The Good, the Bad and the Unready (54 page)

Zenobia, queen of Palmyra,
fl
. third century

When King Odenathus died in 269, the Romans thought that Palmyra in Syria would continue as a vassal state under Aurelian the
RESTORER OF THE WORLD
. They were mistaken. Queen Zenobia, now the sole ruler, immediately declared independence from Rome and began a military campaign that eventually saw her troops conquer Egypt and much of Asia Minor.

Zenobia, who styled herself ‘the Queen of the East’, was a true warrior queen, often at the vanguard of her troops as they went into battle. In 274, however, her military ambitions were thwarted. Imperial forces pushed her army all the way back to Palmyra itself and captured her as she tried to flee from her palace on a dromedary. After a brief spell of captivity in Rome, Zenobia married a senator and lived out her days as a socialite on an estate near modern-day Tivoli.

Elizabeth the
Queen of the Sea
see
GOOD QUEEN BESS

Queen
Sarah

Sarah Jennings, first duchess of Marlborough, 1660–1744

Princess Anne, later
BRANDY NAN
, and Sarah, the first duchess of Marlborough, were devoted to each other. Sharing a common dislike of William III, ‘the Gallic Bully’, they privately wrote to each other as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman respectively, and dreamed of the day when Anne would be queen and Sarah the most powerful woman in English politics since
GOOD QUEEN BESS
.

On Anne’s accession a gossiping public were quick to recognize that the power of the throne lay not with their queen but with Sarah, and so honoured the duchess with a royal nickname. Political differences, however, conspired to force the two ‘queens’ inexorably apart: Anne favoured the Tories, whom she saw as the only party serious about the Church, while Sarah was an ardent Whig. In 1710 Anne dismissed her aide, and a relationship of extraordinary sympathy ended in mutual contempt.

Queen
Venus

Margaret of Valois, queen of France, 1553–1615

Margaret’s nickname refers to her string of romantic liaisons, many of which were conducted during her marriage to Henry the
GREAT
. After a brief affair with the extremist Catholic duke of Guise, the daughter of Henry the
WARLIKE
(
see
GALLIC PRACTICE
) reluctantly married the Protestant Henry in 1572, with the king all but physically forcing her to make the responses at their wedding. Her next serious lover was Joseph, Viscount de la Mole, an unsavoury character renowned for his sexual prowess. Popular rumour has it that when he was beheaded for treason, Margaret buried his remains secretly at night. As he had been quartered as well as beheaded it must have been a messy business. Others allege that Margaret embalmed de la Mole’s head, had it set with jewels and placed it in a lead casket which she then interred with her own hands.

Happily divorced and living on a guaranteed income, by middle age Margaret had grown monstrously fat, and in her vast skirts would routinely block doorways. Her old-fashioned clothes, over-rouged cheeks and flabby jowls made her an object of derision. Her massive blonde wig, for which blond footmen were hired and shaved whenever she needed a new coiffure, was the talk of the town. And yet her lovers, whom she is rumoured to have regularly beaten, were prolific. Oddly enough, she got on well with Henry’s second wife, Marie de Medici, who allowed her children to call this very strange woman Aunt’.

William the
Rake of Piccadilly

William Douglas, fourth duke of Queensbury, 1724–1810

As a young man, William pursued his passion for wine, women and the races with such reckless abandon that he made eighteenth-century London society gasp. When William continued pursuing the same passions with unrelenting ardour even into his eighties, early nineteenth-century London reeled at his behaviour: he was the consummate dirty old man.

His love of a bet was legendary. He once won a wager that he could make a letter travel fifty miles in an hour, by stuffing the letter into a cricket ball and having twenty men throw it back and forth as fast as they could. And while his colours were a mainstay at horse-racing meets for many decades, it was his myriad and shameless dalliances with women, regardless of their position or marital status, that earned him his notoriety and nickname.

From the balcony of his house at 138 Piccadilly, William would leer at and ogle the passing women and have his groom take notes to those who caught his eye. To the dismay of genteel England, many young women would accept his invitation to be entertained at his expense. Towards the end of his extremely long life, which he ascribed in part to his habit of bathing in milk, ‘Old Q’ would still drive out in his signature dark green clothes and make passes at women. When the poet Leigh Hunt saw him in the early 1800s, he ‘wondered at the longevity of his dissipation and the prosperity of his worthlessness’.

 
Louis a
Reborn Alexander
see
Louis the
LION

Amadeus the
Red
see
COLOURFUL CHARACTERS

Erik the
Red

Erik, Viking explorer, 935–1001

Redheaded Erik often saw red. Such was his temper that he was convicted of manslaughter both in his native land of Norway and later in Iceland, and was banished from both for three years respectively. Erik decided to spend his exile exploring a new land that had been sighted some fifty years earlier by a Norwegian sailor called Gunnbjorn, and so in 980 he set sail for terra incognita.

He found a territory uninhabited by man but flush with bears, foxes and caribou, and as soon as his period of exile was over he returned to Breidafjord in Iceland waxing lyrical about this new country, which was prime for colonization. The place had to be named, of course, and, though some may mock given its vast expanse of ice, Erik called the country ‘Greenland’ after the deep-green fjords and lakes and verdant slopes of the south-west.

Otto the
Red
see
Otto the
BLOODY