The Good, the Bad and the Unready (9 page)
Read The Good, the Bad and the Unready Online
Authors: Robert Easton
Bonnie Prince Charlie
Charles Edward Stuart, pretender to the English throne, 1720–88
Charles Stuart was a handsome young man and was very popular with some of the ladies of Edinburgh when he captured the city in 1745 as part of his vain attempt to secure the throne for his father, James the
WARMING-PAN BABY
. Some of the women went to great lengths to lay their hands on a lock of his hair, and miniature portraits of ‘the Highland Laddie’ were all the rage.
After his crushing defeat at the battle of Culloden Moor against ‘William Augustus the Bloody Butcher’, his popularity waned significantly. Popular legend has it that one Flora Mac-Donald helped him escape by disguising him as her maid Betty Burke, and as a result Charles ended his days in Italy not as a ‘Young Pretender’ but as an old, worn-out and unattractive alcoholic.
James the
Bonny Earl
James Stewart, second earl of Moray, d.1592
Suspecting that James, the second earl of Moray, had been involved in a plot against his life, James the
WISEST FOOL IN CHRISTENDOM
issued a warrant for his arrest, and asked George Gordon, the sixth earl of Huntly, to oversee the matter. Huntly was more than happy to oblige since he hated the Bonny Earl with a passion. When he found James, who had holed up at his mother’s house on the coast of Fifeshire, Huntly did more than just arrest him. He set the building on fire, causing James to rush out and race to the beach where he was hacked down at the water’s edge.
James was a good-looking man (hence his appellation ‘bonny’) and it is said that when Huntly gashed James’s cheek with a sword, James proudly exclaimed, ‘You have spoilt a better face than your own.’ His distraught mother took the corpse to Holyrood Palace, where it lay exposed to the elements for months.
The Bonny Earl’s death has given rise to a new word in the English language. It originated in a mishearing of a line from the ballad ‘Geordie’, which records his murder:
Ye Hielands and ye Lowlands
O, whaur hae ye been?
They has slain the Earl o’ Moray,
And laid him on the green.
In an article for
Harper’s Magazine
in 1954 the American writer Sylvia Wright admitted that she had misheard the last line as ‘And Lady Mondegreen’ and had gone on to tell friends that she thought it unfair that James’s innocent wife had also been killed. And thus the term ‘mondegreen’, referring to a misheard song lyric, was born.
Albert the
Braided
see
Albert the
ASTROLOGER
Brandy Nan
Anne, queen of England, 1665–1714
At the age of eighteen, Anne married Prince George
EST-IL-POSSIBLE
? of Denmark. She bore him seventeen children. Eleven were stillborn, five died in infancy and the only other, little William, duke of Gloucester, died of hydrocephalus in 1700 at the tender age of twelve. Some have suggested that this series of misfortunes was what drove Anne to drink, bringing about her nickname ‘Brandy Nan’.
Brandy Nan
A common contemporary portrayal of Anne was that of a dull, massively overweight, heavy-drinking queen with a duller, fatter husband who, not to be outdone, possessed an almost unlimited capacity for hard liquor. It was a depiction that gained further currency when some humorist wrote the following graffiti on her statue in St Paul’s churchyard, which used to have a gin shop directly in front of it:
Brandy Nan, Brandy Nan,
Left in the lurch
Her face to a gin-shop
Her back to the church.
Some would counter, however, that this is an unfair character sketch, resting primarily on Jacobite malice. The duchess of
Marlborough, otherwise known as
QUEEN SARAH
, makes it clear that while Anne’s husband ate and drank heavily, Anne herself did not drink to excess, preferring hot chocolate last thing at night. For her gout, however, she did take laudanum on toast floating in brandy.
The Battle of Bravalla
The battle of Bravalla, as recorded by the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus, took place around the beginning of the eighth century. The Danish king ‘Harald Wartooth’ fought his nephew Ring, whom he had made sub-king of Sweden. In the fighting, the aged and blind Harald was clubbed to death by his own charioteer, a man called Brun, who some suspected was the god Odin. Saxo Grammaticus lists a number of the most notable nobles who fought on each side. They include:
On Harald’s Side
Olvir the Broad
Gnepia the Old
Tummi the Sailmaker
Brat the Jute
Ari the One-Eyed
Dal the Fat
Hithin the Slender
Hothbrodd the Furious
On Ring’s Side
Egil the One-Eyed
Styr the Stout
Gerd the Glad
Saxo the Splitter
Thord the Stumbler
Throndar Big-Nose
Hogni the Clever
Rokar the Swarthy
Rolf the Woman-Lover
Sven of the Shorn Crown
Thorulf the Thick
Thengil the Tall
Birvil the Pale
Thorlevar the Unyielding
Grettir the Wicked
Hadd the Hard
Roldar Toe-Joint
Rafn the White
Blihar Snub-Nosed
Erik the Story-Teller
Holfstein the White
Vati the Doubter
Erling the Snake
Od the Englishman
Alf the Far-Wanderer
Enar Big-Belly
Mar the Red
Grombar the Aged
Berg the Seer
Krok the Peasant
Alf the Proud
Othrik the Young
Frosti Bowl, also known as Frosty Melting-Pot
The Swedes, under Ring, won, losing only 12,000 men to Harald’s 30,000.
In an emphatically drunken age, Anne, some contest, was a comparatively sober individual with a sober outlook on life. Deeply religious, she loathed the Whig politician Lord Wharton on account of his lecherous immorality; rumour has it that, as well as chasing married women, he once defecated in a church pulpit. Rumour has similarly tarnished the reputation of Anne, a decidedly ordinary person with her fair share of weaknesses who became known as little more than a gargantuan old soak.
British Kings of the Dark Ages
From the Roman invasion of 55 BC until approximately AD 900 the first names, let alone nicknames, of kings of Britain are more often matters of conjecture and legend than fact. Some names and nicknames can be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
History of the Kings of Britain
, although this too is thought to be as much the stuff of legend as actual history. Geoffrey’s work was completed in 1136 and, among other things, provided the basis for the stories of King Arthur. Below is a list of those kings from this period that were accorded nicknames.
The Earliest Kings
Beli the Great
Lucius the Great
Macsen the Leader
Coel the Old (better known as Old King Cole)
Gurgust the Ragged
Northern Britain
Bran the Old
Morcant Lightning
Merchiaun the Lean
Eleuther the Handsome
Dunaut the Stout
Mynyddog the Rich
South-west Wales
Tryffon the Bearded
Aircol Longhand
North-west Wales
Cadwallon Longhand
Maelgwyn the Tall
Rhun the Tall
Idwal the Roebuck
North-east Wales
Brochfael of the Tusks
Cynan the Cruel
Cyndrwyn the Stubborn
Minor Kingdoms of Wales
Rhun Red Eyes
Gwrin of the Ragged Beard
Glitnoth Longshanks
Gwrgan the Great
South-west Scotland
Dumnagual the Old
Rhydderch the Old
West Scotland
Fergus the Great
Eochaid the Yellow-Haired
Domnall the Pock-Marked
Ferchar the Long
Eochaid Crooked-Nose
Aed the Fair
Eochaid the Poisonous
East Saxons
Sigebert the Little
Sigebert the Good
It appears that Mercians, Northumbrians and West Saxons, until Alfred the
GREAT
, were not interested in nicknames.
The
Bread-Soup King
see
Louis the
KING OF SLOPS
