THE TITLE of Princess Consort is very new, but that of Royal Mistress is very old, and when she becomes Mrs Windsor in April, Camilla Parker Bowles will bring to an end a tradition that has lasted in European royal history for more than 500 years.
There will be no more royal mistresses after Mrs Parker Bowles: hypocritical modern mores, and the press, will see to that. There are sure to be dangerous liaisons, secret lovers and extramarital scandals, because this particular royal line may be the randiest in history, but the position of royal mistress, maîtresse-en-titre as it was formally styled in the French court, is no more. In her capacity as royal paramour, Mrs Parker Bowles was heiress to a tradition that encompassed Madame de Pompadour, Lola Montez, Nell Gwyn, Lillie Langtry and Lady Castlemaine. She is the last of the line.
Mrs Parker Bowles was an excellent royal mistress, following the peculiar demands of that role with aplomb: discreet, cheerful, available, undemanding and not too beautiful. She knew she was good at it, perhaps even born for it: after all, she introduced herself to the Prince of Wales with the observation that her great-grandmother had been his great-great-grandfather’s mistress. The off-blue blood of the royal courtesan runs in her veins, including that of Louise de Panencoet de Keroualle, Charles II’s French lover. Now she must exchange that historic role for an altogether weightier title that has no history at all. No doubt she will the very best Princess Consort we have had, being the first, but I wonder how much she will enjoy it? Royal mistresses have always had a lot more fun than royal wives.
In European courts from the 14th to the end of the 19th century, the royal mistress was a position comparable in power and status to that of the prime minister, officially unacknowledged, but known to all. Three people in a royal marriage was usually a bare minimum. In exchange for influence and favour, the royal mistress was expected to sustain the spirits of the king or heir apparent, encourage him in battle, criticise and plot against his blood relatives, sell her jewellery at times of war, dispense patronage to the arts, sleep with him on demand and also, often, his friends. She acted as a lightening rod for criticism of royalty, a “shield against hatred” as one 18th-century court manual put it. Indeed, the failure to acquire a royal mistress could be lethal: Louis XVI’s uxorious loyalty to Marie Antoinette may have cost them their heads; lacking a mistress to blame for their grievances, the mob turned on the Queen.
But mostly the royal mistress was there to be jolly, a distraction from the boredom and pomposity of court. This is what Mrs Parker Bowles apparently did best, providing cheerful companionship on tap. She even had her literary salon, of sorts, if you count Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope. Courts are twisted places, encrusted with malice and toadying, favouritism and revenge, which is why mistresses have been valued as much for their domestic as their sexual talents.
This may explains why so many of the most successful royal mistresses have tended towards the plain. Marie-Emilie de Choin, companion of Louis, the heir of Louis XIV, to judge from oil paintings, was no oil painting, having the figure of a beer barrel, black teeth and halitosis that could be detected from the other end of a ballroom. But she provided a homely security.
Mrs Parker Bowles wielded far less power and cash patronage than many of her historical predecessors. Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, the ultimate royal mistress, ruled over Louis XV and France for 19 years, to the point where one courtier grumbled that “the mistress is prime minister, and is becoming more and more despotic, such as a favourite has never been in France.” If a mistress could keep her royal paramour interested, and her rivals at bay, the perks were often tremendous: private suites, lands, jewellery, titles for friends, allies and illegitimate children. Alice Perrers, Edward II’s grasping courtesan, took self-enrichment to extremes, denuding the Treasury, building up vast landholdings and then, as the king lay dying, prising the gold rings off his fingers.
Of course it was not all picnics, knick-knacks and pomade. There was little job security in being a royal mistress, and plenty of competition. The beauty regimen was often ferocious: Diane de Poitiers, mistress to Henri II of France, slept sitting up to reduce wrinkles, wore a black velvet mask to prevent sunburn, bathed in asses milk and swallowed a tincture of liquid gold in the belief that it would hold back time. It did not, and it must have done her digestion no good at all. Many a mistress was keen to end up with piles of gold, but not in that way. Madame de Pompadour may have retired with 17 estates, but she too died weighed down by the poisonous lead powder on her face and the strain of having to be witty for nearly two decades in the morbidly depressing royal presence.
In her entertaining book, Sex with Kings: 500 years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry and Revenge, Eleanor Herman points out that most kings and kings-in-waiting tended to acquire a long-term mistress because their marriages were purely dynastic, and based on false advertising. Many a prince was shown a glamorous painting of a bride to be, only to discover, when the real thing turned up, that they had been sold a pup or, as Henry VIII described Anne of Cleves, a “Flanders mare ”.
Very few rulers end up marrying their mistresses. Nero did, in AD64. The Church of England was created to allow Henry VIII to marry his mistress. But the Prince of Wales’s decision to marry his paramour has few precedents in royal history. Mistresses were traditionally there to be pampered and displayed but not, on the whole, to be married. Many of the most famous mistresses did not want to marry their royal lovers anyway, preferring the freedom of adultery. History remembers the glamorous royal paramours, but tends to forget the wives. Few could name Louis XV’s queen, but two centuries after Madame de Pompadour’s death, the quiff favoured by English teddy boys of the 1950s was named in her memory. Now that is fame.
Camilla Parker Bowles may make a good royal wife, but she will surely be remembered more as the last of the royal mistresses, the final fling of a long and colourful tradition. Even so, I rather doubt whether, 200 years from now, our descendants’ children will be naming any radical new hairstyles after her.
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