March 4, 2021 • 26 mins
Professional Royal Mistress? Professional? Yup. Eleanor Herman, author of Sex With Kings, 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge, joins the show to help Matt and Helen shed a little light on this often overlooked and misunderstood profession.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is job slete. I'm Helen Home and I'm Matt
beat and today we're talking about royal mistresses. But she earned,
as far as we can tell, some two hundred million
dollars in today's money. Here's yet another reason why language
(00:23):
can be confusing. Words have different definitions. Take the word
mistress for example. I know you're likely thinking in your
head right now, Wait a second. Isn't there only one
definition of mistress? We know what mistress means. But no,
oh no, there are two main definitions. Here's the one
(00:44):
that probably sounds familiar. Quote a woman having an extramarital
sexual relationship, especially with a married man. Okay, but here's
the other definition. Quote a woman in a position of
authority or can troll. Huh, that's not the definition I
expected today. When we think about the word mistress, we
(01:07):
don't think of it being literally a job title. As
long as there have been kings around, there have been
royal mistresses. And yes, that was a job title. So
the king often would seek one or more additional women
to be intimate with, to actually be their true emotional
(01:29):
and sexual companions. Who was going to stop him? He
was the freaking king for crying out loud. I'm glad
Matt that you pointed out the two definitions of mistress,
because literally I was on the edge of my seat,
like what's the other definition of mistress? And then I
was like, oh, right, like the master of the house,
the mistress of the house, like I'm the mistress of
my house right, like excuse me, excuse me. And then
(01:53):
I speak to the mistress of the house like very
old timy, like the lady of the house, I guess,
or the boss lady of the house. But I think
the definition, the first definition you gave is the one
that we all think of when we hear the word mistress,
which is side chick, but side check, which is the
current like in the current verbiage, is what it is.
(02:14):
But back in the day it was an actual job,
which is why we're talking about it here on Job Salte. Yes,
stay with us, don't you go off falling in love
with another podcast now, because yes, sorry, that was really bad, Helen.
When would you say was like the heyday of the
royal mistress? If I had to guess that, it was
(02:37):
probably the time when the king was the most powerful
person in an entire country. Um, you know, when the
king was like off with his head and you would
actually have to cut this guy's head off. And like
you said in your intro marriages, royal marriages back at
that time where we're usually not the choice of the royals, like,
it was all like power dynamics, right. So you know,
(03:00):
the Prince of France would marry the Princess of Spain
as a political marriage, and they usually never even met
each other before the wedding day, and often they couldn't
stand each other. They would just you know, do the
deed to to have children, but they weren't actually really partners,
and a lot of times they were just at relatives.
(03:21):
Oh that's right. Gross. Yeah, yeah, so that led to
some genetic complications. But yeah, so this is where mistress
comes in. And yeah, the primary thing was that sexual companionship,
the intimacy they didn't get from their their real marriage.
So we found this amazing expert. Her name is Eleanor Herman.
(03:43):
She literally wrote the book on the topic because she's
the author of Sex with Kings, among other books, great
books that she's written. She's a great expert, and she
told us what life was like and what marriage was
like for kings at that time, the kings were married
to women that they ordinarily would never have chosen, right
(04:09):
like it was a political alliance. Often they didn't know
that his language, and they were very disappointed. I think
the funniest story is when Henry the eighth ordered up
his mail order bride Anne of Cleaves, who was a
German princess from a really flattering portrait, and then he
met her and he started roaring, whom shall men trust?
(04:31):
I see nothing in this woman as men report of her.
She has nothing fair and to have very evil smells
about her. So this is the kind of situation that
the kings found themselves, and they married these women. I
call it the old portrait trick. They would send this
gorgeous picture and then when the queen came, it's like,
oh my god. And you couldn't send her back, you know,
that would have been affront to the nation she came from.
(04:53):
It could have resulted in war or trade distribute. See
Matt cat fishing was a thing even back then. Of course, Yeah,
we're basically the same people we were back then. Uh technology,
that's the only difference. Yeah, So this was an official
thing to each court having one official royal mistress and
(05:14):
everybody knew about it. Each royal court only had one
official mistress. The French title was the mistress entitle. It
was a kind of sexual prime minister. And even if
a king had dozens of women he was sleeping with,
there was one woman who held the title at a time.
Oh so they so he might have had like ten
(05:37):
side chicks, but there was only one official side chick.
I find this all fascinating, like who are these women?
Like where did these women even come from? If he's
marrying princesses from other countries or even people that he's
related to, then who are these women that are becoming
his mistresses? Well, these women are the real housewives of
(06:00):
Orange County or Kardashians, that's who they are. Then they
are in the nobility. They are the aristoptracy and the
real housewives of Versailles. Is that what you're saying. That's
what I was trying to say. Yeah, except they were
not married, No, they were single. They showed up, they
had these big parties, and of course the king went
(06:20):
around and flirted with all these women. So generally you
had to be pretty high up in the hierarchy to
even get into these parties. But there were exceptions. Mostly
they were noble women at court from noble families, and
they might be ladies in waiting to the Queen, which
was a great honor, and you had to have very
ancient noble blood to have that honor, and they would
(06:43):
just sort of flaunt and flirt with the king. There
were two important exceptions. One was called Nell Gwynn, and
she was an almost illiterate actress in the sixteen sixties
and seventies, and she was very cute and hilariously funny.
Her mother had run a tavern or a whorehouse, so
she came from the dregs of society. And she was
(07:05):
so funny and cute that they brought her to the
king's rooms in the palace, and he liked her so
much that he did make her one of his regular
She was never the official royal mistress. The other one
was a century later, and her name was Madame DuBarry,
and she was the most gloriously beautiful prostitute in Paris.
(07:26):
And at this point Madame de Pompadour had been dead
five years, and the king was in his sixties, and
he couldn't really, you know. One of his valets said
listen to I have the girl for you. She's going
to get you, you know, back in the saddle. Eleanor
is so funny. She's like, he couldn't, you know, because
(07:49):
they did not have viagra back then. I'm assuming. I'm
just glad she's talking about this more than me, you know,
specifics here. So I didn't know that actually most mistresses
were noble women. Yeah, I mean in most societies throughout history,
you know, generally people that have connections and wealth and
(08:10):
power already are the ones who kind of stay in
those positions. But you know, occasionally people slip in, and
the seventeen hundreds France was was no exception. So she
was talking about nel Gwynn and Madame Duberry. But yeah,
you spoke with eleanor Um, not not Madame Dubert. Because
obviously the audience is probably thinking, well, we know the
(08:30):
main job of the mistress here, but what else did
the royal mistress do? Well it was interesting because I too,
like you, I just thought the mistresses would just you know,
have sex with the king and that was like all
they did. But actually it turns out they did a
lot more than that. So what other than sex did
the royal mistress do. Her job was to offer a
(08:53):
haven for the king to relax and to enjoy himself
and um release of the pressures of his job. So
she wouldn't work with the chef to make sure he
had the most fabulous, delicious dinners. She might get up
and sing a song or play a musical instrument, recite poetry.
(09:14):
She was on call twenty four seven. It wasn't just sexual,
and in many cases it was absolutely exhausting, and she
had to do this whether she was sick, whether she
was tired. She didn't want to let the king out
of her sight for a minute because she was afraid
another of these hundreds of beautiful young women would try
(09:35):
to get in his good graces and get the title
away from her. Can you believe that? So the royal
mistresses at the time, not only were they sleeping with
the king, they were also his personal assistant and his
nanny is his like his butler, and you know, they
she had to do all these different jobs otherwise she
(09:57):
would get booted. And you know, and they also The
interesting thing I learned from Eleanor is like they had
very limited ability to actually end up marrying the king.
(10:22):
Like I wonder if there was any possibility for advancement,
like career advancement if you're a royal mistress. Not really,
you know. And it was kind of sad because a
lot of times the king would love the mistress, they
would be in love with each other. But yeah, most
did not end up being together ultimately for you know,
happily ever after. Now, sometimes mistresses did actually get to
(10:47):
marry the king. Eleanor can kind of go into how
it didn't always work out so well. I'd say several
kings married their mistresses, and it usually worked out horribly.
I mean, Henry the eight moved heaven and earth and
changed the whole religion and killed thousands of people to
marry Anne Boleyn, and then after three years he cut
her head off, Like if any king would marry his mistress,
(11:10):
like he had to be crazy and something had to
be done about it, and no one was going to
stand for it. It was shaming and dishonoring the whole nation.
Oh that Henry the Eighth, I mean, come on, what
a moody, mood swinging guy. Yeah, yeah, that's uh. That
definitely did not end well for Anne Boleyn. But so
(11:30):
the few handful of times that a king did end
up marrying the mistress eleanor saying it was like really
bad news bears. But did their kids make out well?
You think, oh, yeah, so sometimes the mistress would get
pregnant with the king's child. Of course this is before
well before birth control was widely available and widely understood,
(11:51):
so so yeah, mistresses would have children with the king,
and of course these were seen as illegitimate children. But
what's fascinating is that, as I said earlier, genetically, often
these kids would have an advantage. They'd be healthier, stronger,
they would be able to they'd have qualities that generally
actually would make for a better king. It's almost a stereotype,
(12:15):
but you kind of think throughout history of many kings,
especially when it's the lineage goes so far, is that
the kings kind of get weaker and they kind of
they're less assertive because they're because they're interbreeding, right there,
interbreeding exactly. That's never good for the gene pool. Yeah, so,
(12:36):
I mean, it's the makes me slightly uncomfortable to talk about,
but yeah, illegitimate children sometimes mixing in with royal blood
was actually beneficial for the future of the royalty in
the country. So Henry the fourth, there's an interesting account
of his children, his illegitimate children. Will let Eleanor explain that.
(12:59):
There's a funny worry about Henry the fourth of France,
who insisted on raising his maybe a twelve or fifteen
bastards in the royal nursery with his many legitimate children.
Because he had so many children, he couldn't keep them straight.
So he had this piece of paper in his pocket
and when he visited them in the in the royal nursery,
(13:19):
it had like their names, their descriptions, and the names
of their mothers. It was just it was confusing. He
didn't know who was who. He didn't know who was
a legitimate child, who was an illegitimate child. He's like, hey,
little hold on Bobby, Yes, Bobby, your Bobby, and your
hold on hold on your mother is I can really
(13:42):
I can totally relate to that, my huge brood. You know,
I'll give it up to him. At least he was
trying to raise his children. You know. I'm sure a
lot of the kings would have bastards, didn't want nothing
to do with them, and you know, and send them packing, right,
that's the silver lining. Yeah, that's that's it's a positive
spin on it. So the bottom line, Matt is this
(14:05):
sounds like a sucky job. If you're if you're like
you can never become the queen. And if you do
become the queen, he might cut your head off after
he gets bored with you. Not only that, if the
king died, what do you think happen to the mistress? Uh? Yeah,
she was probably off with her head. It gets one
(14:26):
thing these women had to worry about is when their
king died, the new king is generally going to be
the dead king's son, who's going to be really angry
at these women for insulting their mother, the queen. You know,
some of them had some terrible things happened to them
when when that occurred. One of them was marched through
the streets wearing a dunce cap and pelted with horse turds.
(14:50):
Madam drew Berry was put in a convent to scrub
pots and pans uh for a year, and then when
she came out, it was the French Revolution and they
cut her head off. So that was really the that
was really the end of the official royal mistress job.
Was the French Revolution. I'm trying to think of what
(15:12):
I would hate more getting horse turd thrown at me
or having to scrub pots and pans in a convent.
I think it's I think it's like, yeah, they're both
pretty bad, but I guess all of that's not as
bad as head of having your head caught off. Well,
but you know who knows what happens after that. So
so far we've only told you about the horrible things
(15:34):
about the job and how it basically was like the
worst job on earth. So coming up, we're going to
look at why, well why did these women want to
do this horrible job? Okay, Helen, you want an upside
(16:07):
to being a royal mistress? I would very much like
an upside because it seems like a horrible job. Well,
let me introduce you to two of my friends. Wealth
and power. It was, for a couple of centuries, the
most desirable profession for thousands and thousands of women in
(16:27):
the various European countries, because hundreds of years ago, a woman,
no matter how intelligent she was, couldn't go into business
and make millions of dollars or go into politics. She
was severely limited and the only way a woman could
could achieve great position, great power, and great wealth was
(16:48):
to become the royal mistress. And the funny thing is
that the royal mistress had much nicer rooms than the
Queen herself. So in Versailles power is the queen had
a suite of eleven rooms and the royal Mistress had
fourteen rooms that were really much nicer. Oh that's a
(17:09):
good side check, gig, I get it. The reason why
women wanted to do this job, this crappy job, is
because it was completely crappy times for women. Yeah, and
we always think of queen's is ruling just as much
as the kings have throughout history, you know, but uh,
(17:30):
a lot of times they were jealous of these mistresses,
not just because of the sexual relations, but because they
literally had less power and wealth, which to me, when
I first found this out, I was I was very surprised.
I guess, if you're like an upper middle class noble
woman and then you get in with the king and
you're like living at Versailles with fourteen rooms, and I
(17:53):
assume you're wearing like the nicest silk dresses and eating
the best food, I guess that is a good gig
for as long as you can keep it along with
your head. Yeah. So that's another question, is what if
they wanted to leave and actually, you know, have a
life outside of this crazy relationship with the king. You know,
(18:14):
could they do that? Could they retire and you know,
have a pension and most royal mistresses might last, you
know a few years, and then they would be replaced
by a younger one and they were pensioned off. They
generally got as a retirement president they were ennobled, so
they become a countess or a duchess and get the
castle and the lands. And some of these women, there
(18:36):
were some even in their early forties who they got
married and they had children and so they were really
much happier post royal mistress. And the cool thing about
being ennobled is that nobody could ever take that away
from you. And this is really the main reason why
all of these women were throwing themselves at the smelly
old king, right, is because the rewards were apts, resolutely enormous.
(19:01):
Madame de Pompadour was in her position for nineteen years,
so that is certainly longer than most. But she earned,
as far as we can tell, some two hundred million
dollars in today's money. What two hundred million dollars that
that is a damn good pension exactly, well, you know,
(19:23):
it was asset. I'm trying to put myself in the
place of Madame Pompadour and be like, is two hundred
million dollars worth sleeping with a stinky old, probably fat,
gross king for nineteen years and it's a toss up
and basically following him around and entertaining him while you
(19:46):
weren't having sex with him you were. I'm glad you
brought up Madame de Pompadour because that's kind of I think,
the most famous royal mistress because there are movies about her.
And but yeah, two hundred million dollars wealth. Wow, it
makes sense now because so far I was like, why
(20:06):
would anyone want this job? But if you if you're
savvy enough and lucky enough to not have the king
cut your head off, then if you could retire with
two hundred million dollars and like Eleanor was saying, like,
eventually get married to someone else that you actually did
like and have kids like that would be awesome. That
would be a dope life. You know that. It's it's
(20:28):
so that it brings up such an interesting point that
I guess if you were in such a public position,
that means the public supported the title of the mistress.
You know, their taxes were the ones that we're paying for,
you know, all the fancy clothes in the in the
in the rooms and the palace and stuff. So up
to that point, the people were like, yeah, the king
should have a royal mistress and that's fine, and you know,
(20:50):
we'll help pay for it. But then at a certain
point that people were like nah, yeah, I mean the
Enlightenment ever since these countries started rebelling against kings, you know,
the United States, France, others around the world, like oh,
individual liberties are more important than divine rule is Actually
(21:11):
that's not real. Uh yeah, I guess if you're if
you're willing to cut your king's head off, then you're
willing to get well. And you can't have a mistress either.
You're gonna lose your head and your royal mistress. Oh.
You know, for hundreds of years that the people, like
the average people were really upset to see all of
(21:34):
their tax money and they were squeezed really hard. If
you were rich and noble, you'd pay no taxes. If
you had like one chicken, somebody would come and take
it for for taxes. Right. And so they were really
upset at these women, seeing them drive by with their
horses and carriages, you know, loaded down with jewels. Um.
So they really were sick of it. And then the
(21:57):
French Revolution occurred, and um they cut off the head
of um the last French royal mistress, as I said,
and then the next French monarch was Napoleon. Well, he
didn't um want a royal mistress. He didn't want to
give any woman that much power. He had lots of lovers, uh,
(22:19):
he did. He hated the idea of women meddling in politics.
And he said, adultery is fifteen minutes on a couch,
which probably doesn't say very much for his skill in
the sack. So the adultery continued, Um, but it wasn't.
They really tried to hide it. And these women were
no longer made duchesses or countesses or given all that money.
(22:45):
That's interesting that Napoleon didn't want a mistress because he
didn't want to give any woman that much power. Not
only complex but also sexism. Yeah, bad form Napoleon, That
ad form what about modern examples, Helen, can you think
of any I do know that like, for instance, China,
(23:08):
the you know, the emperor of China back in the
day had concubines. Is that like a royal mistress? It was,
I mean essentially it was like the same position and
you had you had the same dynamic going on there.
And in other parts of the world as well. We
have records of from the Ottoman Empire, it was a
thing there. So Eleanor is going to tell us more
(23:29):
about that, just to compare and contrast. And I know
that in uh China, as long as there was an
emperor um there there was a harem and um they
would periodically have a kind of beauty contest in different
parts of the country where royal messengers would go out
(23:50):
and they look at all the beautiful young girls. Uh
they bring the prettiest ones back to Beijing and um
and these um, these older women would stare at them
when they were sleeping to see if they snore, did
they have bad breath, you know, were they flatulent? I
don't know all of these things. And then they would
(24:12):
pick like just the top the top six, the top twelve,
and then um stick them in the harem. And I
also studied the Turkish Sultans, and they had a harem,
and women would just go in there and disappear, and
you'd never hear from them again. When the Ottoman Empire fell,
it was at the end of World War One, I
(24:32):
think nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen, something like that, and so
they opened up the harem and here were all of
these women of various ages. Now, the younger ones just
went back to their families, but some were like eighty
years old, and they didn't They didn't know if where
their families were or how to contact them. That's kind
(24:53):
of scary, that's not so ominous, like women would just
go in there and disappear and you never hear from
them again, like I think people in though I think
people knew. I think definitely in Europe, the royal mistress
gig is done and gone. I think now, if you're
a mistress, like Prince Charles had a mistress when he
was married to Princess Diana, and I'm sure other modern
(25:15):
royals have mistresses right now, but I don't think that there.
I don't think it's a paid position like a royal
mistress was back in the day, I did hear an
interesting tidbit about the King of Thailand. Really, yeah, that
the King of Thailand has concubines that he can make
(25:38):
like an official second wife. I'm gonna say we could
there There could be a similar positions we just are
not aware of, so I'd love to actually if the
audience can share those with us, that would be great.
But yeah, it's fairly jobsolete in terms of what we
think of the historical definition. Jobsolete is produced for I
(25:59):
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(26:21):
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This is job slete. I'm Helen Home and I'm Matt
beat and today we're talking about royal mistresses. But she earned,
as far as we can tell, some two hundred million
dollars in today's money. Here's yet another reason why language
(00:23):
can be confusing. Words have different definitions. Take the word
mistress for example. I know you're likely thinking in your
head right now, Wait a second. Isn't there only one
definition of mistress? We know what mistress means. But no,
oh no, there are two main definitions. Here's the one
(00:44):
that probably sounds familiar. Quote a woman having an extramarital
sexual relationship, especially with a married man. Okay, but here's
the other definition. Quote a woman in a position of
authority or can troll. Huh, that's not the definition I
expected today. When we think about the word mistress, we
(01:07):
don't think of it being literally a job title. As
long as there have been kings around, there have been
royal mistresses. And yes, that was a job title. So
the king often would seek one or more additional women
to be intimate with, to actually be their true emotional
(01:29):
and sexual companions. Who was going to stop him? He
was the freaking king for crying out loud. I'm glad
Matt that you pointed out the two definitions of mistress,
because literally I was on the edge of my seat,
like what's the other definition of mistress? And then I
was like, oh, right, like the master of the house,
the mistress of the house, like I'm the mistress of
my house right, like excuse me, excuse me. And then
(01:53):
I speak to the mistress of the house like very
old timy, like the lady of the house, I guess,
or the boss lady of the house. But I think
the definition, the first definition you gave is the one
that we all think of when we hear the word mistress,
which is side chick, but side check, which is the
current like in the current verbiage, is what it is.
(02:14):
But back in the day it was an actual job,
which is why we're talking about it here on Job Salte. Yes,
stay with us, don't you go off falling in love
with another podcast now, because yes, sorry, that was really bad, Helen.
When would you say was like the heyday of the
royal mistress? If I had to guess that, it was
(02:37):
probably the time when the king was the most powerful
person in an entire country. Um, you know, when the
king was like off with his head and you would
actually have to cut this guy's head off. And like
you said in your intro marriages, royal marriages back at
that time where we're usually not the choice of the royals, like,
it was all like power dynamics, right. So you know,
(03:00):
the Prince of France would marry the Princess of Spain
as a political marriage, and they usually never even met
each other before the wedding day, and often they couldn't
stand each other. They would just you know, do the
deed to to have children, but they weren't actually really partners,
and a lot of times they were just at relatives.
(03:21):
Oh that's right. Gross. Yeah, yeah, so that led to
some genetic complications. But yeah, so this is where mistress
comes in. And yeah, the primary thing was that sexual companionship,
the intimacy they didn't get from their their real marriage.
So we found this amazing expert. Her name is Eleanor Herman.
(03:43):
She literally wrote the book on the topic because she's
the author of Sex with Kings, among other books, great
books that she's written. She's a great expert, and she
told us what life was like and what marriage was
like for kings at that time, the kings were married
to women that they ordinarily would never have chosen, right
(04:09):
like it was a political alliance. Often they didn't know
that his language, and they were very disappointed. I think
the funniest story is when Henry the eighth ordered up
his mail order bride Anne of Cleaves, who was a
German princess from a really flattering portrait, and then he
met her and he started roaring, whom shall men trust?
(04:31):
I see nothing in this woman as men report of her.
She has nothing fair and to have very evil smells
about her. So this is the kind of situation that
the kings found themselves, and they married these women. I
call it the old portrait trick. They would send this
gorgeous picture and then when the queen came, it's like,
oh my god. And you couldn't send her back, you know,
that would have been affront to the nation she came from.
(04:53):
It could have resulted in war or trade distribute. See
Matt cat fishing was a thing even back then. Of course, Yeah,
we're basically the same people we were back then. Uh technology,
that's the only difference. Yeah, So this was an official
thing to each court having one official royal mistress and
(05:14):
everybody knew about it. Each royal court only had one
official mistress. The French title was the mistress entitle. It
was a kind of sexual prime minister. And even if
a king had dozens of women he was sleeping with,
there was one woman who held the title at a time.
Oh so they so he might have had like ten
(05:37):
side chicks, but there was only one official side chick.
I find this all fascinating, like who are these women?
Like where did these women even come from? If he's
marrying princesses from other countries or even people that he's
related to, then who are these women that are becoming
his mistresses? Well, these women are the real housewives of
(06:00):
Orange County or Kardashians, that's who they are. Then they
are in the nobility. They are the aristoptracy and the
real housewives of Versailles. Is that what you're saying. That's
what I was trying to say. Yeah, except they were
not married, No, they were single. They showed up, they
had these big parties, and of course the king went
(06:20):
around and flirted with all these women. So generally you
had to be pretty high up in the hierarchy to
even get into these parties. But there were exceptions. Mostly
they were noble women at court from noble families, and
they might be ladies in waiting to the Queen, which
was a great honor, and you had to have very
ancient noble blood to have that honor, and they would
(06:43):
just sort of flaunt and flirt with the king. There
were two important exceptions. One was called Nell Gwynn, and
she was an almost illiterate actress in the sixteen sixties
and seventies, and she was very cute and hilariously funny.
Her mother had run a tavern or a whorehouse, so
she came from the dregs of society. And she was
(07:05):
so funny and cute that they brought her to the
king's rooms in the palace, and he liked her so
much that he did make her one of his regular
She was never the official royal mistress. The other one
was a century later, and her name was Madame DuBarry,
and she was the most gloriously beautiful prostitute in Paris.
(07:26):
And at this point Madame de Pompadour had been dead
five years, and the king was in his sixties, and
he couldn't really, you know. One of his valets said
listen to I have the girl for you. She's going
to get you, you know, back in the saddle. Eleanor
is so funny. She's like, he couldn't, you know, because
(07:49):
they did not have viagra back then. I'm assuming. I'm
just glad she's talking about this more than me, you know,
specifics here. So I didn't know that actually most mistresses
were noble women. Yeah, I mean in most societies throughout history,
you know, generally people that have connections and wealth and
(08:10):
power already are the ones who kind of stay in
those positions. But you know, occasionally people slip in, and
the seventeen hundreds France was was no exception. So she
was talking about nel Gwynn and Madame Duberry. But yeah,
you spoke with eleanor Um, not not Madame Dubert. Because
obviously the audience is probably thinking, well, we know the
(08:30):
main job of the mistress here, but what else did
the royal mistress do? Well it was interesting because I too,
like you, I just thought the mistresses would just you know,
have sex with the king and that was like all
they did. But actually it turns out they did a
lot more than that. So what other than sex did
the royal mistress do. Her job was to offer a
(08:53):
haven for the king to relax and to enjoy himself
and um release of the pressures of his job. So
she wouldn't work with the chef to make sure he
had the most fabulous, delicious dinners. She might get up
and sing a song or play a musical instrument, recite poetry.
(09:14):
She was on call twenty four seven. It wasn't just sexual,
and in many cases it was absolutely exhausting, and she
had to do this whether she was sick, whether she
was tired. She didn't want to let the king out
of her sight for a minute because she was afraid
another of these hundreds of beautiful young women would try
(09:35):
to get in his good graces and get the title
away from her. Can you believe that? So the royal
mistresses at the time, not only were they sleeping with
the king, they were also his personal assistant and his
nanny is his like his butler, and you know, they
she had to do all these different jobs otherwise she
(09:57):
would get booted. And you know, and they also The
interesting thing I learned from Eleanor is like they had
very limited ability to actually end up marrying the king.
(10:22):
Like I wonder if there was any possibility for advancement,
like career advancement if you're a royal mistress. Not really,
you know. And it was kind of sad because a
lot of times the king would love the mistress, they
would be in love with each other. But yeah, most
did not end up being together ultimately for you know,
happily ever after. Now, sometimes mistresses did actually get to
(10:47):
marry the king. Eleanor can kind of go into how
it didn't always work out so well. I'd say several
kings married their mistresses, and it usually worked out horribly.
I mean, Henry the eight moved heaven and earth and
changed the whole religion and killed thousands of people to
marry Anne Boleyn, and then after three years he cut
her head off, Like if any king would marry his mistress,
(11:10):
like he had to be crazy and something had to
be done about it, and no one was going to
stand for it. It was shaming and dishonoring the whole nation.
Oh that Henry the Eighth, I mean, come on, what
a moody, mood swinging guy. Yeah, yeah, that's uh. That
definitely did not end well for Anne Boleyn. But so
(11:30):
the few handful of times that a king did end
up marrying the mistress eleanor saying it was like really
bad news bears. But did their kids make out well?
You think, oh, yeah, so sometimes the mistress would get
pregnant with the king's child. Of course this is before
well before birth control was widely available and widely understood,
(11:51):
so so yeah, mistresses would have children with the king,
and of course these were seen as illegitimate children. But
what's fascinating is that, as I said earlier, genetically, often
these kids would have an advantage. They'd be healthier, stronger,
they would be able to they'd have qualities that generally
actually would make for a better king. It's almost a stereotype,
(12:15):
but you kind of think throughout history of many kings,
especially when it's the lineage goes so far, is that
the kings kind of get weaker and they kind of
they're less assertive because they're because they're interbreeding, right there,
interbreeding exactly. That's never good for the gene pool. Yeah, so,
(12:36):
I mean, it's the makes me slightly uncomfortable to talk about,
but yeah, illegitimate children sometimes mixing in with royal blood
was actually beneficial for the future of the royalty in
the country. So Henry the fourth, there's an interesting account
of his children, his illegitimate children. Will let Eleanor explain that.
(12:59):
There's a funny worry about Henry the fourth of France,
who insisted on raising his maybe a twelve or fifteen
bastards in the royal nursery with his many legitimate children.
Because he had so many children, he couldn't keep them straight.
So he had this piece of paper in his pocket
and when he visited them in the in the royal nursery,
(13:19):
it had like their names, their descriptions, and the names
of their mothers. It was just it was confusing. He
didn't know who was who. He didn't know who was
a legitimate child, who was an illegitimate child. He's like, hey,
little hold on Bobby, Yes, Bobby, your Bobby, and your
hold on hold on your mother is I can really
(13:42):
I can totally relate to that, my huge brood. You know,
I'll give it up to him. At least he was
trying to raise his children. You know. I'm sure a
lot of the kings would have bastards, didn't want nothing
to do with them, and you know, and send them packing, right,
that's the silver lining. Yeah, that's that's it's a positive
spin on it. So the bottom line, Matt is this
(14:05):
sounds like a sucky job. If you're if you're like
you can never become the queen. And if you do
become the queen, he might cut your head off after
he gets bored with you. Not only that, if the
king died, what do you think happen to the mistress? Uh? Yeah,
she was probably off with her head. It gets one
(14:26):
thing these women had to worry about is when their
king died, the new king is generally going to be
the dead king's son, who's going to be really angry
at these women for insulting their mother, the queen. You know,
some of them had some terrible things happened to them
when when that occurred. One of them was marched through
the streets wearing a dunce cap and pelted with horse turds.
(14:50):
Madam drew Berry was put in a convent to scrub
pots and pans uh for a year, and then when
she came out, it was the French Revolution and they
cut her head off. So that was really the that
was really the end of the official royal mistress job.
Was the French Revolution. I'm trying to think of what
(15:12):
I would hate more getting horse turd thrown at me
or having to scrub pots and pans in a convent.
I think it's I think it's like, yeah, they're both
pretty bad, but I guess all of that's not as
bad as head of having your head caught off. Well,
but you know who knows what happens after that. So
so far we've only told you about the horrible things
(15:34):
about the job and how it basically was like the
worst job on earth. So coming up, we're going to
look at why, well why did these women want to
do this horrible job? Okay, Helen, you want an upside
(16:07):
to being a royal mistress? I would very much like
an upside because it seems like a horrible job. Well,
let me introduce you to two of my friends. Wealth
and power. It was, for a couple of centuries, the
most desirable profession for thousands and thousands of women in
(16:27):
the various European countries, because hundreds of years ago, a woman,
no matter how intelligent she was, couldn't go into business
and make millions of dollars or go into politics. She
was severely limited and the only way a woman could
could achieve great position, great power, and great wealth was
(16:48):
to become the royal mistress. And the funny thing is
that the royal mistress had much nicer rooms than the
Queen herself. So in Versailles power is the queen had
a suite of eleven rooms and the royal Mistress had
fourteen rooms that were really much nicer. Oh that's a
(17:09):
good side check, gig, I get it. The reason why
women wanted to do this job, this crappy job, is
because it was completely crappy times for women. Yeah, and
we always think of queen's is ruling just as much
as the kings have throughout history, you know, but uh,
(17:30):
a lot of times they were jealous of these mistresses,
not just because of the sexual relations, but because they
literally had less power and wealth, which to me, when
I first found this out, I was I was very surprised.
I guess, if you're like an upper middle class noble
woman and then you get in with the king and
you're like living at Versailles with fourteen rooms, and I
(17:53):
assume you're wearing like the nicest silk dresses and eating
the best food, I guess that is a good gig
for as long as you can keep it along with
your head. Yeah. So that's another question, is what if
they wanted to leave and actually, you know, have a
life outside of this crazy relationship with the king. You know,
(18:14):
could they do that? Could they retire and you know,
have a pension and most royal mistresses might last, you
know a few years, and then they would be replaced
by a younger one and they were pensioned off. They
generally got as a retirement president they were ennobled, so
they become a countess or a duchess and get the
castle and the lands. And some of these women, there
(18:36):
were some even in their early forties who they got
married and they had children and so they were really
much happier post royal mistress. And the cool thing about
being ennobled is that nobody could ever take that away
from you. And this is really the main reason why
all of these women were throwing themselves at the smelly
old king, right, is because the rewards were apts, resolutely enormous.
(19:01):
Madame de Pompadour was in her position for nineteen years,
so that is certainly longer than most. But she earned,
as far as we can tell, some two hundred million
dollars in today's money. What two hundred million dollars that
that is a damn good pension exactly, well, you know,
(19:23):
it was asset. I'm trying to put myself in the
place of Madame Pompadour and be like, is two hundred
million dollars worth sleeping with a stinky old, probably fat,
gross king for nineteen years and it's a toss up
and basically following him around and entertaining him while you
(19:46):
weren't having sex with him you were. I'm glad you
brought up Madame de Pompadour because that's kind of I think,
the most famous royal mistress because there are movies about her.
And but yeah, two hundred million dollars wealth. Wow, it
makes sense now because so far I was like, why
(20:06):
would anyone want this job? But if you if you're
savvy enough and lucky enough to not have the king
cut your head off, then if you could retire with
two hundred million dollars and like Eleanor was saying, like,
eventually get married to someone else that you actually did
like and have kids like that would be awesome. That
would be a dope life. You know that. It's it's
(20:28):
so that it brings up such an interesting point that
I guess if you were in such a public position,
that means the public supported the title of the mistress.
You know, their taxes were the ones that we're paying for,
you know, all the fancy clothes in the in the
in the rooms and the palace and stuff. So up
to that point, the people were like, yeah, the king
should have a royal mistress and that's fine, and you know,
(20:50):
we'll help pay for it. But then at a certain
point that people were like nah, yeah, I mean the
Enlightenment ever since these countries started rebelling against kings, you know,
the United States, France, others around the world, like oh,
individual liberties are more important than divine rule is Actually
(21:11):
that's not real. Uh yeah, I guess if you're if
you're willing to cut your king's head off, then you're
willing to get well. And you can't have a mistress either.
You're gonna lose your head and your royal mistress. Oh.
You know, for hundreds of years that the people, like
the average people were really upset to see all of
(21:34):
their tax money and they were squeezed really hard. If
you were rich and noble, you'd pay no taxes. If
you had like one chicken, somebody would come and take
it for for taxes. Right. And so they were really
upset at these women, seeing them drive by with their
horses and carriages, you know, loaded down with jewels. Um.
So they really were sick of it. And then the
(21:57):
French Revolution occurred, and um they cut off the head
of um the last French royal mistress, as I said,
and then the next French monarch was Napoleon. Well, he
didn't um want a royal mistress. He didn't want to
give any woman that much power. He had lots of lovers, uh,
(22:19):
he did. He hated the idea of women meddling in politics.
And he said, adultery is fifteen minutes on a couch,
which probably doesn't say very much for his skill in
the sack. So the adultery continued, Um, but it wasn't.
They really tried to hide it. And these women were
no longer made duchesses or countesses or given all that money.
(22:45):
That's interesting that Napoleon didn't want a mistress because he
didn't want to give any woman that much power. Not
only complex but also sexism. Yeah, bad form Napoleon, That
ad form what about modern examples, Helen, can you think
of any I do know that like, for instance, China,
(23:08):
the you know, the emperor of China back in the
day had concubines. Is that like a royal mistress? It was,
I mean essentially it was like the same position and
you had you had the same dynamic going on there.
And in other parts of the world as well. We
have records of from the Ottoman Empire, it was a
thing there. So Eleanor is going to tell us more
(23:29):
about that, just to compare and contrast. And I know
that in uh China, as long as there was an
emperor um there there was a harem and um they
would periodically have a kind of beauty contest in different
parts of the country where royal messengers would go out
(23:50):
and they look at all the beautiful young girls. Uh
they bring the prettiest ones back to Beijing and um
and these um, these older women would stare at them
when they were sleeping to see if they snore, did
they have bad breath, you know, were they flatulent? I
don't know all of these things. And then they would
(24:12):
pick like just the top the top six, the top twelve,
and then um stick them in the harem. And I
also studied the Turkish Sultans, and they had a harem,
and women would just go in there and disappear, and
you'd never hear from them again. When the Ottoman Empire fell,
it was at the end of World War One, I
(24:32):
think nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen, something like that, and so
they opened up the harem and here were all of
these women of various ages. Now, the younger ones just
went back to their families, but some were like eighty
years old, and they didn't They didn't know if where
their families were or how to contact them. That's kind
(24:53):
of scary, that's not so ominous, like women would just
go in there and disappear and you never hear from
them again, like I think people in though I think
people knew. I think definitely in Europe, the royal mistress
gig is done and gone. I think now, if you're
a mistress, like Prince Charles had a mistress when he
was married to Princess Diana, and I'm sure other modern
(25:15):
royals have mistresses right now, but I don't think that there.
I don't think it's a paid position like a royal
mistress was back in the day, I did hear an
interesting tidbit about the King of Thailand. Really, yeah, that
the King of Thailand has concubines that he can make
(25:38):
like an official second wife. I'm gonna say we could
there There could be a similar positions we just are
not aware of, so I'd love to actually if the
audience can share those with us, that would be great.
But yeah, it's fairly jobsolete in terms of what we
think of the historical definition. Jobsolete is produced for I
(25:59):
Heart Radio Zealots manufacturing hand Forge Podcast for You. It's
hosted by us Helen Hong That's Me and Matt beat
That's Me. The show was conceived and produced by Jason Elliott,
Steve Zamarki, and Anthony Savini. Our editor is Tommy Nichol,
Our researcher is Amelia Pauca, our production coordinator is Angie Hymes,
(26:21):
and theme music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Special
thanks to our I Heart Radio team led by Nikki Etre,
Katrina Norvell, Ali Cantor, Mangesh Hatti, Khador, Will Pearson, conne
Burne and Bob Pittman.
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