The True History of the Blackadder (66 page)

Neither Sir Francis Drake nor Lord Effingham were ever under sentence of death – they were victors against the Spanish Armada, and rewarded accordingly.

Queen Mary I was never beheaded – although, as this claim was made by Elizabeth’s Nurse, her every pronouncement can safely be dismissed as insanity.

Elephants are not orange.

There is no record of boomerangs appearing in Britain until after the first recorded discovery of Australia by Captain Cook in the eighteenth century.

The song ‘Happy Birthday to You’ was written at the turn of the twentieth century.

If a horse was ever made Pope, the Vatican did not record it, nor allow anyone in Christendom to know about it.

Sir Thomas Herriott actually introduced the potato to Britain from Colombia in 1586.

Sir Walter Raleigh was not born until two years after the expedition he claims to have embarked on in 1552.

The Cape of Good Hope had already been navigated by 1488, by Portuguese explorer Dias.

Blackadder could not have called the police, two and a half centuries before their creation.

Lord Percy’s suggestion of inviting Cardinal Wolsey to a party is peculiar, given Wolsey’s death thirty years earlier – although Percy perhaps wasn’t to have known that.

Prince Ludwig’s demand for Swedish kronor comes three hundred years before the currency’s invention.

Charles I was captured two years before 1648, the beginning of Sir Edmund’s Chronicle. Oliver Cromwell was also not known as ‘Lord Protector’ until after Charles’s execution. In addition, King Charles never lived to have a fiftieth birthday.