Random Most Disastrous Royal Weddings In History (14 items)

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  (#1) Philip IV of Spain

  • Dec. at 60 (1605-1665)

  King Philip IV of Spain should have known better when he married his own niece. The Spanish Hapsburg line was already dangerously inbred, to the point that hereditary deformities were killing off huge numbers of children in the family. But that didn't stop the troubling union in 1644.

  The wedding produced the tragic King Charles II, who could barely function due to genetic abnormalities. Genetic tests show the Hapsburg gene pool was so familial that Charles was almost as inbred as a child produced by a brother impregnating his own sister.
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  (#2) George IV of the United Kingdom

  • Dec. at 68 (1762-1830)

  In 1795, George, Prince of Wales – the future King George IV – married his cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick. It wasn't a union of love, much like many royal marriages in the period. George needed help paying off some debts (£630,000, to be exact), and Caroline had money. 

  When George saw his bride for the first time, he exclaimed, “I am not well. Get me a glass of brandy!” It went downhill from there. On their wedding day, George was so drunk that he couldn't stand on his own, and two dukes had to hold him up at the altar. He even wept openly during the ceremony. 
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  (#3) Henry VIII of England

  • Dec. at 56 (1491-1547)

  Pretty much every one of King Henry VIII of England's weddings ended in disaster. His first wedding, to his dead brother's widow, ended with Henry breaking a thousand-year alliance with the Catholic Church and triggering the English Reformation. His second wedding, to a pregnant Anne Boleyn, ended badly when she couldn't bear him a son. She was convicted of treason and beheaded. His third bride, Jane Seymour, died nine days after giving birth. 

  Henry's fourth bride, Anne of Cleves, lucked out. He found her repulsive and divorced her only six months after the wedding. The fifth bride wasn't so lucky. Catherine Howard was Anne Boleyn's cousin, and she was also beheaded for allegedly cheating on the king. Henry's sixth wife, Catherine Parr, managed to outlive her royal husband.
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  (#4) Diana, Princess of Wales

  • Dec. at 36 (1961-1997)

  Diana Spencer faced major jitters on July 29, 1981, and nearly called off her wedding to Charles, Prince of Wales, just days before the ceremony.

  "I can't marry him, I can't do this, this is absolutely unbelievable,” she reportedly told her sister. Diana suspected that Charles was still secretly seeing his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles (and she was probably right). 

  To make matters worse, she spilled some of her perfume on her wedding dress, and it left a noticeable stain. Her makeup artist suggested she hold the stained spot as she walked, making it look like she was simply holding up her dress instead of hiding something.

  Diana wasn't the only one with doubts, either. In 1994, Charles revealed in a candid authorized biography that he was forced into the wedding by his domineering father, Prince Philip.

  After agreeing to go through with the marriage, Diana still mixed up the prince's name, calling him Philip rather than Charles. In 1996, the pair divorced.
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  (#5) Henry IV of France

  • Dec. at 57 (1553-1610)

  On August 18, 1572, a French princess married the king of Navarre. The royal wedding went horribly wrong when it led to one of the worse massacres in the history of France.

  The wedding occurred during the French Wars of Religion, and it instantly divided Paris because the bride and groom practiced different faiths during the darkest days of the Reformation. Margaret of France, daughter of Queen Catherine de Medici and sister of France's king, was raised Catholic. Her groom, King Henry of Navarre, was a Protestant, also known as a Huguenot. The royal Catholics saw the wedding as an opportunity, since many wealthy Huguenots came to Paris for the event.

  Just days after the two wed in a public ceremony, Catholics sent by the queen rose up and slaughtered at least 3,000 Huguenots, in what became known as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The horrific wedding present didn't end the union, and two decades later the groom became King Henry IV of France.
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  (#6) James I of England

  • Dec. at 59 (1566-1625)

  In 1589, King James VI of Scotland sailed across the sea to meet his future bride, Anne of Denmark. But on the way back, storms nearly threatened to sink the ship. James became obsessed with the idea that witches were trying to kill him, and he began a witch hunt as soon as he returned to Scotland.

  Under torture, a woman named Geillis Duncan (the inspiration for an Outlander character accused of witchcraft) blamed other women for bewitching the king and his bride. James's witch persecution spiraled into the North Berwick witch trials, where the king personally tortured accused witches to force confessions. 
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  (#7) Marie Antoinette

  • Dec. at 38 (1755-1793)

  When Marie Antoinette left Austria to marry the heir to the French throne in 1770, she was only 14 years old. The wedding disaster went beyond the fact that she and Louis XVI of France barely knew each other. The French prepared an elaborate white and silver dress covered in diamonds for the foreign bride – but it didn't fit.

  The dressmakers miscalculated the teen bride's measurements, and it was much too small. Marie Antoinette walked down the aisle with a gap in the back of her dress, which was deemed scandalous. This wasn't even the worst part of her union – her marriage eventually led the reviled queen to the guillotine, where she lost her head during the French Revolution.
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  (#8) Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha

  • Dec. at 53 (1719-1772)

  Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha was nervous on her wedding day. In 1736, she had just left Germany to travel to Britain. Augusta crossed the channel to marry the heir to the United Kingdom, Prince Frederick. At the time, Augusta was only 16, and her groom was nearly 30. They only met once before their wedding, and the teenage bride didn't speak any English. 

  Augusta's nerves only grew stronger on her wedding day. She vomited all over her dress – and even worse, she threw up on her mother-in-law, Queen Caroline. 
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  (#9) Edward II of England

  • Dec. at 43 (1284-1327)

  In 1308, King Edward II of England married a young French princess named Isabella. At the time, Isabella was only 12 years old, and she likely wasn't happy when her new husband kissed someone else at the wedding. And even more shocking, the king kissed another man instead of his bride.

  Edward II had a reputation for same-sex affairs, and he didn't try to hide his relationship with a knight named Piers Gaveston, the man he kissed at his wedding. But Isabella got her revenge eventually – she deposed Edward and seized the throne for herself.
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  (#10) Harthacnut

  • Dec. at 24 (1018-1042)

  King Harthacnut, ruler of Denmark and England, became the most memorable guest at a wedding in 1042. The king abruptly dropped dead in the middle of a toast: "As he stood drinking... he fell suddenly to the earth with a tremendous struggle." 

  Harthacnut was the last Scandinavian ruler of England, replaced by Edward the Conqueror.
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  (#11) Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor

  • Dec. at 60 (1459-1519)

  In the past, royals often arranged marriages for their heirs when they were still children. But not many arranged marriages top the 1506 agreement to marry off a fetus.

  That year, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I arranged a double-marriage between his heirs and King Vladislas of Hungary and Bohemia. The alliance created intense bonds between the two royal families, but it came at a high price. In the first wedding, Maximilian's grandson Ferdinand, who was three at the time, was promised to marry Vladislas's daughter Anna, also three. In the second wedding, Maximilian's granddaughter Mary, who was still a baby, would marry the fetus in Vladislas's wife's belly as long as it was a boy.

  The arranged marriages were held in 1515, with tween and teen brides.
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  (#12) Alfred the Great

  • Dec. at 50 (849-899)

  Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, was 19 when he married in 868, and he was already afflicted with hemorrhoids. The night before his wedding, Alfred prayed for God to replace his hemorrhoids with a less painful disease.

  Instead, Alfred woke up with a much worse problem: a flare up of an intestinal issue that made the hemorrhoids look mild. Today, historians suspect it was likely Crohn's disease. At the discovery, Alfred supposedly burst out, “If only I’d stuck with the hemorrhoids!"
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  (#13) Edward VIII of the United Kingdom

  • Dec. at 78 (1894-1972)

  In 1936, King Edward VIII ruled over the powerful British Empire, but he gave it all up and abdicated his throne to marry an American named Wallis Simpson. The scandal created a crisis in the British monarchy because Simpson was divorced. When Edward stepped away from his royal position, he declared, "I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love."

  Simpson's divorce became final the month before she married Edward, scandalizing the British nobility. Even though Edward gave up the throne for marriage, he didn't completely lose his titles. The pair were known as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and they remained married until Edward's death in 1972.
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  (#14) Elizabeth II

  • 92

  On November 20, 1947, Princess Elizabeth planned to wear the famous Fringe Tiara at her wedding. The elaborate tiara, made of diamonds, gold, and silver in 1919, had a long history in the royal family. But on the morning of her wedding, disaster struck.

  According to the royal jeweler, "the Fringe was given to Queen Elizabeth on her wedding day, and the hairdresser broke it." Thinking quickly, the tiara was sent to the House of Garrard workshop – the same designers who originally made the tiara – with a police escort:

  We fixed the tiara that morning, had it sent back to Queen Elizabeth, and then she got married in it. You don't expect the royals to have those sorts of mix-ups, but they do!

  They say rain is unlucky on a wedding day, but apparently a broken tiara is good luck: Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip have been married more than 70 years. 

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