I began writing this series of mini-essays in the late 1990s for a brief
publication entitled The Breaking Wind, edited by that talented jack-of-all
trades, my friend Paul Kleving. These writings are as close as I have ever
come to historical fiction, and dangerously approach the pale of plagiarism; the
Elizabeth essay is an embellishment of a passage from Longford’s Royal
Anecdotes, while the Monmouth piece comes directly from Macaulay’s History.
The Queen Anne piece is all my own- the quote is from Mark Kishlansky’s A
Monarchy Restored.
FROM THE PAGES OF HISTORY . . . .
A curious incident of “breaking wind” dates from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I
of England (1558-1603). It was the custom for members of the nobility to
periodically appear at court to display their loyalty and affection to their
monarch, and such occasions were usually marked by a solemn display of
nobility and grace. But not always. When Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford, a
member of one of the most established and prestigious noble houses in
England, was in attendance at court, bowing low before his queen, he suffered
an attack of involuntary flatulence. The effect of this noble wind was
commensurate with the august earl’s eminent social standing; the sound
echoed throughout the royal audience chamber, while the unsavory odor,
pungent to the extreme, was inescapable to all in attendance, including, of
course, her majesty. Mortified, the earl swiftly absented himself from court, not
to return for many seasons. Yet, despite Lord de Vere’s acute and enduring
embarrassment, his permanent absence from court would have been taken as
a sign of disloyalty to the crown. Inevitably, some years later, the earl once
again found himself bowing low before his queen, undoubtedly squeezing his
noble cheeks as tightly as was possible for a gouty and corpulent old earl. Her
majesty was most gracious on the occasion of this long delayed reunion,
exclaiming, “My Lord, you need not have stayed away from court so long, I had
completely forgotten about the fart.”
publication entitled The Breaking Wind, edited by that talented jack-of-all
trades, my friend Paul Kleving. These writings are as close as I have ever
come to historical fiction, and dangerously approach the pale of plagiarism; the
Elizabeth essay is an embellishment of a passage from Longford’s Royal
Anecdotes, while the Monmouth piece comes directly from Macaulay’s History.
The Queen Anne piece is all my own- the quote is from Mark Kishlansky’s A
Monarchy Restored.
FROM THE PAGES OF HISTORY . . . .
A curious incident of “breaking wind” dates from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I
of England (1558-1603). It was the custom for members of the nobility to
periodically appear at court to display their loyalty and affection to their
monarch, and such occasions were usually marked by a solemn display of
nobility and grace. But not always. When Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford, a
member of one of the most established and prestigious noble houses in
England, was in attendance at court, bowing low before his queen, he suffered
an attack of involuntary flatulence. The effect of this noble wind was
commensurate with the august earl’s eminent social standing; the sound
echoed throughout the royal audience chamber, while the unsavory odor,
pungent to the extreme, was inescapable to all in attendance, including, of
course, her majesty. Mortified, the earl swiftly absented himself from court, not
to return for many seasons. Yet, despite Lord de Vere’s acute and enduring
embarrassment, his permanent absence from court would have been taken as
a sign of disloyalty to the crown. Inevitably, some years later, the earl once
again found himself bowing low before his queen, undoubtedly squeezing his
noble cheeks as tightly as was possible for a gouty and corpulent old earl. Her
majesty was most gracious on the occasion of this long delayed reunion,
exclaiming, “My Lord, you need not have stayed away from court so long, I had
completely forgotten about the fart.”
FROM THE PAGES OF HISTORY . . . .
While the England of today no longer executes its criminals and traitors, the
English people traditionally have always loved public executions. Following the
Protestant Reformation, which reduced the number of religious party days, and
before the invention of football, the English flocked to public hangings,
quarterings, burnings, and mutilations, sometimes displaying the kind of mob
violence that we associate today with English sporting events. On the vast
majority of occasions, the guilty party would be a common murderer or thief,
occasionally a traitor or a heretic. But to view a big time royal execution was a
sight few English people could aspire to; sort of like getting to see Barbra
Streisand at the MGM Grand- beyond the grasp of the ordinary person.
Some of the most memorable victims of public executions in English history
belonged to the royal house of Stuart. Alas, the Stuarts were never lucky
when it came to facing the gleaming axe of the executioner. The sixteenth
century Mary, Queen of Scots, a sore loser in her royal bitch fight with
Elizabeth I, took quite a few whacks before her head was finally severed, in
front of a rapt audience at Fotheringay castle, who knew they were witnessing
the execution of the century. At least Charles I (1625-1649), the unrepentant
victim of Puritan revolution, died with dignity, humility, and one clean slice to his
royal neck. Without doubt, this was the most exciting execution of the
seventeenth century, as a horrified Europe watched the spectacle of a
revolutionary Parliament cutting off the head of the sanctified person of their
king. This event drew a respectable crowd of 100,000 people, many of whom
kicked and clawed their way to the platform, erected above a second story
window, to dip a handkerchief in royal blood.
While England experimented with life without a king, Charles’s heir, the Prince
of Wales, wandered the continent of Europe, sniffing like a dog for support to
gain his throne, and bedding a number of full figured women in the process.
One of these women, an obscure wench named Lucy Walter, bore the first of
what would be a long line of illegitimate children for the future King Charles II,
his bastard son James.
When Charles finally gained his crown, in the Stuart Restoration of 1660, it
was definitely time for him to take a proper wife who could bear him legitimate
heirs. Unfortunately, Charles’s bride, the Portuguese princess, Catherine of
Braganza, was unable to bear children, quite unlike the multitude of women
that Charles continued to bed. As the king’s eldest bastard child, James,
created Duke of Monmouth, received the lion’s share of royal favor and
affection. But Charles had spared that rod, and he spoiled that child; James
turned into a foolish, feckless, weak-willed man, enduringly discontent with his
illegitimate status, which prevented him from legally inheriting his father’s
kingdom.
Monmouth loathed his father’s legitimate heir, his uncle, Charles II’s brother,
James Duke of York. The feeling was mutual. When Charles died in 1685,
York ascended the throne as James II. James’s great liability as king was that
he was a devout Catholic in a strongly Protestant country. A number of
Protestant lords saw Monmouth as a convenient stooge and fall guy in their
plots to overthrow James II. Indeed, it took very little convincing to get
Monmouth to lead a rebellion to place himself on the throne as England’s
Protestant hope. Sadly, Monmouth’s ill-starred revolt attracted precious little
assistance or sympathy, and fell ignonimously like a house of cards. While
Monmouth’s compatriots at least retained their manly courage and dignity in
the face of defeat, Monmouth cried and wailed all the way to his trial in
London. Once there, the Duke begged piteously to see the King. Once James
II granted the interview he must have instantly regretted it; Monmouth crawled
on all fours weeping, wrapping his arms around the King’s legs, begging for his
life. To no avail: Monmouth was convicted of treason and sentenced to die.
Because of his noble status, Monmouth was spared the type of execution
reserved for common traitors: hanging, then cut down while still alive to have
your entrails removed, and finally cut into four pieces to be publicly displayed
as a warning against committing treason. Instead, the relative luxury of
beheading was reserved for noblemen. If you were lucky, this was a swift send
off to eternity. As a parting gift to his second wife, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII
arranged for a swordsman to come over from St. Omer to slice his wife’s neck
in one delicate stroke. For everyone else, the usual practice was to bribe the
executioner to make it as quick and painless as possible. Quite in character,
Monmouth capped a lifetime of stupid decisions by insulting the executioner,
John Ketch, contemptuously offering him six guineas and a box of toothpicks if
he performed his office well. In an unrepentant and patronizing tone,
Monmouth promised that his servant would offer even more money if Ketch did
a good job.
The executioner was, by now, pissed off. At the same time, the huge crowd
assembled on Tower hill was in a frenzy, impatient for their Protestant martyr’s
head to roll. These factors served to unsteady the usually sturdy grip of John
Ketch. As every competent executioner knows, severing a head quickly
requires getting the blade between the segments of skeleton in the neck. But
Ketch, rattled by Monmouth’s impetuosity and the ferocity of the crowd, was
unable to get anywhere near the neck after three or four attempts, butchering
Monmouth’s skull and upper back instead. Thankfully, Ketch’s next few
attempts landed closer to the neck itself, but the crowd, impatient for the blood
squirting climax, roared for Ketch to lay Monmouth’s by now mutilated upper
body over the side of the scaffold. Someone in the crowd threw up a rusty pen
knife, which Ketch employed to finally sever the still dangling head of the Duke
of Monmouth. With the traitor’s head finally off, the riotous mob was ready to
grab Ketch and rip him to pieces for a job not well done. Happily, the
executioner barely escaped an even more grisly death than the one he had
just inflicted upon the unlucky Duke of Monmouth.
THE BIGGEST QUEENS IN HISTORY
Queen Anne (1702-1714), the last monarch of the house of Stuart, was one of
the biggest queens in English history. While this full figured crown wearer was
somewhat comely in her youth, decades of nearly constant procreative activity
rendered her prematurely matronly, while a childhood malady made her
eyeballs water and bulge to the end of her life. In these things she was quite
unlike the rest of the seventeenth century royal Stuarts, who were mostly
blessed with pleasing countenances and slim figures, like her sister Mary II
(1689-94), an international beauty. Even the prissy and fussy James VI and I
(1603-25), who grew stout in the center, always kept his legs.
What Anne lacked in physical appeal she more than made up for in dynastic
luster; from the moment of her birth she was never more than a few heartbeats
away from the throne. In the year 1683, when she was sixteen, her uncle
Charles II married her to Prince George of Denmark, brother to the Danish
king. George was no looker, either; pockmarked, and, to many
contemporaries, rather stupid looking, this was hardly a textbook fairy tale
prince and princess waddling up the aisle in the chapel royal at St. James’s
Palace.
Fortunately, looks were not an issue with this royal couple. Despite their
arranged marriage, they took to each other like two hogs in heaven, and
remained that way until death parted them. George’s primary duty was to sire
male Protestant heirs for the House of Stuart, a task he took very seriously and
with great relish. In a span of some seventeen years, Anne conceived
annually. Undoubtedly, Anne’s prodigious weight gain was easily explained by
the fact that for much of her adult life she was always eating for two!
Tragically, all of George and Anne’s children died before, during, or soon after
birth, save one, the little duke of Gloucester, who endured a chronically
swelled head, which had to be drained periodically. The poor child died at the
age of ten, the last Protestant male heir of the House of Stuart.
Despite her royal status, Anne consoled her grief in the common fashion, by
over-indulging in the consumption of food. Constant dining, in fact, constituted
“bonding” for the unlucky Prince and Princess. George, racked by asthma
and other physical ailments, haunted by the death march of his children, also
grew a paunch of epic proportions. In an age in which support groups, Jenny
Craig, Weight Watchers, and Slim-Fast were unknown, George and Anne
consoled themselves with the limited options available to them, choosing a
food frenzy over religious devotion.
Eventually sidelined from the usual outdoor aristocratic pursuits by their royal
girths, Anne and George, when they were not eating, were dedicated
gamblers. In the words of one historian, “Anne lost prodigious pounds at the
gaming tables, and moved to the supper table, where she gained them back.”
By the time she became queen in 1702, she had to be carried to her
coronation in a litter. Nearly blind, crippled by gout, and as big as a house,
Queen Anne brought Louis XIV to heel, united England and Scotland, and
presided over Britain’s “Augustan Age.” All this done, as you can well imagine,
from that big, roomy, comfortable chair that constituted her throne.
| THE BREAKING WIND |