We have recently and rightly been reminded that the Europe of the early modern period was a continent of multiple kingdoms and dynastic agglomerations: in the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsular, Austria-Hungary, and Brandenburg-Prussia, once-hostile and separate countries were held together, with varying degrees of permanency and success, by little more than shared allegiance to the same sovereign ruler. By contrast, Europe on the eve of the First World War was a continent of unitary, integrated, nation-state monarchies, with their parliaments and bureaucracies, their railways and empires, their postal services and carefully guarded frontiers, extending from Portugal to Russia, the Netherlands to Italy, Spain to Germany. But it is only in retrospect that this transition from royal to state authority seems both inevitable and irreversible. During the eighteenth century, and for much of the nineteenth, it was far from clear that sovereign nation states (and nation-state sovereigns) were going to be the culmination of the European story, as it had developed and unfolded down to 1914.

As historian and biographer, Derek Beales has devoted much of his life to the study of monarchs and monarchies in this confused, uncertain, intervening period, and he has ranged far and wide among continental royalty, from the Habsburgs to the Hanoverians, from Queen Victoria to King Victor Emanuel II. Thanks in no small part to his work, it is no longer ‘peculiarly old-fashioned’, as he himself once lamented it was, ‘to find interest in monarchs, dynasties and marriage treaties’.