Books about Monarchies from Amazon.com

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

Now a major motion picture starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes

Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day. In 1774 Georgiana achieved immediate celebrity by marrying William Cavendish, fifth duke of Devonshire, one of England’s richest and most influential aristocrats. She became the queen of fashionable society and founder of the most important political salon of her time. But Georgiana’s public success concealed an unhappy marriage, a gambling addiction, drinking, drug-taking, and rampant love affairs with the leading politicians of the day. With penetrating insight, Amanda Foreman reveals a fascinating woman whose struggle against her own weaknesses, whose great beauty and flamboyance, and whose determination to play a part in the affairs of the world make her a vibrant, astonishingly contemporary figure..
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What really happens when the most powerful man in the world invites the most famous woman in the world to dinner? What is life really like in the 650 rooms beyond the gates of Buckingham Palace? Who are the 50 people in the line of succession to the throne? What does a Lady-in-Waiting do? What do you actually say when it's your turn to meet royalty?

A Year with the Queen tells the story from the inside. No Monarch in history has travelled as far and met as many people as Queen Elizabeth II. And no book has revealed the workings of the Monarchy like this -- with members of the Royal Family and world leaders telling their own stories, too.

Like the brilliant television series it accompanies, A Year with the Queen shows the extraordinary world of the Monarch and her family -- from sacred constitutional talks with the Prime Minister to the razzmatazz of a stay at the White House and from a seaside stroll with the Prince of Wales to a weekend in Iraq with Prince Philip. Equally extraordinary is the work of the Royal Household team -- the man who carries the Crown around in a box, the team who counts out the medals, the chef who paints the chocolates, the in-house royal agony aunt....

The result is a book packed with fabulous photographs, important insights, wonderful anecdotes -- and plenty of advice, too. Ever wondered how to reply to a royal invitation? Or how to get one...?.
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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.

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Isabella arrived in London in 1308, the spirited twelve-year-old daughter of King Philip IV of France. Her marriage to the heir to England’s throne was designed to heal old political wounds between the two countries, and in the years that followed, she would become an important figure, a determined and clever woman whose influence would come to last centuries. But Queen Isabella’s political machinations led generations of historians to malign her, earning her a reputation as a ruthless schemer and an odious nickname, “the She-Wolf of France.”

Now the acclaimed author of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir, reexamines the life of Isabella of England, history’s other notorious and charismatic medieval queen. Praised for her fair looks, the newly wed Isabella was denied the attentions of Edward II, a weak, sexually ambiguous monarch with scant taste for his royal duties. As their marriage progressed, Isabella was neglected by her dissolute husband and slighted by his favored male courtiers. Humiliated and deprived of her income, her children, and her liberty, Isabella escaped to France, where she entered into a passionate affair with Edward II’s mortal enemy, Roger Mortimer. Together, Isabella and Mortimer led the only successful invasion of English soil since the Norman Conquest of 1066, deposing Edward and ruling in his stead as co-regents for Isabella’s young son, Edward III. Fate, however, was soon to catch up with Isabella and her lover.

Many mysteries and legends have been woven around Isabella’s story. She was long condemned as an accessory to Edward II’s brutal murder in 1327, but recent research has cast doubt on whether that murder even took place.

Isabella’s reputation, then, rests largely on the prejudices of monkish chroniclers and prudish Victorian scholars. Here Alison Weir gives a startling, groundbreaking new perspective on Isabella, in this first full biography in more than 150 years. In a work of extraordinary original research, Weir effectively strips away centuries of propaganda, legend, and romantic myth, and reveals a truly remarkable woman who had a profound influence upon the age in which she lived and the history of western Europe.

Engaging, vibrant, alive with breathtaking detail and unforgettable characters, Queen Isabella is biographical history at its finest.


From the Hardcover edition..
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Four Queens is a rich pageant of glamour, intrigue, and feminine power at a time when women were thought to have played limited roles. In thirteenth-century Europe, four sisters from a single family—Marguerite, Eleanor, Sanchia, and Beatrice of Provençe—rose from obscurity to become the queens of, respectively, France, England, Germany, and Sicily. All four were beautiful, cultured, and ambitious, and their stories offer a window into the era of chivalry, crusades, poetry, knights, and monarchs that will appeal to fans of Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser..
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In Murder of a Medici Princess, Caroline Murphy illuminates the brilliant life and tragic death of Isabella de Medici, one of the brightest stars in the dazzling world of Renaissance Italy, the daughter of Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Florence and Tuscany.
Murphy is a superb storyteller, and her fast-paced narrative captures the intrigue, the scandal, the romantic affairs, and the violence that were commonplace in the Florentine court. She brings to life an extraordinary woman, fluent in five languages, a free-spirited patron of the arts, a daredevil, a practical joker, and a passionate lover. Isabella, in fact, conducted numerous affairs, including a ten-year relationship with the cousin of her violent and possessive husband. Her permissive lifestyle, however, came to an end upon the death of her father, who was succeeded by her disapproving older brother Francesco. Considering Isabella's ways to be licentious and a disgrace upon the family, he permitted her increasingly enraged husband to murder her in a remote Medici villa. To tell this dramatic story, Murphy draws on a vast trove of newly discovered and unpublished documents, ranging from Isabella's own letters, to the loose-tongued dispatches of ambassadors to Florence, to contemporary descriptions of the opulent parties and balls, salons and hunts in which Isabella and her associates participated. Murphy resurrects the exciting atmosphere of Renaissance Florence, weaving Isabella's beloved city into her story, evoking the intellectual and artistic community that thrived during her time. Palaces and gardens in the city become places of creativity and intrigue, sites of seduction, and grounds for betrayal.
Here then is a narrative of compelling and epic proportions, magnificent and alluring, decadent and ultimately tragic..
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A revealing portrait of one of the most glamorous, influential, and notorious members of the Spencer family

Intelligent, attractive, and born into wealth, Harriet Spencer, ancestor of Princess Diana, married Frederick, Viscount Duncannon, at the age of nineteen. But it was her affair with Lord Granville Leveson Gower that resulted in the birth of two children and all but consumed Harriet’s life.

The first comprehensive biography of Lady Harriet Spencer, Privilege & Scandal gives readers an inside look at the British aristocracy during the decadent eighteenth century, while bringing one of the era’s most intriguing women to life..
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