11 Of The Dumbest Things Pop Culture Has Us Believe About Historical Royals

The Trope: Royal marriages were practical and pragmatic. Royals married to build alliances within the kingdom or abroad. They didn't marry for any other reason and never loved their spouses.

Why It's Inaccurate: Though marriages were a crucial way for royal families to create alliances, many royal marriages were not politically advantageous.

Some royals, for example, definitely married for love. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, married Countess Sophia Chotek because he loved her. Because the countess wasn't royal, it meant the marriage was morganatic and their children would lose all inheritance claims over Austria-Hungary.

Notable Offenders: Television shows like The Borgias and The White Princess present royal marriage as a wholly political negotiation.

The Trope: The ill-fated French queen focused on frivolous, personal pleasure, blithely detached from the political tensions that consumed the rest of France in the years before revolution.

Why It's Inaccurate: Marie Antoinette keenly understood that seemingly frivolous things like fashion weren't detached from politics - they were fundamentally political. As biographer Antonia Fraser pointed out:

In fact, the role of the queen of France was to be splendid, was to wear beautiful clothes. When she wore cheaper muslins, cottons, people didn't like that at all. They said the queen of France should be dressed magnificently.

Notable Offenders: Two eponymous Marie Antoinette biopics - one from 1938 and the other from 2006 - largely drain politics from the queen's story to instead focus on her relationships. 

The Trope: Being king or queen is a heavy, tragic burden, one in which a royal must choose between public duty and private happiness.

Why It's Inaccurate: Historically, monarchs have seen the throne as a right. Many kings and queens throughout history - like Louis XIV or Charles II - didn't see their private life as being in conflict with their public duties. In fact, there was little distinction between the "public" and the "private."

Notable Offenders: Series and films like The Crown, The King's Speech, and Elizabeth fixate on the idea of a monarch sacrificing their private life for royal duty. 

The Trope: Virtuous emperors and kings who see that their heir isn't a good fit for the job ignore the line of succession to ensure that a better candidate will take their place.

Why It's Inaccurate: Rulers who may have been deemed "unfit" inherited the throne all the time. Ancient Romans, for instance, experienced a string of terrible emperors because the political system enabled their power.

Sometimes, advisers or relatives labeled a ruler unfit to take power for themselves, as was the case with Spain's Joanna of Castile. 

Lines of succession weren't always ironclad. In the context of Great Britain, the line of succession was manipulated to ensure that a Protestant rather than Catholic monarch took the throne in 1714. But in this case, the ultimate successor - George I - was still in the line of succession, just much, much further down.

Notable Offenders: In both The Man in the Iron Mask and Gladiator, civic-minded leaders step in to protect the kingdom or empire from cruel rulers. 

The Trope: Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra enjoyed a loving, harmonious family life with their five children. 

Why It's Inaccurate: Though perhaps more close-knit than other royals, the Romanovs were just like any other family, complete with tension, arguments, and grievances. Maria - Nicholas's third child - sometimes worried that nobody cared for her, for example.

Though he was unsuccessful at the time, Nicholas actually worked to cultivate the image of happy domesticity. As scholar Wendy Slater notes:

The "aura of violated domesticity" that surrounds the narratives of [the family's execution in 1918] suggests that the perfect family of Romanov propaganda is actually a more iconic image today that it ever was in the early 20th century, even before it shattered under the pressure of war and social unrest.

Notable Offenders: The film and stage musical Anastasia emphasize domestic bliss in the imperial family before the Russian Revolution comes along and ruins everything. But they also totally sidestep some of the family's difficulties, including the czarevich's struggle with hemophilia.

The Trope: Royal consorts - usually women who appear in the background or as window dressing - have no real authority in the kingdom and exist solely to support their spouse.

Why It's Inaccurate: Some royal consorts have been politically significant, for better or for worse. George II's wife Caroline of Ansbach arguably had greater influence in Great Britain than the king. On the other end of the spectrum, royal consorts weren't always supportive of their spouses. One of the most famous rulers of all time, Russia's Catherine the Great, actually began her imperial career as a royal spouse who took the throne from her husband.

Notable Offenders: In Braveheart, the future Queen Isabella is shown as a passive royal whose one - wildly inaccurate - act of defiance is to have a fling with Scottish leader William Wallace. In fact, Isabella made her mark in history as one of the most consequential royal spouses of all time - she overthrew her husband in 1327.

The Young Victoria and the television series Victoria downplay the extent to which Prince Albert took advantage of his wife's frequent pregnancies to leverage authority for himself.