The Good, the Bad and the Unready (38 page)

John, king of England, 1167–1216

As the youngest son, John had no immediate inheritance and thus received the nickname ‘Lackland’ –an entirely appropriate epithet as it turned out, since during his reign he succeeded in losing nearly all of England’s territories in France. His exploits in Ireland when still a prince, however, should have alerted his nobles to the humiliations that were to come. Dispatched there in 1185 to conclude the conquest begun by his father, Henry
CURTMANTLE
, all John managed to do was alienate the friendly native kings by ridiculing their dress and appearance, and infuriate his own soldiers by spending their pay on himself.

If ‘Lackland’ was an apt epithet, that of ‘Softsword’ was undeserved. Although certainly no warrior like his brother Richard the
LIONHEART
, he was no coward either, and it was merely sniping malcontents who dubbed him ‘Mollegladium’ after he signed the peace treaty of Goulet with Philip the
MAGNANIMOUS
in 1200. Similarly, the French unjustly nicknamed him ‘Dollheart’, in contrast to his lionhearted brother, after he famously retreated from the siege of La Roche-aux-Moines in 1214 even though he had the superior force. A more fitting nickname might have been ‘the Restless’, since, as attested by his need for many mistresses and his habit of writing notes in church telling the preacher to hurry up as he wanted his dinner, he could never sit still.

 
Albert the
Lame

Albert II, duke of Austria, 1289–1358

Until his early thirties Albert was a tall, good-looking man with a commanding presence, but when an illness left him paralysed from the waist down and unable to move except in a litter or on horseback, his ability to govern Austria was in the balance. But thanks, undoubtedly, to the encouragement of his permanently merry brother and co-regent Otto the
JOLLY
, an undaunted Albert demonstrated for a further fifteen years a deftness and generosity that endeared him to his subjects and won him the additional nickname ‘the Wise’.

David the
Last King of Paradise
see
David the
MERRY MONARCH

Charles the
Last Man

Charles I, king of England, 1600–1649

Deliberately avoiding the word ‘king’, Parliamentarians called Charles ‘the Last Man’, implying that he would be the last person to sit on the throne of Great Britain as monarch. When he was not, they refused to be daunted and with admirable determination dubbed Charles II ‘the Son of the Last Man’.

Unlike his son, Charles was in no way a merry monarch. Standing five feet four inches, his sad, dispirited face with its mournful, heavy-lidded eyes showed no trace of affection even towards his closest colleagues. His stammer, meanwhile, which he tried (unsuccessfully) to cure when a boy by cramming his mouth with pebbles, made strangers uncomfortable. And though devoutly religious, the king did not impress William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury, who remarked, ‘He neither is, nor knows how to be great.’

The morose Charles had few close friends apart from his wife, Henrietta Maria, but had many enemies. Puritans dubbed him ‘the Man of Blood’ for his leadership in the Civil War, and had
him beheaded in January 1649. His many distant supporters, however, considered his execution an act of religious persecution and conferred upon him the title ‘the Martyr’.

Alfred the
Last of the Dandies

Count Alfred d’Orsay, French nobleman, 1801–52

The political and artistic elite of early Victorian London, including Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli and Napoleon III, ‘the Man of December’, loved to visit Alfred’s opulent residence. They were intrigued by his tight trousers, loud waistcoats and strong perfumes, they were thrilled and scandalized by his simultaneous affairs with both the count and countess of Blessington, and they were eager to hear him hold forth on matters of taste in English society. That is, until the money ran out. In 1849 d’Orsay went bankrupt, and he fled back to France where he died fighting off his many creditors.

Harold the
Last of the Saxons

Harold II, king of England, c.1020–66

Whether Harold was killed at the battle of Hastings by an arrow in the eye, as the Bayeux Tapestry famously appears to suggest, is a matter for debate. Certainly no mortal arrow wound is mentioned in any contemporary account of the battle. Writing in 1070, William of Jumieges merely states that ‘Harold himself was slain, pierced with mortal wounds’ by four Norman soldiers. ‘The first, cleaving his breast through the shield with his point,
drenched the earth with a gushing torrent of blood; the second smote off his head below the protection of the helmet and the third pierced the inwards of his belly with his lance; the fourth hewed off his thigh and bore away the severed limb.’ The
Chronicle of Battle Abbey
, meanwhile, records that he was ‘laid low by a chance blow’.

Henry of Huntingdon, however, writing some sixty years later, is adamant that a shower of arrows ‘fell around King Harold, and he himself sank to the ground, struck in the eye’. And although he does not describe
how
he died, the contemporary historian William of Poitiers writes that the king’s body was ‘recognized not by his face’, suggesting such mutilation as an arrow might cause.

To this day, the precise nature of Harold’s death is unclear. What
is
clear is that the death of Harold Godwinson spelled the end of the Anglo-Saxon phase of English history and ushered in Norman rule under William the
CONQUEROR
.

Magnus the
Law-Mender

Magnus VI, king of Norway, 1238–80

Magnus is the last Norwegian king to be featured in the Icelandic sagas, but in covering his life, stories of heroic valour and errant knights are noticeably absent. Instead, we learn how he devoted his life to the legal reform of his nation, revising and codifying previous laws and establishing among his nobility a hierarchy along European lines, with the introduction of dukes, earls, knights and barons. We find out that, under him, the punishing of criminals was considered a public affair, meted out by official courts rather than private individuals with a score to settle. We are told, furthermore, that belligerent bishops ensured that the only area of law not to be changed was the governance of the Church. It was a time of serious, unromantic politics, and Magnus – a serious, unromantic king – was the right man for the job.

 
Edward the
Lawgiver
see
Edward the
HAMMER OF THE SCOTS