Sex with Kings
Ratings9
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings9
Average rating3.8
Throughout the centuries, royal mistresses have been worshiped, feared, envied, and reviled. They set the fashions, encouraged the arts, and, in some cases, ruled nations. Eleanor Herman's Sex with Kings takes us into the throne rooms and bedrooms of Europe's most powerful monarchs. Alive with flamboyant characters, outrageous humor, and stirring poignancy, this glittering tale of passion and politics chronicles five hundred years of scintillating women and the kings who loved them. Curiously, the main function of a royal mistress was not to provide the king with sex but with companionship. Forced to marry repulsive foreign princesses, kings sought solace with women of their own choice. And what women they were! From Madame de Pompadour, the famous mistress of Louis XV, who kept her position for nineteen years despite her frigidity, to modern-day Camilla Parker-Bowles, who usurped none other than the glamorous Diana, Princess of Wales. The successful royal mistress made herself irreplaceable. She was ready to converse gaily with him when she was tired, make love until all hours when she was ill, and cater to his every whim. Wearing a mask of beaming delight over any and all discomforts, she was never to be exhausted, complaining, or grief-stricken. True, financial rewards for services rendered were of royal proportions -- some royal mistresses earned up to $200 million in titles, pensions, jewels, and palaces. Some kings allowed their mistresses to exercise unlimited political power. But for all its grandeur, a royal court was a scorpion's nest of insatiable greed, unquenchable lust, and vicious ambition. Hundreds of beautiful women vied to unseat the royal mistress. Many would suffer the slings and arrows of negative public opinion, some met with tragic ends and were pensioned off to make room for younger women. But the royal mistress often had the last laugh, as she lived well and richly off the fruits of her "sins." From the dawn of time, power has been a mighty aphrodisiac. With diaries, personal letters, and diplomatic dispatches, Eleanor Herman's trailblazing research reveals the dynamics of sex and power, rivalry and revenge, at the most brilliant courts of Europe. Wickedly witty and endlessly entertaining, Sex with Kings is a chapter of women's history that has remained unwritten -- until now.
Reviews with the most likes.
Anecdotal historical fluff about royal mistresses. If there's such a thing as beach-reading history, this is it.
Don't be fooled by my middle-of-the-road rating. This book was chock-full of gossip, tidbits and stories about old-timey royals' sex lives, intrigue and sexual politics, and it was a DELIGHT to read. I read some passages aloud to my husband because they were just too ridiculous to not share with someone, and it was such a fun experience.
The reason I'm only giving it three stars is because the organization of the book was kind of terrible. It was arranged around various themes, such as King's Bastards, Mistresses and Queens, The Husbands That The Mistresses Had to Abandon Randomly to Boink The King, etc. (I don't remember specifically what they were called, but that's the gist.) In the process, the book was constantly jumping from king to king, country to country, time period to time period, with the result that none of the mistresses — who were FASCINATING, by the way — ever really got “fleshed out” into a real character/person for me.
It was too hard to keep straight who was who, when they lived, which mistresses came in what order, what happened to them, the trouble they got into ... and it just turned into a series of anecdotes and fun stories for me, without giving me a better understanding of any one of them in particular. That was kind of disappointing, as I would have liked to have come away with some kind of knowledge about the individuals; beside the themes that were covered in general, I didn't come away with much knowledge about any one mistress, because I couldn't distinguish between, say, Madame du Barry, Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Pompadour.
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