I've wanted to do this since last year when those ghastly inbred Britons they keep making movies about had that wedding everyone seemed to think was so important. I'm not anti-Princess, you see, I'm just pro-truth when it comes to selling the deplorable lifestyle of European royalty to little girls. If the evil Disney corporation ever loses a class action lawsuit when a dozen poor little girls are horribly disfigured after their non-flame-retardant polyester princess gowns go up in flames at some birthday party in Hoboken, I hope part of the settlement involves handing out a coloring book like this one at all their theme parks, free of charge.

1. A Royal Wedding

Like most historical princesses, as soon as Princess Isabella of France reached breeding age she was shipped off to become a sperm depository in some other European duchy and live out her days incubating male heirs or facing the wrath of a shrewish dowager. In 1308 when Isabella was twelve she was sent to London to marry the gay prince, Edward II, who must have stared longingly at the many gowns of baudekyn, velvet, taffeta and cloth she brought with her from France (and almost certainly tried on all 72 of her headdresses and coifs when she wasn't looking). Unfortunately for Princess Isabella, Edward II loved his friend Piers so much he chose to sit with him rather than her at their own royal wedding. He even let Piers wear Isabella's jewelry in public. When Edward II later started shacking up with his other friend Hugh, Isabella left him and enlisted her relatives in France to help raise her son to to the throne. When she caught her husband's new husband, she dragged him from his horse, stripped him, and scrawled Biblical verses against corruption and arrogance on his skin. Poor Hugh was then castrated, condemned to hang as a thief, disemboweled, and drawn and quartered as a traitor. His body parts were picked up and dispersed throughout England. Isabella found herself a new boyfriend named Mortimer and her gay husband died a few years later in jail.

Isabella joined a convent after Mortimer was executed by her son for treason. 

2. A Princess Tea Party

Princess Nazli lived in a beautiful Turkish-style palace on the banks of the Nile in the early nineteenth century. A daughter of Muhammad Ali (the founder of modern Egypt), she was notorious for her cruelty. It was reported that her husband once said something kind to a beautiful serving girl; for the next night's feast, Nazli cut off the girl's head and served it to her husband as the main course. Nazli also demanded that her chambermaids hold a mosquito net above her bed all night, and if one dropped it she would be executed. When one servant girl dropped a corner of the net, Nazli ordered her eunuchs to pin the girl to the ground and place burning hot coals between her breasts. She then calmly boiled a pot of tea on the coals while the girl shrieked and burned to death. Not much later, news of Princess Nazli's exploits reached her family, and her brother Ibrahim ordered her to kill herself or he would do it himself. She reportedly took poison and died.


3. A Real-Life Prince Charming

Princess Marie Louise was was the eldest daughter of the Duke of Orléans. In 1679 when she was sixteen she was forced to marry the last Habsburg ruler of Spain, Charles II. Sadly, Charles II's gene pool was more like a fishbowl. The Empress Maria Anna was both his aunt and his grandmother and Margarita of Austria was both his grandmother and his great-grandmother. All of his great-grandparents were descended from one royal couple. His "Habsburg lip" was so pronounced he could not chew his own food and he was famous for drooling during important matters of state. This Prince Charming reportedly did not bathe. He went bald at a young age, suffered from epilepsy, and was supposedly lame, impotent, infertile, and mildly retarded.

When she arrived at court, Princess Marie Louise discovered that the starving Spanish populace already hated her. They frequently rioted outside her dark and gloomy rooms in the Royal Alcázar of Madrid. She and her husband presided over the largest auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition, where over 21 people were burned at the stake. After ten unhappy years of marriage, Marie Louise grew fat and died of stomach pains while horseback riding. Rumor had it she was actually poisoned by her mother in law.


3. When You Wish Upon a Prophet

Princess Salome of Judea was the stepdaughter of King Herod (the king who wanted to kill baby Jesus, so he just went ahead and killed all the babies born in Judea around the same time). One night, Princess Salome performed a "special dance" for the drunk king and he was so impressed he became the proverbial genie in the bottle and said, "Your wish is my command." The girl pondered all of the riches she might possess, but at the urging of her mother simply said: "Bring me the head of John the Baptist." The old hermit's head was summarily brought to the princess on a platter.

5. The Princess and the Anarchist

 
Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria (popularly known as Sisi) was cousin to Mad King Ludwig II and the daughter of an eccentric Duke obsessed with mummies, folk music, and circuses. When she was sixteen she caught the eye of the emperor of Austria and left her beloved country castle for the rigid formalities of Imperial Vienna. She grew increasingly anxious, developed a fear of staircases, obsessed over exercise and combing her hair, and experimented with binge eating and anorexia. Princess Sisi's bulimia rotted out all her teeth, and after age 32 she constantly hid her face behind a leather fan. She was famous for her extremely tight corsets and her 16-inch waist. The only male heir she produced for the empire committed suicide in 1889 and afterwards she wore only black. In 1898 she was stabbed to death with a homemade shiv by an Italian anarchist too poor to buy a knife.

* * * * *

I was railing against the princess industrial complex well before that lady turned that great New York Times article into a really long book about it. See also:

Parenting the Enemy (the most fun to write)

Why Can't There be Fairy Archduchesses 

Santa Makes Local Dad Feel Like a Total Asshole

And previous coloring book remixes here.

The mother of one of my daughter's friends asks, "Is she not supposed to play princess?"

I have never told my daughter she couldn't play princesses. We may have had a few conversations about how princesses aren't good role models, but I've NEVER said she couldn't pretend to be one. Apparently while playing at her friend's house, my daughter whispered, "My dad doesn't like princesses. He says they're lazy goodfornothings." Then she proceeded to pull one of those prefabricated princess gowns over her torso and said, "I'll just tell him I was being a fairy." This pleases me, because it shows she is beginning to understand that her highly-opinionated father can be quite difficult, though easily appeased by doing whatever it is he doesn't approve of once well out of sight. This will prove a useful skill as the years go on.

When told this happened, I felt a tinge of guilt. Then the other little girl stood up and said to my daughter, "I AM THE BEAUTIFUL PRINCESS. You must do my bidding. Go and fetch me the finest flower in the land." My daughter reacted with a look of incredulity that could only be translated as, "Fuck that, dude." Or, perhaps less crudely, "My father was right: princesses are bossy and not very nice." She refused the quest, and the princess sulked.

I looked down at them in their ill-fitting polyester costumes, stained with mulberry juice and globs of yoghurt. I could have delivered the coup de grâce right then: I could have pointed out that their threadbare, shoddily-made dresses of imitation satin and tulle made them look more like Courtney Love at the tail end of an Oxycontin binge than any representative of The Crown. But I didn't. As Benjamin Disraeli once said, Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.

"Worry not, your Highness," I said, winking at my daughter. "I shall fetch my steed and deliver thee the loveliest dandelion in all Detroit."

Santa. Hello, Princess. Let me guess. Do you like Dora?

Terrified Local Girl. [silence]

Santa. Should I bring you a Hannah Montana toy?

Terrified Local Girl. [silence]

Santa. Barbie? Ariel? Tinkerbell?

Local Dad. Yeah, she doesn't really watch television.

Santa. [bites his lip, shaking his head] Not even Spongebob?

Local Dad. Not really.

Santa. [staring ruefully at Local Dad] Well, Princess, maybe this will be the year Santa finally brings you a television set.

Scene: 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town, London. 1860.

A man with the beard of a biblical prophet sits writing at a desk under a cloud of pipe smoke. This is Karl Marx. Two four-year-old girls walk in. The first has dark hair and the same nose as the man. This is his daughter, Eleanor (affectionately known as "Tussy"). The second girl is lovely with blond curls. This is Tussy's new friend, Dollie Catnatch.

Tussy. Shall we take the phaeton to Schönbrunn this afternoon, your royal highness? I should think a picnic near the Ruin of Carthage might cure what remains of the diphtheria you have been contending with these many weeks.

Dollie. You're such a silly goose, Princess Maria. Surely the captain of the royal guard would never allow just the two of us to escape in the phaeton unnoticed. Alas, it will take a good hour for the royal coach to be ready. Those coachmen can be so lazy. They deserve a good thrashing.

The man looks up from his writing and stares curiously over at the two girls.

Tussy. I suppose that means we are stuck here at the Hofburg. I'm bored. Are they hanging any anarchists today?

Dollie. Not that I am aware of, but my room in the Neue Berg has an excellent view of the gallows.

Marx. Excuse me, young misses, what exactly are you playing today?

Tussy. Why father, we are playing princesses, of course!

Marx. Princesses?

Tussy. Dollie here is Gisela Louise Marie, Princess Imperial and Archduchess of Austria, the Princess of Hungary and Bohemia, and the Princess of Bavaria. I, of course, am her cousin Maria Theresa Anna of Austria-Teschen, daughter of Princess Hildegard of Bavaria.

Marx [aside] What is this madness?

Dollie. We have decided we are bored with our many palaces and are eager for adventure. Perhaps we will whip those Turks my dragoons captured at the siege of Sevastopol or visit an enchantress in Klosterneuburg to help us find that troupe of laboring dwarfs who love to whistle whilst they work.

Marx. Tussy, who is this tiny person speaking to me?

Tussy. Father, this my friend, Dollie Catnatch.

Marx. Is she related to James Catnatch, publisher of that penny dreadful Molls of the Monarchs?

Dollie. Why, he's my father! Here's his latest publication, sir. It's called Catnatch's Lives of the Princesses, A Ha'Penny Book for Girls.

Marx. What is this pap? [snatching it, reading aloud] "The mud on Prince Albert's brogues: what does his cobbler know?"; "Win over your own Prince Charming in five easy steps"; "Victoria says Spitalfields satin and Honiton lace are so 1840." And what in blazes is this ink color?

Dollie. It's called fuchsia. My father invented it.

Marx. I'm not sure I approve of the amount of stocking this princess on the cover is showing.

Tussy. Come on, Dollie. Let's play "The Czarina's Wardrobe."

Marx. Can't you two girls play something respectable, like "Fenians Revolt!" or "The Conditions in Manchester's Textile Mills"?

Tussy. Sorry, Papa, but princesses are beautiful and have lovely clothing. Textile mill workers and the Irish are dirty and ugly.

Marx. Oy, this is why Engels never had children.

Scene 2. The Marx bedroom, that same evening

Karl and his wife, Jenny, sit in their bedclothes. Karl has his arms folded across his chest.

Marx. You should have seen the frock she was wearing today. It was pink merino trimmed with white swan's down. Next she'll be asking for an ermine coat.

Jenny. Yesterday she begged me to let her two take of my finest silver spoons down to the smithy to forge a crude tiara.

Marx. Doesn't she understand that even a constitutional monarchy is an anachronism, a tool used to perpetuate the slavery of women and workers, a reserve weapon of reaction and a distraction of pomp and glitter? Bah!

Jenny. Maybe you could write a pamphlet about a beautiful young girl who inspires The Revolution after working long hours in an oyster-shucking factory. You could call it "Proletarian Princess."

Marx. I would have to illustrate her in a fuchsia petticoat just to get her attention. Do you know the price of color ink! I'm afraid this Catnatch girl is a bad influence. Don't any of our revolutionary friends from the June Days Uprising have a daughter her age?

Jenny. Now Karl, they're only girls. Once you were a boy, even if it was a very long time ago. Surely even Karl Marx once enjoyed playing Prince Theseus and the Minotaur or Prince Siegfried bathed on the blood of the dragon?

Marx. When I was her age I was too busy fighting rats in the Prussian streets for crumbs to feed my six brothers and sisters.

Jenny. Wasn't your father a lawyer?

Marx. Not a very good one.

Jenny. Well, someday I'm sure she'll come to understand your feelings Karl. For now, let's just be glad she doesn't need to fight the rats for crumbs. We've given her a safe home here in London and enough bread on the table that she can feel like a princess.

Marx. Oh, how bourgeois.

So the kid is really into fairies, and I am largely at fault. Every night I tell her a bedtime story that involves owls and fairies flying around her room and sometimes I get all Pink Floyd with a laser pointer and a blue LED flashlight, and I'd best stop writing about this before I reveal something about "the land of fairy dreams" that could earn me an unfortunate nickname. Let's just say she's really into fairies and leave it at that. I was at the store the other day and I thought I'd pick her up a Christmas present that involved some sort of plastic, figurative fairy, and walking up and down the toy aisles the closest thing I could find is all this "fairy princess" crap. Now I've pretty much had her sequestered away from the whole Princess Industrial Complex. As far as she's concerned, "princess" is just what the creepy old ladies who get in her face at the grocery store call her. I just don't understand why the only fairies they sell also have to be princesses. Is not enough just to be a fucking fairy? You've already got effervescent butterfly wings and a magic wand and pointy shoes and a toadstool couch and two little tiny ponies to pull you around the forest in a wee cart. On top of all that, you need to be a member of some faerie aristocracy? With a fairy castle with little pixie maidservants and a whole fiefdom of lesser fairies to tax in order to sustain your royal extravagances? Why is it perfectly acceptable to celebrate this lifestyle of excess permitted only to those lucky enough to be yanked out of most royal of fairy vaginas? I want the kid to understand that just because someone's parents are wealthy, that doesn't make them smarter, nicer, prettier, more interesting, or in any way better than anyone else. If I teach her that now, she won't have to waste four years at Yale to learn the same thing. Think of the tuition we'll save in 2023!

Well, I suppose I'll have to go looking in one of those hippie toy catalogs that sell faceless dolls made out of organic wheatberry chaff. I'm sure they sell fairy toys that won't offend my Jacobin sensibilities, you know: hardworking proletarian fairy serfs who harvest thistledown and collect dew drops for the royal baths. I wonder if they'll be able to ship in time for the holiday. As my wife always says, you can't rush a hippie.