A royal bummer

ISSUE NO. 33 // A ROYAL BUMMER

Well, this is disappointing.

Last month I tossed out two questions and planned to unveil the answers this month. No luck.

I didn’t have a back up plan, so I’m switching over to a different mystery. This time, I’m not expecting any answers.

For reasons I can’t even imagine, my King George III page is the third most popular page on my website. There’s nothing even there.* In an effort to round out my King George III knowledge, I read Becoming Queen Victoria: The Unexpected Rise of Britain's Greatest Monarch by Kate Williams. It zipped through most of her reign, so I’m sharing some of my favorite royal tidbits from this book, along with some favorites from other books.

Or should I say “favourites”?

Presidential Doodler

* I’ve done none of the stuff that digital/content marketers would recommend. The SEO is terrible. There’s barely any content. Visitors don’t seem to be coming from another page on my website. Nobody even clicks “more” to see related posts. I barely get any traffic from referrals. I didn’t add any alt tags to the image. The page doesn’t have a high Google ranking. And why would it? It only includes three weak bullet points.

Inspired by The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, by Lindsay M. Chervinsky. More here.

Queen Elizabeth

Way before Queen Victoria and before George Washington was the original Queen Elizabeth. She foisted royal visits on people to exert her dominance and/or as punishment. A “royal visit” could meaning hosting and feeding a hundred people for weeks … at the host’s expense.

Washington understood that his visits would be a burden, so he always paid his own way. That meant staying in some pretty crappy, small, dirty public houses with zero privacy, gross food, and bedbugs and lice.

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From Queen Elizabeth, England went to cousins and co-regents Queen Mary and King William, then Queen Mary’s sister Queen Anne, then to George I… which brings us to this family tree, taking us straight through to today:

Wrapping my head around this family wasn’t easy (even though there was a family tree in the book!). I family-treed the heck out of them until I finally got it. Sorta. In any case, it was far too much to include in this post.

See all the trees!

King George I

Queen Victoria’s 3x great grandfather.
Didn’t really even like England. As much as possible, spent his time out of the country
Not popular.
Barely spoke English.
His selling points? Proximity and Protestantism. Impressive LinkedIn profile!
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King George III

Speaking of impressive LinkedIn profiles: King George III wasn’t always able to lead effectively. Or at all. And he lost the colonies. But he was blessed with “easy fertility.”

Inspired by The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington, by Josh Mensch and Brad Meltzer. More doodles here.

George Washington was taunted by a statue of King George from his office. Maybe it looked like this. It probably didn’t. It no longer exists.
Washington’s troops eventually toppled the statue. Perhaps pushed the head around in a wheelbarrow. Or maybe not.
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Princess Charlotte

Princess Charlotte’s doctor decided (whilst she was quite literally growing a human being from scratch!) that she (the heir to the throne!) was eating too much and gettin’ kinda porky. For months, he had her on a starvation diet and bled her regularly.
Shockingly, she was pretty weak after both making life and having hers methodically drained from her by the guy who was supposed to care for her.
She didn’t survive childbirth. And neither did her baby.

Despite King George III’s “easy fertility” and his fifteen kids collectively making 56 offspring… there wasn’t a single eligible heir in the bunch.

After King George III died, Charlotte’s dad King George IV became king.
When George IV died, power went to his brother…

…King William IV…

who wanted to return to his bedchamber when he found out he was king because (wink, wink) he’d “never yet been to bed with a queen.”

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Inspired by Bobs’ Folly: Fulton, Livingston and The Steamboat, by Travis Bowman. More here.

Queen Victoria

I always love when Queen Victoria pops up in presidential biographies, so it was kind of a bummer that not a single president made an appearance in this book. Luckily, I have doodles from other books.

She thought Millard Fillmore was “the most handsome man.”
She and James Buchanan exchanged telegraphs after steamboats laid down the Transatlantic cable.

Decision Points, by George W. Bush

Queen Victoria sent HMS Resolute in search of a missing explorer, but the ship had to be abandoned.

Three years later, the U.S. found the ship. We fixed it up and gave it back to Queen Victoria.
When the ship was decommissioned two decades later, she made desks out of it and gave one to President Rutherford B. Hayes. Yeah, that’s right — it was the Resolute Desk!
FDR requested the door with the seal (the one JFK, Jr. hid behind). I checked with Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum:
- He used the Resolute Desk in the Oval Room, not the Oval Office. (The Roosevelt Library has the actual desk he used in the Oval Office on display. It’s one of only two presidential libraries with the actual desk used in the Oval Office on display. The LBJ Library is the other.)
- The panel may have been requested to hide recording equipment.
- And the door never arrived in time! FDR died before it was finished.

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Inspired by Presidential Grave Hunter: One Kid's Quest to Visit the Tombs of Every President and Vice President, by Kurt Deion. More here. Including a pantsless Eisenhower.

King George & Queen Elizabeth

Sara Roosevelt (FDR’s mom) remodeled one of the nine bathrooms at Hyde Park before the first reigning British monarchs to visit America arrived.
She received a ridiculously high bill after they left. Assuming they were being overcharged either because of their wealth or because of the royal visit, She refused to pay it. The plumber repossessed the toilet and put it in his window with a sign: “the King and Queen of England sat here.'“