The chair sits in a collection of royal curiosities, its true purpose hidden by an innocent frame. It was built not for two but for three, and it was designed personally by King Edward VII for his erotic adventures with his mistresses, of whom he had no fewer than fifty over the course of his lifetime. For his wife, Queen Alexandra, the knowledge of it was only one humiliation among many she endured for decades. Bertie, as Edward was known to his family, hardly looked in his portraits like a man of such tireless appetites, but the reputation was real.
The women who loved these men, the queens and empresses who stood beside them, spent years swallowing the shame of affairs that were often conducted openly, in the very rooms where they lived. The story of how these women suffered, and how some of them kept their dignity to the end, begins in France with a king who loved pleasure more than he ever loved his queen. For centuries, noblemen were permitted far more in marriage than women ever were. A wife’s infidelity was treated as almost unthinkable and deeply shameful, while a husband’s affairs, even fathering children outside of marriage, was often accepted as entirely ordinary.
When it came to kings, who seemed allowed almost anything, becoming involved with them was for many women both the ultimate ambition and a powerful social elevator. But among all the pleasure-seeking monarchs, some elevated marital infidelity to an entirely different level and made their wives’ lives miserable through endless affairs. Such a king was Louis XIV, the Sun King, who seemed to enjoy romantic pleasures even more than war and art. Paradoxically, a man known for boundless energy and a passionate nature was given a wife who was his complete opposite.
Maria Theresa of Spain had been raised in the strict etiquette and rigid formality of the Spanish court. Their marriage was part of the Pyrenees Peace Agreement between France and Spain, signed after nearly thirty years of war. The bride and groom were also very closely related, in fact double first cousins. Louis’s father, Louis XIII, was the brother of Maria Theresa’s mother, while his mother, Anne of Austria, was the sister of Maria Theresa’s father.
Then again, Maria Theresa was a Habsburg princess, and among the Habsburgs that level of family connection was hardly enough to surprise anyone. On June 9, 1660, the royal wedding took place. During the first year of their marriage, Louis seemed genuinely enchanted by his wife, and the couple spent every night together. But little by little it became clear that they were completely mismatched as a couple.
Maria Theresa was deeply religious, reserved, proud, and fiercely attached to her Spanish heritage. Despite spending the rest of her life at the French court, she never truly mastered the French language and preferred the company of her Spanish ladies-in-waiting, her dwarfs, and her beloved dogs. Politics held little interest for her. Before long, Louis grew bored and returned to the carefree lifestyle he had enjoyed before marriage.
One of the most famous affairs of that period was his relationship with Louise de La Vallière, which lasted six years and resulted in the birth of four children. While Louis’s mother, Queen Mother Anne of Austria, was still alive, the passionate king at least tried to keep his affairs discreet. He regularly received stern lectures from his mother, who did everything she could to support and protect Maria Theresa. In those early years of marriage, Maria Theresa also fought against her husband’s infidelity in her own way.
She sent her servants to spy on his movements, and on one occasion, with the help of one of her ladies-in-waiting, she even tried to prevent him from reaching his mistress by having bolts installed on the bedroom door. The incident angered Louis so much that he banished the unfortunate lady-in-waiting from court. Around this same time, Louis made a promise to his wife. He assured her that he would live this kind of libertine lifestyle only until the age of thirty, and that afterwards he would become a devoted and faithful husband.
He did not keep that promise, of course. The real humiliations for Maria Theresa were still ahead. After the king’s mother died, Louis threw himself into his affairs with even less restraint than before. He forced his wife to accept both Louise de La Vallière and his new favorite, Madame de Montespan, as ladies-in-waiting.
As if that were not enough, he openly traveled with his wife and his two mistresses at the same time. Watching this spectacle, people whispered, sometimes mockingly, sometimes with genuine concern, that the king was taking three queens out for a walk. Louise was gentle by nature and made at least some effort not to flaunt her status as maîtresse en titre, the king’s official mistress. The very existence of such a position may seem shocking to modern eyes, but it had been a recognized institution at the French court since the fourteenth century.
Madame de Montespan, however, was an entirely different story. She was no meek and humble favorite. Through a mixture of ambition and cunning, she became the king’s mistress while both the queen and Louise were pregnant. Before long she began referring to herself as the true queen of France, thanks to the enormous influence she wielded over both Louis and the court.
At Versailles, Madame de Montespan occupied twenty rooms, exactly twice as many as the legitimate queen. She maintained a court of her own where ministers, generals, and ambassadors considered it an honor to be received. Her servants, her carriages, and her receptions rivaled those of royalty itself. The humiliation for Maria Theresa was constant.
During her thirteen-year relationship with Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan gave birth to seven of his children. Four of them survived into adulthood and were later legitimized by the king. And this was perhaps the saddest part of Maria Theresa’s story. Over the course of her marriage, she gave Louis six children of her own.
But because those children were, in a sense, victims of generations of royal inbreeding, born to parents who were extremely closely related, only one of them, Louis the Grand Dauphin, survived childhood and reached adulthood. She lost her children one after another while her husband’s pregnant mistresses walked the halls of the court, giving birth to healthy babies year after year. It was only toward the end of the queen’s life that her husband began treating her with kindness again, and even then it happened largely because of the influence of his new favorite, Madame de Maintenon. Touched by this unexpected change, Maria Theresa once said that God created Madame de Maintenon to give her back the king’s heart, and that never had he treated her with such tenderness as he had since he began listening to her.
But this long-awaited marital harmony, after thirty-three years of marriage, did not last long. Maria Theresa died at the age of forty-four after suddenly developing an abscess beneath her arm. The doctors treated it with bloodletting and in all likelihood introduced an additional infection. Within just a few days she was dead.
On her deathbed she spoke the heartbreaking words that although she was a queen, she had only one happy day in her life. After her wife’s funeral, Louis made a remark that has puzzled historians ever since: that this was the first sorrow she had ever caused him. Perhaps it was genuine grief for a wife he had never truly appreciated while she was alive. Yet only two months later he secretly married his long-time mistress, Madame de Maintenon.
On February 5, 1880, an explosion rocked the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The bomb had been intended to kill the Russian Tsar Alexander II. At that very moment his wife, Empress Maria Alexandrovna, who was slowly dying of tuberculosis after nearly forty years of marriage, was resting in her apartment, unaware of what had happened.
After such a terrifying attack, her husband did not rush to see whether she was safe. Instead he hurried to the rooms of his mistress, a woman nearly thirty years younger than him who lived in the very same palace together with their illegitimate children. That detail alone says a great deal about why Alexander II deserves a place among history’s worst unfaithful husbands. What is particularly remarkable is that this future faithless husband almost ended up becoming the husband not of the German Princess Maria, but of Queen Victoria herself.
Back when Victoria had only recently ascended the throne and had not yet met Prince Albert, Alexander was traveling across Europe. During that journey he arrived in London, where the young queen and the tall, blue-eyed Russian Grand Duke met and immediately took a liking to one another. Victoria wrote in her diary that the Grand Duke pleased her very much, that he was natural and cheerful, that one felt at ease with him, and that she was delighted. At a ball held in honor of the visitors, Victoria did something that was considered almost scandalously bold for the time.
She danced with Alexander several times and even offered him a seat beside her between dances. But no matter how strong the attraction between the two young people may have been, the match was never destined to happen. To marry the queen of another country, Alexander would have had to renounce his claim to the Russian throne. So instead he turned his attention to a far less complicated bride, Princess Maximiliane of Hesse-Darmstadt.
Their first meeting was hardly the stuff of fairy tales. Maximiliane was not trying to attract his attention at all. She was simply sitting quietly and eating cherries when the Russian prince unexpectedly approached her. Caught off guard, she had no choice but to spit a cherry pit discreetly into her hand before answering him.
For some reason, Alexander found this moment utterly charming. It revealed a naturalness and sincerity that impressed him far more than any carefully rehearsed courtly performance. After meeting her, he wrote to his parents that he loved her and would sooner give up the throne than give her up, and that he would marry only her. For the first years of their marriage, they truly were happy.
After converting to Orthodoxy, Maximiliane became Maria Alexandrovna and quickly adapted to life at the Russian court. With her modesty, kindness, and gentle nature, she won over almost everyone around her. Even people who disliked the Russian Imperial family often spoke warmly of her. But over time their relationship began to deteriorate, especially after the death of their eldest son.
The loss devastated the Empress. She withdrew into herself completely and seemed to go through life almost mechanically, never truly recovering from her grief. And it was precisely at that moment that her husband began taking mistresses. His most notorious and controversial affair was with a young woman named Catherine Dolgorukova.
When Alexander first saw her walking in a garden, she was only seventeen years old, while he was nearly fifty. Before their relationship became romantic, they met frequently during walks in the gardens, and the emperor could hardly believe that such a young girl might genuinely fall in love with him. Yet over time their relationship grew into something much larger, almost a second family existing alongside the first. There does seem to have been genuine affection between them.
Their correspondence has survived to this day, and they exchanged letters almost daily, many of them remarkably tender and openly passionate. Still, the love story leaves a rather uncomfortable aftertaste, especially considering the enormous age difference and the fact that Alexander already had both a wife and a family. Catherine eventually gave Alexander four children, and he installed her in the very same palace where his legitimate family lived. He even had a private elevator constructed, allowing him to travel directly from his own apartments to hers whenever he wished.
Naturally, this arrangement was deeply humiliating for Maria. She could now hear the footsteps and laughter of her husband’s children by another woman echoing through the very corridors of her own home. But Maria was extraordinarily gentle and patient, accustomed to enduring hardship in silence, and so she continued to do exactly that. The bombing at the Winter Palace, when Alexander chose to run to his mistress instead of his wife, had a devastating effect on Maria.
The shock and anxiety for her husband took a heavy toll on her already fragile health. In the end she could no longer continue her battle against tuberculosis and passed away. After the empress’s death, a touching letter addressed to her husband was discovered among her personal belongings. In it, she thanked him for the years they had spent together.
Less than two months later, Alexander married his beloved Catherine without even waiting the customary mourning period required by propriety. But the happiness they had built upon suffering did not last long. Less than a year later, the emperor was assassinated, and the newly widowed Catherine left Russia with her children. There is a Russian proverb that says the mouse’s tears will one day be repaid to the cat.
Perhaps this was exactly that moment. The British king Edward VII earned the nickname The Caresser. Unfortunately for his wife, all those caresses were usually reserved for his mistresses rather than for the woman who spent more than forty years married to him. Depending on which historian you believe, he had somewhere between fifty and one hundred lovers over the course of his life.
From a very young age, Bertie was a constant source of disappointment to his parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Unlike his older sister, he was not particularly diligent in his studies. He had a quick temper, and in general he failed to fit the image of the perfect Victorian child that the royal couple had hoped to raise. If small children bring small problems, then grown children bring much larger ones, and once Bertie reached adulthood he became a very real headache for his parents.
At the very time when Victoria and Albert had begun searching for a suitable bride for their son, firmly believing that marriage would set him on the right path, the future king embarked on his first serious affair with an actress. Furious, Prince Albert traveled to Cambridge to confront his son and try to bring him to his senses. It was November, and the two men spent a long time walking outdoors while having their difficult conversation. Albert’s health had already been fragile for some time, and the journey appears to have taken a serious toll on him.
Two weeks later he fell ill with typhoid fever, and a week after that he was dead. Queen Victoria was devastated. For the rest of her life she blamed her son for the death of the man she loved more than anyone else. She wrote that she never could or shall look at him without a shudder.
Perhaps in an effort to please his grieving mother and honor the memory of his father, Bertie proposed to Princess Alexandra of Denmark in September of the following year. Although Edward was in many ways pushed into marriage, he could be called extraordinarily lucky. His young bride was not only deeply in love with Bertie but also blessed with a cheerful disposition and an easy-going nature. The first years of their marriage were genuinely happy.
The couple established a separate household, spent much of their time attending social events and entertainments, and before long children began arriving as well. In many respects Alexandra really did have a positive influence on her husband. Unfortunately, family life quickly lost its appeal for the prince. He spent more and more time in the company of questionable friends and women of dubious reputation, becoming a regular visitor to London’s brothels.
Perhaps the saddest part of this story is that by recklessly involving himself with so many different women, Bertie could hardly avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases, which were extremely common in an era before modern medicine and contraception. There have long been theories that he may have infected Alexandra with either syphilis or gonorrhea. This remains only a theory. Historians who support it point to some of Alexandra’s later health problems, including chronic rheumatic illness and her progressive deafness, which can sometimes develop as long-term complications of such diseases.
Alexandra’s medical records were seen only by her physicians, and only they could have known the truth with certainty. But if the theory is correct, it makes the story all the more tragic, considering what a loyal and devoted wife she was to him. Edward certainly did not abandon his romantic adventures as he grew older. Even after he had become considerably heavier and was approaching sixty years of age, the king continued his pursuits.
It was during this period that he met the woman who would become the last great love of his life, Alice Keppel, a woman nearly thirty years younger than him and incidentally the great-grandmother of today’s Queen Camilla. Of all Edward’s mistresses, Alice was the one who managed to build the best relationship with Alexandra. The queen herself admitted that Alice had a remarkable ability to calm her husband’s emotional outbursts and keep him in good spirits. Over time Alice even began to play a small role in politics, occasionally persuading her royal lover to receive a particular ambassador or support a certain course of action.
When Edward fell gravely ill, Alexandra somehow found the strength to forgive him. She remained by his side during the final hours of his life, personally holding an oxygen tube to help him breathe. She even allowed Alice Keppel to come and say goodbye to the man they had both loved. And in that moment she once again proved who the true queen had always been.
For a long time the saddest part of these stories seemed to be the infidelity, but maybe it was not. Maybe the saddest part was that so many of these women spent their lives loving men who never truly valued them. Yet every one of them was far more than a betrayed wife. They were queens, mothers, patrons, leaders, and remarkable individuals in their own right.
Perhaps in the end these women were not the real losers in these stories. The real loss belonged to the men who traded loyalty, devotion, and genuine love for fleeting pleasures.
