queen would have been unfaithful. Looking at the earliest stories of adulterous queens, 5 5

    we are unsure whether to condemn their weakness or applaud their courage.
    In 1109 King Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon forced his wid-owed daughter and heir, Princess Urraca, to marry Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragon. Feeling his end drawing near, Alfonso VI wanted his daughter to have the protection of a fierce warrior husband at her side. He died soon after the wedding and never saw Alfonso of Aragon and Urraca of Castile and Leon battling each other for decades. Though valiant on the battlefield, Alfonso was probably useless in bed; no one at court could comprehend his aversion to whores, mistresses, and women in general. Ur-raca detested her husband and soon abandoned him.
    But Urraca had little need of Alfonso on the battlefield. She hopped on a horse herself and spent thirteen campaign seasons out of her seventeen years’ rule waging war against unruly neigh-bors. Her top military commander was her lover Pedro Gonza-lez, a powerful noble, whom she bore at least two illegitimate children. The queen died at the age of forty-six, giving birth to twins, some said, though no one knows. Records of the life of this intriguing woman are few and far between.
    E l e a n o r o f A q u i t a i n e ,
    Q u e e n o f F r a n c e
    “I Find I Have Wed a Monk”
    When eighteen-year-old Louis VII of France married the spir-ited fifteen-year-old Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1137, he would have gladly bedded her often, but his priests prevented it. Young as she was, she sized up her husband’s band of bleating clerics at a glance and dismissed them as worthless. They sized her up, too, and were alarmed; they had wielded unlimited power over the impressionable young king. Now this power was threatened by a headstrong girl whom Louis deeply loved. The renowned abbot Bernard of Clairvaux wrote the king that he was under the
    “counsel of the devil,” the devil being Queen Eleanor.1
    Louis’s priests often pulled the king out of his marital bed, s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n
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    leaving Eleanor seething with anger amongst the pillows. As a re-sult of the priests’ interventions, in a decade of marriage, Eleanor gave her husband only one child—a useless girl. “I thought to have married a king,” she snarled, “but find I have wed a monk.”2
    When a penitent Louis VII vowed to go on crusade in