Trashy Royals

Long a vassal state to its much larger neighbors, Belgium only became independent in 1830, at which time it decided that what it really needed was a (constitutional) monarchy! Its first king, Leopold I, earned the gig by virtue of being born a Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld prince who had cultivated his relationships with Europe's royal houses during a distinguished military career. Like his son, he was not a paragon of family values, which prompted his second wife, Louise of Orleans, to lash out at their children.

When Leopold II succeeded his father in 1865, he was hot to trot in acquiring colonial possessions, something that his father had attempted to achieve but never managed to. This led to a world-changing catastrophe and a crime of truly historic proportions. Leopold II engineered a private scheme by which he became the sole owner of the territory that is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he essentially enslaved the population and forced them to pillage their own land - rubber and ivory were especially valuable at the time - for his enrichment. Failure to meet quotas was punishable by death. Rape, mutilations, destruction of settlements, and taking workers' families as hostages to force them to work harder were all common.

Leopold was savvy enough to recognize that this state of affairs wouldn't fly with the public in Belgium, so he invested heavily in a propaganda effort to mask the reality on the ground. For the average person in Belgium, the stories of the Christianization of the people of the Congo and the improving social and economic conditions there supported their king's enterprise entirely. Meanwhile, writers and journalists around the world began to realize through their own travels what was really going on. But even millions of deaths, a horrifying population-wide immiseration, and the slimy personal enrichment Leopold had attained through those practices didn't cause the Belgian Parliament to rush to correct the situation. It wasn't until 1908, a year before Leopold's death, and decades into his brutal domination of the Congolese people, that Belgium's elected government took control of what would become the Belgian Congo, and later, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

His involvement with the Congo wasn't the only thing damaging Leopold's image at home. He was a terrible husband to his wife, Queen Marie Henriette, and at the age of 65, in 1899, very publicly took a 16-year-old mistress who he lavished with money and properties around Europe, including the famous Villa Leopolda.

Listen ad-free at ⁠patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast⁠.

To advertise on this podcast, reach out to ⁠[email protected]⁠.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the outcomes of the 20th century's two world wars was the widespread abolition of monarchies across Europe. Some of these events were brutal, as in Russia, but others, like Italy, happened bloodlessly and through the popular will.

After a long reign that saw the Kingdom of Italy enthralled by Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship, World War II, and King Victor Emmanuel III aiding and abetting it all, the Italian people were exhausted. In an effort to preserve the institution, Victor Emmanuel III abdicated in 1946, elevating his son, Umberto II and his wife Marie-Jose of Belgium, to the throne.

A referendum on the future of the monarchy was already scheduled, so Umberto and Marie-Jose, whose marriage had been uniquely unhappy, barnstormed the country trying to salvage public opinion and hang onto their thrones. It didn't work; by a 54-46% vote, Italians chose to create the Republic of Italy, and the reign of King Umberto II and Queen Marie-Jose ended after just over a month. They and their four children were exiled to Portugal, but it wasn't all bad news. After all, the independent and curious Marie-Jose had been strategically wed to a dullard who happened also to be gay. Once free of her role as anybody's Queen, she left Umberto on the Portuguese Riviera and took the kids to a new life in Switzerland and never looked back.

Unfortunately, their one son, Vittorio Emanuele, did not exactly live his best life in the aftermath of it all. While just a child when the monarchy ended, he had a strained relationship with his father, fell into arms dealing and shady international finance as an adult, and managed to get himself into - and out of - serious legal trouble a number of times.

Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you worried that royal houses had gotten a little too genteel by the 19th century, the story of Ranavalona I of Madagascar will disabuse you of that pretty quickly. Seizing the throne in 1828 after the death of her husband, King Radama - despite not being the rightful heir to it - she immediately launched a campaign of murder against her political rivals and potential successors, and summarily ended friendly relations with European nations, including expelling missionaries who had established schools. She didn't merely promote the local customs and faith traditions of the Malagasy people; she eventually banned the practice of Christianity entirely and executed those who practiced it. In fact, she executed a lot of people, in a variety of creative ways, and historians believe that in her 33-year reign of terror, she depopulated Madagascar by about half. It's no wonder that she's considered Madagascar's Bloody Mary, and Madagascar's Caligula.

Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When she assumed the throne in 1558, she made it clear to the members of her court that they shouldn't plan to have their wives or female companions around the place. She intended to be singular as she consolidated power, but perhaps she had another motive as well; by banishing the wives, Robert Dudley, newly appointed Master of the Horse to Her Majesty the Queen, was not required to send for his wife, Amy Robsart, to join him in London.

Elizabeth and Robert were not overly discreet in their enjoyment of one another's company, while the young queen's advisors, especially William Cecil, her Secretary of State, grew more and more insistent that Elizabeth find a suitable strategic marriage to enter into with some titled European. This, of course, was not to be. Her relationship with Robert became such a scandal that Cecil himself decided it would cause her government to fall, and everything carried on very precariously until the morning of September 8, 1560, when Amy Robsart was discovered dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs at her home at Cumnor Place. The scandal banished Robert from court for more than a year, and while he and Elizabeth would remain close for the rest of his life, the intense romance that characterized the beginnings of her reign was over.

Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While Queen Elizabeth I of England famously never married, her close relationship with Robert Dudley began when the two were small children together in the court of Henry VIII. Elizabeth was a princess who was downgraded to a lady after her mother, Anne Boleyn's, death. Robert was the grandson of an advisor to King Henry VII who was executed for treason upon the ascension of Henry VIII, forcing the Dudley family to struggle mightily to rehabilitate its noble image at court.

All of which is to say that these two could really relate to each other, tossed about as they were by their families' fortunes and the whims of a King both had reasons to love and hate. But when Mary I seized the throne in 1553, everything changed for both of them. Robert's father had engineered the ascension of Lady Jane Grey, his daughter in law, to the throne over Henry VIII's eldest daughter, Mary, and after The Nine Days' Queen was deposed, the male Dudleys were imprisoned in the Tower of London, condemned to death.

Catholic Mary also imprisoned her protestant half-sister Elizabeth, fearing a credible challenge to her reign. Alicia imagines - with the help of some Taylor Swift lyrics - what the months Elizabeth and Robert spent together in The Tower must have been like, doomed as they both believed themselves to be, confidants since they were toddlers.

Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a big week for Tortured Poets, so we decided to take a long look at history's most famous one: William Shakespeare himself. Alicia explores the mystery around the true identity of the author of some of the world's most famous pieces of literature. Was it really the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon penning Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and all the sonnets, or was that a convenient pseudonym for someone else, or a group of someone elses?

Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Taylor Swift launches her latest era with The Tortured Poets Department, Alicia dives into her favorite era: Tudor England. We explore the 17 surviving love letters that King Henry VIII penned during his courtship and early relationship with Anne Boleyn in the latter half of the 1520s, particularly noting that for quite a long time, it seems like Anne wasn't really that into him.

Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

However much 'protocol' may attempt to intervene, the truth is that eccentricity is a trait that even royals have. This is certainly the case for Elisabeth of Wied, a German princess who became Romania's first queen, wife of Romania's King Carol I.

Politics in Europe were extra complex in the latter half of the 19th century. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II had concluded his father's Crimean War in 1856, but even with the defeat of Russia in the conflict, the Ottoman Empire was in retreat. As Ottoman influence waned, former vassal states, including what would become modern Romania, were shaped by the other great powers and their own internal politics, which led to the unification of several formerly Ottoman principalities into what is now Romania.

And what does a newly independent player on the European stage need? A royal house, of course! And wouldn't you know it - the Germans had so many of those lying around that it was easy pickings to find some stuffy but qualified guy to 'elect' king. King Carol I was both a liberalizing influence on the new nation's politics, as well as personally fastidious and, according to accounts, quite humorless.

Which must have been tough on his wife, Elisabeth, a flamboyant writer with an artist's temperament who is better known by her nom de plum, Carmen Sylva. She was enough of a handful in the Romanian court that her husband once exiled her back to Germany for a couple of years, from which she sent letters to the Romanian Crown Prince's wife, Marie of Edinburgh, that she hoped Marie's forthcoming baby would turn out to be a girl!

Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The fourteenth century was full of challenges to marital bliss, especially for nobles. Travel was complicated, especially during times of war, but royal houses still needed to cement alliances through marriage - often among woefully young princes and princesses who, again, were separated by vast distances and perhaps had never met.

So it was for Portugal's young prince Pedro, born 1320. Proxy-married to Constanza Manuel, a Castillian noblewoman, the union was made so Portugal's king, Alfonso IV, could register his disdain for the ruler of Castile, King Alfonso XI. Yes, it's a little confusing. And also, there was a war on in Europe, so it would be five long years before young Constanza could safely make the journey to Portugal to meet her young husband. For Pedro, encountering his bride for the first time was an experience of fireworks and butterflies - because of the presence of her lady-in-waiting, Inês de Castro, a Galician noblewoman with whom he fell madly in love.

This was obviously not an ideal situation for anyone, and while various machinations were tried to end the affair between Pedro and Inês, it was genuinely true love, with an extremely tragic and violent eventual outcome that lives on as a story of deep cultural resonance in Portugal to this day.

Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We touched on England's King George IV in our episode about Queen Victoria's Trashy Hanoverian Uncles (episode 17), but there's so much more to the story of his misspent youth and his cataclysmic marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. To help out, we asked our friend Sam from the podcast I'm Horrified!, who recently delivered this banger of a story over there.

The daughter of King George III's eldest sister, Caroline was raised in the German duchy of Braunschweig, or Brunswick in English. Her family situation was fraught; while her parents remained married throughout their lives, her father's undisguised and longstanding mistress made for difficult family dynamics, where a kind interaction with one parent led to rebuke and allegations of disloyalty from the other.

Upon meeting her soon-to-be new husband, Crown Prince George of England, the antipathy was mutual. Not only was George already illegally married, he also openly brought his mistress (to be clear, these are two separate women) to their introductory dinner. That would set the stage for the rest of Caroline's life.

They managed to have one child, Princess Charlotte, but quickly agreed to live separate lives at separate residences due to their mutual disdain. George seems to have spent a good amount of time trying to dirty his estranged wife's reputation, but she was quite popular with the public, especially balanced against his poor reputation as a drunkard and wastrel. Propaganda campaigns were waged against one another in the press and in Parliament, and as King George III's health deteriorated and Crown Prince George's power grew, Caroline left the country.

Her travels across Europe and the Holy Lands with a handsome Italian servant set tongues wagging everywhere, but when George III died in January 1820, Caroline realized that she had to return to England if she had any hope of blunting her husband's power - he was king now, and she was queen - and asserting any of her own. But it didn't go that way; George's mission with his new throne was to exclude his wife from everything and try to formally strip of her titles. Because of his own rampant infidelity, divorce was out of the question, but perhaps poisoning wasn't?

Thanks so much to Sam for sharing this banger of a story. Listen to new episodes of I'm Horrified! every Tuesday!

Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices