The Good, the Bad and the Unready (34 page)

James V, king of Scotland, 1512–42

The whole of James’s upbringing was conducive to moral delinquency, and it was said that his stepfather, Archibald
GREYSTEEL
, actively encouraged him in a precocious career of vice. When he was still a teenager, he already had three illegitimate sons and, by the time he died, aged twenty-nine, he had sired seven children, all with different mothers.

Considering his merciless treatment of the inhabitants of the Scottish Borders and Highlands, his treacherous double-dealings with
BLUFF KING HAL
of England and his vindictive domestic policy of taxation, it is little wonder that he was called ‘the Ill-Beloved’ and is generally understood to be one of the most unpopular monarchs who ever sat on the Scottish throne. ‘So sore a dread king,’ the duke of Norfolk wrote to Thomas the
HAMMER OF THE MONKS
, ‘and so ill-beloved of his subjects, was never in that land.’

There was another side to James, however, a side that endeared him to many. Stories of ‘the King of the Commons’ wandering unknown among his subjects are widespread. Perhaps the best known tells how a miller called Jock Howieson rescued the (incognito) king from a gang of thugs and washed and dressed his wounds. James introduced himself as ‘the Gudeman of Ballangiech’, a tenant farmer on one of the royal estates, and, in gratitude, invited Howieson to Holyrood Palace. James promised the miller that he would catch a glimpse of the king, whom he would recognize as the only person wearing a hat. Once they had arrived at the palace, with James still in disguise, a group of courtiers all removed their hats and bowed, at which
Howieson, who was wearing a cap himself, exclaimed, ‘Then it must be either you or me, for all but us are bareheaded!’ For his Good Samaritan kindness, Howieson received the freehold of a royal farm.

But such romantic events were mere interludes in what was otherwise a dark reign steeped in iniquity. The circumstances of James’s death were fittingly sad. On hearing that his forces had suffered a disastrous rout at the hands of the English at Solway Moss, James climbed into bed, turned his face to the wall and died, indifferent to the birth of his daughter Mary the
MERMAID
the week before.

Ill-Fated Henry
see
Henry the
MARTYR

Jamshid the
Illustrious

Jamshid, king of Persia,
fl
. eighth century BC

To Jamshid, the fifth monarch of Persia’s Pishdadian dynasty, we owe much. Legend credits him with nothing less than the introduction of the solar year and the invention of most of the arts and sciences on which civilization is based. It is to one of his wives, however, that we owe the discovery of the properties of wine. Suffering from a painful illness, she drank the juice of some fermented grapes in the mistaken belief that it would prove lethal. On the contrary, she fell into a deep sleep and woke up the next morning with a hangover – but cured.

Perhaps it was the drink, but in later life Jamshid elevated his own status to that of a god, and for his pride he was put to a barbaric death. A Syrian prince named Zohak hunted him down and had him strapped between two boards and sawn in half with the backbone of a fish.

Ptolemy the
Illustrious
see
PTOLEMAIC KINGS

 
Yung-cheng the
Immortal

Yung-cheng, emperor of China, 1678–1735

On 8 October 1735 Yung-cheng the Immortal died.

Vlad the
Impaler

Vlad Tepes, prince of Wallachia, c.1431–76

As one might suspect, the origins behind Vlad’s nickname are not for the queasy.

In the middle of the fifteenth century the province of Wallachia in southern Romania was self-governed under Turkish suzerainty. It was a brutal time and Vlad, who called himself ‘Dracula’, meaning ‘Son of the Dragon’, was the most brutal prince of all. He ruled the province three times. The six years of his principal reign, between 1456 and 1462, were predominantly occupied with combating the Turkish forces of Mehmed the
CONQUEROR
and quashing repeated rebellions by the Saxon citizens of Brasov. During this period he supposedly put 20,000 people to death, and his methods of maintaining sovereignty were nothing short of stomach-churning.

He loved to watch people being boiled alive in copper cauldrons. He delighted in peeling the skin off the feet of Turkish prisoners, covering their wounds with salt and then bringing goats to lick their soles. Once, some Ottoman ambassadors refused to remove their turbans as a sign of respect for him, so he had their turbans nailed to their heads.

But his favourite modus operandi was impalement. The people of Brasov earned the dubious distinction of being the most popular victims of this form of execution, and the hills surrounding their town carried more stakes than anywhere else in the principality. Here, it is said, Vlad impaled women and their suckling babies on the same stake and then wined and dined with Carpathian vultures among the cadavers. Here, a Russian narrative tells us, a boyar who was unable to endure the smell of coagulating blood any longer held his nose in a gesture of revulsion, upon which Vlad ordered a stake, three times as long as
normal, to be prepared. He then presented it to the peasant saying, ‘You can live up there yonder, where the stench cannot reach you.’ The poor man was immediately impaled and his body left to rot in the sun.

The mechanics of impalement are cumbersome. A sharp stake is thrust through the victim’s rectum, and then forced through the body to emerge either through the eye or throat. The stake is then planted in the ground, leaving the victim hanging in agony. Stories of Vlad’s impaling some 100,000 people in his lifetime are therefore highly improbable. If a tenth of the tales of his brutality deserve any credence, however, Vlad was one of the most barbaric men of the Middle Ages, and any gory scenes in Bram Stoker’s novel
Dracula
are the lightest of entertainments in comparison.

Ferdinand the
Inconstant

Ferdinand I, king of Portugal, 1345–83

The story of this woefully perfidious king is a tale of three women who had something in common. Ferdinand, also known as ‘the Handsome’, initially intended to marry Leonor, daughter of the king of Aragon, but under the provisions of a political treaty was compelled to snub her in favour of Leonor, the daughter of the Castilian ‘Henry the Bastard’. Ferdinand then rocked royal society by jilting Henry’s daughter in favour of the beautiful Portuguese noblewoman Leonor Teles de Meneses. While one may not admire his inconstancy with women, one cannot but be impressed with the constancy of their names.

Louis the
Indolent
see
GALLIC PRACTICE

Elizabeth the
Infamous