Customer Reviews

Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Born to Rule is a joint biography of five royal consorts, all first cousins and granddaughters of Queen Victoria, who reigned over their countries during the early to mid twentieth century. Although Maud of Norway (called Harry in the family), Sophie of Greece, Victoria Eugenie of Spain (Ena), Alexandra of Russia (Alix), and Marie of Rumania (Missy) were cousins who knew each other fairly well, their personalities and ultimate fates were very different.

Most readers will be at least somewhat familiar with Alix's story, which has been told and retold many times on paper and on film, but Ena's struggles with the same hereditary disease of hemophilia, which she passed on to at least two of her sons, are less well known than those of her Russian cousin. Similarly, while the story of Alix's overthrow in the 1917 Revolution and her subsequent death with her family has been described at length, few readers will be as familiar with Ena's long exile from Spain and Sophie's on again off again career as Queen of Greece. Harry's great success as the democratically chosen monarch of Norway and Missy's extensive struggles on behalf of Rumania deserve to be remembered as well.

One of the most interesting achievements of this joint biography are the numerous parallels and comparisons that can be drawn between the five women. We can see, for example, how Harry's natural modesty and informality made the Norwegians fall in love with her, and how Missy's beauty and elegance endeared her to the Rumanians. On the other hand, Sophie, Alix, and Ena's shyness and natural reserve were not well received by their husband's subjects and helped lead to the downfalls of the monarchies in their countries. The cousins' origins outside of the countries they eventually ruled were also worthy of comparison. Alix and Sophie's German blood were black marks against them (poor Sophie was on the outs with the Greeks for being German, and with her brother the Kaiser for not being German enough!), as was Ena's English reserve in Spain. As far as homelife goes, Alix seems to have had the only genuine love match among the five, since Sophie and Missy were married off for political considerations (to husbands they eventually came to love or at least respect), Ena for generally the same reasons (to a husband she eventually came to detest), and Harry married her cousin primarily to avoid being an old maid (but had a happy marriage regardless).

Of all these women only Harry has been consistently remembered with love and respect by her adopted country. Alix and Ena have been rehabilitated to a degree by the twists and turns of twentieth century history in their countries, and while Sophie and Missy are practically forgotten in Greece and Rumania today, it is to be hoped that their many contributions will eventually be recalled in Athens and Bucharest.

None of these women were well educated or exceptionally intelligent, but the circumstances of their births and marriages gave them influence at a critical moment in world history. Born to Rule enables us to remember them and to better understand their impact.

This book is a must-have for any fan of royalty. It profiles the lives of five granddaughters of Queen Victoria, four of whom suffered greatly in the name of duty, either by their spouse's infidelity, the betrayal by their children or the instability of their country. The life and death of the tragic Alexandra is, of course, well known, but this chronicles four other queens as well -- Sophie of Greece, Maud of Norway, Marie of Roumania and Victoria Eugenie of Spain -- who may not be so well known. The effect Queen Victoria had on all these women could not be underestimated. Julia Gelardi did a great job bringing all these women to life. I can't recommend this book enough.

As a specialist royalty bookseller and publisher of a royalty journal, I receive many royalty-themed books for review every year. Many are middle of the road productions on the same over-studied topics. Then and again comes a book such Ms. Gelardi's, a marvelous first book by a tremendously promising author.

I am not a stranger to the story of Queen Victoria's five granddaughters who sat on European thrones. However, Ms. Gelardi's research brought many episodes to light and considerably expanded my own knowledge about these amazing women. Not only did she research extensively, but she was fortunate enough to be able to personally interview children and grandchildren of these royal ladies. That alone makes BORN TO RULE a must have for anyone interested in European royalty. Five huge stars must be granted to Ms. Gelardi...KUDOS!

Arturo Beéche @ books@eurohistory.com

The unifying factor in this work is the fact that these five women, all granddaughters of Queen Victoria, became queens of the countries they married into. Some chose their husbands for love, others for duty.

While this work is ambitious in the sense that Gelardi wants to discuss these women comparitively, it is somewhat hard to follow as she jumps from cousin to cousin within the chapters - with very little to unify other than a phrase to transition the reader over.

She spends very little time with Alexandra, who, in death, becomes notorious. I did like that she shows how these women, and their influence, have bled into the current political structure of modern Europe.

It is a well researched book, but it is also hard to follow.

It is very easy to find a book in English about Queen Victoria and Tsarina Alexandra but to find one that includes Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, Queen Sophie of Greece, Queen Marie of Romania AND Queen Maud of Norway, that is in itself, amazing. I couldnt tear myself away from this book since the day it arrived. An excellently researched book (although I will forgive the author for calling Princess Ingeborg of Sweden as CROWN Princess when she was most certainly not) that is a joy to read.

This is a good book to read if you are extremely familar with Queen Victoria. There are two problems with this book, (1) The author did not focus or give enough information about Queen Maud's life as she did with the other grandaughters. (2) It's lacking information in certain places.

Here are some books I would recommended before/after reading this book:

(1)Northern Crowns: The Kings of Modern Scandinavia by John Van Der Kiste.

(2)Victoria's Daughters by Jerrold M. Packard.

(3) An Uncommon Woman - The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm by Hannah Pakula.

(4)Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals by Christopher Hibbert.

(5)Ask Sir James: Sir James Reid, Personal Physician to Queen Victoria and Physician-In-Ordinary to Three Monarchs
by Michaela Reid.

(6)A Royal Family, The Story of Christain IX and His European Desendants by Anna Lerche and Marcus Mandal (Very hard to find, there are only two places I know where you can find an English translation of this book, Denmark and the Majesty Magazine website; however, I do not know if they are still offering this book on their website).

I was taken in right away by the easy storytelling style of the author. This is a personal bio of the 5 granddaughters, so major historical events are covered only as they effect the lives of the queens. This may be as intimate a glimpse as we can get of these royal women. Queen Victoria, mentor and role model to the queens, looms in the background.

Some here felt it would be better to cover each queen separately, but I liked the chronological presentation. Because events of WWI interlocked, with this kind of organization more focus could be put on the situations of the queens without re-introducing the war and its politics.

I was surprised that the princesses had as much say as they did in selection of their husbands. Queen Victoria seems like a feminist in her attitutes from the direct quotes from her letters.

While the monarchy as an institution has been widely studied, I'm not aware of any treatment of the role of the married off princess. Young girls, who may be in love with men they hardly know, move, permanently to a country where they don't know the language and may have to change a religion. Travel and communication are not what they are today, and their local obligations will be consuming so the promise of seeing a family which may have indulged them is slim (unless, like Maud, they marry into a low key, not so prestigeous situation). These teens or twentysomethings are thrust into a politics of which they have little awareness, and unless their husbands mentor them, are open to intrique, gossip and worse. If they're from countries with which their new country is at war, things can hardly get better.

Maud has the most satisfying life, marrying a minor noble, who later agrees to become an elected king. The royalists are abhorred but Maud is happy in her modest court and country.

Marie is the only one to make a silk purse from a sow's ear, (but it only goes back again). She does this by dropping her Victorian ways and doing as the Romanians do.

The author implies that Alexandra's stiff upper lip was a major factor in her family's ultimate tragedy. I'd be interested in informed opinion on this, as well as on Marie's actual influence on the course of events in Romania.

And I was looking forward to reading this! One major element that kept me from enjoying the book was the numerous typos, sentence fragments and bad punctuation; whoever edited this book was definitely asleep at the wheel.

Also, there was a great deal of confusion with regards to people/relationships and I think this was due to two things: The first is due to the writing; the author tends to interrupt her narrative flow, mentioning other people at odd moments or breaking one story to start/resume another. The other is the book's set-up; I think the reader would be better served by "profiling" each granddaughter separately, instead of trying to tie all five lives together. This would have helped with keeping family lines straight, and perhaps help keep the overviews more concise.

All in all, a disappointment.

The discussions of four of the women were excellent, and I learned a great deal about Queen Sophie, Queen Maud and Queen Victoria Eugenie. But there are 2 problems - one small, one large - that compel me to award only 4 stars.

Small problem: the writing is sometimes clunky and repetitive.

Big problem: the author's discussion of Queen Marie of Rumania. If you want to accept somebody's memoirs as gospel, stick `em in block quotes. But if you want to write history, you need to be impartial, and use a variety of sources to assess a historical figure.

Ms. Gelardi simply parrots back Queen Marie of Rumania's own valuation of herself and her efforts. If you take an impartial look at the record, she doesn't actually come out too well. It's pretty clear from reading the accounts of the Versailles Treaty that, however much Clemenceau and Lloyd George may have liked having lunch with her, they were not impressed with Queen Marie and she had very little influence over their deliberations (and of course she struck out completely with Woodrow Wilson). Also her influence on her husband to get him to enter the war on the allies' side could be interpreted as really disastrous for her country, seeing as Germany immediately conquered huge tracts of Rumania.

Second, although she discusses Marie's son Carol II and his awfulness at great length, she never puts the pieces together. I mean, Marie's reputation is that she had affairs with many men of the Rumanian aristocracy including Barbo Stirbey - why is anyone surprised that her son was angry about this? Sons may adore their mothers, but they often identify with their fathers, and in this situation what impression would young Carol have gotten about being King? He would have seen his father having the responsibility and burden of matters of state all day, every day; while his wife cheats on him with various men from the aristocracy and flits in and out exerting her influence on politics when she feels like it, without having to take the consequences that the King does. Why is anyone surprised that Carol II was furious at her, and at Barbo Stirbey?? And as for Stirbey's political "mentoring" of Marie - I have NOT read up on this in detail, but it occurs to me that he may well just have taught her to favor his side on political questions. I would have liked an impartial analysis of Stirbey's political role.

I wouldn't call BORN TO RULE a historical tour de force by any means. There's a shallowness to the writing, and it has numerous little errors of fact that grate on my nerves. Frankly, any reader can get more depth and detail about the lives of Marie of Rumania, Maud of Norway, Alexandra of Russia, et al., from GRANDMAMA OF EUROPE: The Crowned Decendants of Queen Victoria, by Theo Aronson.

Mr. Aronson's book covers the same five women covered in Ms. Gelardi's, and while you might have to go to more trouble and expense to get a copy, I can basically promise you a better reading experience; one more expertly written and researched than Ms. Gelardi's.