A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens Read Online Free Page A

princess desperately in love—with another girl. She was Frances Apsley, the beautiful daughter of the king’s hawks keeper and nine years Mary’s senior. In her long string of passionate letters, the princess called Frances “Aurelia” and addressed her as “Husband.”
    “You shall hear from me every quarter of an hour if it were possible,” Mary gushed in one letter, exclaiming in another that “all the paper books in the world would not hold half the love I have for you my dearest, dearest, dear Aurelia.” While missives like these were filled with the frothy language of a girlish crush, others made it clear that Mary knew how to get down and dirty. “There is nothing in this heart or breast, guts or bowels, but you shall know it,” she wrote, offering at one point to become Frances’s “louse in bosom.” Some of the letters were almost masochistic in their abasement: “[I am] your humble servant to kiss the ground where you go, to be your dog in a string, your fish in a net, your bird in a cage, your humble trout.”
    After a while, Mary’s deluge of clingy love letters began to make Frances uncomfortable and she started to withdraw. As Frances’s letters became more and more infrequent and her manner increasingly distant, Mary went into a desperate frenzy. “Oh have some pity on me and love me again or kill me quite with your unkindness for I cannot live with you in indifference, dear dearest loving kind charming obliging sweet dear Aurelia.” Subtle she was not.
    Her desperation grew worse when she heard the news that she was to be married to her cold, asthmatic cousin, William of Orange, and sent to live with him in Holland. Mary wept nonstop for a day and a half, lamenting her fate and loss of her “dear dearest Aurelia.” Of course she eventually got over it, learning to love her wheezy mildly hunchbacked husband and helping him to usurp her father’s throne in 1688.
     
    When Mary’s sister Queen Anne died in 1714 with no surviving children, a relatively distant number of the royal family was imported from Germany to rule as King George I. Thus arrived the new House of Hanover, whose members would establish themselves as among the most wanton monarchs ever to rule Britain. No sooner had the English taken stock of their new king than they began to laugh at him. It was not just the fact that George I spoke barely a word of English nor his bizarre entourage and strange German customs. It was his penchant for fat and ugly mistresses.
    Two of the most famous came over from Hanover with the king. To be fair, only one of these was grossly obese; the other was exceedingly thin. They were dubbed “The Maypole” and “Elephant and Castle.” The essayist Horace Walpole recalled meeting the fat one—whom King George had given the title Countess of Darlington—when he was a young boy and being terrified of her enormous bulk: “Two fierce black eyes, large and rolling beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower part of her body, and no part restrained by a stay . . . no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress, and that the mob of London were highly diverted at the importation of so uncommon a sergalio!”
    Lord Chesterfield was particularly vicious in his assessment of King George’s peccadillos: “The standard of His Majesty’s taste, as exemplified in his mistresses, makes all ladies who aspire to his favour . . . strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and dignity of the ox. Some succeed, and others . . . burst.”
     
    The king’s son, George II, inherited his father’s tastes as well as his crown. “No woman came amiss to him,” one contemporary snorted, “if she were but very willing and very fat.” His queen, Caroline of Ansbach, shared the second George’s lascivious interests, sometimes even arranging dalliances for him, but always making