I have a moderate interest in the European royalty of centuries past kind of in the same way I have a moderate interest in Australia--it's entirely composed of things that are so completely alien to me and so radially different than anything I have ever experienced before that it's fascinating to think that for a good many real people, that was and remains 'normal'.
But it's just a small amount of interest and I don't spend a lot of my time scouring books and articles for whatever scraps of information I can find about Queen Awkwardia VIIXICML of Derpland or anything like that. They start to meld together in my mind unless they distinguish themselves in some way or another, not least because there seemed to be this really intense desire to make sure everybody all had the same three or four names. (Think about it--you could probably account for a good chunk of England's kings with just four names: Henry, George, James, Richard. English queens could probably make do with only three: Catherine, Anne, Mary. Add numerals to taste, garnish with fresh surnames.) Another reason my interest doesn't intensify is because--and this might come as a surprise to some people--royal lives are fucking boring. There's this hugely romanticized and largely fantastical collective delusion a lot of people, a lot of whom might also be women-people I venture, have about what royal life was like. Here's what it was like: you were never alone at any point in your entire life, every decision was made for you by somebody else, you had no control over your own fate, you were expected to dutifully uphold an impossible standard of behaviour and appearance, produce heirs that survived to adulthood (no half-points for making a boy if he doesn't live!), and participate in as much or as little of the actual governing of the actual normal people as is expected of you at any given time and is subject to change without notice.
Without complaining.
Plus there was always the possibility that you could be left with a kingdom full of problems caused by all the idiots before you and if you didn't fix it completely they would revolt and then you'd be screwed and have to take all the blame for everything. And then they chopped your head off because fuck you, Queenie.
And that was provided you made it to adulthood yourself, didn't die in childbirth, and the husband someone else picked for you didn't turn out to be homosexual or give you syphilis from one of his many mistresses--all circumstances that happened a lot more often than most people realize.
So, yeah, royal life wasn't as great as most people think it was. If things went wrong they went really wrong, and even when things went well your life consisted of pretty much nothing more exciting than gossip. You know why every successive royal couple built new castles all over the place when there were already perfectly good ones available to use? Because they were fucking bored and building a castle was a complicated and lengthy undertaking that would at least occupy some of their otherwise totally monotonous lives.
And if all that isn't a big enough deterrent for you, consider this: if you were a member of a royal family, you were probably aggressively ugly.
Because--by the way--you would be the product of many centuries of dedicated cousin marriage and you would have to continue with that proud tradition yourself by marrying a relative and producing increasingly atrocious-looking children with them. Some of them probably had webbed feet and extra fingers and everything. Turns out that cousins marrying was actually a really bad idea, but by the time anyone thought to stop doing it the royals were all pretty offensively unattractive and the boys kept turning out to have hemophilia thanks to all that cousin-fucking. Well done, everyone, you couldn't have screwed your descendants over any better if you tried.
Obviously it's not entirely fair to render opinions on eighteenth-century beauty standards with a 21st-century bias--what one generation considers attractive usually inspires hysterical laughter from the next. Across the passage of centuries conventional beauty has undergone so many radical redefinitions that the surviving portraits all represent an ideal so far from our own that it might as well have originated on another planet.
But I'm going to do it anyway.
The thing you have to realize about the portraits painted of royals--and nobility of any kind, but especially with royalty--is that they weren't painted to be accurate. They were painted to be as flattering as possible and assure that their image would be preserved in the best possible light, even if it meant walking the thin line between 'artistic license' and 'outright dishonesty'. Not that too many painters were tempted to do otherwise when the guy they were painting had the authority to sentence them to death if they decided to go for a little more realism and depict the king's excessive ear hair and acne problem. You'd have to have a real artistic hard-on for realism to decide a risk like that was worth taking.
Knowing that, you start to see all those royal portraits a bit differently. Let's be honest here, shall we? The people in those portraits are definitely not pretty. Sometimes they look like they could be, but the effect is ruined with subtle--but arresting--irregularities in their features. Something is off about these portraits and you don't know exactly what it is. Somehow, though, it all just doesn't seem quite right.
What doesn't seem quite right about the portraits is that they're still not actually very flattering. And yet the paintings met with the approval of the subject or else they wouldn't have been kept, which leaves us with only one question to ask:
Exactly how ugly were these people in reality that their most flattering pictures could look like this and it was still the best job anybody could do?
In all it just sort of brings all of those princess fantasies you've secretly held onto crashing down to earth like a skyscraper demolition. Reality bites sometimes, doesn't it?
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