Notorious Royal Marriages

A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

By: Leslie Carroll

Narrated by: Leslie Carroll

From the author of American Princess: The Love Story of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry comes a funny and delightful history of the royal weddings and marriages of Europe’s most famous—and infamous—monarchs.

Since time immemorial, royal marriages have had little to do with love—and almost everything to do with diplomacy and dynasty. Clashing personalities have joined in unholy matrimony to form such infamous couples as Russia’s Peter II and Catherine the Great, and France’s Henri II and Catherine de Medici—all with the purpose of begetting a male heir. But with tensions high and silverware flying, kings like England’s Henry II have fled to the beds of their nubile mistresses, while queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine have plotted their revenge …

Full of the juicy gossip and bad behavior that characterized Royal Affairs, this book chronicles the love-hate marriages of the crowned heads of Europe—from the Angevins to Charles and Di—and ponders how dynasties ever survived at all.

©2010 Leslie Carroll (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Great story-horrible accents

The stories are great. The narrator's attempts to do the various accents is annoying at best. I wish more narrators understood that we don't need them to sound in a different accent for each character if it's not their natural accent.

Wtf with the accents

The attempt at quotes using various accents and pronouncing names and places with accents is so bad, it makes the book almost unlistenable. It makes it very hard to focus on the story. The accents are downright awful and distracting.

Most enjoyable!

Lots of little juicy tidbits you won’t hear on a documentary on The History Channel. Makes you wish that Queen Victoria’s diaries and letters hadn’t been edited by her daughter or that Czarina Alexa hadn’t destroyed her diaries and love letters.

Horrible accents

Just read the book. Please spare
us these terrible accents. It’s totally cringe worthy. Would prefer an English narrator.

Absolute inaccurate bs

Inaccurate British history written by an American, no doubt from what they learned on Netflix.
Frankly I’m shocked, it’s so inaccurate. Like she takes a shocked, huffy stance that “Ferdinand USURPED Joanna’s crown in Castile.”
Except…that’s literally what Isabella, the previous Queen and mother of Joanna, wanted….the crown passed to Joanna’s son Charles, just as it was supposed to. But the author excuses it all, saying:
“Her behaviour was not without reason”. Um.
The woman threw herself against walls in a rage because of her husbands’ infidelity, and traveled with his corpse because she couldn’t be parted from him.
She has excuses for this, too, all of them….not only wrong, but utterly illogical. Carroll apparently didn’t bother to study succession politics of the time, or even use some basic critical thinking.
Richard III’s section was also facepalmingly inaccurate, and she quotes Vives as a reliable source!!! You know….except the fact no historian takes his work remotely seriously, except to understand what the Tudors wanted from their rewrite of history….. I guess Netflix didn’t cover that, huh, Leslie?
She does her own narration, using WILDLY cringey and offensive “accents”.
DNF