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Review by Carolly Erickson
"Kings are not born," George Bernard Shaw once wrote. "They are made by artificial hallucination."
The grand hallucination of monarchical rule has haunted the imagination of Europeans since the Middle Ages, and holds immense sway in our own time.
Journalist Jeremy Paxman surveys this theme in his very entertaining, thought-provoking book On Royalty.
From the lonely King Zog of Albania, who acquired his throne by answering an advertisement, to the murderous Ivan the Terrible who beat his own son to death with a cane to the unfortunate Charles I of England who was executed at the hands of his subjects, Paxman discusses the entire gamut of monarchs—“good, bad, saintly, lecherous, wise, stupid, athletic or indolent.”
Though kings and queens have ruled for centuries, they have been drawn from a smaller and smaller gene pool. Inbreeding, Paxman writes, has produced a good many fools and monsters, among them such curious specimens as King Carlos II of Spain. That startling monarch had an enormous, misshapen head that made him look as if he had been hit by a sledgehammer; among his other malformations were diseased bones, a dysfunctional nervous system and a tongue so large he could not speak coherently.
Paxman is an exceptionally engaging writer whose prose sparkles. Urbanity of tone lightens the more somber aspects of the tale he tells. He writes with nostalgic affection of England's 40-odd monarchs since 1066, some of them heroic, some truly magisterial, but quite a few condemned to die violently through disembowelment, murder, or loss of life in battle.
Paxman devotes quite a few pages to the "Prince Charles problem," the irritating inability of the current heir to the British throne to "surrender his personality to the exigencies of his task." The prince's image as a "spoilt, talking-to-the-trees grumbler" has lowered the monarchy in public esteem. Yet Charles' beloved first wife Diana was the object of so much love and admiration that when she died, the public outpouring of grief was unprecedented in its sincerity and scope, and some two and a half billion people watched her funeral on television.
Monarchy is "antique, undemocratic and irrational," says Paxman. The royals are eccentric rather than representative specimens of humanity, their lives far removed from the common experience of humankind. Yet they are needed. However selfish, boorish, feckless, courageous, or admirable, the royals are symbols of certainty, constancy, and devotion. They are a living connection with the past. Through them, their subjects are brought close to history, and experience an upwelling of emotion unknown to dwellers in democracies.
Dream or hallucination, artificial or real, the royals still cast a spell over the collective mentality of much of the world, Paxman says. And having dreamed the royal dream, the monarchs' faithful subjects remain, for the most part, unlikely to awaken any time soon. In On Royalty, Jeremy Paxman chronicles the lives and times of these extraordinary rulers with wit, erudition, and grace. 384 pages • 6 1/8" x 9 1/4"
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