The Raucous Royals: Test Your Royal Wits: Crack Codes, Solve Mysteries, and Deduce Which Royal Rumors Are True (review)

Thirteen beliefs about rulers receive an acerbic and irreverent interrogation in this blend of royal-watching and skeptical investigation. The royal rumors, arranged chronologically, start with the real story behind Prince Dracula and Richard III’s murderous ways, stopping en route at Napoleon’s short stature and Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” utterance, and finish up with Catherine the Great’s death and King George III’s madness. The book ducks what would seem to be the main point of the Catherine the Great legend (the sexual component is never mentioned) but otherwise offers an interesting mixture of the false, true, and unprovable. Lively style, picture-book format, and varied layout with novel approaches such as fictional academic arguments (pro and con for Richard III), quizzes, and codes add interest, and underneath the amusements is genuine examination of the way partisanship and gossip can codify rumor into truth over the years. Illustrations slyly play with historical images, with, for instance, the familiar portraits of Henry VIII’s six wives tweaked to make them snapshots of emotional response, while the best-known single portrait of Anne Boleyn alters the details to caricature her according to rumors. The energy and gleefully gossipy nature makes this a fine companion for Krull’s Lives of . . . series, while its verve particularly recommends it as an entrée into historiography and critical thinking. A closing section on “How You Can Research a Rumor” gives guidelines, and endnotes and a divided bibliography are included.