Adrienne Dillard reviews a new biography of Charles I

Leanda de Lisle's first book, After Elizabeth, was a fascinating account of the dying days of the Tudor dynasty and the subsequent transfer of power to the Scottish ruling house. Now, after best-selling accounts of the Grey and Tudor families, de Lisle has returned to the Stuarts, with a biography of King Charles I, the autocratic monarch whose reign ended in civil war, his execution, and the temporary abolition of the British monarchy. With new research from previously unused private documents and a focus on Charles's marriage to the unpopular French princess, Henrietta Maria, this biography is already garnering interest and applause amongst fans of royal and political biographies. 

The White King is released today in the United States and it is available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Its British release date is on 11th January. I am delighted to host this review of The White King by American novelist Adrienne Dillard, who is the author of two novels set at the Tudor court - Cor Rotto, inspired by the life of Elizabeth I's cousin, Katherine Carey, and The Raven's Widow, based on the life of Catherine Howard's confidante Jane, Lady Rochford. 

The Martyr King: Adrienne Dillard's review of Leanda de Lisle's "The White King"

As a Tudor historian, it is nearly impossible to review works set during the time period without seeing the content through the jaundiced lens of your own biases.  More often than not, there is room for multiple interpretations of the documented evidence, but it can be hard to overcome the instinctual gut-reaction humans experience when faced with an opinion that differs from one they wholeheartedly embrace about historical figures they have come to cherish.  That uncomfortableness is invaluable when we seek academic growth, but it makes reading for pleasure a challenge.  Thankfully, I had few preconceived notions about England’s first Caroline king, and when I was offered the opportunity to review the latest take on his life, I leapt at the chance.  Few things can compare to the joy I feel when introduced to a new historical subject and this beautifully crafted biography did not disappoint.

The subtitle of Leanda De Lisle’s The White King calls the monarch a traitor, murderer, and martyr, but upon completion of the book, I have come away with the impression that the only fitting descriptor used is martyr.  The other titles seem far too subjective for this oft-misunderstood king.

Though Charles’ reign came many years after the death of the ginger-haired tyrant at the head of the Tudor court, the spectre of Henry VIII looms large throughout this biography.  His reign and personality are held against those of Charles I to show how vastly different they were and just how much the world had changed in the intervening years.  The charges of tyranny lodged against the latter monarch pale in comparison to the actual tyranny perpetrated by Henry VIII and his children, yet none of their reigns ended with the humiliation of the scaffold, as Charles’ did.  Even more striking are the parallels De Lisle makes with our current political climate – where “populism meets religious justifications for violence” and “the rise of demagogues, who whip up mobs by feeding off ethnic and religious hatreds.”

De Lisle brings the figures surrounding Charles I to life with the strident confidence that accompanies the historian who fully understand their subject.  All of their graces and foibles are fully explored; their ever-changing allegiances reported without a hint of sentimentality.  If their motivations are not revealed in the primary sources, they are left unexplained here, preserving the jarring atmosphere Charles must have felt during his reign.  Even the most historically savvy reader is never quite certain where loyalties lie or how often the tides will turn.  In the hands of a less experienced historian these twists would be rendered into a confusing mess, but De Lisle deftly navigates the murky waters with expert precision.

My favorite part of The White King was the focus on Robert and Henry Rich and their cousin, Lady Lucy Carlisle. Having spent the better part of the last decade researching Catherine Carey, Lady Knollys, it was refreshing to see the role her descendants played during this tumultuous time in English history. The fealty they showed their monarch was far from the devotional loyalty Lady Knollys was known for in her lifetime, but the Puritan proclivities of their great-grandfather, Francis, remained un-diluted. I often found myself wondering what their grandmother, Lettice, would have thought of their intrigues. Lady Carlisle appears the most like her ancestor. Like Lettice, she even bore an uncanny resemblance to the queen she served.

I thoroughly enjoyed De Lisle’s inclusion of the correspondence between the king and his wife, Henrietta Maria, recently unearthed from the Belvoir archives.  Through their words, the unjust depictions of the queen fall apart at the seams, and Henrietta Maria is finally given the recognition she deserves.  The emphasis on Charles family life is most touching here.  The love and devotion they showed to him speaks volumes about his character.

A well-written and impeccably researched biography, The White King seeks not to revise the history of England’s Civil Wars, but uncover the truth hidden beneath the grime of centuries of propaganda and myth.

Rebecca Lenaghan talks playing Madame de Polignac

Revered as one of the most iconic beauties of the eighteenth century and reviled as a symbol of pre-revolutionary society's elitism, Gabrielle de Polignac, a duchess who befriended Marie-Antoinette, has had a chequered history. In The Gate of the Year, the story of Gabrielle and the revolution was updated to the modern day and the Northern Irish actress who played her, Rebecca Lenaghan (above, right), is the first among the cast to answer a few questions about the show.

1. Rebecca, on-stage the character of Jack Necker describes Gabrielle de Polignac as a “self-absorbed socialite”. That seems to be a pervasive view of her. Do you think it’s fair?

Jack Necker’s comment is a superficial, heated jibe at Gabrielle and it is most unfair to the complexities of her character. Necker provides the phrase in an attempt to guide an equally juvenile response; however, the Duchess’s composed reaction is indicative of her sure knowledge (as well as my own) that the remark is ridiculous. She does not need to respond because she knows, like Necker, that his words are neither fair nor true. The play is littered with examples of Gabrielle’s genuine affection for the people who matter most, both her friends and her family, despite the somewhat aloof exterior she presents to characters like the Prime Minister.

Rose Byrne (left) as Gabrielle in the 2006 movie Marie Antoinette, opposite Kirsten Dunst

2. She’s played by on-screen by actresses like Rose Byrne and Virginie Ledoyen, how did you approach playing her yourself and making your own?

Both actresses played their characters differently in Marie Antoinette and Farewell, My Queen and I wanted to change her again. My main focus in making my Gabrielle different from theirs was to approach her from a more sympathetic angle, especially knowing the audience might be sceptical of high aristocratic society. I wanted the audience to understand the human horror faced by the residents of Versailles and to do this, I tried to make her enjoyable; someone who members of the audience would want to befriend. Through trying to make her likeable and passionate, I wanted the audience to feel the poignancy in the play’s concluding scenes, that a character they had so thoroughly enjoyed watching could face such a harrowing end.

3. Are there any similarities between you and Gabrielle?

At the beginning of the rehearsal process, I didn’t think so but as I got to know her more, various similarities appeared. We are certainly both prepared to fight for what we want, regardless of the thoughts of others as well as the importance of family and friends in our lives. I would like to think I could relate to her self-determination and inability to lie to herself. Gabrielle’s strength and surety of her character encourages my own and I hope this continues. And, of course, we both love Marie-Antoinette.

Rebecca on-stage in The Gate of the Year with David Paulin as Charles

4. Many of your scenes on-stage take place with David Paulin, who plays the King’s younger brother, Charles. Did you enjoy creating their relationship?

Unexpectedly, I really did enjoy developing this relationship. I had thought that Gabrielle’s rapport with the Queen would be my favourite but, in the end, I think her friendship with Charles won. Our first rehearsal of a Charles and Gabrielle scene definitely helped in shaping their relationship throughout the play. We did some very enjoyable improvisations, with the addition of Gabrielle’s brother Oscar, which created a bit of background to their friendship and meant that we could share more understanding on-stage with each other than we could with other characters.

5. You spoke in rehearsal of how much you had enjoyed playing her: was there any moment that always stood out as a personal favourite?

I loved playing Gabrielle. I think my favourite moment in the play was her line to Necker “most people who didn’t go to boarding school pronounce it that way” in response to his pronunciation of “oxymoron”. It captures her wicked humour, her astute intelligence in social situations and her ability to flawlessly deliver such an acerbic line with a sumptuous smile.

In rehearsal with Amos McCormack as Jack Necker

6. Would you ever want to play her again?

If I got the opportunity, I would love nothing more than to play her again. Even though the play has ended; she still very much seems to be a part of me and I’m not sure I’m quite ready to let her go yet.

The other Catherine Howard

History records three Catherine Howards who enjoyed prominence at the early modern English court - the first, and most famous, was the fifth wife of Henry VIII, executed for her alleged adultery in February 1542. The second, the Countess of Notthingham, was a kinswoman and close friend of Elizabeth I, whose death in 1602 hastened the elderly queen's spiral into depression.  The third, born Catherine Knyvet in 1564, enjoyed fame and notoriety at the court of King James I, the first sovereign to rule over both England and Scotland. She was close to the royal family and knew many of their secrets, but her career ended in disgrace and allegations of financial corruption.

Born into the gentry early in the reign of Elizabeth I, Catherine Knyvet was married while still a very young teenager to Robert Rich, a minor lord. (It is often erroneously stated that only the great aristocratic heiresses were married off at a comparatively young age in this period.) Levels of mortality being what they were, she was left a widow at the age of sixteen, but her family soon arranged for her to marry Thomas Howard, a younger son of the 4th Duke of Norfolk. Marriage to the Howards, who were related to the reigning Queen on her mother's side, brought young Catherine a place in one of the oldest and most prestigious families of the English aristocracy. However, the Howards' continued adherence to the Catholic faith made many in Elizabeth's government view them with suspicion and Thomas's father had perished on the executioner's block for allegedly plotting to marry Elizabeth's cousin and Catholic heir-presumptive, the deposed Queen of Scots. 

Like Catherine, Thomas had been married before - to his stepsister, Mary Dacre. She too had died young, leaving Thomas without children. Thomas, handsome, aristocratic and in his early twenties, was a good match, if he could manage to exhibit the Howards' genetic knack for overcoming the political disgrace of a loved one; Catherine, beautiful and charming, also seemed like a good choice for the younger son of a great family. Children soon followed with annual regularity - one child per year for the first twelve years of their marriage. Theophilus, the eldest, born in 1582, followed by Elizabeth, Robert, Gertrude (who sadly died in the year of her birth), William, Thomas, Catherine, Emily, Frances, Charles, Henry and John. There were also two more children, born slightly apart from one another, Edward and Margaret. In total, Catherine Howard bore her second husband fourteen children in seventeen years. 

Luckily, this growing brood had access to royal favour, since Queen Elizabeth had restored the title taken from Thomas at the time of his father's execution for treason - he was now Lord Thomas Howard again, a courtesy title he was entitled to as the son of a duke. He commanded a ship in the attack against the Spanish Armada in 1588 and he was vice-admiral in charge of the fleet that attacked the Spanish port of Cadiz in 1596. He helped suppress the Earl of Essex's rebellion against Elizabeth's rule in 1601, by which stage the Queen had indicated her confidence in him by making him a Knight of the Garter. Catherine had been appointed one as one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, eventually being given the prestigious post of Keeper of the Jewels, which in the past had been held by women close to the queens they served - women such as Katherine Parr's younger sister, Anne.

In 1603, when Elizabeth died without children, Thomas and Catherine enthusiastically supported the accession of Elizabeth's third cousin, the King of Scots. A Presbyterian with sympathy for Anglicanism and a passionate belief in absolute monarchy, James lacked the late Elizabeth's tact and charisma, but he was nothing like the drooling, repulsive moron of later Whig imagination. In return for their support for his succession, James raised Thomas to the aristocracy in his own right, making him head of a collateral branch of the Howards as Earl of Suffolk in his own right. (Elizabeth had previously made him a baron, but the rank of an earl brought with it much greater prestige and much larger income.) James liked Thomas and the new Danish-born queen consort, Anna, warmed immediately to Catherine Howard. Like the queen, the new Countess of Suffolk was vivacious, extravagant, glamorous and had a penchant for intrigue. The two couples became very close, with Catherine apparently standing as godmother for the short-lived royal child, Princess Sophia.

Thomas and Catherine knew the royal family's secrets, particularly concerning the King's sexuality. James's association with the funding and publication of the great translation of the Bible that still bears his name has led generations of his enthusiasts to dismiss the allegations concerning his homosexuality out-of-hand, but the work of historians like Leanda de Lisle, whose excellent account of James's accession After Elizabeth should not be missed, and Michael B. Young, prove almost conclusively that James was involved in several, if not numerous, affairs with members of his own gender. Catherine, apparently, was in the know and not only knew but found it to her advantage to help the King along. According to one well-placed source, the countess was arranging liaisons between her sovereign and several "choice young men," all of which made the Suffolks increasingly indispensable to the monarch. What Queen Anna made of this, if she knew at all, is unknown.

Catherine, however, used her position as royal favourite to line her pockets - sowing the seeds of her own ruin. She accepted money and gifts like sable-lined muffs and jewels in order to work men into royal favour, persuade the government to remit fines on offending individuals and promote friends and clients. Her sympathy for Catholicism and an alliance with Spain marked her out as suspicious to the more puritanical members of James's court and she was accused, perhaps unfairly, of taking lovers herself. Her children were all married into the ranks of the aristocracy, securing Thomas and Catherine's own political ascendancy.

In 1619, Catherine's friend and patron, Queen Anna, died and Catherine herself contracted smallpox. She survived but her handsomeness was gone. The queen's death and the loss of the countess's beauty marked the start a year of disaster for the Suffolks, as their financial and political corruption led to them facing trial, after their enemies at court finally persuaded the King to move against them. They lost royal favour and were banished from court. At the time, it was Catherine who was blamed for leading the family astray, with her husband Thomas being viewed with sympathy, even by those who detested his wife and her greed. Whether this was a true reflection of Catherine Howard's role in the scandal or simply a case of the woman being re-cast as Eve to her husband's Adam is uncertain. Her children continued to make a name for themselves at the court of Charles I, and her daughter Frances was caught in one of the last great scandals of James I's time, but Catherine Howard herself died in her late sixties or early seventies over a decade after losing the lucrative favour of King James. 

The Cunard sisters

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Great Britain was not accustomed to the sensation of inferiority. America, although large and rich, was still viewed as a parvenu republic whose influence was confined to a continent that none of the other great powers were interested in; Imperial Russia had an empire that was second in size to Britain's, an economy drastically smaller and a political system which, to the British, bordered on the barbaric and arcane. France, Britain's theoretical ally and rival, was prone to revolution - as changes of regime in 1804, 1814, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1852 and 1870 had shown. The only country that Britain could not dismiss was Imperial Germany - newly unified and hungry for the glory that Britain enjoyed. The two countries competed in everything - army, navy, diplomacy, economy, art, industry and colonialism. The rapid expansion of the German navy under Admiral von Tirpitz gave Britain cause for alarm; the expansion of her commercial passenger fleet simply caused patriotic pique. Britannia was supposed to rule the waves in all its guises - be it military and commercial - and this newfound teutonic one-up-manship quite simply would not do.

The arrival of four lavish luxury liners, all named after members of the German imperial family, caused distress in London and Liverpool. The British Empire no longer had the largest passenger ships in the world. Then when another German company launched the Deutschland in 1900, which took the Blue Riband award for the fastest westbound crossing of the North Atlantic, it was clear that something had to be done. The British government were prepared to offer generous financial assistance to the Cunard Line to enable them to build a duo that would resoundingly crush the humiliation posed by the German liners, in terms of both size and speed. The only contractual stipulation was that if Britain ever needed the ships to perform for the Royal Navy during war-time, then Cunard would have to oblige. No such offer was made to Cunard's British rivals, the White Star Line, who, by that stage, were simply far too heavily-financed by J.P. Morgan for the British government's liking.

Although today all Cunard ships are named after British queens, before 1936 they were all named after provinces of the ancient Roman empire. (Hence why they all ended with -ia, whilst the adverb-inspired White Star's ended with -ic.) The first sister was named Lusitania, after the ancient Roman province of Portugal, and she was built at the John Brown shipyards on the Clydebank in Scotland. Weighing in at 31,550 tons, she was launched by Lady Inverclyde. She sailed on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York in September 1907 and immediately recaptured the Blue Riband for Britain; wresting it from the Deutschland.

The second ship, Mauretania, was named after Roman northern Africa and she was built at Swan Hunter shipyards on the Tyne in north-eastern England. She was launched by Winston Churchill's aunt, Anne, Duchess of Roxburghe, Queen Victoria's former Mistress of the Robes. Entering service in November 1907, two months after her sister, the Mauretania was slightly larger and slightly faster. The 31,900-ton liner took the Blue Riband and held it, quite incredibly, for the next twenty-two years. 

The press excitement surrounding the Lusitania and Mauretania was not just a result of patriotic sabre-rattling, but also because of a genuine sense of technological excitement. The two ships were not just larger than their German rivals, but a marvel of contemporary engineering because they were nearly twice the size of any ship then in existence. Their interiors, too, provoked much purple-hued commentary. Unlike the White Star Line, which preferred to decorate sister-ships (i.e. ones of roughly similar design, size and construction date) in almost identical styles, the 1907 Cunard sisters had individual aesthetics. To be reductive, the Lusitania was slightly more 'baroque' in her first class accommodation - particularly in her famous first class dining saloon (above) and the Mauretania was more conservatively English, with more use of mahogany, stained glass and a 'country house' feel in rooms like her first class lounge (below.) The Queens Grill on the current Cunard ship Queen Victoria is inspired by the first class lounges on-board the Mauretania.

For four years, the two Cunard sisters were the last word in ocean-going luxury, size, speed and safety. In 1911, Cunard's British rivals, White Star Line, struck back with the 45,000-ton Olympic. Half-again as large as the Mauretania, the Olympic and her two sisters that were still being built in Belfast - Titanic and Britannic - were never designed to challenge the Cunarders in terms of speed. They would take a full extra night to make it across the Atlantic, but they would carry their passengers in more stable and spacious accommodation. There would also be three of them, not two, meaning that they would be able to offer more regular services than the Cunard Line's flagships. In response, Cunard commissioned a third ship to be built on the Tyne and opted to play White Star at their own game. She was not to be as fast as the two elder ships, but rather she was to be roughly the same size as White Star's Olympic and to offer comparably luxurious quarters. 

Of course, by the time the new Aquitania was launched by the Countess of Derby in 1913, White Star's dream of a three-ship express run lay in tatters due to the Titanic disaster. All of the Cunard ships were revamped to carry more lifeboats since, like most of their contemporaries, they had been as unprepared as the Titanic had been. Named after the Roman province of western France, the Aquitania sailed on her maiden voyage in May 1914 and was dubbed "the ship beautiful," because of her palatial first class rooms. (Below) A month after she entered service, the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated on a state visit to Sarajevo and Europe slid into the carnage of the First World War.

During the war, the Aquitania was gutted of her beautiful interiors and served first as a hospital ship and then as a troop transport for the Royal Navy. The Mauretania was a warship, a troop transport and a hospital ship; whilst the Lusitania was tragically sunk by a German U-Boat with the loss of over one thousand civilian lives in 1915. When the war ended in 1918, the two surviving sisters re-entered service for Cunard and the triumphant British government exacted the ultimate commercial humiliation on a vanquished Germany. The former pride of the German maritime fleet - the 52,000-ton Imperator, launched into service by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1913 - was requisitioned and given to Cunard as reparations for the sinking of the Lusitania. She was kitted up in the Cunard colours (red and black funnels) and renamed Berengaria - which I like to think of as a bit of a transition name. It was the first Cunarder to be named after a queen of England (Richard I's wife in the twelfth century), but she still had the -ia ending.

Throughout the 1920s, Cunard ran a three ship service - now sailing from Southampton, rather than Liverpool. The Berengaria could be marketed as the company's impressive flagship (she wasn't the largest in the world; that honour went to White Star's Majestic); the Mauretania was still the world's fastest liner and the Aquitania represented a gracious alternative to the fast "jazz age"-style decoration of newer ships. It was a commercially successful operation, until the Great Crash of 1929 upended the world's economy. Passenger numbers plummeted and the three Cunard ships began to run at a financial loss for the first time in their history.

Inventive, if undignified, methods were used to try to make the vast ships turn a profit again. The Berengaria was sent on several "booze cruises" out of New York, to give alcohol-thirsty Americans a chance to escape Prohibition and drink themselves into a nautical stupor once the ship sailed outside American jurisdiction. The Mauretania was painted white (below) and tried to crack the cruise market. She was, however, too big and too old fashioned to cope well with exotic or hot ports of call. The Aquitania, which had been the most profitable of the three during the 1920s, went on short cruises to the Mediterranean. But these were piecemeal methods and the ships, particularly the Mauretania, were now simply too old to function properly for a company that could not afford to keep repairing ships that were unfashionable and consistently booked far below full capacity.

In 1934, Cunard and White Star bowed to economic reality and merged with one another to become the Cunard-White Star Line. Britain only needed one transatlantic luxury firm now, not two. This, of course, created the problem that they now had six liners available for the north Atlantic trade - the Majestic, Olympic, Homeric, Berengaria, Aquitania and Mauretania. Both White Star and Cunard had been making plans to build a new super-ship to modernise their companies' image and capture the new markets emerging as the Depression receded. They now wisely merged their finances and the new ship was named the Queen Mary in part because it avoided giving off the appearance of bias by picking either an -ia or -ic name. (Although as a sign of the way things were to go, her funnels were painted in the Cunard colours.) 

The Mauretania was withdrawn from service shortly after the 1934 merger. Her furnishings were sold at auction in the following year and she was bought by a scrapping firm, after paying an emotive final trip to her "birthplace" at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. As a sign of how much affection she'd been held in during her career, even the U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote a letter urging that she should be bought and preserved as a museum. The Berengaria, which helped maintain the transatlantic route whilst the Queen Mary was built, was retired in 1938 and met a similar fate. It was decided that the Aquitania should keep the new Queen Mary company until the new Queen Elizabeth was ready in 1940, which meant that when the Second World War broke out in 1939, the Aquitania was once again called-up to serve her country. Over the next six years, she transported nearly 400,000 soldiers for the Allied war effort. When the war ended in 1945, the former "ship beautiful" was used by Cunard to help the Canadian government in bringing "war brides" and their children over to Canada. By 1949, she had to be definitively retired as she was so old that she could not be brought in line with modern safety requirements. After a career that spanned nearly four decades, 1.2 million passengers, 3 million miles and two world wars, the Aquitania was sold for scrap metal in Scotland in 1950. 

4th August, 1900: The birth of the Queen Mother

When Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died on Easter Saturday 2002, she was one hundred and one years old. She had outlived all of her brothers and sisters, her parents, her husband (by half a century) and her youngest daughter. Her eldest daughter, also called Elizabeth, had already reigned as the British sovereign for fifty years. Across the nation, television broadcasts were immediately stopped to make the official announcements, although the original BBC newsreader made a huge faux pas when he forgot to don the usual black tie, in his haste to make it to the studio.

The Queen Mother had been born the Honourable Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, the ninth child of Lord Bowes-Lyon and his wife, Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck. Elizabeth's father, Lord Bowes-Lyon (Claude), was an old Etonian, soldier and heir to the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne - one of the grandest titles in the Scottish aristocracy. Her mother, Cecilia, Lady Bowes-Lyon, was an elegant and deeply religious socialite. Claude and Cecilia Bowes-Lyon had been happily married for nineteen years, when their fourth daughter, Elizabeth, entered the world. Before her, they had averaged a child for every two years of their marriage and Elizabeth joined seven siblings - Mary, Patrick, John, Alexander, Fergus, Rose and Michael. Her eldest sister, Violet, had died seven years earlier at the age of eleven, as a result of diptheria; Lady Cecilia had been heartbroken.

When Elizabeth was four years old, her father became the new Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne - the fourteenth member of the family to hold that title since it was given to them by James VI in 1606. This meant the family now had several homes and a substantial private fortune. Their main home was the magnificent, if slightly terrifying, Glamis Castle in Scotland - which Shakespeare buffs will remember as the home of Macbeth. There was also a Baroque stately home in Durham called Streatlam Castle, which they visited infrequently. Their favourite home a very pretty country house at the gloriously English-sounding St. Paul's Walden Bury, where Elizabeth spent most of her childhood. She was described as "an exceptionally happy, easy baby: crawling early, running at thirteen months and speaking very young." She was close to both of her parents, especially her mother Cecilia - from whom she acquired her strong Protestant faith. Elizabeth was also particularly close to her childhood nanny, Clara Cooper Knight, and to her youngest brother, David, who was born in 1902. 

Surprisingly, given that she is the mother of the current Monarch, Queen Elizabeth's birthplace is something of a mystery to us. The 1901 census listed her place of birth as being at her family's country house at St. Paul's Walden Bury; her friend, Lady Cynthia Asquith, repeated this in a book she published in 1927. However, in a letter to an astrologer friend in 1978, the Queen Mother told him that she had actually been born in London; something which the Press Office at Buckingham Palace confirmed. Another version of events, which may square the circle, was that she had been born in an ambulance or at the home of the family doctor, Dr. Bernard Thomas G.P.

At the time of Elizabeth's birth (wherever it was), the Bowes-Lyon family lived a life of great privilege. Like most of their class, they had a veritable tribe of servants, numerous homes and all the mod-cons in electricity, travel, medicine and comfort which solidified the huge gulf between the social classes at the turn of the century. As the youngest, and very pretty, daughter of an earl, Elizabeth could confidently expect to exist in this world for the rest of her life, much like her mother and ancestors had done before her. She would spend her childhood travelling between her family's houses; then, at sixteen she would be launched into London Society as a debutante where, after a few years of parties and parental match-making, she would announce her engagement to an eligible young man from a similarly aristocratic background No-one, of course, could have predicted that Elizabeth would marry into the royal family or that the twentieth century would bring about unheard-of changes that helped destroy the Brideshead Revisited-esque world into which she had been born.

To give an idea of how extraordinarily long Elizabeth's life was, it's worth considering that when Elizabeth was born, the ruler of Britain was still Queen Victoria. There had never been a world war. The Titanic was a full decade away from being built. There were only three republics in all of Europe. Countries like Czechoslovakia, Northern Ireland or Yugoslavia had not even been thought of. All of central Europe was still dominated by the empires of centuries-old royal families like the Austrian Hapsburgs. The German nation itself had only existed for three decades. Communism was an abstract theory that no-one ever expected to see implemented. Women still did not have the vote. The only way to cross an ocean was by ship; aeroplanes had not been invented. Russia was still a monarchy and its tsarina had just fallen pregnant with her youngest daughter, Anastasia, whose name was to become a legend in Elizabeth's own lifetime because of the rumours she had survived the Russian Revolution that killed the rest of her family. Elizabeth herself was to live through two world wars, the Titanic disaster, the sinking of the Lusitania, the Russian Revolution, the partition of Ireland, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, the political career of Winston Churchill, the decline of the British Empire which, when she was born in 1900, was the largest empire in humanity's history; she would outlive the Cold War, the 'swinging sixties,' (one can imagine what she made of it), the entire career of Margaret Thatcher, all of the Northern Irish Troubles, multiple economic booms, then recessions, the death of Princess Diana and the rise of the Internet. When she was born in 1900, her house did not have a telephone; television had not been invented. She lived longer than the entire Soviet Union.

The little girl, who lived so long, was eventually to become one of the great stars of the British monarchical show. Hitler allegedly called her the "most dangerous woman in Europe," because of the job she did in bolstering British morale during the terrible years of the Blitz. Her admiring biographer, William Shawcross, wrote of her, "The core of her popularity and the major feature of the second half of her life was surely her permanence, both in her principles and in the pattern of her life. As she grew older, she showed great courage in not allowing the infirmities of her years to compel her into retirement. There was something immensely reassuring in her insistence on carrying out her commitments year after year, and the stamina which enabled her to do so. Britain changed enormously but she remained constant. This had particular resonance for all those who were feeling rudderless in the wake of the immense social upheavals of the late twentieth century. Her high spirits and her love of traditions and the quirkiness of Britain were an inspiration to millions." 

Two slightly more critical chroniclers were the historian Piers Brandon and the Labour MP Philip Whitehead, who wrote a ruthlessly unsentimental but very good history of the royal family - The Windsors: A Dynasty Revealed, in 2000. They wrote of Elizabeth's later life, "While eating, surrounded by a galaxy of crowned heads and waited on by a bevy of liveried footmen, the Queen Mother could happily exclaim: 'Look at us. We are just ordinary people around the table having an ordinary lunch.' Her political views were pickled in the past. 'Never trust the Germans, never trust them,' ... [she said] in 1991. [For her 100th birthday in 2000], the Thanksgiving Service at St Paul's was a magnificent affair but it was said that the Queen Mother would spend her actual hundredth birthday itself quietly with family and friends. What this meant was that she processed to Buckingham Palace accompanied by two military bands and a mounted escort of the Blues and Royals. And she received a 41-gun salute." But elsewhere in their book, Brandon and Whitehead acknowledged that Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had become a secret and invaluable weapon to the British monarchy - particularly once her husband unexpectedly became King George VI when his brother abdicated in 1936. That she had also played an invaluable role in ensuring the survival of the institution. They write, "When King George came to the throne a new star was born - his Queen. Brilliantly displaying those essential but barely compatible royal attributes - majesty and the common touch - she was, says John Grigg, 'beautiful, charming, sweet, affectionate, almost cuddly'. But she also exuded regal dignity on the public stage". 

Born in 1900, and outliving the entirety of the twentieth century, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was one of the most popular members of the British royal family at the time of her death in 2002.

The Ultimate Social Climber?

From the portrait painted by Madame Lebrun, Gabrielle de Polignac gazes out at the world with bambi-eyed complacency. She looks so comfortable in her disarmingly simple white linen gown, there is a little poesy of flowers in her hand and on her head; she wears a wide-rimmed straw hat, like any country housewife. The portrait gives the impression that Lebrun managed to capture the beautiful duchess unexpectedly, on a lazy summer afternoon in the gardens. It has the feel of a photograph, snapped suddenly, capturing and preserving a fleeting moment like a fly caught forever in amber. It all looks so effortless - the governing maxim of Gabrielle de Polignac's social existence.

But, of course, it wasn't effortless. Portrait painting was a lengthy and time-consuming business. Artist and subject must have spent hours negotiating one another's schedule - finding the right outfit, the right style, the right look, the right time of day, the right light and, for Lebrun, the right price. Gabrielle must have known that she was taking a risk by appearing in such a revealing, faux-peasant ensemble. She knew that the more rigidly pious and conservative members of the French court, not to mention the woman-loathing, sexuality-fearing neo-puritans of the French revolutionary emergent "Left", were going to criticise her for appearing in what they saw as such a fundamentally indecent gown. Duchesses were not supposed to be painted looking like shepherdesses - but Gabrielle was indifferent to the criticism of those outside her charmed palace-dwelling clique. Her one nod to conventional portrait etiquette was that she appeared wearing a wig - had she appeared showing her own gorgeous brunette tresses au naturelle, it's likely that her (many) opponents would have had a collective aneurysm. 

So there she stands - two hundred years later - fresh-faced, pretty, elegant, simple. Lebrun, apparently, for what it's worth, didn't like the portrait very much and felt that she had failed to capture the one quality everyone could agree upon about Gabrielle - her beauty.

In his account of the French Revolution, the historian Simon Schama describes this portrait of Marie-Antoinette's favourite friend in her diaphanous shift as the painting of a woman who was "by any standards, strikingly comely ... looking like some freshly harvested and luscious fruit." Perhaps Gabrielle's most unusual feature were her lilac-coloured eyes, but her alabaster skin, youthfulness, pearly straight white teeth and brunette hair also combined to make her a devastatingly beautiful young woman. It was the first thing anyone commented on when describing her and the only thing they all seemed to agree upon. The Duc de Lévis, who didn't particularly like her, said she looked like a Raphaelite Madonna; Marie-Antoinette's chief perfume maker, Fargeon, choked out that Gabrielle's ravishing good looks masked her hateful personality; the first adjective used to describe Gabrielle by another of Marie-Antoinette's ladies-in-waiting was "beautiful", another said "lovely". When Gabrielle lay dying, her own daughter was at pains to stress that her mother's face had remained "beautiful" up to the very moment her life ended. Beauty and the strange affect it has on other people flowed through Gabrielle de Polignac's life, like a silent stream that slowly shaped the course of her destiny. De  Lévis rather nastily remarked that her beauty had ruined her; she had come to rely solely on it and she therefore had no other personality, no other interests, beyond simply being beautiful. Many would have agreed. The fact that her own child seemed preoccupied with stressing their mother's beauty, even in extremis, suggests how frighteningly inextricable it had become to how people, even her close loved ones, perceived her. How she would have coped without her looks, we shall never know. She died before they had begun to fade.

Gabrielle de Polignac was born Gabrielle de Polastron, the daughter of an impoverished family of the French aristocracy. She was married-off, whilst still a teenager, to Jules de Polignac, the son and heir of an equally well-bred and equally down-on-their-luck noble clan. It was a conventionally satisfactory aristocratic marriage - Jules and Gabrielle did not make each other miserable, but nor is there any sign of great love between them. They had four children together - their daughter, Aglaé, and three boys, Armand, Jules and Camille-Henri. Gabrielle's pushy sister-in-law, Diane, was a courtier at Versailles and it was through her that the couple were invited to a new year's party at the palace in the first year of Louis XVI's reign. It was there that Gabrielle was introduced to the new Queen of France, Louis's twenty year-old Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette. The two women struck up an instant rapport and Marie-Antoinette was fascinated by Gabrielle's unshakable self-confidence, her poise, her charisma and, almost certainly, her other-worldly beauty. Years later, it would be suggested that Marie-Antoinette had a lesbian or bisexual crush on Gabrielle; a version of their relationship that was recently revived in the new French movie Farewell, My Queen where Diane Kruger plays Marie-Antoinette and Virginie Ledoyen plays Gabrielle (below.)

There is nothing to suggest that Gabrielle's relationship with the Queen was a sexual one, or even romantic in the way that we would now understand it. It is by no means impossible, of course, for otherwise-heterosexual people to develop intense 'crushes' on a particularly interesting or attractive individual of the same sex; or for otherwise-homosexual people to do so vice-versa with the opposite sex. Marie-Antoinette's most recent biographer, Lady Antonia Fraser, concludes that, in the early years of their friendship, this is the best way to describe Marie-Antoinette's devotion to Gabrielle. She writes, "None [of their behaviour] corresponded to an active lesbian relationship, if the test of that is physical consummation. But it is plausible to believe that Marie Antoinette was in some romantic sense in love with [Gabrielle] de Polignac (or, in girlish language, had a crush on her), at least in the early years of their relationship." For those familiar with the world of Brideshead Revisited, there was a relationship between the Queen and the Duchess which was not so very different to the one between Charles and Sebastian in Evelyn Waugh's novel. Intense, passionate, almost certainly platonic in the physical sense, but romantic in the emotional sense. To extend the metaphor even further, in Brideshead Revisited Sebastian was the desperately lonely son of an absent marquess and Charles was a middle-class social climber dazzled by Sebastian's wealth and ineffable charm; Marie-Antoinette was the desperately lonely wife of a foreign king, crushed and depressed by the stultifying conservative court etiquette at Versailles, homesick for her sisters and prone to hysterical bouts of crying, shortness of breath and general unhappiness. Gabrielle de Polignac was the impoverished wife of an impoverished aristocrat, who was smart enough to know that friendship with the young queen could  lead directly to the golden fountain of royal favour - i.e. money.

From the moment they met, Gabrielle and Marie-Antoinette were inseparable. Gabrielle was cool, chic and glamorous; unlike everyone else at Versailles, she seemed indifferent to things like money, position, etiquette and power. In reality, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Gabrielle de Polignac was anything but indifferent to any of those things. Gabrielle rose quickly in the Queen's favour and in the King's, who, like his wife, found her to be a breath of proverbial fresh air. (There is no truth in the rather ridiculous theory recently put forward that the devoutly Catholic King Louis was sexually interested in Gabrielle himself; Louis XVI had a famously low sex drive and an extremely conservative Christian faith.) Gabrielle became an integral part of the royal couple's lives and, with her, came her family. Gabrielle managed to get them all jobs, pensions, generous salaries, good marriages and positions at court. She became the metaphorical centre of a rather fast, hard-partying clique of young courtiers, socialites and aristocrats who helped alleviate Marie-Antoinette's crushing sense of boredom. As Antonia Fraser writes, Gabrielle helped banish the ennui - "People enjoyed themselves in her company; her manner was gently pleasing and she had a delightful laugh." But, "For one seemingly lacking in avidity, she would amass an amazing amount of positions and rewards for herself, her large family [and] her connections".

One historian, Vincent Cronin, who wrote a dual biography of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, has admittedly sprung to Gabrielle's defence, arguing that it was only natural that the Queen should provide jobs and funds for a down-on-her-luck friend. Furthermore, given that Gabrielle was now expected to host various entertainments and parties because she was living at Versailles, Louis and Marie-Antoinette were "duty-bound" to help her afford it. 

There is some truth in Mr. Cronin's arguments, but the sheer amount of money that poured into Gabrielle's pretty little hands in the 1770s and 1780s went far, far beyond what was either prudent or necessary. Another one of Marie-Antoinette's biographers, Stefan Zweig, was infinitely more critical of "la belle Gabrielle," fulminating in his 1933 biography, "Not even Madame de Maintenon, not even the Pompadour, cost as much as this favourite, this angel with downcast eyes, this modest and gentle Polignac." That, too, is perhaps an exaggeration. Gabrielle de Polignac was no more responsible for damaging the French economy than Marie-Antoinette was. In the grand scheme of things, the amount of money being paid to the Polignacs and their dependents was a drop in the metaphorical ocean compared to the ludicrous sums being spent on frequent (and inevitably failing) recession-busting initiatives, in funding the American revolutionaries' fight against Great Britain or on trying to fix France's federalism-run-amok, creaking, out-of-date taxation system. But you can't get mad at federalism and you can't get mad at long-term socioeconomic trends, either. You can, however, look at the violet-eyed duchess and her Versailles crew and apportion all blame to them. She's visible and she's memorable. Gabrielle de Polignac, to put it mildly, was therefore loathed within a few years of joining Marie-Antoinette's circle.

Within the palace, the reasons for her unpopularity sprang mainly from jealousy. With Gabrielle monopolising Marie-Antoinette's time and affection, no-one else could climb the social ladder and become the Queen's new favourite. Many a failed socialite would utter the cry of the insidious and vile Madame de la Motte, who complained in her memoirs, "To be sure, one could hope for presentation to the Queen only through the Polignac clique, but the Duchess, jealous and fearful of losing the royal favour she monopolised, disdainfully repulsed any outsider who sought so much as a smile or a glance from the Queen... I was outraged by the attitude of this haughty and imperious woman. Well could I remember the Polignacs in Paris when they were impoverished nonentities". Gabrielle therefore became a useful scapegoat for any aristocrat who wanted to say they didn't enjoy the Queen's favour because the Duchess controlled all access to her; not because they themselves were too boring, annoying or unpleasant to actually win Marie-Antoinette's much-coveted friendship. 

Gabrielle also managed to tick people off with her (rare) displays of political sympathies - she was almost alone at Versailles in being pro-British and anti-American and she was rather too fond of drawing-up lists of people like the Duc de Brissac or Baron de Breteuil who had annoyed her. People on that list soon found their social lives at the palace being severely restricted and, in doing so, their opportunities for political advancement correspondingly dwindled. One palace servant likened Gabrielle to a steel dagger in a silken glove; another noted that the sweeter her tone got, the meaner her sentiment was likely to become.

Outside the palace, Gabrielle took the place of the royal mistress in public opinion. The French had a tradition of blaming all the mistakes of their government on the King's mistresses, rather than on the kings themselves. Even today, we have an ugly tendency to get angry when a woman, no matter how capable, seems too close to a powerful man - as poor Hillary Clinton found to her cost during her husband's presidency. However, both Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were too clean-living to provide the country with paramours to blame. In Marie-Antoinette's case, anti-monarchists responded by simply making up hundreds of accused lovers - including animals, children and transvestites. They also, increasingly, insisted that she was having affairs with Gabrielle de Polignac and another close friend, the Princesse de Lamballe. Marie-Antoinette, with rather touching innocence, wrote to her mother that she was mainly being criticised in the gutter press for having a taste for lovers and a taste for women. Which rather suggests to me that the sheltered young royal wasn't aware that she was actually being accused of combining the two categories.

As they grew-up, Gabrielle and her queen remained close, but the girlish, co-dependent infatuation of the early days was long gone. They did, occasionally, quarrel. Marie-Antoinette loathed the Comte de Vaudreuil, a pushy military man whom Gabrielle was terribly fond of and who many believed she was having an affair with. The possibility that Gabrielle did have an affair with Vaudreuil cannot be disproved, nor should it be too easily dismissed; although, for what it's worth, my money is that they probably were not lovers. Marie-Antoinette also began to resent Gabrielle's numerous, parasitical relatives and their constant demands for more money and more favour, particularly at a time when the Queen herself was making drastic economies within the royal household. Sensing that time apart might do them good, Gabrielle went on a visit to England, where she stayed at Chatsworth with another close friend, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whom she had first met at a Belgian spa a few years earlier. By the time she returned, French politics was teetering on the brink of its most epic crisis. Gabrielle hurled herself into supporting the agenda of what we would now recognise as the far-right. The diplomat, Marc de Bombelles, noted that he found her "working hard" with the King's younger brother, the Comte d'Artois, to have the liberal chief minister, Jacques Necker, dismissed from office.

Gabrielle de Polignac died in Austria on 9th December 1793, less than two months after the guillotine claimed the life of Marie-Antoinette. The cause of her death has variably been suggested as heartbreak, cancer or tuberculosis. In the two centuries since her death, historians have generally dealt harshly with her. At a time when many felt the French monarchy was in urgent need of reform, Gabrielle had actively supported the harshest possible measures against reformers and revolutionaries. In an age of great philosophers and the emergence of new political ideologies, the pretty duchess had laughed at intellectuals, mocked politicians and excluded anything too serious or too unpleasant from conversation at Versailles. She came to symbolise the corruption of the ancien regime - a government for blue-bloods, by blue-bloods. She was the last of the royal favourites. As more and more evidence was uncovered that Marie-Antoinette was nothing like the money-burning bimbo of popular legend, it was still possible to hurl all the blame onto Gabrielle de Polignac. Gorgeous, self-centred and wilfully isolated, Gabrielle became the historical poster girl for what had been wrong with a gorgeous, isolated, out-of-touch monarchy. She has, admittedly, had her defenders, too. Apart from Vincent Cronin, there have also been passionate rebuttals of her critics  - beginning, understandably, with her friends and family in the early nineteenth century. Recently, a "trad" Catholic royalist got rather carried away, I'm afraid, and compared her to Saint Nathaniel, which rather seems to be overegging the proverbial pudding.

Gabrielle de Polignac was not a "bad" woman - either by the standards of her own day or, really, by ours. She was a conventionally observant Roman Catholic, she was not promiscuous and she conformed to the general political beliefs of her religion and her class. She was not murderous, nor was she an ideologue. Whilst she was certainly selfish, vain and capable of petty nastiness, she was also gracious, elegant and had moments of great tenderness, as shown by her ability to soothe Marie-Antoinette's intermittent bouts of depression. But apart from the extraordinary times in which she lived and the extraordinary queen whose friendship she won, there is nothing too intrinsically fascinating about Gabrielle de Polignac - beyond two things. The first, as has been mentioned, is her great beauty. Beauty is, in itself, a fascinating topic. Good looks can both improve and bedevil the life of their holder. Beauty, which is good looks magnified, can also cut both ways like a double-handed sword. In Gabrielle's case, it propelled her into the spotlight, but it also led to people instinctively disliking her. Then and now, people don't like someone to "have it all". To be that beautiful, that confident and to have acquired the eighteenth century holy grail of royal patronage was quite simply too much for most of Gabrielle's contemporaries to stomach. 

The second point of interest is her astonishing success. It might seem strange to say that. After all, what did Gabrielle de Polignac really contribute to the world? She had no discernible talents and she produced nothing that impacted on French or European culture; even her letters are few and far between. By our standards, she did nothing except happen to be very rich and very pretty. Furthermore, she ended her life as a refugee from the bloody revolution that had destroyed the world she had grown-up in. But, by the standards of her own era, I do believe firmly that Gabrielle de Polignac not only succeeded but did so spectacularly. To an eighteenth century aristocrat, there were fewer obligations higher than family. Using nothing but her charm and self-belief, Gabrielle de Polignac dragged two families - her own and her husband's - from the genteel poverty that they had languished in for nearly a century. Regardless of the cost to her own personal reputation, she took the Polignac family and skyrocketed them into the upper echelons of the French nobility - a position that they hold to this day. Gabrielle's descendants included future prime ministers, Confederate generals, composers, mathematicians, socialites and royalty. Today, some of her surviving jewels nestle in the collection of the Grimaldi royal family of Monaco - who are also her descendants. She was, quite simply, the most spectacular social climber of her century and the trick behind her success was that she hid it so well. Gabrielle seemed so perfectly well-mannered, so at ease in herself and so completely indifferent to the usual mechanisms of "high society," that for decades after she was dead, she was still held up as the ultimate icon of the old aristocracy's wealth, supreme indifference to the outside world and entrenched privilege. She made it look effortless, just like the supremely affected unaffectedness in the Lebrun portrait of her. No-one ever saw Gabrielle's little feet paddling desperately beneath the water - all they saw was the gorgeously self-confident swan representing "all the glories of those set apart by privilege and wealth, flaunting themselves once more like the last beacon of an expiring world."

Marie-Antoinette and the Affair of the Minuet

Via Tea at Trianon comes an article about an early clash between the 14 year-old Marie-Antoinette and the Versailles court aristocracy over an issue of precedence at the young princess's wedding ball. 

Due to the intrigues of the Austrian ambassador and France's foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, a fifteen year-old aristocrat, Anne-Charlotte, Princesse de Lorraine, had been given the right to take the first dance at the ball after the Princes of the Blood. The House of Lorraine, the family of Marie-Antoinette's late father, the Emperor Franz-Stefan, occupied a difficult place in French court etiquette, because of the debate about whether they were members of the native nobility or an independent, foreign dynasty. In any case, the attempt to honour Anne-Charlotte with the first dance after members of the immediate Royal Family ruffled feathers in a way that they could only be ruffled at Versailles. Half the court aristocracy threatened to boycott the ball entirely, much to the distress of the King, who had poured an enormous amount of money into the celebrations for his grandson's marriage to Marie-Antoinette. As far as the courtiers were concerned, Anne-Charlotte de Lorraine's precedence at the ball over them was obnoxious, inappropriate and a sure sign that Marie-Antoinette was arriving to shamelessly promote her family's interests over her husband's. The fact that the bride in question was fourteen years-old and had not yet set foot in France when this matter was decided was of little concern to her new critics. 

For those interested in the historical significance of the so-called "Affair of the Minuet," there is also an excellent article by Professor Thomas E. Kaiser - "Ambiguous Identities: Marie-Antoinette and the House of Lorraine from the Affair of the Minuet to Lambesc's Charge."

Famous Shipping Disasters: The sinking of the "Titanic" (1912)

With the centenary approaching, the Titanic is once again big news, particularly in Belfast, where a host of festivities are being designed to mark the opening of the world's largest (and long-overdue) Titanic visitors' attraction. Built in Harland & Wolff as the second of three sister ships for the White Star Line, the Titanic is today probably the most famous ship in history - eclipsing Noah's Ark and Cleopatra's Barge. With several Hollywood blockbusters and television movies made (the most accurate is the brilliant 1958 A Night to Remember) and the discovery of its broken, eerie and rotting wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic in 1985, the Titanic shows little sign of diminishing its hold over the world's imagination.

Much of what happened, or is supposed to have happened, on board the Titanic as she sank has achieved the status of twentieth-century legend - the boasts that she was "unsinkable" (grossly exaggerated and never made by the White Star Line itself), its luxurious first class accommodation, its undiminished speed as it entered the ice field, the bravery of the band as it continued playing throughout the sinking, the insufficient numbers of lifeboats, "Women and Children" first, the high casualty levels in Steerage and the tragic loss of life.

At the time, however, the Titanic did not garner nearly so much media attention as her elder sister ship, the Olympic, which went into service in May 1911, eleven months before Titanic. Titanic's maiden voyage from Southampton on April 10th 1912 did not quite have the same fanfare as Olympic's, but five days later when news broke that the vessel's inaugural trip had ended in the worst maritime disaster, to date, the Titanic shot into her place in popular culture and never left it. Her very name is still synonymous with disaster.

For a more in-depth post on the sinking of the Titanic, click here. This blog has also posted about life in the ship's first, second and third-class accommodation.

"The confidence and affection of the King"

Author Elena Maria Vidal takes a brief look at the fascinating life of Zoe du Cayla, a French aristocrat and socialite who became the last favourite of King Louis XVIII of France. Like Gabrielle de Polignac at the court of Louis XVI, Madame du Cayla eventually used her friendship with the royal family to promote a conservative political agenda - in this case, furthering the cause of the Ultras, the far-Right of nineteenth century French royalism. Louis XVIII had come to the throne in 1814 with the intention of attempting to arbitrate between the Left, liberalism and the Right, in the hope of healing the political scars caused by the Revolution. However, after the assassination of his nephew, the Duc de Berry, by a republican terrorist in 1820, the ageing monarch moved further to the Right. Liberal monarchists, dismayed at their sovereign's new-found sympathy for the Ultras, tended to blame Madame du Cayla, in much the same way as devotees of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had castigated Gabrielle de Polignac as a canker at the heart of government in the 1780s. Given the closeness of the obese King Louis to the radiant and sophisticated du Cayla, many assumed (then and now) that she was his mistress. However, Elena Maria Vidal argues persuasively that the relationship between the two was almost certainly platonic. The king's marriage to the late Queen Marie-Josephine had been childless; possibly on the grounds that Marie-Josephine may have been what we would now recognise as a lesbian, but equally possible because Louis himself had a very low sex drive (his correspondence with his close friend, the Duc de  Lévis, certainly seems to hint at that). In any case, Elena Maria's view that Madame du Cayla was the king's favourite but not his mistress seems convincing. Du Cayla attended the King on his deathbed, where she managed to persuade him to receive the Last Rites of the Roman Catholic faith, which he had struggled to avoid, perhaps in the hope of denying his inevitable mortality.

For the article on Zoe du Cayla click HERE.

Can republics be snobbier than the Monarchy?

The National Post has a very interesting article upon the Monarchy and attitudes to class in Britain. Perhaps one of the things which people who aren't too well-acquainted with monarchical history will find surprising is how often various members of the British aristocracy have scorned and criticised the monarchy for being too "common". The gorgeous but fascist socialite, Lady Diana Mosley (nee Mitford), was extremely critical of the late Queen Mother, whom she rather unfairly and improbably characterised as a social climber. A little like members of the ci-devant nobility in pre-revolutionary France who criticised Marie-Antoinette for her farm at Versailles, because it was considered lacking in majesty.

Perhaps one of the most interesting points the article raises is that, contrary to popular misconception, the monarchy in Britain does not necessarily encourage snobbery and it cites the rather revealing example of how entrenched snobbery can be in the United States and France, both of them the most celebrated republics in the world and both founded, at least in theory, on the principle of equality. Historically, it's often true that "self-made" aristocracies or oligarchies, like those in the United States or, most obviously, in ancient republican Rome, can be the most precious and conscious of their status. I don't entirely know what I think of that argument, although there seems to be a lot of truth in it. In any case, The National Post raises an interesting point when it says: -

"Many commentators continue to follow Malcolm Muggeridge's argument that the monarchy is the source of class consciousness, that "the impulses out of which snobbishness is born descend from the Queen at the apex of the social pyramid, right down to the base." This neglects the fact that several countries routinely held up as progressive, egalitarian democracies - Holland, Sweden, Norway - are also monarchies. It also neglects the Olympic-class snobbery to be found in every non-royal society, from Ivy League America to the Crillon Ball crowd in Paris."

The full article can be accessed here and it's definitely worth a read. Perhaps one of the saddest and most interesting anecdotes is the tale of Queen Mary, consort of George V, obsessively pouring over her family tree and the Almanach de Gotha to see if she qualified as Rank I or II of royalty for the opening waltz at the wedding of the Kaiser's daughter in 1913. 

My interview in THE IRISH TIMES

My interview with THE SUNDAY TIMES was published in July 2011. The interview is by Pavel Barter, the photograph by Kelvin Boyes.

"A BOY WHO'S DOWN WITH THE MEAN GIRLS"

Friends trashed his idea for a bitchy teen-fiction novel set in Belfast, but Gareth Russell's savagely witty debut wins out in the popularity stakes, says Pavel Barter.

When Gareth Russell said he wanted to write a novel about wealthy high-school kids in Belfast, everyone told him to wise up. Spoilt debutantes, popping into Victoria Square shopping centre for a spot of retail therapy, getting manicures, wearing Ralph Lauren, and sipping martinis at high-society functions? Not images you associate with Belfast.

The negativity bothered him. "Parents of friends told me that nobody would ever publish a book about being popular or a socialite set in Belfast," he says. "If it's not about the potato famine, the Titanic or the Troubles, no one cares. I thought, 'We'll see.' There is so much more to Belfast than  lot of literature and cinema has shown. It was great to set a comedy here. You can have craic in Belfast that you couldn't in New York, Miami, London or LA."

So Russell ignored the naysayers and the setting proved ideal. Popular, the 24-year-old's debut, is set in the fictional Mount Olivet Grammar School, on Belfast's Malone Park, a real-life private avenue. Sitting in the bar of the Europa hotel, the writer takes a gulp of Evian, and wonders if he should send the city's upwardly mobile princesses a thank-you note for providing his inspiration.

Cliques are commonplace in Northern Irish schools, Russell explains. An Oxford graduate, he is co-directing a stage adaptation for Belfast's Belvoir Players Studio, to be staged in early September. The cast includes Imogen ("the hot one"), Kerry ("she has Daddy's credit card") and queen bee, Meredith ("the one who'll kill you as you sleep"). With their token male pal Cameron, these filthy-rich beauty queens undergo rivalries, tantrums and faux emotional breakdowns. Popularity is considered the key to happiness; weakness is preyed upon. It's a ruthless social hierarchy, similar to prison, only with Marie Antoinette-themed parties and Gucci handbags.

In most high-school movies, prom queens are either villains or a plot device to teach the protagonist the error of her ways. This was the case in Mean Girls, which starred Lindsay Lohan, while in Clueless and The Breakfast Club the rich girls are vain yet good-natured at heart. In Popular, on the other hand, the characters are unrepentantly egotistical and superficial, owing more to reality fares such as The Hills, Perez Hilton blogs and Paris Hilton.

Russell has an affection for his characters, but understands if the reader loathes them. "There are times when I'm talking about the characters and people look at me with horror," he laughs. "Meredith and Imogen have their own fans, which, in a way, is a devastating reflection on [today's] morality."

His characters were created as a reaction to the political correctness that has crept into high-school fiction. "Glee went further down the line of feeling it had to tick every box," he says. "I wanted to write someone like Meredith who could say the things a lot of us secretly wish we could get away with. She's not particularly interested in what boys think of her. Meredith is much more interested in what girls think of her. She is a woman's woman."

Russell was inspired to create such an unapologetically savage character after reading a Julie Burchill article in which the journalist mourned the passing of the classic Hollywood bitch. "One of my favourite books is Gone with the Wind. You're not supposed to like Scarlett O'Hara at all because she's a husband-stealing, gold-digging, social-climbing hound," he says.

What Popular lacks in redeemable characters, it makes up for in humour. The writer excels at capturing the ability of teenagers to coin expressions and venomous put-downs. Case in point: "I hate her hair... It looks like someone stuck pubic hair on top of a potato." Popular's characters are routinely cruel, but the writer insists there is a difference between bitchiness and being a bully. It's also one of the few Irish teen novels to deal with gay themes, in the form of Cameron's awakening homosexuality.

Some of the incidences in Popular are gleaned from Russell's own experiences as a student in Downpatrick, but the story is not entirely autobiographical. It's as much influence by his history studies at Oxford University and his interest in Tudor history; Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, in particular. "There is a steel-butterfly element to her personality that I warm to," says Russell "In a strange way, she influenced Popular [by being] a good example of you can be bitchy without being evil. I liked the pageantry [of the Tudors] and their self-awareness. They knew everyone was watching them. They believed God was watching them. I found that an interesting idea: how would you live if you thought you were being watched all the time? It's Big Brother, with a change of purgatory at the end. It was a cauldron of big personalities and a society that valued outward appearance more than anything else."

At Oxford, Russell directed and wrote plays, including The Audacity of Ideas, set on the eve of the French Revolution. This experience spurred him to pen Popular after he graduated in 2008. The author received 17 rejection letters from agents before he hit gold. Penguin signed him for two books, and he hopes to write a third.

Russell plans to write a biography of Boleyn in a few years' time. "There is a popular version of her as the femme fatale, and a more recent academic trend to see her as incredibly political, like a 16th-century Margaret Thatcher. I don't think that's something she would have recognised. I'm trying to focus more on her position as a daughter of the aristocracy who had been trained to be pleasing, quick-witted, elegant, charming, but I don't think she was a social climber or a rabid politico."

There is a tactical decision to writing Popular now. The memories are fresh and a few years from now his insights may no longer be relevant. The unrepentant narcissism of these characters still feels like a stumbling block, however. Is there any merit in this lifestyle for teenagers? "It's totally vacuous," he admits. And is popularity really all that important? "No." He takes another sip of water. "In the grand scheme of things, the core clique in Popular are not going to damage your health. They're not promoting drugs or rampant sex [but] the scars they might leave on your confidence are another thing."

Bret Easton Ellis wrote his first book, Less Than Zero, about a similarly spoilt and cloistered gang. It became a grim tale of prostitution, drug addiction and snuff movies. Russell wants to keep a comedic tone - this is fiction for young adults - but plans on visiting darker places in the sequel. "Yes, there's the vacuousness, fabulousness and frivolity, but you have to acknowledge that schemes, rules and intrigues will eventually take their toll on the people doing them," he says.

"Nobody can control gossip. It's a liberated demon. There's no way that you can write a high-school book and not show that sometimes it can turn into the most awful experience imaginable."

Popular is out now from Penguin. 
British and European customers can purchase it here.
Australian readers can purchase here. Borders New Zealand also sells Popular.
Canadian and American readers can purchase here.
South African readers can purchase here.