Royals Biography, Rumours, and the Race to Reframe the Dead
- David Salariya
- Jul 30
- 13 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
CROWNS, CODSWALLOP & CLICKBAIT:
Why Royal Biography is the
Flimsiest Genre in the Literary Court
Royal Biography as Diagnosis, Not Discovery
According to a shocking new biography of the Princess Margaret, she suffered an 'invisible disability' linked to alcohol. So was the Queen Mother's drinking in pregnancy really to blame for Margaret's troubled life?
It used to be enough to say a royal had a secret in a royal biography. Now it seems, it must be a diagnosis. Gone are the days of discretion, deference, or footnotes. Today’s royal biographer is more likely to show up with a psychological toolkit and a flair for the forensic, sometimes more pathologist than historian.
Of course, royal gossip is hardly new. You can hardly walk into the thick walls of Glamis Castle, the Queen Mother's ancestral home in Scotland, without hearing of the alleged "disabled child, locked in a secret room", the Queen Mother’s supposed disabled relation, hidden from public view. Or the outlandish theory (revived every decade or so) that her mother was in fact the cook. Add in the ancient Macbeth legend, with Duncan slain somewhere on the third floor of Glamis Castle (where the housekeeper used to polish the stain with Cardinal Polish), and you’ve got the perfect backdrop for every kind of courtly ghost, literal or literary.
But something has changed. The rumours are no longer just family whispers or sidebars in popular history. They’re becoming the spine of entire biographies, bolstered not by new documents but by emotional inference and diagnostic fashion. So not only do we have an author imply that the Queen Mother was a closet alcoholic who damaged her daughter in the womb. Another hinted that Edward VIII - the Duke of Windsor might have been autistic. A third proposed that Prince Harry suffers from intergenerational trauma so potent it practically
counts as a title.
What we’re seeing isn’t just gossip, it’s the rise of speculative royal biography, fuelled by modern diagnosis culture, clickbait journalism, and publishers hungry for the next big reveal (or scandal). And all too often, the press obliges them, asking no hard questions, running no background checks.
Once the domain of archivists and copious footnotes, this genre is being reshaped by diagnosis, pathologising, and speculative psychology we have also seen this week a book alleging Queen Victoria, bore a secret child with John Brown, which seems to have been taken all the way to New Zealand. And Anne Boleyn, if the latest TikTok-generation theories are to be believed, was neurodivergent, misunderstood, and probably misdiagnosed in her own time too.
These stories aren’t emerging from scholarly journals or old university libraries. They’re coming from publishers and being amplified uncritically by journalists, arts editors, and weekend features sections. Biographical storytelling has collided with the culture of diagnosis, and what’s emerging is something altogether more slippery, a genre that flatters its readers with scandal, speculation, and the promise of insight without the burden of proof.
And the press is letting it happen without question.
From Crawfie to Harry:
The Price and Power of Royal Memoir
When Marion Crawford's book The Little Princesses was published in 1950, she became the first royal insider to cross the invisible line between discretion and disclosure. Once a trusted governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, Crawford’s reward for her candour was exile. No royal wreath was sent to her funeral in 1988.
Her tale was a cautionary one: proximity to power did not confer the right to narrate it.
But the rules would change.
The Evolution of Royal Memoir
In the decades that followed, a new kind of court chronicler emerged, first through secret tapes (Diana: Her True Story, 1992), then tell-all tributes (A Royal Duty, Paul Burrell, 2003), and eventually from within the royal bloodline itself (Spare, Prince Harry, 2023).
Each of these books tested the monarchy’s relationship with its own image:
Diana’s revelations, originally denied, shifted public sympathy and redefined the princess as a vulnerable, modern figure trapped in an archaic institution.
Burrell’s memoir was viewed as opportunistic, but his fate was cushioned by a tabloid-hungry public and a softened monarchy unwilling to impose Crawfie-style consequences.
Prince Harry’s Spare was both grievance and gospel, aimed as much at controlling the narrative as escaping it. Unlike Crawfie, Harry was not cast out for speaking - he had already walked away.
A Misstep Becomes a Model
Where Crawford was accused of betrayal, later biographers argued for ownership of their own stories. With each decade, the monarchy’s once rigid demand for silence has been challenged by new media, shifting public attitudes, and the monarchy’s own need to adapt its image.
And yet the echoes remain. Hugo Vickers, writing of Crawfie, noted:
It was a misinterpretation that would never be solved.
Perhaps that’s the essence of all royal memoirs: contested memory, polished grief, and the endless tension between duty and identity.
A Modern Morality Tale: Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Kompromat Game
In Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, royal biographer Andrew Lownie presents a disturbing portrait of Prince Andrew as a man used, compromised, and ultimately discarded by international predator Jeffrey Epstein. Based on multiple sources, including a controversial 2020 documentary by journalist Ian Halperin, Lownie alleges that Epstein sold “intimate secrets” about the Duke of York to foreign intelligence agencies including Mossad, Saudi Arabia, and Gaddafi-era Libya.
Describing Andrew as a “useful idiot,” Lownie argues that Epstein exploited the prince’s royal status to gain access to global elites, then weaponised Andrew’s indiscretions. The prince, according to Lownie and corroborating sources, had a penchant for the “fast life,” which Epstein facilitated in exchange for intelligence. US fraudster Steven Hoffenberg is quoted as calling Andrew “Epstein’s Super Bowl trophy.”
Andrew didn’t understand that he was being used,” Hoffenberg said.“Epstein planned to sell Andrew’s secrets to Mossad.
Lownie acknowledges the unreliability of some of Halperin’s more flamboyant claims - such as Epstein’s alleged introduction of Princess Diana to Dodi Fayed - but insists that the kompromat claims were independently verified by other sources.
The scandal is compounded by Andrew’s long-denied but high-profile association with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as the civil case brought by Virginia Giuffre, which was settled out of court in 2022 with no admission of guilt.
A Royal Case Study: Princess Margaret, The Queen Mother, and a Diagnosis Without Records
The source material? No medical records, no interviews with living relatives, and no contemporary evidence of the Queen Mother drinking during her pregnancy.
Instead, the argument hinges on a 1925 letter where the Queen Mother says she "can't bear the sight of wine" - a statement that somehow becomes “proof” she drank less while pregnant with Elizabeth and, by inference, more while carrying Margaret. What follows is a tidy moral arc: Elizabeth turns out calm and queenly. Margaret becomes flamboyant, impulsive, and tragic. The cause? Gin in utero, of course. The author also claims that Princess Margaret set fire to her own hair? Setting fire to your own hair ? It doesn't say when.
So when did we miss these headlines - certainly a flaming Margaret would have hit the headlines like a Catherine Wheel ..." Princess Margaret a real hot head!"
Friends say she calmly lit a cigarette from the flames before extinguishing them in a gin fizz.
Royal locks go up in smoke at boozy bash. Tiara remains unharmed.
Palace denies fire was started by brandy, temperament, or unsuitable companions.
Of course these are all made up.
The Death of Footnotes: How Publishers Are Replacing Rigor with Rhetoric
We are in a moment where publishing housesare redefining what counts as biography. No longer is a subject’s medical file, diary archive, or peer-reviewed academic scrutiny a prerequisite. Now it’s enough to match behavioural traits to a contemporary diagnosis, draw parallels from tabloid tales, and cite a few medical papers out of context.
Books are produced quickly to meet news cycles or cultural moments. Fact-checking, if it occurs at all, is left to the author’s discretion.
A Memoir Unravels, and Nobody’s Holding the Thread
The Observer’s investigation into The Salt Path raisesed serious questions - and as yet unanswered - questions about the truth behind Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir: her husband’s illness, the loss of their home, even the route of their walk.
But what’s more damning than the claims themselves is the publisher’s response:
Our editorial and legal processes remain appropriate and robust. - PRH CEO Tom Weldon
That’s not a statement - it’s a defensive mechanism, designed to sound decisive while admitting nothing. As if a legal disclaimer in a contract is a substitute for basic editorial scrutiny. It’s not.
It would be one thing if readers were trained to spot this, but the media isn’t helping.
Repurpose a royal without evidence? Why no mention that the author Secrest, though a Pulitzer-nominated biographer, is entering royal psychology at 95 without new sources?
By presenting these claims without analysis or caveat, journalists give them the veneer of legitimacy. And readers, often just scanning headlines, absorb it as fact.
The Rise of the Diagnosis Biography
This phenomenon, the rise of the “diagnosis biography”, is the product of several cultural shifts:
A public fascinated by trauma and neurodivergence
A publishing world eager to “reframe” well-known lives with a new twist
A media landscape addicted to controversy, but unwilling to challenge it
Readers are encouraged to see themselves in historical figures by giving those figures labels we recognise: ADHD, autism, narcissistic abuse, foetal alcohol syndrome. These labels offer emotional and psychological accessibility. They simplify the messy business of history into neat, explainable pathology.
It’s no longer enough to say “Margaret was complex.” She must have a syndrome. It’s not enough to say “Victoria was lonely.” She must have borne a secret child. We want stories with clinical clarity and scandalous implication which brings me to "Victoria's Secret"
In Victoria’s Secret, author Fern Riddell explores the relationship between Queen Victoria and her faithful Highland servant John Brown
Riddell titles her book Victoria’s Secret, a nod to the American underwear company. However there was nothing secretive about Queen Victoria's affection for her Balmoral ghillie after Prince Albert's death in 1861. This was because she shared it with everyone.
As early as 1868, in her vanity publishing project, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, Victoria praised Brown, enthusiastically stating that his “attention, care, and faithfulness cannot be exceeded.” the rest of the court thought him as drunken, arrogant, and a bit sweary.
By 1866, the Gazette de Lausanne was already reporting allegations that Victoria and Brown had gone through the ceremony of a morganatic marriage and had a child who was secretly adopted. The tale of a secret half-royal offspring has persisted over the years, and, according to Riddell, remains a topic of conversation among the descendants of the Brown family even now.
An article in the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine by Michaela Reid on Queen Victoria's personal physician Sir James Reid gives insight into the complex relationship between the queen and John Brown and also the odd case of blackmail in 1905 and the odd collection of souvineers placed in Queen Victoria's coffin.
On 25 March 1883, 18 months after Reid had arrived at Court, John Brown awoke with erysipelas of the face and was `quite helpless all day'. Reid noted that by the evening of 26 March Brown was worse and suffered from delirium tremens. On 27 March Reid wrote to his mother `Brown is dead. The Queen is in a great way about it.' Reid signed the death certificate.
More than 20 years later Edward VII gave Reid the unenviable task of retrieving letters about John Brown for which the King was being blackmailed. In May 1905, after more than 6 months' negotiation, there is a triumphant entry in Reid's diary: `At 3pm George Profeit came and delivered over to me a tin box full of the Queen's letters to his father [Alexander Profeit, factor at Balmoral] about John Brown, for which he has blackmailed the King'. Reid handed them over to a grateful monarch. There were over three hundred of them, many, as he noted in his diary `most compromising'.
It is astounding too that only after the Queen's death did Reid observe that his patient had a ventral hernia and a prolapse of the uterus. Although he had been attending Queen Victoria for 20 years, obviously he had never examined her. Certainly, when he was away his locum was warned never to use a stethoscope as the Queen had a great aversion to it, but it is extraordinary that her own doctor had to treat her purely through verbal communication, especially as her natural inhibitions should have been broken down after so many childbirths.
So the puzzle to all this is trying to understand what these 'compromising' letters were and the secrets they contained. I suppose this is at the core of the puzzle - something doesn't seem right - so this feeds the gossip and the ideas.
Always Blame the Mother - Gendered Tropes and Lazy Psychology
Notably, the victims of this kind of writing are most often women - especially royal women.
Diagnosing Queen Victoria with postnatal depression, Diana, The Princess of Wales, with borderline personality disorder, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, with narcissistic rage, or The Princess Margaret, with FAS does more than just sell books. It taps into deep-rooted, gendered ideas about women as unstable, dangerous, or secretly mad.
And at the centre of many of these retro-biographies is a familiar villain: the mother. Queen Victoria has a child with a servant and sends the child to New Zealand.
The Queen Mother becomes the irresponsible gin-soaked matriarch. Diana is reimagined as traumatised and destructive. Wallis Simpson (not a mother), long painted as cold and manipulative, now becomes a psychological puppet-master and I suppose a substitute mother - if we keep up this theme.
These portrayals are rarely grounded in fact. But they sell because they feel plausible,
not in historical terms, but in pop-psychology terms. They echo the language of trauma TikTok, therapy speak, and influencer confessionals. “She was probably emotionally neglected” becomes a scholarly thesis. “She had ADHD” becomes a book hook.
What This Says About Readers - And the Stories We Now Prefer
The success of these books says something about us, too.
We Want Flaws, Not Pedestals
In an age of confession and emotional transparency, we prefer our royals flawed. Perfect princesses and stoic queens no longer compel. We want mental illness, breakdowns, impulsivity - not out of voyeurism alone, but because it humanises the inaccessible.
Diagnosing Margaret or Victoria feels like rescuing them from their stately prisons. It makes them more like us.
We Crave the Secret Narrative
There’s a kind of addictive thrill in what history missed. A secret child. An undiagnosed condition. A misinterpreted scandal. These ideas suggest that even the most recorded lives have hidden truths. We - the readers - become detectives. We’re not just reading history; we’re rewriting it.
The Cost of All This - Eroding Trust in Biography
But while it may feel satisfying, this trend is corrosive. Here's why:
It undermines the credibility of biography as a genre. If every figure is diagnosed by hindsight and inference, what’s the difference between a biography and a Netflix drama?
It cheapens actual neurodevelopmental conditions. Suggesting that anyone with migraines and a bit of mischief must have foetal alcohol syndrome does a disservice to people genuinely living with the condition.
It erases context. Margaret wasn’t impulsive because of her mother’s drinking. She lived her entire life in the shadow of a more dutiful sister, in an institution that both constrained and enabled her. Isn’t that rich enough?
And worst of all, it teaches readers to expect diagnosis instead of nuance.
When we reduce people to labels, we lose the complexity that made them worth writing about in the first place.
Where Do We Go From Here?
This isn’t a call to ban speculation or to freeze biography in formaldehyde. It’s a plea for care, rigour, and scepticism - especially from journalists who cover books.
Every biography contains interpretation. But that interpretation should rest on more than just conjecture, diagnosis-of-the-week, or Victorian dinner-table gossip.
And when a publisher with a known reputation for provocation publishes a claim that would have once been a libel suit, the press shouldn’t simply print it. They should interrogate it.
Otherwise, biography becomes just another form of fiction - dressed up in footnotes, disguised as insight, but serving little more than our appetite for scandal, sympathy, and the illusion that we see what the history books missed.
Let the dead speak for themselves - not through our diagnostic lenses, but through their letters, decisions, contradictions, and all-too-human mistakes.
And yes, the media is complicit. In an age where clickbait has become the commissioning policy, outrage and speculation now drive visibility more reliably than scholarship. So instead of carefully edited, deeply reported coverage, we get posthumous diagnoses of royals, hot takes on salad-eating masculinity, and celebrity memoirs that might be true, if you squint hard enough. The algorithm rewards provocation, not precision, and publishers know this.
But there is one small resistance: the comment section, where readers increasingly go not for confirmation but for context, dissent, and reality-checks. That is where truth now lingers - not in the official narrative, but in the footnotes.
And perhaps that is where we must choose to live: as correctives in the margins, ghosting the gloss, pointing out the seams in the fiction dressed up as fact.
Let’s return to the week’s worst offenders...a resume:
"Victoria’s Secret", a book launched alongside a Channel 4 programme, proposes Queen Victoria secretly had a child by her servant John Brown. Not based on fresh documents or even credible testimony — but floated, notably, by someone claiming descendancy.
A new Princess Margaret biography suggests she was affected by foetal alcohol syndrome, caused by the Queen Mother’s drinking in the 1920's.
These are highly speculative, minimally evidenced, and framed as revelations - but functionally indistinguishable from fan fiction.
The Erosion of Trust in Books
We cannot pretend that publishing's big four are imune as the The Salt Path case showed that even respected publishers can no longer answer a basic question:
Who fact-checked this?
We're in a world where:
Royal biographies are rushed out with “friends say…” footnotes
Publishers outsource editorial decisions to marketing teams
AI tools summarise content scraped from websites without visiting the source
Are readers being sold books that haven’t been verified, reviewed, or even edited by anyone other than the sales department - or a bot. And the bots are learning from these books. This is a feedback loop of fakery.
What We Can Do (as Readers, Writers, Editors, Publishers)
1. Ask who’s behind the book
Is there an editor of record? A named researcher? Or is it just “Based on a true story”?
2. Check the publisher’s reputation
Skyhorse, for example, has a track record of publishing controversial, fringe, or conspiratorial books. That matters.
3. Read the acknowledgments and sources
Do they name verifiable people and places? Do they include real footnotes or just a thanks to “everyone who helped”?
4. Support books with transparency
Celebrate books that show their working - that cite sources, include biographies, bibliographies, and list fact-checkers. These are increasingly rare.
5. Don’t confuse “emotional truth” with “truth”
A compelling narrative arc doesn’t make something accurate. A moving scene doesn’t make it real. Publishing should know the difference - and help readers see it too.
David Salariya: The Forgotten Royal of Children's Publishing
There are whispers - naturally - that David Salariya is of royal descent. Not the palace kind, of course, but the far more treacherous court of children’s publishing, where crowns are awarded quietly and often later revoked without notice. Some say he was once king of non-fiction for the under-twelves. Others claim he was merely a gifted court jester with a sharp quill and a fondness for disgusting facts.
Born into obscurity (i.e., Scotland), David rose to semi-visible prominence in the late 20th century by creating, writing and illustrating books that children actually wanted to read - a dangerous heresy in the world of textbook publishing. His series You Wouldn’t Want to Be… and A Very Peculiar History made him a household name, though never quite in the right household.
He suffers from Compulsive Attribution Syndrome - a chronic inability to accept that books can exist without naming the people who created them. His symptoms include fact-checking, making footnotes funny, and publicly regretting the death of the desk editor.
He lives in Brighton with a sturdy sense of irony, and regularly appears - uninvited but entirely correct - in the comments sections of The Bookseller.
Future biographers beware: David keeps receipts.
Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen by Fern Riddell (Ebury £22 pp416).
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