Death at the top

Agatha Christie’s spirit must be loving this poisonous new historical entertainment. Eleanor Herman has already enjoyed the success of Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen, thoroughly researched, gossipy revelations of promiscuity among monarchs and their noble retainers during the Renaissance. She is an American author and broadcaster, born in Baltimore, now living in Virginia, but, at 58, she still concentrates her professional attention on the historic immorality and disastrous vulnerability of western European royalty.

In the Middle Ages, when monarchs commanded virtually absolute power, rivalry for every top job was sufficiently intense to motivate assassination, and the least difficult way to commit it was with poison. As viewed through Herman’s eyes, the age of chivalry was one of ruthless ambition, jealousy and murder. She systematically deromanticises the monarchs, portraying them finally screaming in agony on their soiled deathbeds.

Describing the terminal condition of poison victims, she writes — sometimes overwrites — with clinical precision and scatological excesses. We should not envy 16th-century royalty, she suggests, if we recognise that their ‘most magnificent chambers were befouled by parasites, bacteria, viruses and environmental poison’. Palaces were ‘putrid’, ‘dominions of dung’. ‘Inside those lacquered cabinets were chamber pots brimming with a stinking stew of human waste.’ ‘The castle moat frequently featured floating turds.’

‘To bring you into this world of sublime beauty and wretched filth,’ she promises,

I first investigate the palace poison culture of prevention, protocols and antidotes, followed by chapters on deadly cosmetics, fatal physicians, and the royals’ perilously unhealthy living conditions.

Herman duly recounts 20 case histories of a rich assortment of ill-fated, influential personages, such as Henry VII of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor; Cangrande I della Scala, Italian warlord; Agnès Sorel, mistress of King Charles VII of France; Ivan the Terrible, Tsar of Russia; Grand Duke Francesco I de Medici of Tuscany; Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer and imperial mathematician; Sir Thomas Overbury, royal adviser at the court of James I, and Napoleon Bonaparte.