Royal watchers eagerly await Finding Freedom, the book from authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand that tells Harry and Meghan’s side of the story about their evolution as the British monarchy’s maverick power couple. Though Harry and Meghan have said they did not contribute to the book, rumors abound that the Sussexes and their friends may have helped in exposing the book’s insider secrets. If so, they are following a long tradition of royals (usually women) taking their narrative into their own hands.
Whether in the form of autobiography or through others, royals have written their often shocking side of the story for centuries—be it for money, revenge, love of their public, familial healing, or to convince future chroniclers that they were on the right side of history.
The Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois
Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615) knew a thing or two about the importance of public relations and self-preservation. She was the daughter of King Henry II of France and the legendary Catherine de’ Medici, and a Queen Consort through her scandalous marriage to King Henry IV of France and Navarre. A fashionable, witty stateswoman and protofeminist, she was lampooned and vilified in print during her lifetime and in the centuries following, most notably by Alexandre Dumas in the novel La Reine Margot.
In her Memoirs, Marguerite explains that her then revolutionary decision to write her life story stemmed from a need to clear up false reporting she had read about herself. In doing so, she left a remarkable document covering 17 turbulent years of royal family feuds, massacres, civil war and religious unrest, and a defiant and adaptable spirit who stood up to her scheming mother and brother’s threat of a whipping with the words: “Well, get me whipped if you can; I will suffer whipping, and even death, rather than be damned.”
In adulthood, even her imprisonment during familial turmoil was put to good use. She writes:
I had found a secret pleasure, during my confinement, from the perusal of good books, to which I had given myself up with a delight I never before experienced. I consider this as an obligation I owe to fortune… in order to prepare me, by such efficacious means, to bear up against the misfortunes and calamities that awaited me.
There would be misfortunes aplenty, including wars, extramarital affairs, exile, failed schemes, annulment of her marriage to Henry in 1599, and his assassination in 1610. But the queen’s memoirs, posthumously published in 1628, display a clear-sighted, hard-bitten wisdom. “Envy and malice are self-deceivers,” she writes, “and pretend to discover what no one else can perceive.”
The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
Half self-serving propaganda, half frank how-to manual for surviving the most brutal of royal courts, The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (first published in 1859) have a little bit of everything, including the perfect cure for sunburn—a potion composed of lemon, egg white, and eau de vie.
Willed to her son Paul, the memoir details Catherine’s first 18 years at the treacherous Russian Court of Empress Elizabeth, when she was just a young German princess married to Peter III, the mentally ill heir to the Romanov crown. Although busy ruling Russia as the ultimate enlightened dictator from 1762 to 1796, Catherine seemed obsessed with reliving the trauma of these early years, rewriting her memories repeatedly throughout her reign.
Her husband Peter is presented as an unbalanced, cruel husband who beat his hunting dogs, played with toy soldiers, and drunkenly cavorted with his “little hunchback” of a mistress. Once Peter even hanged a rat, “with all the ceremony of an execution,” because it had eaten two papier-mâché soldiers standing atop a carboard fortress.