Royal Scandals, by Michael Farguhar

I saw this book at work and I thought it'd be interesting but I was a little disappointed to tell the truth. There were a few interesting things in the book but it got a little confusing while I was reading it. Since a lot of the royals had the same name, (Henry, Edward, George, etc.) I was confused about who it was. The format of the book had chapters about different scandals so it would talk about someone in one chapter and then mention them later in the book and it was hard to connect the different scandals to the same person they belonged to. There was also a chapter about how corrupt the Popes were, many had very active sex lives and often bore several children. Here are a few stories that I enjoyed in the book.

Joanna the mad: This is the older sister of Katherine of Aragon (Henry VIII's first wife). She was insanely in love with her husband. She was terribly jealous of her husbands mistresses. After her husbands death she went totally insane. She was so jealous that she would not let any women around her dead husband's body. Periodically she'd have the casket opened so she could embrace her dead husband. As they were moving the body to it's final resting place she refused to stay in a convent full of nuns and instead slept in a field with the casket. Unfortunately there was a lot of inbreeding which produced several crazy and deformed royals from Joanna and her husband. One of the deformities was a severe underbite that was so bad that the king swallowed food whole and it often exited whole because the stomach wasn't able to digest it.

Katherine Howard: Henry the VIII's 5th wife and cousin to Anne Boleyn. She requested to have the block brought to the tower so that she could practice her execution.

Napoleon: Apparently after his death, someone decided to chop off his penis. Right now there is a collector that keeps it in it's own little coffin. It has supposedly shriveled to the size of a pinkie. Gross.

Rasputin: He was a smelly, creepy monk that manipulated Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra. He was known to have hypnotic eyes. When the Prime Minister met Rasputin, he said he kept staring at him with his crazy eyes as if trying to hypnotize him. Finally he told him that his eyes had no effect on him and to stop staring at him. The Tsar's nephew decided he was going to kill Rasputin and invited him over. He fed him poisoned cakes which were supposed to kill him instantly, when it didn't work, they gave him poisoned wine, which didn't work either. He finally shot him in the back. Rasputin fell over and a doctor declared him dead on the spot. A little while later Rasputin jumps up and attacks his murder and chased him around the courtyard. One of the coconspirators shoots at Rasputin as he tries to escape in the shoulder and possibly the head. The group beat him until he lay still, then tied him up, cut a hole in the frozen river and dumped the body in. When his body was found a few days later, his lungs were filled with water showing that he died of drowning, after everything else they had done to him. Talk about evil.

Jane Grey: She was known as "the nine days queen". After Henry VIII died, his son Edward VI from his third marriage was made king. He ended up dying at a young age and conspired with a few people including Jane's parents to bypass his half sisters and make Jane queen when he died. Jane had no desire to be queen and didn't think it was right to steal it from Mary and Elizabeth. Mary was furious and took over anyway and executed Jane, even though Jane sent a letter to Mary saying that it wasn't her idea and would gladly let her be queen. It was said that as Jane's head was being chopped off, her mother was off having an affair with a servant that was 15 years younger.