Last updated on April 25th, 2026 at 02:10 pm
What if the most “scandalous” women in royal history were not reckless at all—but strategic, trapped, lonely, and politically dangerous? I chose Sex with the Queen expecting gossip, but what I found was a vivid, deeply readable history of how queens’ bodies, marriages, pregnancies, and reputations were turned into instruments of dynastic control.
Sex with the Queen is best for readers who love royal history, women’s history, palace politics, Tudor drama, and smart narrative nonfiction that reads like a high-stakes chronicle.
Not for readers who want dry academic prose, minimal speculation, or a spoiler-free overview—because this book, and this review, go straight into the scandal, the politics, and the endings.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics is a work of popular history by Eleanor Herman, published by HarperCollins on April 11, 2006.
Eleanor Herman is a bestselling popular historian whose work repeatedly circles around power, sex, monarchy, and the hidden mechanics of elite life.
In the book’s own “About the Author,” she is described as an accomplished lecturer and TV/radio commentator on royal issues; current publisher and author pages likewise identify her as a New York Times bestselling author who has also written Sex with Kings and hosted history programming for The History Channel and National Geographic Channel.
This is not a conventional academic monograph. It is narrative popular history—part political history, part social history, part gender history, part royal scandal archive. Herman’s subject is not simply “queens who had lovers.”
Her real subject is the structure around them: arranged marriage, dynastic reproduction, court surveillance, misogynistic double standards, factional warfare, and the use of sexual accusation as a political weapon.
That framing is visible from the first pages, where she contrasts “virile kings” and “chaste queens,” then moves quickly from palace glamour to reproductive duty, sexual hypocrisy, and the problem of paternity.
The core argument of Sex with the Queen is stated with unusual bluntness: “It was never adultery alone… It was politics.” Herman argues that queens were not principally punished for sex itself, but for the political consequences of sex—or even for allegations of sex—especially when those allegations threatened succession, factional balance, or the legitimacy of heirs.
That is the book’s real intellectual hook, and it is why Sex with the Queen is better than its deliberately sensational title suggests. In my reading, Herman is ultimately less interested in bedroom titillation than in how courts weaponized female sexuality.
2. Background
The phrase “900 years” is not just marketing flourish. Herman stretches her narrative from early medieval Europe into the twentieth century, ending with Diana, Princess of Wales.
What the book does especially well is put queens back into material reality.
Herman reminds us that palace life was often cold, filthy, monitored, lonely, medically dangerous, and emotionally brutal. She writes of drafty rooms, rats, insects, spies among servants, children taken away for state purposes, and husbands who were cruel, indifferent, impotent, absent, gay, or simply impossible.
In one of the book’s most revealing early formulations, Herman asks us to consider “why a decent God-fearing woman… might seek a little love and understanding in the midst of her misery.”
That matters because it shifts the moral frame. Instead of beginning with “the queen sinned,” Herman begins with “what sort of system produced this outcome?” For me, that is the book’s most modern instinct.
3. Sex with the Queen summary
The governing idea: royal adultery is about bloodlines
Early in the introduction, Herman explains why female adultery mattered so much more than male adultery in dynastic systems. Kings could father bastards without threatening the succession; queens, however, carried the heirs.
Before modern paternity testing, the queen’s fidelity was central to the myth of royal blood. Herman even notes that a scientific means of establishing paternity did not arrive until “the blood test of 1927.”
This section is crucial because it explains the whole structure of the book. Queens were expected to be Marian figures—chaste, patient, obedient—while kings were often indulged. Herman sums up the asymmetry through examples from Charles II, Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Peter the Great, showing that royal mistresses could become quasi-official institutions while queens were expected to remain sanctified vessels of lineage.
Chapter 1: Life behind palace walls
This may be the most important chapter in the book because it builds the emotional and political conditions that make the rest intelligible. Herman dismantles the fantasy of palace life. Palaces are shown as sites of discomfort, surveillance, and powerlessness.
Queens were often married by proxy, sent abroad, deprived of familiar attendants, denied authority over children, and trapped in marriages designed around diplomacy and the uterus.
Herman is particularly strong on the grotesque details of royal marriage. Princesses were often valued, in Napoleon’s awful phrasing, as a reproductive instrument: “I want to marry a womb.”
Sex with the Queen then piles on example after example: humiliating wedding nights, husbands who were sexually incompetent or repellent, and medical systems that bled, purged, and butchered royal bodies.
The result is that adultery, when it comes, no longer feels like a cheap scandal. It feels like the predictable crack in a dehumanizing system.
Chapter 2: The queen takes a lover
This section distinguishes between ruling queens and queen consorts. A ruling queen—like Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, or Isabella II—could often survive public or semi-public sexual irregularity because she held power in her own right.
A powerless consort could not. Herman explains the mechanics of secrecy: female accomplices, private staircases, spa visits, false illnesses, hidden pregnancies, and forged alibis.
This chapter also contains one of Herman’s clearest interpretive moves: that a queen’s lover was often not just a lover but a political ally. If a queen and a powerful man formed a faction, accusations of adultery became a wonderfully efficient way to destroy both.
Medieval queens and Tudor victims
The medieval chapters move through women like Urraca of Castile and Eleanor of Aquitaine, but the emotional center of this early section is Anne Boleyn. Herman’s treatment of Anne is striking because she flatly argues that the most famous executed “adulterous” queen was innocent.
She points to impossible dates in the charges, missing co-conspirator ladies-in-waiting, and the political utility of removing Anne for Henry VIII and rival factions. Herman’s conclusion is devastating: Anne and Catherine Howard were not destroyed by uncontrollable female lust but by court ambition.
This is where the book becomes more than entertainment. Herman is teaching the reader how accusation works. Adultery is not merely a fact pattern; it is an instrument.
Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: escape, survival, and open arrangements
As the book moves forward, the treatment of queens becomes slightly less medieval in method, but not necessarily less ruthless in effect. Some women manage to survive through annulment, widowhood, or strategic alliances.
Herman shows how Maria Francisca of Portugal, Maria Carolina of Naples, and other queens navigated political systems in which sexual relationships could become tools of regime change.
Herman is especially interested in queens whose affairs were tolerated because they benefited the state. That point returns in the conclusion, where she contrasts politically useful affairs with politically dangerous ones.
When a liaison stabilized the throne, restored rights, improved administration, or aligned with elite interests, it might be tolerated. When it threatened succession or empowered rival factions, it could be fatal.
Nineteenth century: morality tightens
One of Herman’s sharper historical observations is that the nineteenth century became, in some ways, morally harsher toward female adultery than earlier eras.
She contrasts earlier shrugging tolerance with Victorian-style domestic ideals: the sturdy husband, maternal wife, rosy-cheeked children, concealed male vice, and socially unforgivable female “fallenness.”
In her telling, the modern moral order became less open and more punitive.
Diana, Princess of Wales
The final major section brings the long arc into the modern tabloid monarchy.
Herman’s argument is that even in late twentieth-century Britain, ancient patterns survived: a neglected princess, a husband emotionally tied elsewhere, a public fascinated by her body, sexuality, and supposed instability, and a palace that could not fully contain scandal.
This is one of the most readable parts of the book, but also one of the most contentious. Herman’s Diana chapter includes claims and character judgments that now read more aggressively than some readers will like.
Even so, structurally, it serves her argument: Diana is the late-modern proof that monarchy still turns private pain into public theater.
“The Politics of Adultery”
Herman’s concluding point is the book’s strongest and most memorable. She explicitly states that what mattered was not sex alone but its political significance.
Affairs that helped the state could be tolerated; affairs that threatened state interests or court factions were punished.
This is the sentence I would use to summarize the whole book for search readers: royal adultery in Herman’s telling is never just about desire—it is about legitimacy, inheritance, image, and power.
4. Sex with the Queen analysis
I came away feeling that Sex with the Queen is a bold, vivid, highly persuasive piece of narrative history—messy in places, yes, but never dull, and often genuinely illuminating.
What impressed me most is the clarity of Herman’s framework. She could have written 300-plus pages of salacious palace anecdotes and left it there. Instead, she gives the anecdotes a governing logic: queens were trapped in systems that demanded chastity, fertility, obedience, and dynastic reliability, while also exposing them to humiliation, loneliness, and factional attack.
That framework makes the book feel thematically coherent rather than episodic.
Emotionally, the book landed harder on me than I expected. I expected scandal; I did not expect to feel so strongly the ache of these women being bartered, watched, judged, and reduced to wombs.
Herman’s line about a neglected queen “belching forth as many royal children as her overwrought uterus could bear” is crude, but it captures the violence of the institution with unforgettable force.
At the same time, the book is unmistakably a popular history. Herman writes with verve, compression, and theatricality. She likes a sharp phrase, a grotesque image, a cutting one-liner.
That style is exactly why so many readers find her addictive. A current author-page blurb for Sex with the Queen quotes Entertainment Weekly praising the “hot and heavy details,” and that is fair: Herman absolutely knows how to make history move.
My own two-sentence verdict: **This is an entertaining, provocative, and often brilliant work of popular royal history.
It is not neutral, and it is not shy, but it turns scandal into a serious argument about how women in power are controlled, punished, and remembered.**
5. Evaluation and evidence
Does Herman support her arguments? Largely, yes—but with qualifications.
On the plus side, the book is heavily sourced. The book includes substantial notes and a long bibliography, drawing on memoirs, letters, court chronicles, and modern historians. That alone signals that Herman is not improvising scandal out of thin air.
She is strongest when she works from structure rather than certainty. For example, her broader argument that adultery allegations were political weapons is very well supported across centuries, from Queen Judith in 830 to Anne Boleyn to later queens targeted by hostile factions.
She is also strong when she points to contradictions inside official narratives. In Anne Boleyn’s case, Herman notes that several dates in the indictment are impossible and that the absence of implicated ladies-in-waiting weakens the case. That is a solid interpretive move, and it gives the reader a method for skepticism rather than just a conclusion.
Where the book becomes shakier is in the treatment of rumor, especially in later sections.
Herman is usually aware that rumor is rumor, but she sometimes narrates possibilities with such energy that the boundary between documented fact and vivid speculation can blur.
The Diana section is the clearest example. It is fascinating, readable, and thematically apt, but it can feel more tabloid-adjacent than the stronger historical chapters.
So, does the book fulfill its purpose? Absolutely. It meaningfully contributes to popular understanding of queenship by reframing adultery as a political category rather than a merely moral one.
Even where I wanted more caution, I never felt the book lacked a serious interpretive center.
6. Strengths and weaknesses
Strengths
The biggest strength is the thesis. Herman gives the reader a lens, not just a pile of stories. “It was politics” is the sentence that keeps reverberating.
The second strength is readability. Herman writes like someone determined never to let history lie flat on the page. Her prose is dramatic, quick, image-rich, and memorable. That is why the book can cover roughly nine centuries without feeling deadened by chronology.
The subtitle’s promise of “900 Years” is not empty; the table of contents and the range of queens covered show real historical sweep.
The third strength is empathy. Underneath the wit and scandal, Herman is deeply interested in what it felt like to be a queen inside a dynastic machine. That human feeling is what makes this book more than royal gossip.
Weaknesses
The biggest weakness is tonal overreach. Sometimes Herman’s relish for the outrageous can make the prose feel too certain, too theatrical, or too modern in its psychological confidence.
The second weakness is uneven evidentiary firmness. Some chapters feel robustly grounded; others lean more heavily on rumor, hostile contemporaries, or retrospective interpretation.
The third weakness is that the book occasionally risks reproducing the very fascination it critiques. It wants to expose the politics of scandal, but it also knows scandal sells. That tension never disappears.
Still, for me, these weaknesses did not undo the book. They simply mark it as what it is: high-quality popular history, not a narrowly cautious academic study.
7. Comparison with similar works
The most obvious companion volume is Herman’s own Sex with Kings, which focuses on royal mistresses rather than queens. Herman herself and current publisher/author profiles position Sex with the Queen as a follow-up to that earlier bestseller.
Compared with many monarchy books that stay tightly biographical—say, a single life of Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette, or Diana—Sex with the Queen is broader and more argumentative.
It is less about one woman and more about a pattern across centuries.
Compared with stricter academic gender history, Herman is more dramatic and less hedged. Compared with sensational royal-compilation books, she is more interpretive and historically minded.
That middle position is exactly why the book works so well for general readers: it gives you story, scandal, system, and argument at once.
8. Important quotations and lines from the book
Here are some short, highly useful lines from the book that capture its thesis and tone:
“It was never adultery alone… It was politics.”
“The ancient double standard… was rooted not in misogyny, but in biology.” Herman says this provocatively while discussing dynastic paternity; whether one agrees with the phrasing or not, it is central to her explanatory model.
“Many kings acknowledged children they knew had been fathered by someone else.” This line shows how flexible dynastic “truth” could become when political convenience demanded it.
“I want to marry a womb.” Herman uses Napoleon’s line to strip royal marriage of romance and reveal its reproductive logic.
“Someone has come between my husband and myself.” Isabella of France’s public framing of her marital crisis becomes a political declaration, not merely a personal complaint.
“She excelled them all.” Herman quotes a contemporary on Anne Boleyn’s social force, reminding us that charisma was political capital.
These are brief, but they tell you almost everything: the body, the bloodline, the accusation, the faction, the theater.
9. Who should read this book?
I would recommend Sex with the Queen most strongly to readers interested in:
royal history, women in power, queens consort vs ruling queens, Tudor and Stuart courts, palace culture, dynastic succession, European monarchy, and the political uses of sexual accusation.
It is very suitable for general readers.
Specialists may object to its briskness, its occasional speculative edge, or its appetite for dramatic flourish, but even they will have to admit that Herman asks the right large question: what do societies really punish when they say they are punishing sexual misconduct?
10. Conclusion
My final judgment is simple: Sex with the Queen is one of those rare nonfiction books that can satisfy a casual browser looking for royal scandal and a serious reader looking for a strong interpretive idea.
What stayed with me was not the sensational title, nor even the individual affairs. It was the recurring human pattern underneath them: women turned into symbols, wives turned into wombs, queens judged against impossible standards, and sex used as a language for political attack.
Herman’s conclusion is persuasive because the case studies keep proving it—again and again, across roughly nine centuries, courts cared less about sin than about power.
So yes, I would recommend this book. Not because it is scandalous, but because it is intelligent about scandal.
Not because it strips queens of dignity, but because it gives them back motive, context, and, often, tragic intelligibility.
For me, this was not just a book about illicit love. It was a book about monarchy as a machine—one that demanded obedience, manufactured reputation, and punished women most harshly when they became politically consequential.
