The worst royal marriages in history also happen to be some of the most bloody, heartbreaking, and shocking. From royal cousins who got married to love-matches that soured quickly, some royal marriages were downright disastrous. More often than not, royal husbands and wives lived unhappily ever after.
Part of the problem for many royals was that marriages were typically business transactions. The expectation of marrying for love is actually a relatively modern phenomenon, and most royals throughout history entered into arranged marriages. Whether it was to consolidate territory or build alliances with rival houses, royals relied on parents and advisors to find a suitable spouse and plan a wedding – and consequently they often followed their heads instead of their hearts into marriage.
The stakes were often high for royal couples. Kings and queens could dispose of their spouses for political reasons – or because a marriage between strangers could easily be a mistake. Rocky marriages sometimes meant warfare, and royal marriage rules meant that kings and queens were under increased scrutiny. Since monarchs needed to produce the next generation of rulers, the royal marriage bed was a political matter, and the royal bedding ceremony was a way for courtiers to be sure that newlywed kings and queens consummated their marriage and made things official.
Even though people around the world have fantasized about marrying into royalty, the history of disastrous royal marriages shows that dreaming about marrying a prince is often better than actually marrying one.
Before he became a British king, George I was the Elector of Hanover in what is today modern Germany. In 1682, George’s mother arranged for him to marry the very wealthy Sophia Dorothea of Celle, a Germanic noble. The marriage was unhappy from the start, especially since George felt it was totally within his rights to have mistresses, whom he flaunted in front of his young bride.
But things got worse when Sophia tried to find her own love story and began a relationship with Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, a Swedish count.
When George confronted his wife about the relationship, things got heated, and he actually physically attacked Sophia and began beating her. When brutish George left Hanover to assume his new role as King of Great Britain in 1714, he did so without Sophia at his side: he divorced her in 1694 and virtually imprisoned her for the rest of her life.
The fact that Königsmarck was murdered for his love for Sophia only makes the story all the more tragic.
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Queen Isabella of France was around 12 years old when she married King Edward II of England in 1308. Though the relationship had happy moments in the beginning, Edward’s obsession with a number of male favorites – first Piers Gaveston and then Hugh Despenser – put a strain on the marriage.
Isabella began an affair with Roger Mortimer, and with his help she launched a successful coup against her husband. Edward was soon imprisoned, and in 1327 died mysteriously.
Princess Caroline Matilda of Great Britain – George III’s youngest sister – was married off to King Christian VII of Denmark at the tender age of 15 in 1766. But she found no happiness in her new kingdom. In fact, Christian was suffering from severe mental instabilities that pushed their fragile relationship to the edge.
Among Christian’s behavioral problems was his cruel streak – including the time he let Caroline Matilda know what he thought of her by mounting his new wife’s portrait prominently in the bathroom.
He was also known for his sexual addictions and paranoia. Though Dr. Johann Friedrich Struensee was called in to treat the king, he instead took the reins of government, enacted Enlightened reforms, and even began a relationship with the young queen.
Things did not end well for either of them: Struensee was ousted and executed and Caroline was sent into exile and died at the age of 23.
If there was any royal who could never figure out the secret to marital bliss, it was Henry VIII, the King of England from 1509 to 1547. He divorced two wives, killed two more, and lost one to the ravages of early modern childbirth. Of his doomed marriages, perhaps the most tragic, was to Catherine Howard.
Henry married Catherine when he was 49 and she was only 16 or 17. The huge age discrepancy mirrored a discrepancy in lifestyle, too.
By the time he married Catherine, Henry was a shadow of the golden prince he had once been: he was now obese and inactive, thanks to an old jousting wound. Catherine, by contrast, was in the prime of her youth and allegedly looked elsewhere for romantic fulfillment. After being accused of having an affair with Thomas Culpepper, Catherine Howard’s downfall was swift and decisive – the teenaged queen was beheaded on February 13, 1542.
Catherine wasn’t the only one of Henry’s wives to end up on the chopping block. He had his second wife, Anne Boleyn, beheaded only a few years earlier.
George III’s eldest son and heir – also named George – was more interested in wooing mistresses, commissioning stunning buildings, and accumulating gambling debts than he was in royal duty. So his father had to strong-arm George the younger into marriage by agreeing to pay off his debts if he’d take a short trip down the aisle and marry a suitable bride. George eventually agreed.
The arranged marriage was a total disaster. The chosen bride was the prince’s first cousin, Caroline of Brunswick. It was hate at first sight, and the wedding night of April 8, 1795, was a mess – George was drunk for the whole thing, because he couldn’t stomach the idea of going through it sober.
The couple stayed together long enough to get pregnant, and Caroline gave birth to Princess Charlotte nine months after the wedding. The couple separated and, once George became king in 1820, he shocked Britain by attempting to divorce his wife.
One of the great romances of the medieval world was the relationship between King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Sparks flew when they first met: Henry was the young, handsome future king of England, and Eleanor was the beautiful, captivating wife of the king of France. But they didn’t let a little thing like Eleanor’s marital status stand in their way – she got an annulment in 1152, and Henry and Eleanor married a few weeks later.
Though their marriage was royal, it also was open to the same strains as any other. Henry’s eye wandered, and by the 1170s the marriage was beyond the point of repair. He even installed a mistress at his side. Bitter, brilliant, and bold, Eleanor convinced her sons to rebel against their father in 1173.
Henry put down the rebellion, and, not trusting his shrewd wife, had her locked away for the last 16 years of his life. When her sons Richard and then John inherited the throne, she again became a critical actor in the royal court until her own death in 1204.
Marrying someone not of her choosing proved to be disastrous for the fierce Queen Tamar of Georgia. Though she co-ruled with her father before his death and was his official heir, not everyone was excited about having a queen. Both nobles and members of her own family insisted that she find a man to rule at her side.
So in 1185, the queen married Yuri Bogolyubsky. It was a huge mistake, and, between his drinking and affairs, he soon proved to be an unfit consort. Tamar kicked him to the curb and annulled the marriage in 1187. Enraged, he led a revolt against his ex-wife that she handily defeated. She went on to rule until 1213.
Russia’s Peter I may be remembered as “the Great” – but to his first wife Eudoxia, he was anything but. Eudoxia married the tsar in 1689 in a wedding that Peter’s mother had brokered. Though the marriage produced three kids, Peter grew bored with his wife. In 1698, after nine years of marriage, Peter felt it was time to move on.
So, he divorced Eudoxia and sent her to a convent. With his first wife out of the picture, Peter secretly married his peasant-mistress a few years later.
The Wedding Of King Henri De Navarre And Marguerite De Valois Led To The Massacre Of Thousands
The wedding with perhaps the most directly awful consequences was that of Princess Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre. They came from two sides of the tracks: Marguerite was the willful daughter of Catholic King Henri II of France and his calculating wife Catherine de Medici, and Henri was the Protestant King of Navarre.
Their marriage in Paris on August 18, 1572, brought both Catholics and Protestants to the city to celebrate the royal nuptials. But the spirit of Christian unity was short-lived. On the night of August 24, the so-called St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre – on the orders of Marguerite’s brother King Charles IX and her mother Catherine de Medici – made Paris’s streets run red with the blood of thousands of slaughtered Protestants.
Marguerite’s new husband barely escaped with his life, and it was an ominous way to begin a new marriage. Indeed, the pair annulled their marriage in 1599.
When the 20-year-old Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles – Queen Elizabeth II’s eldest son and heir to the British throne – on July 29, 1981, it was celebrated as a fairytale wedding. But the marriage would quickly become a dark fable. Diana later described her wedding day as “the worst day of my life.”
Why? Because it was the beginning of a disastrous marriage that would change both their lives. Diana chafed at the strict, alienating protocols of royal life. Charles found romance with a mistress, and soon Diana was taking her own lovers. The couple aired their dirty laundry in public. When the royal couple separated in 1992 and divorced four years later, it was proof that royals don’t always get to live “happily ever after.”
