20 Royal Weddings From History That Ended In Disaster

Archduke Franz Ferdinand married Czech countess Sophie Chotek in 1900, but she didn’t have the royal rank required to marry the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Emperor Franz Joseph allowed the marriage only after Ferdinand renounced their children’s rights to the throne. Court protocol also excluded Sophie from many official events and royal boxes, but there was one loophole: she could accompany her husband while he carried out provincial military duties. That’s why Sophie was allowed to be by his side during his 1914 visit to Sarajevo, and why she was sitting beside him in the car when they were both assassinated.

On August 18, 1572, Henry of Navarre married Margaret of Valois in a ceremony held at Notre-Dame in order to put an end to religious wars in France. Four days later, a failed assassination attempt on Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny resulted in his wounding, leading the crown, fearful of reprisal, to authorize a strike. A massacre followed, with an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 victims in the city alone, and up to 30,000 victims throughout France.

Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves was arranged by his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, in 1540. Henry had agreed to the match after viewing a painted portrait of Anne by Hans Holbein, but he was disappointed when they finally met in person. Think of it as a 16th-century version of getting catfished, except your “photo” was an oil portrait and you were already negotiating a royal marriage. Henry claimed that they never consummated their marriage, and it was annulled after just six months. Cromwell, who had helped arrange the disastrous match, was executed as a traitor only a few weeks later, but Anne retained her royal status and outlived all of Henry’s other wives.

In 1906, King Alfonso XIII of Spain married Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg. During their wedding-day procession, their carriage traveled through the packed streets of Madrid. From a hotel balcony, an anarchist dropped a bomb disguised as a bouquet of flowers onto the street. Talk about the absolute worst wedding bouquet imaginable. The bomb exploded beside the royal carriage. Between 24 and 30 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded, although the royal couple escaped uninjured. The Queen’s white wedding dress was splattered with the blood of others.

In October 336 BC, having ordered his bodyguards to keep their distance as a show of confidence in his own security, Philip II of Macedon entered a crowded theater in Aegae. The lavish festival commemorated the wedding of Philip’s daughter to Alexander I of Epirus. But during the procession, Philip was fatally stabbed in the ribs by one of his bodyguards, Pausanias. On his flight, the assassin tripped and was run through by pursuing officers. Philip’s son, twenty-year-old Alexander—later known as Alexander the Great—ascended the throne that day.

Mary, Queen of Scots, married Lord Darnley in 1565, but the marriage soon fell apart. In 1566, Darnley and a group of Protestant lords murdered David Rizzio, the Queen’s secretary. Rizzio was stabbed 56 times in Holyrood Palace in front of the pregnant Queen. The following year, Darnley’s house was destroyed by gunpowder. His body was found in the garden, apparently smothered as he tried to escape.

During a tournament in June 1559 to celebrate King Henry II’s daughter’s marriage (which cemented peace with Spain), the King jousted against the Count of Montgomery. The lance shattered against Henry II’s helmet, and a splinter entered the King’s brain through his eye. For ten days, the leading surgeons of the day, Ambroise Paré and Andreas Vesalius, did their best to save the life of Henry II of France, but failed.

Crown Prince Pedro of Portugal and his lover, Inês de Castro, were secretly married. Pedro’s father, King Afonso IV of Portugal, feared the influence of Inês’s Galician noble family and had her beheaded in 1355. Pedro responded by beginning a civil war and later became king. He then tore the hearts from two of her killers, validated his marriage to Inês, and solemnly reburied her. Talk about taking revenge very, very personally. The tale that Pedro caused courtiers to kiss the hand of his wife’s corpse, however, was a fabrication in 16th-century poetry.

In 453 AD, Attila the Hun married a young woman named Ildico, but the wedding night ended about as badly as possible. The following morning, guards broke down the door and found Attila dead and covered in blood, with Ildico weeping beside his body. There is little evidence of foul play; he apparently suffered from terrible nosebleeds and simply choked to death on his own blood while he slept. Attila’s sons then fought over the throne, and the vast Hunnic Empire fell apart within a few years. One wedding night, and everything went downhill from there.

Weeks after the future Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette in 1770, Paris held a public fireworks celebration for the royal wedding at Place Louis XV. It ended horribly, with police recording 132 deaths. Wind blew flaming embers into a cache of unlit fireworks, starting a fire and sending the crowd rushing toward a single narrow escape route. Unfortunately, the roadway was temporarily blocked by construction trenches and parked vehicles, making the panic even deadlier. Not exactly the wedding celebration anyone had planned. This all happened 23 years before the royal couple themselves were executed by guillotine.

Tsar Ivan IV’s third wife, Marfa Sobakina, married him in October 1571 and was dead just sixteen days later (whether through illness or poison is unclear, although the marriage took place despite her being severely sick). Convinced that her death was the result of a plot, the Tsar proceeded with waves of executions, arrests, and tortures, and her brother and uncles were among those killed.

King Eric XIV of Sweden became increasingly erratic and paranoid and murdered several members of the noble Sture family in 1567. His marriage the following year to his longtime mistress, Karin Månsdotter, a commoner, was also very controversial among the Swedish nobility. And things went downhill fast from there. Just eleven weeks after the marriage, Eric’s brothers rebelled against him. They captured Stockholm and deposed him. Eric died in captivity in 1577, and analysis of his remains later confirmed lethal amounts of arsenic.

In 1200, King John had broken feudal law by marrying the young heiress Isabella of Angoulême. She was already betrothed to John’s vassal Hugh IX de Lusignan. John’s failure to compensate Hugh for the broken betrothal only deepened the offense. Hugh appealed to King Philip II of France, John’s overlord for his continental lands. John ignored the summons, and Philip pronounced John’s fiefs forfeit. Normandy was lost within four years.

In 1308, Edward II married the twelve-year-old Isabella of France. At the wedding celebrations, Edward brazenly gave the jewels gifted by Isabella’s father to his favorite, Piers Gaveston, presented Gaveston with precedence at the coronation banquet in London, and openly embraced his favorite before Isabella and her angry, outraged French relatives. The rift would simmer for eighteen years. In 1326, Isabella and Roger Mortimer successfully invaded England and deposed Edward.

Grand Duke Constantine married Juliane of Saxe-Coburg in 1796, when they were only sixteen. Contemporary memoirs indicate that Constantine would make Juliane stand in porcelain vases for him to shoot at with live pistols and bring rats into her bedroom as targets. Juliane left Russia in 1801 to seek medical treatment abroad and lived safely for decades without returning. The marriage was finally annulled in 1820.

George, Prince of Wales and the future George IV, agreed to marry Caroline of Brunswick in 1795 so Parliament would pay off his enormous debts. When he first met her just days before the wedding, George was so disgusted that he immediately asked for brandy. Not exactly love at first sight! At the wedding, he drank heavily and wept throughout the ceremony. They separated after a year. In 1820, George became king. He never managed to divorce Caroline, but made sure in 1821 that guards kept his own wife out of Westminster Abbey during his coronation.

Caroline Matilda was only fifteen when she married King Christian VII of Denmark in 1766, a king suffering from severe, incapacitating mental illness. The royal physician Johann Friedrich Struensee, hired in 1769 to care for Christian, began an affair with Caroline Matilda and eventually gained so much influence over the king that he effectively ruled Denmark. That arrangement was never going to end quietly. A coup at the royal court in 1772 brought it all crashing down: Struensee was executed by beheading and quartering, while Caroline Matilda was exiled.

In May 1606, False Dmitry I, an impostor claiming to be the son of Ivan the Terrible, married a Polish noblewoman, Marina Mniszech, in Moscow. Hundreds of armed Polish guests were in the Kremlin to mark the occasion, which enraged the Russian boyars, and an uprising took place nine days after the wedding. Dmitry broke his leg escaping out a window, and was dragged back, shot, dismembered, and burned. His ashes were fired from a cannon toward Poland. Marina survived by hiding.

Eudoxia Lopukhina, chosen in 1689 as the bride of the sixteen-year-old Tsar Peter I by his conservative mother, survived him and died in 1731. Peter hated her traditionalist family and deserted his bride within months to pursue his Westernizing reforms and military life. When he returned from his tour abroad in 1698, Peter had her evicted from the palace and forced to become a nun, effectively ending the marriage.

In 1503, James IV of Scotland married Margaret Tudor, which cemented the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between England and Scotland. However, ten years later, James allied with France. When Henry VIII of England invaded France, James declared war against England to honor this alliance. In 1513, the Scottish army was annihilated at the Battle of Flodden; James and ten earls perished, and he would be the last British Isles monarch to die in battle.

This content was created with the help of AI.