Afleveringen
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However much 'protocol' may attempt to intervene, the truth is that eccentricity is a trait that even royals have. This is certainly the case for Elisabeth of Wied, a German princess who became Romania's first queen, wife of Romania's King Carol I.
Politics in Europe were extra complex in the latter half of the 19th century. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II had concluded his father's Crimean War in 1856, but even with the defeat of Russia in the conflict, the Ottoman Empire was in retreat. As Ottoman influence waned, former vassal states, including what would become modern Romania, were shaped by the other great powers and their own internal politics, which led to the unification of several formerly Ottoman principalities into what is now Romania.
And what does a newly independent player on the European stage need? A royal house, of course! And wouldn't you know it - the Germans had so many of those lying around that it was easy pickings to find some stuffy but qualified guy to 'elect' king. King Carol I was both a liberalizing influence on the new nation's politics, as well as personally fastidious and, according to accounts, quite humorless.
Which must have been tough on his wife, Elisabeth, a flamboyant writer with an artist's temperament who is better known by her nom de plum, Carmen Sylva. She was enough of a handful in the Romanian court that her husband once exiled her back to Germany for a couple of years, from which she sent letters to the Romanian Crown Prince's wife, Marie of Edinburgh, that she hoped Marie's forthcoming baby would turn out to be a girl!
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The fourteenth century was full of challenges to marital bliss, especially for nobles. Travel was complicated, especially during times of war, but royal houses still needed to cement alliances through marriage - often among woefully young princes and princesses who, again, were separated by vast distances and perhaps had never met.
So it was for Portugal's young prince Pedro, born 1320. Proxy-married to Constanza Manuel, a Castillian noblewoman, the union was made so Portugal's king, Alfonso IV, could register his disdain for the ruler of Castile, King Alfonso XI. Yes, it's a little confusing. And also, there was a war on in Europe, so it would be five long years before young Constanza could safely make the journey to Portugal to meet her young husband. For Pedro, encountering his bride for the first time was an experience of fireworks and butterflies - because of the presence of her lady-in-waiting, Inês de Castro, a Galician noblewoman with whom he fell madly in love.
This was obviously not an ideal situation for anyone, and while various machinations were tried to end the affair between Pedro and Inês, it was genuinely true love, with an extremely tragic and violent eventual outcome that lives on as a story of deep cultural resonance in Portugal to this day.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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We touched on England's King George IV in our episode about Queen Victoria's Trashy Hanoverian Uncles (episode 17), but there's so much more to the story of his misspent youth and his cataclysmic marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. To help out, we asked our friend Sam from the podcast I'm Horrified!, who recently delivered this banger of a story over there.
The daughter of King George III's eldest sister, Caroline was raised in the German duchy of Braunschweig, or Brunswick in English. Her family situation was fraught; while her parents remained married throughout their lives, her father's undisguised and longstanding mistress made for difficult family dynamics, where a kind interaction with one parent led to rebuke and allegations of disloyalty from the other.
Upon meeting her soon-to-be new husband, Crown Prince George of England, the antipathy was mutual. Not only was George already illegally married, he also openly brought his mistress (to be clear, these are two separate women) to their introductory dinner. That would set the stage for the rest of Caroline's life.
They managed to have one child, Princess Charlotte, but quickly agreed to live separate lives at separate residences due to their mutual disdain. George seems to have spent a good amount of time trying to dirty his estranged wife's reputation, but she was quite popular with the public, especially balanced against his poor reputation as a drunkard and wastrel. Propaganda campaigns were waged against one another in the press and in Parliament, and as King George III's health deteriorated and Crown Prince George's power grew, Caroline left the country.
Her travels across Europe and the Holy Lands with a handsome Italian servant set tongues wagging everywhere, but when George III died in January 1820, Caroline realized that she had to return to England if she had any hope of blunting her husband's power - he was king now, and she was queen - and asserting any of her own. But it didn't go that way; George's mission with his new throne was to exclude his wife from everything and try to formally strip of her titles. Because of his own rampant infidelity, divorce was out of the question, but perhaps poisoning wasn't?
Thanks so much to Sam for sharing this banger of a story. Listen to new episodes of I'm Horrified! every Tuesday!
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This week, we take a look at a different European monarchy, that of Denmark, through two King Frederiks of Denmark. Frederik VII held the throne from 1848 to 1863, and was the last absolute monarch of the country, bowing to calls for reforms and signing Denmark's constitution, which implemented the constitutional monarchy that persists to this day. He was also a terrible husband, was divorced by two wives, and appears to have been part of a throuple with his third wife and their male lover for the last decade or so of his life. He died without legitimate heir, leading to a succession crisis and the reign of Christian IX, who became known as "the father-in-law of Europe."
Then we fast forward to this very year, when Christian IX's fifth-generation descendant - and Queen Victoria's, too - became King Frederik X of Denmark, succeeding his mother Queen Margrethe II after her surprise abdication. A one-time Playboy Prince, Frederik has matured into a down-to-earth leader with strong military credentials and a passion for the outdoors, but his recent history is not without a hint of scandal. Cheating rumors swirled last fall, a situation that seemed to deeply pain his wife, the Australian-born Mary Donaldson, who has since become the first Australian to become a European queen. Was the abdication an attempt to save Frederik and Mary's marriage?
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After the death of Edwina Mountbatten in 1960, Dickie still had another 19 years of living to do, and while he was single, he was in no way alone. He had romances with plenty of women in his later years, and according to many, he had male lovers - including, it is alleged, boys - as well.
A mentor to Prince Charles, his advice to the young man may have contributed to what turned into the tragic marriage, divorce, and untimely death of Princess Diana, who was exactly the sort of woman that Dickie encouraged the playboy prince to settle down with. The men remained close through the end of Dickie's life, and Charles delivered the eulogy at both of Dickie's services in 1979.
Dickie was clearly a charming older man who counted Shirley MacClaine, Barbara Cartland, Christina Ford, and Sacha Hamilton, Duchess of Abercorn, who was also his god daughter, among his paramours. Let's say it was all pretty complicated, but that would only be keeping with rest of his and Edwina's history.
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As Edwina took pains to lay low in Malta after the scandals of her affairs, Italy decided to exit the League of Nations and invade Ethiopia. To protect their children, she took them to Budapest and installed them in a hotel with their nanny and governess... and then forgot which hotel they were in. For months. As the summer of 1935 turned to fall, and then winter, they just stayed in their hotel until Edwina finally came across the paper she'd written the hotel's name on, tucked into the pocket of an outfit she hadn't worn in a while. Careless people.
But then World War II came, and with so much asked of ordinary Britons, the privileged were required to step up. For perhaps the first time in her life, the skills and networking that Edwina had spent her life developing could suddenly be applied to a grand purpose: fundraising, organizing, lobbying for help in the United States. Louis was in the fight as a Naval officer, but Edwina was equally engaged, and the experience brought them together as never before.
They would have further adventures together in India, overseeing the end of the Colonial period there, and form a distinct attachment to Indian Prime Minister Nehru that would last to the end of her life in 1960.
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Programming note: This episode is a bit more explicit than most, including strong language and descriptions of sex. If you listen with wee ones, use your judgment.
The early '30s were a roaring time for Edwina's various romances, though two in particular would have far-reaching implications for her lovers. The first, with American actor Paul Robeson, caused scandal in the London tabloids because Robeson was Black. The Royal Family considered the situation dire enough that they demanded that Louis and Edwina sue the tabloid that wrote it about for libel, and saw to it that the court would handle the case... carefully. An early morning hearing, of which no notice was given to anyone but the Mountbattens, resulted in a quick ruling in Edwina's favor, though the couple notably did not ask for damages. Paul Robeson himself was apparently quite wounded by the whole incident, having been close to Edwina and left to deal with the fallout on his own.
The second notable affair was with Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson, a Grenada-born musician whom Edwina had met in New York City. She encouraged him to bring his talents to England, where he became a bona fide star of the 1920s and '30s, entertaining royals and society patrons, and his work gained national prominence with frequent airings on the BBC. During his dalliance with Edwina, there are rumors that the two became "stuck" in flagrante delicto, requiring transportation by ambulance in the pose that was causing them troubles.
Louis was outraged especially by Edwina's affair with Hutch, and as the scandal grew, Hutch found that his royal and society patrons had abandoned him. In spite of his celebrity, the Mountbattens appear to have had a role in his near erasure from history. It's all reminiscent of Fitzgerald's line in Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
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As the Roaring '20s turned into the '30s, Edwina's appetite for other lovers showed no sign of diminishing, and eventually led to a breaking point with her long-suffering husband, Louis. At one point, they decided that divorce was the best option, but quickly reconciled with new rules for their relationship: Edwina would be more discreet in her dalliances, which had previously been headline news, and Louis would be free to take lovers of his own. But a funny thing happened when he finally did - Edwina was jealous!
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It didn't take long for Edwina, young, rich, and alone while her husband Louis was away with the Navy, to begin flirtations and then affairs with various suitors. There were the young men of her social strata, to be sure, but there was also a scandalous rumored fling with the notably female American entertainer Sophie Tucker, "The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas." These affairs took a toll on her marriage and her relations with the British Royal Family, but also laid the template for the Mountbatten marriage.
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While Louis and Edwina Mountbatten would have a 38-year-long marriage, it isn't quite right to say it was a happy union. That first six months or so though - when they traveled through Europe and the United States, meeting Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, and dining with President Warren G. Harding - was a magical time for the couple. Once they returned to England and settled into married life, things quickly went sideways. With Louis frequently at sea for long periods as a Naval officer, and Edwina living large on her huge pile of inherited money, perhaps they were destined to have an unusually promiscuous marriage.
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As many will already know, it was the youngest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine who would become a prominent figure in the lives of the modern world of the Windsors. Young Louis Battenberg, later Louis Mountbatten, was known as Dickie to his confidants, and was stung early when his father, First Sea Lord of the British Navy, was removed from his post at the outbreak of WWI because of his German origins. The episode would motivate his son to excel in a Naval career to reclaim the title, and the then-Mountbattens' familial closeness with the House of Windsor would give him an avenue to real political power and influence.
Edwina Ashley, future wife of Louis Mountbatten, was born into a family of means, but not of emotional connection. While her grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, was kind and involved, her parents left her sister and Edwina to mostly be raised by governesses. After her mother's death, Edwina's father married for a second time to a woman Louis would later describe as "a wicked woman." Edwina was ultimately able to find refuge in her grandfather's home, where as a teenager she became a sophisticated society hostess and a friend to many in the monied elite. Sir Ernest Cassel's death, when Edwina was about 20, made her one of the richest women in England. Upon her engagement to the much-less-rich Louis Mountbatten, Sir Anthony Eden noted in his diary, "Edwina Ashley is engaged to Lord Louis Mountbatten. What a waste."
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Sources
The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves, by Andrew Lownie (Amazon.com)
Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own, by Janet Morgan (Amazon.com)
Lord and Lady Mountbatten Wedding (townandcountrymag.com)
THE LIFE AND LOVES OF LADY EDWINA MOUNTBATTEN - The Washington Post
The Countess Who Counted - The Washington Post
Inside the scandalous 'bed-hopping' marriage of Louis and Edwina Mounbatten | The Sun
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Prince George of Battenberg, later the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, was the third child of Louis Battenber and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, and was by all accounts a pretty good dude. Like his father, he set his sights on a naval career, and excelled at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, entering the Royal Navy in time to participate in World War I.
His 1916 marriage to Countess Nadajda de Torby, called Nada by her friends, would become a source of significant scandal in 1934, when a former maid became a key witness in the high profile custody battle over young heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. The mail alleged on the stand that Nada and the girl's mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, were lovers, and the story was so salacious for its time that the judge cleared the courtroom entirely.
After the family dropped "Battenberg" in favor of "Mountbatten" in 1917, at the height of anti-German sentiment in England, George Mountbatten would continue being one of the few stable presences in the life of Prince Philip, and Queen Elizabeth II, his eventual niece-in-law, was extremely fond of George. His death at the young age of 45, from bone marrow cancer, was yet another tragedy in young Philip's life, while Nada would remain close friends with Edwina Mountbatten, her sister-in-law, and the wife of Philip's next mentor, Louis Mountbatten.
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Admit it: you’re obsessed with royal families – watching them, gossiping about them, wanting to be them. It’s the stuff of fantasy. But for real life royals, the crown jewels can be more like shiny handcuffs. There are expectations and rules – and if you break them, the consequences are big, and very public. And no, we’re not just talking about Harry and Meghan. There are royal families and wild royal tales from around the world and throughout history that you have never heard before. From Wondery comes a new podcast called Even the Royals that will take you inside the cloistered world of royal families, past and present, where wealth and status often come at the expense of your freedom – and maybe even your life. This is just a preview of Even the Royals. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or at Wondery.fm/eventheroyals_trashyroyals
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The second child of Prince Louis of Battenberg (later, Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven) and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine was Princess Louise, born July 14, 1889. While most royal were promptly shuttled into marriage, Louise was an independent, progressive young woman whose heart was set on marrying for love.
There were suitors, to be sure, but Louise was insistent that she would never marry a king or a widower, and of course, that the union be based on love. This led her down some blind alleys, most notably with a Scottish portrait and landscape artist living in Paris, whom she met when they worked together at a military hospital during the First World War. Alexander Stuart-Hill was charming but eccentric, and was decidedly not rich. Fearing her family's reaction, Louise kept the pair's engagement secret for two years; by the time she revealed her secret, her parents asked that she delay marriage until the war had ended.
After Alexander visited the Mountbattens a few times, earning the nickname 'Shakespeare' from his would-be in-laws, Louis Mountbatten had to sit his poor daughter down and explain to her that there were people called homosexuals, and he believed her fiance was one. It's unclear precisely how this resolved between Louise and Alexander, beyond the fact that the engagement ended in 1918.
Princess Louise would find love at last, however, and in a most unexpected place. Sweden's Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf, recent widower of Louise's mother's cousin, visited London in 1923 and took a real shine to Louise, then into her 30s. Sure, he was a widower, and sure, he was destined to be King of Sweden, but at long last, Louise had fallen in love with someone who loved her back. Her new in-laws loved her, and she became the devoted step-mother of Gustav's children. As Princess and then Queen Consort, she was beloved by the people of Sweden for her rejection of royal airs, belief in gender equality and civil rights, humanitarian work during World War II, and democratic reforms to the monarchy.
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After Louis Battenberg's (later Louis Mountbatten) successful campaign to marry Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, the couple set about having babies. The first of these, Princess Alice, was born in 1885, and came into the world congenitally deaf. Given the era, no particular accommodations were made for her, and while her condition caused many to underestimate her, she compensated by learning to lip-read (in several languages) and spoke English, German, French, and, later, Greek.
Her marriage to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark was happy only for a while, but the pair had five children. Alice occupied herself with charity work, and when hostilities broke out between Greece and Turkey, she served as a nurse at the front line, earning the deep affection of the Greek people. During the First World War, Greece exiled the royal family, and setting up in Paris, Alice and Andrew became estranged. He would ride out the rest of his life in the south of France with his mistress, while Alice's life became strange and complicated.
She fell in unrequited love, though history has not retained the identity of her affection, and developed a religious fervor. She was hospitalized in sanitariums and treated with cutting edge techniques for schizophrenia, like hitting her abdomen with X-rays to destroy her ovaries. During her convalescence, which she wanted out of, her daughters married without her knowing and her youngest son, Prince Philip, gradually grew from a child to a man, with no real connection to his mother or father.
Alice spent World War II in Athens, caring for the poor and hungry, and sheltering a Jewish family. When the Nazi occupiers came to search her home, she leaned into her deafness, pretending not to understand what they wanted until they were so bamboozled they left empty handed. She founded a religious order, but when Greece again abolished the monarchy, her son Philip, now married to Queen Elizabeth II, ensured her safe passage to Great Britain, where she lived out her days simply and humbly, as a quiet resident of Buckingham Palace.
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Sources
Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece, by Hugo Vickers (Amazon)
The Extraordinary Life Of Princess Alice | Queen's Mother-in-Law | Real Royalty (YouTube)
No, Princess Alice Wasn't Really Interviewed by a Guardian Journalist Named John Armstrong (townandcountrymag.com)
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While royal houses are often insular and even incestuous (at least at the cousin-marrying level), new blood does manage to enter those gene pools from time to time. Meet the Mountbattens! The family's story begins in Russia, circa 1850, where the orphaned daughter of a Polish general named Julia von Hauke was serving in the household of Maria Alexandrovna, future wife of future Tsar Alexander II. Maria's brother, Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, fell hard for the common-born Julia, a romance that was seemingly halted by Emperor Nicholas I, who wanted Prince Alexander to marry his niece.
Unable to shake off their love, the two eloped, which left Alexander persona non grata in the Russian court. Returning to his native Hesse, Prince Alexander's brother, Grand Duke Louis III of Hesse-Darmstadt, granted Julia the title of Countess of Battenberg, named for a town in the north of the duchy, and later, Princess of Battenberg.
But Europe's royal houses have both a long memory and an enormous snobbery, meaning that when Alexander and Julia's sons, The Battenberg Boys, began pursuing the granddaughters of England's Queen Victoria for marriage a generation later, the courtships - successful and unsuccessful - were rife with intrigue and scandal. But it was the marriage of Louis Battenberg to Queen Vic's granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine that would eventually transform the family from a tainted, common-born Battenberg lineage to the British Mountbattens, the house of Queen Elizabeth II's husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. But that's a story for next week.
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Eleanor's life was no less interesting following the death of Henry II. Rather than fade into the background, her son, King Richard I, instead made her his most powerful deputy in England while he went to the Holy Land on Crusade. In fact, Richard I was an extremely disinterested monarch and spent very little of his decade-long reign in the country. His brother, the future King John, at one point tried to raise and army and take the crown by force, but his mother put an end to that. Then there was the ransom of Richard the Lionheart, by Austrian Duke Leopold V. Eleanor personally traveled to negotiate with, and pay ransom to, Holy Roman emperor Henry VI.
Eleanor's final years were spent in the reign of her youngest son, King John, during which she traveled among her children in Europe, arranging marriages for her granddaughters. By the time she died in 1204, at the age perhaps of 82, she had seeded her offspring among the royal houses of the continent, where they and their offspring would be players for generations to come.
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After Eleanor finally succeeded in ending her marriage to Louis VII of France, she had a brief turn of wedded bliss to the future Henry II of England. It's not that the marriage was short, just her happiness. Henry II, it turns out, was a king of questionable judgment, as Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket would find out. He was also loathe to cede power to their children, and little was helped when Henry's head was turned by a young noblewoman named Rosamund Clifford - an affair that contributed to Eleanor urging her sons to rise up against their father in England. For her treachery, Eleanor would spend more than a decade and a half confined; their sons were welcomed back into the fold in a "boys will be boys" way. But this was not the end for Eleanor. Upon the death of Henry II in 1189, she was the extremely involved Dowager Queen of England while her sons, Richard the Lionheart and King John, would take their turns on the throne. But those are stories for next week, in Part Three.
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History is not without examples of powerful women, to be sure, but even in that pantheon, Eleanor of Aquitaine is a special case. In this first part of her story, Alicia takes us through her early life in the French province of Aquitaine, where her father was the ruling Duke, and her first, disastrous marriage to the future (it turns out by a matter of days) Louis VII of France. A marriage that would, after many unhappy years, be annulled, allowing Eleanor to create one of history's most audacious political romances: she married the future Henry II of England, son of Empress Matilda, paving the way for Eleanor to have been both Queen of France and Queen of England through separate marriages!
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After the unfortunate incident with the boating accident that killed Heir Presumptive William in 1120, King Henry I had a choice to make when it came to succession planning. While he had nephews through his sister and illegitimate children (galore), it was his daughter Matilda, Holy Roman Empress since her arranged marriage at the age of eight, that he tapped to take the throne when he shuffled off his mortal coil. There was a big gathering of nobles to mark the occasion, and in the presence of Henry and Matilda, they all swore fealty to their future lady king, presumably with their fingers crossed behind their backs.
Life went on for everyone for a few years yet. Matilda was re-married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and had a couple of babies, and it was in Ajou that she learned in December of 1135 that her father the king was dead. Long live the lady king!
But not really. Matilda's cousin Stephen acted with swiftness on the news of his uncle's death and, despite having sworn fealty to Matilda in the presence of said uncle back in 1127, got himself crowned King of England, with the support of all those nobles who had also sworn fealty to Matilda back in 1127! And this is how the First Cousins' War - better known as the Anarchy - began!
As you may know, there is no Queen Matilda in England's royal history, but after a protracted and draining conflict, Stephen agreed to pass the crown to Matilda's eldest son, Henry Plantagenet, launching a dynasty that would hold the English throne for centuries.
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