CROWNED IN A FAR COUNTRY

The author’s ongoing chronicle of royalty (The Serpent and the Moon, 2004, etc.) continues with the tales of poor little princesses married off abroad.

Some of them—can you imagine?—lived among people who didn’t speak French! Or hadn’t seen operas! Princess Michael begins by noting that she’s terribly interested in political history, but that she prefers what she calls “the lighter side.” There aren’t too many juicy tidbits among the profiles (even in the section about Marie Antoinette). We learn lots about what these royal expatriates wore on important occasions. Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky, for example, looked great in “white moiré, trimmed with Honiton lace” at her 1858 wedding to Prussian King Frederick III. We learn a little about what they ate (pretty much whatever they wanted) and sometimes what they thought. She tells us that Danish princess Alexandra, married to Vickie’s scapegrace brother Bertie, Prince of Wales, inherited her interest in politics from her father; ten pages later, the author credits Alexandra’s mother. Princess Michael cannot shed or even conceal her belief that royalty are just better than the rest of us. When Austrian archduchess Leopoldina arrived in Brazil to marry its Portuguese ruler in 1817, she found no culture there. Former French Empress Eugénie was heartbroken when her exiled son died in 1879 on a noble mission “to conquer the troublesome African tribes.” It was a “tragedy” that cultured Vicky had to live among louts in Germany, especially since her son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, grew up to be one of them.

Superficial history related in tone-deaf, elitist prose.