Sex with the Queen

In this follow-up to her bestselling Sex with Kings,Eleanor Herman reveals the truth about what goes on behind the closed door of a queen's boudoir. Impeccably researched, fi lled with pageturning romance, passion, and scandal, Sex with the Queen explores the scintillating sexual lives of some of our most beloved and infamous female rulers.

She was the queen, envied and revered, but also miserable, forced to marry a foreign prince sight unseen—a royal ogre who was sadistic, repulsive, mentally incompetent, or sexually impotent—and in some cases all of the above. How did queens fi nd happiness? In courts bristling with testosterone, many royal women had love aff airs.

When a queen took a lover, anything could happen—from disgrace and death to political victory. Some kings imprisoned erring wives for life; other monarchs named the queen's lover prime minister. At European courts, it was the politics, not the sex, that caused a royal woman's tragedy—or her ultimate triumph.