As the Roaring '20s turned into the '30s, Edwina's appetite for other lovers showed no sign of diminishing, and eventually led to a breaking point with her long-suffering husband, Louis. At one point, they decided that divorce was the best option, but quickly reconciled with new rules for their relationship: Edwina would be more discreet in her dalliances, which had previously been headline news, and Louis would be free to take lovers of his own. But a funny thing happened when he finally did - ...
Feb 22, 2024•40 min•Ep. 47
It didn't take long for Edwina, young, rich, and alone while her husband Louis was away with the Navy, to begin flirtations and then affairs with various suitors. There were the young men of her social strata, to be sure, but there was also a scandalous rumored fling with the notably female American entertainer Sophie Tucker, "The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas." These affairs took a toll on her marriage and her relations with the British Royal Family, but also laid the template for the Mountbatten m...
Feb 15, 2024•41 min•Ep. 46
While Louis and Edwina Mountbatten would have a 38-year-long marriage, it isn't quite right to say it was a happy union. That first six months or so though - when they traveled through Europe and the United States, meeting Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, and dining with President Warren G. Harding - was a magical time for the couple. Once they returned to England and settled into married life, things quickly went sideways. With Louis frequently at sea for long periods as a Naval officer, and ...
Feb 08, 2024•36 min•Ep. 45
As many will already know, it was the youngest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine who would become a prominent figure in the lives of the modern world of the Windsors. Young Louis Battenberg, later Louis Mountbatten, was known as Dickie to his confidants, and was stung early when his father, First Sea Lord of the British Navy, was removed from his post at the outbreak of WWI because of his German origins. The episode would motivate his son to excel in...
Feb 01, 2024•45 min•Ep. 44
Prince George of Battenberg, later the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, was the third child of Louis Battenber and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, and was by all accounts a pretty good dude. Like his father, he set his sights on a naval career, and excelled at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, entering the Royal Navy in time to participate in World War I. His 1916 marriage to Countess Nadajda de Torby, called Nada by her friends, would become a source of significant scandal in 1934, w...
Jan 25, 2024•35 min•Ep. 43
Admit it: you’re obsessed with royal families – watching them, gossiping about them, wanting to be them. It’s the stuff of fantasy. But for real life royals, the crown jewels can be more like shiny handcuffs. There are expectations and rules – and if you break them, the consequences are big, and very public. And no, we’re not just talking about Harry and Meghan. There are royal families and wild royal tales from around the world and throughout history that you have never heard before. From Wonde...
Jan 23, 2024•8 min
The second child of Prince Louis of Battenberg (later, Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven) and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine was Princess Louise, born July 14, 1889. While most royal were promptly shuttled into marriage, Louise was an independent, progressive young woman whose heart was set on marrying for love. There were suitors, to be sure, but Louise was insistent that she would never marry a king or a widower, and of course, that the union be based on love. This led her ...
Jan 18, 2024•32 min•Ep. 42
After Louis Battenberg's (later Louis Mountbatten) successful campaign to marry Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, the couple set about having babies. The first of these, Princess Alice, was born in 1885, and came into the world congenitally deaf. Given the era, no particular accommodations were made for her, and while her condition caused many to underestimate her, she compensated by learning to lip-read (in several languages) and spoke English, German, French, and, later, Greek. Her marr...
Jan 11, 2024•53 min•Ep. 41
While royal houses are often insular and even incestuous (at least at the cousin-marrying level), new blood does manage to enter those gene pools from time to time. Meet the Mountbattens! The family's story begins in Russia, circa 1850, where the orphaned daughter of a Polish general named Julia von Hauke was serving in the household of Maria Alexandrovna, future wife of future Tsar Alexander II. Maria's brother, Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, fell hard for the common-born Julia, a roma...
Jan 04, 2024•37 min•Ep. 40
Eleanor's life was no less interesting following the death of Henry II. Rather than fade into the background, her son, King Richard I, instead made her his most powerful deputy in England while he went to the Holy Land on Crusade. In fact, Richard I was an extremely disinterested monarch and spent very little of his decade-long reign in the country. His brother, the future King John, at one point tried to raise and army and take the crown by force, but his mother put an end to that. Then there w...
Dec 28, 2023•44 min•Ep. 39
After Eleanor finally succeeded in ending her marriage to Louis VII of France, she had a brief turn of wedded bliss to the future Henry II of England. It's not that the marriage was short, just her happiness. Henry II, it turns out, was a king of questionable judgment, as Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket would find out. He was also loathe to cede power to their children, and little was helped when Henry's head was turned by a young noblewoman named Rosamund Clifford - an affair that contri...
Dec 21, 2023•58 min•Ep. 38
History is not without examples of powerful women, to be sure, but even in that pantheon, Eleanor of Aquitaine is a special case. In this first part of her story, Alicia takes us through her early life in the French province of Aquitaine, where her father was the ruling Duke, and her first, disastrous marriage to the future (it turns out by a matter of days) Louis VII of France. A marriage that would, after many unhappy years, be annulled, allowing Eleanor to create one of history's most audacio...
Dec 14, 2023•42 min•Ep. 37
After the unfortunate incident with the boating accident that killed Heir Presumptive William in 1120, King Henry I had a choice to make when it came to succession planning. While he had nephews through his sister and illegitimate children (galore), it was his daughter Matilda, Holy Roman Empress since her arranged marriage at the age of eight, that he tapped to take the throne when he shuffled off his mortal coil. There was a big gathering of nobles to mark the occasion, and in the presence of ...
Dec 07, 2023•43 min•Ep. 36
Today we travel back nearly a millennium to look at three of the sons of William the Conqueror. The first Norman (French) king of England, William of course defeated the English King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, after which he was crowned King of England, but mostly administered the territory from his duchy in Normandy. An early example of remote work, perhaps. William I implemented a plan of succession that ended up causing history-making trouble. His eldest son, Robert, with whom ...
Nov 30, 2023•59 min•Ep. 35
At the turn of the last century, the French Riviera was mostly a winter destination for those in colder climates. It turns out that "fun in the sun" and "playground for the rich" are fairly modern concepts, but in a brilliant real estate move, American actress Maxine Elliott created both. Her waterfront Château de l'Horizon, constructed in 1932, became a veritable clubhouse for the rich, famous, and powerful on both sides of the Atlantic. Alicia takes us through some of the more notable personag...
Nov 22, 2023•58 min•Ep. 34
The House of Grimaldi has ruled the tiny principality of Monaco since January 8, 1297, when Francois "The Spiteful" Grimaldi disguised himself as a monk and knocked on his uncle's castle door, launching a coup. In the violence that followed, according to legend, a woman - possibly a lover of Francois, possibly a witch he had wronged (can't it be both?) - issued a curse that has resonated across the centuries: "Never will a Grimaldi find true happiness in marriage." The Grimaldi family was consid...
Nov 16, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 33
Once their grandmother, Queen Victoria, died in 1901, Ernie and Ducky were finally free to do what everyone sorta kinda understood they should: divorce. But sovereigns don't divorce, so the situation became a scandal in the Royal Houses of Europe, and in Russia, Ernie's sister, Empress Alexandra, blamed Ducky for it all. This became a significant issue for Ducky, who had rekindled her romance with Russian Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich (another first cousin), whose station and nationality meant...
Nov 09, 2023•47 min•Ep. 32
Queen Victoria's efforts to make suitable matches for her dozens of grandchildren was in no way a flawless endeavor. Take today's subjects, for instance. First cousins Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine (nickname: Ernie) and Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (nickname: Ducky), became the subject of intense Royal meddling as Victoria pushed Ernie to propose to Ducky, not realizing that Ernie's interests ran more to the young men employed at his court in Hesse. But the ...
Nov 02, 2023•51 min•Ep. 31
Before he was King Edward VII, Queen Victoria's son "Dirty Bertie" lived a few different lives. There was his endless womanizing and brothel-patronizing, which prompted that nickname, as well as "Edward the Caresser." But after a particular romantic scandal that Queen Victoria blamed for his father's death, Bertie married and fulfilled his duties to the empire to produce heirs (if not to produce a monogamous marriage). Prince Albert Victor was the eldest son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (th...
Oct 26, 2023•31 min•Ep. 29
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had a plan to use their nine children to unite Europe's various monarchies into one big, happy family. Unfortunately for those royal houses, Queen Victoria herself appears to have spontaneously developed a gene mutation for the inherited clotting disorder hemophilia. With son Leopold affected, and two of her daughters as unwitting carriers of the disease, royal houses in Spain, Germany, and Russia all found themselves navigating a new terrain where the potential ...
Oct 26, 2023•17 min•Ep. 30
As we continue looking at the lives and times of Queen Victoria's children and grandchildren, we're going to keep bumping into people who changed the course of human history, often for the worse. But when it comes to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria's first grandchild, events beginning with his breech birth lend a bit of context to emotional and moral deformities that he would inflict on the world in the form of World War I. Wilhelm's mother, Princess Royal Victoria, very nearly died ...
Oct 19, 2023•31 min•Ep. 28
While the thesis of this podcast is that our betters have always behaved badly, there are examples that really take it to the next level. Meet Princess Charlotte of Prussia, the first granddaughter of Queen Victoria, daughter of Princess Royal Victoria, and sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose reputation for using people as pawns became legendary in her own time. From spreading rumors about her many cousins to dim their marriage prospects to hosting sex parties in order to blackmail the participan...
Oct 12, 2023•47 min•Ep. 27
In her first decade and a half on the throne, Queen Victoria was pregnant for more than 40% of it. This was an irony, as she herself disliked the condition of pregnancy, and was no fan of small children, either. And yet, her lusty romance with her husband ultimately produced nine children, and a new project for the English monarchy: using matrimonial ties to stitch Europe into a friendly, peaceful future. Well, it was a nice thought anyway. Aside from producing marriageable offspring, Victoria a...
Oct 05, 2023•44 min•Ep. 26
Crown Prince Rudolf's death left a young daughter in mourning, but her grandfather, Emperor Franz Joseph, stepped into the breech to become guardian of young Elisabeth Marie, future Archduchess. Though the two were close, Elisabeth was a fiery child who balked at convention, much like her father. She cajoled her grandfather into approving her first marriage, a union unsuitable for her rank, but he ultimately relented and allowed Elisabeth to wed Prince Otto of Windisch-Graetz. Otto was as surpri...
Sep 28, 2023•43 min•Ep. 25
Content warning: Suicide This week, we take a little trip over to the Austro-Hungarian Emprire in the latter half of the 19th century to meet one of the more scandalous figures of his age - and a man whose death most likely put the world on the path toward World War I. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria grew up in an emotionally and physically abusive environment, tormented by the military official in charge of his education and ignored by his mother, whose affection he craved. Bookish and forward-t...
Sep 21, 2023•54 min•Ep. 24
We tend to think of Queen Victoria attired in black, with a dour countenance, but as a young queen she was anything but. Her marriage to Prince Albert was the rare love match, and according to her surviving letters and journal entries, the two enjoyed a vibrant intimacy, albeit in an era where birth control wasn't really a thing. The nine children Victoria and Albert produced speaks to that. Then, Alicia has some tales from the more ordinary lives of Victorians in England, most of which evinced ...
Sep 14, 2023•38 min•Ep. 23
Queen Victoria was just 18 when she assumed the throne in the United Kingdom in 1837. She ruled for more than 63 years and is considered truly one of the great monarchs in history, but her reign did not start without a few hiccups. Looking at her first two years on the throne or so, we examine some of the personal politics that played out through the lenses of a few people in her orbit. Sir John Conroy, her mother's comptroller (and possibly lover), had been integral to the much-loathed "Kensing...
Sep 07, 2023•45 min•Ep. 22
We tend to think of royal upbringings as fairly entitled, but for the future Queen Victoria, her childhood was more like a hostage situation. After her father's death when she was just an infant, her mother and (maybe) her mother's lover went to great lengths to control every aspect of her life. Young Victoria was simply never allowed to be alone, including sleeping in her mother's bedroom until the day she became Queen, and was not permitted to walk down stairs without holding the hand of eithe...
Aug 31, 2023•43 min•Ep. 21
In the never-ending see-saw that was Romanov rule in Russia, a truly forward-thinking Tsar finally came to power in 1855. Alexander II accomplished Catherine the Great's never-achieved emancipation of Russia's serfs, among a host of other good-government reforms, leading his newly free and suddenly energized public to call him Alexander the Liberator. Likely influenced by a grand tour of Europe when he was a young man (and during which he and a 20-year-old Queen Victoria may have had a bit of a ...
Aug 24, 2023•27 min•Ep. 20
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...
Aug 17, 2023•28 min•Ep. 19
