17. So While touring Europe, Julia enjoyed a private audience with the Pope – and she even had brief romances with dashing royals
Whilst in Rome, the Gardiners were invited to the Vatican for an audience with Pope Gregory XVI (a strong critic of the Atlantic slave trade, a trade which her future husband would support as President). Julia would kiss the Papal Ring and receive the Pope’s blessing. It may have been this meeting that led her to convert to Roman Catholicism many years later, in May 1872. However, it wasn’t only the Pope who was taken with the beautiful and vivacious young American. She also caught the eye of some of Europe’s most eligible bachelors – and evidently enjoyed the attention.
According to her later diaries, Julia enjoyed a brief romantic fling with a Belgian Count. Indeed, so infatuated was he that he even planned on leaving Brussels for America, only abandoning his romantic plans when he learned of Julia’s marriage to Tyler. She also enjoyed a fling with the German Baron von Krudener whilst in Rome. She later recalled that he adored her “in secret, in silence, in tears”. Though nothing came of this romance – indeed, it’s unlikely they were ever really intimate – 25 years later she asked her sons to check up on the Baron when they went to Germany for their studies.