Six days after a royal wedding meant to end France’s religious civil wars, the streets of Paris ran with blood. The marriage of Marguerite de Valois, the Catholic sister of the King, to Henry of Navarre, the Protestant leader, took place on the doorstep of Notre Dame in August 1572. Henry, barred from entering the Catholic cathedral, stood outside while a stand-in escorted Marguerite to the altar. The architect of the union, Catherine de Medici, watched from inside.
On August 22nd, an assassin shot Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the highest-ranking Protestant in France. The shot wounded him but failed to kill him. With thousands of Huguenots in Paris for the wedding and fears of reprisal from the new Protestant brother-in-law, the royal council met in secret. They authorized a preemptive strike against the Protestant leadership.
On the night of August 24th, church bells rang and Catholic militias began going door to door. Coligny was thrown from his window and dragged through the city. The killing spree expanded from leaders to ordinary civilians, then spread to a dozen provincial cities. Historical estimates put the death toll at around 3,000 in Paris alone and between 5,000 and 10,000 nationally, with older figures reaching as high as 30,000.
Henry of Navarre was forced to convert to Catholicism to save his life in September 1572. He was held at court for years before escaping and converting back. He would eventually become King Henry IV of France and was assassinated in 1610. Marguerite’s account of that night describes hiding a wounded Protestant nobleman in her bedroom.
The marriage was annulled in 1599 with no children. A different kind of disaster struck a French royal wedding in 1770. Marie Antoinette of Austria married the Dauphin Louis at Versailles on May 16th. The couple was 14 and 15 years old.
The wedding celebrations ended on May 30th in Paris with a massive fireworks display that went wrong when a rocket misfired and set a wooden structure on fire. The crowd of roughly half a million surged toward the Rue Royale, where they met oncoming carriages and open construction trenches. People were trampled, crushed, and pushed into the river. The official death toll was 132, with hundreds more injured.
It remains the deadliest fireworks disaster in history. The newlyweds, who were not present, donated their allowance to the victims. The marriage remained unconsummated for seven years. Their first child was born in December 1778.
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were both guillotined in 1793, the queen in the same square where 132 of their wedding guests had died 23 years earlier. In 1795, George, Prince of Wales, married his first cousin Caroline of Brunswick for money. Parliament agreed to pay his debts only if he married a legitimate Protestant princess. He met Caroline just two days before the ceremony.
According to the Earl of Malmesbury, the prince walked into the room, looked at her, walked out, and asked for brandy, saying he was not well. At the wedding, George was so drunk he had to be propped up. He stared at his mistress throughout. According to Caroline’s later account, he passed out in the fireplace of the bridal chamber, where she left him.
Their only child, Princess Charlotte, was born nine months later. The couple separated immediately. Caroline moved to Italy and lived openly with an Italian courier. In 1820, Parliament tried her for adultery.
The next year, she was physically barred from George’s coronation. She died three weeks later. In 1606, a man claiming to be the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible was crowned Tsar in Moscow alongside his Polish Catholic bride, Marina Mniszech. He had taken the throne with Polish backing.
Marina was the first Catholic crowned in Russia. Nine days later, the boyar Vasily Shuysky led an uprising. The pretender tried to escape through a Kremlin window, broke his leg, was caught, and shot. His body was displayed on Red Square for three days with a flute jammed in its mouth.
The body was then burned, and the ashes were packed into a cannon and fired westward toward Poland. This is recorded in contemporary Russian chronicles. Marina survived and later recognized a second pretender as her resurrected husband. After the Romanov dynasty was established in 1613, Marina, her Cossack ally, and her three-year-old son were captured.
The child was publicly hanged. Marina died in prison the same year. In 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Within months the marriage was breaking down.
Darnley demanded the crown matrimonial, and when she refused, he joined a conspiracy of Protestant lords. In March 1566, Darnley and accomplices burst into Mary’s supper room and stabbed her Italian secretary, David Rizzio, to death. The body bore 56 wounds. Mary was six months pregnant.
On the night of February 10, 1567, Darnley’s lodging was blown apart by gunpowder. His body and his valet’s were found in the garden unmarked by the explosion. The Privy Council concluded they had been strangled before the blast. Three months later, Mary married James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the man widely suspected of the murder.
She claimed Bothwell had raped her after intercepting her on the road. Mary was forced to abdicate, escaped to England, and was held captive for 19 years before being beheaded in 1587. Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves in January 1540 as a diplomatic alliance. The marriage had been arranged by Thomas Cromwell.
Five days before the wedding, Henry attempted to surprise Anne with a romantic game in disguise. Anne, watching bull-baiting from a window, was repelled by the strange man and shoved him off. When he returned as the king, he reportedly muttered, “I like her not. ”
He married her anyway.
The marriage was annulled six months later on the grounds of non-consummation. Henry’s deposition said he had left her “as good a maid as I found her. ” The famous story about Henry calling her a mare is not contemporaneous; it appeared in a hostile source over a century later. Thomas Cromwell was beheaded 19 days after the annulment.
Anne accepted a settlement, kept her head, and is the only one of the six wives buried in Westminster Abbey. In 48 AD, while Emperor Claudius was inspecting a harbor at Ostia, his wife, the Empress Messalina, married another man. The ceremony was a standard Roman wedding with a yellow veil, sacrifices, a dowry, and witnesses. The groom was the consul designate, Gaius Silius.
Messalina was still legally married to the emperor, making it bigamy and treason. When Claudius returned, he was indecisive. His freedman Narcissus, fearing Messalina if she lived, sent guards with orders claiming to come from the emperor. Messalina was offered suicide but could not do it.
The tribune ran her through with a sword. Her name was chiseled off public inscriptions. Claudius reportedly said nothing at dinner and asked for more wine. In November 1894, Tsar Nicholas II married Princess Alix of Hesse.
The wedding had been moved up by 25 days because his father had just died. It was held during state mourning, less than a month after the burial. The peasants said, “She came to us behind a coffin. ”
At the coronation celebrations in May 1896, a people’s feast was scheduled at Khodynka Field, which was still cross-crossed with trenches from army exercises.
Around half a million people gathered overnight to wait for gifts. A rumor that the gifts were running out sparked a surge. The official death count was 1,389 people crushed or trampled, with another 1,300 injured. That night, Nicholas and Alexandra were scheduled to attend a ball at the French ambassador’s residence.
Nicholas wanted to cancel, but his uncles insisted it would insult the French. He attended, opened the ball, and left early. Nicholas’s diary that night reads, in part, “Today a great sin occurred. ” Nicholas, Alexandra, and their five children were murdered in a basement in Yekaterinburg in July 1918.
In 1745, a 16-year-old German princess named Sophie became Catherine Alexeievna and married Peter Fyodorovich, the heir to the Russian throne. According to Catherine’s memoirs, Peter informed her on the wedding night that he was in love with one of her maids and then went to sleep. Peter played with toy soldiers in the marital bed and had them court-martialed. He insisted on Prussian uniforms even when Russia was at war with Prussia.
In one famous episode, Catherine found Peter solemnly hanging a rat by the neck from a gallows. He explained the rat had eaten two of his lead soldiers and under the laws of war this was punishable by death. Catherine wrote she found this difficult to admire. The marriage went unconsummated for years.
Catherine took lovers and gave birth to a son named Paul in 1754, his paternity debated. Peter ascended the throne in 1762 and gave back all of Russia’s gains in the Seven Years’ War to Prussia. Within six months, Catherine led a coup against him. Peter was arrested and died eight days later in custody, killed by Alexei Orlov.
The official cause of death was “hemorrhoidal colic. ” Catherine ruled Russia for the next 34 years. In 1881, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria married Princess Stephanie of Belgium. The marriage was a slow-motion disaster.
Rudolf was a liberal intellectual, a womanizer, and heavy drinker. He infected Stephanie with gonorrhea, leaving her infertile after one daughter. By 1889, Rudolf was conducting an affair with 17-year-old Baroness Mary Vetsera. On January 30th, he shot her in the head at his hunting lodge in Mayerling.
Then he sat with her body for hours before shooting himself. His valet found them at around 8:00 in the morning. The court first reported a heart attack, then admitted suicide, but did not mention Mary Vetsera. Her body was smuggled out, propped between her two uncles in a carriage as if she were still alive, and buried quietly at night.
Her farewell letters, rediscovered in 2015, confirmed she went to Mayerling knowing she would die. One ends, “I am happier in death than life. ”
With Rudolf dead, the succession passed to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. His assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 sparked the First World War, which led to the collapse of the Habsburg empire.
Stephanie outlived everyone, remarried against her family’s wishes, and died in 1945 days after Soviet troops looted her castle.
