300 Pounds of Caviar, Champagne Sorbet, and More Ways to Party Like a Royal

On October 14, 1971, over 100 bejeweled guests, including 60 royals and heads of state from across the globe, dined in a silk-canopied banquet hall, part of an elaborate tent city which had risen near the ancient city of Persepolis, in Iran. Guests including Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco, US Vice President Spiro Agnew, and England’s Prince Philip and Princess Anne feasted on 300 pounds of caviar, imperial peacock, and Champagne sorbet.

After dinner, the attendees were treated to a fireworks and light show, and a historical pageant in the ruins of Persepolis, while an orchestra played a new work from Greek French composer Iannis Xenakis. The evening, one journalist wrote, was “an expression of the most absolute luxury…and the most complete refinement.”

This legendary banquet was part of a multiday celebration of the 2500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian empire by Cyrus the Great. Thrown by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, the event had taken over a decade to plan and officially cost $16.8 million (well over $100 million today), although the likely bill was much higher. “This was no party of the year,” Orson Welles stated. “It was the celebration of 25 centuries!”

But as author Robert Steele notes in The Shah’s Imperial Celebrations of 1971: Nationalism, Culture and Politics in Late Pahlavi Iran, while the party was devised to cement the Shah’s reputation as the leader of a national cultural renaissance, it ignored the millions in Iran who lived in poverty. The celebration, the Washington Daily News noted, was a “vain, pompous, vulgar show of wealth.”

Until recently, royals have rarely let optics get in the way of a good party. In the first century, the Roman emperor Nero hosted days-long bacchanals (and some say orgies) in a rotating banquet hall that overserved guests, allegedly, only allowing them to leave so they could vomit and continue to eat and drink.

However, not every royal party was thrown simply to gratify a monarch’s gluttonous desires. And no one in the ancient world knew how to throw a party for diplomatic reasons like Cleopatra. One of the richest people in the world, the Egyptian queen used her sumptuous banquets as a way to shock, awe, and inebriate potential allies and enemies alike.

In 41 BC, Cleopatra hosted a dinner to celebrate the Roman leader Mark Antony, who was a well-known party animal. Twelve banquet rooms were lined with glimmering purple tapestries, the table was set with bejeweled golden plates, and the couches were sumptuous and heavy. Stacy Schiff writes in Cleopatra: A Life:

Cleopatra’s preparations defied description. Antony thrilled especially to the elaborate constellations of lights she had strung through the tree branches overhead. They cast a gleaming lace of rectangles and circles over the sultry summer night, creating “a spectacle that has seldom been equaled for beauty”… Antony gaped at the extraordinary display. Cleopatra smiled modestly. She had been in a hurry. She would do better next time… At meal’s end she sent her guests off with everything they had admired: the textiles, the gem-studded tableware, and the couches as well.

Antony was duly dazzled, and he and Cleopatra were soon partners in statecraft and in bed. But they continued to party hard, forming a drinking club known as the “Society of the Inimitable Livers,” whose members, according to Plutarch, “entertained one another daily in turn, with an extravagance of expenditure beyond measure or belief.” Even as the walls closed in, leading to both of their suicides, they kept partying, now calling their drinking society “Companions to the Death.”

Perhaps the most elaborate diplomatic party ever thrown was the legendary Field of Cloth of Gold, an 18-day summit (June 7–24, 1520) of King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France, meant to cement peace between the two countries after centuries of war.

Held in Northern France, Henry stayed in the English-controlled town of Guînes, which was kitted out with a magnificent temporary timber structure called the “crystal palace” for its number of expensive windows, and hundreds of tents for his retinue of over 5,000. Meanwhile, Francis stayed nearby in the French village Ardres, with his over 5,000 courtiers, in another tent city topped by a 120-foot-tall tent covered in gold, which blew away before festivities began.

In the countryside between the two cities were more tents and competition fields. The weeks were filled with jousts, banquets, balls, masques (including one where Henry appeared as Hercules, complete with a lion pelt made of gold thread), sporting events, and diplomatic meetings. The kings jousted, the queen threw balls where everyone, including the monarchs, danced energetically, and hundreds of gallons of beer (made from a special temporary brewery) and wine were imbibed.

Commoners were also supplied with all the alcohol they could handle. “There were vacaboundes, plowmen, laborers and of the bragery [rabble], wagoners and beggers that for drunkenness lay in routes and heapes, so great resort thether came,” one chronicler wrote.

During one drinking party, Henry VIII almost caused an international incident when he challenged Francis to a wrestling match. Francis, using a maneuver called the “tour de Bretayne,” quickly pinned Henry, much to his embarrassment. “So decisive was Francis’s win,” Glenn Richardson writes in The Field of Cloth of Gold, “that according to the conventions governing these things, he was not obliged to offer Henry a second go when asked to, and chose not to do so.”

On the last day, mass was celebrated, when a great dragon kite made by the English flew through the sky, amazing those below, as fireworks exploded from its nostrils. But despite these wonders, the expensive extravaganza accomplished very little. “What should have been a politically advantageous meeting quickly degenerated into a mere masque for the prodigal entertainment of two extravagant courts,” Alison Weir writes in The Six Wives of Henry VIII, “whose sovereigns postured in new outfits of increasing splendor every day and ended up barely able to conceal their jealousy of each other.”

Sometimes royal parties could be not only purposeless, but deadly. In 1398, Queen Isabeau of France threw a masque to celebrate the marriage of her lady-in-waiting. Her husband, the mentally ill Charles VI, arrived at the party in disguise with a group of friends. Dressed as wild mountain men, they announced their arrival with howling, cursing, and frenetic dancing.

The king and his men’s costumes were made of linen soaked in resin and flax. When his brother Louis I, Duke of Orleans, arrived, he lifted his torch over his head to try and guess the identity of the wild men. He ended up setting one on fire.

All hell broke loose. Four of the wild men caught fire, screaming on the floor in agony as flames consumed them. Louis was saved by his quick-thinking Aunt Joan, Duchess of Berry, who threw her long skirts over him, while another wild man found safety by jumping into a vat of wine. Queen Isabeau fainted.

The disaster known as the Bal des Ardents (Ball of the Burning Men) infuriated the public, who were disgusted by the court’s debauchery and the danger the king had been put in. King Charles VI was emotionally shattered, and the court was forced to do penance, while Orleans donated money to the church to atone for his actions.

While not as tragic, royal parties, even those with diplomatic intentions, often descended into sloppiness. When the Danish king Christian IV came on a state visit to see his sister, Anna, and her husband, the often soused James I of England, in 1606, the court put on an elaborate pageant (a specialty of Queen Anna) recreating Solomon’s Temple.

According to The Cradle King, the Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain by Alan Stewart, the party quickly went sideways. One drunken courtier, playing the Queen of Sheba, spilled a casket of edible delicacies all over King Christian, though he hardly seemed to mind.

“His Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba,” one reveler recalled, per Stewart, “but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and laid on a bed of state, which was not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen which had been bestowed on his garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other good matters. The entertainment and show went forward, and most of the presenters went backward, or fell down; wine did so occupy their upper chambers.”

It was another more sophisticated 17th century king who would take the art of entertaining to another level. In 1664, Louis XIV, the Sun King himself, threw a legendary weeklong fête known as the “Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle.” The first party held at his new palace of Versailles, it was officially a celebration of the king’s formidable mother Queen Anne and his meek Spanish wife Marie-Thérèse. But all the guests knew it was really in honor of the king’s mistress, Louise de La Vallière.

Centered around a temporary island palace constructed in the gardens of Versailles, the festival’s conceit was that this was a mystical island, where men had been bewitched by an enchantress named Alcina. There were balls, tournaments, lotteries, and performances of a new play by Molière and a ballet by Jean-Baptiste Lully. The king took part in the pageant himself, as Antonia Fraser writes in Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King:

Louis, flashing with the jewels which studded his silver breastplate, flame-coloured plumes nodding from his head, took the role of their leader Roger, and rode the finest horse among his troop… ‘A small army’ of actors, dancers, musicians and stage-hands also took part.

In an ultimate show of decadence, the party palace itself was burned to the ground.
“At the end of the festival, there was a huge display of fireworks,” Fraser writes.  “Alcina’s palace, dome and all, was reduced to cinders and vanished into the waters of the ornamental lake where it stood.”

These extravagances would continue until the revolution, increasingly drawing ire from the suffering public. Marie Antoinette, a legendary hostess, was particularly targeted for her love of entertaining, especially her epic gambling parties, like one she threw in 1778 for her 21st birthday at Versailles.

“Play started on the night of 30 October and continued to the morning of the 31st, and then went on again until 3 a.m. on the morning of the Feast of All Saints,” Antonia Fraser writes in Marie Antoinette: The Journey. “When the King taxed his wife with this, she replied naughtily: ‘You said we could play, but you never specified for how long.’ The King merely laughed and said quite cheerfully: ‘You’re all worthless, the lot of you.’”

Like the Shah of Iran and the French Bourbons, the doomed Russian royal family would also throw a legendary soiree that later symbolized their dynasty’s excesses. On February 11 and 13 of 1903, Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra held a celebration to mark the history of the Romanov dynasty. The first night, the court was treated to performances of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov followed by Minkus’s La Bayadère and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

On February 13,^, a ball was held at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The cream of Russian society dressed in 17th century Russian garb. Nicholas dressed as Czar Alexis I and Alexandra as Czarina Maria Miloslavskaya danced as an orchestra played behind a golden fence. “Some mysterious magic,” Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna said, “seemed to have changed all these familiar figures into splendid visions of Russia’s oriental past.”

But this would be the last grand imperial ball of the couple’s reign—and their lives. “A new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace,” Grand Duke Alexander later wrote. “This magnificent pageant of the seventeenth century must have made a strange impression on the foreign ambassadors; while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the far east were hanging dangerously low.”

In the past century, many royals, perhaps learning from the bad PR from the past, have hidden their more decadent bacchanals behind closed doors. In his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry describes “Club H,” the Highgrove basement where he and his brother, Prince William, created their own party pad, complete with stereo system, “borrowed” booze, and an electronic dartboard.