
Notorious Royal Marriages
A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire
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Narrated by:
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Leslie Carroll
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By:
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Leslie Carroll
From the author of American Princess: The Love Story of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry comes a funny and delightful history of the royal weddings and marriages of Europe’s most famous—and infamous—monarchs.
Since time immemorial, royal marriages have had little to do with love—and almost everything to do with diplomacy and dynasty. Clashing personalities have joined in unholy matrimony to form such infamous couples as Russia’s Peter II and Catherine the Great, and France’s Henri II and Catherine de Medici—all with the purpose of begetting a male heir. But with tensions high and silverware flying, kings like England’s Henry II have fled to the beds of their nubile mistresses, while queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine have plotted their revenge …
Full of the juicy gossip and bad behavior that characterized Royal Affairs, this book chronicles the love-hate marriages of the crowned heads of Europe—from the Angevins to Charles and Di—and ponders how dynasties ever survived at all.
©2010 Leslie Carroll (P)2022 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...




















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Most enjoyable!
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Wtf with the accents
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Frankly I’m shocked, it’s so inaccurate. Like she takes a shocked, huffy stance that “Ferdinand USURPED Joanna’s crown in Castile.”
Except…that’s literally what Isabella, the previous Queen and mother of Joanna, wanted….the crown passed to Joanna’s son Charles, just as it was supposed to. But the author excuses it all, saying:
“Her behaviour was not without reason”. Um.
The woman threw herself against walls in a rage because of her husbands’ infidelity, and traveled with his corpse because she couldn’t be parted from him.
She has excuses for this, too, all of them….not only wrong, but utterly illogical. Carroll apparently didn’t bother to study succession politics of the time, or even use some basic critical thinking.
Richard III’s section was also facepalmingly inaccurate, and she quotes Vives as a reliable source!!! You know….except the fact no historian takes his work remotely seriously, except to understand what the Tudors wanted from their rewrite of history….. I guess Netflix didn’t cover that, huh, Leslie?
She does her own narration, using WILDLY cringey and offensive “accents”.
DNF
Absolute inaccurate bs
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Also, the narration is just flat out awful. It's incredibly slow -- I had to listen to it on 1.75 speed just to feel like I could follow it, which is higher than my usual listening speed -- and the narrator, who is also the author, oddly emphasizes phrases. There is also an attempt at various accents, some of which aren't too bad but many of which are just painful (especially the Italian ones). She also inserts a lot of opinion into the piece, often without substantiated sources behind it, so it comes across as "here is why I think the following misunderstood women were really mistreated geniuses" rather than a more persuasive argument of how they were successful despite popular modern belief otherwise. Some of the language used is also just jarringly... attempting to be hip? Going from badly-accented primary sources to claiming someone is "crazy like a fox" was just incredibly winceworthy.
It's a great idea, but the narration was just flat-out problematic and the opinions were really too much for me to enjoy it.
Unfortunate narration, opinionated inserts
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