Not every Romanov Nicholas got to be a Tsar. In the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century, the grandson of Nicholas I, Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich, drove his royal family absolutely batty. The first in his family to go to college (as we would put it today), the dapper military hero scandalized St. Petersburg with his affair with an American woman and his theft - for money - of a valuable religious icon from his mother.

He was banished repeatedly; first to Tashkent, in Uzbekistan; later to Crimea, and eventually found his way back to Tashkent, where he was instrumental in developing canals, art museums, and irrigation projects. His death in Tashkent in January 1918 was certainly set against the backdrop of the revolution in Russia that swept his family from the throne; his relatives back in St. Petersburg were murdered by the Bolsheviks six months later.

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Upon the death (or departure?) of Russia's Alexander I in 1825, an unusual power struggle developed between his two surviving brothers. The eldest, Constantine, declined the opportunity to take power, leaving Nicholas, the youngest son of Paul I, the only legitimate candidate.

The delay, and apparent passing over of the next in line, prompted an uprising called the Decembrist Revolt, and while Nicholas successfully put it down, the rebellion likely heightened his more autocratic impulses, including the creation of an extensive secret police force whose job was to blot out any and all who might plot against his authority.

His efforts to control all facets of his subjects' lives led to horrifying outcomes. Russian Jews, in particular, were forced into military conscription, and Jewish children were often sent by the state to schools far away from their families and communities, where they could be indoctrinated in an effort at Russification. Strongly opposed to civil liberties and popular revolution, he engaged with Europe largely to back monarchs against their people. After Russia's military incompetence was revealed in the Crimean War, Nicholas died after a 30 year reign when he refused medical treatment for pneumonia. Contemporaries described it as "passive suicide," and a close aid wrote soon after, "The main failing of the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake."

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It's almost a historical accident that England's Queen Victoria, granddaughter of King George III, was born at all. Her father, George III's fourth son, shared his many brothers' predilection for the freedom of a bachelor's life, so when the heir apparent of the next generation, Princess Charlotte, died in childbirth, the princes of England found themselves in a race to marry and produce legitimate offspring to eventually take the crown.

Victoria's father, Edward, Duke of Kent, was high up in the line of succession himself, but having succeeded in marrying and producing Victoria, he promptly died - meaning that there was no chance that he and her mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, could produce a male heir to leapfrog her in the line.

It's safe to say that the sons of George III were a blight on the country and the monarchy, but somehow out of that whole mess, one of Great Britain's finest and most beloved monarchs emerged.

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In the see-saw nature of Russian leadership, Catherine the Great had died before establishing her grandson, the future Alexander I, as her heir, leaving Alexander's father, Paul I, to take the big chair in his stead. This... went poorly for Paul, who was assassinated by a group of his nobles after just four and a half years. Alexander I became Emperor of Russia in 1801, and spent the first part of his reign navigating a complicated relationship with Napoleon Bonaparte's France.

After helping the European alliance to victory in the Napoleonic Wars, he became drawn to mysticism, and gradually seemed to withdraw from interest in the duties of a monarch. When Alexander's wife, Louise of Baden, took ill and required a change of weather in 1825, the couple boarded a train heading south. Stories here diverge; in the official account, Alexander I caught typhus on the journey, dying in the southern town of Taganrog. But another story developed, too, and continues to captivate. A decade later, a mysterious monk named Feodor Kuzmich arrived in Siberia with a knowledge, bearing, and wisdom that grew the legend that the monk was in fact Alexander, having faked his own death to escape the bondage of his title.

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As the long reign of Catherine the Great wound down, she made moves to ensure the succession of her grandson, Alexander, but those were still incomplete by the time she died. Instead, it was her estranged son Paul who became emperor, and while his reign was not long, it was spiteful and much reviled by both the public and the elites. In just four and a half years, Paul I passed nearly 8,000 laws engineered to roll back the achievements and advances made by his mother, who he blamed for his father's death, and plunge Russia backward.

It was only four and a half years before a conspiracy of nobles attempted to depose Paul by forcing him to sign papers of abdication. When he resisted, they beat him to death, leaving the throne to his son Alexander, who had known of the plot for a bloodless coup, and never forgave himself for not interceding in a plot that, in fact, led to his father's murder. We'll be back next week with the mystery of Emperor Alexander I.

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One of history's great ironies is that one of Russia's most successful periods occurred under the leadership of a monarch with not a drop of Russian blood. Catherine II, better known as Catherine the Great, was a minor Prussian princess whose fairly horrible mother set her sights on achieving notoriety through her daughter.

Fortunately for young Catherine (who was born Sophie), Frederick the Great of Prussia had a political project to strengthen ties between his country and Russia, and Russia's Empress Elizabeth needed her heir, the future Peter III, to find a wife, have babies, and continue the Romanov line. All eyes turned to the 16-year-old from Anhalt-Zerbst.

The marriage went poorly, but the real surprise occurred on the death of Empress Elizabeth in 1762. While crowned as Empress Consort to her husband, Peter III, it was only a matter of months before Catherine deposed her husband, forced him to sign an abdication, and became Russia's sole ruler, and the longest-ruling Empress in Russia's history.

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It feels safe to say that when Russians recall a leader's reign as a "dark era," we're into some deeply, deeply dark events. Empress Anna, a niece of Peter the (Not So) Great, had survived many humiliations before Russia's Supreme Privy Council elevated her to Empress; they thought she would be easy to control, but instead, her decade-long reign was characterized by Anna's cruelty and capriciousness. A career of personal vendettas was fueled by her limitless power and a secret police system she stood up to discover and end plots against her.

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For the Dutch Republic, 1672 was a series of existential catastrophes that nearly saw the nation swallowed by France's Louis XIV. But the internal push and pulls that culminated in the brutal murder and partial consumption of the man who'd run the place for a couple of decades actually began much, much earlier, when Martin Luther (perhaps) hammered his Ninety-Five Theses into a church door, sparking a flowering of dissonant thought across Europe, as well as a brutal regime of repression to try to tamp it down.

Across the 80 year struggle for Dutch independence from Spain, a succession of Princes of the House of Orange ably managed the country's political and military affairs. But once the war ended, Dutch nobility preferred to decentralize power through a Republican model of government, putting the House of Orange and its supporters on the margins. This went pretty well, right up until it didn't, and as the calamities of 1672 unfolded, public anger against the longtime administrator of the country, Johan de Witt, grew into the kind of blind rage that leads to dangerous mob violence. In The Hague that August, it led all the way to cannibalism.

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The last couple of years have been a time of enormous change for the House of Windsor, the United Kingdom, and the 14 nations that comprise the Commonwealth, and we are so grateful to be joined by podcasting superstar and Royal watcher extraordinaire Kristen Meinzer to discuss.

When Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022, Prince Charles, England’s longest-serving Prince of Wales, immediately fulfilled the obligation he had waited 73 years to meet: He became King Charles III, and his second wife, the former Camilla Parker Bowles, was coronated Queen alongside him on May 6 of this year.

It’s no secret that Charles and Camilla’s history is… complicated. Kristen walks us through the decades of history behind their 2005 marriage, as well as the toxicity of Camilla’s close friendships with some of the UK’s least savory media personalities.

Check out more of Kristen’s Royal (and more) watching at The Daily Fail podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Pausing from the messiness of Plantagenet England, Alicia takes us on a trip to the east to visit Mother Russia, circa 1700, where the Romanov Tsar Peter the Great was busily acquiring lands, founding cities, and reforming the institutions of a country that - largely through his efforts - would become a major player on the world state for centuries to come. But with those accolades and accomplishments, it's important to recall that the dude was really, really trashy - as his two wives, many mistresses, and romantic rivals would attest to. At least, those whose heads didn't end up in jars.

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