The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul

INTRODUCTION

In 1670, at the glittering court of Louis XIV, the beautiful twenty-six-year-old princess Henrietta, duchesse d’Orléans, sips from a cup of chicory water, clutches her side, and cries out, I am poisoned! Her ladies undress her and put her to bed, where she vomits and soils herself repeatedly. The ceaseless pain is like a thousand red-hot knives slashing and burning her insides. She writhes in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, screaming. She begs God to make the pain stop. She whimpers and groans, and falls silent.

By the time the princess dies, nine horrifying hours after the initial attack, it is a mercy. Given her symptoms, it appears that she was indeed poisoned. The suspected murderer? Her husband, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, the king’s vindictive brother, furious at her for exiling his male lover.

In researching my books on royal love affairs, I was intrigued by numerous such stories of the young, the beautiful, the talented and powerful, cut down before their time. For centuries, almost every death of a relatively young royal was rumored to have been caused by poison. But was it poison? Or had they all died of natural causes?

I decided to return to this absorbing topic, which so adeptly combines my love of forensic crime shows with my passion for the past. I soon found myself up to my elbows in the grisly, the astonishing, the tragic, and the hilarious. I learned how to perform a sixteenth-century autopsy and embalming—not something for the faint of heart. Wide-eyed, I read Renaissance beauty recipe books whose ingredients included mercury, arsenic, lead, feces, urine, and human fat. I dove into modern scientific papers on the exhumations of royal bodies found to be riddled with a variety of toxic materials. And I discovered the elaborate—and to us comical—poison-prevention protocols at royal courts.

As I delved into this world, I learned that palaces were bursting with many kinds of poison, not all of them deadly doses of arsenic intended to kill. Gazing at the gorgeous portraits of centuries past, we don’t see what lies beneath the royal robes flashing with diamonds: the stench of unwashed bodies; the lice feasting on scalps, armpits, and private parts; the lethal bacteria from contaminated water and poorly prepared food; and the excruciating cancers eating away at vital organs. We can’t smell the nauseating odors of overflowing chamber pots or the urine-soaked staircases where courtiers routinely relieved themselves. We don’t glimpse the barbaric medical treatments more dangerous than the original illness itself, or elixirs designed to beautify that sometimes killed.

To bring you into this world of sublime beauty and wretched filth, I first investigate the palace poison culture of prevention, protocols, and antidotes, followed by chapters on deadly cosmetics, fatal physicians, and the royals’ perilously unhealthy living conditions. I then examine twenty cases of royal personages rumored to have been poisoned, from the renowned, such as Napoleon and Mozart, to the obscure, such as a fourteenth-century Italian warlord and a sixteenth-century queen of Navarre, household names in their own time but mostly forgotten in ours.

While palace physicians were often completely baffled when it came to determining the cause of an illness and death, modern science can shed light on what really happened to our tragic princess and many others who died mysteriously. In these chapters I examine their lives, their deaths, and their exhumations and modern analyses, if these have occurred; if not, I provide a modern diagnosis of their symptoms and probable cause of death.

What I have found is that people living in terror of poison were, in fact, poisoning themselves every day of their lives, through their medicine, cosmetics, and living conditions. At Europe’s dazzling royal courts, beneath a façade of bejeweled beauty, there festered illness, ignorance, filth, and—sometimes—murder.

Nor is poisoning of one’s political rivals hermetically sealed in the past. As my final chapter will show, in some countries political assassination by poison is as alive and well as ever it was in the sinister royal courts of the Renaissance.

PART I

Poison, Poison, Everywhere

1

POISON from the BANQUET TABLE to the ROYAL UNDERPANTS

Imagine a king casting his gaze over a feast of roasted meats, rich sauces, glazed honey cakes, and fine wine. Even though his stomach rumbles with hunger, he might lose his appetite when considering that anything on the table could, in fact, cause him to die horribly over the next few hours.

Were his fears unfounded? Did all those palace personages who died young and unexpectedly succumb not to poison but to natural disease undiagnosed by bewildered physicians? No, alas. While rumor incorrectly attributed many royal deaths to poison, records prove that fear of poison was more than just palace paranoia.

Italy was the beating heart of the poison trade. Both the ruling de Medici family of Tuscany and the Venetian republic set up poison factories to produce toxins as well as antidotes and test them on animals and condemned prisoners. Unlike the ancient Romans, who used plant-based poisons to murder imperial heirs and nagging mothers-in-law, Renaissance poisoners employed heavy metal poisons—the deadly quartet of arsenic, antimony, mercury, and lead.

Among the four million documents of the Medici Archives in Florence are numerous references to poison. In 1548, Duke Cosimo I initiated a plot to assassinate Piero Strozzi, a military leader who opposed Medici rule, by slipping poison into his food or drink. In February of that year, an anonymous correspondent wrote in cipher to Cosimo, Piero Strozzi usually stops to drink a few times during his journey. The writer requested something that could poison his water or wine, with instructions on how to mix it.

In 1590, Cosimo’s son, Grand Duke Ferdinando, suspected of having poisoned his older brother Francesco to gain the throne three years earlier, wrote his agent in Milan, You are being sent a bit of poison, and the messenger will tell you how to use it … And we are pleased to promise three thousand scudi and even four to the one who administers the poison. The quantity being sent is enough to poison an entire pitcher of wine, has neither odor nor taste, and works very powerfully. You need to mix it well with wine, and if you want to poison only one glass of wine at a time, you need to take a half ounce of the material, rather more than less.

The mysterious Council of Ten, one of the main governing bodies of the Republic of Venice from 1310 to 1797, ordered assassination by secret, careful, and dexterous means—a clear reference to poison. In a new study, Matthew Lubin of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has identified thirty-four cases of Venetian state-sponsored political poisonings between 1431 and 1767. Eleven of the attempts failed, nine succeeded; in two cases, the intended victims appeared to have died of natural causes before consuming poison, and in twelve cases, the outcomes are not recorded. In all probability, there were many more Venetian poison attempts on political undesirables than were recorded.

The council hired botanists at the nearby University of Padua to create the poisons. Council annals include two detailed poison recipes from 1540 and 1544 that called for the following ingredients: sublimate (mercury chloride, a poisonous white crystal), arsenic, red arsenic, orpiment (yellow arsenic trisulfide crystals), sal ammoniac (a mineral composed of ammonia chloride), rock salt, verdigris (a blue or green powder from corroding copper), and distillate of cyclamen, a flower that blooms in December in Venice.

The widespread popularity of poison lasted well into the seventeenth century. Until her execution in 1659, a woman named Giulia Toffana sold poisons for fifty years in Naples and Rome, mostly to would-be widows, killing an estimated six hundred individuals. She created what became known as Aqua Toffana, a toxic brew of arsenic, lead, and belladonna that was colorless, tasteless, and easily mixed with wine, and which remained in favor long after Giulia’s death. To fool the authorities, she disguised the poison as holy water in glass vials with the images of saints or put it in cosmetics containers.

In 1676, the forty-six-year-old Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d’Aubray, marquise de Brinvilliers, was executed in Paris for using Aqua Toffana to kill her father and two brothers in order to inherit their estates. During her interrogation, she declared, Half the people of quality are involved in this sort of thing, and I could ruin them if I were to talk. And indeed, three years later, 319 people—including many courtiers—were arrested in and around Paris, and thirty-six were sentenced to death for poisoning.

KILLING THE KING WITH CUISINE

It would only take one person to slip a little something into a king’s food. Henry VIII had two hundred people employed in his kitchens at Hampton Court: cooks, scullery maids, stewards, carvers, porters, bakers, butchers, gardeners, butlers, pantlers (pantry servants), and delivery men who plucked, chopped, boiled, baked, carried, garnished, plated, scrubbed, and ran errands. Royal kitchens were food factories, pumping out hundreds of meals a day as servants trudged in and out.

With such an unsettling number of hands touching his food, what steps did a royal take to avoid ingesting poison? The earliest advice comes from the great Jewish physician, philosopher, and scholar Maimonides, who in 1198 wrote a treatise on the subject for his employer, Sultan Saladin of Egypt and Syria. He advised against eating foods with uneven textures, such as soups and stews, or strong flavors that could conceal the flavor or texture of poison. Care should also be exercised with regards to foods … obviously sour, pungent, or highly-flavored, wrote Maimonides, also ill-smelling dishes or those prepared with onion or garlic. All these foods are best taken from a reliable person, above all suspicion, because the way to harm by poison is only to those foods which assimilate the poisonous taste and smell, as well as the poison’s appearance and consistency.

According to Maimonides, poison in wine was particularly dangerous and difficult to detect. The trick is easily done by mixing the poison with wine, he wrote, because the latter as a rule covers up the poison’s appearance, taste, and smell, and speeds it up on its way to the heart. Whoever drinks wine about which he has reason to suspect that someone has tried to outwit him is certainly out of his mind.

In the late sixteenth century, the powerful minister of Spain, Gaspar de Guzmán, Duke of Olivares, was evidently well aware of the dangers of poisoned wine. According to a report in the Medici Archives in Florence, Olivares, when dining in the city of Valencia, having taken his first drink and tasting a very unnatural flavor in the wine, he feared poisoning and jumped away from the table in a great fury asking for remedies. Meanwhile the wine steward, having heard what was going on, reassured His Excellency that the bad taste resulted from his not having rinsed the wine flask well after washing it with vinegar and salt. When the steward then preceded to drink the same wine, he [Olivares] finally calmed down.

Girolamo Ruscelli agreed with Maimonides. He wrote the 1555 book The Secrets of the Reverend Maister Alexis of Piemont, Containing Excellent Remedies Against Diverse Diseases, Wounds, and Other Accidents, with the Maner to Make Distillations, Parfumes, Confitures, Dyings, Colours, Fusions, and Meltings, which swept across Europe in numerous translations and editions. In a section called For to preserve from poisoning, he noted, You must take heed that you eate not things of strong savor, or of a very sweete taste, because that the bitternesse and stench of poisons in this maner is wont to be covered, for the over-sweet, souer, or salte thing mixed with poison, doth hide the bitternesse of it.

Ambroise Paré, physician to four kings of France, wrote in his 1585 treatise on poisons, It is a matter of much difficultie to avoid poisons because … by the admixture of sweet and well-smelling things, they cannot easily bee perceived even by the skillful. Therefore such as fear poisoning ought to take heed of meats cooked with much art, verie sweet, salty, sowr, or notabley endued with anie other taste. And when they are opprest with hunger or thirst, they must not eat or drink too greedily, but have a diligent regard to the taste of such things as they eat or drink.

For thousands of years, kings hired tasters to test each dish before it reached the royal mouth. However, poisons—even a hefty dose of arsenic—don’t necessarily work instantly. Contrary to what we see in film, the victim of poison didn’t swallow something, grab his throat, and hit the floor dead. The length of time required for the first symptoms (abdominal pain, vomiting, and diarrhea) to appear varied greatly depending on the individual’s height, weight, genetics, general health, and how much food was already in the stomach, which would slow the poison’s absorption.

One of the few recorded examples of this phenomenon occurred in 1867 when a group of twenty guests sat down to a meal at an Illinois hotel and ate biscuits mistakenly made with arsenic instead of flour. One guest fell ill shortly upon rising from the table, while the others became sick over several hours, although they all consumed the arsenic at the same time. All the victims had nausea and diarrhea, but other symptoms varied, including a burning pain in the gut, a constricted throat, cramps, and convulsions. One victim had diarrhea and difficulty urinating for several weeks. None died.

Certainly, the royal family wouldn’t wait at the table an hour or two after a taster tested their meal to see if he started retching—their food would be stone cold. Evidently, kings and their physicians weren’t aware of this time lag and expected poisoned tasters to start gagging and vomiting immediately. They also must have relied on the taster to test for unusual flavors or textures.

According to Maimonides, it was preferable if the taster—or a host whom the king suspected of unkindly intentions toward him—took a great heaping helping of the food rather than a polite nibble. Someone who wants to guard himself against someone else whom he suspects, the philosopher wrote, should not eat from his food until the suspect first eats a fair quantity from it. He should not be satisfied with eating only a mouthful, as I have seen done by the cooks of kings in their presence. To prevent the poisoning of his hard-won son and heir, the future Edward VI, Henry VIII had tasters stuff their faces with the young prince’s milk, bread, meat, eggs, and butter before the boy took so much as a spoonful.

By the Middle Ages, the tasting of the king’s food developed into a complicated set of protocols, rituals, and safeguards. Testing began in the royal kitchen. A 1465 report of the banquet held to celebrate the installation of George Neville as Archbishop of York described the numerous assays, or tests, of the dishes. In the mean tyme the Sewer goeth to the dresser, the author explained, and there taketh assay of every dyshe, and doth geve it to the Stewarde and the Cooke to eat of all Porreges, Mustarde, and other sawces … And of every stewed meate, rosted, boylde, or broyled, beyng fyshe or fleshe, he cutteth a litle thereofe … and so with all other meates, as Custardes, Tartes, and Gelly, with other such lyke.

When faced with any dish bearing a crust, such as a meat pie, the tasters broke the crust, dipped bread into the food below, and tasted it. By the time the monarch received a plate of food, the resulting haggis was not only lukewarm but may have looked more like a dog’s breakfast than a king’s dinner. Servants carried the tested dishes in pompous procession to the royal dining chamber, where they placed them on a credenza, which takes its name from the various credence tests for poison conducted there. Each servant had to eat from the dish he himself had carried, and armed guards made sure no unauthorized person approached the food.

Anything the king drank—whether water, wine, or ale—was also tested, of course. The taster poured a few drops of the beverage into the bason of assay, or testing basin, and drank it. A servant also tested the water the king used to wash his hands before and after eating by pouring some from the royal basin over his own hands to see if it caused pain, itching, or burning.

But tests were not only reserved for food and drink. Servants also kissed the king’s tablecloth and seat cushion. If their lips didn’t itch or swell, they assumed the items were poison-free.

Even the king’s salt was tested. The pantler scooped out a bit of salt from its large, ornate dish and passed it to the porter to taste. The servant bringing the king’s napkin from the linen closet did so by hanging it around his neck so that he could hide no poison in its folds. According to the 1465 report, Then the Carver taketh the Napkyn from his shoulder and kysseth it for his assay, and delyvereth to the Lorde. Then taketh he the Spoone, dryeth it, and kysseth it for his assay. With all this kissing of the king’s utensils, it is far more likely his royal highness was sickened with germs rather than arsenic.

According to the 1712 edition of État de la France, an annual administrative report, in his last years Louis XIV employed 324 people to serve the royal table at the Palace of Versailles. The king generally preferred to dine at one o’clock in his own apartments. Though he was the only one eating, he wasn’t alone. In addition to the bevy of servants assisting him, courtiers and ambassadors stood watching him. Sometimes the king joined the court and the rest of the royal family at a banquet where the protocol was even more stifling, and members of the public were allowed to walk by, gaping at the sight of a monarch chewing.

Before Louis XIV entered the dining chamber, the Officers of the Goblet made the trial of tablecloths, napkins, cups, dishes, cutlery, and toothpicks by kissing them, rubbing them against their skin, and, in some cases, rubbing bread against the tableware and then eating the bread. A servant even moistened the king’s fine linen napkin and rubbed his hands with it before folding it and placing it back on the king’s table. Oddly, the king thus always used a soiled, wet napkin.

At the same time, servants in the Office of the Royal Mouth in the kitchen tested the king’s food. Then each one took a dish and lined up in pompous parade formation with butlers carrying silver batons and guards carrying guns to make sure no one got near the food. This contingent began its long trek to the king’s dining room. Leaving the royal kitchens, they crossed a street, entered the south wing of the palace, ascended a flight of stairs, traversed several long corridors, crossed the upper vestibule of the Staircase of the Princes, passed the Salon of the Shopkeepers, the Grand Hall of the Guards, the upper vestibule of the marble staircase, and the Hall of the King’s Guards before reaching the first antechamber of the king’s apartments. By then, we can imagine, the food was lukewarm at best. Throughout the meal, servants at the table of trial continued shaving off bits of the king’s dinner and eating them.

Like Louis XIV, the Tudors usually ate in their private apartments, enjoying a more relaxed atmosphere with reduced pomp and circumstance. But unlike Louis, they built small privy kitchens below the royal apartments in their various palaces. These private kitchens offered the advantages of warmer food, which didn’t have to be carried across a cold courtyard, and less risk of poison, as only a handful of trusted servants came near the meals.

In all royal palaces, servants refreshed the decanters of wine and water in the king’s rooms throughout the day. If he expressed the desire to whet his whistle, the Officers of the Goblet made the trial in front of him. If the king wanted a picnic on a hunt, the same servants would test his food and beverages. Never would anything, except medicine and Holy Communion, enter the royal mouth without others testing it for poison first.

The household servants had good reason to ensure the king was not poisoned or even suspected he might have been when he was, in fact, merely suffering from an upset stomach. If the royal intestines went into an uproar, the king could have any or all of these servants tortured horribly, and under such torture even the most innocent person would probably confess to a crime. Once a confession was torn out of them, along with chunks of flesh by red-hot pincers, the admitted poisoners would be executed in some awful way: hanged, drawn and chopped into quarters, or pulled apart by four horses.

Some poisoners, aware of the difficulty of poisoning the king’s food with so many tasters, came up with more creative methods. On May 26, 1604, when King Henri IV of France opened his mouth to take the communion wafer from a priest, his dog suddenly grabbed the king’s coat with his teeth and pulled him back. Henri moved forward again to take the host, but again the dog yanked him back. The king believed the dog was trying to warn him of something and ordered the priest to eat the wafer. At first, he refused, but the king insisted. According to a contemporary report from Venice, When the priest had taken it, he swelled up and his body burst in twain. Since no known poison causes a body to burst in twain, the correspondent was probably exaggerating the violent effects of diarrhea and vomiting, which can certainly make one feel as if one were bursting in twain. Thus was the plot discovered, the writer continued, and some of the noblemen privy to it are now in the Bastille.

POISONED OBJECTS

Monarchs weren’t worried only about what they consumed. They were also terrified of touching something coated with toxins, allowing the poison to enter through their skin. As Ambroise Paré, the sixteenth-century French royal physician, wrote, Now poisons do not onely kill being taken into the bodie, but som being put or applied outwardly.

The gentlemen who made Henry VIII’s bed every morning had to kiss every part of the sheets, pillows, and blankets they had touched to prove they had not smeared poison on them. The king was also quite concerned that his enemies might try to poison his son’s clothing. New garments straight from the tailor were never to be put on the prince; they must first be washed and aired before the fireplace to remove any harmful substances. Before the prince donned any items of clothing—hose, shirt, or doublet—his servants tested them; either they rubbed them, inside and outside, against their skin, or they dressed a boy Edward’s size in them and waited to see if he cried out that his skin was on fire.

Henry VIII decreed that no one could even touch his son without express permission. Those few who were permitted to plant a kiss on the boy’s hand were first obliged to perform a reverent assay: in other words, they had to kiss a servant’s hand, after which everyone would stare at the kissed spot to see if it reddened and blistered from some poison the kisser had smeared over an antidote on his lips. Even the cushion on Edward’s chamber pot was tested before he used it, though we are not sure how. Perhaps one of his servants sat on it with his bare butt and waited to see if his cheeks flamed up bright red and burning.

In 1560, Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, William Cecil, concerned about a Catholic plot to poison the new Protestant queen, took extra precautions not only with the queen’s food, but also with her clothing. He decreed that she was not to accept the traditional gifts to a queen—perfumed gloves and sleeves. No unauthorized person was to be allowed near her wardrobe. The royal underwear, and all manner of things that shall touch any part of her majesty’s body bare, had to be carefully guarded, tested, and examined before the queen wore them. With regard to testing the royal underpants, we can only wonder whether Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting kissed them, rubbed them against their hands, or even tried them on to see if their private parts burned before they removed them and handed them to her majesty. Her ladies also tested new gifts of perfume and cosmetics for poison before passing them on to the