Royal Affairs and Notorious Royal Marriages

My wedding hats

2011-04-29T11:13:00.001-07:00

I promised a post with photos of my hats, so here they are. I bought them from www.nyfashionhats.com, so it was a real feat of trust that they would look as good on my head as they did online because there's no brick and mortar store. But Mia at NY Fashion Hats in Bainbridge NY gave me great advice over the phone; we chatted for over an hour and she helped me winnow down my selections; and by the time we hung up, I felt like we were already old friends.

I wore the black hat on Wednesday in front of Buckingham Palace and was interviewed by an Italian TV journalist (it pays to dress well!). She was surprised to find out that she'd snagged a royalty expert. When I gave her my card after the interview, she indicated that she'd heard of me ... several of my books have been translated into Italian.

The mood on the Mall was like one giant block party -- with half a million of your closest friends.

Here I am with Melanie (English) and Cavell (Scots), who broke out the pink champagne after William and Catherine said their vows. I was standing diagonally opposite Clarence House. The wedding ceremony was broadcast on speakers and people sang along with the hymns (when they sang "Jerusalem," I became all choked up. It was the favorite hymn of my dear friend Patrick Tull, an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, fellow Player, and Lord Nelson aficionado. Needless to say, I became all teary during the vows as well. I always cry at weddings (except for my own, where I was beaming throughout the ceremony).

I wore my turquoise hat to the royal wedding -- along with my late paternal grandmother's antique garnet necklace. Her family was English (she said that long after her father emigrated to the States he referred to George VI as "our king"), and she would have wanted to be here today.

Here's my wedding suit -- it's a similar color to Carole Middleton's!

Royal Wedding Fever Grips London!

2011-04-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

So far the naysayers and the republicans have kept their snark under wraps. If you walk the streets of London (providing you have sharp elbows and a lot of patience to brave the tight-knight crowds), in the areas of Buckingham Palace, the Mall and Wesminster Abbey where Prince William will wed Catherine Elizabeth Middleton tomorrow, it is nothing but a love-fest, a jolly-holiday spirit, replete with tent cities, flags, and creative costumes.

This man was the first to arrive outside Westminster Abbey, staking out a spot with his teddy bear early in the week. His shirt says "Diana Would Be Proud."

We're staying around the corner from the Goring Hotel, where Kate Middleton will spend her final night (tonight) as a single woman, staying with her family. With so much making news every moment, perhaps one of the few secrets left is what her wedding dress looks like. We may have seen it off-loaded from a van yesterday, along with the Middletons' other wedding wear -- but everything was discreetly concealed inside garment bags.

My husband Scott and I strolled along the Mall this afternoon and I came across a very touching homage. On the Mall not far from Clarence House (where Princes William and Harry lived with their father Prince Charles after the death of their mother Princess Diana, and where their great-grandmother, known to our generation as the Queen Mum, lived), is her statue as well as one of her husband George VI. For those who get their royal history from Hollywood movies (rather than from my books, she half-joked), George VI is the stammerer from "The King's Speech," who ascended the throne in December 1936 after his elder brother Edward VIII abdicated after Parliament presented him with the choice of remaining on the throne or marrying his twice-divorced American inamorata Wallis Simpson.

His queen consort Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the mother of the current queen, was very close to William and he adored her. Below her statue, a few people had laid bouquets; and one person placed a little box of what looked to me like mums, with a photo of Wills and Kate on it, a touching homage and a nice way of including William's great-gran in his wedding festivities.

I'll post a photo in one of my hats soon!

I'm Off to the Royal Wedding!

2011-04-25T01:19:00.000-07:00

As soon as Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their wedding date right around Thanksgiving weekend, my husband and I made plans to be in London for the royal "I do's." Having written four books on royal romances, relationships, and scandals thus far*, with a fourth under contract (and which will have a chapter on William and Kate's romance), it was a dream to be able to soak up the atmosphere and pageantry of the grand event.

We lucked out on renting an apartment. Not only will we be right around the corner from Buckingham Palace, abutting the royal mews,

but we are also a stone's throw from the elegant Goring Hotel where Kate Middleton will be joining her family, spending her final night as singleton and as a commoner.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind for me, giving numerous interviews to radio and television stations across the U.S. about the royal wedding plans, William and Kate's relationship, and about past royal weddings and marriages. It's a dream job, and the cherry on the sundae is that I will be appearing on national television from London as a guest expert on CBS nightly news, interviewed by the lovely Michelle Miller. Air date is likely Monday, April 25.

It's been thirty years since the last major royal wedding -- that of William's parents, then thirty-two-year-old Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, barely twenty. Theirs was really an arranged marriage as most royal unions throughout history were, and bore all the hallmarks of one, starting with the fact that the groom was still in love with his longtime inamorata, Camilla Parker Bowles. As the Waleses' marriage became rocky and Diana would become unfaithful as well, she publicly lamented on broadcast television, "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded." She and Charles were divorced in 1996, and one year later, she was tragically killed in an automobile accident in Paris.

The marriage of her oldest son, a young man whom she described when he was just a little boy as being an old soul and so much like herself, to a lovely woman of his own choosing, a woman who is his own age, his former college classmate, housemate, and for all we know, his soulmate as well, brings a sense of closure to the wounds the world felt at Diana's passing, leaving behind a teenage son (and his younger brother Prince Harry of course), whose one-word bereavement card that read "Mummy," placed atop her lily-bedecked coffin told you all you needed to know about the depth of feeling William had for his mother.

A deeply romantic and keenly sensitive young man, one reason he waited so long to propose to Kate was that he wanted to ease her into the family and try as much as he could to make sure that she would not become a victim of the media frenzy that he felt had murdered his mother; that she understood what sort of a lifelong lifestyle commitment she would be making; their marriage would not be just the two of them, and perhaps a few kids, like other couples. Giving Kate Diana's 18-carat sapphire and diamond engagement ring was another way of including his mother in the celebration. At first I wondered about his judgment; after all, Diana had a miserable marriage -- mightn't the ring be bad luck? But Diana chose that ring herself (and took a lot of flak for it initially, from the Windsors). So, good on William (and Diana)!

I've been telling all these broadcast journalists that Kate and William's story is not a Cinderella story, as some of the press would like to spin it. For one thing, Cinderella went from rags to riches. Kate, although she is a commoner (as was Diana; a commoner is anyone not of royal blood -- although Kate was born into the middle class and Diana was the daughter of an earl). Kate is going from riches to royalty, thanks to an entrepreneurial mother and a father who was game enough and wise enough to stand beside his spouse and support her goal to build a mail order party planning business after the pair of them enjoyed careers in aviation.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Carole Middleton. For starters, we share a maiden name: Goldsmith. I applaud her enterprising spirit, her talent, and her ambition, even if she does have a bit of Jane Austen's Mrs. Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) in her. And besides, just as Mr. Bingley genuinely fell in love with Jane Bennet after her mother sent her over to Netherfield in the rain, William genuinely fell in love with Catherine Elizabeth Middleton after her mother encouraged her to enroll at St. Andrew's (rather than the University of Edinburgh, which had a better History of Art program), because the prince was going to St. Andrews.

Kate had been a fan of William throughout her girlhood. And her grades from the posh Marlborough College (a private high school) were good enough to permit her to enroll anywhere. So why begrudge her the opportunity to befriend England's heir presumptive? Kate in fact makes history as the first college-educated future Queen of England.

Another reason William and Kate's romance isn't a fairy tale is that it's all too real and relatable. In fairy tales the handsome prince and beautiful princess barely know each other before they get married and; so the story ends, "live happily ever after." In Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, the poor girl receives a kiss while she's non compos mentis and that passes for courtship. Even poor Diana got more than that. But Kate and William's relationship developed organically over time and weathered two breakups with the eyes of the world upon them as well as tremendous pressure to wed on the media's timetable rather than their own. They met nearly a decade ago and have been a couple since 2002, living together while they were in college. Kate is practically a decade older than Diana was when she married Charles and has more maturity and life experience. She's also had several years, rather than a few dates (and always within a crowd), to get to know her prince.

And William is not Charles. He is an atypical Windsor, more "warm and fuzzy," like his mother was. Against Charles's wishes, Diana insisted that their sons go to school with other children from their earliest years and that they always be keenly aware of the less advantaged. This lesson has paid off. William is a mensch.

Here's the link to my interview with Michelle Miller that aired on CBS Nightly News with Katie Couric on Monday, April 25. The text is a mashup of what was voiceover narration and actual interview quotes, but I believe you can click to play the video of the footage that actually aired.

Here's a link (I think). The text takes what was narrated in voiceover, plus what was actually said in the interview, but I believe you can click to play the video footage of what actually ran on air tonight. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/25/eveningnews/main20057243.shtml?tag=broadcast

So, what about you? Are you looking forward to the royal wedding on April 29, 2011 and will you be watching it? Did you watch Charles and Diana's wedding?

*for NAL, ROYAL AFFAIRS (2008), NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES (2010), and ROYAL PAINS (just published last month); and exclusive to Barnes & Noble, THE ROYALS: The Lives and Loves of the British Monarchs (a big, illustrated "coffee table" volume containing facsimiles of historical memorabila that you can take out of envelopes and peruse, due out this October, I believe. The last section is on William and Kate); and my wip, ROYAL ROMANCES: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (also for NAL)

ROYAL PAINS now on sale

2011-03-01T17:32:00.000-08:00

Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

Leslie Carroll’s third nonfiction title about scandalous royals,

ROYAL PAINS:
A Rogues’ Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

is now available wherever books are sold!

In a world where sibling rivalry knows no bounds

and excess is never enough, meet some of history’s boldest, baddest, and bawdiest royals!

The bad seeds on the family trees of the most powerful royal houses of Europe often became the rottenest of apples. In an effort to stave off wrinkles, sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory bathed in the blood of virgins, and for kicks and giggles devised even more ingenious forms of torture than the über-violent autocrats Vlad (the Impaler) Dracula and Ivan the Terrible had ever imagined. Lettice Knollys strove to mimic the appearance of her cousin Elizabeth I and even stole her man. The Duke of Cumberland’s sexcapades and subsequent clandestine marriage led to a law that still binds England’s royal family. And the libidinous Pauline Bonaparte scandalized her imperial brother by having herself sculpted nearly nude and commissioning a golden drinking goblet fashioned in the shape of her breast.

Chock-full of shocking scenes, titillating tales, and wildly wicked nobles, Royal Pains is a rollicking compendium of the most infamous, capricious, and insatiable bluebloods of Europe.

***

Praise for Leslie Carroll’s 2010 title, Notorious Royal Marriages

“For those who tackled Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and can’t get enough of the scandal surrounding Henry VIII’s wives, [Notorious Royal Marriages is] the perfect companion book.”—The New Yorker

“Carroll writes with verve and wit about the passionate—and occasionally perilous—events that occur when royals wed.”—Chicago Tribune (5 stars)

William and Kate's Engagement: Why It's Historical

2010-12-09T14:56:00.000-08:00

On November 16, Prince William of Wales announced his engagement to his girlfriend of more than eight years, Catherine (Kate) Middleton. It was the moment that millions had been waiting for with bated breath.

Royal-watchers released said breath with a joyful exhalation and then began bloviating about what it all meant (mine to follow); and manufacturers from Stoke-on-Trent to Shanghai released the work orders for the commemorative tchotchkes: the tea towels, plates, thimbles, and spoons, and all manner of junk that in fifty years' time will become treasured scraps of memorabilia.

But there is something exciting about a royal wedding, especially this royal wedding. William's parents did not wed in love. On July 29, 1981, when those of us who watched Charles and Diana walk down the aisle of Westminster Abbey, could we have imagined the sorrow that lay ahead and the tragedy that would end Diana's life at the age of 36? William and Kate give us the chance to believe in a royal happily-ever-after again.

And there is an added significance to William's choice of bride. You've heard ad nauseum that Kate Middleton (she will be known as Princess Catherine after her royal wedding on April 29, 2011) is a "commoner."

Well, Diana, was a commoner, too. So was Elizabeth the Queen Mum, born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. A commoner is someone who is not of royal birth. BUT in the past, the heirs to the throne have wed commoners who were born to the purple, so to speak, women of noble lineage. For example, the Queen Mum was the daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Diana's father was the eighth Earl Spencer and her noble lineage goes back several generations farther than the Windsors' does.

What makes Kate Middleton special is that her background is not remotely aristocratic. Her father Michael was a flight dispatcher and airline officer for BA, where her mother Carole (née Goldsmith, as was I -- so I'll be eagerly anticipating my wedding invitation) was a flight attendant. The entrepreneurial Carole Middleton later started a party planning company for children, Party Pieces, which took off, so to speak, landing the family in financial clover. Consequently, through the dint of her parents' hard work, Kate was able to grow up in soft surroundings and attend the best schools.

The last time an heir presumptive to the British throne wed a true commoner--one absent all aristocratic blood--was in 1660 when James, Duke of York, the younger brother of Charles II (and the future James II; 1633-1701), clandestinely wed the zaftig brunette Anne Hyde (1637-1671).

Here's the story of James and Anne, excerpted from my book ROYAL AFFAIRS: A Lusty Romp Through the Extramarital Adventures That Rocked the British Monarchy.

The prodigiously buxom and flirtatious Anne Hyde was the daughter of Edward Hyde, a Wiltshire lawyer who turned to politics, becoming Charles II’s chancellor. Her contemporaries noted her intelligence, though they admitted she was not very pretty; in fact, Anne was most often described as a cow. A hearty eater during an era when slenderness was the vogue at court, the girl’s booty came in for some serious ribbing in a popular rhyme:

With chanc’lor’s belly, and so large a rump,

There, not behind the coach, her pages jump.

For several years before the Restoration, Anne had been a maid of honor to Mary, the Princess Royal, sister of Charles and James. But it was in Paris at the exiled court of the Queen Mother Henrietta Maria where Anne first met Mary’s brother James, the Duke of York.

The stuttering duke was stiff and reserved, with a downer of a personality, but by all accounts, James, tall, blue-eyed, and fair, was even more of a rake than his less classically handsome brother, Charles. It certainly wasn’t charm or affability that was the chick magnet—in fact, James was considered rather slow and plodding, particularly compared to the exceptionally bright and witty Charles. But then again, James didn’t attract the beauties of the age, as did his elder brother. On James’s embracing of Catholicism as well as loose women, Charles observed, “My brother will lose his throne for his principles and his soul for a bunch of ugly trollops.” He jested that James’s mistresses were so universally hideous that his priests must have given them to the duke as penance.

With Anne Hyde, however, “dismal Jimmy” (as Charles’s famously clever mistress Nell Gwyn called him) must have scintillated. Apparently their affair grew passionate after the exiled court had moved to The Hague. After the Restoration, Anne’s father sent for her, and she returned to London, fat and glowing—but as Anne was always fat and glowing, her father didn’t notice that she was also pregnant.

Hyde should have congratulated himself on the fact that his daughter had inherited his canny political skills, because in August 1659, Anne had successfully convinced the duke to sign a marriage contract. After that, they cohabited intermittently and clandestinely as man and wife.
On Anne’s return to England, realizing they’d be caught sooner or later, James sneaked into Worcester House, her father’s home, with an Anglican chaplain in tow. The chaplain married Anne and James in a private ceremony on September 3, 1660. Only after they were legally wed did Anne’s new husband throw himself upon the king’s mercy, begging him to allow them to publicly marry.

King Charles summoned Chancellor Hyde, a portly Polonius who had known nothing of his daughter’s affairs until the news was broken to him by two of his friends, the Marquis of Ormonde and the Earl of Southampton. Hyde assured the monarch that as soon as he got home to Worcester House, he would toss Anne out into the street as a strumpet. At the suggestion that Anne might actually be married, the politician then changed his tack, ranting that he would sooner see his daughter be the king’s whore than the duke’s wife—and if Anne were really married to James, she should be thrown into a dungeon in the Tower of London and an Act of Parliament passed to behead her.

“And I shall be the first man to propose that to Parliament!” Hyde shouted.

Charles endeavored to smooth things over, but poor Anne ended up locked in her room. However, Anne’s sympathetic mother managed to sneak the duke into her daughter’s chamber for conjugal visits.

But Anne, a mere commoner, had unintentionally created an international incident.
The Queen Mum, Henrietta Maria, came over from Paris “to prevent so great a stain and dishonor to the Crown.” Then a group of courtiers was enlisted to convince James of his wife’s rampant promiscuity—and therefore, her unsuitability to be his duchess. Anne was traduced by men who had never even met her, all claiming to have bedded her. It seemed that every man in England had crawled out of the woodwork to testify to Anne’s lasciviousness, each sworn statement more outlandish than the last.

Charles didn’t believe a word of it, and assured his increasingly livid chancellor that his daughter was being unjustly slandered. As Anne lay abed, the birth of her baby imminent, the king sent his most trusted ladies to attend her.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Anne, shrieking with labor pains, was forced to endure another torment. The oh-so-sensitive Bishop of Winchester visited her bedside and demanded, “Whose child is it of which you are in labor? Have you known any man other than the Duke of York?” Anne responded in the negative, and probably spat out a lot of other negative things to the bishop besides.

Enter Henrietta Maria, in high dudgeon at Dover, ready to defend her son’s good name and tar Chancellor Hyde with the brush of treachery for daring to marry an undeserving creature of his own lowly brood into the royal house—little realizing that she and the chancellor were on the same side.

Charles stepped in and averted a crisis by making Hyde a baron, with a gift of £20,000 (well over $4.3 million today) to sustain the honor. By the time the groom’s mother reached London, she was greeted by the bride’s father, now Baron Hyde of Hindon, a peer of the realm. The following year Charles made Hyde Earl of Clarendon.

The dowager queen’s argument about the worthiness of Anne Hyde’s family had thus been gracefully nipped in the bud, and eventually, Henrietta Maria grew to accept her new daughter-in-law.

Anne was clearly the dominant partner in the marriage, yet she could not prevent James from returning to his rakish ways soon after their union was legalized in the eyes of family and state. “The duke is in all things but his codpiece led by the nose,” Samuel Pepys observed.

Anne coped with her husband’s frequent infidelities by overeating. She was also perpetually pregnant, giving birth to eight children in nearly as many years, but only two daughters, Mary and Anne, survived to adulthood. The rest died in infancy.

After suffering from cancer for three years, Anne finally succumbed to the disease in 1671, a few weeks after giving birth to her eighth child. In her final days, she also became a secret convert to Catholicism.

One evening after enjoying a hearty dinner at Burlington House, Anne retired to pray, and then collapsed in the chapel. A frantic James sent for the Bishop of Oxford, but by the time he arrived, Anne was incoherent.

She died at St. James’s Palace in her husband’s arms, with the words “Duke, Duke, death is terrible. Death is very terrible.” She was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Anne’s two daughters each went on to become Queen of England, and both would make their mark in British history. Mary, born on April 30, 1662, would marry William of Orange and become a key player in the Glorious Revolution that would overthrow her own father and place herself and her husband on the English throne. Her younger sister, Anne, born on the sixth of February in 1665, would inherit her mother’s corpulence as well as her father’s crown. Under Queen Anne, England and Scotland were combined into a single nation in the Act of Union signed on May 1, 1707, thereby making Anne Hyde’s younger daughter—the issue of the woman who was such a “stain and dishonor to the Crown”—the first monarch of Great Britain.

So, are you a royal watcher? Do the impending nuptials of William and Kate have you excited or are you more fascinated with their place in the pageant of history?

Congratulations, William and Kate

2010-11-16T10:18:00.000-08:00

At last -- the romantic moment that royal watchers have been awaiting for months, if not years!

Prince William, England's heir presumptive, popped the question to his longtime girlfriend, the lovely Kate Middleton.

We wish the couple all the joy in the world

And the winner of Pearson's Elven Princess Tiara is...

2010-10-16T05:46:00.001-07:00

RACHEL

Congratulations!!

Send me a photo of you wearing the tiara to the office -- tongue-in-cheek, and all!!

Falconing!

2010-09-28T11:46:00.000-07:00

Well, I channeled my inner Maid Marian on my birthday and enjoyed an awesome experience, falconing with Dawn from the British School of Falconry, based at the Equinox Resort & Spa in Manchester, Vermont.

I encourage anyone headed up this way to check it out, particularly if you're a medievalist, or have ever harbored a fascination for these phenomenal creatures.

The British School of Falconry flies Harris Hawks, because of the birds' sociability, meaning that they are adaptable to being flown by strangers with only a 45-minute lesson under their belts. That's me with Hamish ... or is it his brother, Mycroft (yes, yes, we know Mycroft's brother should be named Sherlock!)

In any case, here are Mycroft and Hamish:

And many thanks to the falconer, Dawn, for the fabulous experience! And to my marvelous husband Scott for making it all possible and making all my fantasies come true!

My new find! Pearson's Renaissance Shoppe -- Huzzah!

2010-09-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

So! My darling, romantic husband is granting my birthday wish and getting me a falconing lesson at Manchester Vermont's famed Equinox Resort. http://www.equinoxresort.com/thingstodo/falconry/

I get a 45-minute lesson, followed by a "hawk walk" through the leafy vermillions, russets, and golds of the Green Mountains as they don their autumn hues.

But, speaking of donning ... what do I wear? I'll go falconing on my birthday, but my birthday suit is out of the question. My husband will of course bring a camera: this excursion must be saved for posterity.

The actress in me (not to mention the author of historical fiction and nonfiction) noodges, "Dress the part!" Something velvet, perhaps? Brocade? A hooded cloak? Flowing sleeves? Adorable soft leather booties? This time, Saks Fifth Avenue or Nordstroms is not going to have the perfect outfit to go falconing.

Enter Pearson's Renaissance Shoppe [http://www.pearsonsrenaissanceshoppe.com/], an online emporium to satisfy all your Robin and Marian, or Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, fantasies.

For guest appearances as the author of my Royal series, ROYAL AFFAIRS, NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES, and the soon-to-be-released ROYAL PAINS, I occasionally wear a replica Renaissance gown that I bought at the Ren Faire in Tuxedo NY years ago. So it's not a stretch for me to scour the internet in search of items to augment my wardrobe.

Can I say that I wished I could buy just about all of the Medieval and Renaissance gowns Pearson's offers? http://www.pearsonsrenaissanceshoppe.com/renaissance-medieval-dresses.html

The falconer might look at me sideways if I arrived for my lesson in full regalia, but a girl can dream, can't she?

And if one doesn't want to do a full Eleanor of Aquitaine, Pearson's has all manner of jewelry (even crowns!) with which to accessorize.

Pearson's is so delighted that I fell in love with them that they are hosting a contest on this blog. One lucky winner, drawn at random, will win a lovely and delicate "Elven Princess" tiara. Perfect for channeling your inner Arwen!

Please provide your name and email contact, and feel free to post a comment as to where you might wear this fabulous accessory to indulge your own Medieval or Renaissance fantasy.

Item Description:

This fairy tale comb is made of rhinestones and pearls with a flower and leaf design. The Elven Leaf Comb is metal plated in sterling silver and has a comb in the back to stay on your head. It measures 1.5 inches tall and 4.5 inches wide.

The contest is open from September 24 to October 15 at midnight, EST. I will choose a winner on October 16.

Multiply your chances to win! If you become a follower of this blog, you'll get an additional 2 chances. If you tweet about the contest, you get one additional chance; and if you post something about this contest on Facebook, you'll earn one additional chance as well.

All images in this post are taken from Pearson's web site.

Leslie Carroll's interview on NPR's TRAVEL WITH RICK STEVES

2010-08-18T06:44:00.001-07:00

The marvelous and engaging Rick Steves, travel guru extraordinare, interviewed me in March 2010 about traveling in the footsteps of famous royals. It was a marvelous opportunity to discuss my 2010 nonfiction release, NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES, and thanks to the broadcast, my book sales have skyrocketed.

The interview aired in mid-August 2010.

Here's the link to the interview. Please note that via the magic of Mr. Steves' editing, my segment is preceded, quite serendipitously, by an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of EAT, PRAY, LOVE, which was adapted into a major (and just released) motion picture, starring Julia Roberts.

Leslie Carroll's interview on Rick Steves' travel program on NPR:

http://www.ricksteves.com/radio/streaming/program216.asx. Extras, including a discussion of Princess Diana, can be found at http://www.ricksteves.com/radio/archive.htm#216.

Enjoy -- and may you be tempted to hop on the next plane for your favorite palace!

ROYAL ROMANCES on the horizon!

2010-08-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

Happy August, everyone!

As the "dog days" of summer continue (whyever are they called that? How would the phrase pertain to, e.g., a Siberian husky or an Alaskan Malamute on their home turf?) I am delighted to share some wonderful news:

I will be writing a fourth book in my nonfiction Royal series, to be titled

ROYAL ROMANCES: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe

I'm very excited about it and am still finalizing my table of contents. I'm always open to suggestions. In fact, this volume will include at least one couple of royal paramours that didn't make it into ROYAL AFFAIRS because of limitations on page count.

I tend to be as visual as I am verbal, and even though a production meeting on the cover art is months and months away, I love to imagine what NAL's art department might come up with.

Here are some of my initial thoughts:

The Kiss, by Francesco Hayez

The Black Brunswicker, by John Everett Millais

A Huguenot on St. Bartholomew's Day (also by Millais)

Just for the fun of it, if you have any cover art suggestions for a book titled ROYAL ROMANCES, feel free to share them. Who knows? Your suggestion may be on a book cover one of these days!

My March 2011 release: ROYAL PAINS

2010-07-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

Coming March 1, 2011 from NAL:

ROYAL PAINS:

A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

In a world where sibling rivalry knows no bounds and excess is never enough, meet some of history’s boldest, baddest, and bawdiest royals

The bad seeds on the family trees of the most powerful royal houses of Europe often became the rottenest of apples. In an effort to stave off wrinkles, sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory bathed in the blood of virgins, and for kicks and giggles devised even more ingenious forms of torture than the über-violent autocrats Vlad (the Impaler) Dracula and Ivan the Terrible had ever imagined. Lettice Knollys strove to mimic the appearance of her cousin Elizabeth I and even stole her man. The Duke of Cumberland’s sexcapades and subsequent clandestine marriage led to a law that still binds England’s royal family. And the libidinous Pauline Bonaparte scandalized her imperial brother by having herself sculpted nearly nude and commissioning a golden drinking goblet fashioned in the shape of her breast.

Chock-full of shocking scenes, titillating tales, and wildly wicked nobles, Royal Pains is a rollicking compendium of the most infamous, capricious, and insatiable bluebloods of Europe.

Praise for Leslie Carroll's Notorious Royal Marriages

“For those who tackled Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and can’t get enough of the scandal surrounding Henry VIII’s wives, [Notorious Royal Marriages is] the perfect companion book.”—The New Yorker

“Carroll writes with verve and wit about the passionate—and occasionally perilous—events that occur when royals wed.”—Chicago Tribune (5 stars)

The Jock Who Would Be King

2010-06-19T10:48:00.001-07:00

Thirty-six-year-old Daniel Westling, former personal trainer to Crown Princess Victoria Ingrid Alice Desirée of Sweden, wed the princess on Saturday, June 19. He will henceforth be known as Prince Daniel, Duke of Vastergotland.

A rather vocal minority in Sweden believes the monarchy is passé and anachronistic, with 22% wanting the monarchy abolished entirely, up from 15% just six years ago. And a Facebook group called "Refuse to Pay for Victoria's Wedding" garnered popularity.

The thirty-two-year-old Crown Princess is currently next in line for Sweden's throne, although it wasn't always the case. In 1980 the succession law was changed, making King Carl XVI Gustaf's heir his oldest child, regardless of gender. Poor Prince Carl Philip, Victoria's younger brother. So close ... and yet so far.

Though I can guess how this is going down (after all, it's a royalist sort of blog), what's your opinon of this royal wedding -- and of monarchies in general?

Should taxpayers have been burdened (no matter how insignificant the share to the individual citizen of Sweden) with the cost of the flowers, booze, and royal wedding band?

Do you think monarchies are outdated? A charming relic of the past? Part of the continuity of a kingdom's history that is great for tourism and should continue indefinitely?

None of the above? Please share your thoughts. And what do you think of the fact that a gym rat whose father was a postal employee will one day sit on the Swedish throne? Very cool? Or very appalling?

Of Royalty, Polo, and Champagne

2010-06-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the Widow Veuve, polo returns to NYC on June 27 with a charity event sponsored by Veuve Clicquot champagne to benefit the American Friends of Sentebale, the US arm of a charity that Prince Harry of England founded to help underprivileged children in Lesotho.

Like his mother, the renegade redheaded prince is philanthropic and socially aware (except, umm... for those little hiccups where he forgets all lessons in World History and wears Nazi uniforms to fancy dress balls, or insults Pakistani comrades in arms with a derisive nickname related to their headgear).

Like his father, the Windsor spare plays polo.

I wish I could attend this event, and I do have a lovely pastel-colored suit and a large picture hat, so at least I can dress the part; but I think I'd need a charitable trust of my own to finance the excursion. However, as much as I write about royal scandals and scandalous royals, I'd be very tempted to root for Prince Harry's opponent, the Argentine heart-throb, polo player, and erstwhile Ralph Lauren model, Nacho Figueras.

Okay, ladies, which one would you choose to root for?

Grace Kelly: movie star, princess, fashion icon

2010-06-06T05:32:00.000-07:00

If you're lucky enough to be in London this summer, and you're a big fan of all things royal, and you consider yourself something of a fashionista, or even a film buff -- if I were you, I'd run-not-walk to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has on exhibition a retrospective of Grace Kelly's wardrobe.

http://www.stylelist.com/2010/04/09/grace-kelly-style-icon-exhibit-london-vanda-museum/

Born in November, 1929, Kelly grew up near Philadelphia's mainline, a princess of privilege, although her charismatic and entrepreneurial father Jack, a bricklayer by trade, was quite the self-made man. She studied acting in NYC at the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts on Madison Avenue, a conservatory that also produced the likes of Spencer Tracy, Robert Redford, and a starry-eyed kid who wasn't yet named Leslie Carroll.

First Broadway beckoned, then Hollywood, and the slender, blond, athletic golden girl, the quintessence of All-American beauty (although the fact [in the post WWII years] that her mother was German-born was either downplayed or suppressed by the media) became a film star by the time she was in her early 20s, winning an Academy Award for her leading role in "The Country Girl." At the age of twenty-six, believing that she'd done it all, and that the glamour of the silver screen would soon turn to tinsel (“Each year my makeup call is a lot earlier. And when I look at the other ladies who’ve been there since dawn, do I want to live like that? Get me out.”) she agreed to take time off from film promotion in Cannes to meet the thirty-one-year-old neighboring prince of Monaco, Rainier III.

The rest, as they say, is history: an archetypal fairy tale wedding (in truth funded by Jack Kelly and MGM; even her wedding gown, hair, and makeup was done by studio personnel), followed by three children and a jet-setting lifestyle in the ultimate gilded cage.

Grace Kelly's wedding suit (worn during her civil wedding, the day before the grand church wedding. Her formal wedding gown was deemed too fragile to travel to the V&A exhibit)

But of course, beneath the glittering surface all was not perfect -- and you can read the true story of the marriage of Grace and Rainier in my book, NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire.

http://www.amazon.com/Notorious-Royal-Marriages-Journey-Centuries/dp/0451229010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275829473&sr=1-1/div>

Are you familiar with the life of Grace Kelly? What's your impression of her?

Fergie's Noblesse Oblige

2010-05-25T06:06:00.000-07:00

A royal scandal indeed! Of course Buckingham Palace is quick to remind the media that the Duchess of York's divorce from Prince Andrew means that she is no longer a member of the royal family, but that hasn't stopped the American press from Duchess in Disgrace headlines.

Royals occasionally make strange bedfellows when they've extended their financial means (Prinny, anyone?). Ditto for desperate and destitute divorcees.

So, what do you think of Sarah Ferguson's latest?

Uneasy lies the head...

2010-05-21T04:31:00.000-07:00

Enjoy this latest bit of dish on Princess Diana! This was merely the crowning (tee-hee) touch to a disastrous bout of pre-wedding jitters. Of course, you might think twice, too, if you suspected that your royal fiance was enamored of another.

http://www.aisledash.com/2010/05/20/princess-diana-wedding-tiara-headache/?icid=mainhtmlws-main-wdl3link4http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aisledash.com%2F2010%2F05%2F20%2Fprincess-diana-wedding-tiara-headache%2F

And the Winner is ...

2010-02-21T04:59:00.000-08:00

Celtic Lady!!

Congratulations! You have won the Valentine's Day contest: an autographed copy of NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES!

My very own valentine, my hubby Scott, drew the winner's name.

Happy belated Valentine's Day!

THE NEW YORKER magazine loves NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES

2010-02-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES was featured online today in the venerated New Yorker magazine. I'm over the moon about this! And I finally have something else in common with my late grandfather Carroll Carroll, who used to write humorous pieces for the magazine in the 1920s -- as well as with one of my all time favorite poets and snarks, Dorothy Parker.

Thank you, Thessaly, and thanks to THE NEW YORKER for making this New Yorker extremely proud. I only wish my grandfather were still around to read this. But hopefully, from that great Round Table in the sky, he's grinning at me over his rocks glass.

THE BOOK BENCH

February 17, 2010
The Exchange: Notorious Royal Marriages
Posted by Thessaly La Force

Notorious Royal Marriages

by Leslie Carroll

Thomas More’s father once said that marriage was like putting “your hand into a blind bag full of snakes and eels together, seven snakes for one eel.” (It helps to know that eels were a staple of Renaissance diets.) In other words, marriage wasn’t easy. Leslie Carroll, the author of “Royal Affairs,” has a new book out documenting over two dozen of the royal set’s juiciest marriages. For those who tackled Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” and can’t get enough of the scandal surrounding Henry VIII’s wives, here’s the perfect companion book. You can get all of the dirt you want, with none of the guilt (it’s history, O.K.?). Carroll took time this week to answer some of my questions about “Notorious Royal Marriages.”

There have been so many notorious marriages in the past decade—why focus on royal marriages?
True: we all love to read dishy stuff about the high and mighty, particularly when their lives are revealed to be less than rosy. Yet Americans in particular have enjoyed an ongoing love affair with royalty—perhaps because we’ve never had any—so we’re especially enamored of castles and crowns. I like to shine a light on what the life of a royal really means and to depict them as human beings and not as glamorous icons. Mel Brooks’s famous quip “It’s good to be the king” is less of a truism than Shakespeare’s “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”
Royal scandals and scandalous royals have become my nonfiction niche. I débuted in nonfiction with “Royal Affairs” in 2008; writing about these powerful relationships from the legitimate side of the sheets, was the logical next step, and that’s how “Notorious Royal Marriages” came about.

How do you define “notorious”?
I chose marriages that in some way impacted the monarchy itself as well as the kingdom or empire. That said, there have been so many royal unions that fit this criterion that I couldn’t cover them all in one volume (which, conveniently, leaves lots of room for a sequel). I also aimed at balancing some of the notorious “greatest hits,” such as all six of Henry VIII’s marriages, with some of the more obscure European royal unions: for example, the marriage of George Ludwig of Hanover (the future George I of England) and his wife (and first cousin) Sophia Dorothea of Celle. Come to think of it, there were so many of them that I probably could have written a book limited solely to first-cousin royal marriages!

For a royal, what did it mean to be a good wife or a good husband?
Queens were primarily expected to be brood mares. In a time of high infant mortality, they were expected to be fertile, and give the kingdom as many children—preferably boys—as possible. They were also expected to be docile, complacent, and ornamental; the brightest jewel in the king’s crown. Kings could pretty much do anything they wanted; being a good husband was in the eye of the beholder. Or the monarch. Charles II, who fathered seventeen illegitimate children, considered himself a very good husband because he didn’t send his wife, Catherine of Braganza (who was very much in love with him) back to Portugal after she proved unable to carry a child to term. He realized that it wasn’t her “fault,” and that he had put her through the emotional ringer by flaunting his bevy of royal mistresses.

Why did people from royal families get married? How is marriage different from the ceremony we perform today?
The primary purpose of a royal marriage was to beget an heir to continue the line. The stakes could not have been higher. No direct heirs of the king’s body could lead to civil war between competing contenders for the crown, each asserting a stronger claim than the other, or to an invasion by a foreign monarch claiming the throne.

In France, only a male heir could inherit the throne, putting additional pressure on the queen. Royal marriages were dynastic and political alliances. A foreign queen who proved to be barren, or could not beget a male heir, ran the risk of being sent back to her country of origin. Henry VIII was desperate for a male heir even though women could inherit the English throne. His was still a very martial era and the monarchy was far more of an autocracy at the time. It was commonly believed that only a male who could lead his troops into battle could govern the kingdom and keep any rebellious nobles in line, quashing any local uprisings as well.

The notion of anyone wedding for love would not only have been laughed at, it would have been ignored; and even in the nineteenth century the young queen Victoria and, two generations later, her granddaughter, Alexandra of Hesse, were looked at somewhat askance for insisting on a love match (with Prince Albert, and with the tsarevich, Nicholas Romanov of Russia, respectively).

Before the sixteenth century, when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, and Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome, everyone was Catholic. Because the royal gene pool was not terribly deep (and would grow even shallower as time went on), more often than not, marriages between cousins were arranged. And, more often than not, their familial relationship to each other, or consanguinity, often presented an obstacle to their marriage. The more closely related the royals were to each other, the greater the degree of consanguinity. However, the popes, always eager to increase their coffers, made dispensations available to the royal houses of Europe. After some wrangling and a bit of paperwork, a papal dispensation made it O.K. for cousins to wed each other. Conveniently, these dispensations were sometimes overturned because—shock, horror!—the spouses were cousins! Eleanor of Aquitaine and her fourth cousin, King Louis VII of France, who had required a papal dispensation permitting them to wed in the first place, raised the subject of their consanguinity after several years of marriage during which Eleanor bore Louis two daughters, but no sons. By that time, both of them wanted a divorce. The Pope reversed the dispensation because the pair were fourth cousins.

Within weeks, Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, the eighteen-year-old Duke of Normandy, who soon became King Henry II of England. And here’s the kicker about the ridiculousness of the papal dispensations for consanguinity. Henry was Eleanor’s third cousin!

Which marriage is your favorite, and why?
I spent so much time researching these couples that each of them found a place in my heart. But if I have to choose one, I would say that Marie Antoinette and the dauphin—the future Louis XVI—became my favorite because what I came away with after extensively researching their relationship is that they were so misunderstood—as royals and as human beings. I entered my research with preconceived notions (for example, that he was a doofus or a dolt and that she was a bubbleheaded shopaholic); yet the more I read about this pair, the more sympathetic I found them. In fact, I found Marie Antoinette and Louis so intriguing—as individuals, as a couple, and in the context of their time—that I couldn’t wait to turn my historical-fiction pen (O.K., keyboard) to Marie Antoinette’s story.

The wedding of Marie Antoinette Josephe Jeanne Archduchess of Austria and Louis Auguste Dauphin of France. They were married on Wednesday, May 16, 1770.

Are there any parallels you’ve seen with more contemporary marriages to any of the marriages you write about? (Is there, for example, a modern day Henry VIII? Or Anne Boleyn?)

Let’s hope there isn’t a monarch ready to execute his wife because she has so far failed to bear him a son, or because (in the case of Kathryn Howard) she may have taken a lover! Of course, European monarchies are now constitutional ones, and the sovereign can no longer get away with judicial murder. Because governments are now in the hands of parliamentary bodies, royal spouses don’t have the same ability to shape their kingdoms in their own image. Tabloids might be filled with the sexcapades of current royals, or with their hypothetical battles with drugs or depression, but you don’t read about outsized colorful figures that really put their stamp on the world. The closest we’ve come lately was Princess Diana, but her effect on England and the world was more sentimental and emotional than literal. For example, she didn’t (as Anne Boleyn did) inspire her husband to change the course of world history by breaking with the church and establishing himself as the head of a new national religion, an act that forever impacted European history.

Leslie Carroll

Marriage, especially in royal court, can be very public, but I imagine there were also very private moments. Can you explain how you researched this book?

I read about sixty biographies of the royals profiled in “Notorious Royal Marriages,” in addition to a couple of dozen biographical articles published in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Many of the secondary sources contain primary-source material, including diary entries, poems written by the royals, and correspondence, including love letters, as well as primary-source material written by others close to the royal spouses (e.g., parents, courtiers, governesses). Although journal entries, and even some correspondence, can be written with an eye firmly on posterity or on one’s own reputation, and therefore are not entirely reliable, these primary-source materials do provide a valuable, and fascinating, window into the private lives of royal spouses.

You’re also the author of “Royal Affairs.” How common were affairs?
Extramarital affairs were extremely common—more the rule than the exception, actually. Because royal marriages were political and economic unions, odds were that the spouses had little affection, let alone love, for each other. However, what was good for the gander was not acceptable for the goose. Kings strayed constantly. But queens were expected to remain one-hundred-per-cent faithful to their husbands, to shut up and put up with the king’s mistresses, turning a blind eye to his infidelities.

Keywords
Henry VIII;
Leslie Carroll;
Marie Antoinette;
Notorious Royal Marriages;
royals;
wedding
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Win an Autographed Copy of NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES!

2010-02-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

In honor of Valentine's Day, I am offering a giveway of an autographed copy of NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES. Life wasn't always hearts and flowers for these famous royals. So, you can either count yourself lucky that you're in a much more rewarding relationship, or steal a few tips from some of the genuinely happily married couples. Hint: some of them wrote some extremely erotic love letters to each other. Others were hopless romantics in their correspondence.

To enter, post a comment below. A comment gets you 1 chance. Becoming a follower of this blog gets you an additional chance to win. Becoming a follower of my other blog, "The Lady Novelist" at http://www.leslie-carroll.blogspot.com/ garners you a third chance. Tweet about it as well and you get 4 entries.

The winner's name will be drawn on Sunday, February 21, 2010. I will notify the winner by email and post his or her name on the blog.

Happy Valentine's Day to all, and may it be everything you'd hoped for!

The Week That Was: NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES in the News

2010-02-10T03:55:00.000-08:00

Last week began with a bang. I had the honor and privilege to guest host the first anniversary of Lady Jane's Salon on Monday, February 1.

On February 5, the marvelous Barbara Vey published a report on her PW Book Blog, "Beyond the Book," written by Leanna Renee Hieber, whose unique writer's voice is moving copies of her debut novel, THE STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL CASE OF MISS PERCY PARKER off the shelves as though they were hotcakes at a firemens' breakfast.

See my reprint of the article here:

February 5, 2010

Author Leanna Renee Hieber here with birthday wishes to Lady Jane! Monday marked the one year anniversary of New York’s only reading series devoted to Romance Fiction; Lady Jane’s Salon. Lady Jane’s was founded in late 2008 by myself, fellow romance authors Hope Tarr, Maya Rodale and internet guru Ron Hogan over drinks one night discussing why New York, in all its literary splendor, didn’t have a reading series for Romance Fiction. So it was up to us to start one. And we did, in the red-velvet-drenched upstairs of Madame X, with our first authors Cara Elliot and Lauren Willig- who becauseof their partnership at Lady Jane’s are now teaching romance in the big leagues (Yale). While the night boasted champagne, corsages and cupcakes, the spirit of Lady Jane’s is always about great fiction and a good cause. Now New York Times bestselling author Lauren Willig returned to our stage to help us celebrate this landmark year with her latest hit, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, along with guest emcee and fabulous Historical author Leslie Carroll and her Notorious Royal Marriages, and scintillating debut author Sara Lindsey with Promise Me Tonight.

Leslie Carroll (fittingly dressed as Tudor Queen Lady Jane Grey) with fellow history hoyden and NY Times Bestselling author Lauren Willig; [this photo courtesy of my husband, Scott]

And so a year later… thanks to the support of people like you, Barbara, and Romantic Times Magazine, our wonderful venue Madame X, a host of bloggers, newspaper articles, radio interviews, thanks to a slew of talented authors and an ardent crowd of loyal supporters, Lady Jane’s is one of the most vibrant forces in New York’s experience of fiction in real-time; a face to face opportunity for readers, authors, industry and fans to talk about and applaud (literally) the genre we love. And then, of course, to share the love, by donating money and gently used romance novels to women in need, as charity remains a core part of our Salon’s identity.

A ton has happened through the year, for the co-founders, our readers and authors. Our co-founders published new books, the year marked my dream-come-true with my debut; The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, we watched as our featured readers’ books hit lists and thrilled at the news of contracts for our some of our Lady Jane’s audience who will now be debut authors too, Ron Hogan got a cool new job ruling the interwebz for the very smart New York publishing house who snatched him up, and 2010 proves to be no less than spectacular.

With featured readers returning to the Lady Jane’s stage unveiling new names and new initiatives, we’ll also have a host of debut authors take the stage. We’ll continue our mission to promote every single sub-genre within Romance. We’ll be expanding our charity options, we’ll have a Salon at the Romantic Times convention (please come!), and most importantly, we’ll get to see you again, Barbara Vey, our supporter from the beginning, and we can’t wait for it all to unfold. Keep in touch at Lady Jane's Salon and come see us! Blessings, thanks and happy reading!

Thanks again to Barbara Vey for showcasing a very special program that benefits an equally important cause!

Then, on Saturday, February 6, I had a double-header in southern Vermont. First, the Royal High Tea at the picturesque 18th century Dorset Inn, was a splendiferous success. Hosting in the guise of Marie Antoinette, I chatted with readers as they enjoyed their afternoon repast, dishing the dirt on various renegade royals throughout the ages. I was tremendously impressed with our guests' erudition when it came to royal history.

It was also a treat to finally meet the talented Heather Rieseck, author of the very popular historical fiction blog, The Maidens' Court. We've been connecting in cyberspace for months, and I'm happy to say that she's just as much of a delight in person!

Dorset Inn owners Lauren and Steven Bryant and their wonderful Chef Thom really pulled out all the stops. The royal tea was a delicious and elegant event and such a success that we're already batting around ideas for the next themed tea. Jane Austen, anyone?

That evening , I was back in mufti for a reading, discussion, and signing of NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES at the marvelous Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT. I read from my chapter on the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, which gave me the chance to share with readers who have also seen the recent feature film "The Young Victoria" a taste of how the marriage really transpired and what went on within it. I must confess, I suddenly became very emotional and teary as I was reading Victoria's own words about the last moments of her beloved Albert and her vows to rule her kingdom the way he would have wanted her to do so. I noticed some moist eyes in the house as well. The courtship and marriage of Victoria and Albert is one of the rare love stories in royal history.

Thanks are due to Northshire events coordinator Zach Marcus and his assistant Kate, as well as to my fabulous publicist at NAL, Kathryn Tumen, for making it all happen!

Join me on February 1 at Lady Jane's Salon

2010-01-25T01:00:00.000-08:00

On February 1, 2010, I will be reading from NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES (and signing the copies available for purchase) at Lady Jane's Salon, located at the seductive Madame X, 94 West Houston Street in New York City.

Joined by the lovely and talented Lauren Willig and Sara Lindsey, I'll be guest hosting that night as well. Don't miss me dressed as a Tudor (you'll have to guess which one).

Here's the lowdown:

WHAT: Reading & signing @ Lady Jane’s Salon
WHERE:Madame X
94 Houston Street
NY, NY 10012(212) 539-0808

Subways: F,V,B,D @ Lafayette/N, R @ Prince St.

WHEN: 7-9 pm on 2/1/2010

WHY: Support women & the arts! (Need more incentive? There’s cheap booze!)

ADMISSION: $5 or a gently-used romance novel.
Proceeds from the evening benefit Share the Love.

Afternoon Tea and Royal Gossip at The Dorset Inn

2010-01-11T12:18:00.000-08:00

Please join me at the gorgeous, historic Dorset Inn in on Saturday, Feb. 6th at 3 p.m for an afternoon of Royal gossip from my newest book,

NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny and Desire.

From the press release: “Historian and Manhattan-based actress Leslie Carroll is on her way to becoming the go-to-girl when it comes to the real life love (and hate) stories, gossip, and scandals of famous royals.”

So, while The Dorset Inn will be dishing out Afternoon Tea, accompanied by a delectable selection of pastries and sweets prepared by Chef Thom, I'll be dishing about your favorite royals (in costume, no less!)

$15 per person, all inclusive
Please call the Dorset Inn at 802-867-5500 to reserve.

Reservations Required by Feb 2nd.

What could be more fun than a wintry afternoon by the fire together, savoring culinary delights from a top chef in one of the nation's most picturesque towns?

I do hope to see you there!

At long last ... NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES releases today!

2010-01-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

It's been a long gestation ... but finally, my 13th book is on the shelves today! I've been blogging about it for days already, with many more exciting guest posts and personal appearances to come . . .

You can visit me today at another of my homes away from home, the History Hoydens blog at http://www.historyhoydens.blogspot.com/ , and all this week at the myriad events set up by the fantastic Octobloggers of the Historical Fiction Round Table. Scroll down to my previous post to see who and where they are.

Special thanks are due to my amazing husband Scott for being so kind and patient and understanding through the long hours of research and writing.

And here's a double-barrelled question for my readers: who is your favorite royal couple, and why?

NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES week at the HISTORICAL FICTION ROUNDTABLE

2009-12-30T18:43:00.000-08:00

I am delighted to announce that all week, from January 4 through 10, 2010, the delightful, erudite, and passionate ladies at the brand new Historical Fiction Roundtable blog (http://historicalfictionroundtable.com/) will be featuring my 13th book, NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES. The book's release date is January 5, 2010.

Be sure to visit the Round Table website as well as the ladies' individual blogs for exciting giveaways, guest posts, interviews, and other special events.

Roundtable Members:
Allie of Hist-Fic Chick

Amy of Passages to the Past

Arleigh of Historical-Fiction.com

Heather of The Maiden’s Court

Lizzy of Historically Obsessed

Lucy of Enchanted by Josephine

Marie of The Burton Review

Susie of All Things Royal

These amazing women have pulled out all the stops to put together an awesome blog tour for my second foray into historical nonfiction. Ever wonder about the real stories behind some of your favorite royals, their lives and loves? For more couples than you think, wedlock was more like unholy matrimony, and till death did they part couldn't come soon enough! And then there were the real-life love stories that will break your heart and may even surprise you.

For example ... Queen Victoria was so hot for Albert that she couldn't tear her gaze away from his tight white trousers when the couple was supposed to be reviewing a military parade. And once their children were born, she couldn't bear the fact that they took her attention away from her beloved husband. Victoria and Albert eventually had nine children and eleven was definitely a crowd!

And then there was Victoria's granddaughter,Alicky, the future Empress Alexandra of Russia. Alicky married her cousin Nicky, just days after he became Tsar of all the Russias. They had a secret signal for sex. Nicky would warble like a bird, and Alicky would blush, hitch up her skirts, and run to his arms. When things went south politically, Nicholas turned to cocaine, while Alexandra dosed herself with Veronal to help her sleep. Never for a moment did they allow adversity to chip away at their mutual passion for each other, which was as strong the day they were brutally executed as the day they first pledged their love.

So, mark your calendars to pull up a chair to the Historical Fiction Roundtable for the royal ride of a lifetime!

THE YOUNG VICTORIA: First Impressions

2009-12-27T13:20:00.000-08:00

God Save Paul Bettany, Jim Broadbent, Miranda Richardson, Harriet Walter, and the host of stellar character actors who populate "The Young Victoria," a sumptuously filmed Hollywood-ization of the late teenage years of Victoria Regina.

It's a welcome costume drama, if an imperfect one. In the interest of giving our royal heroine some adversaries the filmmakers created them where they did not historically exist, thereby depriving theatregoers of the pleasure of enjoying the way the real courtship between Victoria and Albert unfolded.

What is missing is the breathless passion that the eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria felt for her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Where is the girl who wrote in her diary about the tight white trousers Albert wore when they watched a parade review, intimating that she could scarcely tear her gaze from his manly attributes? Sounds like the stuff of a maudlin romance novel -- but it's fact. She was head over heels in lust with him by that point; I wish we'd seen that bubbling beneath the surface of Emily Blunt's cousinly cordiality.

Did we really need the stereotypical villains handed to us by the screenplay, since we've got three of them, not counting Victoria's mother? However, they do deserve kudos for making Sir John Conroy, Victoria's mother's comptroller (in every way) as nasty as he surely was (he even aims a kick at Victoria's dog, Dash -- played to heartwarming perfection by a Tricolor Cavalier King Charles Spaniel).

But we're given two additional screen baddies who in real life were Victoria's champions during the period covered by the film -- her ascendancy to the throne and her courtship with Prince Albert. The fact that Victoria and Albert were cousins is glossed over, possibly because of its "ick factor" to 21st century audiences, although intermarriage was more the rule than the exception for the royal houses of Europe.

I am always disappointed by the unnecessary revising of history when the real story is just as (if not more) delicious and fraught with tensions as the cinematic one. For example, King Leopold of the Belgians was in fact very much a long-distance father-figure to Victoria, and not at all the self-interested Machiavellian we have in the movie. Yes, he was the one who first proposed the idea of a match between Victoria and Albert, but he was a pragmatic and avuncular advisor who very much cared for her interests. And she looked up to him for guidance and advice.

Also falling into that category in real life was William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, Victoria's first prime minister and mentor, another father figure. Paul Bettany can do little wrong in my eyes (never have I seen him in a film where he doesn't burn up the screen with his intensity. And it could be my vintage that is responsible for my vantage here, but in my view, sexuality comes off the man in waves). Consequently, he seems far too young and sexy to play Lord Melbourne (who was 58 when Victoria ascended the throne). And yet, odd casting choice aside, when Bettany's onscreen it's impossible to watch anyone else.

But the filmmakers were cognizant enough of Bettany's sex appeal to use it as a foil for Rupert Friend's Prince Albert. True, Melbourne attempted to discourage Victoria from marrying her Coburg cousin for political reasons -- but almost as soon as she became queen, he did urge her to find a husband, and to do so without delay, the opposite position taken from his cinematic counterpart. Melbourne, as written for Mr. Bettany, consistently encourages her to delay any considerations of marriage and seems to wish he could bed Victoria himself. True, the real Melbourne was a flirt, but we're talking about the lively banter between a girl of 18 or 19 and a man pushing 60. The actors in "The Young Victoria," -- Bettany, and (the rather tall and thin for Victoria) Emily Blunt -- look far too much like contemporaries (Bettany is currently 38 years old) for the proper dynamic to be believable.

Throughout the film, I missed the real Victoria who was so full of bouncy ebullience and exuberance that her conduct made Albert nervous. At the outset, he was unsure that a bubbly wife who loved late nights and balls would suit his temperament. That Victoria is not the character the movie makers have given us. Perhaps they thought they had done so, but whether it's due to the screenplay, the direction, the casting, or a combination of all of those factors, it's not there.

Still, there is much to enjoy about the film. It is gorgeous to look at and the supporting cast is particularly strong. The creators were true to the way certain events (and even stretches of dialogue) unfolded, and for that they merit applause. I just wish they'd trusted history a bit more, and not felt compelled to invent situations for purely dramatic reasons; truth being stranger than fiction, more often than not the actual events were far more exciting than anything concocted by a screenwriter.

For those interested in the story of the real courtship of Victoria and Albert and in the actual personality of the young Victoria, here are a few paragraphs from my nonfiction book, NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES, to be released on January 5.

When she was six days shy of her seventeenth birthday, on May 18, 1836, Victoria, not yet queen of England, had the opportunity to meet her two Coburg cousins, Ernest and his younger brother Albert.

Victoria’s immediate reaction to her sixteen-year-old cousin was overwhelmingly positive. According to her diary entry, “. . . Albert, who is just as tall as Ernest but stouter, is extremely handsome; his hair is about the same color as mine; his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth; but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful; c’est à la fois [it’s at the same time] full of goodness and sweetness, and very clever and intelligent.”

However, Albert privately nursed some reservations regarding Victoria’s suitability as a future spouse. Ebullient and vivacious, she enjoyed late nights and parties and also delighted in the trivialities and fripperies of court life and etiquette. He’d also heard she was stubborn and that she was not terribly fond of Nature, which was one of his passions. True, insects—as well as turtle soup, and Tories—were among three of her pet peeves.

At least the cousins possessed similar senses of humor, favoring the sort of practical joke that would make a vaudevillian proud over the brisk intellectual quip or display of wit.

The visit progressed swimmingly. On June 7, Victoria wrote to Leopold with her characteristic effusiveness, “I must thank you, my beloved Uncle, for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me, in the person of dear Albert. Allow me . . . to tell you how delighted I am with him, and how much I like him in every way. He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable, too. He has besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see.”

The Coburg cousins returned to Germany, but the stage had been set for a genuine love match, that rarest of occurrences in the history of royal marriages.

Oh, how I wish this Victoria, the girl of the "characteristic effusiveness," had been the woman we saw in the film:

An honest physical appraisal of the young queen was offered by the wife of Andrew Stevenson, the American Minister in London, who had been one of Victoria’s dinner guests during the first year of her reign. The British ruler stood about five feet tall and was a bit plump, with the bulging blue eyes and protuberant chin of the Hanovers. “Her bust, like most English women’s, is very good, hands and feet are small and very pretty . . . her mouth, which is her worst feature, is generally a little open; her teeth small and short, and she shows her gums when she laughs, which is rather disfiguring.” Mrs. Stevenson did find Her Majesty’s laugh to be “particularly delightful,” however, “so full of girlish glee and gladness.” Others described Victoria’s smile as enchanting and her voice as melodious.

Thomas Creevey, who dined in the teenage queen’s company at the Brighton Pavilion in October 1837 had much to say about her gustatory habits. “She eats quite as heartily as she laughs, I think I may say she gobbles . . . She blushes and laughs every instant in so natural a way as to disarm anybody.”

Have you seen "The Young Victoria"? What are your thoughts on the film and on the way it portrayed Victoria's various relationships?

VICTORIA IN LOVE

2009-12-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

The new film, "The Young Victoria" is all the buzz right now, all set to make its US debut, enthusiastically promoted by one of its producers, Sarah Ferguson, better known as "Fergie" -- no, not the Black Eyed Peas singer -- Duchess of York. Ferguson's daughter Princess Beatrice is an extra in the film, and owing to her DNA looks a whole lot more like the young Victoria than the film's star, the talented Emily Blunt.

The redheaded former Windsor has been telling all the morning TV anchors what a great unknown story she discovered in the archives of Windsor Castle -- that of the great love (and even passion) between the young Victoria and her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

See the movie -- read the book!

It's not that unknown, actually -- and you can learn even more about this beautiful royal love story (complete with quotes from Victoria's diaries) in my upcoming nonfiction release, NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES. The book hits the shelves on January 5, 2010, the eleventh day of Christmas.

I invite you to pick up a copy of the book and enjoy your own epiphany regarding one of the greatest love stories ever ... and many more love (and hate) stories of some of the world's most famous royal couples.

NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES is the talk of a PW blog!

2009-12-09T08:03:00.000-08:00

The delightful Barbara Vey, who writes a very popular blog on the Publishers Weekly website, emailed me today to inform me that NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES has a capsule review -- by a male, yet! -- on her blog today!

It turned my rainy day sunny!

WW Ladies Book Club Blurbs December 9, 2009

. . . Notorious Royal Marriages by Leslie Carroll

Read by Michael

"Happily Ever After" doesn't always occur in real life romances, and especially not when the marriage involves royalty. In this book, Leslie Carroll tells us a little bit about some of the more famous royal marriages, starting with Eleanor of Aquitaine and ending with Prince Charles. The author has the ability to make dry old history become interesting and fun to read. The writing is quick and clever, without over embellishment of the facts. I’m a big fan of history and of historical fiction, and felt I learned a lot by reading this book. I will be perusing her previous non-fiction book, Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp Through the Extramarital Adventures That Rocked the British Monarchy.

Thank you, Barbara and Michael!

Here's the link for today's post:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/880000288/post/1620051162.html

The Queen is Dead! Long Live the Queen!

2009-11-04T17:52:00.000-08:00

Undoubtedly there will be more news as I get the details, but I am DELIGHTED to announce that I have just accepted a terrific three-book offer from Random House for a historical fiction trilogy on the life of Marie Antoinette.

Although I got my exercise at the gym already today, I have been doing the proverbial "happy dance" since I heard the news, and shared a bottle of Prosecco with my agent this afternoon because I just had to give myself a couple of hours off from researching my nonfiction wip ROYAL PAINS, to digest the incredible news!

The first book, tentatively titled BECOMING is about Antoinette's early years, from the day she learns, as a ten-year-old girl, that her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, has opened negotiations to marry her to Louis-Auguste the dauphin of France -- heir to his grandfather Louis XV's throne. The first novel will end on the day she becomes queen of France.

I know exactly what time period each of the other two novels in the trilogy will span but I prefer to keep that to myself for the moment.

The only other information I have about this marvelous Random House contract is that this fresh start will necessitate a new pen name for my historical fiction (I will continue to write my nonfiction ROYAL series for NAL under my own name).

So, Amanda Elyot, who wrote 4 historical novels, and who was described by Publishers Weekly as "the queen of historical romance" [though she really wrote historical fiction, and there is a difference] has been officially declared dead. I loved her very much and I will miss her. For closure, I wrote an epitaph at the Northshire Bookstore's Halloween party last Saturday night up in Manchester, VT.

She lived to write another day ... but under another name.

"What's in a name?" asked the greatest writer in the English language. We'll find out. Right now my choice of surname is "Grey" -- it has royal overtones and "Leslie" is Celtic for "from the grey fortress, so it's my little personal inside joke.

As for potential first names, I'm becoming fond of (alphabetically) Annabel, Diana, Emily, Juliet, Olivia, and Vivien.

Feel free to weigh in! I welcome your suggestions.

I guess I'm an "award-winning blogger" now!

2009-11-04T17:37:00.000-08:00

Heather over at The Maiden's Court (http://www.themaidenscourt.blogspot.com/) [ forgive me for being such a Luddite that I don't know how to create the link by just clicking on the words] honored me with the Superior Scribbler Award.

Of course nothing comes without a few strings, but they're nice strings and enable our own readers to discover other interesting and well written blogs. The award also comes with rules, which must be posted ... so, voila!

Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.

Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.

Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award.

Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we'll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor!

Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

So, without further ado, I pass the award to:

The entire coterie of History Hoydens (yes I am one, but I have 10 colleagues of remarkable distinction over at the hoydens who immensely deserve recognition) at http://www.historyhoydens.blogspot.com/

Lauren at Marie Antoinette's Gossip Guide at http://marie-antoinettequeenoffrance.blogspot.com/

Carlyn Beccia at The Raucous Royals at http://blog.raucousroyals.com/

Eliza Knight at History Undressed at http://www.historyundressed.blogspot.com/

Lucy at Enchanted by Josephine, at http://enchantedbyjosephine.blogspot.com/

Happy Birthday, Marie Antoinette

2009-11-02T01:00:00.000-08:00

On November 2, 1755, after suffering a toothache all day that interfered with her ability to focus on running the Austrian empire, the Hapsburg Empress Maria Teresa gave birth to her fifteenth child, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Hapsburg Lothringen [the last of those names was the German version of the word " Lorraine," as the little girl's father was Francis of Lorraine.]

Some historians love to state that the date of Maria Antonia's birth was ill-starred because Portugal suffered a devastating earthquake that day, which leveled cities, towns, and villages and resulted in hundreds of deaths. But news traveled very slowly then; behind the massive walls of Vienna's Hofburg Palace, no one would hear of the disaster in Lisbon for several days.

In 1766 Maria Teresa proposed the union of Maria Antonia, then only eleven years old, with the French dauphin. Negotiations on behalf of the respective sovereigns that dragged on for years.

Her marriage negotiations were still pending when Antonia was thirteen years old. She was a pretty little blue-eyed blonde with a high forehead and a long neck; a Sèvres porcelain figurine who had yet to reach puberty. “The little one” as her mother called her was graceful and vivacious, but a spoiled, temperamental little hoyden. No only that, her mother was disgusted that the future queen of France still couldn’t read and write French and German correctly and remained clueless as to the barest rudiments of history.

It was time for a major makeover. A French dentist was brought in to straighten Antonia’s teeth with an 18th-century form of braces. A Parisian hairdresser came to Vienna to do something about the girl’s too-high forehead and uneven hairline. But just as importantly, her brain needed to be kick-started. To wit, the empress hired Abbé Vermond to be Antonia’s tutor.

It was an uphill battle for Vermond. He found his royal charge a royal pain. “She is more intelligent than has been generally supposed,” he acknowledged. But “she is rather lazy and extremely frivolous, she is hard to teach. . . . I came in the end to recognize that she would only learn so long as she was being amused.” Physically, however, Vermond noted that “she has a most graceful figure; holds herself well; and if (as may be hoped) she grows a little taller, she will have all the good qualities one could wish for in a great princess. Her character, her heart, are excellent.”

The venerable abbé neglected to mention another international concern, but perhaps it wasn’t foremost in his mind: Antonia’s bosom was still as flat as a flapjack.

Finally, in 1769 Louis XV made the official request for the archduchess Maria Antonia’s hand on behalf of his young grandson, and Easter 1770 was the proposed date for the marriage. Empress Maria Teresa was both relieved and delighted, but made sure to give the monarch a heads-up about her flighty and high-spirited daughter: “Her age craves indulgence.”

On April 17, 1770, Antonia renounced her rights to succeed her mother. Two days later, she was married by proxy in the Augustinian Church. The Dauphin of France was represented by Antonia’s brother, Archduke Ferdinand. After this ceremony, although the young archduchess had not yet met her husband, she was now formally married to him. She also had to change her name. No longer Austrian, but French, the little girl called Maria Antonia would henceforth be known as Marie Antoinette.

On April 21, Marie Antoinette made her formal farewell to her family and was driven away from Vienna in an elaborate coach owned by the king of France. She would never see her formidable mother again.

When the carriage reached the temporary pavilion on the Ile des Epis, Marie Antoinette entered one of the two antechambers that were located in Austria. There, she was to dispense with all things Austrian, from her gown to her shoes and hose to her underwear to her hair ribbon. Historians disagree as to whether Marie Antoinette was literally stripped down to her birthday suit in the presence of prying eyes, effecting the erotic and voyeuristic transition from archduchess to dauphine as her fourteen-year-old body, more childlike than womanly, was dressed in garments constructed entirely in France.

The marriage contract was signed in the central chamber of the five-room pavilion, literally neutral territory. Perhaps it was the first time she had signed her new name; perhaps she was nervous; but Marie Antoinette’s signature is the only one on the document marred by an inkblot.

Marie Antoinette then pulled herself together, swallowed her tears, ginned up her courage, and walked into the next room—into France—led in an elaborately choreographed routine by the French matchmaker, the Duc de Choiseul, who handed her over to the French delegation as the Austrian delegation slowly retreated, walking backwards into their homeland.

After grand celebrations in the streets of Strasbourg, the lavish procession conveyed Marie Antoinette to the forest of Compiègne where she would meet her bridegroom for the first time.
Her new “grandfather,” the sixty-year-old rakish King Louis XV, who was still considered the handsomest man at court was immediately captivated by the new dauphine’s charm, her looks, and her grace. But Marie Antoinette received not a word from the 5’10” dauphin—a lumbering, corpulent youth with heavy-lidded eyes who was built more like a peasant than a royal. Louis Auguste, just fifteen, was awkward, lethargic, and shy—the complete opposite of his new bride.

Just about the only thing they had in common was nearsightedness. In Marie Antoinette the defect manifested itself in a misty sort of look in her eyes; but the poor dauphin could barely see a thing without a lorgnette, which might have accounted for his clumsiness and his dread of such exhibitions of natural grace as dancing. His nasal voice and guttural laugh only added to his physical deficits.

That night, although they had been married by proxy, the two teens were conveyed to separate bedrooms. The dauphin’s diary entry for the day recorded but one sentence: the bizarrely banal Entrevue avec Madame la Dauphine—which more or less translates to “met my wife.”

A novelist would be hard pressed to invent a pair of spouses who were so opposite in every way, from looks to behavior, as Marie Antoinette and the future Louis XVI. She was vivacious where he was dull, mercurial where he was plodding and indecisive, graceful where he was awkward, frivolous where he was studious, devoted to gaiety where he was antisocial, extravagant where he was economical, and as physically lovely and lithe as he was obese and coarse looking.

Only the highest ranking nobles were permitted to attend the official wedding on May 16, 1770 in the chapel of Louis XIV at Versailles. As organ music filled the chapel Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste listened to the paternoster beneath a silver canopy and were pronounced man and wife by the Archbishop of Rheims. Later in the day six thousand lucky spectators, chosen by a lottery of sorts, were allowed to watch the wedding feast.

After the banquet the newlyweds were led to the bridal chamber. The king himself handed his grandson his nightgown, while Marie Antoinette received her chemise from the most recently married lady of semi-royal rank, the Duchesse de Chârtres, and each of the teens retired to a separate, private closet where they changed clothes. The archbishop sprinkled the mattress on the enormous four-poster bed with holy water, and everyone retreated so that the new man and wife could consummate their royal marriage.

But they didn’t. What happened was exactly nothing, confirmed by the dauphin in his diary the following morning—Rien—although Louis would also write the same single word on July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille was stormed. Historians believe the diary was more of a hunting journal, because in it Louis would meticulously record the details of his daily haul; and rien simply indicates that he didn’t hunt that day and therefore there was nothing to report as he had killed nothing.

In May 1771, when the young dauphine and dauphiness should have joyously celebrated their first anniversary, if not a pregnancy, or even the recent birth of a royal infant—still rien. They were two glum teens: Louis was convinced that no one had ever loved him, or ever would; and

Marie Antoinette remained intensely homesick.

Louis confided to Marie Antoinette that he was not ignorant of what was involved in the state of wedlock, and he promised to live with her in marital intimacy when they visited Compiègne for the summer.

“Since we must live in intimate friendship, we must trust each other in speaking about everything,” Marie Antoinette sagely replied. She had been both puzzled and frustrated by her husband’s complete disinterest in sex, conveying this dismay in several detailed letters to her mother.

In reply, Maria Teresa cautioned her daughter not to become peevish about Louis’s utter inactivity in the boudoir. She counseled “caresses, cajoleries”—tenderness and cajoling caresses—but warned Marie Antoinette, “if you show yourself impatient, you may spoil the whole thing.”

By the royal couple’s second anniversary in 1772, the empress had grown very concerned regarding la conduite si étrange—“the very strange conduct”—of Marie’s mari. She knew that it was perfectly legitimate for a barren royal bride to be returned to her homeland for failing to provide an heir, and Austria could not afford that fate.

Evidently, Louis was doing his level best to be a good husband, making regular conjugal visits to his wife’s boudoir, but in the final analysis, he could never get beyond a certain state of arousal, unable to close the deal. The still virginal Marie Antoinette attributed this failure to her husband’s maladresse et jeunesse—his clumsiness and youth. But there was more to the story. Something was medically amiss.

It was the empress Maria Teresa whose frequent letters to the king of France regarding this intolerable situation convinced Louis XV to call in the royal physician, Monsieur Lassone. He determined that the dauphin’s romantic troubles were due to phimosis, a condition where the foreskin is so tight that it cannot be retracted from the penis, rendering copulation extremely painful. But he also counseled that the operation to remedy the problem—circumcision—might do as much harm as good, and advised against it.

Despite his wife’s encouragement, it’s widely assumed that Louis never underwent the operation, because the procedure would have required weeks of recuperation, which meant no time in the saddle, and his hunting journals do not reflect a cessation of activity.

The years stretched on. After reigning for sixty years, Louis XV died of smallpox in the spring of 1774 and the young dauphin assumed the throne of France as Louis XVI. Empress Maria Teresa knew too well that the teenage king, and more particularly her daughter, were absolutely out of their depth. “There is nothing to calm my apprehensions in the situation of the King, the ministers, or the state. She herself is so young, has never had any power of application, nor ever will have—unless with great difficulty.”

With great prescience about the future of France, the empress advised her daughter to “change nothing; let matters go on as they are, otherwise chaos and intrigue will become insurmountable, and my dear children, you will find yourselves in such a tangle that you will be unable to extricate yourselves.” With the prophetic vision of Cassandra, Maria Teresa warned the queen “You must learn to interest yourself in serious matters, for this may be most useful if the King should ask your counsel . . . Be careful to avoid misleading him into any great or unusual expenditure.”

The difficulty that most continued to plague the young monarchs was Louis’s lack of performance in the bedroom. By now, it was the talk not only of the court, the legions of servants, and the foreign ambassadors, but all of France seemed to know about the king’s impotence.

The public awareness of Louis’s private shame soon affected other aspects of his life, including his inability to make firm decisions about anything. He was too weak willed to confront Marie Antoinette regarding her excesses—her noisy frivolity, financial extravagances, and relentless pursuit of distraction and pleasure. She rebelled whenever possible at the rigid, scripted, and unspontaneous behavior at the French court, blazing her own social trails that wounded the pride of plenty of influential nobles accustomed to centuries of perquisites. It would eventually cost her dearly.

Still intacta, Marie Antoinette poured her passions into outrageously costly fashion, garish makeup, outlandish coiffures, and high-stakes gambling, hosting lavish parties and sneaking into Paris late at night to attend masked balls while her husband snored away in his bedchamber. “I am terrified of being bored,” she admitted. Her sexuality was by now fully awakened and she could only tremble, blush and stammer in the presence of courtiers who stirred her heart, aware that she could not get too close to them. She couldn’t even consider taking a lover, as all French nobles routinely did, until she produced an heir.

As the empress counseled her daughter to be patient with her husband and to seduce him with tender caresses, she had not neglected to remind Marie Antoinette that as she was to appear to be a completely submissive wife and not to meddle in politics or governmental affairs, she must also learn to dominate her husband beyond the marriage bed, never to forget that she was a political agent of Austrian interests. These mixed signals completely confused the bubble headed queen who had already demonstrated her naiveté by falling under the influence of Louis’s three maiden aunts, a fat and sour-dispositioned trio who had clear political agendas of their own, educating the young Marie Antoinette in palace intrigues, gossip, and médisance—the art of backbiting.

By now, after nearly seven years of marriage with nothing to show for it, very few people in France believed that Marie Antoinette was not satisfying her sexual urges elsewhere. Speculation took on a life of its own; stories abounded of orgies and lovers of both genders, particularly since the queen was exceptionally close to a couple of female friends, notably the Princess de Lamballes and the Duchesse de Polignac. Provocative poems and songs soon burst the locked confines of nobles’ secretaires and made their way onto the streets and into the burgeoning hotbeds of reform.

The young queen's heedless extravagance remained a prime concern to Maria Teresa as well. The concerned mother and astute politician had also written to her daughter, “I have news from Paris to the effect that you have been buying bracelets at the cost of two hundred and fifty thousand livres, with the result that you have thrown your finances into disorder and have heaped up a burden of debt . . . A queen only degrades herself by decking herself out in this preposterous way; and she degrades herself still more by unthrifty expenditure, especially in such difficult times. . . . Everyone knows that the king is very modest in his expenditure, so the whole blame will rest on your shoulders. I hope I shall not live to see the disaster that is likely to ensue.”

It was fruitless for Marie Antoinette to try to explain that everyone at court was spending extravagantly on jewels, gowns, and modish coiffures and that as queen she was expected to set the tone—and could on occasion afford to do so solely with her gambling winnings. Moreover, it was her duty as the queen to patronize the country’s factories, shops, and artists and to fill the palace’s rooms with their products, such as the famous Sèvres porcelain. Nor would it avail her to tell her mother that every one of the royal family was financially out of control, including the king’s three maiden aunts, and his younger siblings, their spouses, and households.

What Marie Antoinette could not get her pious and prudish mother to comprehend was that her levity was characteristic of her generation; in the artificial Rococo era, filled with women who were highly cultivated, delicate hothouse blooms with idle hands and coddled minds, she was the most contrived. In a coterie of spendthrifts, she was the biggest; and among a generation of coquettes, she was the most flirtatious and charming.

Where Louis could not satisfy his wife sexually, he tried to make up for it by lavishing material treasures upon her, among them Le Petit Trianon, the little summer villa on the grounds of Versailles, about a mile from the palace. There she spent some of her happiest days, picnicking on her manicured lawns, strolling through her gardens, and enjoying the delights of the Hameu—the little peasant village on the adjacent grounds with its thatched roofs and pristine farm yards—which bore about as much resemblance to an actual peasant village as the Epcot Center does to Europe.

But her lavish expenditures on furnishings and refurbishment for this little pleasure idyll would eventually come back to haunt her. As would le Petit Trianon’s exclusivity. It was the queen’s domain alone and she chose to surround herself with a choice selection of intimates and family members, insulting high ranking nobles by shutting them out. But Marie Antoinette saw no reason to host at her safe haven those who detested her, who spoke ill of her behind her back, and who after all those years still thought of her as the outsider—L’Autrichienne. Her lack of interest in bending over backwards to please either the entrenched French aristocracy or the plebian poor and bourgeoisie would also condemn her in later years.

In 1777, Marie Antoinette was twenty-two years old and still a virgin. Among the friends and female relatives of her own age, she was the only one without a child. Immensely frustrated sexually, she was running out of self-control. To prevent disaster (such as her having an extramarital dalliance), Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph, the Emperor of Austria, decided to pay her a visit.

Like their mother, Joseph proved to be a prophet of sorts when it came to predicting Marie Antoinette’s future, able to read the writing on a wall that the French queen refused to recognize even existed. “In very truth, I tremble for your happiness, seeing that in the long run things cannot go on like this . . . the revolution will be a cruel one, and perhaps of your own making.”

After three weeks at Versailles, Joseph began to understand the gravity of the situation and what seemed to be keeping Marie Antoinette and Louis apart, physically and emotionally. In a letter to his younger brother Leopold, Joseph violated the king’s confidence and shared the lurid details of Louis’s sexual problems. “In his conjugal bed he has normal erections; he introduces his member, stays there without moving for about two minutes, then withdraws without ejaculating, and still erect, bids good night. This is incomprehensible because he sometimes has nocturnal emissions, but while inside and in the process, never; and he is content, and says quite frankly that he was doing it purely from a sense of duty and that he did not like it. Oh, if I could only have been present once, I would have taken care of him; he should be whipped so that he would discharge sperm like a donkey. My sister moreover, has very little temperament [hot blood] and together they are two complete fumblers.”

The widowed emperor asked his baby sister just as bluntly, “Do you really seek opportunities [to spend quality time with the king]? Do you honestly respond to the affection he manifests for you? . . . Do you not show yourself bored, or even repelled by him? If so, how can you expect that a man of cold temperament who has never experienced carnal pleasures should make advances to you, become aroused, love you and successfully complete his great act, or at least taste the possible pleasures with you? This point requires all your attention, and whatever you do to reach this great goal will be your strongest link to happiness in life. Never get discouraged and always give him the hope that he will still be able to have children; don’t ever let him give up or despair of it. ”

The Emperor Joseph’s multiple admonitions evidently got results. On August 19, 1777 (seven-and-a-quarter years after her wedding), she wrote to Vienna, “As regards my virgin status, it is unfortunately still the same. However, I do not despair, for things are certainly going a little better. The King is more forthcoming, and in his case this means a great deal.”

And finally, in a subsequent letter dated August 30, Marie Antoinette trumpeted the good news: “I have attained the happiness which is of the utmost importance to my whole life. More than a week ago my marriage was thoroughly consummated. Yesterday the attempt was repeated, with results even more successful than the first time . . . I don’t think I am with child yet, but at any rate I have hopes of becoming so from moment to moment.”

This happy event soon became the topic of international buzz, as the various ambassadors reported the news of the queen’s defloration to their respective sovereigns. According to the Spanish envoy to the French court, “His Majesty has become more cheerful than he used to be, and no one can fail to note that the Queen has blue circles around her eyes far more often than of yore.”

Louis finally had something to smile about. He confided to one of his maiden aunts, “I find the pleasure very great, and I regret that so long a time has passed without my being able to enjoy it.” Unfortunately, ten days later, the new toy was already cast aside. Marie Antoinette lamented “the King is not fond of sleeping in the same bed with me. I do my best to ensure that there shall not be a total separation between us in this matter. Sometimes he comes to spend the night with me, and I think it would be a mistake for me to urge him to do so more often.”

But even too-little-too-late turned out to be just enough. Marie Antoinette’s pregnancy was officially announced to the court on August 4, 1778. In May, she had been fairly sure of it, but wanted to wait a while to be certain she wasn’t merely suffering the missed periods of her customarily irregular cycle.

The queen derived the greatest joy from announcing the blessed event to her husband. Entering his presence with a faux glum and cranky countenance, she declared “I have come, Sire, to complain of one of your subjects who has been so audacious as to kick me in the belly.”

On December 18, 1778, Marie Antoinette went into labor. Seven hours later, she had a daughter. It was the custom in France for the queen to give birth in the presence of several royal witnesses, with the room shut tight so that no harmful drafts could penetrate. Marie Antoinette lost consciousness immediately after the delivery, perhaps due to the claustrophobic atmosphere, combined with the pain of childbirth and the stress of endeavoring to suppress her cries and act queenly in the most un-regal of circumstances. She was bled, and when she recovered, she was told she had not a dauphin, but a daughter. The queen named the baby Marie-Thérèse, after her mother and throughout her life, the girl was formally known as “Madame Royale.”

Despite the honor of her grandchild’s name, Maria Teresa was still unsatisfied; Marie Antoinette had not brought a son into the world and given Louis an heir.

After suffering a miscarriage in 1780, on October 22, 1781, Marie Antoinette finally gave birth to a boy, Louis-Joseph. The king himself broke the news to her, announcing proudly, “Madame, you have fulfilled our wishes and those of France, you are the mother of a dauphin.” In a letter to her friend Princess Charlotte of Hesse-Darmstadt, Marie Antoinette described the birth as “The happiest and most important event to me.” Louis wept profusely during his son’s baptism.

After another miscarriage in 1783, the queen bore a second son, Louis-Charles, on March 27, 1785. “He has in strength and health everything that his brother is lacking. He is a real peasant’s child, big, fresh-faced, and fat,” Marie Antoinette wrote to her brother. And the following year, on July 9, several weeks’ premature, she bore another daughter, Sophie Hélène Béatrix, the child of an unwanted pregnancy. Sophie died on June 14, 1787, before she reached her first birthday.

Motherhood had been metamorphosing Marie Antoinette into a more grounded and responsible woman. Her pregnancies had necessitated several months’ absence from her usual round of gay amusements and she discovered it was more fun to play with her children than it had been to play faro deep into the wee hours of the morning.

But her reputation as a frivolous, extravagant bubblehead and the marital issues in the royal bed had already demonized her in the eyes of the people at all levels of society. Harvests had been bad, and bread was scarce. The royal family spent lavishly on their own pleasures instead, while the treasury continued to be depleted, but the criticism was leveled squarely at the outsider—the Austrian woman.

The royals and their favorites had indeed been profligate spendthrifts, but France’s foreign policy during the reign of Louis XV had also eaten up an enormous chunk of cash. The country had never quite recouped its expenditures on the costly Seven Years War (1756-1763) fought on American soil. Then Louis XVI had been persuaded by the leaders of the American colonists to aid them financially and materially in their revolution against France’s age-old enemy, England. The French stock market had dropped precipitously as well, further tanking the economy.

Yet even as Louis was funding the American Revolutionary War, he and his wife were utterly unaware of the changing mood in their own kingdom. A burgeoning middle class, inspired by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, averred that they, too, had rights. From the earliest voices of reform within the nobility to the Parisian fishwives, the French subjects knew their sovereign was an indecisive man and blamed all failed policies and bad decisions on the malevolent influence of his foreign-born wife. Although she succeeded in urging Louis to adopt her pro-Austrian ideas as often as she failed to persuade him, Marie Antoinette had in fact encouraged Louis to appoint certain ministers, her own strings being pulled from Vienna.

The Swedish count and military man Axel Fersen, who quite probably became Marie Antoinette’s lover, observed that “the queen is universally detested. Every evil is attributed to her and she is given no credit for anything good,” including her generosity to the poor and her philanthropy. “The King is weak and suspicious; the only person he trusts if the Queen and they say she does everything.”

To make sure that the monarchs knew what the people thought of them, unseen hands managed to slip these mean-spirited pornographic cartoons, leaflets, and pamphlets such as the popular “List of all the Persons with Whom the Queen Has Had Debauched Relations” into the folds of their dinner napkins, among a sheaf of Louis’s state documents, or affixed to the inside of their box at the opera. Louis was portrayed as a hapless cuckold, an impotent lout who was the utter puppet of his wife, the monstrously dissipated Austrian whore. By the time they were brought before the Revolutionary tribunals they were already as good as executed, the “proof” of their “guilt,” of Marie Antoinette’s obscene excesses and heinous crimes (adultery, lesbianism, nymphomania) having previously been supplied not by a hungry, angry, and illiterate mob, but by the bejeweled hands of a disgruntled aristocracy.

In the twelve years of Louis XVI's reign 1,250 million livres (nearly $10.5 million today) had been borrowed. Who had spent it? And on what? Why was the country nearly bankrupt when the king was known to have modest tastes? There could only be one answer: his foreign-born spendthrift wife. The people new-baptized Marie Antoinette “Madame Deficit.” She finally began to understand the mood of her subjects and began to economize. But it was too little too late.

In early June, 1789, the representatives from the three Estates General met to demand more self-determination in government, and to limit the powers of the sovereign. The first estate was the Clergy; the second, the Nobility; and the third estate was comprised of the ninety-six percent of the population that was neither noble nor clerical, such as the peasants and bourgeoisie. But at the time, the monarchs were faced with a sorrow of a more domestic nature. The frail, seven-year-old dauphin, who weighed barely more than a toddler, was dying of tuberculosis of the spine. On June 4, he expired and the king and queen took the luxury of grieving for an entire day in seclusion. But any extended mourning was cut short when on June 17, the representatives from the third estate declared themselves to be a National Assembly.

The dichotomy between the national mood versus the royal one was not lost on Marie Antoinette. While the French were in “a delirium” of anti-monarchical, power-to-the-people fervor, she could not control her tears. “At the death of my poor little Dauphin, the nation hardly seemed to notice,” she wrote to her brother Leopold in Austria.

On July 14, 1789, falsely believing that the king was sending a foreign army to crush them, a mob of Parisians stormed the Bastille in search of weapons with which to defend themselves. A horridly bloody scene ensued during which the prison’s governor was beheaded with a knife. But in Louis’s diary, (which as previously indicated was primary a hunting journal, with scant references to other quotidian events) he wrote rien—which some historians have taken to mean that as far as he was cynically concerned nothing of moment happened that day. The king did however believe that the fall of the Bastille was merely another petty insurrection and he had to be corrected by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt who brought the ugly news to Versailles that it was not simply a revolt. “No, Sire. It is a revolution.”

Husband and wife did not see eye to eye when it came to dealing with the rebellious mob. Louis had read all about England’s Charles I and thought the way to avoid that monarch’s fate was to negotiate with the revolutionaries, not to do as Charles had done and endeavor to mercilessly crush them, along with any attempts at governmental reform.

But Marie Antoinette insisted mon métier est d’être royaliste—“royalty is my career,” and harbored nothing but hatred for the great unwashed masses that had traduced her for years.
With so many of her intimate circle of aristocrats being sent away in order to appease the angry populace, or departing for safer territory on their own, the queen had few people to turn to.

Back in 1774 at a masked ball in Paris she had met a Swedish military man the same age she was, Count Axel von Fersen. That evening they enjoyed a harmless flirtation. Over time, whenever Fersen was back in France, their friendship deepened, yet somehow managed to be so discreet that when Marie Antoinette was being accused of sleeping with everything on two legs, his name was never mentioned. Fersen, was described by his contemporaries as looking like the hero of a novel, or as the queen’s hairdresser Léonard thought, “like Apollo.” He eventually did become the queen’s lover and most trusted confidant. She called him le bel Axel (handsome Axel), while he found her to be “the most amiable princess I have ever met.”

Those in the know, and even some modern historians, publicly wondered whether Fersen was the father of the fetus that Marie Antoinette miscarried on the night of November 2, 1783, and whether he had indeed sired her third and fourth children. But Louis never questioned the paternity of his offspring and Fersen’s official diplomatic appointments place him nowhere near the queen’s anatomy when her children would have been conceived. Fersen and Marie Antoinette endeavored to remain above suspicion, but if the king was aware of the nature of their relationship he never let on, nor reproached Marie Antoinette for it.

Fersen fought for France on behalf of the Americans during the American Revolution and then became an aide-de-camp to his own sovereign, Gustavus III. By 1785, he was back on French soil. His reappearance coincided with Marie Antoinette’s unwanted fourth pregnancy and her desire from then on to cease enjoying intimate relations with her husband. By then, she and Louis had been married for fifteen years.

On October 5, 1789, an angry army of women marched from Paris to the palace of Versailles demanding bread, and although Louis conceded to their request, the instigators amid the rabble spread the propaganda that he was lying. The following day, the mob stormed the palace, destroying the queen’s rooms (looking to murder her) and assassinating several of the royal guards, whose heads they stuck on pikes. The following day they insisted on conveying the royal family back to Paris where the new National Assembly could keep an eye on them. Marie Antoinette bravely insisted that as long as she was not separated from her husband, she could endure anything.

What a difference from June 8, 1773 when Marie Antoinette and Louis had made their first formal entrance as dauphin and dauphine into Paris. They were received then with such warmth and acclaim that Marie Antoinette never forgot their love, or how it made her feel. She wrote to her mother at the time, “What touched me . . . was the affection and the zeal of the poor people, which, though crushed by taxation, was overflowing with joy at the sight of us.” But from the safety of her sumptuous carriage, she never saw how the poor people really lived. She had never been inside the home of a bourgeois subject, let alone an impoverished one. In fact, she knew absolutely nothing of France beyond the gaiety of Paris nightlife and the confines of the royal demesnes that lay within a few kilometers’ drive of Versailles. Tragically, the monarchs themselves had unwittingly aided the revolution in being so unsuited to comprehending the peoples’ crises, and then by their inability to handle them once they had begun.

In Paris, the royal family was placed under what can best be characterized as a dignified house arrest in the Tuileries, a palace that had fallen into disuse and disrepair since it had been forsaken more than a century earlier for Versailles. Ironically, although the king and queen maintained separate apartments at the Tuileries, the royals behaved most like a close-knit, “normal” family when they were most in adversity, taking meals together, playing with and educating their children, and enjoying games of billiards. Outside the palace, the autumn leaves were falling in the gardens, an apt metaphor for the autumn of their reign and for the French monarchy in general. “We have seen too much horror and too much bloodshed ever to be happy again,” the queen lamented.

Yet in the Tuileries, Marie Antoinette, now thirty-four years old, finally began to realize her potential—and rose to meet it. In effect, she became the king. Everyone shunted aside her ineffectual husband. So she grabbed hold of the royal defense. It was Marie Antoinette who held council with the ambassadors and ministers, who learned to read and write in cipher, and who developed the secret diplomatic channels necessary to maintain the reins of government. She had no assistance, no clerks or secretaries. Spies abounded, even in the Tuileries.

Some of the revolutionary leaders called for the king’s divorce. Freed of Marie Antoinette, he might learn (under our guidance) to be a good king after all, they reasoned. According to French law, if she could be convicted of adultery she would be publicly whipped and then sent to a convent for two years. If her husband died during her incarceration, she’d remain there forever.

Marie Antoinette never thought she had committed a wrong against anyone, in either her public or private life. “I expect an upright judgment from the future, and this helps me to bear my sorrows. As for those who refuse it to me now, I despise them too much to care about them,” she insisted. Instead, while she continued to beg her family in Austria to come to the aid of her French royal family, she placed her hopes on her children. “If I could be happy, I should be made happy by these two little beings . . . I am alone in my room the whole day. My children are my sole resource, and I have them with me as much as possible.”

Meanwhile, anti-royal fever continued to mount, but the monarchs held out hope that either the winds of revolution would blow over or that some sort of compromise with them could be reached. Mirabeau, one of the original revolutionary leaders, asserted, “The King has but one man to support him—his wife . . . the only safeguard for her lies in the reestablishment of the royal authority . . . of this much I am certain, that she will not be able to save her life unless she saves her crown.”

Behind the scenes, Marie Antoinette and Axel Fersen, along with a few trusted others, worked to effect the escape of the royal family. But the June 20, 1791 flight to safety in eastern France ended in disaster at Varennes when the royal party was unmasked, and unceremoniously escorted back to Paris. From then on, they were kept under heavier guard and enjoyed fewer privileges.

Marie Antoinette continued to plea for help from Austria, but the new emperor, her brother Leopold, had his own political woes, and limited pockets. He could scarce afford to send precious troops to France to aid his sister with both Russia and Prussia knocking on his door, and a new plan to partition Poland for a second time.

The political climate in France had shifted once again, which was very bad news for Marie Antoinette and Louis. “There exists within this realm no power to restrain the armed populace . . . The very chiefs of the Revolution are no longer listened to when they try to talk to each other about order,” the queen told Count Mercy, the Austrian ambassador to France. Her husband was useless. “You know the person with whom I have to deal. When one believes him persuaded into accepting any course, a single word, a trifling argument, may make him change his mind and his purpose without warning. That is why a thousand things I should like to do can never be undertaken.” But, for all their distress, she had found her spine, even as Louis had lost his. “Tribulation first makes one realize what one is,” she told Mercy.

On March 1, 1792, Marie Antoinette’s brother Leopold, emperor of Austria, died and was replaced on the throne by his twenty-four-year-old son Francis who never knew his aunt and therefore had even less of a reason to come to her aid. On April 20, hoping to deflect attention from the revolution and necessitate the mobilization of troops elsewhere, Louis declared war against “the House of Austria.”

But Marie Antoinette didn’t share her husband’s view; she knew that a declaration of war would hurt their cause rather than help it. And her allegiances were clearly in opposition to Louis’s. Why should she feel loyal to her adopted homeland where everyone hated her? “Never have I been more proud than at this moment to have been born a German,” she wrote to Fersen, hoping the Austrian army would kick French derrière!

The queen was correct; the declaration of war merely angered the revolutionaries, who believed the monarchs were secretly scheming with foreign powers. They pushed their way into the Tuileries on June 20. She and her son hid behind a table barricaded by guards, where the rabble couldn’t reach her. Louis offered no resistance and even accepted the Phrygian cap of liberty. “It was a case of violence and rage on one side, feebleness and inertia on the other,” Marie Antoinette wrote to Count Mercy, Austria's ambassador to France.

The Tuileries palace was even more violently stormed on August 10, 1792, a day that was referred to as “the Second French Revolution.” The king’s Swiss Guard were brutally massacred and the royal family taken to the Temple—so named for once having been the Parisian castle of the Knights Templar. There they were placed “under the safeguard of the nation.” That night, the guillotine was erected in the Place de Carrousel.

As of that day, Louis XVI was no longer in charge of France. The bloody period known as the Terror had begun.

Married to Louis for more than twenty years, Marie Antoinette had gradually come to respect him, even if she still found his equivocating exasperating. They got along better than most royal spouses in dynastic marriages and although it was compelled by the most adverse of circumstances, their cozy nuclear family managed to behave in quite a “normal” way, with the parents educating their own children, reading to them, and playing with them.

But debasing the sovereigns and systematically removing the king’s powers of authority wasn’t enough for the most radical of the revolutionaries who had seized control of the Assembly. A new France could not be born until his royal blood stained the streets of Paris. Louis was accused of being a “tyrant” and an “oppressor” and separated from his family. After so many years of marriage, when Marie Antoinette and Louis finally came to realize that they might actually love each other, all contact was forbidden.

On January 20, 1793, Marie Antoinette was told by an official of the Commune, the new government, that by an exceptional indulgence, she and the children would be allowed to visit the king. She knew what that meant; his execution was imminent. They spent a few final, tearful hours together and then at about 10:00 p.m., Louis said farewell with dignity, assuring his wife that he would visit her again in the morning. They both knew he was lying. Hours before his death, Louis lamented to Cléry, his valet, “Unfortunate Princess! My marriage promised her a throne; now what prospect does it offer her?” He handed Cléry his wedding ring and asked him to give it to Marie Antoinette. “Please tell her that I leave her with sorrow.”

The following morning, Marie Antoinette was forbidden to go downstairs. But she heard the distant drumbeats and the rumble of carriage wheels and—at 10:22—the cheerful shouts that meant she was now a widow.

She was taken away from her children, confined as “prisoner 280” within the walls of La Conciergerie, the Paris prison where only the most dangerous of criminals were housed and from which very few people were freed. On October 16, 1793, after a sham of a trial, frail, white-haired, and suffering from severe gynecological hemorrhaging, Marie Antoinette followed her husband to Madame la Guillotine. She had been forbidden to mount the scaffold in mourning, and so she wore white, with black satin shoes. She had left the Conciergerie with her hands bound behind her, the cord held by Henri Sanson, the executioner, as if she were on a leash. At 12:15 p.m., the blade fell. Marie Antoinette was only thirty-eight years old, the same age as Louis had been upon his execution. Her remains were taken to the Cimitière Madeleine, but the cost of digging a single grave was considered too high, so not until sixty corpses—all victims of the Revolution—were accumulated, was her coffin smothered with quicklime and buried amid the others.

Heroine, villainess, martyr, victim, or some combination of these? What do you think of Marie Antoinette?

A Halloween Blood Bath[ory] Post

2009-10-29T17:32:00.000-07:00

I've been researching Elizabeth (or Erzabet) Báthory—the “Blood Countess”—for my nonfiction wip, tentatively titled ROYAL PAINS: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Bastards, and Bad Seeds. Elizabeth most certainly is one of the baddest of bad seeds, and since it's Halloween, I thought I'd put up a special holiday post about this fifteenth/sixteenth century Hungarian noblewoman who was one of history's greatest mass murderesses.

So, sit back, relax, curl up with a goblet of your favorite potion, and enjoy the gruesome life story of one of history's real-life ghouls.

ELIZABETH (ERZABET) BÁTHORY
“The Blood Countess”
1561-1614

She made the Marquis de Sade look like Mother Teresa. In an age when her English counterparts were plying their needles or playing the virginals, Elizabeth Báthory was employing red hot pincers and bathing in virginal blood.

Stephan Bathory, King of Poland

Like most noble families, the Hungarian Báthory clan, and especially Elizabeth’s parents, György and Anna (whose father, also named Stephan Báthory, had been a Voivode or Prince of Transylvania), prided themselves on the purity of their line, and of course inbreeding leads to insanity. Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth’s family had its share of mentally deranged relations. This niece of the Polish king Stephan Báthory, a political crony of Prince Vlad Dracula of Wallachia, came by her brutality honestly—or at least genetically. Her aunt Klara was a bisexual sadomasochist with a specific talent for flagellation; one of her uncles was into devil-worship; and Elizabeth’s brother was merely a libidinous drunkard. Her own predilections appear to have been a fatal combination of nature and nurture.

Because of her noble rank, it was beneath Elizabeth’s dignity, even as a child, to be scolded for anything she did; consequently, she grew up vain, willful, and arrogant. She also would eventually become quite a beauty; tall, raven-haired, and voluptuous, with pale skin and catlike amber eyes.

Although Western Europe had emerged from the dark ages into the comparatively enlightened and cultured Renaissance, much of the central and eastern areas of the continent had yet to cast off the violence and superstition of the Middle Ages. And while the Tudors were no strangers to torture, and particularly to gory and incendiary public executions, the nobles of Mittel Europe, lacking the poetry of a William Shakespeare or the paintbrush and chisel of a Michelangelo, resorted to making their murders as heinously creative as possible.

When Elizabeth was a little girl she was permitted to witness a public execution where a gypsy (the malfeasor) was stuffed into the freshly slit belly of a horse (while the completely innocent beast was still alive), and sewn into the warm, bloody cavity. The tortured horse writhed in pain and tried to rid itself of its unwelcome burden, while the gypsy struggled in vain to free himself from the horse’s gut. Both expired in due course, but not until they’d provided a bored and jaded populace with a highly entertaining reality show.

Perhaps this is where baby Báthory developed her taste for gruesome torture. In any case, she lived in an especially violent culture and came from a particularly demented family with a ghoulish cast of role models. But surely from witnessing the public’s delight in and the authorities’ sanction of this unique form of execution, Elizabeth must have grown up assuming that anything goes.

She was never quite right in the head, however. Elizabeth began to experience epileptic seizures at the age of four or five in addition to the violent mood swings of a classic manic depressive. Though her temper was fierce, her birthright shielded her from chastisement, let alone punishment, for any bad behavior. The Báthorys were a wealthy, influential and powerful Protestant family, highly connected in the world of sixteenth-century Hungary.

In 1570, at the age of nine, Elizabeth was contracted in marriage to Ferenc [pronounced Franz] Nádasdy, eleven years her senior, and was packed off, according to the custom of the time, to reside with her future mother-in-law. There she may have been given a long lead as well, because it was rumored that she’d given birth in 1574 to an illegitimate daughter fathered by a peasant boy. The child, if there ever was one, was purportedly smuggled away—to where and to whom, no one seems to know.

Before Elizabeth got herself into further trouble, in the presence of 4500 guests she was married to Ferenc Nádasdy on May 8, 1575 in the palace at Varannó. She was fourteen years old; the groom was twenty-five. Although he was already a war hero known for his feats of athletic prowess off the battlefield (though his own mother admitted that her boychik was “no scholar,”), Ferenc made the rare move of adopting his bride’s surname as his own. It would greatly enhance his prestige to be thought of as a Báthory.

Ferenc wouldn’t be the first to marry a younger, smarter wife. Elizabeth was much better educated than her husband, able to read and write Greek, Latin, German, and her native Hungarian. Nevertheless, it’s always good for spouses to have common interests, and in the case of Elizabeth and Ferenc, they shared a particularly unusual one: both were sadists.

Ferenc’s temper was notorious. As a warlord he didn’t spare the rod, savagely flogging and beating both adversary and underling; and earning himself the remarkably complimentary and alliterative nickname, “The Black Hero of Hungary.” His wife’s soubriquet was equally insouciant; in due time she would be known throughout Europe as “The Blood Countess.”

After a brief stay at Nádasdy Castle in Sárvár, where Elizabeth whiled away her hours while Ferenc studied in nearby Vienna, the couple took up residence in the thirteenth-century Castle Csejthe [also spelled Čachtice], a gloomy fortress perched high in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania.

It had been a wedding gift from the Nádasdy family to their teenage daughter-in-law. The castle, or the picturesque rubble that remains of it, is located in present-day Slovakia.

Ferenc made his living fighting the Ottoman Turks and consequently spent little time at home. While he was off butchering his enemies, his young wife developed an odd way of relieving her boredom. No embroidery or dancing lessons for Elizabeth. She didn’t even curl up with a good heretical tract. Instead, Aunt Klara began popping ’round to school her niece in her preferred methods of entertainment: flagellation, lesbian orgies, and various forms of sadomasochism.

Klara was abetted by a loyal retainer named Thorko who introduced the beautiful young newlywed to the occult, piquing her interest in mixology. Elizabeth grew adept at concocting sundry drugs, brews, and potions; and in her husband’s absence her various houseguests included self-proclaimed sorcerers and seers, warlocks, witches, and alchemists. Before long, black magic and torture were her favorite ways to pass the time. She became especially fond of a set of silver pincers that could clip and claw off chunks of someone’s flesh. The device had a particular allure because it was so versatile: it could be heated until it was as hot as a branding iron or attached to a sturdy whip, turning it into an effective flaying tool. Ferenc, who made a career out of massacring Hungary’s military enemies, couldn’t stand the heat. When Elizabeth got out the silver pincers, he had to leave the room.

While Ferenc was off fighting the Turks, Elizabeth also amused herself with a variety of Italian sex toys and took it into her head to color it—bleaching her hair the same pale blond that was all the fashion in sixteenth-century Venice among both noblewomen and courtesans.

She liked to collect recipes, too, writing to her husband at the front about a particularly effective one she’d learned from one of her handmaidens. “Dorka has taught me a lovely new one. Catch a black hen and beat it to death with a white cane. Keep the blood and smear a little of it on your enemy. If you get no chance to smear it on his body, obtain one of his garments and smear it.”

Like most sadists, Elizabeth learned that the best victims were the weak. As there were no existing laws governing the relationship between masters and servants, the peasant girls employed at Castle Csejthe were fair game and fertile fodder for Elizabeth and Klara’s gruesome hobby.

Five of Elizabeth’s most loyal and trusted servants ensured that the girls (those who survived the tortures, or who made it safely through another day after their fellow slaveys and sculleries were murdered) would keep quiet about what they had seen or heard. One girl who was deemed too voluble had her mouth sewn shut.

In fact everyone in Hungary, regardless of rank or proximity, lived in terror of the wrath of the powerful Báthorys.

Still only an adolescent girl herself when she began torturing peasant girls, Elizabeth took advantage of a serving wench’s merest misstep, using it as an excuse to punish her. But rebukes and slaps were for sissies. If a girl was suspected of theft, she was commanded to strip naked and was then tortured by the application of red-hot coins pressed against her bare skin.

Sometimes the countess opted to go organic: the girls were whipped with stinging nettles after being beaten with some other device. And even if a servant girl hadn’t misbehaved she might still end up as the day’s entertainment. Mutilation was frequently on the menu. Girls were placed into cages fitted with internal spikes that impaled them everywhere as the cage tightened, resulting in an agonizing and bloody death. Pincers and tongs, heated until they glowed, were used to tear off bits of flesh. Scalding irons branded their tender skin. Elizabeth even perfected a technique of tearing a girl’s head apart by tugging the sides of her mouth until they ripped, and her neck snapped in two.

The countess was said to have achieved sexual ecstasy during these torture sessions, squealing in girlish delight at the sights and sounds of her victims’ agony. She enjoyed whipping them from the front, just so she could see the pain and terror on their faces.

Sometimes for kicks and giggles Elizabeth would slather a girl with honey and tie her to a tree, leaving her to the mercy of insects and other wildlife with a sweet tooth. Her water torture involved stripping the girls naked, pouring water on them and then leaving them in the frigid mountain air to freeze to death. And even Dick Cheney would have been impressed with Elizabeth’s “star-kicking” game. Bits of oiled paper were inserted between her victims’ toes and set aflame. She had endless hours of fun watching the hapless young women trying to kick off the burning paper, which, thanks to the piping hot oil, was stuck to their skin, burning it as well. If that became boring, she could always burn the girls’ genitals with a hot poker, or candle wax. Other instruments of torture included razors, torches, and knives.

In 1604, at the age of forty-seven, Ferenc died, possibly from a wound he received in battle. Between 1585 and 1598 he and Elizabeth had had five children, two of which had died in infancy. The surviving offspring were in placed the care of governesses, a common practice at the time.

With Ferenc in his grave, Elizabeth was a lonely, thirty-something widow, losing her looks and intent on staving off the aging process. Traditional cosmetics weren’t doing the trick. Even a glamorous new wardrobe failed to deflect attention from her epidermal flaws.

But by then she had discovered that torture and mutilation had an additional, and healthful, benefit. One day, a hapless servant accidentally pulled the countess’s hair while she was brushing it, and received such a resounding slap that her nose bled; the blood splashed on Elizabeth’s hands (or face, depending on the source of the anecdote). After regarding herself in a mirror, Elizabeth was convinced that her skin looked ever so much more youthful where the virgin girl’s blood had spattered her. If only Restylane and Botox had been invented—how many young lives might have been spared!

After Anna Darvulia, one of Elizabeth’s entourage, suggested that bathing in the blood of virgins would be as beneficial as a fountain of youth, Elizabeth lured as many peasant girls as she could to Castle Csejthe, as well as to her other properties, to ensure that her new beauty regimen, as well as her preferred form of entertainment, remained uninterrupted. According to historian Margaret Nicholas, she and her confederates roamed the area after dark in search of fresh victims, though that allegation sounds a bit too gothic to be credible. At the castle the girls were systematically slaughtered, their blood collected in vats and buckets. If a victim was particularly beautiful, Elizabeth was reputed to have imbibed her blood. According to local lore the countess would sometimes bite the necks, shoulders, and breasts of these girls, devouring their flesh.

Even if the last accusation was fanciful to the point of straining credulity, it becomes plausible enough, given the other atrocities Elizabeth was believed to have committed.

It is a sad comment on the culture of sixteenth-century Hungary, that countless young peasant women went missing and the authorities never bothered to search for them. No one dared speak out against the Báthory family, even if they had their suspicions; and other members of the nobility were loath to betray one of their own.

Elizabeth wasn’t even discreet about cleaning up after herself, and no one else might have been around to mop up the gore, since her supply of domestics eventually dried up, so to speak. Rotting corpses and mutilated bodies dotted the castle’s hallways and corridors.

After more than three decades of wholesale kidnapping, torture, and mutilation, Elizabeth ran out of peasants. She managed to purchase the service of a few more by telling their families that their daughters were being given the opportunity to serve the illustrious Báthory family. Naturally, the countess neglected to inform them that it was as a moisturizer.

But in 1609 came a stroke of good news. Erzsi Majorova, a local widow who had become one of Elizabeth’s confidantes, informed her that she’d been doing it all wrong for years. No wonder she was getting wrinkles and crows’ feet, aging despite her best efforts! She’d been using peasants! The way to ensure a permanently youthful complexion was to bathe in the blood of virginal aristocrats!

So Elizabeth cleverly advertised for young women of the minor nobility to attend a sort of finishing school at Castle Csejthe, accepting twenty-five girls at a time to learn “the social graces appropriate to their class.” The young ladies were indeed finished—but not in the way their families had anticipated. And after several young noblewomen permanently disappeared, people began to notice; the rumors even reached Vienna, the epicenter of the Holy Roman Empire.

As early as 1602 a courageous Lutheran minister named István Magyari complained to the local and Viennese authorities, but nothing was done. Elizabeth’s family was fully aware of her crimes, but dismissed any mention of them as malicious gossip and idle supposition, as well as the superstition of unlettered peasants.

Finally, in 1610, her dark deeds were brought to light after four corpses of young girls that had been carelessly tossed over the castle walls were discovered. Magyari had long suspected some ghoulish scenario after Elizabeth had asked him to discreetly bury some bloodless corpses; at long last, the local officials agreed to hear his allegations.

No one cared about dozens, if not hundreds, of missing peasant girls; but the disappearance of so many aristocratic young ladies bore investigation. Thanks to István Magyari, the evidence of Elizabeth’s atrocities eventually reached King Matthias II of Hungary. Although he had undoubtedly heard of Elizabeth’s brutality, he had dithered for years before finally having to confront it. Why? He owed the Bathory family money! But it eventually became convenient for Matthias to take the matter in hand because a cornerstone of his reign was to curb the increasing power of the nobility. By bringing the Blood Countess to justice Matthias would make an example of the Báthorys (who ruled Transylvania at the time) to any nobles who might be getting too big for their breeches.

Matthias II of Hungary, Holy Roman Emperor

In December 1610, eight years after István Magyari first spoke up about the dark doings at Castle Csejthe, King Matthias dispatched the Lord Palatine of Hungary, Count György Thurzó, to raid the castle.

But Thurzó already knew about Elizabeth’s crimes; he was a relative of the Báthory family. However, he accepted his commission, and on his arrival at Castle Csejthe, discovered that his kinswoman’s atrocities were even worse than he had imagined. He nearly tripped over the corpse of a girl in the main hall; then a groan grabbed his attention. It came from a dying girl whose body was so pierced with holes that she resembled a sieve.

Dead and mostly dead girls were found in a number of holding cells. In the basement several more victims were discovered hanging from the rafters, their bodies slit open and dripping blood into large vats placed on the floor below them that would be used for another of the countess’s rejuvenating soaks.

After Thurzó ordered the excavation of the basement floor, another fifty corpses were uncovered. A maidservant named Zusanna directed him to Elizabeth’s desk where he found a ledger containing a tally, in her handwriting, of her victims. Some 650 names were on the list, though her confederates would later dispute this number, placing the total body count at four to five dozen. However, between 100 and 200 bodies were removed from the castle by Thurzó’s investigators.

Elizabeth’s accomplices, Dorottya (“Dorka”) Szentes, Ilona Jó, and a washerwoman named Katarína Benická, were arrested. Also arrested was Elizabeth’s dwarf, János Újváry, nicknamed both Ibis and Ficzko, who has been characterized by one historian as retarded. Erzi Majorova managed to escape, but she was subsequently apprehended.

Some historians claim that Elizabeth was arrested along with her servants; others state that because she was a noblewoman she could not be arrested. Because aristocrats were not permitted to be placed on trial, Elizabeth was never called upon to testify in her defense. In any event, if she had been found guilty and executed for her crimes, her property would have been forfeited to the crown. Naturally, it remained in the best interests of the Báthory family to hold onto their real estate at all costs.

On January 7, 1611, Elizabeth’s accomplices were placed on trial before a panel of twenty judges. Two hundred witnesses testified against the absent countess. What they had to say undoubtedly shocked the court. For example, it came out during the trial that a twelve-year-old girl named Pola had managed to escape Elizabeth’s clutches but was pursued by Dorka and Ilona who brought her back to the castle. Pola was placed inside a spherical cage lined with dozens of spikes. As the cage was hauled up by a pulley, the unfortunate child was pierced all over and bled to death. And one of Elizabeth’s diary entries referred to a young maid who had died too quickly for her demise to provide much amusement; she had deemed the girl “too small.”

Finally a verdict was rendered: The servant girl Zusanna was acquitted. Katarína was imprisoned for life. The retarded dwarf Ficzko was beheaded and then burned. Erzi, Dorka, and Ilona were all pronounced guilty of being witches and because their fingers had been quite literally “dipped in the blood of Christians” [Lewis, p 38] had them ripped from their hands with hot pincers, a weapon with which they were undoubtedly all-too-familiar.

Since the countess’s rank prevented her from being tried, her relatives took it upon themselves to exact punishment—which conveniently kept her property within the family. Confined by her relations to her bedchamber in Castle Csejthe, Elizabeth was no longer considered a danger to anyone and remained out of reach of King Matthias. Slits in the walls allowed her a bit of light and air and permitted food and water to be passed to her.

Her house arrest lasted a little more than three years. On August 21, 1614 the fifty-four-year-old countess was discovered lying face down in her makeshift prison, having recently breathed her last. She was buried in the church at Csejthe, but the villagers grew too vociferous about having a mass murderess reposing among them, so Elizabeth’s body was moved to the Báthory family crypt located near her birthplace, at Ecsed.

It has been suggested that the reason charges were never brought against Elizabeth Báthory herself was because the king owed her money, but moreover, because she was innocent: the scapegoated lesbian daughter of a powerful Protestant family that dared to oppose the (Catholic) Hapsburg emperors. But if that were the case, then it is unlikely the Báthorys would have been either so prominent or so feared. Could it really be true that people kept their mouths shut about the goings-on at Csejthe Castle because there was in fact nothing going on? And if religious dissent was at the heart of the matter, why was the man who ultimately blew the whistle on Elizabeth a Lutheran minister—one who shared her religious views, rather than opposed them? Some things don’t tally and we may never have all the answers because documents are either sealed in Hungary’s archives or are too difficult to decipher because of their age and the obscurity of the seventeenth-century form of the language.

Although we may view Elizabeth’s countryman Vlad Dracula as a mass murderer, he might have argued in his defense (if he didn’t impale you first), that his brutality was a necessary evil in order to maintain law and order in a culture that lived and died by the sword, as well as to maintain his occasionally tenuous possession of the Wallachian crown. Elizabeth Báthory—the “Blood Countess”—was also a royal mass murderer; but there was no political rationale for her outsized brutality. Her atrocities were committed for sport, though admittedly there came a time when they became a vital part of her skin care regimen. Vanity never had a higher, or more gruesome, price.

Have you ever heard of Elizabeth Báthory? Do you believe the stories about her?

Who Let the Dogs Out? At Long Last, My Review of WOLF HALL

2009-10-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

WINTER, 1533: an eerie noise pierces the London night. “Is there loups in this kingdom,” a young French émigré asks his new mentor and surrogate father Thomas Cromwell.

Cromwell replies, “I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.”

They may not have thick gray coats and fangs, but Hilary Mantel’s London is full of wolves, of the human and equally carnivorous kind: from clergymen to courtiers, to concubines, to the king himself, Henry VIII. Hence the title WOLF HALL, though it means something else as well, something quite literal. Wolf Hall is also the name of the Seymour family’s estate—a den of carnivores with a father that eats his young, so to speak. The patriarch Sir John Seymour, father of Jane, her sister Lizzie, and her soon-to-be famous brothers Edward and Thomas, stole Edward’s wife Catherine Filliol and had children by her. The relationship was considered incestuous, Edward repudiated Catherine and had their marriage annulled. Her children were declared bastards and Catherine was banished to a convent. The reader can infer from this little domestic scandal the parallels to Henry VIII’s incestuous relationships with his first two wives: Henry slept with Mary Boleyn prior to wedding her younger sister; and Katharine f Aragon was first been married to Henry’s older brother Arthur. Whether or not their union was considered incestuous leads to the trial of the sixteenth century.

Winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction, WOLF HALL begins in the late 1520s (with several pages of flashback to Cromwell’s impoverished and violent childhood in Putney) and ends in the summer of 1535. England at the time was edging toward a future no one could fully imagine. For Henry, eager to rid himself of his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, in order to wed the striving, ambitious, manipulative commoner Anne Boleyn, history was moving at a glacial pace; while for his former Chancellor, the crackerjack lawyer and theologian Sir Thomas More, the velocity was dizzying and needed to be halted.

After countless novels featuring at their epicenters Anne Boleyn and other women of the Tudor Court, WOLF HALL offers an original and refreshing take on the era. As we dog the footsteps and enter the private thoughts of the narrator, Thomas Cromwell, we visit the places where wives and mistresses, and even Anne Boleyn—the usual suspects at the center of Tudor era historical fiction—are personae non grata. As I mentioned in my preliminary review of the novel, we are taken behind the arrases, into the corridors of power and into the minds of the men who set the rules and who, with impunity, seek to change them. Some are true believers and others are masters of expedience, their eyes on the highest rung of the ladder and their consciences fluid and malleable, as circumstances dictate. Memories are long and revenge is a game for the patient.

Self-made commoner Thomas Cromwell is the sort of stout, pugnacious man with a dubious past who is so good at his job that his social betters overlook his humble origins even as they mock them. He is a true mercenary; a brawler from the slop-strewn streets of Putney who had to learn to give as good as he got from his perennially drunken father Walter, a brewer and blacksmith. At his age “I used to stick knives in people,” he thinks when he looks at his sweet-tempered son Gregory. After a particularly brutal beating, Cromwell ran away as far as his legs and a ship could take him, eventually becoming a mercenary soldier for the French army, and then a banker in Florence. He is as familiar with counting houses as he is with kitchens, man who can judge the weight of a yard of cloth by running it between his thumb and forefinger as well as he knows the proper weight of a given coin.

He is a survivor by dint of his wits, his tenacity, and his cunning, built like a bear-baiting mastiff, with a temperament to match. And he happens to be in the right place at the right time to rise to dizzying, and unprecedented, heights. The strong-arming consigliere in Henry VIII’s cosa nostra of courtiers, Cromwell advances rung by slippery rung, until he is made Lord Chancellor—the office once held by Thomas More as well as Cromwell’s mentor, Thomas Wolsey, the late cardinal. And he has a strained relationship with Thomas Boleyn, the father of the would-be queen. Yes, as Mantel has Cromwell quip to himself, call out the name Thomas and every man in the room will turn his head.

Mantel’s Cromwell is shrewd, manipulative, pragmatic. He lends money at interest—anathema to Christian practices. He doesn’t care if people don’t like him. He will point-blank demand a promotion, except in the king’s presence where he learned, at Wolsey’s hem how to play the self-effacing toady when the situation demands it. Cromwell’s aim is to be the secular Wolsey, smoothing the path of access to the king (for fees and considerations of course), the way his mentor (as well as the corrupt priests he decries) sell the gullible access to God.

The only sure thing in this era is death. Cromwell takes into his home, Austin Friars, his late sisters’ children, distant relations, and the equivalent of at-risk youths. He not only feeds and clothes them, but he gives them a purpose, a hand-up, and the chance at upward mobility that no one ever gave him. They will become loyal to a fault. The girls will make good marriages. Yet even as a doting father figure, rarely does Cromwell’s vulnerability surface; rather, he endeavors to suppress it at every turn. One of the rare times we are privy to the man behind the mask is in his relationship with his wife Liz—and even so, he will betray her memory, embarking on a new liaison in much the same way that the king, Henry VIII did after he cast aside Mary Boleyn. The parallel is not lost on the reader.

Cromwell's god is expedience. Only Thomas Cromwell the family man is likeable. Thomas Cromwell the public servant works very hard to appear invulnerable. “He doesn’t mean to give away pieces of himself,” Mantel tells us. “Arrange your faces,” he advises his minions as they prepare to do political battle.

In my preliminary review I mentioned Mantel’s inventive characterizations, notably her version of Thomas More as more sanctimonious than saint. And yet his final confrontations with Cromwell will tug at the reader’s heart, engaging the emotions in ways that the rest of the novel, though we appreciate Mantel’s craft and storytelling skills, do not. For More is the other side of the coin that is Cromwell; and Cromwell knows he has no worthier adversary. When he pleads, more than once, for More to swear to Henry’s new Act of Supremacy, it is Cromwell, and not More, who sounds desperate to preserve a life. Mantel’s characterizations are all the more plausible for their complexity and contradictions. As I mentioned in my preliminary review, Mantel’s Thomas More is brutal and violent and no contemporary reader can excuse certain aspects of his behavior. And yet, in the last fifth of the novel, during a tense scene between the two Thomases, Cromwell and More—More’s unshakeable belief and his devotion to his conscience are laudable, since most of the characters in this novel are so lacking in scruples.

In that standoff between More and Cromwell, pushed to the limit of his patience the latter explodes: “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he says. “A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church had liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. You call history to your aid, but what is history to you? It is a mirror that flatters Thomas More. But I have another mirror, I hold it up and it shows a vain and dangerous man, and when I turn it about it shows a killer, for you will drag down with you God knows how many, who will only have the suffering, and not your martyr’s gratification. You are not a simple soul, so don’t try to make this simple. You know I have respected you? You know I have respected you since I was a child? I would rather see my only son dead, I would rather see them cut off his head, than see you refuse this oath, and give comfort to every enemy of England.”

The writing is masterful. If that had been a dramatic monologue, it would have stopped the show for applause.

Nevertheless, the reader cannot help but side with Cromwell when it comes to the corrupt practices of the Catholic Church at the time—and yet it is Cromwell whose motives are impure. His gods are Money and Power—not so different, in fact, from those princes of the church. Yet Cromwell makes the overwhelmingly cogent point that in the Bible Jesus never singled out one of his disciples and told him he would be the Pope as would his descendants, nor did Jesus give any of his followers permission to make laws, collect rents, decide who was born legitimate or a bastard ... it’s really quite wonderful how Mantel can make such an unpleasant man appear on the side of the angels—or not, as the literal case stands. Reading about the struggle to reform a corrupt institution—in this case the Catholic Church—reminds one of the battle over healthcare reform that is currently raging on Capitol Hill. Everyone agrees that the system is corrupt, and that a few are becoming enriched by it while many are made to pay through the nose for something that should by right be theirs. And yet the ones resisting reform are those whose purses are the fattest thanks to the old system, while those who would most benefit from reform are reluctant or skeptical about it—scared of changing the status quo for fear it might physically imperil them.

Historically Cromwell could not have cared less about that aspect of reforming a corrupt religion. He aimed to dissolve the monasteries and channel their wealth into the royal treasury thereby enabling Henry VIII to fund his wars, building projects, etc. And Mantel dramatizes that event gorgeously in the novel. Cromwell places the idea into Henry’s head in such a subtle way that Henry thinks it's his own idea.

Mantel’s Henry VIII is what you expect him to be. Ditto for Wolsey. They are men of large appetites, accustomed to getting what they want when they want it. The only major figure in the novel that did not work as well for me was Anne Boleyn. The novelist gives us the shrewd shrew that many authors before her have written. But lacking that crucial scene or two where she truly dazzles with her exotic beauty and sublime grace (because we always see her concentrated intent to manipulate her audience); and without a scene where we see the workings of her much vaunted intellect, we don’t have a woman that Henry will wait seven years for, let alone overturn the Christian religion to wed and bed.

Outside of the king’s presence, courtiers salivate over her as well, long before she becomes queen; yet the reader never sees what they must see in her; in fact, she clearly disdains the men in their very presence, so how could they be so blind? We hear of her quarrels with Henry, her sharp tongue, her fierce temper. We see how she treats other women, especially her sister Mary, with malice and cruelty. Where is the Anne the king fell in love with? Even Cromwell, that hard nut, eventually becomes smitten by her physical charms; (he fantasizes sexually about both Boleyn sisters).

Mary Boleyn, on the other hand, becomes very likeable, though Mantel makes skilled use of historical rumors that have been bandied about over the centuries surrounding the other, older Boleyn girl’s relationship with the king. Operating on the premise that if Anne is holding out for marriage, it’s better for Henry’s sexual urges to be satisfied by someone within the family, Mary remains Henry’s unwilling plaything long after her marriage to William Carey and into her widowhood. Here, the king is believed to be the father of her son, also named Henry. And even after he has wedded and bedded Anne, Henry is slaking his lust with her older sister, if not their cousin Madge Shelton as well. Mantel’s libidinous Mary is almost as canny as Anne in that both young women are aware of the power of their own allure. Each wields sex as a weapon as skillfully as Cromwell handles a knife, knowing just when to give that fatal twist, or estoc.

Mantel also makes literary hay from a centuries-old rumor that when Henry was a youth, he slept with the mother of the Boleyn girls, Elizabeth Howard Boleyn. It strains credulity, but that’s why they call it historical fiction. The author also consistently refers to Wolsey as the son of an Ipswich butcher, because that’s what history has handed down to us; Wolsey’s father was in fact a grazier. But slaughtering cattle is such a squalid profession compared to herding them, that regurgitating that sort of teensy factual error is entirely forgivable; besides, it’s fiction, and her characters get plenty of mileage out of disdaining the butcher's son.

Mantel stealthily introduces us to seemingly minor characters who, the well-versed Tudor geek immediately recognizes, will play a much larger role in the future. In fact the entire novel is about the future—of England, and of the Church, and of Mantel’s vast cast of characters. Wolf Hall is the home of Henry's future wife--and not the one he spends the better part of the novel trying to marry.

The first time we see a homely, diffident blond scuttling from Anne Boleyn’s rooms, the intuitive reader knows already who she is and what role she will eventually play. The fun part is getting there; in Mantel’s novel, while Henry doesn’t look twice at Jane Seymour, the widowed Cromwell does, disappointed when he learns she will return to her father’s estate in the country. And a young lutenist initially in Wolsey’s employ, with a penchant for gazing goggle-eyed at Anne and gawking at the nobility, as well as for listening at keyholes, is of course Mark Smeaton.

Mark, along with the Francises—Bryan and Weston; Henry Norris, and William Brereton, Henry’s smug quartet of courtiers (whom we first see playing devils in a masque depicting the fall of Cardinal Wolsey), will lose their heads on Tower Hill within a year after we turn the final page, victims of a trumped up charge of treason for bedding Anne Boleyn. So too will Anne’s brother George, Viscount Rochford, a cold, power-hungry popinjay who hates his wife and spends an inordinate time getting the silk lining beneath his slashed sleeves to puff perfectly.

Part of the deliciousness of the novel is in knowing that some of the most arrogant characters are headed for a fall, including the novel’s protagonist, who will part company with his own head on July 28, 1540—Henry’s wedding day to wife number five, Kathryn Howard—for brokering the king’s disastrous marriage with Anne of Cleves, and for becoming too big for his breeches. There but for the grace of Henry go any of them.

Other characters, including those Cromwell has little use for, such as Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester; and particularly the politician Thomas Wriothesley, whom he refers to as “Call-Me-Risley”—or just “Call-Me”--will not only outlive Cromwell, but “Call-Me” will one day have his job as Lord Chancellor.

Although WOLF HALL falls squarely into the category of historical fiction, the voice-y third-person present tense owes more of a debt to literary fiction. Tenses change within the same paragraph. Words are laid out like playing cards, sometimes deliberately forming grammatically incomplete sentences of the kind that tend to send historical fiction copyeditors into a self-righteous tizzy. Dialogue is not always set within quotation marks, often blending with a character’s inner thoughts.

The novel ends with plans for a royal progress, almost a play on words for what will come next. It is summer, 1535. Sir Thomas More has just martyred himself on Tower Hill. Anne Boleyn’s thousand days are already numbered, although she has yet to realize it. In damp and drafty Kimbolton Katherine of Aragon has a little more than half a year to live. Come September, Henry and his courtiers will visit Wolf Hall, the seat of the Seymour family. If you know your Tudor history, that visit is when Henry’s serious infatuation with Jane Seymour truly began, no doubt disappointing Mantel’s Cromwell, who is tempted at various points in the novel to stake his own claim for her. We can’t help but laugh at his misguided view that she is so plain and unprepossessing that no one else would ever want her anyway. But in her final sentence Mantel leaves us with a hopeful Chancellor; the man who has finally made peace with his wife’s passing and is ready to make his move on the unattractive little blond who has haunted his thoughts for years. Little can anyone know that the biggest wolf in the halls of England will snatch up the little rabbit.

Plagiarism: Setting the Record Straight

2009-10-13T13:45:00.001-07:00

There are clear cut ethics when it comes to quoting other people verbatim and not attributing it to them. With regard to the current firestorm as to whether part of my preliminary review of Hilary Mantel's blockbuster novel WOLF HALL was plagiarized by someone the following day in their own blog, here is the paragraph from my preliminary review that I posted here on Saturday, October 10.

Winner of Britain's prestigious Man Booker prize, the novel is certainly my cuppa. For one thing, I love "voice-y" writing. And Mantel tells the story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell, the self-made son of a violent Putney brewer and blacksmith, in the third person present tense, most often referring to the protagonist, one of history's more famous anti-heroes, as "he." It gives the novel a simultaneous sense of immediacy and distance, a seemingly oxymoronic balance that is hard to strike; yet Mantel finds that razor's edge and remains there for 532 pages. There are a few drawbacks to this tone, however. Since there are several scenes where more than one man is in the room, referring to Cromwell as "he" occasionally makes for confusion, and I have found myself needing to re-read passages to make sure I know who's talking. Knowing who's talking is exceptionally important in a world where one's political and religious opinions can be calculated by scant degrees.

And this is the original wording (it has since been revised) from Elizabeth Mahon's review, posted on the following day, Sunday, October 11, on her blog, http://www.scandalouswoman.blogspot.com/

Mantel tells the story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell (1485?-1540)the son of a violent Putney blacksmith, in the third person present tense, most often referring to the protagonist as "he." It gives the novel a simultaneous sense of immediacy and distance. The reader feels like they are right there in the room as the wheeling and dealing is going on. There are a few drawbacks to this, however. Since there are several scenes where there is more than one man in the room, referring to Cromwell as "he" makes it incredibly confusing at times, and I had to re-read sections to make sure I knew who was talking. It doesn't help that so many of the characters are named Thomas.

The similarities are far too close for coincidence. Not only have my words been used, but the opinions contained within them. Sure, people may share similar opinions of any given thing, but we would hope they would express those opinions in their own words.

I do have copies of both blog pages printed out so that I know what the original date-stamped text was in each case. She has since revised her text, which is in itself an admission of wrongdoing. I would accept her apology and a promise not to plagiarize in the future. In fact, if she did not troll my blogs, or my Facebook page, she would not be aware of what I wrote in either venue and could therefore never place herself in a position of copying my text into her own.

But here's a curious conundrum: if the party in question denies that she plagiarized my blog, how would she realize I had been referring to her? Because one of the odder things about this is that I do not mention her, or her blog, by name on my Facebook wall, nor did anyone else; and yet she knew I was referring to her, and had to post something about it on her blog, as though she were the wronged party.

And since she is liable to read this post, a chastened "oh, shit, yes I admit I copied from your blog; I have learned my lesson, and I would never dream of doing so again; now let's shake hands like ladies" apology would be accepted.

Coming soon ... my review of WOLF HALL

2009-10-10T07:55:00.001-07:00

Hilary Mantel's remarkable novel WOLF HALL, a sweeping story of political one-upmanship behind the arrases at the Tudor Court will be released on Tuesday, October 13.

Winner of Britain's prestigious Man Booker prize, the novel is certainly my cuppa. For one thing, I love "voice-y" writing. And Mantel tells the story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell, the self-made son of a violent Putney brewer and blacksmith, in the third person present tense, most often referring to the protagonist, one of history's more famous anti-heroes, as "he." It gives the novel a simultaneous sense of immediacy and distance, a seemingly oxymoronic balance that is hard to strike; yet Mantel finds that razor's edge and remains there for 532 pages. There are a few drawbacks to this tone, however. Since there are several scenes where more than one man is in the room, referring to Cromwell as "he" occasionally makes for confusion, and I have found myself needing to re-read passages to make sure I know who's talking. Knowing who's talking is exceptionally important in a world where one's political and religious opinions can be calculated by scant degrees.

The novel is full of sly wit and "in-jokes" for those well versed in the Tudor era, in that Mantel makes excellent use of actual historical events, weaving them seamlessly and plausibly into her epic (which at 532 pages, it certainly is), as well as employing, verbatim, remarks actually uttered by the players, though she will sometimes shift the location, timeline, and context to suit her own purposes as a storyteller. However, that's why they call it historical fiction. And Mantel skillfully flashes her license to invent.

I have fewer than 200 pages still to read; thus far, there isn't a single likeable person in the book among the key players. And yet it is a testament to Mantel's craft as a writer that the novel is a page-turner nonetheless. Mercifully, she does not sanitize the personalities of the historically objectionable or complex. In fact, for her own purposes, she does the opposite in some cases, inverting the long-held image of Sir Thomas More as a saintly and principled man, and instead turning him into a religious zealot as bloodthirsty as his adversaries. He scourges, tortures and burns those who deny that the host is the literal body of Christ and who disseminate copies of the Bible in English. Mantel's More is a perfectly plausible creation, and who's to say that he is not more "real" than the venerated image in the history books? And yet you wonder why history lauds him while it (with good reason) castigates her protagonist, Thomas Cromwell,

Obviously all of the players are long dead. Readers who are well versed in Tudor history know how they died as well as the circumstances of their demise. Cromwell rises here, and we will leave him at the apex of fortune's wheel ... but he, too, will fall -- as hard as many of those he mocks, including Thomas More.

I have much, much more to say about WOLF HALL, and hope to get it posted by the book's release date. I am not sure that the book will be as much of an enjoyable read to those who get their Tudor history via half-dressed actors on Showtime, or who are not terribly familiar with the actual events of the era and the identities of the key players, their relationships with the king, Henry VIII, and with each other. In Mantel's novel, many characters rise to dizzying heights on the wheel of fortune; and it enriches the experience of reading WOLF HALL to be grounded in 16th century English history, and therefore to be aware of how the characters tumbled as the wheel spun downward, and who was standing behind them waiting to reap the benefits of their demise. It makes the read that much more delicious to know that Cromwell derides those who we know will outlive, outplay, and outlast him.

Royal Wedding Gowns -- "In or Out?"

2009-10-06T18:54:00.000-07:00

Amanda McCabe has a terrific post up today over at Risky Regencies. The timing was perfect, because I just finished reviewing the second pass page proofs of NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES and could not have wished for a more delightful way to kick back and relax. Ogle these gorgeous wedding gowns. Salivate. Imagine yourself in them, either on your own big day or in a royal wedding.

Which ones can you imagine yourself wearing?

And if you were one of these royal brides, who would you most like to be, and why?

http://riskyregencies.blogspot.com/2009/10/royal-brides-in-or-out.html

The gowns may be "in or out" in Project Runway parlance ... but for better or worse, each of the couples I profile in NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES had to "make it work"!

The Faint Tinkle of Royal Wedding Bells?

2009-10-04T07:43:00.000-07:00

Your timing is impeccable, Your Highness ... if true.

According to a September 21 squib in Vanityfair.com (www.vanityfair.com/online/style/2009/09/which-queen-spent-the-morning-in-harlem) a confidant (who may no longer be one by now) of Britain's Prince William and his on-again/off-again girlfriend of eight years, Kate Middleton, have set a wedding date.

Vanity Fair alleges that the couple's university chum Jules Knight (a member of the boy band Blake -- which means absolutely nothing to me, so maybe some of you readers can enlighten me) have set a June 2012 date for their "I do's."

The reason for the delay, according to Knight (lovely name for a prince's pal, isn't it? How teddibly, teddibly fitting!) is that Wills wants to wait until he turns thirty (nothing like emulating your father's timetable regarding his BrideQuest, eh, wot?). Apparently, "Kate is fine with that." Additionally, says Knight, the second in line to the British throne wants to focus on his RAF (Royal Air Force, for the uninitiated) training.

Kate Middleton -- with, Prince Harry: her future brother-in-law, perhaps?

According to an article in http://www.people.co.uk/, one of their pals said: “He is very careerminded and wants to get as high up as he can in the force. Kate knows he loves her and wants to marry her but also understands what it means to be the girlfriend of the future king.”

If there is a June 2012 date already set, those of us who have tripped down the aisle, or at least taken the trip, know that you need that much time to plan a wedding, half of which is generally devoted to squabbling among the future in-laws! At least they might not have trouble booking a band: Blake is purportedly Kate's first choice, so I doubt they'll have to worry about the band having another booking on their special day.

Your Highness, Miss Middleton -- I wish you all the best. And in the fairy tale maelstrom that the world continues to stir up regarding your royal romance, and (perhaps) your upcoming nuptials, may you both be able to plant your feet firmly on the ground and remain rooted to the realities of marriage.

Will they or won't they hear wedding bells? In June 2012? Sooner? Later? Never?

Please chime in!

Awww, I'm blushing!

2009-09-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

I've never received a blog award before. I'm touched and tickled pink. So I thank the lovely and generous Allie over at www.histficchick.blogspot.com who passed along this award to me ... of course the reason my blog is so lovely is because she coached (copiously) from the sidelines, guiding me where to go online for terrific backgrounds and banners. I was thrilled to fong an image of a crowned woman and a key to her heart -- perfect indeed for a blog titled ROYAL AFFAIRS!

and ... if you have any royal scandals on your mind, please pop in for a visit anytime to discuss them. Who are some of your favorite scandalous royals -- and why?

A Most RAUCOUS acquisition!

2009-09-20T06:38:00.000-07:00

I am delighted to say that I am now the very tickled recipient of Carlyn Beccia's delightful (and fabulously illustrated) RAUCOUS ROYALS.

Not only can this delicious volume be enjoyed by adults for its sheer whimsy (as well as its solid research); but it's a set of regal training wheels (and I mean the phrase as a compliment) for younger readers whose appetites for royal scandals will surely be whetted by it, and who may become tempted down the line to read my nonfiction titles on royals behaving badly ...

ROYAL AFFAIRS: A Lusty Romp Through the Extramarital Adventures That Rocked the British Monarchy;

and

NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire. (from NAL trade; the release date is January 5, 2010).

Carlyn will soon be giving away a copy of ROYAL AFFAIRS on her blog, http://blog.raucousroyals.com/ so be sure to pay her a visit. Her blog is always chock-full of fascinating historical arcana.

Allie Rocks!

2009-09-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

I have finally brought this blog up to aesthetic speed!

And about 95% of the credit is due to the talented, witty, and articulate Allie Greenwald at www.histficchick.blogspot.com.

Allie is one of the premier bloggers in the world of historical fiction. Without her online tutorials, suggestions, crosstown hand-holding, talking this near-Luddite off the metaphorical ledge, my blog wouldn't look this pretty.

Please visit my other blog, too, at www.leslie-carroll.blogspot.com to view my own efforts after following her tutorial.

NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES -- the cover!

2009-09-14T19:01:00.000-07:00

At long last I have been given the thumbs-up to formally release the cover image for my second nonfiction release, NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire.

Comparing the selection of a marriage partner to fishing for an eel—that staple of Renaissance diets—Sir Thomas More’s father commented that it was as if “ye should put your hand into a blind bag full of snakes and eels together, seven snakes for one eel.”

In these pages are the snakes as well as the eels—the disastrous unions and the delightful ones; the martyrs to marriage and the iconoclasts who barely took their vows seriously; the saintly and the suffering; the rebels and the renegades—all of whom took the phrases “I do” and “I will” and ran as far as they could go with them, exploring and embracing the broad spectrum of passion, power, and possibilities far beyond the royal bedchamber.

You can pre-order the book from Amazon at

http://www.amazon.com/Notorious-Royal-Marriages-Journey-Centuries/dp/0451229010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252980499&sr=1-1

Worth Mentioning: The Royal Unmentionables

2009-09-09T05:04:00.000-07:00

A pair of drawers and a linen chemise that once belonged to Queen Victoria (1819-1901) have been restored to Britain's Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at London's Kensington Palace.

Although Victoria had a sylphlike 20-inch waist when she became queen at the age of eighteen, decades of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and unhappiness when she was widowed in 1861 at the age of forty-two, took their toll.

The pair of drawers, with its 56-inch waist have a matching chemise (which is quite voluminous). Both unmentionables are embroidered with a "VR" (which stands for Victoria Regina, Latin for Queen Victoria) and are believed to date from the 1890s.

In my nonfiction debut, ROYAL AFFAIRS there is a chapter on Victoria's relationship with one of her Highland ghillies, John Brown, and the rampant innuendo that speculated on whether they became sexually involved, leading to her nickname of "Mrs. Brown."

And in NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES, which will be published on January 5, 2010, you can read a chapter on one of the greatest real-life love stories in English history, Victoria's marriage to her first cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Theirs was the rare happy royal marriage.

The Versailles Glide

2009-08-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

Come on over to my other blog at http://www.leslie-carroll.blogspot.com/ and learn how I suffered for my art, by taking lessons in the Versailles Glide, all in the name of research for my novel-in-progress on the early years of Marie Antoinette!

Maria Zannieri, dance teacher, choreographer, and period dance expert -- shown here with her husband John DeBlass and co-owner of West Side Dance Project studios at 260 W. 36th Street, 3rd floor, NYC, where I had my lesson from Maria in the Versailles Glide. John and Maria are a multitalented couple, superb dance teachers, theatre directors, and choreographers (and John's a music teacher, too)

Josephine's Hair

2009-08-22T18:52:00.001-07:00

A lock of Josephine's hair; snipped on the day of her death, May 29, 1814.

Run, don't walk, or at least take one of those $1 buses, to Philadelphia before September 7, when the National Constitution Center's Napoleon exhibit shuts its doors.

And prepare to spend at least two hours there, because the exhibition is massive, containing an exhaustive and comprehensive collection of items belonging to Napoleon, his two wives, his numerous siblings, and those, like Talleyrand, with whom he had contentious relationships to say the least.

In the short time I had at the Constitution Center, I barely made through half the exhibit, and found it so compelling that I have made plans to return to Philly to see the rest of it.

The exhibition is divided into segments covering the rise to power of a Corsican upstart named Napoleone Buonaparte; his roles in the rapidly changing post-revolutionary governments; his marriages to the soigné Creole widow, Josephine de Beauharnais, and to the naive Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria; his numerous siblings (you'll want to take a nap on Jerome Bonaparte's sumptuous bed with it's apricot brocade curtains and bolster); his military career and accomplishments; his coronation as Emperor of France; and his exiles on Elba and St Helena.

The item that has most remained with me from my first visit to the exhibit is depicted above--a lock of Josephine's hair, snipped from her corpse by her physician on the day she died -- at the age of fifty, on May 29, 1814. Tied with a dark green ribbon, it is a shade of pure brown, exactly the color that comes to mind when you think "brunette." I admit to tearing up when I saw such a deeply personal memento, and almost felt as though I was invading her privacy by viewing it. Perhaps my visceral reaction had to do with the fact that the curl was taken after she had died, a true rape of the lock because she had been unable to consent to its loss.

Josephine's prayer book; on exhibit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia PA until September 7, 2009

I fell in love with Josephine when I researched her life and her marriage to Napoleon for NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES (NAL, January 5, 2010). She was no saint, but she was not well treated by either of her husbands.

Another highlight (for me) from the exhibit is an enameled snuffbox that belonged to Napoleon's nyphomaniacal sister Pauline. It bears her silhouette in gold, which makes it a particularly egotistical gift to have bestowed on one of her homelier sisters. But that's what she did. Pauline will get her due in my third book of the royal nonfiction series, currently titled ROYAL PAINS: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Bastards, and Bad Seeds.

Stay tuned for more from the National Constitution Center's Napoleon exhibit.

In the meantime, have you ever been moved to tears by an artifact you saw in a museum exhibition? What was it?

Napoleon Takes Philadelphia By Storm!

2009-08-18T08:19:00.000-07:00

Before it ends on September 7, I plan to get down to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to see the special exhibit on Napoleon, "An exhibition offering visitors a rare opportunity to explore the private life of the Emperor of France and to see beyond the legend to gain an understanding of this complex figure as a man and political leader whose actions reshaped the landscape of Europe and America."

I have to confess I don't like the man. Never did. Although I developed a soft spot for his first wife, Josephine de Beauharnais, who he summarily divorced when she proved unable to bear him an heir. I read quite a bit about the emperor's personal life when I was researching my upcoming [NAL January 5, 2010 release] nonfiction book, NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire. The more I read, the more I was fascinated by what a cruel jerk he was.

Of course I bring other prejudices to the table. As a fan of Lord Nelson, it's impossible to view his Gallic nemesis as a hero. And yet I remain intrigued by how he lived and loved. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston hosted a spectacular temporary exhibit back in 2007-08 on Napoleon and Josephine's furniture and other personal effects, including an enormous china service with emblems of Egypt painted on the dishes and Josephine's swan shaped bed, in which she breathed her last on May 29, 1814.

So I admit to being a bit of a Napoleon groupie, even though the more I learn about him, the less I admire him.

Are there any historical figures that make you feel the same way? Who are they?

Kiss Him, Kate!

2009-08-04T12:30:00.001-07:00

Hello, readers!

I just came across a fun post about Prince William and his on-again/off-again sweetheart Kate Middleton.

http://worldofroyaltyblog.com/2009/07/state-of-kate/

Will Wills ever pop the question? And will his timing be oh-so-convenient for the January 5, 2010 pub date for my second historical nonfiction book NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire?

I made my agent cry!

2009-08-04T06:14:00.000-07:00

In a good way.

I submitted a 40-page proposal for a novel about the early years of Marie Antoinette titled BECOMING. And she loved it so much she cried.

As I researched Marie Antoinette for my second nonfiction title NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES, it made me hungry to learn more about her. And the more I read, the more I revised my opinion of her.

The Marie Antoinette I came to love and pity after reading a dozen biographies of her presents such delicious contradictions in terms that she is a novelist’s dream.

Possessed of a proud temperament, she was nonetheless desperate to please, and in doing so was often too eager to place her trust in the hands of those who were not in fact her confidantes, but who wished her harm instead. She would brook no contradiction, yet was vulnerable to criticism; a frivolous creature who was also the most generous member of the French royal family when it came to helping the poor. She was stubborn and willful, yet playful and adorably charming; regal, yet empathetic; loyal, yet confounded by the dual roles she was often expected to play. She was a natural beauty who according to her own mother was in dire need of painful physical improvements in order to enhance her looks; born to rule, yet shockingly unprepared to do so when the time came to fulfill her ultimate destiny.

Do you know a lot about Marie Antoinette? A little? What's your opinion of her?

The Cost of Tiaras Must Be Rising...

2009-06-30T05:30:00.000-07:00

It's a royal scandal.

We all know that the cost of living never seems to keep pace with our incomes. And that's just as true for the House of Windsor, except that the public pays their bills. It now costs every Brit 69p (or about $1.15 as of this writing) to support the royal family in the style to which they have become accustomed for centuries.

Put in perspective, it's about the same amount (if not more) that Americans pay to keep the National Endowment for the Arts afloat.

But John Bull has chafed at the royal family's noblesse oblige with their hard-earned money for as long as the royals have been profligate with it. For example, in ROYAL AFFAIRS as well as in my upcoming NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES, I note that in 1794 the Prince of Wales's debts had mounted to the exorbitant sum of £600,000 (nearly $80 million in today’s economy). It was his father George III's promise to discharge them the day young George wed that spurred him to marry his odiferous and slovenly first cousin Caroline of Brunswick. The union was an unmitigated disaster.

Fast-forward 215 years to today's royals. Evidently, last year Her Majesty's expenses (which include those of the royal family) amounted to $68.9 million (41.5 million pounds), which reflects an increase of $2.48 million (1.5 million pounds) over last year's tally. That breaks down to an additional 3p (5 cents) per subject.

Buckingham Palace

Taxpayer pounds pay for the royal family's travel expenses as well as for the upkeep of their umpteen homes, castles, and palaces.

So why the cost of living increase? Evidently, the RAF (which is a bit busy in Afghanistan) made fewer jets available to the Windsors last year so they often had to (gasp!) charter commercial aircraft at a moment's notice. You know how pricey that can be.

Add to that the $661,302 (400,000 pound) price of updating the royal family's web site this past February. Who did they use?? Perhaps I should recommend Authorbytes.com which did my new site; their prices are somewhat more reasonable.

And then there's the housecleaning! A veritable army of someones have to dust those priceless tchotchkes and vacuum all those Axminsters. Think about how many people the Windsors gainfully employ! $496,000 (300,000 pounds) was spent on scrubbing the royal abodes. Last year's food bills (my invitation to tea must have been lost in the post) ran to $827,209 (500,000 pounds).

Windsor Castle

And then there was the high cost of Her Majesty's garden parties: (another 400,000 pounds). Was the price of hats factored into the total?

None of these expenses include the tab for security.

But Elizabeth R is probably considering herself quite thrifty because in order to meet expenses, she supplemented the 7.9 million pounds ($13.9 million) of public money with 6 million pounds ($9.9 million) from a reserve fund she'd built up over the years.

The royals have never understood how to work within a budget as the rest of us mere mortals are compelled to do. And if she keeps the purse strings loose, she will run out of funds by 2012 as she prepares to celebrate her 60th year on the throne.

So, what do you think? Is 69p a small price to pay to maintain a national institution (the royal family), whose existence still sparks such romantic feelings in many of us on the other side of the puddle that we spend our own hard-earned money to visit that sceptered isle, shop at stores that have been granted a royal warrant, if only to take home the shopping bag with the crest, purchase tea towels and coffee mugs with royal images and insignias, and tour Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle? Is it worth supporting the royal family because their existence brings in more tourist dollars per year than it costs the British taxpayer?

Or should a stricter budget be imposed to teach the House of Windsor a lesson in economy?

Or is it time to cut those tiara wearing welfare recipients loose?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Royal Updates

2009-06-07T11:29:00.001-07:00

Hitting the shelves in January 2010, my second "Royal" work of historical nonfiction for NAL will indeed be titled...

NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire.

Marie Antoinette

Louis XVI

They didn't go for the Rembrandt cover I suggested. However, I've seen the cover art they chose, though, and think it's "grabby" and fun. Since it may not be finalized I won't post it yet. It's a watercolor, and judging from the clothing worn by the man and woman, it's clearly from the 1780s or 1790s. So much for the "nine centuries" of the subtitle, but I guess they had to pick one of them!

And it's true, NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES does cover some of the great unions of the 18th century: the puerile Peter III and the powerful Catherine the Great; Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI;

Catherine the Great

Tsar Peter III

George IV, when still Prince of Wales; a miniature painted by George Cosway, c. 1792

the two marriages of the future George IV of England--his illicit one in 1785 with the Catholic widow Maria Fitzherbert

Maria Fitzherbert

and his 1795 marriage to his first cousin, the dumpy and odiferous Caroline of Brunswick.

Caroline of Brunswick

as well as Napoleon Bonaparte and his first wife, Josephine Beauharnais.

Napoleon

Josephine

So we do spend a lot of time in the 18th century.

I'm really looking forward to the January 2010 release of NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES. If you have any questions, I'd love to hear them!

Royal Titles

2009-01-10T14:39:00.000-08:00

Literally, this time. My title suggestions for my second work of historical nonfiction were sent to my editor this past Monday.

For those of you who are curious about how the wild and wacky world of publishing works, my suggestions--or at least the one my editor liked best--must be vetted by a number of her colleagues, including those in the sales and marketing forces. They want to be sure that any book title is "grabby" enough for bookstores to want to place hefty orders.

So, at the moment anyway, the title of my next work of nonfiction may very well be . . .

(drum roll) . . .

NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire.

This title is meant to suggest that it's a great companion book to my maiden work of nonfiction, ROYAL AFFAIRS: A Lusty Romp Through the Extramarital Adventures That Rocked the British Monarchy.

I'm hoping they select a "companionable" cover image as well. Here's the one they chose for ROYAL AFFAIRS.

And here's the one I hope they choose for NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES:

What do you think?

Happy New Year to all! May '09 be fine!

ROYAL AFFAIRS promotion events

2008-09-22T14:17:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday evening I was delighted to visit the venerable Book Revue in Huntington, Long Island, the kind of independent bookstore that makes you want to get lost in the stacks for days.

What a lively, intelligent crowd! After I read from ROYAL AFFAIRS, we had a terrific Q&A about some of the royals themselves, about my writing process, and whether I prefer writing nonfiction or fiction. For the record, I love both; each presents its own set of challenges and rewards.

This coming Monday I'll be speaking with one of Dianne DeFonce's book clubs at the Borders in Fairfield, CT. I'll make another appearance at her Borders location in November, as part of a panel on historical fiction, wearing my nom de plume'd hat as Amanda Elyot.

And in October, I'll make the happy journey to Camden, NJ to speak with a book club hosted at a local library.

I absolutely love visiting book clubs and speaking with readers, whether in person or online. If you belong to a book club, I'd be delighted to hear from you. If it is located in the NY Metro area, it would be lots of fun for me to chat with your group in person. Feel free to get in touch with me here, and we'll take it from there.

In the meantime . . . happy reading . . . and remember to support your local libraries, if not with your pocketbook then with your vote. Nothing could be more patrotic than echoing our nation's founders by keeping the First Amendment a cherished right.

Apocryphal Events: Fact or Fiction?

2008-08-26T05:22:00.001-07:00

Marie Antoinette (1755-1793)

I kicked off this blog with a post titled "Just the Facts, Ma'am" about my experience researching and writing ROYAL AFFAIRS. I joked that because I came to nonfiction as a multipublished novelist, it was a challenge not to be able to make things up.

One thing I can assure my readers is that, apart from the way I structured ROYAL AFFAIRS, nothing in the survey of these scandalous liaisons "that rocked the British monarchy" for more than nine centuries, came from my oh-so-fertile imagination. I read numerous historical biographies and articles by respected historians and academics. And, while I tried at all costs to avoid doing so, it's certainly possible that I may have inadvertently included what I like to call "bad history" here and there.

"Bad history" (I did make up the phrase) is how I term stories that have been handed down through the ages, repeated from biographer to biographer over the centuries as though they are factual. However, oftentimes a biographer will refer to a shopworn legend, such as Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat cake" (Qu'ils mangent de la brioche) and then immediately disclaim it, pointing out who really said it and in what context.

On other occasions I've seen biographers discuss an event or anecdotal bit of information about an historical personage, followed by the statement that its accuracy has never sufficiently been proven, or is in doubt. Whether Eleanor of Aquitaine rode to the Crusades barebreasted (or not) like an Amazon warrior queen, is a fine example. It turns out it's partly true (no, not the barebreasted part), based on an eyewitness account of Eleanor astride her horse, and quickly became elaborated by those seeking to discredit a queen who they wished to paint as a brazen, adulterous slut.

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204)

Those are important distinctions; and when I've discovered during my research that something we all have been taught as schoolchildren probably never happened I make the decision for my own nonfiction--to omit any reference to the event, or to bring it up and include the disclaimer.

For example, for centuries it was popularly believed that King Edward II of England, a notorious "sodomite," was killed by the insertion of a hot poker into his anus, during his imprisonment. Or smothered by a table so he couldn't wriggle about, followed by the hot poker. Various versions of this gruesome death were recorded and repeated throughout the ages, from Sir Thomas More to the 20th century academic, A.L. Rowse. In the ROYAL AFFAIRS entry on Edward, I refer to the legendary story of the king's death as well as all doubts, discrepancies, and disclaimers regarding its veracity.

Edward II of England (1284-1327[?])

So I can promise my readers that I didn't invent anything I refer to in ROYAL AFFAIRS. All of the information I include was gleaned from the dozens of sources I read in the course of my research. If an historical biographer didn't refer to (or know) whether an event was in fact merely apocryphal, or fictional (or introduced a refutation of it), it was not possible for me to know otherwise.

Now I am neck-deep in research for a companion book to ROYAL AFFAIRS. The working title is WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? Notorious Royal Marriages from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Camilla Parker Bowles. I face the same challenges, sifting through centuries of history, scanning for the personal opinions and political agendas of the monks, lovers, bosom companions, staffers, journalists, politicians, academics, and historians -- and sometimes the royals themselves -- who have written or spoken about the sovereigns I plan to include in Notorious Royal Marriages. With one hand raised and the other firmly placed on an encyclopedia (not Wikipedia), I can assure my readers that to the best knowledge that extensive research can yield, the book will contain ... Just the Facts, Ma'am.

SHE GETS PUSHY OVER 'AFFAIRS'

2008-08-11T05:03:00.001-07:00

I had to copy this tidbit from the "Page Six" gossip column of the New York Post (August 11, 2008):

PRINCESS Pushy, a k a Princess Michael of Kent, has gone to war against New York Social Diary blogger David Patrick Columbia for reporting this week that her husband is having an affair.

Prince Michael, 66, who was 16th in line to the British throne before he married the Catholic divorcée in 1978, was photographed at the ballet last month with attractive, Danish-born Marianne Krex, 36.

Columbia reported, "The prince has a new girlfriend. With the emphasis on the 'new,' meaning this isn't the first."

The princess, 63, claimed to Britain's Mail on Sunday that Krex was just a family friend.
"At the last moment, the princess couldn't accompany him that evening, and so, says the princess, she suggested her husband take Marianne in her place," columnist Richard Kay reported.

But Columbia says the lovebirds don't only go to the ballet but also "rendezvous at a bar called Julie's in Notting Hill." He also links the prince to ballerina Bryony Brind and American artist Lucy Weber.

Columbia quotes from a diary Weber kept about the prince, whom she saw for eight years: "He loves sex pure, unadulterated. He thinks about it quite a bit during his working hours - loves white suspenders [garters], beige or tan. His sexual senses are keen."

Princess Michael has "extramarital interests" as well, Columbia writes, and was photographed with Russian billionaire Mikhail Kravchenko last year in Venice, where they had adjoining $4,000-a-night hotel suites.

The royal couple is known as the Rent-a-Kents because they get paid by wealthy social climbers to be their guests.

Princess Michael also earns money by giving lectures. But demand for her speeches plunged in May 2004, when The Post reported that she told a table of high-spirited black diners at Da Silvano in Manhattan to "go back to the colonies."

Princess Michael ought to know a lot about royal affairs. She is the author of Cupid and the King: Five Royal Paramours, a compilation of historical biography of five royal mistresses, including two ladies whose scandalous liaisons are profiled in ROYAL AFFAIRS--the actresses Nell Gwyn and Lillie Langtry.

By the way, Da Silvano is one of the best Italian restaurants in NYC, and is always mobbed. Silvano himself is a charming host. He doesn't need her custom.

Royal Mistresses: Defining Their Own Destinies

2008-07-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine

A couple of months ago I wrote an article for a web site that focuses on women's empowerment issues. The site's creator, Barrie-Louise Switzen, was interested to know how royal mistresses' lives tied in with her theme. I maintain that in many cases royal mistresses had more options open to them than the queens whose connubial prerogatives they usurped . . .

One thing that struck me as I researched the lives of the royal mistresses who are profiled in ROYAL AFFAIRS was that for the most part, these women were not “victims” who were thrust into compromising relationships with men they didn’t love. On the contrary, they were clever women who, given the legal and social constraints on females during their day, had the rare opportunity to shape their own destiny—and grabbed it with both hands.

Now, I can’t say that many of the mistresses I “met” during my research were “nice girls.” Many of them were greedy and grasping, with their hands in the treasury, the privy purse, and the pockets of those who sought to gain patronage from their royal lovers. King George I had two German mistresses who exemplify this type. Lady Castlemaine, one of Charles II’s favorite mistresses and the mother of several of his children was renowned for her relentless greed. But that’s not to say that these women didn’t passionately—and occasionally too passionately—adore their men. And, no matter whether you’d want to have lunch with them, these women—all of them—were significantly more empowered in their day than just about any other women of their era, including the queen-consorts, their “rivals” for the monarch’s affection. In general, a queen-consort was little more than a well-dressed womb whose job was to produce the requisite “heir and a spare” and remain otherwise chaste, maintaining a stainless reputation in order to avoid all suspicion that her children might not have been spawned by her husband, the sovereign.

Nell Gwyn

Some of the women profiled in ROYAL AFFAIRS had careers of their own before they met their royal lovers. Nell Gwyn, Mary Robinson, and Dorothy Jordan were the most celebrated actresses of their day. However, they lived during a time when being an “actress” (even if you performed the works of Shakespeare and other “serious” dramatists) was tantamount to being a prostitute. Actresses displayed their bodies on the public stage—for money! They were notoriously considered loose-moraled, supplementing their salaries on the gifts (monetary and otherwise) that came from their various “admirers.” But my research into royal affairs led me to a great hypocrisy, which should not have surprised me, I suppose, yet as an actress myself, it made me shiver with anger.

The double-standard I discovered was that acting was considered a disgraceful profession for the reasons I cited above, yet the royals thought nothing of (even if they were married—or if the actress was married), consummating a passionate and frequently adulterous affair with them. However, if they wished to become the prince’s or king’s mistress—before such extra-connubial canoodling could take place, the actresses were requested by their royal lovers to put aside their “disgraceful” and “shameful” profession—the career that had gained these women recognition and renown (as well as an independent income—a rare thing for a woman before the 20th century).

Mary Robinson

My Forward to ROYAL AFFAIRS includes a paragraph about royal mistresses and how many of them they were able to parlay their unusual opportunity into a life-changing event:
And what of the mistresses? During the earlier, and more brutal, eras of British history, a woman didn’t have much (if any) choice if the king exercised his droit de seigneur and decided to take her to bed. Often, girls were little more than adolescents when their ambitious parents shoved them under the monarch’s nose. However, most of the mistresses in Royal Affairs were not innocent victims of a parent’s political agenda or a monarch’s rampaging lust. They were clever, accomplished, often ambitious women, not always in the first bloom of youth and not always baseborn, who cannily parlayed the only thing they had—their bodies—into extravagant wealth and notoriety, if not outright fame. In many cases, their royal bastards were ennobled by the king, making excellent marriages and living far better than their mothers could have otherwise provided. Eventually taking their place in the House of Lords, the mistresses’ illegitimate sons went on to become the decision makers who shaped an empire and spawned the richest and most powerful families in Britain.

Having talked about other women’s stories, I’d like to share my own with you. I spent many years in “pink collar” jobs making other people money before becoming a full-time writer and my own boss. I worked in several fields, including journalism, marketing, and law. When I toiled for lawyers, I was usually employed by solo practitioners. More often than not I was their legal secretary, legal assistant, receptionist, bookkeeper, and office manager. I ate lunch over my keyboard. I took home barely enough money to make ends meet. Scratch that—I dipped deep into my savings to support myself, even as a single woman in NYC living in a rent-stabilized apartment. I got my assignments done as quickly, thoroughly, and efficiently as possible, so I could leave myself time in the workday to write. Thank God for Windows programs where one can quickly switch screens! My employers never had cause to complain about my work ethic or my output—though of course when I left the jobs they would cite my writing during business hours as an issue! Naturally, I challenged them on this point: if they knew what I was doing and had a problem with it, why, during the entire course of my employment, had they never raised the subject?

In June, 2003, I was downsized from a secretarial position I’d held for half a year, By that date I had had two novels published and another one in the editorial pipeline. In fact book #3, TEMPORARY INSANITY, was about my experiences in day-job hell. But rather than jump back into the survival-job pool and seek a new position working for yet another boss who undervalued my skills or company that had made me feel miserable, and had systematically sapped my soul, I chose to become the mistress of my own destiny. I decided that come hell or high water, from then on I would make my living as a writer. I would enrich myself, literally and spiritually for the first time in my life. Serendipity had offered me the chance to choose to follow my bliss.

And I did. This year, 2008, my 10th and 11th novels were published. I have written 7 works of contemporary women’s fiction under my own name, and 4 works of historical fiction under the pen name Amanda Elyot—all of which have been published since 2002. ROYAL AFFAIRS marks my nonfiction debut and I have just entered an agreement with my publisher for another nonfiction book, currently titled NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES. This volume will spotlight many of Europe’s most famous royal couples (including Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Napoleon and Josephine—up through the centuries all the way to the marriage of Charles and Camilla—seen through the prism of the wife’s point of view).

I’m my own boss now. I make my own hours, and you have no idea how fabulous it feels to be finally enjoying a fulfilling career (instead of a frustrating job). And sometimes I like to joke that instead of all my hard work making some jerky boss rich, now I’m the “jerk” who gets to enjoy the fruits of my labors.

I can’t emphasize enough that any woman at any stage in her life can take charge of her destiny and pursue her passion, no matter how long she has neglected it, or her own needs. Impractical? Imprudent? Unrealistic? Unattainable? Somehow, once a woman sets her mind and focuses her energies on empowering and enriching herself, the economics seem to take care of themselves.

ROYAL AFFAIRS released today!

2008-06-03T05:32:00.000-07:00

Writing a book is like giving birth. Jane Austen, who never married or had kids, was known to have said "my books are my children."

In the grand scheme of things, it's been a relatively short gestation period, but the labor was the most difficult I've ever experienced in my writing career thus far. For one thing, ROYAL AFFAIRS is nonfiction. And I'm accustomed to making stuff up for a living. Actually, I did encounter a few things in historical biographies written by some rather well respected scholars that were inaccurate, and what I call "bad history" that was regurgitated over the years from bio to bio, or is repeated as fact on the Internet. And it was a difficult task to extract the real "truth" from some of what's been reported as such through the ages.

But all that said--ROYAL AFFAIRS became a joy to write. I'm a history geek and I love to learn new things. My research process became a crash-course in over 900 years of British history.

A side effect of all this new knowledge and perspective was that I became quite spoiled. It's impossible for me to watch a film or TV version of the royals' lives (unless it's a documentary) without going nuts about all the things they "got wrong"--from the historical facts themselves to the costumes or weapons. And in some cases, the casting. Don't get me started about The Tudors!

On the other hand -- please do get me started on The Tudors. Millions of people find this series to be wildly entertaining. In ROYAL AFFAIRS I unveil their true sex scandals -- for your delectation and amusement.

Let's dish about The Tudors!

Do you care that Henry VIII was actually big and brawny and redheaded? He was a real hunk until he reached his 30s, by the way. He wasn't dark and small and churlish-looking.

Do you care that his younger sister was actually named Mary and not Margaret, and that at age 18 she married the elderly (he was 52!) king of France--not the king of Portugal? Do you care that the real Mary Rose Tudor was a beautiful, willowy redheaded teen and not a raving bitch -- and that she did not smother the king to death? And that the love of her life, Charles Brandon, was actually about a dozen years her senior, which meant that being older and wiser, he should have known better than to flout the king's expressed wishes?

Do you care that Anne Boleyn waited until Henry made an honest woman of her, rather than shtupping (or "tupping" as the Tudors and Elizabethans would have put it) the king in a forest glade. I watched this scene slack-jawed -- with disbelief - at the travesty of history in the name of good old family entertainment. Well, maybe not the entire family. While I was thinking "nice boots" as I gazed at Anne's black leather footwear, most of the men in the audience were probably gaping at something a bit further north and thinking "nice boobs."

I encourage you to read ROYAL AFFAIRS, where sex and politics, plotting and betrayal, make for titillating bedfellows, not only for the real Tudors, but for their predecessors and their descendants as well.

The Other Boleyn Girl's Story: The Real One

2008-03-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

My literary agent and I made a girls’ afternoon out of watching “The Other Boleyn Girl” on opening day. After all the research I did for ROYAL AFFAIRS, my nonfiction debut this June, I found myself wincing in pain. We were watching what I couldn't help referring to as "Betty and Veronica in Tudorland." But this post isn’t intended to debate the artistic merits (or lack thereof) of the film adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s novel, which is in itself alternative history—the other Boleyn history, if you will.

Want to hear about the real Mary Boleyn (1499-1543), her affair with Henry VIII (1491-1547) and her relationship with her relatives?

Mary Boleyn (1499-1543)

The French monarch François I called her his “hackney,” explaining that he loved to ride her. An Italian visitor to François’s court thought her “una grandissima ribald et infame sopre tutte” (a great prostitute and more infamous than all of them). She is probably best remembered as the older sister of Anne Boleyn. What seems clear is that this daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn and Lady Elizabeth Howard knew how to have fun in bed.

Mary Boleyn possessed the blond, blue-eyed, curvy beauty that was the era’s belle idéale. In 1514, she was a member of the French court in the household of the queen, Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary Tudor. But after Mary’s husband, King Louis XII, died on New Year’s Day in 1515, Mary Boleyn remained at the French court, where she became a lady-in-waiting to the new queen, Claude, the wife of François d'Angoulême. Claude was the older daughter of Louis XII, but France was under Salic law, which prohibited a female from inheriting the throne. So on Louis's death, his son-in-law became king.

Francois I (1494-1547)

Evidently, Mary Boleyn also became the paramour of the new king, François I. But after François tired of Mary, she consoled herself in the arms of enough of his courtiers to create a scandal. In 1519, at the age of twenty, Mary was ignominiously dismissed from Queen Claude’s service and packed back to England, much to the embarrassment and disgrace of her family.

But the Boleyns were a powerful family, so Mary quickly secured a place as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Katherine, the unofficial but de facto usual incubator for a royal mistress. Sure enough, soon after Bessie Blount delivered Henry’s son in 1519, the regal eye began to rove, alighting before long on the new flavor in his wife’s retinue.

His affair with Mary Boleyn was reputedly short but intense. And in a situation similar to Bessie Blount’s, Henry saw to it that Mary made a financially brilliant marriage. So, on February 4, 1520, at the Chapel Royal in Greenwich, Mary Boleyn wed William Carey, one of Henry’s favorite Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. His Majesty himself attended the wedding, bestowing an offering of six shillings, eightpence in the chapel. However, some believe that Mary was still Henry’s mistress at the time she was wed to William Carey.

(Henry VIII 1491-1547)

In any case, Henry was so immensely grateful for the gift of Mary’s favors, he enriched her father as well as her new husband. Sir Thomas Boleyn was made Viscount Rochford, and William Carey’s coffers were vastly enlarged.

In 1525, Mary gave birth to a son, who she named Henry. The king never claimed paternity, and Mary never pressed the point, so the boy was likely her husband’s. But Mary’s motherhood had the effect of dampening Henry’s lust, just as it had more or less killed his ardor for Bessie Blount soon after she gave birth.

Yet there was another reason Mary was supplanted: Henry had fallen madly in lust with her younger sister, Anne.

Mary wasn’t too upset about it. She devoted herself to her husband and their two children. But in 1528, after the thirty-two-year-old William Carey died during the outbreak of the sweating sickness, Mary found herself buried under a mound of debts. Petitions to her family were fruitless. Requests to Henry fell on deaf ears as well. Only Anne, who at the time of William’s death was the king’s inamorata, managed to procure something for her sister—an annual pension of £100 (nearly $72,000 today), and an elaborately wrought golden cup.

Anne Boleyn (1500 (?) - 1536)

In 1534, Mary secretly married William Stafford, a commoner without rank of any kind. She bore him two children. For wedding a man so far beneath her station, the Boleyns disowned her for good, but Mary emphatically averred, “For well I might a’ had a greater man of birth, but I assure you I could never a’ had one that loved me so well. I had rather beg my bread with him than be the greatest queen in Christendom,” a rather pointed swipe at her sister, as well as a triumphant declaration of True Love. But the jibe struck too close to Anne’s bones, and Anne, now queen, declared that Mary and her husband would never again be received at court.

Her ostracism was probably a blessing; Mary was well rid of the vipers’ nest of the Tudor court. She rusticated with her small family at Rochford in Essex while Anne and their brother George tasted the full measure of Henry’s rough justice. Mary did not visit her siblings as they waited in the Tower for the executioner’s blade to end their lives. Perhaps she was cannier than she’d been credited; she deliberately remained as far from the madness as possible, the better to avoid getting swept into the bloody dustbin of her family’s history.

Mary died at home on July 19, 1543.

Her son, Henry Carey, was eventually made a Knight of the Garter by Elizabeth I. Mary’s daughter Catherine became a maid of honor to both Anne of Cleves and Kathryn Howard. One of Catherine Carey’s daughters, Lettice Knollys, was Queen Elizabeth’s bosom companion, lady-in-waiting—and later, her rival and enemy, after she married Robert Dudley, the great love of Elizabeth’s life.

Mary Boleyn’s twentieth-century descendants include Winston Churchill; Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (the mother of Elizabeth II); Diana, Princess of Wales; and Sarah Ferguson.

Stranger than fiction? Better than fiction? What other historical personages can you think of who had more more fascinating (even juicy) lives than their fictional avatars?

ROYAL AFFAIRS cover!

2008-02-20T16:15:00.000-08:00

I'm so excited to finally be able to post the finalized cover for ROYAL AFFAIRS.

Insatiable kings. Lecherous queens. Kissing Cousins.Wanton consorts.

Welcome to nearly 1,000 years of Naughty Behavior.

Royal unions have always been the stuff of scintillating gossip, from the passionate Plantagenets to Henry VIII’s alarming head count of wives and mistresses, to the Sapphic crushes of Mary and Anne Stuart right on up through the scandal-blighted coupling of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Shoved into loveless arranged marriages for political and economic gain, many royals were driven to indulge their pleasures outside the marital bed, engaging in delicious flirtations, lurid love letters, and rampant sex with voluptuous and willing lovers.

This nearly pathological lust made for some of the most titillating scandals in Great Britain’s history. Hardly harmless, these affairs disrupted dynastic alliances, endangered lives, and most of all, have fed the salacious curiosity of the public for centuries.

Peek between the covers…

The title will be released from NAL Trade on June 3, 2008. If your book club chooses this title, I'd be delighted to arrange a special "tryst" just for your club where, on a mutally agreeable date, I'll answer any questions individual readers may have and we'll have an interactive chat about the book, my research and the affairs themselves. We can even chat about the ones I might have omitted and why. I look forward to hearing from my readers!

Much Ado about Di and Dodi

2008-01-14T14:41:00.000-08:00

More than eleven years after her death as the result of a high-speed car chase in Paris, the inquest into Princess Diana's demise continues.

Now it's newsworthy that, according to the princess's former butler and confidant, Paul Burrell, Diana had no intentions of marrying Dodi at the time. Burrell told the inquest that his former employer was enjoying "a 30-day affair" with the notorious playboy, and had confided to Burrell that "I want another marriage like I want a bad rash." According to Burrell, Diana was on the rebound from a two-year relationship, a passionate clandestine affair with heart surgeon heartthrob Hasnat Khan, and was not emotionally ready to commit herself to another man--certainly not one she had known for barely more than a month.

Paul Burrell

Burrell said, "The princess had just finished a long-term relationship with someone she cared deeply about. I know that, because I was there. I saw it." He characterized Dodi Fayed as "someone who was very kind and attentive and generous."

Under pressure from the coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, Burrell reluctantly disclosed information regarding a rather harsh conversation between Diana and her mother, the late Frances Shand-Kydd, who would win few mum-of-the year awards, and who was none too crazy about either of the two beaux, and had some harsh words for Diana about her somewhat catholic (in the original sense of the noun) taste in men. Burrell said Diana invited him to listen in on the call, and he heard Frances say Diana was "a whore" who was messing around with Muslim men." She said some very nasty things," Burrell told the coroner.

Dodi Fayed, under the Brooklyn Bridge

Care to chime in? We know almost as much as everyone else does--which is next to nothing--but it doesn't prevent anyone from airing their opinions. Do you think Di and Dodi were close to marriage at the time of their deaths?

Call it the Royal "WeTube"

2007-12-24T15:38:00.000-08:00

"Her Majesty never changes--she adapts," said a Buckingham Palace commenter on CNN this morning, in reference to Queen Elizabeth II's announcement of The Royal Channel on YouTube, from now on, the go-to location for all things royal.

Her Majesty's official site currently boasts a number of video clips, including her coronation and rare silent footage from the 1927 royal marriage of the queen's parents, the Duke of York (and future George VI) and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

This year, the 81-year-old monarch will wed tradition with technology as her fiftieth annual Christmas broadcast will be viewable on The Royal Channel's YouTube url.

Happy Christmas to all!

Well done, Your Majesty!

2007-12-20T11:55:00.000-08:00

Not an affair to remember in the annals of British royal history -- but certainly a date to remember.

As of this morning, Queen Elizabeth II, who was born on April 21, 1926, has surpassed Queen Victoria as Britian's oldest reigning monarch. Victoria was 81 years, 7 months and 29 days old when she died on January 22, 1901. She had ruled for sixty-three years, seven months, and two days.

Elizabeth I

True, Victoria ruled for more years than Elizabeth II has (to date), and has an entire era named for her (the Elizabethan era is of course named for Elizabeth I (1533-1603), but her reigning majesty's milestone should be recognized nonetheless.

Elizabeth II ascended the throne on the death of her father, King George VI, on February 6, 1952. Since her mother lived to be 101, it's quite possible she may outlast her heir apparent, Prince Charles, who will turn 60 next November 14. And if Charles is still Prince of Wales on that date, he will have surpassed Queen Victoria's eldest son and heir, the future Edward VII, who was 59 years old when he finally became king.

Since the Norman Conquest in 1066, there have only been a handful of queens regnant (queens who rule in their own right, as opposed to being the consort of a king--a "queen-consort" through her marriage to him).

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) by 19th c. French romantic painter Paul Delaroche

The teenage Lady Jane Grey (known as the "Nine Days' Queen") was never crowned, but ostensibly ruled England in the brief window of time between July 10-19, 1553, as the puppet of a conspiracy to keep a Protestant on the throne and prevent the Catholic Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, from ascending the throne. The hapless Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII's younger sister, Mary Tudor, was judicially executed within the precincts of the Tower of London on April 12, 1554.

Mary I

Elizabeth I's older half-sister, Mary, ruled England as Mary I from 1553-1558. Mary earned her nickname "Bloody Mary" for the numerous executions of Protestants. carried out in her name.

Elizabeth I acceeded to the throne on Mary's death, and it was not until 1689, after the successful "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 led to James II's abandonment of his throne and the coronation of William III of Orange and his wife, Mary Stuart (James II's elder daughter) that England saw a regnant queen once more. William and Mary (she was Mary II) ruled jointly, although they had both taken a parliamentary oath swearing that William would be the primary ruler.

Mary II

However, William was a warrior-king and during the spring and summer months when he was out of the country on military campaigns, Mary was fully in charge of the kingdom and rose to the occasion. She died in 1694 and William continued to rule alone until his death in 1702.

Queen Anne

William's successor was his wife's younger sister, Anne, under whose reign England and Scotland were united, thereby becoming the first monarch of Great Britain.

After Anne, there was not another regnant queen until the barely eighteen-year-old Victoria acceded to the throne in 1837, on the death of her uncle, William IV.

So, here's to Queen Elizabeth II, the second longest serving head of state in the world after King Bhumibol of Thailand. Her reign has seen 11 prime ministers, starting with Sir Winston Churchill. Long may she reign over us (well, them). God save the queen.

The High Cost of Being Camilla

2007-12-13T09:41:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning to a news item (if one can really call it news) on my AOL home screen, which broke down the annual cost of maintaining the makeover responsible for turning the Duchess of Cornwall from Barbour Shop belle into Belle of the Ball. Relying on an article published on December 9, 2007, in the online edition of The Sunday Times [of London], the AOL article breaks down the cost of hair, makeup, wardrobe, jewels, and of course her Philip Treacy hats (among other items, such as facials and lunches).

The grand tally came to £507,321.58. Since the pound is running a few cents higher than $2 these days--you do the math.

Gee, my hairdresser and colorist (did I say colorist?) would be so delighted if I spent $60K a year at their salon. The owner would surely give me an even bigger smile when he sees me check in. Evidently she gets a blow-out every day. With all that concentrated heat, she'll need some heavy duty conditioning to prevent her straw-colored hair from feeling like it. And I wonder how much a Philip Treacy hat goes for on ebay?

But now that the flower girl has been successfully passed off as a Duchess, thanks to a bevy of Henry Higgginsesque beauty experts and fashion emporia from Mayfair and Kensington, has she found more favor in the public's eyes?

Speaking of concentrated heat, Camilla is still feeling it from the unwashed masses. Some of the public responses posted after the AOL story include:

"You can dress the woman in the finest clothing money can buy....but underneath she's still the whore Charles cheated on Diana with."

And "I'm very surprised that it didn't cost far far more to makeover this thoroughly ruthless, cruel and unkind woman. What the aged Camilla Parker-Bowles looks like now is irrelevant. She remains what she is - the implacably ruthless woman who demeaned her own husband and family and children; who destroyed young Diana's marriage and family; who kept poor weak Charles on a leash; and who is now delighting in her undeserved media fame as she (isn't this true?) dances on Diana's grave. "

Then there were the kinder comments--the ones that merely mentioned that she looks like a drag queen. Care to weigh in, Lypsinka or Hedda Lettuce?

Drag queen Hedda Lettuce (infinitely more glamourous than Camilla)

But there were also some comments from those who have clearly not put their penny in the Princess Diana Canonization Fund boxes: "Diana knew that Charles loves Camilla. Camilla helped pick Diana out. It was arranged. She married her anyway because she wanted to be Princess. Not to mention she admitted throwing herself down the stairs when she was Pregnant. It is wonderful that Charles got to married her true love, and didn't just marry somebody because of some silly rule that you had to marry a virgin."

So, how do you feel about Camilla? Ruthless hussy, or patient Griselda? Do you blame her for wrecking Prince Charles's marriage to Diana?

Magna Carta ... Going once... going twice...

2007-12-06T14:05:00.000-08:00

It's not a royal affair per se, but it is a royal shame: the mother-document of English Common Law is going up for auction.

The only privately-owned copy of the Magna Carta in the United States is on the block. My husband and I had the privilege of seeing it last June on display in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. -- which is where it belongs -- just steps away from the original manuscripts of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. Who knew the Magna Carta only had a temporary visa?

Billionaire pie-chart magnate Ross Perot, who owns it, has decided he doesn't have enough money already and the law is for sale. Come to think of it, many people think that's business as usual in the U.S. Capital. So, on behalf of the Ross Perot Foundation, which bought it in 1983 for $1.5 million, Sotheby's is holding an auction on December 18, 2007.

King John (b. 1166. Ruled England 1199-1216)

The Magna Carta was the birth of the concept that nobody - including the king - was above the law, and that a fair trial was a right of all. The document was first written in 1215. King John (the wicked king of Robin Hood legend) was on the throne, and yes, he was quite the bully. His barons didn't appreciate such autocracy, however, and at the risk of losing his throne in a civil uprising, King John signed the document in a convocation held at Runnymeade in 1215.

Magna Carta was originally written because of disagreements among Pope Innocent III, King John and the English barons about the rights of the King. Magna Carta required the king to renounce certain rights, respect certain legal procedures and accept that his will could be bound by the law. It explicitly protected certain rights of the king's subjects, whether free or fettered — most notably the right of Habeas Corpus, meaning that they had rights against unlawful imprisonment.The document was revised throughout the 13th century. It wasn't confirmed as English law until 1297, when it was signed by King Edward I (the wicked king of William Wallace ["Braveheart"] legend). Of 17 copies of the Magna Carta that still exist, all but this one are publicly owned. The only other copy outside England is on show in Australia's Parliament.

Edward I (b. 1239. Ruled England 1272-1307)

With only two small holes in the animal skin it was written on, what is now being referred to as "Sotheby's Magna Carta" is considered in great condition. The Perot/Sotheby's copy, 2500 Latin words long, was written in 1297. This copy is signed by Edward I, known as "Edward the Lawgiver," the reigning king at the time.

Sotheby's expects the Perot Magna Carta to fetch at least $30 million. So you CAN put a price on the law!

Just the Facts, Ma'am: Researching and Writing Historical Nonfiction

2007-11-30T12:50:00.000-08:00

Nell Gwyn (or is it Barbara Palmer, Lady Castlemaine?) with one of her her royal bastards by Charles II

My first book as a newlywed is all about adultery. I should qualify that by explaining that my first work of nonfiction (as a newlywed) is all about adultery.

Actually, as a novelist, by the time that ROYAL AFFAIRS: A Lusty Romp Through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy hits the bookshelves on June 3, 2008, I will have seven works of contemporary fiction published under my name and four published works of historical fiction under my pen name for that genre, Amanda Elyot.

I spent the spring, summer, and autumn of 2007 as a fly on the wall in the glittering, debauched court of King Charles II, cavorting with Windsor and Wallis, and with Charles and Camilla, with The Fair Rosamund, and with The Jersey Lillie. For most of August, I climbed into bed with the Tudors .

NAL, my (Amanda's actually) historical fiction publishers have afforded me the opportunity to flex my authorly muscles, with my first non-fiction contract.

Writing ROYAL AFFAIRS has been, and continues to be, as I deliver the revisions, a daunting task, made no less scary by a tight deadline, a mandated page count, and the vast amount of research necessary to do the job.

Nearly every morning since the middle of May, I shuffled from my bedroom to my home office and glanced (and sometimes glared) at the piles of books on and around my desk and wonder how the heck I’m going to do this job to my own demanding standards.

My initial thoughts as I sat down to structure the volume were: given the parameters of the contract, how do I deliver 50-plus entries with (doing the math) a proscribed page count for each entry, when there’s often so much juicy information about these royals and their paramours? How do I decide what to keep and what to (very reluctantly) omit because of time and space issues? How do I deliver a delicious-but-nutritious bit of amorous history, full of flavor and spice, in an appetizer-sized portion? And most importantly—how do I get it right? And what if there’s just no “there” there?

My publisher asked for a table of contents before I began my research in earnest, so I pulled together a list of more than fifty affairs. I reminded them that the list was just a draft because my research might uncover some juicy liaisons I hadn’t previously known about (and therefore weren’t listed in that table of contents). Conversely, I cautioned that I might have to scrap some of the relationships if I just couldn’t find any legitimate sources to confirm them.

Richard I

The love life of Richard I, also known as Richard the Lionhearted, was one such case in point. He may, or may not, have had a passionate relationship with King Philip II of France. I added Richard to the table of contents based on scenes from the film The Lion in Winter, and from historical tidbits I have read for years about Richard’s homosexuality. This is not what is considered legitimate research!

I'll be blogging about the Hollywood versions of some of these libidinous royals as time goes on. Suffice it to say that their celluloid counterparts tend to be anywhere from mildly inaccurate to wildly inaccurate!

So far, I have not found a single credible source (though I keep looking) to substantiate the supposition, other than a lone paragraph written by a medieval historian, which can be parsed to suggest that Richard and Phillip were lovers, but is more easily explained by many other historians as exemplary of the customs of the day between two monarchs demonstrating their détente. And the rest of their story—political adversaries during the bloody and brutal Third Crusade—does nothing to suggest that the two of them shared a romantic backstory. Yet, history is colored by the times; no one in 1199 was about to eulogize their late king as a great gay warrior. Yet a historian looking back from 1999 might have an agenda they want to promote, and consequently will look for, and manipulate, what little facts exist in order to support the tale they wish to tell.

Well, obviously, a non-fiction book cannot be written based on scenes from a movie, or chapters of historical fiction. So, after giving myself a good amount of time to look for it, I found no solid academic justification for an affair, and jettisoned the entry from the Table of Contents.

In historical fiction we have the privilege and the joy of making things up, of filling in the gaps in a person’s life story with colorful scenes of “what if?” We are novelists, not historians, who bring our own prejudices to the narrative and put our own spin on it. In fiction, when we choose to illuminate the lives of characters whom history has judged more harshly than we do, we give them vulnerable warm and fuzzies, so that readers will feel for them. You don’t get to do that in non-fiction.

What I’m getting to is, I can’t make stuff up. Obviously. And yet that’s one problem I have encountered in the numerous research books and biographies I have been poring over, and will continue to plough through: how do I know they’ve got it right? We all know that internet research is dodgy. In this most democratic arena, anyone can post something, regardless of their credentials, and very often the information is not entirely bona fide. If a date is wrong, is it because of bad research, or is it a typo that no one bothered to catch? Online, there’s an abundance of blatantly incorrect information slyly masquerading as truth.

As I did my research, I was never confident of what was accurate unless I checked several sources. Given my short deadline for ROYAL AFFAIRS, I resorted to internet research, but only as a backup for vetted and published works of non-fiction.

Yet, who vetted the books I was poring over? Academics, journalists, novelists—suddenly all of these people are considered historians because they have a non-fiction work on the bookshelves. How good is their research? Editors and copyeditors are supposed to make the manuscript read well; it’s not in their job description to make sure the author got it right. Chances are, no one reviewed the manuscript as a fact-checker, unless the book is a published version of someone’s PhD thesis, where the candidate was severely grilled by a committee. And how am I to know that the research done by these so-called scholars is impeccable? How do I prevent myself from regurgitating “bad history” in my own book?

Among the pile of books on my desk was a book about European royal scandals. This one is now collecting dust because I’m afraid of using it any more, wondering what else the author got wrong. Here’s why: as soon as I got the volume, I turned to the alphabetical index at the back of the book and looked for the name of someone I “knew.”

In the course of my research for my next historical novel, ALL FOR LOVE (to be published by NAL on Feb. 5, 2008), I spent more than two years with the 18th-century actress and royal mistress (and oh-so much more than that) Mary Robinson. I’ve read at least a half dozen biographies of her, including her own memoirs. The author of the non-fiction book I refer to in this paragraph gave Mary Robinson a child by the Prince of Wales!

Well! That just didn’t happen! And it’s not even a tiny gaffe on the part of the writer—it’s an egregious error of fact. So, because I’m not an expert on the lives of the other people discussed in that book, how do I know that anything else in it is valid research bolstered by solid facts? I don’t, unless I review several other sources and get a concurrence. I just have to do the best I can, and promise my readers that I am doing my due diligence—all within the time frame I have been given to write the book.

My goal is to make it juicy and racy, informative and entertaining--and as right as I can get it.