Inspired by Robert Lacey’s Royal: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
Commentary by M.L. Littlefield

The possibility of losing one’s monarch at the hands of a lunatic induces panic. So when a royal figure survives an attack, especially with sangfroid, there’s relief all around. There’s a surge of public sympathy and support for the royal family and people express amazement at how cool their monarch can be.

Then, there’s a bit too much of a good thing. The media and the public get bored with cool, steely resolve after a while and get cranky. Queen Elizabeth II has experienced both the praise and the pouts of the people because of her grace under fire. As it turns out, it’s an experience that’s all in the family….

Coming Soon: Chapter-by-chapter review of Robert Lacey’s Royal: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Join me by buying or borrowing this book to follow along. Leaving comments is greatly appreciated.

Mandy

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

Once there was Vicky, Alice, Helena, Louise, and Beatrice…

Now with Marie, Maud, Ena, Alix, and Sophie, we see the face of Europe change once more. Julia Gelardi’s book is a fascinating study of the lives of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. It gets slightly difficult to read at times, because each woman’s life is chronicled along side the other. Winding is a good word for the style, but nevertheless, this book is a captivating look at another quintuple of royal kin. The first set was, of course, Queen Victoria’s own daughters, some of whom were the mothers of these powerful women…

A Book Review of “An Uncommon Woman – The Empress Frederick”
Originally published on September 15, 2005

You will feel great sympathy towards Vicky, the Empress Frederick, who was an unfortunate hostage to the intrigues of the German court. Sympathy will soon give way to awe at her courage and determination to do her best while having to perform the impossible: being all things to all people…

IN THE HOUSE OF GRIMALDI – by Peter Kurth

The subject on everyone’s mind in Monaco these days is marriage: Stephanie’s marriage, Caroline’s marriage, Albert’s marriage, even Rainier’s marriage. Since none of the ruling Grimaldi family is married at the moment, and since the only point in having royalty (even teeny-tiny royalty like Monaco’s) is to see them behaving just like everyone else (only more so, or less so, depending on the state of their public relations) — well, after ten years of bad press, bad luck, and illegitimate babies, you can imagine it’s time for some domestic tranquility. Someone in Monaco has to get married, and fast, if only to prove that they’re still in the game….

10 Little-Known Palaces and Homes Where Royalty Play

How would you hide from the paparazzi, your scathing skeptics or needy subjects if you were a member of royalty? Would you own several homes far, far away from your domain? Or, would you show up unexpectedly with bodyguards and staff to a high-priced resort tucked neatly away in the Caribbean…?

“Baby”
By Susan Flanders

She was the baby of the family and her story is one of my favorites. This is a picture of Princess Beatrice on her wedding day, wearing her mother’s wedding veil. Her mother, of course, was Queen Victoria. Beatrice was the only daughter—and there were many—to be given the privilege of wearing Victoria’s own veil of honiton lace…

Dom Duarte Pio: Portugal’s King-In-Waiting
By Harold Schmautz

Portugal was the first country in the 20th century to lose her monarchy, yet the pretender to the Portuguese throne hopes the country will be the first in the 21st century to win back the Monarchy.

Dom Duarte Pio, Duke of Bragança, is confident of re-gaining the throne that was taken away from the Royal House of Bragança in 1910 because recent opinion polls demonstrated that up to 30 percent of the people would not mind having a King instead of a president. This high approval rate for a Crowned Head of State is not just nostalgia, but is to a large extent Dom Duarte’s good reputation as someone who cares about the country and the environment…

A Treasury of Royal Scandals – The Shocking True Stories of History’s Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors

By Michael Farquhar

Part IX, Chapter 7: Death Be Not Dignified

When a king of France died, he was subject to a fairly rigorous post-mortem. His body was sliced open from throat to hips, after which his internal organs were removed and preserved. This ritual wasn’t so bad. After all, it was part of an old tradition going back to the ancient Egyptians. The procedure took and odd twist with Louis XIV, however. While the hearts of most French kings were placed in gilded urns to rest for eternity, the Sun King’s ended up in the stomach of an English eccentric. Or so the story goes.

Blame it on the French Revolution. Sure, Louis XIV had been dead for decades before the popular uprising even started, but he was royal, and as his descendant Louis XVI discovered on the guillotine, royalty wasn’t going over very well at the time. Even dead royalty. At the Cathedral of St. Denis, an angry mob raided the tomb of the king who had gloriously wallowed in absolute monarchy for more than half a century. They stole his embalmed heart.

The organ was then sold to an English nobleman, Lord Harcourt, who in turn sold it to the dean of Westminster, Rev. William Buckland. When the good dean died, the heart passed by inheritance to his son, Francis Buckland. Frank, as he was called by his friends, was a scientifically minded man, but nevertheless a bit bizarre. He was among the founders of the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals in the United Kingdom, whose goal it was to import and raise exotic animals to increase the national food supply.

For a while Buckland was satisfied devouring kangaroo, ostrich, and the like, but soon his palate became more adventurous. Almost anything organic would do. And here’s where Louis XIV’s heart came in. According to one report, Buckland produced the dried organ at dinner one evening. “I have eaten many strange things in my lifetime,” a startled guest recalled him saying, “but I have never before eaten the heart of a king.”

In a few gulps, the Sun king became a gourmet snack.

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It Doesn’t Take An HRH To Be Prince of My Heart
By Jerramy Fine, author of “Someday My Prince Will Come”

I was only 6-years-old when I fell in love with Peter Phillips. Like always, I was up to my knees in royal library books (I was a royal-watcher from a very early age!) when I found him in the Windsor family tree.

At that point, my #1 career goal was to be a princess, so when I saw that Peter had been born in 1977, just like me – I knew it was a match made in heaven. Peter was the only eligible male royal on the planet that was my age – and to my 6-year-old self, that made him my true love.

Back then, I had no idea that marrying Peter wouldn’t automatically make me a princess. My precocious young mind was only just learning about the rules of hereditary titles, and it never once occurred to me that as the son of a princess, he wouldn’t be a prince.

Yet Peter was the first royal baby to be born without a title in over 500 years. Little did I know that royal titles only pass through the male line, and since Peter is a descendant of Princess Anne, he was not entitled to become an HRH. (It is widely believed that the Queen offered to make Peter a prince, but Princess Anne declined the proposal, not wanting her children to be unnecessarily burdened. Moreover, Peter did not inherit a courtesy title from his father, because Captain Phillips also declined a title from the Queen upon his marriage to Princess Anne.)

But as I grew older and as my royal crush grew stronger, none of this newfound hereditary knowledge made the slightest bit of difference to me. The heart wants what the heart wants – and my teenybopper heart wanted the Queen’s oldest grandson.

That said, I wonder if by opting not to bestow her children with titles, if Princess Anne actually spared Peter (and his younger sister Zara) from anything. Both Master Peter and Miss Zara will always be “royal” and that is something neither can ever escape. They will always be direct descendents of the monarch, they will always appear in royal family photographs, and they will always have royal-fanatics like me writing about them on royal blogs! I’m not sure life would be any more difficult, or if they would be treated anymore “normally,” if they merely had different prefixes attached to their names.

Look at Diana, Princess of Wales. After her divorce, she was stripped of her HRH, yet as Earl Spencer so aptly observed at her funeral, Diana “needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.”

The same can be said for Charlotte and Andrea Casiraghi. They may be title-less (at their mother’s request) just like Peter and Zara, but these Monegasque beauties still grace the pages of the royal magazines month after month. So does Kate Middleton for that matter – and she doesn’t have a single royal parent to her name!

In this day and age, an HRH is increasingly irrelevant. What matters is one’s proximity to the monarch, one’s place in the line of succession and most importantly, how much the world’s media loves you.

But as Peter has learned, your place in the line of succession can change – or be removed entirely. Back when I found Peter in that library book, he was 7th in line to the British throne. But with the subsequent births of HRH Princess Beatrice, HRH Princess Eugenie, and Lady Louise, Peter has since moved to 10th place in the line of succession. (Please note how Prince Edward also tried to give baby Louise a life of “normality” by removing her HRH.)

When the Countess of Wessex has her next baby, Peter will move to 11th place. But this won’t last for long – for when he marries his Catholic fiancée Autumn Kelly (not only will my heart be broken!) but Peter will have relinquished his succession rights forever. As the Act of Settlement 1701 prohibits anyone who has married a Roman Catholic from succeeding to the throne, only Peter’s children will be able to retain their rights to succession. And after all this “normality,” I wonder if Peter will bother to spare them from the “burden” of an HRH.

Someday My Prince Will Come will be published January 10th.
www.jerramyfine.com

© 2007 Jerramy Fine