August Annotations

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

* * * * *

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.

Buy It

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