In 1612, the unhappy marriage of Robert Devereux, the third Earl of Essex, erupted into a prolonged and contentious scandal. His countess, Frances, declared to all and sundry that Essex was impotent and that their marriage had never been consummated. One of London’s notable gossips reported that “there was a divorce to be sued this term twixt the Earl of Essex and his lady, and he was content (whether true or feigned) to confess insufficiency in himself.” But when it came to the actual trial Essex refused to acknowledge impotence—except in matters of his wife. A group of gentlemen were invited to witness his manly potential and agreed to its general working order; a group of ladies in turn inspected a heavily veiled Frances and pronounced her a virgin. After months of acrimony King James ordered the marriage dissolved on grounds of nullity. The Lord Chamberlain himself reported (with some glee) that “it was truth that the earl had no ink in his pen.” But many London gossips firmly maintained that Frances had petitioned for divorce solely because she was in love with a dashing, handsome young lord, the Earl of Somerset, whom she married shortly after the annulment of her first marriage.

Alex is only roughly modeled on the Earl of Essex—my Earl of Sheffield and Downes is not and never was impotent—but the pleasures and dangers of scandal as depicted in Potent Pleasures are fully historical. The third Earl of Essex was plagued by charges of impotency throughout the remainder of his life. When his second marriage produced no children, the whispers grew louder. On the other hand, Frances was never free from scandal either. When she was accused of murder some years later, most of England linked the charge to her dubious claims of virginity.

Yet scandal and love are sometimes true bedfellows. Frances and her second husband, the Earl of Somerset, lived together until her death in 1632. Their marriage—consecrated in the midst of intense speculation—was celebrated by the poet John Donne in one of the most beautiful of English love poems:

Now, as in Tullia’s tomb one lamp burnt clear
Unchanged for fifteen hundred year,
May these love-lamps we here enshrine,
In warmth, light, lasting, equal the divine.
Fire ever doth aspire,
And makes all like itself, turns all to fire,
But ends in ashes; which these cannot do,
For none of these is fuel, but fire too.
This is joy’s bonfire, then, where love’s strong arts
Make of so noble individual parts
One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.

Look for the exciting new
novel from Eloisa James

Midnight Pleasures

Available from Delacorte Press
in August 2000

Chapter 1

London, December 1804
Brandenburg House
Mayfair, London