100 Books I Keep Keeping... 48 Royal Mysteries and Pretenders
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Royal Mysteries and Pretenders by Stanley B R Poole (1969)
This is a very old, very old-fashioned, and rather strange little book.
It was actually in my primary library (though elderly and probably slated for disposal even then) and I remember borrowing it several times, caught by the frisson created by a clash of what is to be honest, competent but dry and very academic writing, and the bunch of stories - lurid, nightmarish, bloodstained and often touched by a layer of pure horror - that are being written about.
But of course when I left school. I didn't see it again... until I was browsing in a book barn in Sydney and ran across it completely by coincidence, and remembered it immediately (which does say something about my usually appalling memory, because as you can see, the cover is hardly memorable).
Starting from the 1480s, it does cover many of the most famous royal stories - the Princes in the Tower, Mary Queen of Scots and the Casket letters, Mayerling, the Romanovs at Ekaterinburg and the claims of Anna Anderson... but also some that were well known but have faded (like the bleak life and mystery of Kasper Hauser), and also several really black-tinged stories of those who paid for being born royal in tragically brutal ways: Charles Louis, the last and oh so tiny Dauphin of France, Philip II of Spain's mad heir Don Carlos, Tsarevitch Alexis of Russia, tortured and probably murdered by his father Peter the Great). In fact many of the right royally grim and most horrible stories - and doom-laden, bloody fates - come from Russia's imperial history, including a couple that would leave what I know of Game of Thrones in the dust, as cool and plain as the telling of them is.
(There is just one lighter one - the story of Stella Chiappini, a rather dotty lady who appears to have been a genuine noble foundling but convinced herself, if no one else, that she was a royal princess. Her claim is, at least to me, close enough to one of Georgette Heyer's early storylines to make me think she'd read about it too... but at least the chapter on Stella makes a much needed breather from all the twisted family ties and terrors that Stanley Poole presents us with everywhere else)
It's an ex-library copy (which library is heavily blacked out, but if it was the same one, it had to have travelled a fair bit) and very fragile, so I keep it carefully in a cupboard with other bookish treasures...