Author: Karl Shaw (no website found)
Publisher: Crown
Rating: WARTY!
Not to be confused with Royal Babylon by Heathcote Williams which actually has, believe it or not, a more amusing cover than this one does, this book is a tour of European royalty across the ages (mostly across the ages where there is sufficient documentation to support an informed conclusion). My problem with it, and the main reason I'm rating it negatively is the author's style and tone, which i did not appreciate at all. He writes in a stridently supercilious tone and he seems to relish describing royals in the worst light imaginable regardless of how they actually were. This gives me some cause for doubt as to how accurate his portrayals really are, especially when I caught him in some outright falsifications (or to be more benign, in displaying inexcusable ignorance or laziness in his research.
I doubt he even took the trouble to look at pictures of the people he describes, judged by some of the things he says. I know that portraits were (and are) deliberately painted to be flattering, but in instances where I've checked on his descriptions, they are far in excess of what the portraits indicated. In one case, it was recent enough that there was a photograph, and he was outright lying about that princess's appearance. It's like the author didn't care about veracity if he could get in a sly swipe at some royal person or other. I'm far from a supporter of the nobility, trust me, but I get the impression that Shaw either hates royals or derives a perverse pleasure from gratuitous sniping at those who are dead and cannot therefore defend themselves. Here's what he says about Crown Princess Margaret of Prussia, for example:
...Queen Victoria admitted that the Crown Princess was "not regularly Pretty." In the context of royal doublespeak, it is safe to assume that she was grotesque.
(Page 32)
This is an outright lie as you can see from the images in wikipedia. Did this author never check any image or portrait? As it happens, it was not safe to assume any such thing and the author could have verified this for himself if he had taken the trouble. The fact that he didn't speaks more erudite volumes than the one he has written here. From the photograph in wikipedia, and she looked like any random person you might consider. Now I admit that beauty (and by definition ugliness) is in the eye of the beholder, and she was not what you might describe as outstandingly beautiful or classically beautiful (for what that's worth), but she looked perfectly fine, and it seems to me to be disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst to describe a woman like that as grotesque.
In another instance, he describes on page 45, a princess as dying young and a spinster because she was ugly and/or deformed, yet I cannot even track down who this is. He names her as Princess Frederica of Saxe-Coburg, but the only such princess I can find from the period was not a spinster at all. She married, had children, and lived a long life.
With regard to Queen Charlotte, with whom king George was very much in love by all accounts, Shaw goes out of his way to repeat how ugly she supposedly was. Actual portraits, even allowing for the fact that they're typically painted in a flattering light, and also allowing for personal taste, would seem very much to label him a liar. I honestly don't get why he does this so dedicatedly, particularly towards women, whom he describes routinely as at best, "short" and at worst, "squat" or "dwarfish". He seems to fail to understand that diminutive stature was the norm back then. It's only recently that both men and women have become (relatively speaking) the towering giants we're used to today.
There's another really egregious case on page 61 where the author says, "Edward VII and his wife Alexandra raised lackluster children whose general education standard was well below average. The eldest, Prince Eddie, was by any standards a half-wit." This refers to Prince Albert who died at the terribly early age of 28, carried off by the flu. Shaw's claims are not supported in his writing; they're simply stated and left at that. According to wikipedia, which I trust significantly over this author, Prince Albert "Eddie" was nothing like Shaw claims he was.
Shaw has a fairly extensive bibliography at the end of this book, but not a single reference number anywhere in his text to support the calumny he heaps upon any of his victims. I supposed he expects us to take his word for it, or to read the scores of books he lists in the hope we can find what he was talking about. This is shoddy scholarship at best and an outrage at worst. This is not to stay that royalty of yesteryear were paragons, by any means. Some of them were heroic, but an awful lot of them were an awful lot. that doesn't mean it's fine to choose the largest most indiscriminate brush possible and blindly and randomly tar them all with it.
He plays the same kind of game with British Queen Elizabeth 2nd's uncles: Henry, John (who had epilepsy and died of a seizure). Finding what might be glaring errors, or at least questionable information, causes me to doubt his credentials as a reliable reporter. He is accurate in many things he says, but his most derogatory comments seem to be reserved for princesses, so I'm really wondering what this guy's game was in writing this!
I don't mind snark, but it's inappropriate to me when it's aimed at peoples' looks, and especially so when the looks don't even merit the snark in the first place. It's different if, for example, someone with a seriously outrageous appearance (in one way or another) sets themselves up as a standard of 'gorgeous' or 'beautiful' or fashionable when they clearly aren't. Someone like that might arguably deserve snark; however, to routinely and repeatedly take pot-shots at people not based on some eccentric peccadillo, or some absurd or obscene behavior, but purely on their looks is petty and mean, and it's especially so if their looks aren't even remotely as bad as the author claims.
To me there's a big difference in a person's behavior, of which they are largely in control, and in merely their appearance or facial features, of which they're not - not back then, anyway. If they're purposefully doing something bizarre with their looks, it's rather different, but even that must be tempered with reference to the age in which they lived.
Shaw's book purports to be highlighting wacky and outrageous royal behavior, with which I have no problem even if it might be exaggerated somewhat, but he's just as much jumping all over them for purely for how their face appeared or whether they were overweight or had a physical deformity as he is for truly oddball behavior. To me, it's unnecessarily cruel, especially when he has so much real wacky material to play with. Had he turned the same cruel eye upon contemporary people, he would have been rightly censured for it. I don't see that removing his slurs a few hundred years gets him a free pass, and I refuse to recommend this particular and cruel view.
