Silvio Berlusconi the end of April 2009, Berlusconi's wife Veronica Lario, who would divorce him several years later, wrote an open letter expressing her anger at Berlusconi's choice of young, attractive female candidates—some with little or no political experience—to represent the party in the 2009 European Parliament elections. Berlusconi demanded a public apology, claiming that for the third time his wife had "done this to me in the middle of an election campaign", and stated that there was little prospect of his marriage continuing. On 3 May, Lario announced she was filing for divorce. She claimed that Berlusconi had not attended his
Droit du seigneur of the "right of first night" with money payment as an alternative. According to Howarth, this suggests that "droit du seigneur" was a familiar notion to people at that time, which he traces back to Boece. The Jesuit hagiographical work Acta Sanctorum (Acts of the Saints), published from 1643 onwards, recorded the existence of "jus primae noctis" in its biographies of St Margaret and St Forannan. English lexicographer Thomas Blount recorded the "right" as a medieval custom of some English manors in "Fragmenta Antiquitatis" in 1679. French philosopher Montesquieu referred to the practice in The Spirit of the Laws (1748),