THE NEW YORKER magazine loves NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES

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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