I promised that I’d tell you about the whippings today. Louis was weaned when he was twenty-five months old. That was also when he first experienced a whipping. His father, Henri IV commanded Louis’s governess to, “…whip him every time he is stubborn, or does something bad. There is nothing in the world that will do him more good.” None of the servants wanted to whip their future king, so they told him that his father had commanded them to do it. They said he should welcome the whippings rather than resist them. He appeared to accept this, as his physician Héroard records in his journal. “Awakens at eight, starts out in a bad humour: cries, is whipped, puts his hand on his back end, saying, Tickle me! Tickle me! Cries out of spite, pacified.”
There is another aspect of the father and son relationship which strikes me as very strange. Henri often demanded that his son sleep with him. On the first occasion, Louis didn’t want to, and Henri threatened to sleep with Louis’s beloved nurse instead. When father and son did sleep together, they compared the size of their genitals. I can’t help feeling that Henri was a rather overgrown child himself.
I wrote yesterday that the whole court were desperate that Louis would produce heirs. His nurses and maids encouraged him in this direction. He also slept with his younger sister, Elizabeth, and examined her intimately. Since Héoard was always close at hand, I can only hope that this education stopped short of incest. Elizabeth later became queen of Spain and Portugal. His youngest full sister, Henrietta, married Charles I of England. It’s hardly a happy family, is it? Those he loved put pressure on Louis to grow into a virile man, but they also threatened him with castration. His father took him to bed, and compared penises with him. His physician’s early and frequent administration of suppositories gave him an anal fixation. It’s great material for the next volume of the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures.