Illicit love, madness, betrayal--it isn't always good to be the queen
Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn, and Mary, Queen of Scots. What did they
have in common? For a while they were crowned in gold, cosseted in silk,
and flattered by courtiers. But in the end, they spent long nights in
dark prison towers and were marched to the scaffold where they
surrendered their heads to the executioner. And they are hardly alone in
their undignified demises. Throughout history, royal women have had a
distressing way of meeting bad ends--dying of starvation, being burned
at the stake, or expiring in childbirth while trying desperately to
produce an heir. They always had to be on their toes and all too often
even devious plotting, miraculous pregnancies, and selling out their
sisters was not enough to keep them from forcible consignment to
religious orders. From Cleopatra (suicide by asp), to Princess Caroline
(suspiciously poisoned on her coronation day), there's a gory downside
to being blue-blooded when you lack a Y chromosome. Kris Waldherr's
elegant little book is a chronicle of the trials and tribulations of
queens across the ages, a quirky, funny, utterly macabre tribute to the
dark side of female empowerment. Over the course of fifty irresistibly
illustrated and too-brief lives, Doomed Queens charts centuries of
regal backstabbing and intrigue. We meet well-known figures like
Catherine of Aragon, whose happy marriage to Henry VIII ended
prematurely when it became clear that she was a starter wife--the first
of six. And we meet forgotten queens like Amalasuntha, the notoriously
literate Ostrogoth princess who overreached politically and was
strangled in her bath. While their ends were bleak, these queens did not
die without purpose. Their unfortunate lives are colorful cautionary
tales for today's would-be power brokers--a legacy of worldly and
womanly wisdom gathered one spectacular regal ruin at a time.
