"The So-Called Mad Kings" Is a Clear Eyed Historical Biography: Author Interview
Kira Lennox is a women’s historian perhaps best known for her brief and cutting feud with Elizabeth Raye-Muller and Julie Shipland over their research on Maleen of Adlkofen, but perhaps less well known for taking Raye-Muller’s suggestion that she get her conservation degree and go to Bavaria. In 2016, Lennox began a degree at Buffalo State College and spent the summer with Raye-Muller, Shipland, and their team, examining their documents and compiling research on some of the people involved.
This book focuses on Maleen’s children—including three sons who died bizarre, bloody, and painful deaths—and Maleen’s cousin Federica, who spent years as princess-consort and had what may have been schizophrenia.
Interviewer, Amy O’Conner: So you just got your Master’s Degree.
L: [laughs] Yes, I did.
O: Well, congratulations---this is, I’m going to guess, pretty far from where you were expecting to be this time in 2015.
L: [laughs] Yeah.
O: Tell us how you got here.
L: So—ages and ages ago, in the ‘80s, I read this little historical paper, pretty much just a paragraph, about the mad kings of Kollstansze—and I take issue with that term, but that’s what the article called them. And it was a tiny article, just this little report about these three brothers who had all died these horrible deaths in this tiny little state. And whoever had written it—I haven’t been able to find it again—was working off of this one entry from a historical log of the state of Willmars--
O: Which was a neighbor to this state of Kollstansze.
L: Yes, exactly. And this article said something to the effect of and in Kollstansze, four princes went mad, and one gouged his own chest open with a dull blade, and one was pierced through the eye with a branch and began to speak in tongues, and one was murdered after committing crimes, and one turned down the throne.
O: Some pretty graphic stuff in there.
L: Yes. And I’m a women’s historian, in America, this isn’t my field, so I just read it and got rid of it. Then, 2015, Elizabeth Raye-Muller’s book The Cursed Queen came out and her team had found all the papers from Kollstansze and all this incredible history about these men and their mother and her family.
O: And you were pretty critical, at the time.
L: Yes.
O: Why?
L: So—the thing about The Cursed Queen, and I’ve talked to Elizabeth about this now, is that it’s very focused on Maleen of Adlkofen--
O: The mother of these—these mad kings, to use the term from the paper.
L: Yes. And there was this whole—she was going to be married to the prince of Kollstansze, but at the last second, her cousin was put in her place—Adelaide—and then Adelaide died, and she was replaced by Federica. Lots of scheming involved. Maleen married a count of Willmars, an ambassador.
O: And it’s his record that tells us most of what we know about the court.
L: Yes. Exactly. Which is part of my problem—his notes are all jumbled up with love letters from his wife, and little notes from his kids, and since he’s Maleen’s husband, he’s not always going to be the most reliable witness, and The Cursed Queen takes him very seriously—which makes sense—but also takes his emotional take on things maybe a little too seriously.
O: Give us an example of that.
L: Sure. So there are a lot of sections where Conrad suggests that Frederick, Maleen’s cousin, put Adelaide in her place because he wanted to advance himself. Conrad really hates Frederick—but we also see Frederick saying no, you can’t marry Maleen even though you’re in love with her for a considerable amount of time. So we have to ask ourselves—is Conrad really the best judge of character in this case?
O: So you got into a pretty serious feud with the team in Germany, and Elizabeth Raye-Muller said [reading] if Kira Lennox wants to get her master’s degree in conservation and come help, she’s more than welcome.
L: [laughs] And I emailed her that night, and I said that’s it? That’s all I have to do for you to let me see those Federica papers? And she was really surprised, but I ended up calling their whole team sometime that week, and talking to them about my research on women and mental illness in that era, and the story I’d read on the kids. And next thing I did, I started working on a Master’s degree, and I was there for a year, and I spent that summer at their lab at the museum in Bavaria.
O: So tell us what you did there.
L: So—they have a system over there. There are lots of conservators because there are thousands of pieces of paper. At this point, Martin Shipland is working on what’s called Conrad’s Code, because Maleen’s husband labelled his notes with these strange numbers.
O: And there’s a theory about those now.
L: Yes. He thinks they’re labels for rooms in the palace—1 is Conrad’s bedroom, 12 is Maleen’s bedroom—we have no idea why he did this, but they make sense that way. And Julie Shipland works on Maleen’s love letters to Conrad, and she’s written Love Letters, which is a book about those, a translation. And Elizabeth Raye-Muller does a lot of research about the details of this switch, about Adelaide and Federica being put in Maleen’s place, and who was suspicious, and when, and why. And my job, over the summer, was going through all these papers, and flagging the places where Conrad talks about Federica.
O: Does he talk about her a lot?
L: [laughs] Oh, yes. She’s the princess for a long period of time, and he’s a courtier, so a lot of his job is hanging out with the prince, who talked about her just constantly. And it seems from the notes that Federica was always with him—the prince was in meetings, she was there; the prince was at dinner, she was there; the prince was at church, she was there, and Conrad took notes on all of this that he could send to the prince of Willmars.
O: And you have just his notes?
L: His notes and drafts of some letters.
O: So you’re going to read us some of what he wrote about her.
L: Yes. So we have an account that goes pretty much all the way back. We have his really early letters, when Maleen and Federica and Adelaide all first got to court, and he wrote about them to the prince of Willmars—and he said, and this is translated, and a pretty modern-English translation—[reads]--among the Duchess’s delegation is one lady who another lady of my acquaintance--that’s Maleen, who must have started talking to him pretty early on--who is said to be Frederick von Scharrau’s illegitimate daughter, Federica. This lady of my acquaintance says that Federica was brought up privately and began to have visions at the age of five. These visions appear near constant—she converses with figures that are not present, weeps at hearing voices, and believes herself to be somewhere else. Her sewing is extraordinarily slow, and she cannot sit still. At times her speech makes no sense. The Duchess--Adelaide, before she was married--has no patience with her, but the lady of my acquaintance, although often kept awake at night in their shared room, is kind to her, and brings her food when her father denies it.
O: You’ve put forward a pretty persuasive theory about that switch between Maleen and her cousin Adelaide.
L: It’s turned out to get some significant support, yeah. What I noticed was that Frederick and his cousin, Maleen’s mother, had been brought up in extremely abusive conditions in Scharrau, where they were expected to be disciplined and obedient all the time—even more than most women in that era, it was expected from the kids brought up in the royal family there. And Frederick had no patience with how indulgent Maleen’s father was with her—her father didn’t organize the marriage. It was done after he died. Frederick was extremely strict with his own daughters. So if Maleen was complaining on the road from Adlkofen to Kollstansze, it makes sense to me that Frederick would have just said fine, Adelaide, pretend to be her. Maleen doesn’t seem like she’s complaining in Conrad’s notes—that never shows up, even though she just stopped being a Duchess and started being a countess—a viscountess, and then a countess, when she married Conrad. That’s a drop. He never writes down that she complains. So we can think something’s up there—like, Maleen was in on this. That makes the most sense to me.
O: You also examine the three sons of Maleen and Conrad who ruled after Prince Ludvik.
L: Yes. Those are Ludvik, Otto, and Conrad—Conrad Junior, this is. They’re the three so-called mad kings--first, they aren’t kings, but that’s what that first article called them. And it’s technically only Ludvik who was said to have gone mad.
O: Give us a quick summary?
L: Yes. So Ludvik was adopted by Federica and her husband to take the throne when he was ten, and Maleen was princess regent—Conrad was too close to Willmars to be put on the council of regency. Ludvik took the throne at sixteen, and ruled for about ten years—but for the last four, his mother was regent again. Conrad’s record on this is pretty clear—Ludvik eventually was hearing so many voices, seeing and believing so many things, that he stabbed himself—he split himself down the chest. He writes--we found L in a pool of his own blood, on his side on the floor of his bedchamber, all frozen. If he had cried out in the night, I must have heard because I slept on the floor outside the door, and I hope this means that God spared him from too much pain.
O: That’s sad.
L: That is really sad. So the next son, Otto, took the throne. He ruled for about five years, and then he went out riding and something happened, and a branch went in through either his eye or his mouth and out the back of his head, but didn’t kill him. He lived for about a year like that, couldn’t walk or string a thought together—Maleen was regent again. He gets lumped into this category of insane because during that time, he’s speaking total gibberish. Conrad doesn’t write much about his death—that time he just says O released today.
O: And then we come to Conrad. Conrad Junior.
L: Right. Conrad Junior ruled for about three years, and near the end, 1558, Conrad writes this little entry about Conrad Junior. This horrible little moment where Ludvik’s son, who’s about thirteen or fourteen, comes back from being somewhere with Conrad Junior—Conrad doesn’t tell us that. What he does write is [reads]--L came to me in the study and I thought he would speak, but he came and sat and for a long time was silent. At length I asked him something—I don’t recall what—and he remained silent until I began to think of Federica and Ludvik and their long silences between fits of visions—but found that he was not silent but weeping soundlessly, and when I asked and pressed he said--and this is the fascinating part--he said that Conrad is like the Scharrau men and has done things he shouldn’t have done. And when we did through the rest of the notes and other sources, that’s one of the things we find out about this place the Scharrau royal children were brought up, that every single one of them was abused at some point by some older cousin who something awful had happened to, too. And that’s why Conrad Junior got lumped into this category—the story is that every royal person out of Scharrau goes insane.
O: And he died violently.
L: Yeah. About a year after that, Ludvik stabbed him to death—as far as the notes say. It’s a little hazy in history about
whether or not Conrad had something to do with it—the only people who were up to see all the fallout, and Ludvik covered in blood, were Maleen, Conrad, and William, who was the son of the man who had just about raised Conrad.
O: And William was also--
L: By 1559, he was Henrik’s partner, Henrik being Conrad and Maleen’s youngest son. So these were all people who were going to back up any story.
O: And Henrik is that fourth “mad king”.
L: Right. Henrik was the one who turned down the throne—and he certainly doesn’t sound “mad” by today’s standards. He turned down a high-pressure, high-stakes job that all of his brothers had just died doing, so he could do read books and ride horses out in the country with William—but when we’re looking back then, what he did was turn down the chance to be prince in favor of a child nephew—and his mother as regent—and go commit a lot of sins. And that looked insane. So really, the name is a little bit of an exaggeration, if you say four mad kings. But when you’re looking at this whole history of the Scharrau family—that’s the part that’s most interesting to me, where that whole contemporary take on it came from.
O: Kira Lennox, thank you for your time.
L: Thanks for having me.
Buy The So-Called Mad Kings
This book focuses on Maleen’s children—including three sons who died bizarre, bloody, and painful deaths—and Maleen’s cousin Federica, who spent years as princess-consort and had what may have been schizophrenia.
Interviewer, Amy O’Conner: So you just got your Master’s Degree.
L: [laughs] Yes, I did.
O: Well, congratulations---this is, I’m going to guess, pretty far from where you were expecting to be this time in 2015.
L: [laughs] Yeah.
O: Tell us how you got here.
L: So—ages and ages ago, in the ‘80s, I read this little historical paper, pretty much just a paragraph, about the mad kings of Kollstansze—and I take issue with that term, but that’s what the article called them. And it was a tiny article, just this little report about these three brothers who had all died these horrible deaths in this tiny little state. And whoever had written it—I haven’t been able to find it again—was working off of this one entry from a historical log of the state of Willmars--
O: Which was a neighbor to this state of Kollstansze.
L: Yes, exactly. And this article said something to the effect of and in Kollstansze, four princes went mad, and one gouged his own chest open with a dull blade, and one was pierced through the eye with a branch and began to speak in tongues, and one was murdered after committing crimes, and one turned down the throne.
O: Some pretty graphic stuff in there.
L: Yes. And I’m a women’s historian, in America, this isn’t my field, so I just read it and got rid of it. Then, 2015, Elizabeth Raye-Muller’s book The Cursed Queen came out and her team had found all the papers from Kollstansze and all this incredible history about these men and their mother and her family.
O: And you were pretty critical, at the time.
L: Yes.
O: Why?
L: So—the thing about The Cursed Queen, and I’ve talked to Elizabeth about this now, is that it’s very focused on Maleen of Adlkofen--
O: The mother of these—these mad kings, to use the term from the paper.
L: Yes. And there was this whole—she was going to be married to the prince of Kollstansze, but at the last second, her cousin was put in her place—Adelaide—and then Adelaide died, and she was replaced by Federica. Lots of scheming involved. Maleen married a count of Willmars, an ambassador.
O: And it’s his record that tells us most of what we know about the court.
L: Yes. Exactly. Which is part of my problem—his notes are all jumbled up with love letters from his wife, and little notes from his kids, and since he’s Maleen’s husband, he’s not always going to be the most reliable witness, and The Cursed Queen takes him very seriously—which makes sense—but also takes his emotional take on things maybe a little too seriously.
O: Give us an example of that.
L: Sure. So there are a lot of sections where Conrad suggests that Frederick, Maleen’s cousin, put Adelaide in her place because he wanted to advance himself. Conrad really hates Frederick—but we also see Frederick saying no, you can’t marry Maleen even though you’re in love with her for a considerable amount of time. So we have to ask ourselves—is Conrad really the best judge of character in this case?
O: So you got into a pretty serious feud with the team in Germany, and Elizabeth Raye-Muller said [reading] if Kira Lennox wants to get her master’s degree in conservation and come help, she’s more than welcome.
L: [laughs] And I emailed her that night, and I said that’s it? That’s all I have to do for you to let me see those Federica papers? And she was really surprised, but I ended up calling their whole team sometime that week, and talking to them about my research on women and mental illness in that era, and the story I’d read on the kids. And next thing I did, I started working on a Master’s degree, and I was there for a year, and I spent that summer at their lab at the museum in Bavaria.
O: So tell us what you did there.
L: So—they have a system over there. There are lots of conservators because there are thousands of pieces of paper. At this point, Martin Shipland is working on what’s called Conrad’s Code, because Maleen’s husband labelled his notes with these strange numbers.
O: And there’s a theory about those now.
L: Yes. He thinks they’re labels for rooms in the palace—1 is Conrad’s bedroom, 12 is Maleen’s bedroom—we have no idea why he did this, but they make sense that way. And Julie Shipland works on Maleen’s love letters to Conrad, and she’s written Love Letters, which is a book about those, a translation. And Elizabeth Raye-Muller does a lot of research about the details of this switch, about Adelaide and Federica being put in Maleen’s place, and who was suspicious, and when, and why. And my job, over the summer, was going through all these papers, and flagging the places where Conrad talks about Federica.
O: Does he talk about her a lot?
L: [laughs] Oh, yes. She’s the princess for a long period of time, and he’s a courtier, so a lot of his job is hanging out with the prince, who talked about her just constantly. And it seems from the notes that Federica was always with him—the prince was in meetings, she was there; the prince was at dinner, she was there; the prince was at church, she was there, and Conrad took notes on all of this that he could send to the prince of Willmars.
O: And you have just his notes?
L: His notes and drafts of some letters.
O: So you’re going to read us some of what he wrote about her.
L: Yes. So we have an account that goes pretty much all the way back. We have his really early letters, when Maleen and Federica and Adelaide all first got to court, and he wrote about them to the prince of Willmars—and he said, and this is translated, and a pretty modern-English translation—[reads]--among the Duchess’s delegation is one lady who another lady of my acquaintance--that’s Maleen, who must have started talking to him pretty early on--who is said to be Frederick von Scharrau’s illegitimate daughter, Federica. This lady of my acquaintance says that Federica was brought up privately and began to have visions at the age of five. These visions appear near constant—she converses with figures that are not present, weeps at hearing voices, and believes herself to be somewhere else. Her sewing is extraordinarily slow, and she cannot sit still. At times her speech makes no sense. The Duchess--Adelaide, before she was married--has no patience with her, but the lady of my acquaintance, although often kept awake at night in their shared room, is kind to her, and brings her food when her father denies it.
O: You’ve put forward a pretty persuasive theory about that switch between Maleen and her cousin Adelaide.
L: It’s turned out to get some significant support, yeah. What I noticed was that Frederick and his cousin, Maleen’s mother, had been brought up in extremely abusive conditions in Scharrau, where they were expected to be disciplined and obedient all the time—even more than most women in that era, it was expected from the kids brought up in the royal family there. And Frederick had no patience with how indulgent Maleen’s father was with her—her father didn’t organize the marriage. It was done after he died. Frederick was extremely strict with his own daughters. So if Maleen was complaining on the road from Adlkofen to Kollstansze, it makes sense to me that Frederick would have just said fine, Adelaide, pretend to be her. Maleen doesn’t seem like she’s complaining in Conrad’s notes—that never shows up, even though she just stopped being a Duchess and started being a countess—a viscountess, and then a countess, when she married Conrad. That’s a drop. He never writes down that she complains. So we can think something’s up there—like, Maleen was in on this. That makes the most sense to me.
O: You also examine the three sons of Maleen and Conrad who ruled after Prince Ludvik.
L: Yes. Those are Ludvik, Otto, and Conrad—Conrad Junior, this is. They’re the three so-called mad kings--first, they aren’t kings, but that’s what that first article called them. And it’s technically only Ludvik who was said to have gone mad.
O: Give us a quick summary?
L: Yes. So Ludvik was adopted by Federica and her husband to take the throne when he was ten, and Maleen was princess regent—Conrad was too close to Willmars to be put on the council of regency. Ludvik took the throne at sixteen, and ruled for about ten years—but for the last four, his mother was regent again. Conrad’s record on this is pretty clear—Ludvik eventually was hearing so many voices, seeing and believing so many things, that he stabbed himself—he split himself down the chest. He writes--we found L in a pool of his own blood, on his side on the floor of his bedchamber, all frozen. If he had cried out in the night, I must have heard because I slept on the floor outside the door, and I hope this means that God spared him from too much pain.
O: That’s sad.
L: That is really sad. So the next son, Otto, took the throne. He ruled for about five years, and then he went out riding and something happened, and a branch went in through either his eye or his mouth and out the back of his head, but didn’t kill him. He lived for about a year like that, couldn’t walk or string a thought together—Maleen was regent again. He gets lumped into this category of insane because during that time, he’s speaking total gibberish. Conrad doesn’t write much about his death—that time he just says O released today.
O: And then we come to Conrad. Conrad Junior.
L: Right. Conrad Junior ruled for about three years, and near the end, 1558, Conrad writes this little entry about Conrad Junior. This horrible little moment where Ludvik’s son, who’s about thirteen or fourteen, comes back from being somewhere with Conrad Junior—Conrad doesn’t tell us that. What he does write is [reads]--L came to me in the study and I thought he would speak, but he came and sat and for a long time was silent. At length I asked him something—I don’t recall what—and he remained silent until I began to think of Federica and Ludvik and their long silences between fits of visions—but found that he was not silent but weeping soundlessly, and when I asked and pressed he said--and this is the fascinating part--he said that Conrad is like the Scharrau men and has done things he shouldn’t have done. And when we did through the rest of the notes and other sources, that’s one of the things we find out about this place the Scharrau royal children were brought up, that every single one of them was abused at some point by some older cousin who something awful had happened to, too. And that’s why Conrad Junior got lumped into this category—the story is that every royal person out of Scharrau goes insane.
O: And he died violently.
L: Yeah. About a year after that, Ludvik stabbed him to death—as far as the notes say. It’s a little hazy in history about
whether or not Conrad had something to do with it—the only people who were up to see all the fallout, and Ludvik covered in blood, were Maleen, Conrad, and William, who was the son of the man who had just about raised Conrad.
O: And William was also--
L: By 1559, he was Henrik’s partner, Henrik being Conrad and Maleen’s youngest son. So these were all people who were going to back up any story.
O: And Henrik is that fourth “mad king”.
L: Right. Henrik was the one who turned down the throne—and he certainly doesn’t sound “mad” by today’s standards. He turned down a high-pressure, high-stakes job that all of his brothers had just died doing, so he could do read books and ride horses out in the country with William—but when we’re looking back then, what he did was turn down the chance to be prince in favor of a child nephew—and his mother as regent—and go commit a lot of sins. And that looked insane. So really, the name is a little bit of an exaggeration, if you say four mad kings. But when you’re looking at this whole history of the Scharrau family—that’s the part that’s most interesting to me, where that whole contemporary take on it came from.
O: Kira Lennox, thank you for your time.
L: Thanks for having me.
Buy The So-Called Mad Kings