The Good, the Bad and the Unready (41 page)

Louis the
Locksmith King
see
the
BAKER AND THE BAKER’S WIFE

Edward
Longshanks
see
Edward the
HAMMER OF THE SCOTS

Archibald the
Loser

Archibald Douglas, fourth earl of Douglas, c.1369–1424

Archibald lost so many battles and was so unlucky a general that he gained the nickname of ‘Tine-man’, or ‘the Loser’, as well as the sympathy of the historian David Hume of Godscroft, who wrote that ‘no man was lesse fortunate, and… no man was more valorous.’ Archibald lost more than battles, however. In 1402 he lost an eye when fighting Harry
HOTSPUR
at the battle of Homildon Hill; later that same year he lost favour with Henry
BOLINGBROKE
of England when he joined Percy’s rebel forces; and finally, on 14 August 1424, he lost his life while leading the French and Scottish troops against the English under John with the
LEADEN SWORD
in the battle of Verneuil in Normandy.

Ptolemy the
Lover of his Father
see
PTOLEMAIC KINGS

 
Ptolemy the
Lover of his Mother
see
PTOLEMAIC KINGS

Philip the
Lucky
see
GALLIC PRACTICE

Macedonia’s Madman
see
Alexander the
GREAT

Charles the
Mad
see
Charles the
SILLY

Joan the
Mad

Joan, queen of Castile and Aragon, 1479–1555

As early as 1499 a Spanish priest reported his concern that the young wife of Philip the
HANDSOME
was ‘so frightened that she could not hold up her head’, but the first clear signs of her extreme neurosis did not appear until three years later, when she would apparently run up curtains like a cat. Many chroniclers believe that her mental imbalance lay in her profound jealousy of her good-looking but inept husband, whom she suspected of having numerous affairs. Such suspicion was highly justified. Philip was a playboy whose calculating advisers, one ambassador reported, would ‘take him from banquet to banquet and from one lady to the next’. When the lusty Philip died aged twenty-eight, Joan went completely insane and refused to have her husband buried. Instead she traipsed his corpse from monastery to monastery (avoiding convents, where she assumed that Philip might seduce the nuns) in the expectation that he would rise from the dead.

 
Otto the
Mad

Otto, king of Bavaria, 1848–1916

Incurably insane when he came to the throne in 1886, Otto invoked his ‘royal prerogative’ to shoot a peasant every day. His courtiers-cum-guards duly obliged. Using a gun loaded with blanks, the monarch would take a pot at a palace servant dressed as a serf. On hearing the report of the gun, the courtier would topple ‘dead’ into the nearest bush.

Rupert the
Mad Cavalier