The Queen's Diamonds: The Affair That Launched the"Three Musketeers"

by Roger Macdonald

Sex, scandal and diamonds history as it s never been told before... In seventeenth century England, everyone is for even the king himself, James I, is a secret pensioner of Spain. James also trades jobs and titles for homosexual favours from ambitious and parasitic Scotsmen who descend on Whitehall, until George Villiers, the future Duke of Buckingham, an irresistibly handsome Englishman, upstages them all to become James s established lover. Buckingham also likes, and perhaps prefers, women. A countess here, a duchess there, even the Spanish prime minister s wife, all serve as appetisers for an unimaginably daring and dangerous main Anne of Austria, Queen of France. With a homosexual husband, Louis XIII, who possesses a pathological hatred of women, Anne is looking for love. She finds it in Buckingham, who arrives in person at Paris in 1625. Their affair all but paralyses the French court and turns a potential alliance into a shooting war. Anne makes the almost fatal mistake of giving Buckingham, as a token of her love, a fabulous diamond necklace, only for Louis XIII, prompted by the Queen s enemy, Cardinal Richelieu, to order her to wear it at a royal ball. Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle, the Cardinal s secret agent in London and Buckingham s jealous mistress, steals two of the diamonds and takes them to Richelieu. Three Musketeers began a desperate race to England and back to retrieve the necklace from Buckingham. Will they be in time to save the Queen s honour? Oxford historian Roger Macdonald uncovers the true, extraordinary tale of intrigue, sex and revenge that inspired Alexandre Dumas s immortal novel.

Paperback

First published January 7, 2010

Reviews

[Roman Clodia]

If you're looking for serious or even semi-serious history with accuracy, precision, up-to-date references and a calibrated sense of the time, then this is definitely one to avoid. Macdonald places himself firmly within the very popular history category with this romp through the love lives of seventeenth century celebrities. This is the kind of book which is a fun read but if any of the personages were alive today would be up in front of a libel tribunal immediately.

Macdonald may have an Oxford MA (in history?) but his career has been spent on Fleet Street, the BBC and with a programme made for the Discovery Channel - and that pedigree shows. So the book assumes that all the gossip, scandal and invective of the seventeenth century was true and historical fact, even quoting from a pamphlet that wasn't written until 1715, almost a hundred years after the events of the book. The book also (bizarrely) uses Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall as support for its own arguments, almost implicitly placing itself into the fictional category.

With no evidence the text presumes to know almost exactly what people got up to in the privacy of their own beds and reports that each of Buckingham's social elevations was the result of giving in to James' deeper sexual demands. Characters are delineated with a very broad and sweeping brush, so Henry VIII is a psychopath, James I is a corrupt and smelly sexual tyrant (this is also the man, let's not forget, who gave us the King James' authorised edition of the bible), and Lucy Percy a whore.

In describing James' person the book omits to mention that no-one in the sixteenth century was much of a fan of personal hygiene. James was a man of his times, rather than the disgusting figure which this book wants to turn him into - but that, of course, would be far less sensational to read.

So overall this is an enjoyable read, but a rather guilty pleasure akin to watching reality TV or reading Heat, OK, and the News of the World back to back.