Colin Crosby Heritage Tours

Kings, Queens, Bones and Bastards

An intriguing, fascinating and very useful book by David Hilliam is "Kings, Queens, Bones and Bastards".

It is subtitled "Who`s Who in the English Monarchy from Egbert to Elizabeth II", and answers such questions as "Who invented the House of Windsor as a Royal name?", "Westminster Abbey?", "Which king had twenty five illegitimate children?" and many others, quite a lot of them pretty scandalous.

The book is in four main sections.

"Kings and Reigning Queens of England" tells the stories of the English monarchs, both the well known facts and sometimes the less known ones.

"Queens and Consorts" details all the wives of kings, and of course the husbands of queens.

"Royal Bones" looks into what happened to the remains of monarchs after their deaths. This is often straightforward, but sometimes not, and sometimes quite ghastly.

"Royal Mistresses and Bastards" is obviously the most titivating of all the sections. Naturally, it is probably incomplete, in view of the sometimes desirable secrecy, but details all the known mistresses of kings, as well as the dallyiances of queens, and their known illegitimate offspring.

This section ends with Edward VIII.

Posted by colin on Thursday 14th January, 2010 at 9:25am