The new grand duke – none other than Cardinal Ferdinando himself – had Bianca’s body dumped at night in an unmarked grave and had her name effaced from every portrait and monument in Tuscany as if she had never existed. Recent research indicates that the grand duke’s brother, Cardinal Ferdinando, horrified that a trollop should be grand duchess, had the couple poisoned with arsenic by a doctor who was treating them for malaria. In 1578, the recently widowed Grand Duke Francesco of Tuscany wed his mistress of 12 years, Bianca Cappello. Nor is it likely that Charles and Camilla will meet an ignominious end because of outrage over their marriage. (A modern forensic analysis of Erik’s remains found them riddled with arsenic.) Compared with Anne Boleyn, Queen Karin got off lightly she was exiled to an estate in the country where she lived out her days in relative comfort.
Johan locked Erik up, grabbed the crown for himself, and in 1577 had his brother’s jailer finish him off with poisoned pea soup. Erik had given numerous alarming examples of mental instability over the years – including stabbing a courtier to death in a fit of rage – but his half-brother Johan saw the scandalous marriage as undeniable proof of the king’s insanity. Courtiers whispered that Queen Karin – by all accounts a sweet, simple soul – had used the dark arts to beguile the monarch, muttering incantations over a candle and feeding him love potions with eye of newt and toe of frog. In 1568, Erik XIV of Sweden married his mistress Karin Mansdotter, the beautiful daughter of a jailer. Most of her subjects were not sad to see the ambitious vixen go.įor another thing, no one has ever accused Camilla of ensnaring Charles through witchcraft or Charles of sliding into lunacy for marrying her. After two miscarriages, in 1536 she was tried on trumped-up charges of adultery with five men, including her brother, and lost her head on the chopping block. Those who refused were executed.Īnne, who was pregnant at the wedding, produced not the longed-for male heir, but a mere girl. So many of his subjects protested Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne that the king made it treasonable to write or act against the marriage and forced all adult males to swear to uphold it. Anne Boleyn's marriage to Henry VIII was annulled before her execution, two weeks before Henry married again to Jane Seymour.įor one thing, in centuries past, a monarch marrying the Other Woman instead of a virgin princess was thought to disgrace the entire nation and call down the wrath of God in the form of plague, war, drought or floods.
0 kommentar(er)
