The Book of Ancient Bastards (34 page)

The Spider King

( A.D. 1423–1483)

If you can’t lie, you can’t govern.
—King Louis XI of France

The son of King Charles VII, who had been dispossessed and disinherited by King Henry V of England, Louis spent his childhood and early adulthood witnessing his father’s attempts to pry the English out of northern France (the king didn’t even own Paris at the time!). By the time he came to the throne at age thirty-eight, he had learned the hard lesson that the French nobility could not be trusted, since they usually had their own agendas when it came to the distribution of power, and that there was nothing to be gained by ever keeping his word to them.

So he didn’t.

Ever.

The result for the country of France turned out better than you might expect. Louis XI was the most successful king at adding territory to the realm since Philip Augustus, and wouldn’t see his equal again until the accession of Louis XIV during the seventeenth century.

Once he became king, Louis immediately set about breaking the power of the nobles in France. So when Philip the Good, senile ruler of the massive duchy of Burgundy, contacted him about wanting to go on crusade (it was the fifteenth century; the kingdoms of Western Europe hadn’t mounted a notable crusade in well over a century), Louis slyly offered to bankroll the enterprise, in return for a large slice of Philip’s duchy, and a rewrite of the duke’s will.

This brought Louis into conflict with Philip’s son, a violent fellow known alternately as Charles the Bold, Charles the Rash, and Charles the Terrible, depending on who was talking about him. Convinced that Louis was attempting to steal his inheritance (he was right), Charles rebelled against the king, convincing a large number of French, Dutch, and Flemish nobles to join him.

Louis lost battle after battle to Charles (who was a brilliant general), but was able to string out the conflict (just as Philip Augustus had done time and again with the kings of England) until he finally got lucky: Charles was killed at the Battle of Nancy in A.D. 1477, and with his father’s redrawn will still on the books, the duchy of Burgundy got split down the middle between his two heirs: Philip’s daughter and Charles’s old enemy, the Spider King himself, Louis of France.

Louis’s luck continued to hold: in A.D. 1481, four years after the death of Charles the Bold/Rash/Terrible, the king’s cousin (Charles IV, Duke of Anjou) died without living children, and the duke willed his large estate in southern France to the king. So when Louis himself died two years later at age sixty, he left his heirs a much-expanded France.

What’s in a Name?

Louis had many nicknames, including “le Prudent” and “the Spider.” He earned both of these, as he was better with money than his somewhat feckless father, and like Philip Augustus preferred to gain through intrigue rather than through the naked exercise of military power.

Chastity, Schmastity, I’m the Pope and My Son’s Gonna Be a Cardinal

( A.D. 1431–1503)

Now we are in the power of a wolf, the most rapacious perhaps that this world has ever seen. And if we do not flee, he will inevitably devour us all.
—Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici on hearing of the election
of Rodrigo Borgia as pope

One of the early Renaissance popes whose conduct exemplified the deep systemic corruption of the Catholic Church at the end of the Middle Ages, Alexander VI was a Borgia and is more famous today not for being pope, nor even for his many excesses, but for being father of the infamous Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia (yes, those Borgias).

Completely ignoring the prohibition against clergy having sex, Borgia had several mistresses, and at least four children by one of them, an Italian woman named Vanozza dei Cattanei. Elevating nepotism to an art form, he filled high-level papal government positions with family members (including his own son Cesare, whom he made a cardinal while still a teenager, even though the boy hadn’t spent a single day as a priest).

Spanish-born Rodrigo Borja (later changed to the Italian spelling of “Borgia”) followed his uncle to Rome when the latter became Pope Callixtus III in A.D. 1455. After that, his ascent through the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was rapid, culminating in his being elected pontiff in A.D. 1492.

Although a talented administrator (a welcome change from the incompetence of several of the most recent popes), Alexander VI was a debauchee of the first order.

Just one of many examples of the tenor of the depravity at Alexander’s papal court was the so-called “Ballet of the Chestnuts,” a theme party put on by Alexander’s son Cesare (by this time a cardinal in the Catholic Church without ever having become a priest) in his apartments in the Palazzo Apostolico in Rome in A.D. 1501. Among the attendees: the pope (Cesare’s daddy), a number of cardinals, and fifty prostitutes whose clothes were auctioned off, and who were then required to crawl around the floor on hands and knees, picking up hundreds of chestnuts dropped there for the purpose of getting these prostitutes on all fours and keeping them there. Every chestnut retrieved garnered the woman retrieving it a cash bonus.

And of course while they were down there, all those godly men in attendance got busy gettin’ busy with them. Male orgasms were kept track of by an attendant, and the guy who had the most over the course of the party won the contest. The originator of the Orgasm Game? None other than Pope Alexander VI!

The Truth about These Borgia Bastards

Lucrezia Borgia, one of history’s great villainesses, gets a bad rap. Hardly the poison-brewing succubus contemporary chroniclers made her out to be, Lucrezia was a pious, God-fearing woman and, as far as we can tell, a loyal wife to her various husbands. The problem was her vicious brute of a brother Cesare, who killed indiscriminately in pursuit of ultimate power. Included among his victims: at least one of Lucrezia’s husbands and one of his and Lucrezia’s brothers!

Hunchback? No. Child-Killer? Probably

( A.D. 1452–1485)

I would my uncle would let me have my life
though I lose my kingdom.
—King Edward V of England

Made infamous by Shakespeare’s play, Richard III of England has come down through history as a monster who seduced the widow of the rightful heir to the English throne in order to get at her immense wealth; set up his own brother to be tried and executed for treason against their eldest brother, Edward IV; and most notoriously usurped the throne on the death of the aforementioned brother/king, took his two nephews prisoner, and quietly had them murdered in the Tower of London once he’d secured his hold on the throne.

The youngest brother of King Edward IV, Richard, then duke of Gloucester, was one of Edward’s most trusted advisors and generals by the time Edward consolidated his reign. After the rival claimant to the throne, Edward of Westminster, was killed in battle, Richard married his widow Anne Neville. This was no mean feat since Richard was rumored to have had a hand in killing her husband in the first place!

In A.D. 1483 , when Edward IV died, Richard became regent for Edward’s underaged sons. He moved quickly to secure physical control of the boys, managing to kidnap both of them and send them to “protective custody” in the Tower of London.

Next, Richard moved to have them declared illegitimate on the grounds that their father had been engaged to someone else when he secretly married their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, in A.D. 1463. His supporters on the regency council agreed with Richard that this was a clear case of bigamy, and that all of the dead king’s children were illegitimate and therefore unable to succeed to the throne.

Just like that, Richard, duke of Gloucester, became Richard III, king of England. Neither of the princes was ever seen or heard from again. Some historians speculate that someone else did them in, but it doesn’t make much sense for someone else to have killed the boys, because no one else could have profited from their deaths as much as their uncle.

Richard had precious little time to enjoy his ill-gotten crown, though. Within two years, he was facing open rebellion in the person of a distant cousin of the Lancaster kings, Henry Tudor, who landed in England at the head of a small army and was quickly joined by many of Richard’s own lords. Attempting to put down this rebellion, Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last English king to die in battle.

Hunchbacked Bastard?

Throughout his play
Richard III
, William Shakespeare consistently portrays the Duke of Gloucester and last Plantagenet king of England as a hunchback. There is no evidence from contemporary sources to support this claim, and it’s pretty clear that Shakespeare was borrowing the notion from authors who wrote during the reign of Richard’s successor Henry Tudor. These authors (including Shakespeare) curried favor with the Tudor monarch by vilifying Richard and representing Richard’s alleged crooked spine as an outward manifestation of his inner villainy.