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Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty

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I have to admit I wasn't expecting much from an author whose previous works, according to the bio on the back cover, include Gross: A Compendium of the Unspeakable, Unpalatable, Unjust and Appalling, Gross Too, and The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists. However, I was very pleasantly surprised. Compared to A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors by Michael Farquhar, which covers much of the same ground in a far more tendentious fashion, 'Royal Babylon' is a very good book.

The sell-copy on the book's cover makes 'Royal Babylon' sound like nothing more than recycled gossip and titillating stories about Those Nasty Royals. It's actually a somewhat more systematic history than that, with in-depth profiles of several monarchs and thumbnail sketches of many others. Shaw also charts thoroughly the recurring incidences of mental and physical illness in the massively inbred family trees of European royalty, and tells tales of drunkenness and debauchery that never made it into the official history books.

Unlike Farquhar, Shaw doesn't moralize about monarchy as an institution, or argue that his findings invalidate the very idea of having a hereditary head of state. In fact, he makes the important distinction (on pages 125-127) that in a constitutional monarchy like Britain, having a nut -- to use the clinical term -- on the throne, while still not a good thing, has far fewer negative repercussions than it does in absolute monarchies like Prussia or Imperial Russia.

An eye-opening and disturbing element of Shaw's history is the body-count of people whose lives were taken or destroyed at the whim of a monarch. Throughout the book, people are beaten, starved, frozen, marched to death, or handed back and forth like trading cards. Thousands died in the construction of St Petersburg. Tall men from across the continent were kidnapped to Prussia to form Frederick William I's Potsdam Giant Guards. Other monarchs laughed at, or even enabled, this 'eccentricity.' As another review on this page notes, however, the death toll from monarchs is still far less than that exacted, in the twentieth century alone, by leaders acting in the name of the People. It may be outside the scope of Shaw's history to point that out, but it's still important to keep in mind that monarchies have tended to be far less sanguinary than 'dictatorships of the proletariat' are.

I wish Shaw had included an index. But apart from that failing, this is a decent general survey of the seamy underside European royal history. Fans of the contemporary House of Windsor will want to read the evidence that suggests the domestic tableau of the post-Victorian British monarchy hides some secrets every bit as dark and troubling as those of the Wittlesbachs, Hohenzollerns, or Romanovs.

I thought that the book had some promise, when it started to describe how the inbreeding of the Royal houses caused a number of genetic health problems. The book quickly degenerated into a history according to rumor. The usual scandals are dredged up with no attempt to separate fact from fiction. The book then started to get sloppy, did anyone edit it? For example, in the section of Catherine the great the author states that she had three children with three different fathers. On the same page he then names the man responsible for her three children. The author also wants to cover as many people as possible so there is little depth on any one figure. It really reads like a long gossip column.

This has to be the best non-fiction light reading this summer. Why slog through hundreds of dusty history books for the "juiciest bits" when Karl Shaw has lined most of them up in this rollicking little 325 page volume ? It does for the fabled royal houses of Europe what the 'Hollywood Babylon' books did for our American celebrities twenty years ago. This is not a book which is likely to please royal apologists - between the excerpts, Shaw lays on mercilessly outspoken criticism of the Royals described, in the best British tradition. Underlying the fun is a very serious message about the corruption of the aristocracies in Europe generally, and the monarchies in particular - the great pretension of good old feudalism & aristocracy was the simple idea that power should be for the best & mightiest. Yet Shaw has lined up a "rogues gallery" of people at the very top of the aristocratic pyramid that have had absolutely no moral, mental, or even physical might or superiority. One has to be rightly horrified that this system held together, no matter what, and that the whole world and everything in it, was laid at the feet of these monstrous characters. This is a delightfully shocking little book. What is more, 98 per cent of it is entirely true, no matter what the apologists try to argue. As one might expect, since this writer is based in England, Shaw's biggest salvos are directed at the reigning Hanovers - and it certainly does raise an eyebrow that if Diana had survived marriage to Charles and QE II, that she would have been the first Englishwoman sitting on the throne since Henry the Eighth's last wife, Katherine Parr. Or, that even though she was the daughter of an Earl, a decendant of the Stuart kings, and had a noble lineage older than the Oueen's, that she was considered a "commoner" by the customs of England's "Royal" house. Celebrate Bastille Day and the Fourth of July the right way, and buy this book. It may be the best advertisement for democracy you will ever read !!

This account of European royalty between the 17th-20th centuries has some interesting stories about the eccentric and often deplorable behaviour of the members of various royal families. There is an emphasis on sexual misbehaviour, and Mr. Shaw's own prejudices show up quite clearly. He obviously has a strong distaste for the idea of women having sex past a certain age, Catherine the Great comes in for particular censor for being still interested in sex while in her sixties (ugh!)He refers sneeringly to George I's mother as a "flabby, toothless crone"She was a very old lady at the time, but that's no excuse, evidently, for being flabby and toothless. I suppose Mr Shaw thinks she should have been working out at the gym, or something. Camilla Parker-Bowles is refered to dissaprovingly as 'Prince Charles's forty-five year old mistress' (one feels Mr Shaw would dissaprove of her less had she been in her twenties).Mr Shaw seems to feel that hereditary power, combined with in-breeding, is the cause of the bad behaviour of monarchs, though as a previous reviewer pointed out, that hardly explains the deplorable behaviour of such non-hereditary monarchs as Napoleon, Hiter, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao etc. An intersting book if you don't mind the constant dwelling on (sometimes wildly exaggerated) disgusting details. The blurb on the back of the book describes this volume as 'side-splitting' but it is hardly that. Midly amusing perhaps. If you want a side-splitting history book, try 'The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody' by Will Cuppy.

Many years ago, on December 11, 1936, my mother took me Christmas shopping in Robinson's Los Angeles store. I was six years old. Christmas carols were being wafted from radio speakers when suddenly the music stopped and there was total silence. People all over the store stopped whatever they were doing as though they were playing "statues." Then a man's melodious voice issued forth to a rapt audience. It was Edward VIII renouncing the throne for the woman he loved. My six year old heart was thrilled. Half a century later the coach for me turned into a pumpkin. Shaw's "blackest sheep of all" is the Duke of Windsor.

Karl Shaw's "Royal Babylon" is a fascinating read, but I was less interested in the constant sexual excesses endemic in the royal houses all over Europe than in the author's iconoclastic remarks about broadly admired royal figures who had feet of clay. Make no mistake: I gasped at the unbelievable sexual excesses, and you will, too, but Shaw's discussions of the Duke of Windsor, Queen Mary, and Tsar Nicholas II among others, I found particularly revealing.

THE DUKE OF WINDSOR
Edward never seemed to get it through his head that he owed the British government something in return for his immensely priviledged position. You wonder what on earth he was taught growing up, but to serve was not one of them. It is amazing that he found such a soul mate in Wallis Simpson, who believed, just as he did, in taking with no giving. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor spent the next thirty years in migrating from one party to the next. They were both Nazi sympathizers, and the Duke, in meeting Hitler, clicked his heels and gave the Nazi salute in such a frenzied preformance that even the Nazi aides who were present were embarrassed.

This is the former king of England grovelling before Hitler. It boggles the mind. This is the former king of England who showered the Duchess with cartloads of jewels, all paid for by the British taxpayers. This is the former king of England who felt he had no obligations to England and who led a life of unremitting vacuity.

NICHOLAS II- THE LAST TSAR
Nicholas as tsar was a disaster from day one. Indecisive, weak, vascillating, and rather stupid, be was under the thumb of his German wife, Alexandra. It is hard to even envision his world, in which peasants prostrated themselves when his train passed. One can imagine the toadying around his person as well. He did have a beautiful family: four lovely girls and the hemophiliac tsarivich Alexei. But the boy's illness was kept a state secret so that the insinuation of the debauchee Rasputin in to the family was totally miunderstood. Rasputin could calm the boy and relieve his suffering but in no way was this treatment a direct channel from God. Rasputin was nothing if not an opportunist. Alexandra's infatuation with the smelly peasant was a major reason for the rise of the Bolshevics. But Nicholas was doing his part to bring down the House of Romanov. He ruthlessly slaughtered people whom his army declared subversives leaving the survivors starving and without shelter.

And he hit the bottle. And drugs. Cocaine and heroine were easily obtained and used for all kinds of illnesses, the fact of addiction seemed to be unknown. Alexandra doused herself with these drugs as well for her myriad ailments. In two years, Nicholas's face changed so much he was barely recognizable. You can see for yourself in the pictures of him: sunken eyes, black circles under them. He was so spaced out much of the time that courtiers couldn't reach him: he was often in a drugged stupor.

Nobody condones the murder of the tsar and his family. But the tsar and the tsarina laid the groundwork. Ineptitude, Rasputin, and a total isolation from their subjects whom they hardly knew, brought them down. A tragedy among many tragedies.

QUEEN MARY
Queen Mary seemed to be a pillar of rectitude. She looked like a pillar, statuesque, a Juno, if you will. Her antagonism towards Wallis Simpson, both before and after the death of George V, seemed just right. She didn't want that common, vulgar woman anywhere near her son let alone a futue queen. She echoed absolutely the sentiments of her subjects. Rectitude. That was Queen Mary, everybody thought.

In examining Mary closely, as Shaw does in "Royal Babylon" her feet of clay become very apparent. This was a woman who had five sons and one daughter. She apparently lived on Mount Olympus as far as they were concerned. She simply could not emote. It is a wonder she could even keep them straight. Her youngest son, Prince John, was an epileptic and had learning disabilities. What his parents did was sweep him under the rug by isolating him from the rest of the family in a separate house. It's unlikely they ever visited him. The press knew nothing about him, and when he died at fourteen from an epileptic fit, his poor little bubble of an existence was submerged and quickly forgotten.

Queen Mary was a kleptomaniac, and if she couldn't socially blackmail a hostess into giving her some treasure in their home she coveted, she would simply steal choice items from department stores. Her debts were paid under the table All hush-hush.

But Mary's non-communication with her children was perhaps her biggest failing. How could a prince grow up- the prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII- without being taught that he was a servant to the country not vice versa? That he had to give something back. That his immensely priviledged existence demanded a re-payment.His academic education was also extremeely poor.

There are many other delicious biographical tidbits in "Royal Babylon." The book is an eye-opener, full of meaty facts you'll no doubt enjoy, as I did! Like the real lowdown about "Dickie" Mountbatten. And it's scary that three of the most inept monarchs ever occupied important thrones at the same time: Nicholas II in Russia; the loutish Kaiser Wilhelm II in Germany and the even less than mediocre George V in England. It's all in "Babylon" and it's a great read.

I enjoyed reading this light treatment of the royals of Europe, but was seriously distracted by the numerous errors in facts regarding names and relationships. As a retired professor of history, I find this to be very poor editorial work on the part of both the author and his editorial "professional" at the publisher! Just a couple of examples of what I consider serious errors:
(1) p. 94 - "Louis [i.e., Louis XIV of France] was at one time enamored of his new sister-in-law, the buxom Austrian Princess Henrietta." This Louis had only one brother, Prince Philip of Bourbon, Duke of Orleans, who married twice: (1) Princess Henriette Anne of England, daughter of Charles I, King of England, and his wife, Princess Henrietta Maria of France; and (2) Elizabeth Charlotte, Countess Palatine of Simmern, daughter of Charles Louis, Elector Palatine, and his wife, Charlotte of Hesse-Cassel. There was NO SISTER-IN-LAW who was a 'buxom Austrian Princess Henrietta."
(2) Likewise, the entire treatment of Prince Philip of Bourbon, Duke of Orleans, the brother of Louis XIV, emphasizes the numerous heterosexual activities he supposedly had with multitudinous women....yet it is a confirmed fact that his primary sexual nature was homosexual and was known for his "mignons" and the way he and his followers dressed and cavorted at Versailles and other places.
(3) p. 113 - "Alphonso [i.e., Alfonso XII of Spain] plunged into an almost suicidal depression from which he never quite recovered. He regained his poise sufficiently to honor his dynastic obligations, and a year later was remarried to Maria, daughter of the star-crossed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand."

The Iberian rulers named Alfonso (in English) rarely if ever had their names written as Alphonso...rather as Affonso. As for this second marriage, (and not technically a "remarriage" since the couple had never been married before to each other) the cited bride, Maria, was not called just Maria, since almost every daughter of the Austria and Spanish dynasties was named Maria + other names. She was actually named Maria Christina (Cristina)and was NOT the daughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Countess Sophia, but the daughter of Archduke Charles Ferdinand of Austria-Teschen and his first cousin-wife, Archduchess Elizabeth Francesca of Austria-Hungary.

So if readers are seeking factual history, they need to read this book with the caution that the gossip is more important to the author and publisher than the historical facts.

No legitimate historian would be caught dead with this book. Shaw has gone through a bookcase of European history books and assembled all the trashy tidbits, especially where sex or personal hygiene is concerned. The end result is a very, very strange book. Focusing mainly on European monarchs of the 1700s and 1800s, the author details the shocking excesses of the royals, with an emphasis on the sexual. Attention is mainly on the monarchies of Britain (before the reign of Elizabeth II), France, Germany, and Russia, with secondary attention on Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Austria. The people discussed are all long-dead; look elsewhere for a recounting of the Charles-and-Di story. The author assumes the reader has some background in European history. Historians will sneer at this book, but it kept me amused during a long day of flying and sitting in airports. It also reminds us that the potential to abuse power is bottomless, and it reminds us why we fought a revolution to get rid of the British monarchy (oops, I forgot -- I live in Canada).

...I found it at my local library. It's like reading news from National Enquirer! The author sounded like a cheesy tour guide:
* Louis XVI was mistakenly referred to as Louis XIV's great-grandson
* Louis XIV's sister-in-law was an English princess, somehow the author decided to move her birth place to Austria
* Perhaps the author felt sorry for Louis XV, an only child orphaned at age two, so he made Louise de la Valliere, the well-known mistress of Louis XIV who left Versailles to become a Carmelite nun, his sister
...there are just too many obvious and laughable errors, makes you wonder if the author has ever heard of the word 'Google'!

This is a popular history of the Royal families of Europe that is censored from most histories. It has a bibliography, but no index. From the Hanoverians of 1714 until 1871 the British royal family was never popular. They were attacked in the press for profligacy, indolence, stupidity, or squalor. Page 3 tells how "spin doctors" and the British press turned public opinion in favor of the royal family. Yet they compared favorable to the royal houses on the continent. Their escapades in the 1990s are a return to past traditions.

Spain's rapid economic decline coincided with the reigns of mad rulers. The Habsburgs, Braganzas, Savoys, Hohenzollerns, and Wittelsbachs were inbred, insane, or both. While academic history books deal with trade or battles, they censor the personalities behind those events. The rulers called "Great" were not given that name for any good works. Until the 19th century royals were very often illiterate (like their subjects). History is as much about the madness of men as about social events. The more powerful a ruler, the greater the danger of his folly. So read about the last three centuries of European dynasties. Let's hope that it can't happen here, with an Imperial Presidency and Corporate Aristocracy!

This book appears to be a spicy confection. but there is whole wheat beneath the pink icing. This book teaches without preaching; the facts speak for themselves.

Page 95 gives the origin of "God Save the King". The personality of Kaiser Bill is described on pages 144-8. The history of the Romanovs is on pages 151-188. Did you wonder what the world lost in that dynasty? The frequent absences from England by George I was the reason for the creation of a Prime Minister (p.193). During the reign of George V many of the royal rituals were invented. The symbol of a royal family as an example of marital fidelity, good manners, and religious devotion was also created (p.276). The royal family needed popularity to survive. Since the Battle of Hastings, England was ruled by six families, none of them English (p.281). Chapter 9 tells about the Windsors; the most important dynasty left in Europe.

This author seems to specialize in books about the tasteless, gross, and unspeakable -- his own words -- but he seems to have done his research on the dubious mental health, psychopathic behavior, and unbridled sexual antics of most of the royal families of Europe over the past three centuries. It was noted by many contemporary observers, in fact, that in 1801 virtually every hereditary monarch was demonstrably insane. The Bourbons, Hanoverians, Habsburgs, Braganzas, Romanovs, Wittenbergs, Wittelsbachs, and Hohenzollerns all were monstrously inbred, the result of negative eugenics as a matter of state policy. Extreme ugliness, dwarfishness, and physical deformities which were rare in the general public were common enough in the palaces of Europe. And even a relatively healthy newcomer like Napoleon III Bonaparte took full advantage of the royal prerogative to frolic among his horde of mistresses unhindered. Moreover, the full public schedule of even a young royal generally meant that no prince or princess received much of an education and many were barely able to sign their names. Nor is 20th century Britain immune to these personal and dynastic shortcomings. In 1941, five members of the Bowes-Lyon family, including two of Queen Elizabeth's nieces, were confined to a mental hospital in Surrey on the same day; Buckingham Palace later lied to _Burke's Peerage_ about their existence, ignoring the fact that several of them were still alive in an NHS ward in the mid-1980s. This semi-tabloid volume would have been improved by footnotes and an index. Nevertheless, the genealogist who discovers a link to royalty among his ancestors might think twice before publicizing the fact.