The Good, the Bad and the Unready (66 page)

Frederick the
Wise

Frederick III, elector of Saxony, 1463–1525

Frederick was a pious man and owned a collection of holy relics supposedly including scraps from Jesus’s swaddling clothes, a hair of his beard and remains of some of the innocents slaughtered by King Herod. As well as a keen collector, Frederick was also a fierce promoter of scholarship and, despite his own Catholicism, supported and protected the reformer Martin Luther against Catholic charges of heresy. His reputation for deliberation and even-handedness won him the titles ‘the Wise’ and ‘the Learned’, although his cautious nature earned him the soubriquet ‘the Hesitater’ from (a rather ungrateful) Luther.

James the
Wisest Fool in Christendom

James I, king of England, and VI, king of Scotland, 1566–1625

James had a tongue too big for his mouth, legs too weak for his body, and lifeless, buglike eyes that rolled around inside his head. He pranced about in padded green clothing, with a hunting horn rather than a sword dangling at his side. He rode abominably,
swore horribly and wrote some of the dullest treatises of all time. Many people, among them the author Charles Dickens, would have us believe that the only son of Mary the
MERMAID
was a complete and utter buffoon and an impossible pedant. This is an unnecessarily harsh portrait. That said, his character did contain shocking defects:

And yet James was no fool. As a young man he studied Greek, French and Latin, and he regularly consulted his library of classical and religious writings. Narrow-minded he may have been, yet he was still able to quote Aristotle freely, expound at great length on his favourite topic, witchcraft, and write poetry, political treatises and translations of some thirty psalms. Aware of his learned background, the duke of Sully, French envoy to the English court, dubbed him ‘the Wisest Fool in Europe’, but when the King James Version of the Bible appeared, a translation commissioned at James’s behest, the epithet was broadened to ‘the Wisest Fool in Christendom’.

 
James the
Wisest Fool in Europe
see
James the
WISEST FOOL IN CHRISTENDOM

Eleanor the
Witty

Eleanor ‘Nell’ Gwyn, mistress of King Charles II of England, 1650–87

Of all the mistresses of Charles the
MERRY MONARCH
– and there were many – the public took only one to their hearts, namely the petite, brown-eyed and high-spirited Nell Gwyn.

After a childhood serving brandy in a brothel and selling oranges at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, Nell worked as a comedienne until she left the stage for Charles in 1669. Her infectious wit and gleeful lewdness won her a host of nicknames and the acclaim of a public otherwise cool to the monarch’s paramours. Many knew her as ‘Sweet Nell’, others as ‘Pretty Witty Nell’, while the scholar Robert Whitcomb described her as having the beauty of Venus, spirit of Hercules, wisdom of Apollo and wit of Mercury. Such extravagant praise must have softened the pain of her less flattering epithets, ‘Puddle-Nell’ and ‘the Protestant Whore’.

Nell had an extravagant lifestyle – she bought her house on fashionable Pall Mall in cash – and by the time of Charles’s death she was universally in debt. Aware of this, the king, on his deathbed, begged his brother to ‘not let poor Nelly starve’, and so she was given a modest annual income until her own death from a stroke when in her late thirties.

John the
Wizard

John III, king of Poland, 1629–96

John III, or John Sobieski, is a Polish hero most famous for his rescue of Vienna from a Turkish invading force in the late summer of 1683. With the Turks heading his way, the pusillani mous emperor ‘Leopold the Great’ (
see
GREAT… BUT
not that Great
) skulked off to his Bavarian fortress, leaving the Viennese to their fate. But up stepped John, with his large moustache, diamond-encrusted fur cap and, as always, a scimitar strapped to his side. On 12 September, with his force of some 70,000 men, John routed the ‘infidel’ and wrote a message to the pope: ‘
Veni, Vidi, Deus Vicit
’ –
‘I came, I saw, God conquered.’ The Turks simply could not understand how they had lost, and named John ‘the Wizard’ in the belief that he possessed supernatural powers.

Sobieski may have relieved Vienna, but he proved unable to extract any tangible benefits for Poland from the victory. Possessing little of the ambition of Louis the
SUN KING
or the conquering spirit of Peter the
GREAT
, the wizard simply lacked the magic needed to prevent his homeland from tumbling into vassalage after his death.

Alexander the
Wolf of Badenoch

Alexander Stewart, lord of Badenoch, 1343–c.1405

When the bishop of Moray censured the lord of Badenoch for adultery, he cannot possibly have expected Alexander’s reaction. With a posse of Gaelic thugs Alexander ransacked the town of Forres before moving on to Elgin and burning the cathedral to the ground. As a result, the lupine lord, elsewhere known as ‘Big Alexander’, was excommunicated. A fictional account of the unsavoury exploits and amorous adventures of Alexander the Wolf of Badenoch can be found in a novel of the same name by the Victorian author Thomas Lauder. Readers may also wish to peruse some of Lauder’s other works, including ‘Account of a
Toad Found in the Trunk of a Beech’ and ‘An Account of the Worm with which the Stickleback is Infested’.

Frederick the
Wonder of the World