Doomed Queens (49 page)

Answer yes or no.

1. I am married to a powerful man who has had several wives before me.

2. I am married to a powerful man whose previous wives have died under suspicious circumstances.

3. I am married to a powerful man whose previous wives now control major corporations or small countries that serve as tax shelters.

4. I am the single parent of a child.

5. I am the single parent of a child who will inherit money upon reaching legal age.

6. I am the single parent of a child who will inherit a country upon reaching legal age.

7. I am the leader of a country where there is religious unrest.

8. I am the leader of a country where there is political turmoil.

9. I own a large corporation whose shareholders are
very
unhappy.

Is this statement true for you?

I am related to royalty.

Answer Key

SECTION ONE
:
Give yourself 0 points for every a answer you chose; 1 point for every b; 2 points for every c; 3 points for every d.
SECTION TWO
:
Give yourself 2 points for every yes answer, 0 for every no.
BONUS QUESTION
:
Add 4 points if you have royal blood. Total all your points to learn what your risk factor is for becoming a doomed queen.

0 to 9 points:
While you may not be royally inclined, your humility will gain you many years of life.

10 to 19 points:
Blue blood or no, you are more regal than most. Use your powers for good.

20 to 34 points:
Mildly in danger of becoming a doomed queen. But the frisson of anxiety makes you attractive to the masses.

35 to 50 points:
There’s still time to avoid the chopping block. You may live on through infamy, but you’re flirting with doom.

AFTERWORD AND SOURCE NOTES

W
hatever your score on the preceding quiz, I hope that you found the cautionary tales presented in
Doomed Queens
useful for avoiding an unfortunate end. David McCullough wrote that “history is a guide to navigation in perilous times.” If this is true, then too many of the female rulers profiled in this book spent their lives adrift without a compass.

Doomed Queens
has been my most research-intensive publication to date. Tragic queens such as Marie Antoinette or Anne Boleyn fill the terrain of many a PBS pledge drive—but what about lesser-known monarchs such as Cleopatra’s not so loyal sister Berenice or the teenaged and trapped Blanche of Bourbon? Even with the plump resources of research libraries at my disposal, locating the truth about their reigns often proved to be a tricky proposition. I often felt like Nancy Drew (but minus the blue roadster) as I sought the clues that would reveal the fullness of these queens’ sad, but sometimes well-deserved, fates.

Ultimately but not surprisingly, many of these women’s lives were buried as footnotes within the histories of kings and wars and dynasties. The writings of ancient historians such as Appian, Dio Cassius, Herodotus, Jordanes, Plutarch, and Tacitus provided me with intriguing and occasionally contradictory insights into the lives of Cleopatra, Olympias, Boudicca, and their contemporaries. Other queens’ stories hinged on single sources; nevertheless, I decided to include them, since they were too colorful to ignore. The Bible recounted the saga of bad-to-the-bone Athaliah and her mother, Jezebel. The reign of Anula is recorded in the
Mahavamsa
. The
Han Shu
(or
Book of Han
) offered information about the unnaturally truncated reigns of the Chinese empresses of the Han dynasty.

What follows is a severely edited list of works that I consulted as I worked on
Doomed Queens
; a complete bibliography is posted at
www.doomedqueens.com
. And remember, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Bell, Rudolph M.
How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Bradford, Ernle.
Cleopatra.
London, New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Brown, Tina.
The Diana Chronicles.
New York: Doubleday, 2007.

Caillois, Roger. “The Sociology of the Executioner.”
The College of Sociology, 1937–39,
edited by Denis Hollier. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Collingridge, Vanessa.
Boudica: The Life and Legends of Britain’s Warrior Queen.
Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2006.

Davis-Kimball, Jeannine, with Mona Behan.
Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines.
New York: Warner Books, 2002.

DeLorme, Eleanor P.
Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress.
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

Denny, Joanna.
Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England’s Tragic Queen.
New York: Da Capo Press, 2006.

Fraser, Antonia.
Marie Antoinette: The Journey.
New York: Anchor Books, 2002.

———. The Warrior Queens.
New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Frieda, Leonie.
Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France.
New York: Fourth Estate, 2003.

Garland, Lynda.
Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, AD 527–1204.
New York: Routledge, 1999.

Green, Peter.
Alexander of Macedon, 356–323 BC: A Historical Biography.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Herrin, Judith.
Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Lindsey, Karen.
Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII
. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

Massie, Robert K.
Nicholas and Alexandra.
New York: Ballantine Books, 2000.

———.
Peter the Great: His Life and World.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1986.

Parsons, John Carmi, ed.
Medieval Queenship.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Perkin, Joan.
Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England.
London: Routledge, 1989.

Perón, Eva.
In My Own Words: Evita.
Translated by Laura Dail. New York: New Press, 1996.

Robins, Jane.
The Trial of Queen Caroline: The Scandalous Affair That Nearly Ended a Monarchy.
New York: Free Press, 2006.

Seagrave, Sterling.
Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China
. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Sinclair, Andrew.
Death by Fame: A Life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Starkey, David.
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII
. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

Tillyard, Stella.
A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings.
New York: Random House, 2006.

Tyldesley, Joyce A.
Chronicle of the Queens of Egypt: From Early Dynastic Times to the Death of Cleopatra.
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006.

Voltaire.
The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version.
Volume 4. Translated by William F. Fleming. Paris: E. R. DuMont, 1901.

———.
The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version [Ancient and Modern History, V. III France, 1384–Europe, 1599].
Volume 26. Translated by William F. Fleming. Paris: E. R. DuMont, 1901.

Warner, Marina.
The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of Tz’u-hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835–1908.
New York: Atheneum, 1986.

Weir, Alison.
The Children of Henry VIII.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1997.