Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics

Such a fun read! How engaged modern students in history classes would be if their textbooks were as rich and vibrant as Sex with the Queen! All scandals aside, the vivid details mixed with well-documented facts, pull the reader into a world long since gone but instantly come alive and real. This was beyond pleasurable to read, heartbreaking and devastating to experience. Honest, with raw emotions, this book honors the women who chose their own paths, despite society's norms and followed their hearts into uncharted waters.

This is a compilation of sex scandals and extramarital affairs of royal historical figures. Reading this felt like falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, each chapter making me want to pull my phone out to Google for more details. Like after reading Marguerite Louise d’Orleans sick burn to her husband:

“No hour of the day passes when I do not desire your death and wish that you were hanged…”

and,

“What aggravates me most of all is that we should both go to the devil and then I shall have the torment of seeing you there…”

There’s just enough here to give you the highlights of these women’s more intimate moments but with a caveat: the author, Eleanor Herman, is weirdly unkind to her subject matter. Take this passage, for show more example, on Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard:

“But silly Catherine was a poor candidate for queen. Like a good-natured dog she thought only of present enjoyment or pain. Thinking of past errors or future repercussion seemed to be beyond her limited intellectual capacity. She enjoyed each moment to the utmost until the master’s voice bellowed out loud and threatening. Then she feared and, like a dog, did not understand the words but only that she would undergo imminent punishment.”

Ok, damn, Herman. Why so salty? “Sex with the Queen” is fun and fast. But, there’s a thread of unnecessary judgement and wild speculation by the author that’s sometimes hard to ignore. show less

I get the feeling that the author wanted this to be sort of dishy and titillating, but the truth is that most of the queens had incredibly sad and depressing lives, and it's hard to make that sound fun.

Still, it was pretty fascinating. Catherine the Great was awesome, and the thing about the horse is totally not true.

Eleanor Herman's non-fiction book "Sex With the Queen" covers roughly 900 years of sexual escapades and adultery by queens and princesses. I had always known that kings had many adulterous liaisons, but I had assumed that queens had little opportunity to be anything but faithful to their husbands.

Although many ordinary people envied royalty's beautiful attire, rich surroundings and fabulous jewels, the fact is that queens had little freedom and led lonely, boring lives. They lived in foreign countries, far from their native languages and customs, and in most cases never saw family and friends for the rest of their lives. Servants did their work and took care of their children, leaving the queens to do little but embroider all day.

In show more order to avoid inbreeding and create international liaisons, princes and princesses where betrothed to royalty from other countries, often sight unseen. In some cases, the kings or princes were fat, ugly, uncouth, unfaithful, insane, gay, cold, or even impotent.

Frustrated women turned to other men for affection with varying results. Some queens were beheaded, imprisoned, exiled, or sent to convents, and some were tolerated and a few queens even thrived despite their illicit behaviors.

Many of the stories are quite funny, like the unfortunate woman who married an impotent king who was so fat that he had his servants roll him through his palace's corridors and insisted that priests say mass in his bedroom but were not allowed to awaken him. Many stories had tragic endings. But whatever the outcomes, the queens' stories made fascinating reading.

The first two chapters of this book give examples of so many kings and queens, some of whom I had never heard of, that my head was spinning. But starting with chapter three, Herman goes into depth about the love affairs of the wives of Henry VIII, as well as Catherine the Great, and many other queens, up to and including Princess Diana of England who was so desperate for love that her life was vastly more pathetic than I ever imagined.

If your prurient interests may be aroused by the funny, sad, uplifting and tragic tales of historical women who desperately sought love and sex despite potential consequences, I highly recommend this well-researched and very readable book. show less

Eleanor Herman has followed up her successful Sex with Kings by covering the other half of royal adultery with Sex with the Queen. Although still amusing, it’s not quite as good as the first book; perhaps it was a little rushed or perhaps there’s just not as much information available about royal lovers as there is about royal mistresses. Herman abandons the categories of the first book to go with a more conventional chronological order here, but her emphasis is still feminist; the difficult life of a royal mistress in the first book is paralleled by the notion that being queen is not all it’s cracked up to be. Princess Sophia Dorothea of Hannover was imprisoned until her death after she was caught trying to flee with her lover, show more Count Philip von Köningsmark (Köningsmark was killed and buried in quicklime under the palace floor). Matilda of Denmark’s lover Count Struensee had his hand chopped off (because he had presumed to touch the queen) before being drawn and quartered. Queen Caroline of England and her husband George IV hated each other so much that when George was told that his worst enemy was dead, he gloated “Is she, by God!” only to be disappointed when he discovered the messenger was referring to Napoleon.


Women who were Queen in their own right did somewhat better than adulterous royal consorts. Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia had four admitted lovers at a time, and her successor Catherine the Great (after Catherine’s annoying husband Peter III was strangled by her lover Gregory Orlov) had a whole stable of them.


Herman finishes the book with a tabloidesque discussion of the affairs of Princess Diana. I can’t quite get a feel for what Herman actually thinks about Diana; she reports every rumor of Diana’s affairs (including the one that Prince Harry is actually the son of James Hewitt) but also expresses some grudging admiration for someone who she believes stood up to the British establishment. Diana does come across as moderately wacko, but I might end up that way too if reporters followed me around trying to acquire my used tissues so they could get DNA samples out of them.


This book has much more prurient language than Sex with Kings, although most of the nastiness is direct quotes from original sources. Rumor has it that Herman’s next book will be about sex with Popes, which ought to complete the series. Lightweight reading, with some interesting history thrown in. show less

My lil' sis gave me this one. It's basically about various queens love affairs. The chapter on Marie Antoinette and Fersen, which was sufficiently romantic for my sensibilities, having been raised on BeruBara.

I have learned though, that while it may have been good to be the King (and even that's really debatable: The last King I read about was pretty much tortured into insanity by his tutors in their attempts to make him a 'real man') it was not good to be the Queen. Married off in your early teens to a man who was often cruel, insane or at best neglectful, without any friends, the slave to the whims of your husband and a pawn to political factions? And if you did find love with a handsome courtier, you and he could be exiled, tortured show more or executed? No thank you. show less

A history of European queens and their lovers, this is a very worthy companion to Herman's other book, Sex with Kings, a history of European kings and their mistresses. It was engagingly written, well-researched and full of titillating details. Even people who normally don't go for history will enjoy this. I highly recommend!