Royal Babylon

         

ROYAL BABYLON

         

Broadway Books
NEW YORK

Royal Babylon
THE ALARMING HISTORY
OF EUROPEAN ROYALTY

KARL SHAW

Cover Page

TITLE PAGE

Introduction

About this Title

Copyright

ALSO BY KARL SHAW

         

Gross

Gross 2

The Mammoth Book of Eccentrics

         

ABOUT
200
YEARS
ago, England's greatest republican confidently predicted the imminent downfall of the House of Hanover. “Hereditary succession is a burlesque upon monarchy,” he wrote. “It puts it in the most ridiculous light, by presenting it as an office which any child or idiot may fill. It requires some talents to be a common mechanic, but to be a king requires only the animal figure of a man—a sort of breathing automaton. This sort of superstition may last a few years more, but it cannot long resist the awakened reason and interest of men.”

Thomas Paine had good reason to believe that he was on fairly safe ground. The reigning King of England was evidently insane and reduced to conversing with long-dead friends and indecently exposing himself to servants. The King's brother Henry had just become the first member of the British royal
family to be sued for adultery. The rest of the royals, especially the King's seven sons, were reviled throughout the land. One of them was even suspected of having murdered his manservant and raping his own sister. The heir to the throne, an unstable, bloated philanderer unable to step outside his front door without risk of being pelted by the London mob, was locked in the most publicly disastrous royal marriage since Henry VIII was obliged to remove Catherine Howard's head.

Those of Her Majesty's subjects who saw the blitz of British royal embarrassments of the mid-1990s and concluded that the British monarchy had never been worse represented were presumably ignorant of standards set by earlier generations. In the realm of royal behavior, Prince Charles's devotion to his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, probably qualifies as fidelity. Most of the men who have held the title “Prince of Wales” were an embarrassment, none more so than Prince Charles's great-great-grandfather, Edward VII, a man who took the family motto, “I serve,” into another dimension.

From the day the Hanoverians first set foot on British soil in 1714, apart from during the reigns of George V, George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, the British royal family has never been popular, nor does it deserve to have been. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British kings and queens—Shelley's “royal vampires”—were subject to regular attacks from the press for their profligacy, their indolence, their stupidity or for their squalid private lives. And then a curiously repressed minor royal from Germany, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, made the situation of his family even more difficult by forcing them into a straitjacket labeled
MORAL FIGUREHEADS TO THE NATION
, dooming the British royals to an endless struggle to keep up appearances and keep a lid on their family scandals.

The British royal family's rise in popularity was not a straightforward linear development from the much-hated Hanoverians to the widely respected Queen Elizabeth II, more a 300-year roller coaster of highs and lows.

British republicanism was a more potent force in Queen Victoria's reign than at any time since. Victoria herself conceded that the monarchy was so unpopular it would probably not survive her by more than a generation, and she saw no point in giving the Prince of Wales anything useful to do to prepare him for rule.

Then, in 1871, as in August 1997 with the death of Diana, there was one of those rare, defining moments for the British monarchy. Queen Victoria's playboy eldest son, Bertie, experienced an almost fatal attack of typhoid. The Prince emerged from his brush with death bemused to find his mother's subjects bursting with spontaneous gratitude for his recovery and, although his family hardly dared believe it, pro-monarchist sentiment. It was as though their popularity had been transformed by magic. For the first time in nearly three centuries, there was a sea change in public opinion and the tide had turned in the British royal family's favor.

Gladstone and Disraeli, the first royal “spin doctors,” built on this slice of royal good fortune, skillfully turning the image of Queen Victoria round from that of greedy old recluse to the “Grandmama of Europe,” cultivating her as a great empress looking down on an all-conquering British imperialist system. The new, more sympathetic public attitude toward the monarchy was as ever underpinned by the British press, as the politicians still had to rely heavily on the fact that the popular journals of the day—even
Punch
, which had laid ridicule on Prince Albert with a trowel—had suddenly become embarrassingly servile.

As an exercise in marketing, there is no doubting the House of Windsor's near-miraculous success. Under King George V, the British monarchy, which had previously existed as little more than a convenience of constitutional legality with a dodgy past, was reinvented as a bulwark of traditional family values and of duty, dignity and decency. In the 1930s, without telephoto lenses to probe the gulf between the royal family's public face and the sordid romps enjoyed by some of the King's sons, the royal family were always seen in a highly favorable light. It is unlikely that the virtuous middle-class-family image touted by George V would have been so readily embraced if their subjects had been able to read the rumors that throughout his marriage the King visited prostitutes in seaside boarding houses, or if it had been generally known that Queen Mary was a kleptomaniac, or that one of her sons was an alleged Nazi sympathizer and another a bisexual cocaine addict.

During and immediately after the abdication of Edward VIII, popular respect for the British royal family dipped to a new twentieth-century low, although the issue was quickly buried by developments abroad, as Europe inched closer to another World War. From George VI to the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the British royal family enjoyed the support of an adoring, grateful public and an uncritical British press. Fleet Street could not have been more supportive if the Windsors had been censoring coverage of the royal family themselves. For the best part of forty years, the Windsors were invincible. So it came to pass that an opinion poll as recently as 1971 showed that a third of the population of Great Britain believed that Queen Elizabeth II was chosen by God.

Compared to many of their royal cousins abroad, however, the British royal family, even the Hanoverians, although
talentless, greedy, rather unpleasant and generally absurd, were neither very shocking nor particularly strange. For the greater part of the last 300 years, the great continental royal houses have been populated by philanderers, simpletons, sociopaths and tragic emotional cripples. Every monarchy in Europe has at some time or another been ruled over by a madman, although Bavaria alone had the good fortune to have a king crazy enough to remain marketable as a tourist attraction more than a century after his death. The Victorian constitutional expert Walter Bagehot pointed out in 1867: “History seems to show that hereditary royal families gather from the repeated influence of their corrupting situation some dark taint in the blood.” He noted that “in 1802 every hereditary monarch [in Europe] was insane.”

Spain's rapid economic decline coincided with the reigns of an almost unbroken run of mad men and women. From the mid-seventeenth century right through to the Civil War in the 1930s, Charles III was the nearest the Spanish had to a king who could be described as fairly normal. The Habsburgs, for centuries the most powerful family in central and southern Europe, allowed themselves to become monstrously inbred and reduced to physical and mental decrepitude. Similarly, the Braganzas and the Savoys, the ruling houses of Portugal and Italy respectively, were so grotesquely inbred that they became too stupid to avoid their own extinction. The outlandish royal families of Germany, the fatherland of the House of Windsor, excelled at producing princes and princesses with gross personality disorders. Prussia's rulers, the Hohenzollerns, bred a string of psychopaths and megalomaniacs. The Wittelsbachs were frequently certifiably insane. The grasping Saxe-Coburgs, who provided roughly one half of the Windsor gene pool and
somehow managed to infiltrate most of the royal families of Europe, were an outstandingly debauched family riddled with syphilitics and adulterers. The kings of France were sex-fixated epicures, gross even by the standards of their own day.

Unlike the Hanoverian and Windsor queens and queen consorts, who were mostly shallow and materialistic, the continental royal houses produced extraordinary women with passions for violence or for men. The sexual license of the Russian empresses Elizabeth I and Catherine II were the wonders of the age. One of the arguments most often put forward for the British monarchy is that Europe's republics rue the day they got rid of theirs; but there is no sign yet of the democratized former Soviet states running to the genealogical tables to look for a Romanov to sponsor. The entire Russian imperial family tree was thick with lunatics and murderers, and the rulers, male and female, were either drunken, debauched or mentally unstable, and occasionally all three. The great wave of sympathy for the butchered Russian Czar and his family, and the decades of antipathy toward the regime that ordered their assassination, has glossed over the fact that George V's look-alike cousin, Nicholas II, although not especially foul by Romanov standards, was one of the most sinister and cowardly royal despots of the century.

Indeed, reflecting upon the demise of the Russian imperial family, the Czar's sister, the wizened old Grand Duchess Olga, observed, “The Romanovs cared for nothing but the unending gratification of personal desire and ambition.” As we shall see, the Grand Duchess's scathing epitaph could have been fairly applied to almost any royal family in Europe.

A lucky few emperors and empresses were so venerated that historians have awarded them the epithet “Great,” but not
for any good works or lasting benefits to mankind. As far as history is concerned, psychopaths can still be great statesmen or -women. “Great” was generally a recognition of power or brute strength, no matter how they lived, how many people they had killed or how repulsive they were. Consider Frederick the Great of Prussia, a toothless, gouty, smelly little man with no concept of the word “pity,” and an ambiguous sexuality including an alleged inclination toward bestiality. Peter the Great was particularly fond of sadistic torture sessions and capable of watching his son being racked to death before enjoying a marathon banquet. Catherine the Great was both insomniac and nymphomaniac, which was desperately bad news for the dozens of handsome young soldiers she continued to drag into her bed well into her late sixties.

When the last Bourbon king of France, Charles X, was seventeen, he began to show an interest in the Swiss Guards parade ground. A minister of the royal household rebuked him: “You have acquired a liking for drill,
Monseigneur
. That does not become a prince. Run up debts and we will pay them.” Much of royal life is typified by long periods of enforced idleness, punctuated by briefer periods of meaningless formality. Princes were born to endless wealth and privilege and rarely expected to do anything that disagreed with them. Princesses were born to a lifetime of card playing and hopeful motherhood. Education was not usually part of the equation. Until the nineteenth century, royals were very often illiterate, as the early years of their schooling were continually undermined by court ritual and official functions which made study impossible. Russia's Empress Elizabeth, probably the most powerful woman on earth at the time, was unable to spell, considered reading bad for her health, and, although she was reasonably
well informed about international affairs, went to her grave without ever being quite sure where England was.

King Louis XV understood nothing about money: when he heard that the workers were starving he sympathetically sacked eighty gardeners. The Bourbon Henry V never went anywhere without his valet because he had never bothered to learn how to tie his own cravat. The Italian-born wife of the Austrian Emperor Ferdinand V lived in Vienna for fifty years without picking up a single word of German. Italy's first king, Victor Emmanuel II, knew nothing of the Renaissance because he never opened a book in his entire life. On July 14, 1789, the day the
ancien régime
collapsed and the head of the Bastille's governor was paraded around Paris on a pikestaff, the dismal Louis XVI wrote in his diary the one word his grandfather always used when there was no hunting—“
Rien
.”

Royalty and scandal are as indivisible as plankton and the sea. The Austrians discovered royal kiss-and-tell stories more than a hundred years ago when the Emperor Franz Josef's niece negotiated the sale of intimate secrets about the Habsburgs, including the truth about the Emperor's adulterous relationship with an actress, and the Crown Prince Rudolf's suicide. The Emperor bought her silence, and the niece retired to voluntary exile in the United States on an annual pension of $25,000. King Edward VII's sister-in-law, Queen Alexandra's eighteen-year-old unmarried sister Thyra, became pregnant in 1871 by a Danish army officer. The princess was hidden away in a castle in Rumpenheim and not allowed to see the baby, which was handed over to a laundry maid. Two months later, after a couple of abrupt interchanges with the Princess's father, King Christian IX, the child's father shot himself. When Nicholas III of Este, Marquis of Ferrara, was informed that his young wife
was intimately involved with his eldest son, he had them immediately beheaded before asking for proof.

History is as much about the folly and madness of men as it is about underlying social events. When a system is built around people with dangerously flawed personalities, it is entirely appropriate to look at those personalities. The Germans, for example, created an administrative, industrial and military machine of awesome efficiency, in which the kaiser himself was the loose cog. It would be pointless to discuss the rise of Russia as a modern power without referring back to the drink-sodden and murderous Peter the Great. No serious study of the origins of World War I could be complete without an understanding of the personal inadequacies of the men Churchill called “those stupid kings and emperors.”