Sex with the Queen – Eleanor Herman

Beginning in April 1667 Alfonso continually solicited Maria Francisca to visit him in his apartments late at night in the company of two of his lusty favorites. According to custom, if the king wanted to sleep with the queen at night, he went to her apartments, with her ladies hovering nearby, never the other way around. Suspecting what he had in mind, the queen politely refused to visit him in his apartments. His face red with rage, Alfonso put his hand on his sword and vowed that if she did not come of her own accord within twenty-four hours, he would drag her to his bed or have her carried there by four of his attendants.

Maria Francisca, never knowing when she would be carted into the king?s rooms and raped, finally had enough. On November 22, 1667, she retired to a convent and sent word to Alfonso that she considered the marriage null and void due to non-consummation after sixteen months. As soon as the king received the letter, he raced to the convent to drag her out. When the doors were not opened despite his furious knocking, Alfonso called for axes to break them down. At that point Prince Pedro arrived with a large retinue of armed men vowing to defend the queen, and the defeated monarch rode slowly home.

Alfonso's worst nightmare had come true. When he waddled back to the palace, he was taken prisoner and admitted his impotence under questioning. The bishop of Lisbon decreed the marriage null and void.

When the queen wrote the council asking permission to return home with her dowry, the councilors presented themselves at the convent door with hats in their hands and tears in their eyes, begging her not to abandon the realm. And besides, they had already spent the dowry. Exactly as she had foreseen, they implored her to marry Pedro and stay on as their queen. Everyone admired the way she had deftly handled her idiot husband. Portugal needed such a queen. The council went to Pedro and begged him to marry Maria Francisca for the good of the nation. The prince gallantly replied that he would. But when they asked him to accept the throne as well, Pedro refused. As a matter of honor, he would not become king as long as his brother lived, but would rule for him as regent.

Alfonso was placed in genteel confinement. When the deposed monarch learned that his marriage had been annulled and his bride handed over to Pedro, he said, "Ah, well! I don't doubt that my poor brother will soon regret having been mixed up with this disagreeable Frenchwoman as much as I do."

Maria Francisca had gotten the man she wanted, kept her position as Portugal's highest lady, and nine months after the wedding gave birth to a daughter. Despite her happiness, she never forgave her former husband and reveled in disparaging him. "After getting drunk according to his wont," she wrote her sister, "he fell with his head in a basin of water, where he would certainly have been drowned if someone had not promptly pulled him out; but though he lives as a brute beast, he lives, and that is sufficient to keep us always anxious and exposed to the malice of our enemies."Like Maria Francisca, many Portuguese feared that if Alfonso escaped, he would round up his former favorites, punish those who had deposed him and wreak havoc in the realm.

Though poison never passed Alfonso's lips, Pedro made sure that plenty of alcohol did, in the hopes that his brother would drink himself to death. One day, however, Alfonso pledged himself to sobriety, much to the irritation of the Portuguese government. The ambassador of Savoy wrote that Alfonso's Jesuit jailer had spoken of his regained health with "evident regret."

But in the end it was food, not liquor, that did him in. With nothing to do, the prisoner grew fatter than ever. He could barely rise from his bed and had difficulty fitting through a doorway. According to some reports, walking became such an ordeal that he would lie down on the floor and call for an attendant to roll him down the hallway. After fifteen years' confinement he died of a stroke in 1683 at the age of forty. Pedro and Maria Francisca became king and queen in name as well as in fact.

The Portuguese prided themselves on the fact that Alfonso had lived so many years after his abdication despite the threat he posed. "If these things had happened in Spain," a Jesuit priest cheerfully pointed out to the ambassador of Savoy, "the King of Portugal would not have lasted so long; but here we are good Christians."