The Good, the Bad and the Unready (30 page)

By some contemporaries Theodosius was known as a warmhearted man who loved to sit at home and read histories, but history itself records him as being cruel, choleric and intemperate. For example, he generously pardoned the fractious citizens of Antioch in 387, but three years later approved of the massacre of some 7,000 people in Thessalonica, an act for which he had to humble himself in the cathedral of Milan in order to have his excommunication lifted.

Anthony the
Great Bastard

Anthony, Burgundian nobleman, 1421–1504

In the fifteenth century, being a bastard was not a congenital embarrassment. Anthony was unashamedly the illegitimate son of Philip the
GOOD
and, though not in line to any throne, was held in high regard among the elite of Burgundy. The first part of his soubriquet, ‘the Great’, celebrates the fact that he was a courageous jouster, a flamboyant patron of the arts and a collector of illuminated manuscripts.

Less celebrated is Anthony’s abortive crusade of 1464. In the spring of that year he led eighty-two volunteers out of Ghent and started the long journey to Jerusalem. At Marseilles, however, the valiant soldiers heard the news that Pope Pius II had died, and in the absence of a pontiff the men reluctantly turned about face and plodded home.

Roger the
Great Count
see
the
SONS OF TANCRED

Arthur the
Great Duke
see
Arthur the
IRON DUKE

 
George the
Great Patron of Mankind

George II, king of England, 1683–1760

In his poem
The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated
Alexander Pope addresses his monarch, George II, with the following lines:

This was no panegyric, however, but a scathing attack on the king. In referring to George opening up ‘all the Main’, Pope was pointing out that the high seas were in fact full of Spanish ships harassing the English fleet. In mentioning ‘Arms abroad’, he was alluding to the arms of George’s long-term German mistress Countess Melusine von der Schulenberg. And in extolling George’s involvement in the arts and national legislation, he was merely highlighting George’s disinterest in culture and affairs of state.

Indeed, the king was a pedant, an obsessive who spent hours counting the royal treasury coin by coin and who upbraided his officials for even the mildest of breaches of royal etiquette. His preoccupation with order and punctuality meant that court life was stultifying and monotonous. ‘No mill horse,’ wrote the statesman Lord Hervey, ‘ever went on a more constant track on a more unchanging circle.’

The only excitement in court was when George lost his temper. His habit of falling into rages and kicking his wig around the room was legendary.

Isabella the
Great Sow

Isabella, queen consort of Charles VI of France, 1371–1435

Isabella enjoyed seven years of comparative wedded bliss with her husband Charles the
SILLY
until his first severe attack of
insanity in 1392. Initially she sought both medical and supernatural remedies for his condition, but as his illness worsened (from time to time he didn’t even know who she was) she sought comfort in the arms of other men and in so doing earned her reputation and nickname.

One might have expected her to have time for John the
FEARLESS
, who rescued her from imprisonment by her son Charles, but according to the Monk of St Denis she found John ‘hideously repugnant’. Isabella, whom chroniclers variously describe as ‘short and brown-coloured’ and ‘enveloped in horrid fat’, fell instead for the charming and sprightly Louis of Valois, duke of Orleans, who happened to be her brother-in-law. They were apparently seldom apart, putting ‘all their vanity in wealth, all their pleasure in bodily delight’. A scandal for France and a butt of English jokes, she died mocked by both nations.

Anne the
Great Whore

Anne Boleyn, queen of England, c.1507–36

Henry VIII tired of his second wife after about three years, and although
BLUFF KING HAL
and his cronies insisted that she had enjoyed a hundred lovers, only twenty offences of adultery were officially levied against her. It was, of course, a complete pack of lies and yet, even when, on the damnation of her immortal soul, Anne swore on the sacrament that she had never been unfaithful to the king (least of all with her brother George) she won little sympathy. That she was no ravishing beauty- one critic described her as having buck teeth, six fingers on her right hand and a massive wart under her chin – and that she may have shared too many romantic secrets with some of her courtiers may not have helped her cause, but a whore, let alone a great whore, she was not. For failing to produce a male heir (a girl, such as her daughter,
GOOD QUEEN BESS
, was decidedly second-class goods) Anne simply and spectacularly fell out of favour. On the scaffold she suggested that as well as ‘Anne of a Thousand Days’ (owing to the length of her reign) and ‘the Great Whore’, she would rapidly acquire a third nickname. ‘Soon,’ she quipped in true
gallows humour, ‘I shall be known as “Anne sans tete” [Anne the Headless].’

Aurelian the
Greatest Goth
see
Aurelian the
RESTORER OF THE WORLD

Amadeus the
Green
see
Colourful Characters

Archibald
Greysteel