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.”

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.