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The Queen's Lover. It was the beginning of the most colorful period of Sickles' astonishing life. His wife, who had slowly died of shame, sorrow and tuberculosis, was carried to her grave by four embarrassed major generals. Sickles arrived in Madrid a free, amorous, impetuous man. His government hoped he could persuade impoverished Spain to sell Cuba to the United States—a deal that could be put through only by a stable, efficient Spanish government. To get advice, Sickles promptly visited Spain's recently deposed Queen Isabella, whose son, Alfonso, aspired to the shaky throne.
Isabella received Minister Sickles in her negligee, her huge breasts half-bare, her mane of hair hanging down to her waist. She had had as many men in her life as Sickles had had women—an indiscriminate series of ambassadors, footmen, Italian tenors, cabinet ministers, army privates. Sickles and Isabella reacted like magnet and iron. As a sop to convention, Isabella forthwith converted him to Catholicism, arranged for him a marriage of convenience with one of her ladies in waiting. In Madrid they began to call him "Yankee King of Spain." It was all very perplexing to his friends back home, who knew him as a staunch, republican, Tammany Dutch-Protestant.
But there was no stopping Sickles. When Isabella moved her "court" to Paris, Minister-to-Madrid Sickles moved there too, played host at her salon to Gustav Flaubert, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Gambetta and the French Monarchists. He decided that France, too, needed a king, and began to intrigue vigorously on behalf of his friend the Comte de Paris, whom he had met as a French observer in the Civil War.
But Sickles soon found that kingmaking was the most expensive hobby in the world. He was deep in debt when he was approached by a group of Britons who, like Sickles himself, had bought shares in the Erie Railroad and now feared the loss of their investments. Sickles made a sudden dash to New York, and in a lightning coup deposed the corrupt, redoubtable Jay Gould from the presidency of Erie. When the flabbergasted tycoon suggested that in future they team up together, Sickles knocked him senseless with his crutch, hurled him through a window (Gould landed in a bed of violets). Then Sickles rushed back to Madrid with a small fortune in his pocket, the gift of Erie's grateful British investors.
Resigning his Madrid appointment, Sickles worked feverishly for his mistress and her son. Came the day when the young man was triumphantly crowned as Alfonso XII and Isabella, henceforth bound to more conventional behavior, sadly said goodbye to her lover. Sickles returned to New York and resumed his long-forgotten law practice.
Lusty Hero. But the sight of a maimed Union soldier changed his plans. He became a passionate supporter of homes and pensions for disabled veterans. He tore the field of Gettysburg from the hands of souvenir hunters, made it a national shrine. He arranged the famed Gettysburg reunions of Blue and Grey. General Longstreet became his bosom friend. "[Your stand at Gettysburg]," wrote Longstreet, "was the sorest and saddest reflection of my life for many years; but today I can say . . . that it was . . . the best that could have come to us all."