Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp Through the Extramarital Adventures That Rocked the British Monarchy: Leslie Carroll

Celebrities’ behaving badly is, and always has been, a favorite subject of the masses. Before we had misbehaving actresses in coke-pants and singers shaving their heads, there existed the greatest and most titillating celebrity of all: the randy royalty. In Royal Affairs Leslie Carroll offers some insight behind the closed doors of the last thousand years of England's busiest, bed-hopping and head-lopping kings and queens.

The author takes a nicely divided tour of the times, breaking each section down by crown i.e.; Angevin's, Plantagenet's, Lancaster and York, etc. A short bio of the royal is given along with a roll call of the most important and/or influential lovers in their lives. After that she goes into greater detail about the royal and each individual lover. The anecdotes are often amusing, sometimes hilariously so as in the case of Nell Gwyn, the lowborn mistress of Charles II. When her carriage was stopped in the street by a mob who thought it was the hated French mistress her response was to pop her head out and cheerily respond "Pray good people, be civil. I am the Protestant whore!" The section on Nell Gwyn alone makes this book worth reading. Then there was Edward II who, at his wedding dinner to the beautiful Isabella of France, spent the entire dinner making out with his "friend" Piers Gaveston, a commoner!

The tone of most offerings is salacious and gossipy as one would expect such a book to be but the history isn't bad for all that. The author appears to have done her research. Some of the anecdotes are quite heart-wrenching though, as in the case of William of Orange; though he did maintain mistresses, at the end of his life it appeared the he had truly loved his bland and arranged bride Mary. This was a truly enjoyable read and I must say that if you're hungry for gossip, you're much better served getting it here then looking for it in the vapid whores that currently haunt the tabloids right now.
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Paperback: 464 pages
Publisher: NAL Trade (June 3, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0451223985
ISBN-13: 978-0451223982