For more than six years, Princess Louise of Belgium was confined to a psychiatric asylum, locked away after a scandalous love affair shattered her royal marriage. Her escape in 1904, orchestrated by her lover and the woman who loved him, read like a dramatic escape novel—but her freedom came at a devastating personal cost. Born on February 18, 1858, in Brussels, Louise was the eldest daughter of Leopold II, who would become King of the Belgians in 1865. Her mother, Marie Henriette of Austria, was a Habsburg archduchess.
The marriage of her parents was strained from early on, and the household was tense and fractured. The death of her younger brother Leopold in 1869, at just nine years old, deepened the gloom and left the king without a male heir. At seventeen, Louise was married to Prince Philippe of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a thirty-one-year-old German prince with prestigious royal connections. The marriage was a disaster from the start.
Louise later wrote in her memoirs that she had no idea what awaited her on her wedding night, describing the experience as so traumatic that she fled the palace in her nightgown the next morning and hid in a greenhouse. She described a disturbing routine in which Philippe made her pour wine for him while he read from pornographic books before bed. The couple settled in Vienna, living in a palace Louise described as dark and strangely furnished, with her controlling mother-in-law loathing her. The marriage produced two children, a son in 1878 and a daughter in 1881, but by the late 1880s, Louise sought fulfillment elsewhere.
She embarked on a passionate affair with her husband’s military attaché, and after his death in 1888, transferred her affections to his successor, Baron Nicolas Dory. The affair ended when Dory’s wife discovered it in 1893. Word of Louise’s behavior spread through the Habsburg court and across Europe, deeply embarrassing her father, King Leopold II. Seeking a substantial inheritance from her immensely wealthy father, who had grown rich through his personal rule over the Congo, Louise instead began a blazing affair in 1895 with a handsome Croatian officer nine years her junior, Count Géza Mattachich.
When the affair became known, the scandal exploded. In February 1898, Prince Philippe, desperate to salvage his honor, challenged Mattachich to a duel and was quickly defeated. Louise fled to France, and upon her return, her children were taken from her and her marriage was effectively over. The worst came weeks later when Philippe declared Louise insane.
He persuaded Emperor Franz Joseph I to have her confined to a psychiatric institution. Given the brutal choice between returning to her husband or spending her remaining years in an asylum, Louise chose the latter and was sent to an institution in Döbling near Vienna. Mattachich was soon arrested on forgery charges and imprisoned. The Austrian press erupted with sympathy for the fallen princess, prompting Philippe to quietly move her to an institution in Saxony in 1899, where she vanished from public view for years.
She saw none of her family except for one heartbreaking visit from her daughter in 1903. In prison, Mattachich attracted the devotion of Maria Stöger, a married woman who worked at the prison specifically to meet him. She became his mistress and campaigned tirelessly for his release, which was granted in 1902. In the summer of 1904, Louise was sent to Bad Elster in Saxony for a health cure, where supervision was lax.
Mattachich seized the chance, and with Maria’s help, the three fled across the border to France. After more than six years of confinement, Louise was free. The following year, her mental competence was officially confirmed, and her long-delayed divorce was settled in 1906. Philippe granted her a respectable monthly allowance, but Louise, accustomed to a life of luxury, quickly sank into debt.
King Leopold II died on December 17, 1909. He had married his longtime mistress, Caroline Lacroix, just five days before his death and changed his will, triggering an inheritance dispute that shaped the rest of Louise’s life. Louise and her sisters contested the will, but the courts could only offer a small victory. In 1914, they were granted just over five million francs each from their father’s estate.
Much of Leopold’s wealth had been hidden in holding companies outside Belgium specifically to frustrate any legal challenges, effectively cutting his daughters out of his fortune. When World War I broke out, Louise and Mattachich were living in Vienna. As the Austro-Hungarian Empire was allied with Germany, and Germany had invaded neutral Belgium, the Austrians did not want the daughter of the former Belgian king in Vienna. They were expelled and went to Munich.
There, Louise learned that her son had been shot and doused with sulfuric acid by his mistress in a jealous rage in October 1915. He survived but lost an eye and suffered severe injuries, dying in April 1916 after months of agony. Mattachich was then interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. Louise, penniless and with her Belgian income cut off by the German occupation, was declared bankrupt by early 1917, watching her remaining possessions auctioned off.
The end of the war brought relief. Mattachich was released, and they moved to France. Louise wrote her memoirs, published in 1921, offering a revealing look at the scandals of the late imperial European courts. But the couple did not have long to enjoy any success.
Mattachich died in the fall of 1923. Louise moved back to Germany and died in Wiesbaden in extreme poverty on March 1, 1924, at the age of sixty-six. The other princesses shared similarly tragic fates. Princess Charlotte of Belgium, born in 1840 as the only daughter of King Leopold I, married Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1857.
The early years of their marriage were happy, spent in Vienna and northern Italy. But in the early 1860s, a group of conservative Mexican politicians, backed by France’s Emperor Napoleon III, offered Maximilian the crown of Mexico. Maximilian hesitated, but the ambitious Charlotte was a decisive advocate. They sailed for the Americas in 1864, where Charlotte became Empress Carlota.
However, many factions in Mexico refused to recognize them, and a civil war erupted. Their rule collapsed as French support evaporated and the United States, freed from its own civil war, began favoring the republicans. In the summer of 1866, Carlota sailed to Europe on a desperate mission to rally support. She failed to persuade Napoleon III in Paris, who actually advised Maximilian to abdicate, and then went to Rome to seek the Pope’s backing, without success.
As her world crumbled, her mind began to break. She developed paranoid delusions, believing she was being poisoned and refusing to eat or drink. She exhibited hysteria, agoraphobia, and erratic behavior, including stealing a cup from the Pope’s apartment to drink from Roman fountains. Maximilian was captured and executed by firing squad in June 1867, but Charlotte was not told of his death.
She was brought back to Belgium and confined to the royal castle of Bouchout, where she disappeared from public view, spending her days walking, embroidering, and talking to imaginary people. She died on January 19, 1927, at the age of eighty-six. The strangest case of all may be that of Inês de Castro, a 14th-century Galician noblewoman who became Queen of Portugal years after her death. Born around 1325, Inês was the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, a fact that would later define her fate.
She traveled to Lisbon as a lady-in-waiting to Constanza Manuel, who was to marry Peter, heir to the Portuguese throne. Peter fell passionately in love with Inês instead of his wife. The affair was tolerated for years, but King Afonso IV grew increasingly alarmed as Peter favored Inês’s Galician relatives at court, fearing foreign influence and even civil war. When Constanza died in 1345, Peter was determined to marry Inês, but his father was equally determined to prevent it.
In January 1355, the king ordered Inês beheaded. Peter’s rage was immense. He revolted against his father, and a two-year civil war followed until a truce was arranged. When the old king died in May 1357, Peter announced that he had secretly married Inês, making her the rightful queen.
He then had her body exhumed, dressed in royal robes and jewels, and seated on the throne. The nobility was made to kneel and kiss the hand of the corpse. Peter had the body reburied in the royal monastery at Alcobaça, with two tombs facing each other so they could see one another on Judgment Day. He then hunted down her killers, executing two by tearing their hearts out.
His relationship with Inês even contributed to a succession crisis decades later, resolved only when another illegitimate son took the throne, founding a new dynasty that ruled Portugal for two centuries. Queen Maria I of Portugal also acquired the nickname “Maria the Mad. ” Born in 1734, she became the first queen regnant of Portugal upon her father’s death in 1777. Her early reign was successful, marked by the dismissal of the powerful Marquis of Pombal, a diplomatic victory securing Delagoa Bay in Mozambique, and the formation of the League of Armed Neutrality.
But personal tragedy struck repeatedly. Her beloved husband died in 1786, and within two years she lost two of her children to smallpox. Her mental health deteriorated sharply, swinging between severe depression and mania. She was known to attack her servants, scream that she was cursed, and the court atmosphere was described as a perpetual funeral.
By 1792, she was effectively sidelined from power, with her son ruling in her name. When Napoleon’s forces invaded Portugal in 1807, the royal court fled to Brazil. The elderly and increasingly demented queen resisted boarding the ship, believing she was being kidnapped, and had to be carried aboard. She spent the long voyage screaming in terror.
She died in Rio de Janeiro in 1816, at the age of eighty-one. Modern researchers believe she likely suffered from bipolar disorder, but despite her illness, her reign saw Brazil elevated from a colony to a kingdom, an important step toward its eventual independence.