Coburg Family Conspiracy

Sure, the Royal Family may be a group of austere palace-dwellers now but their roots are far from Buckingham - in fact, they're closer to the fields of Germany. In the early twentieth century, the Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield family went from ruling a small, inconsequential German fiefdom to presiding over thirteen royal families, all thanks to the scheming of Leopold Coburg and Augusta, his mother. In The Coburg Conspiracy, author Richard theorizes how the Coburgs could have pulled off such a meteoric acension to power. It began, he says, with one key marriage of Leopold to the daughter of Prince Regent, orchestrated by the Henry Higgens-esque Mother Coburg, who groomed her family to act and become aristocrats, suggesting that kings and queens are made — not born.