In 1875, Princess Louise of Belgium married Prince Philipp of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. She was seventeen. He was thirty-one. And within a single night, her life became a nightmare she would never escape.
She later wrote that she had no idea what to expect on her wedding night, describing the experience as so painful that she fled the palace in her nightgown the next morning and hid in a greenhouse. In the weeks that followed, she described a disturbing routine in which Philipp made her pour his wine while he read from pornographic books before bed. Louise was the eldest daughter of King Leopold II of the Belgians, a man whose personal rule over the Congo made him one of the wealthiest monarchs in Europe. Born in 1858, she grew up in a royal household fractured by her parents’ unhappy arranged marriage.
Her only brother died at age nine, leaving Leopold without a male heir and deepening the bitterness between him and Queen Marie Henriette. Louise was raised primarily by her mother, educated at home in languages, history, and the classics. As the daughter of a small kingdom, her marriage was a matter of diplomacy. After the fall of Napoleon III, negotiations settled on Prince Philipp, a German aristocrat with close ties to several European courts.
The couple were relatives, but that was common among royal houses. The marriage was a disaster from the start. Philipp was domineering, and the couple settled in Vienna in a dark, gloomy palace they shared with his controlling parents. Louise and Philipp had two children, but the marriage deteriorated rapidly.
Louise spent lavishly, and by the late 1880s she had begun a series of affairs. When her husband’s military attaché died in 1888, she quickly transferred her affections to his successor, then to a Croatian officer named Count Geza Mattachich in 1895. He was nine years younger, bold, and handsome. By 1898, the scandal could no longer be contained.
Desperate to save his honor, Philipp challenged Mattachich to a duel on February 18 and lost. Louise fled to France briefly, but when she returned, the consequences were brutal. Her children were taken from her, and her marriage was effectively over. Then Philipp struck far more destructively.
He declared Louise insane and persuaded Emperor Franz Joseph to have her committed to a psychiatric asylum. She was given a choice: return to Coburg Palace or spend the rest of her life confined. She chose the asylum. Mattachich was then arrested on forgery charges and imprisoned.
The Austrian press, learning of Louise’s confinement, erupted in sympathy for the fallen princess. Unnerved by the scandal, Philipp transferred her quietly to a facility in Saxony in 1899, where she faded from public view. For years, she saw no one except one heartbreaking visit from her daughter in 1903. Mattachich meanwhile was imprisoned near Vienna, where a married woman named Maria Stöger, twenty-three years old, took a job at the prison specifically to meet him.
She became his mistress and dedicated herself to winning his release, hiring lawyers and courting the press until he was pardoned in August 1902. Once free, Mattachich tried to rally support for Louise, but nothing changed until the summer of 1904, when Louise was sent to a health resort in Bad Elster under notably lax supervision. Mattachich seized the chance. With Maria’s help, they smuggled Louise across the border into France.
After more than six years of confinement, she was free. The next year Louise’s sanity was officially affirmed, and in 1906 her long-delayed divorce was settled. Philipp granted her a respectable monthly pension, but Louise, long accustomed to extravagant spending, sank quickly into debt. Maria Stöger had by then left the picture.
Louise and Mattachich remained together for the rest of their lives, though they never married. In 1909, King Leopold II died. Rumors had long circulated that he had secretly married his longtime mistress, Caroline Lacroix, and indeed he did, only five days before his death, after altering the terms of his will. He had three daughters, but only a fraction of his enormous fortune was destined for them.
The Brussels court distributed a modest settlement among Louise and her sisters, while the bulk of his wealth went to Lacroix. The news ignited a European scandal and a bitter legal battle. Louise and her sisters challenged the will, but the courts could offer only a small victory: in 1914 they received slightly more than five million francs each. Much of Leopold’s money had been hidden in holding companies outside Belgium, structured specifically to make contesting his arrangements almost impossible.
Louise and her sisters were effectively cut out of their father’s inheritance. When World War I broke out, Louise and Mattachich were living in Vienna. Austria-Hungary, allied with Germany, saw little reason to host the daughter of the former Belgian king, especially after Germany invaded neutral Belgium. Expelled from Austria-Hungary, they could not go to Louise’s homeland, which was under German occupation, so they settled in Munich.
In October 1915, Louise learned that her son, Leopold Clemens, had been shot and doused with sulfuric acid by his mistress in a violent quarrel. He survived, but with horrific injuries: the loss of an eye, broken ribs, a ruptured spleen, and severe acid burns. He died after six months of agony. A year later, Mattachich was arrested and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Budapest.
Louise returned to Austria-Hungary to plead his case, but she was now sinking into poverty. With Belgium occupied, her income had vanished. By early 1917, her debts had swelled to an extraordinary thirty million marks. Bankrupt, she could only watch her remaining possessions auctioned off.
She survived only through occasional support sent by her daughter and her sister Stephanie. Only the end of the war brought relief. Mattachich was released, and the couple moved to France as the Habsburg Empire tore itself apart. Louise wrote her memoirs, published in 1921 under the title Behind the Thrones That I Saw Fall.
The book offered a rare glimpse into the scandals of late imperial Europe, but the couple did not live long to enjoy any profits. Mattachich died in Paris in the autumn of 1923. Louise moved once more to Germany, but she too was worn out. She died in Wiesbaden on March 1, 1924, at age sixty-six, in extreme poverty.
Her daughter Dorothea, her only surviving child, died decades later without biological descendants, bringing Louise’s line to an end. Almost seventy years earlier, in 1840, a Belgian princess was born into the newest royal family in Europe. Princess Charlotte, the only daughter of King Leopold I, was raised near Brussels after her mother’s death from tuberculosis when Charlotte was ten. At seventeen she married Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a handsome and cultured prince nine years her senior.
The early years of their marriage were happy. They lived in Vienna, then in northern Italy, where Maximilian served as regent, and later in a castle near Trieste. But events thousands of miles away would shatter their contentment. In the early 1860s, Mexico, independent from Spain since 1821 but chronically unstable, was invaded by France, Spain, and Britain over unpaid debts.
Spain and Britain withdrew, but Napoleon III remained, nursing a grander scheme. Influential Mexican conservatives, with French backing, offered the Mexican throne to Maximilian. He was hesitant at first, but his ambitious wife pressed him. In 1863 he accepted, and in the spring of 1864 the couple sailed for the Americas, where Charlotte became Empress Carlota.
They were not welcomed universally. Many factions in Mexican politics refused to recognize the new empire, and civil war broke out. Carlota, eager to prove herself, learned Spanish, took an interest in Mexican culture, and adopted two children from the Iturbide family to establish a line of succession. It was not enough.
American support for the republicans grew after the U. S. Civil War, and Napoleon III, distracted by Prussian threats in Europe, began to withdraw French support. By the summer of 1866 Carlota sailed for Europe in a desperate attempt to save their throne.
In Paris, Napoleon III refused to renew support and advised Maximilian to abdicate. In Rome, the pope declined to help. Everything was lost, and Charlotte began to collapse. She developed paranoid delusions, believing she was being poisoned, refusing food and drink, and at one point stealing a glass from the pope’s apartment and drinking from public fountains.
In May 1867, Maximilian was captured in Querétaro and executed by firing squad on June 19. Carlota, who had returned to Trieste under the care of her family, was not told of her husband’s death. By then she was already lost to reality. A medical journal detailed her melancholia and paranoia.
She remained at least partially unaware of her condition. When she finally learned of Maximilian’s execution in January 1868, she was shattered, claiming in a series of nearly four hundred letters that she had died with the fall of the Mexican Empire. She was moved to Belgium, to a medieval castle at Bouchout, where she would spend the next fifty years. She wandered the grounds, embroidered, played cards, listened to her gramophone, and engaged in confused conversations with imaginary companions.
Her attendants described long silences punctuated by incoherent dialogues in French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish with phantoms. Sometimes she smashed vases and tore books in fits of rage. She was told nothing when relatives and servants died, for fear she would worsen. Charlotte died on January 19, 1927, at eighty-six, from pneumonia and influenza.
Five centuries earlier, in 1357, King Peter I of Portugal performed one of the strangest acts in European royal history. He ordered his court to assemble and then crowned his queen. The obstacle was that his queen, Inês de Castro, had been dead for two years. Peter had his beloved’s corpse exhumed, dressed in royal robes and jewelry, seated on the throne, and crowned.
Tradition holds that the assembled nobles were compelled to kneel and kiss the dead queen’s hand in allegiance. Peter had Inês buried in the royal monastery at Alcobaça, in two tombs placed facing each other, so that at the resurrection they might see one another. The tombs were inscribed with the words until the end of the world. Inês’s tragedy began decades earlier.
Born around 1325 in Galicia, illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, she was sent to the Castilian court as a young woman. In 1340 she accompanied her childhood companion Constanza, who was traveling to Portugal to marry Prince Peter, the heir to the throne, as a lady-in-waiting. Peter fell passionately in love with Inês instead. By 1342 their affair was an open secret.
Peter’s father, King Afonso IV, was furious. The affair threatened political alliances and encouraged Portuguese ties to Galicia. Constanza tried to make Inês her daughter’s godmother, a relationship that would have made an affair taboo, but it failed. In 1344 Afonso exiled Inês from court, but Peter simply visited her in Galicia.
Eventually she was brought back to Lisbon where she could be watched. When Constanza died in childbirth in 1345, Peter determined to marry Inês, but his father refused, partly because Inês was illegitimate. The couple lived together openly, and Inês’s relatives gained growing influence over Peter. Fearful that Inês’s sons might displace Constanza’s legitimate heirs, Afonso finally acted.
On January 7, 1355, three assassins cornered Inês at a convent in Coimbra and beheaded her in front of her young child. Legend says the murder took place at a nearby estate, where a fountain is supposedly still stained with her blood, and that her ghost wanders weeping for Peter. Peter was consumed with rage. He rebelled against his father, sparking civil war that lasted two years until a truce was arranged.
In 1357 Afonso died, and Peter became king. After crowning Inês’s corpse, he pursued vengeance against her killers. Two were eventually captured and executed in 1361 by heart extraction, Peter declaring that they had no hearts because they had caused so much suffering to his. This macabre act set a chain of events in motion.
Peter had declared he had secretly married Inês in 1354, but only his own claim supported that. After his early death in 1367, the throne passed to Ferdinand, his son by Constanza, and then, when Ferdinand died without a surviving male heir in 1383, a succession crisis erupted. Inês’s son, John, was a claimant, but a rival faction ultimately placed Ferdinand’s half-brother, another John, the founder of the Aviz dynasty, on the throne. Inês’s love story, meanwhile, was immortalized across Europe, in literature, drama, and opera, and it continues to be retold to this day.
In the winter of 1734, a daughter was born in Lisbon who would one day be crowned as Portugal’s first ruling queen. Her name was Maria. She was the eldest daughter of Joseph I and grew up in the royal court, educated in literature, languages, the Greek and Roman classics, and Catholic theology. In 1750 her father took the throne, and it gradually became clear that one of his daughters would succeed him.
Her prospects were darkened by catastrophe. On November 1, 1755, a massive earthquake struck Lisbon, estimated at roughly 7. 7 magnitude, followed by a tsunami and firestorms. Up to fifty thousand people may have died.
Maria and her family survived, but her father was psychologically shattered, developing a lifelong fear of enclosed spaces. The court moved to wooden barracks, effectively tent city, for years. Maria, delayed by the chaos, was married in 1760 to her uncle, Infante Pedro. The match was appropriate for the times and, despite the twenty-year gap, it was a happy union marred by tragedy: seven children, only three of whom survived childhood.
In 1777 Joseph died and Maria became queen. Her first major act was dramatic: she dismissed the Marquês de Pombal, the powerful and hated minister who had dominated her father’s reign. She replaced his secularizing government with one that restored the Church’s role. Her early reign succeeded.
In 1781 her government negotiated Portugal’s acquisition of Delagoa Bay in Mozambique, and Portugal joined the League of Armed Neutrality in 1782. But private disaster was building. In 1786 Pedro died, and Maria entered a period of profound grief. By 1788 she was swinging between severe depression and mania, banning joyful celebrations until the court atmosphere was described as a perpetual funeral.
Then her two remaining adult children died of smallpox weeks apart, followed by her confessor. A grief-stricken Maria began to lose her grip entirely. She was believed to suffer from melancholia and was treated by Francis Willis, the physician who had treated Britain’s George III, without effect. By 1792 she was effectively marginalized, and her son John increasingly governed, though she remained queen.
Her madness was not simply sadness. Visitors near her apartments reported hearing harrowing screams. She claimed to be cursed and attacked her servants. Treatments such as bloodletting and enemas did nothing.
Her decline intersected with France’s revolutionary wars. In 1807 Napoleon moved to conquer Spain and Portugal. John, Prince Regent, decided to flee to Brazil, but Maria, by then in her seventies and suffering dementia, believed she was being kidnapped and refused to board the ship. The fleet commander carried her aboard by force.
It is said she screamed for much of the three-month voyage. She spent her final years presiding over the Portuguese court in exile in Rio de Janeiro. In 1815 her son raised Brazil from colony to kingdom, a step toward the country’s eventual independence. Maria died on March 20, 1816, at age eighty-one.
She is remembered today, in Portugal and Brazil alike, as Maria the Mad, but also as a queen whose reign accomplished far more than the sad title suggests.