Monarchy Books - Page 2

Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (P.S.)

Eleanor Herman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Throughout the centuries, royal mistresses have been worshiped, feared, envied, and reviled. They set the fashions, encouraged the arts, and, in some cases, ruled nations. Eleanor Herman's Sex with Kings takes us into the throne rooms and bedrooms of Europe's most powerful monarchs. Alive with flamboyant characters, outrageous humor, and stirring poignancy, this glittering tale of passion and politics chronicles five hundred years of scintillating women and the kings who loved them.

Curiously, the main function of a royal mistress was not to provide the king with sex but with companionship. Forced to marry repulsive foreign princesses, kings sought solace with women of their own choice. And what women they were! From Madame de Pompadour, the famous mistress of Louis XV, who kept her position for nineteen years despite her frigidity, to modern-day Camilla Parker-Bowles, who usurped none other than the glamorous Diana, Princess of Wales.

The successful royal mistress made herself irreplaceable. She was ready to converse gaily with him when she was tired, make love until all hours when she was ill, and cater to his every whim. Wearing a mask of beaming delight over any and all discomforts, she was never to be exhausted, complaining, or grief-stricken.

True, financial rewards for services rendered were of royal proportions -- some royal mistresses earned up to $200 million in titles, pensions, jewels, and palaces. Some kings allowed their mistresses to exercise unlimited political power. But for all its grandeur, a royal court was a scorpion's nest of insatiable greed, unquenchable lust, and vicious ambition. Hundreds of beautiful women vied to unseat the royal mistress. Many would suffer the slings and arrows of negative public opinion, some met with tragic ends and were pensioned off to make room for younger women. But the royal mistress often had the last laugh, as she lived well and richly off the fruits of her "sins."

From the dawn of time, power has been a mighty aphrodisiac. With diaries, personal letters, and diplomatic dispatches, Eleanor Herman's trailblazing research reveals the dynamics of sex and power, rivalry and revenge, at the most brilliant courts of Europe. Wickedly witty and endlessly entertaining, Sex with Kings is a chapter of women's history that has remained unwritten -- until now.

Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King

Antonia Fraser

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

GREAT BOOK 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

this is a great book. the photos inside are great and its quality is amazing

VIVE LE ROI 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Excellent thorough book. Easy read full of great
info on the kings personal life

Maybe I have lost my ardor for this genre 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I used to be fascinatged by these portraits of historical figures, but this one left me bored and skeptical. I have read a few of Ms Fraser's other books and enjoyed them. Particularly her Marie Antoinette. But this one I found dull by the second chapter and now after chapter 7 have set it aside to move on to something else. I will go back and finish, and if my review changes, I will be back to amend this review, but I just felt there is so much interesting history to touch with Louis XIV and this book ignores a lot of it. In addition, her recreations of events as if she is there left me skeptical of their veracity. Obviously this is well researched, but does she really know that court "rushed" to someones side". I guess I shoudl have deduced form the title that this woudl really focus on Louis love life. I just was hoping for something else. There is enough television and movies telling us about the love lives of famous individuals of the present and past. I was more interested in his intellectual persuits, and his accomplishments in architecture and development of France that earned him the nickname of the Sun King.

Editorial Review:

Louis XIV, the highly-feted “Sun King”, was renowned for his political and cultural influence and for raising France to a new level of prominence in seventeenth-century Europe. And yet, as Antonia Fraser keenly describes, he was equally legendary in the domestic sphere. Indeed, a panoply of women — his wife Anne; mistresses such as Louise de la Vallière, Athénaïs de Montespan, and the puritanical Madame de Maintenon; and an array of courtesans — moved in and out of the court. The highly visible presence of these women raises many questions about their position in both Louis XIV’s life and in France at large. With careful research and vivid, engaging prose, Fraser makes the multifaceted life of one of the most famous European monarchs accessible and vibrantly current.

The Berlin diaries, 1940-1945

Marie Vassiltchikov

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An Elegant Scrounger 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Following the collapse of the Romanov Empire (Russia), the Hapsburg Empire (Austria) and the Hohenzollern Empire (Germany) in the wake of World War I, Europe was overrun by aristocratic refugees. Some of them had family fortunes commensurate with their impressive titles, others did not.

One of these impoverished, but well-educated young aristocrats was Princess Marie Vassiltchikov, who was in her early 20s when she and her sister moved to Germany hunting for jobs. Both found employment despite their non-German status, but it was tenuous for young anti-Communist Russians, especially when Stalin agreed to a non-agression pact with Hitler and happily carved up Poland and the Baltic states, including Lithuania in which Marie and her family had taken refuge from the Bolsheviks.

Yes, she is aristocratic. Yes, she is beautiful and yes, she is generally broke, cold and hungry. Her looks and her family connections provide a safety net of sorts, and as food supplies shrink Marie's diary begins to resemble an extended food quest, typical of anybody who's hungry. She manages to acquire a modest, but apparently elegant wardrobe and admits to gorging herself at parties when the opportunity arises.

Like any beautiful, young woman, she comments on the young men (many of whom are also aristocrats) and how attractive they are (or aren't.) Sometimes her blueblood works for her. Sometimes it works against her. During 1944, for example, the official SS journal (DAS SCHWARZE KORPS/THE BLACK CORPS) rails against "blaublutige Schweinehunde and Verrater"/ "blue-blooded piggish-dogs and traitors" who'd conspired to assassinate Hitler. Yet, the leader of the dreaded SS, Heinrich Himmler, continued to revel in his tenuous connection with the royal family of Bavaria, one of whom was his god-father.

These were dangerous times for bluebloods like Marie and she survived. Not only that, she left some great descriptions of the inner workings of the Third Reich, the July 20th plot and impact of strategic bombing by the Allies.

She doesn't moralize or engage in self pity. She copes, eats when she can, and finds shelter wherever its available. She uses the connections she has and she survives.

Her diaries are straightforward accounts of a critical period in world history. She is not a model 21st century progressive, but neither were most of those who conspired to murder Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters in 1944. Some were unregenerate Monarchists and Prussian Junkers intent on regaining lost status and privileges.

Her diaries and her situation are difficult for a lot of contemporary American readers to fully understand. A Princess, after all, should be wealthy as well as beautiful. The "People's Princess" (HRH Diana Spencer)is the archetypical blueblood for most Americans. While Princess Marie had the requisite elegant good looks, she lacked the money and power most of us expect royals to have.

We forget, or never realized, that Europe during the 1920s and 1930s included lots of people with very impressive titles, good educations and aristocratic bearing, but little or no money. Being a Princess from an empire which no longer existed might get you invited to parties, especially if you're beautiful, but it didn't pay rent or put schnitzel (even the schnitzel made from dead donkeys) on the table.

I liked Marie and her diaries and found a number of interesting insights and facts I didn't know about this period in history. If you keep in mind the totality of circumstances which formed her perceptions, her diaries can provide some interesting and unique insights into this tumultuous period of history.

I recommend the diaries and gave it five stars.

Editorial Review:

The secret diaries of a twenty-three-year-old White Russian princess who worked in the German Foreign Office from 1940 to 1944 and then as a nurse, these pages give us a unique picture of wartime life in that sector of German society from which the 20th of July Plot -- the conspiracy to kill Hitler -- was born.

The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Beautiful coffee table book 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

As a lover of British royal history, I think this is a fantastic overview that 'sums' things up, devoting a few pages to tell the story of each monarch. Antonia Fraser manages to pass on a lot of information in short form. The illustrations are wonderful, as are the charts (although as someone else mentioned, they are missing some details for us serious fanatics). I consider this is a great compilation if you just want the big picture, or a starting point to jump off into detailed biographies of individual monarchs and/or houses.

Editorial Review:

Spanning ten dynasties, this is a guide to almost one thousand years of history, told through the lives and deeds of England's kings and queens. Biographies of the English monarchs, from the invading Normans to the contemporary House of Windsor, bring to life the complex characters of both well-known figures, such as Victoria, and enigmatic sovereigns, such as Richard III. Accompanying the text are contemporary and historical illustrations, genealogical tables, and drawings of the royal coats of arms, whose origins and significance are clearly explained.
A concise and useful reference, The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England is an invaluable resource.
[Note: This 1995 paperback edition is now out of stock. A New Updated Edition is available in cloth and paperback.]

The Lost King of France: How DNA Solved the Mystery of the Murdered Son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette

Deborah Cadbury

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie, enjoyed a charmed early childhood in the gilded palace of Versailles. At the age of four, he became the dauphin, heir to the most powerful throne in Europe. Yet within five years he was to lose everything. Drawn into the horror of the French Revolution, his family was incarcerated and their fate thrust into the hands of the revolutionaries who wished to destroy the monarchy.

In 1793, when Marie Antoinette was beheaded at the guillotine, she left her adored eight-year-old son imprisoned in the Temple Tower. Far from inheriting a throne, the orphaned boy-king had to endure the hostility and abuse of a nation. Two years later, the revolutionary leaders declared Louis XVII dead. No grave was dug, no monument built to mark his passing.

Immediately, rumors spread that the prince had, in fact, escaped from prison and was still alive. Others believed that he had been murdered, his heart cut out and preserved as a relic. As with the tragedies of England's princes in the Tower and the Romanov archduchess Anastasia, countless "brothers" soon approached Louis-Charles's older sister, Marie-Therese, who survived the revolution. They claimed not only the dauphin's name, but also his inheritance. Several "princes" were plausible, but which, if any, was the real heir to the French throne?

The Lost King of France is a moving and dramatic tale that interweaves a pivotal moment in France's history with a compelling detective story that involves pretenders to the crown, royalist plots and palace intrigue, bizarre legal battles, and modern science. The quest for the truth continued into the twenty-first century, when, thanks to DNA testing, the strange odyssey of a stolen heart found within the royal tombs brought an exciting conclusion to the two-hundred-year-old mystery of the lost king of France.

King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War

Catrine Clay

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The extraordinary family story of George V, Wilhelm II, and Nicholas II: they were tied to one another by history, and history would ultimately tear them apart.
Drawing widely on previously unpublished royal letters and diaries, made public for the first time by Queen Elizabeth II , Catrine Clay chronicles the riveting half century of the overlapping lives of royal cousins George V of England, Wilhelm II of Germany, and Nicholas II of Russia, and their slow, inexorable march into conflict in World War I. They saw themselves as royal colleagues, a trade union of kings, standing shoulder to shoulder against the rise of socialism, republicanism, and revolution, and in 1914, on the eve of war, they controlled the destiny of Europe and the fates of millions of their subjects. Clay deftly reveals how intimate family details had deep historical significance, causing the tensions that abounded between them. At every point in her remarkable book, Clay sheds new light on a watershed period in world history.

Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford

Julia Fox

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In a life of extraordinary drama, Jane Boleyn was catapulted from relative obscurity to the inner circle of King Henry VIII. As powerful men and women around her became victims of Henry’s ruthless and absolute power, including her own husband and sister-in-law, Queen Anne Boleyn, Jane’s allegiance to the volatile monarchy was sustained and rewarded. But the price for her loyalty would eventually be her undoing and the ruination of her name. For centuries, little beyond rumor and scandal has been associated with “the infamous Lady Rochford.” But now historian Julia Fox sets the record straight and restores dignity to this much-maligned figure whose life and reputation were taken from her.

Born to aristocratic parents in the English countryside, young Jane Parker found a suitable match in George Boleyn, brother to Anne, the woman who would eventually be the touchstone of England’s greatest political and religious crisis. Once settled in the bustling, spectacular court of Henry VIII as the wife of a nobleman, Jane was privy to the regal festivities of masques and jousts, royal births and funerals, and she played an intimate part in the drama and gossip that swirled around the king’s court.

But it was Anne Boleyn’s descent from palace to prison that first thrust Jane into the spotlight. Impatient with Anne’s inability to produce a male heir, King Henry accused the queen of treason and adultery with a multitude of men, including her own brother, George. Jane was among those interrogated in the scandal, and following two swift strokes from the executioner’s blade, she lost her husband and her sister-in-law, her inheritance and her place in court society.

Now the thirty-year-old widow of a traitor, Jane had to ensure her survival and protect her own interests by securing land and income. With sheer determination, she navigated her way back into royal favor by becoming lady-in-waiting to Henry’s three subsequent brides, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and Catherine Howard. At last Jane’s future seemed secure–until an unwitting misstep involving the sexual intrigues of young Queen Catherine destroyed the life and reputation Jane worked so hard to rebuild.

Drawing upon her own deep knowledge and years of original research, Julia Fox brings us into the inner sanctum of court life, laced with intrigue and encumbered by disgrace. Through the eyes and ears of Jane Boleyn, we witness the myriad players of the stormy Tudor period. Jane emerges as a courageous spirit, a modern woman forced by circumstances to fend for herself in a privileged but vicious world.


From the Hardcover edition.

Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics (P.S.)

Eleanor Herman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Added tidbits of history 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I read a lot of period/non fiction of this period and loved this book. Gave me information about the players of the time I had never heard before. Easy read and lots of fun!

Editorial Review:

In royal courts bristling with testosterone--swashbuckling generals, polished courtiers, and virile cardinals--how did repressed regal ladies find happiness?

• Anne Boleyn flirted with courtiers; Catherine Howard slept with one. Henry VIII had both of them beheaded.
• Catherine the Great had her idiot husband murdered and ruled the Russian empire with a long list of sexy young favorites.
• Marie Antoinette fell in love with the handsome Swedish count Axel Fersen, who tried valiantly to rescue her from the guillotine.
• Princess Diana gave up her palace bodyguard to enjoy countless love affairs, which tragically led to her early death.

In this impeccably researched, scandalously readable follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Sex with Kings, Eleanor Herman reveals the truth about what has historically gone on behind the closed door of the queen's boudoir.

In Triumph's Wake: Royal Mothers, Tragic Daughters, and the Price They Paid for Glory

Julia P. Gelardi

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The powerful and moving story of three royal mothers whose quest for power led to the downfall of their daughters.

 

Queen Isabella of Castile, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and Queen Victoria of England were respected and admired rulers whose legacies continue to be felt today.  Their daughters—Catherine of Aragon, Queen of England; Queen Marie Antoinette of France; and Vicky, the Empress Frederick of Germany—are equally legendary for the tragedies that befell them, their roles in history surpassed by their triumphant mothers.  In Triumph's Wake is the first book to bring together the poignant stories of these mothers and daughters in a single narrative.

Isabella of Castile forged a united Spain and presided over the discovery of the New World, Maria Theresa defeated her male rivals to claim the Imperial Crown, and Victoria presided over the British Empire. But, because of their ambition and political machinations, each mother pushed her daughter toward a marital alliance that resulted in disaster. Catherine of Aragon was cruelly abandoned by Henry VIII who cast her aside in search of a male heir and tore England away from the Pope. Marie Antoinette lost her head on the guillotine when France exploded into Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Vicky died grief-stricken, horrified at her inability to prevent her son, Kaiser Wilhelm, from setting Germany on a belligerent trajectory that eventually led to war.  

Exhaustively researched and utterly compelling, In Triumph's Wake is the story of three unusually strong women and the devastating consequences their decisions had on the lives of their equally extraordinary daughters.

Kings & Queens of England and Scotland

Plantagenet Somerset Fry

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great for everyone! 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This is a neat, fun, informative book for everyone, young and old alike. Facts, information, interesting anecdotes, and superb pictures and graphics. The handy size makes it perfect for kids working on reports for school as well. A super book for a number of reasons, and a great one to have on your shelf, especially if you have kids in school or simply want to know more about British Royalty.

Great Book! 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Kings & Queens of England & Scotland is a great book! I use this on a regular basis and is a good source for reports. I would suggest this book. The individual biographies are great, and the events during the reign are really helpful. This book follows each dynasty and shows a family tree for each. I highly suggest this book for anyone.

Great resource for historians and genealogists! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book is invaluable for anyone researching royal genealogies and history students. Highly recommend, along with the "Mammoth Book of Kings and Queens"

Editorial Review:

From the first Saxon king to Charles, Prince of Wales, this compact visual guide to the royal heritage of Great Britain and Scotland conveys the drama and history of Britain's royal lineage.