Read The Good, the Bad and the Unready Online
Authors: Robert Easton
The Good, the Bad and the Unready (4 page)
William I, king of Sicily, 1120–66
William was actually a ruler of considerable merit. It was the island’s barons, including the contemporary historian Falcandus, who, purely out of malice and envy, titled him ‘Guglielmo il Malo’, spreading rumours of bacchanalian banquets and excessive sexual indulgence.
During the reign of his father, Roger II, the island aristocracy had vociferously complained that they had not been allowed to build castles without his consent. This policy, they claimed, strained their authority over their tenants. As Roger had intended, it also prevented them from seriously considering rebellion against him. And so, when Roger died, the barons conspired to revolt against their new monarch and grab more independence for themselves.
Two major uprisings followed, in the second of which William’s chief minister, Maione di Bari, was stabbed to death and his corpse torn to shreds by a Palermo mob. Soon, however, the rebels fought among themselves and William regained power. Continuing, unsurprisingly, to exclude the troublesome barons from the government, William became an active patron of letters and the sciences, and gained a reputation for religious tolerance by welcoming members of both the Christian and Islamic faiths into his court. All in all then, ‘William the Bad’ was rather good.
The Baker and the Baker’s Wife
Louis XVI, king of France, 1754–93
Marie Antoinette, queen consort of France, 1755–93
On 6 October 1789 Louis and his Austrian wife, Marie, distributed bread to a starving mob at Versailles. This may have earned them the nicknames ‘the Baker’ and ‘the Baker’s Wife’, but not the admiration of a republic which four years later sent them to the guillotine.
A more apposite trade-related nickname for Louis was ‘the Locksmith King’, since at Versailles he converted a room into a metalwork shop where he would merrily tinker away for hours on end, making locks and mending clocks. Louis was a tubby, short-sighted man who also enjoyed reading English periodicals and colouring maps – hardly the sort, one might think, to engender the vitriol of a people. And yet, since he could prohibit any decree submitted to him, he was nicknamed ‘Monsieur Veto’ by the republicans, and eventually lost his head.
The unpopularity of Marie, the daughter of Maria the
MOTHER OF HER COUNTRY
, began when she was unable to produce any children for an expectant France. Even though the cause was found to be a medical condition of Louis’s, which prevented conception (quickly rectified by minor surgery, after which Marie gave birth to a daughter), the public denounced her, not for lack of fertility but for lack of loyalty. Rumours became rife that she was having a number of affairs (at least one with another woman), and a fake autobiography of hers was circulated which claimed she was a whore.
The French, moreover, blamed ‘the Austrian Wench’ for the country’s financial woes, calling her ‘Madame Deficit’ and holding her personally responsible for propelling the country to near bankruptcy. Come the Revolution, Marie – branded ‘Madame Veto’ for reasons outlined above – could do no right, and public animosity against her reached boiling point after her supposed comment ‘Let them eat cake’ when told that her people had no bread. Her jailers vindictively separated her from her infant son (whose cries she could hear from the cell below) and stuck the head of her best friend, the Princess de Lambelle, on a pole and paraded it in front of her.
Marie was bored with the formal French court, which couldn’t match its livelier Austrian counterpart, and she may have been occasionally indiscreet, but she was certainly not callously unpatriotic. Nevertheless, she followed her husband to the guillotine.
Charles the
Bald
Charles II, king of France, 823–77
Was Charles the Bald really bald, or was his nickname, as some have suggested, not descriptive but sarcastic, signifying instead that Charles was actually rather hirsute? There are nine portraits of Charles the Bald, and in them he is generally depicted as having a heavy-jowled face, a square chin, a big nose and a long, thin, imposing moustache. Furthermore, there is a small painting of him on what is commonly accepted to be his throne
in which he boasts a full head of hair as well as a moustache.
The chronicler Lupus of Ferrières noted that Charles was a devout man and a devoted husband, and another contemporary nickname of his was ‘the Most Christian King’.
Constantine the
Bald
Constantine III, king of Scotland, d.997
Like his hair, Constantine’s reign was very short. Chronicles suggest he ruled for a mere two years between kings Kenneth II
and Kenneth III, possibly killing the former and being killed by the latter.
Edward the
Bankrupt
Edward III, king of England, 1312–77
Parliament dubbed Edward ‘the King of the Sea’ because he supported the navy when they defeated the French and Spanish fleets at Sluys and Winchelsea respectively Merchants knew him as ‘the Father of English Commerce’ for promoting trade and enabling foreign businesses, especially from Holland and Belgium, to set up shop in England. Unfortunately for him, the rest of the world nicknamed him for his financial ruin when he defaulted on his debts after heavy losses in the Hundred Years War.
Barbarossa
Frederick I, king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, c.1123–90
Barbarossa
According to his biographer, Rahewin, Frederick was ‘shorter than very tall men, but taller… than men of medium height’. From this somewhat vague description, Rahewin then goes on to mention the physical detail that brought about the emperor’s nickname: we are told that as well as having golden curly hair, piercing eyes and a cheerful face, Frederick sported a
barba rosa
– a reddish beard.
Frederick was a warrior king, and was known as ‘the Father of His Country’ for his military campaigns for the German cause, including no
fewer than six invasions of Italy and his spearheading of the Third Crusade against Saladin the
CHIVALROUS SARACEN
. In June 1190 Frederick unexpectedly died when he was thrown from his horse as he was crossing an ice-cold river in Anatolia. Even though the water was only waist deep, Frederick’s armour weighed him down and he drowned.
A well-known legend, however, has it that Frederick is not actually dead, but merely ‘asleep’ with his knights in a subterranean castle in Thuringia. There he sits at a marble table, waiting to be woken to restore Germany to her former glory. He has been waiting a long time. Some say that his red beard, now snowy white, has grown through the table and touches the floor. Others state that his beard already wraps twice around the table and that he will wake up when it has made a third circumference.
Magnus
Barelegs
Magnus III, king of Norway, c.1073–1103
In 1098 Magnus made a visit to his Scottish territories and was impressed by what he saw, so much so that on his return to Norway he was often seen strolling through the streets of Trond-heim in complete Highland dress – kilt, sporran, the works. His subjects were impressed by what
they
saw, and the skimpiness of his outfit gave the son of Olaf the Quiet’ his nickname. In August 1103 Magnus returned to Britain to see how his son Sigurd the CRUSADER was faring, and he was killed in a skirmish while foraging for food in a bog, his bare legs knee deep in mud.
Boleslav the
Bashful