Royalty in History

[celerydunk]

Nicholas and Alexandra is a great book. I did keep a print out of the family tree, because remembering how all these leaders were related made it even more interesting.

[Auroranorth]

Jul 25, 2019 22:00:28 GMT -4 Ginger said:

Mar 18, 2005 10:57:52 GMT -4 Auroranorth said:

The Massie book Nicholas and Alexandra is very good IMO.

I can't remember the names of a lot of the Romanov books I've read. They all kind of blend together. But this one remains the definitive biography. A+. Probably worth reading this one two or three times rather than the other biographies that largely draw from it anyway.

I think the only other book I really got a different perspective from reading was the collected love letters of Nicholas and Alexandra. The shmoopy shmoopy was a little tedious though.

Nicholas and Alexandra had a very passionate love match, right up to the end. It was unfortunate for the country, but they were utterly devoted to each other.

Agreed about the Massie book. On that note, I do not recommend Victoria Rounding's Alix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina. It's confusingly structured, and I am going to automatically toss out any book where the author does online personality tests trying to recreate the answers that Alexandra or Nicholas might have given- no, I'm not kidding. It's in chapter 4.

[Carolinian]

So... is there any record in the modern era of an English monarch asking a Prime Minister to resign? My question is prompted by this article (and others I've seen) saying that if Parliament passes a vote of no-confidence that QEII would ask Johnson to resign.

[Auroranorth]

Not that I'm aware of. She does have the power to do so, though.

Link to My Empress- it's long out of print and hard to find offline.

[londonstill]

So... is there any record in the modern era of an English monarch asking a Prime Minister to resign? My question is prompted by this article (and others I've seen) saying that if Parliament passes a vote of no-confidence that QEII would ask Johnson to resign.

Sort of, her representative the Governor General dismissed our (Australia’s) Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the seventies when the opposition had blocked supply.

[ladytrentham]

I just watched Empire of the Tsars on Netflix. It's narrated by Dr. Lucy Worsley, who's always good, but it crams the entire Romanov reign into three one-hour episodes. There's a bit of skimming. Still good, though.

[Auroranorth]

While I do rate Nicholas as a poor Czar, as Massie points out in his book, when you consider his contemporaries, none of them would likely have done much better in Russia than he did. Even Peter or Catherine reborn might, at best, have staved off the Revolution for a generation or so, but I think it would have come anyway eventually. Too much had happened before Nicholas's reign to cause unrest, and I don't see anyone being able to control the fallout longterm.
As for the other rulers of his time- Kaiser Wilhelm was dethroned, so was Emperor Karl I of Austria-Hungary (though he was only on the throne for two years, so I think it's fair to say that he was less the cause than his great-uncle Franz Joseph, who ruled for for nearly 70 years.) George V survived but he was a constitutional monarch rather than an absolute one, and he also had a great deal of difficulty during the war, considering how German the royal family was seen to be at the time.

[ladytrentham]

Honestly, I think Britain's constitutional monarchy had more to do with Victoria and Albert than anything else. Albert was taking on more and more power/control until he ruined his health and succumbed to typhoid. (I think it was typhoid?) Anyway, Parliament took on most of Albert's workload during Victoria's mourning/strike and the Crown never got those powers back.

[Auroranorth]

England has been a constitutional monarchy since 1688, so I think that helped prevent the kind of problems Russia had which built up over time. England's government certainly wasn't perfect, but power didn't rest solely in the hands of one person.

And while at the time it was assumed Albert died of typhoid, he'd actually been sick for two years preceding his death, so that may have only been a contributing factor.

[Carolinian]

I just got back from seeing the Downton Abbey movie in the theater. A minor subplot reminded me a tidbit of royal gossip I know. King George and Queen Mary visited America (in the '20s, as I recall the story) and were the guests of Clarence Mackay, the fabulously wealthy heir to the owner of the Comstock Lode, at his house on Long Island. When they left it was discovered that a 16th c suit of armor, made for a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, was missing its left gauntlet. Rather than raise a scandal Mackay found another gauntlet from the same workshop, bought it, and replaced the missing gauntlet. The armor is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you look closely you can see that the left gauntlet has a decoration of roses and thistles while the rest of the armor is decorated with roses and fleurs de lis. The curator who told me the story said the general assumption is that Queen Mary "collected" it.