The Duke and Duchess of Sussex may feel like they are sailing into uncharted waters by starting a fresh life in America, but they are far from the first royals to flee to another country, whether by force or by choice. From Napoleon to James II of England to the Shah of Iran, exile has been the lot of many royals throughout the centuries. Freedom from life in the royal fishbowl may at first seem exhilarating, but Harry and Meghan should take heed. While some exiled royals have flourished away from the royal court, others have floundered, missing the pomp, power, and prestige of life in an exalted station with ready-made fortune and fame.

Queen Christina of Sweden

An ingenious free spirit, Christina (portrayed famously on film by Greta Garbo in 1933) became Queen of Sweden at the age of five. According to Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric by Veronica Buckley, her decision to abdicate in 1654 at the age of 27 was a longtime coming. The queen hated her country’s freezing weather, intellectual stagnation, and Protestant religion. Plus, she refused to marry—likening the marriage bed to a tomb—much to her advisers’ dismay.

After her abdication, Christina traveled to the border between Sweden and Denmark, chopping off her hair and changing into men’s attire before entering the country. From then on she would dress in masculine clothes, her voice deepening and her behavior increasingly stereotypically masculine. “Free at last!” she reportedly cried, as she ran across a stream separating the two countries. “Out of Sweden, and I hope I never come back!”

Christina converted to Catholicism and settled primarily in Rome, where she held salons, allegedly fell in love with a cardinal, patronized the arts, and unsuccessfully schemed for a new throne in Naples, Poland, and eventually Sweden. Still eager for notoriety, Christina’s eccentric actions created many scandals, including the “execution” of a member of her household staff she accused of disloyalty. In the later years of her life she became heavily involved in alchemy, attempting to transmute lead into gold to finance her dream of “leading a Christian army against the Turks.” Until her death in 1689, it was said that her mini court housed all the “thieves, assassins, and debauch’d women” of Rome, according to her contemporary, Christian Gottfried Franckenstein.

For Christina it was a life well lived. “My ambition, my pride, incapable of submitting to anyone, and my disdain, despising everything,” she wrote in her unfinished Memoirs, “have miraculously saved me.”

Queen Caroline of England

After being virtually hounded out of England by her vindictive husband, Prince George, and his political cronies, the controversial Princess Caroline took off to explore the world in 1814. She caused a scandal throughout Europe, acquiring Italian lover Bartolomeo Pergami, according to widespread rumors, as well as cavorting with Bonapartes, dancing in flimsy costumes, and riding a donkey throughout the Italian countryside. “Although if I could have foreseen all that I have had to meet with, I might not have undertaken so distant and dangerous a journey,” she wrote. “I am far, very far from repenting it; I have gleaned so much real knowledge, and been gratified with such long-anticipated sights, that I feel well repaid for the trouble.”

Caroline even traveled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa. “The…Barbarians are much more real, kind, and obliging to me than all the civil people of Europe,” she wrote from Tunis. “I am living a perfect enchantment.”

But the mortified British were determined to sever ties with her once and for all. A tribunal, known as the “Milan Commission,” set out to collect information on her scandalous actions. When Prince George became king upon the death of George III in 1820, Caroline traveled back to England to claim her crown and defend her name. An attempt by the new king to strip her of her title and divorce her on account of her affair with Pergami failed, but she died shortly after in 1821.

Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie of France

Nothing exemplifies the forever-changing fortunes of French rulers in the 19th century than a chance meeting in a small corridor of an English railway station in 1871. Napoleon III and his beautiful, fashionable empress, Eugénie, recently banished from France, found themselves face to face with the royal Orléans family, whose exile in England was now over due to the Bonaparte family’s disgrace. According to Theo Aronson’s The Golden Bees: The Story of the Bonapartes:

For a few seconds the two opposing groups of royalties stood rooted to the ground in embarrassed silence. It was Eugenie who made the first move…she moved slowly to one side, and then dropped one of her magnificent curtsys. She straightened, and followed by the Emperor and her son, swept on without a word.

Napoleon and Eugénie settled in an English country estate. Although they enjoyed the friendship of Queen Victoria, it was mostly a life of boredom with the empress doing needlework as her husband and son walked up and down the gallery. “How many thousands of miles have we walked on this poor carpet which led us nowhere!” Eugénie said to her biographer Augustin Filon. “Our impatient restlessness has worn it out.”

The estate became the center of French expatriate rallies and schemes to reclaim the throne, which were always abandoned. But tragedy awaited. The untimely deaths of Napoleon III (1873) and her son (1879) would lead the Empress to write: “I am left alone, the sole remnant of a shipwreck.” Eugénie would live until 1920 and she would create a museum in honor of the Second Empire on her English estate. According to Aronson:

In the evening, when the lights glanced off the painted canvases and gleamed whitely on the many statues, “the vanished world springs again into life, peopled with those once well-known figures who are the real inhabitants of the dwelling.” And when the Empress, with her pale, still lovely face, moved slowly amongst these lamplit souvenirs, one was almost tempted…to believe that she, too, was “a shadow of the past.”

Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia

After the horrors of the Russian Revolution, the displaced Romanov family scattered across the globe, often ending up café society ne’er-do-wells forced to sell heirlooms and jewelry. One of these refugees was the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, who, according to The Flight of the Romanovs: A Family Saga, “knew approximately how much jewels and clothing cost but had not the slightest idea of the price of bread, meat, or milk.”

But the enterprising Maria was determined to conquer life in the real world. An expert embroiderer, she began designing clothes, using traditional Russian folk art as inspiration. Her suave brother Dimitri introduced her to his mistress Coco Chanel, and Maria soon set up the Parisian embroidery house of Kitmir (One of Rasputin’s assassins, Prince Felix Yusupov, had already opened his own fashion house—Irfé). “Marie learned her craft from the ground up,” writes historian Grant Hayter-Menzies, “studying over machines in a factory and sitting up late fashioning designs. Sometimes she was so weary she had to wrap herself in her fur coat to doze on the workroom floor.”

Contracted primarily by Chanel, Kitmir soon employed dozens of Russian refugees. The shop was heavily involved in the famed 1922 Chanel collection, which drew inspiration from Russian motifs. Maria eventually sold Kitmir and started selling her own perfume in London, later working for Bergdorf Goodman in New York, and wrote her memoirs. She died in Germany in 1958.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor

“Elba,” is how Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, described her husband’s appointment as wartime Governor of the Bahamas, referring to Napoleon’s first place of exile. After Edward VIII abdicated the English throne in 1936, so that he could marry the divorced American, the couple repeatedly embarrassed the British government by cavorting with Hitler, overshadowing the new king, and causing headaches for aristocrats everywhere. “People didn’t want to meet them,” Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, recalled in The Last of the Duchess. “It was difficult to find anyone who would come to dinner with them.”

The duke was equally annoyed, viewing “the prospect of an indefinite period of exile on those Islands with profound gloom and despondency.” But Winston Churchill insisted, and so in 1940 the Windsors began their five-year rule over the Bahamas. The duchess begrudgingly went about her first lady duties, which included arranging Red Cross hospitals and renovating the governor’s house, reportedly painting one room the same shade as her favorite face powder. The duke, according to What Manner of Man Is This?: The Duke of Windsor’s Years in the Bahamas, did little to change the Commonwealth nation’s racist policies, and bungled the investigation into the violent murder of his good friend, the gold mine owner Harry Oakes (which remains unsolved).

In 1945, with the war over, the duke left his post, and the Windsors resumed their lives as international jet-setters, often “caught white-faced and haggard staggering from nightclub to nightclub in Paris, Palm Beach, and New York,” according to writer Caroline Blackwood. Although home was officially in Paris, the Windsors seemed forever restless, in search of the next great thrill. “If you have enough shoes,” the fashion-icon duchess explained, according to Blackwood, “you have the feeling you can always keep moving.”

King Constantine II of Greece

Godfather to Prince William, King Constantine II of Greece long seemed to be the luckiest and happiest of the many modern exiled rulers who have made their home in London. Dethroned in 1974, he has been called the “single most charming man in the world” by Princess Firyal of Jordan. “He has his freedom, no responsibility,” she told Vanity Fair in 1995, “but still the glamour of being ‘king.’”

Close friends with Prince Charles, Prince Philip’s first cousin once removed, and allegedly partially bankrolled by the wealthy Greek diaspora (and perhaps his son Crown Prince Pavlos, whose marriage to heiress Marie-Chantal Miller reportedly included a dowry of $200 million), he seemed content in his life as a jet set power broker. However, below the surface was a longing to return to his home country. “No one can keep me away,” he told a Greek newspaper, according to The Guardian. “For so many years I have lived through my own Golgotha, now I am ready to return.” He did just that in 2013, moving back to Greece as a private citizen with his wife, Anne-Marie. Sometimes, you can go home again.

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