Royal Babylon by Karl Shaw

Everyone is fascinated with the doings of Royalty, but few people know the true histories of the royals, or their deepest secrets: Drug use, Philandering, Kleptomania, Gross incompetence, Naivety and the worst of all, madness, compunded out of a brew that includes a limited gene pool and inbreeding caused by the conviction that only Royals were fit to breed with other Royals.

What this led to was families massively inbred, where madness reigned and genetic diseases such as Hemophillia were passed around through the marriage of one royal carrier to others. Queen Victoria was a carrier of the Hemophilliac gene, and her aggressive marrying of her daughters into other royal families, themselves carriers of the gene deadly in males, had consequences that affected the Royal families of at least three other countries, including Russia and Spain.

But Hemophillia isn't the only thing to be passed down through Royal families, and the amount of covering up of Royal legacies is nearly criminal. From rulers who were certifiably insane to those who viewed the world as their brothel and any woman they saw as fair game, to those who drank and debauched their way through the world, dying at early ages of dissipation and worn out bodies from their heroically profligate lifestyle, Royal Babylon outs them all, telling their stories of life and death in ways that will shock, titilate and horrify readers who only usually get to hear the sanitized versions of royal lives.

The last chapters of the book are dedicated to the British Royal Family, and show how a group of mostly-German monarchs managed to remake themselves to seem completely British after World War I. Names were changed (The House of Hanover became the House of Windsor, the Von Battenbergs became the Mountbatten Family) and lies were told to make the ruse complete, which has then been accepted by the world at large.

Reading this book is titilating, yes, but it's also sickening. Sadly, for most Royals, by the time they realized the problem, it was already too late to change the family legacy of madness and inbreeding. There were no royal families unaffected by problems with sanity, and since most, if not all, royal males must pass on their genes by siring children, even the most insane, ugly, inbred royal families are able to pass on the genes that in a normal family would die out for lack of issue. Even trying to pick the less insane or inbred members of the family, even if they are extremely ugly, dwarfish and have the manners and morals of a ravenous dog in heat, don't change the genes that they came from, which will be passed on to their children.

The chapters on the British Royal Family are the most enlightening, since these are the ones that are still mostly extant in the world today, or at least the most visible, being that they still have a place in British Government (albeit a mostly ceremonial one). In this book, you will learn things about the Royal Family that you never knew nor expected existed, from Queen Mary's Kleptomania to the abdicated King Edward's admiration for Adolf Hitler, and his belief that if he had been on the throne at the time of World War II, Britain would have supported Hitler, not the Allies. Although he and his wife Wallace Simpson lived in France when the Nazis invaded, they fled to Spain, and would have stayed there had not Winston Churchill threatened them. In the end, they went to Jamaica for the duration of the War, but kept in contact with Hitler through a Spanish Ambassador up until the very end of the War. Unbeknownst to many, if Hitler had won the war, he would have placed Edward back on the throne of England as a puppet king, with Wallace as his Queen.

This is a fascinating, if in a horrible way, book, and anyone who enjoys reading about the Royal Family of Britain, or even any royals at all, will find lots of fascinating stuff in it. I highly recommend it, even if reading it gives you the mental equivalent of a stomachache. While most of it is highly repellent, seeing what the Royal Families of Europe were really like is a true eye-opener, and will make you glad that most of them have gone the way of the Dodo.