Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Wed, 22 Jul 1992 16:03:02 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Re: On the deaths of the Romanov family ...

   One of the rules of the monarchy business, which may assume hazardous
proportions when the monarchy in question is over at the absolutish end of
the continuum, is that of Descent of the Throne. The particular local rules of
this, as they obtain in the oarticular Crown of this, Empire of that, may to
be sure vary. And each generation may legislate its own exception to its own
local exception to the prevailing local exceptionalism, viz., the Hanoverian
Succession, 1714, the last occasion as I recall when a Great Lord, Bolingbroke,
went to the Block for Treason.

   Descent of the Throne ensures that every relative however distant, by
cosinship by marriage however many times removed or whatever, has a conjecural
Claim To The Throne, and should uneasy lie the head, and Paranoid be what's in
it, the fact that "Blood is thicker than water" simply conduces to that much
greater difficulty in cleaning it up. We saw very high death rates among Royals
throughout the period from the Lancastrian coup against Richard II, 1399, to
the execution of Mary Stuart, 1583[?] for the manifest reason that so and so
was Too Close To the Throne, was looking shifty, was surely plotting, and the
proof of it was that so and so had every reason to, so if only in self-defense
was in sooth found to have been so doing if only in self-defense, and is
presumed to have been likely to anyway had he or she been allowed to live, so
twas better done and if twas to be done twas best it be done quickly.

   Peak mortality rates by reaosn of political murder among the highly
intermarried magnate families are associated, whatever the statistical data
may ultimately show, with the Wars of the Roses period, 1455 to 1471 o4 1451
to 1485, depending on what you count. To preclude a mess of this magnitude,
or that observed with the sucession of each padishah of the Empire of the Great
Moguls of India, the Ottoman Sultanate had a custom whereby, it's been said,
each successive Sultan had each of his brothers (by polygynous unions) hance
also potential claimants to power, strangled with a bowstring at his accession.
(I doubt this was invariable, or common in all periods.) No question in either
English or Ottoman case of Revolution.

   Revolution entails regicide or violent change of dynasty: China, the Abbasid
Revolution, 747-50 which overthrew the Umayyads and installed the Abbasids, not
to mention the Revolutions in Early Modern Europe, England, 1640-9, and France,
1789-98, entailed regicide and the deaths of royal relatives who were *caught*.
Russia in the seventeenth century surely saw more Romanovs and affinal kin
perish in palace coups and assassinations than died in 1918. The virtue of the
latter deed, however ugly its esthetics by contrast with state trials accorded
Charles I and Louis XVI, was the eradication of manarchist claimants closely
enough related to have become public figures and part of the baggage of White
Armies in the very bloody Civil War then underway.

   The Controversy over Anastasia, nearly as durable post mortem as Elvis,
shows how difficult it is to kill off the social and political craving for a
monarchist claimant, even should one resort to one already dead. Precedents for
this were the False Dmitrys of the Time of Troubles and the claim of Yemelyan
Pugachov to have been the murdered Peter III.

   The rules of the monarchy business are the rules. I fear this is the lesson
the Bolsheviks learned from the adventures of the Comte d'Artois and the Exile
Army over the border in Austria during the French Revolution. If you're going
to have monarchs without relatives you might as well have a republic.

Daniel A. Foss
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