Random Most Destructive And Abusive Royal Marriages In History (12 items)

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  (#7) Tamar of Georgia

  • Notable Figure

  Marrying someone not of her choosing proved to be disastrous for the fierce Queen Tamar of Georgia. Though she co-ruled with her father before his death and was his official heir, not everyone was excited about having a queen. Both nobles and members of her own family insisted that she find a man to rule at her side.

  So in 1185, the queen married Yuri Bogolyubsky. It was a huge mistake, and, between his drinking and affairs, he soon proved to be an unfit consort. Tamar kicked him to the curb and annulled the marriage in 1187. Enraged, he led a revolt against his ex-wife that she handily defeated. She went on to rule until 1213. 
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  (#1) George I of Great Britain

  • Notable Figure

  Before he became a British king, George I was the Elector of Hanover in what is today modern Germany. In 1682, George's mother arranged for him to marry the very wealthy Sophia Dorothea of Celle, a Germanic noble. The marriage was unhappy from the start, especially since George felt it was totally within his rights to have mistresses, whom he flaunted in front of his young bride.

  But things got worse when Sophia tried to find her own love story and began a relationship with Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, a Swedish count.

  When George confronted his wife about the relationship, things got heated, and he actually physically attacked Sophia and began beating her. When brutish George left Hanover to assume his new role as King of Great Britain in 1714, he did so without Sophia at his side: he divorced her in 1694 and virtually imprisoned her for the rest of her life.

  The fact that Königsmarck was murdered for his love for Sophia only makes the story all the more tragic.
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  (#11) Prince Albert Promoted Domestic Values But His Parents' Marriage Had Been A Hot Mess

  Prince Albert is best known for his loving marriage to Queen Victoria and his promotion of domestic values. But the marital bliss he shared with his British bride was new for him - his parents had actually been bitterly unhappy. His mother, Princess Louise, had married his father, Ernst I, when she was only 16. Though Ernst was a noted libertine, he did not tolerate a similar trait in his wife, even as his affairs put a strain on the marriage. Louise gave birth to two sons, but that did nothing to bring the couple closer together.

  When Louise took her own lover, it was an act Ernst could not forgive, and he divorced her in 1826 and forbade Louise from seeing her beloved children ever again. Louise was so desperate to see her children that she actually dressed up as a peasant once to blend into a crowd and watch them. Louise died in 1831 at the age of 30, still bereft at the loss of her sons.
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  (#8) Peter the Great

  • Notable Figure

  Russia's Peter I may be remembered as "the Great" - but to his first wife Eudoxia, he was anything but. Eudoxia married the tsar in 1689 in a wedding that Peter's mother had brokered. Though the marriage produced three kids, Peter grew bored with his wife. In 1698, after nine years of marriage, Peter felt it was time to move on.

  So, he divorced Eudoxia and sent her to a convent. With his first wife out of the picture, Peter secretly married his peasant-mistress a few years later.
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  (#9) Margaret of Valois

  • Noble person

  The wedding with perhaps the most directly awful consequences was that of Princess Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre. They came from two sides of the tracks: Marguerite was the willful daughter of Catholic King Henri II of France and his calculating wife Catherine de Medici, and Henri was the Protestant King of Navarre.

  Their marriage in Paris on August 18, 1572, brought both Catholics and Protestants to the city to celebrate the royal nuptials. But the spirit of Christian unity was short-lived. On the night of August 24, the so-called St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre - on the orders of Marguerite's brother King Charles IX and her mother Catherine de Medici - made Paris's streets run red with the blood of thousands of slaughtered Protestants.

  Marguerite's new husband barely escaped with his life, and it was an ominous way to begin a new marriage. Indeed, the pair annulled their marriage in 1599.
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  (#6) Henry II of England

  • Notable Figure

  One of the great romances of the medieval world was the relationship between King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Sparks flew when they first met: Henry was the young, handsome future king of England, and Eleanor was the beautiful, captivating wife of the king of France. But they didn't let a little thing like Eleanor's marital status stand in their way - she got an annulment in 1152, and Henry and Eleanor married a few weeks later.

  Though their marriage was royal, it also was open to the same strains as any other. Henry's eye wandered, and by the 1170s the marriage was beyond the point of repair. He even installed a mistress at his side. Bitter, brilliant, and bold, Eleanor convinced her sons to rebel against their father in 1173.

  Henry put down the rebellion, and, not trusting his shrewd wife, had her locked away for the last 16 years of his life. When her sons Richard and then John inherited the throne, she again became a critical actor in the royal court until her own death in 1204.

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