The Good, the Bad, and the Unready: The Remarkable Truth Behind History's Strangest Nicknames

by Robert Easton

  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’.

  [R]

  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

  Thorstein the Red see COLOURFUL CHARACTERS

  Sigismund the Red Demon see Sigismund the LIGHT OF THE WORLD

  Red and Black Douglases

  The Douglas clan, one of the mightiest of all Scottish families, has produced several noblemen whose deeds and consequent nicknames can be found throughout this book. But how the name ‘Douglas’ came into being is worthy of note itself.

  There are two main schools of thought. According to that proposed by the eighteenth-century antiquary George Chalmers, a nobleman called ‘Theobald the Fleming’ journeyed in 1147 from Flanders to Scotland, where the abbot of Kelso granted him some land to live on. The abbot also gave him the rights to a river known as ‘the dark stream’, or ‘dhu-glas’, from which the clan name ‘Douglas’ is supposedly derived. A second theory holds that during a battle between the forces of King Solvathius and Donald the WHITE (see COLOURFUL CHARACTERS) Solvathius noticed a knight of surpassing bravery. When the king asked the identity of the man, somebody replied, ‘Sholto du glasse’, a phrase which has been variously translated as ‘Behold yonder grey-haired black man’ or ‘Behold the black, grey man’, and the words du glasse were quickly fused into ‘Douglas’.

  Both these views are based more on conjecture than fact. Of considerably greater certainty is that in the late fourteenth century the Douglas family split into two factions. On one side were the descendants of Archibald the GRIM, known as the ‘Black Douglases’, possibly because of Archibald’s ‘terrible dark countenance in warfare’, inherited from his semi-legendary forebear. On the other side were the ‘Red Douglases’ of Angus, named possibly because of the colour of their hair, which ran through the clan. Of the two households, the Black Douglases initially enjoyed greater influence and were the unrivalled power in the south of Scotland at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. After the death of William, the eighth earl of Douglas, in 1452, Black Douglas power waned and the leadership of the Douglases shifted to the ‘Reds’ of Angus, including such luminaries as Bell THE CAT and his grandson Archibald GREYSTEEL.

  Elizabeth the Red-Nosed Princess see COLOURFUL CHARACTERS

  Aurelian the Restorer of the World

  Aurelian, Roman emperor, 214–75

  In 270 Aurelian, otherwise known as Lucius Domitius Aurelianus, inherited an empire in a shambles. In the space of fifteen years mismanagement, rebellion and barbarian invasion had reduced imperial territories by two-thirds, and his task of reinstating the empire to its former glory was nothing short of Herculean.

  He started immediately, expelling the Vandals from Roman land and forcing the last remaining Goths back over the Danube River, for which he received the title ‘Gothicus Maximus’, or ‘the Greatest Goth’. In
272 he addressed the lost eastern provinces of the empire, now ruled by Zenobia the QUEEN OF THE EAST, where he was delighted to find resistance to be minimal. The so-called Palmyrene cities fell like ninepins before his troops, and Zenobia was ferried to Rome and displayed in golden chains before hundreds of thousands of cheering citizens. For this achievement Aurelian was given the title ‘Restitutor Orientis’, or ‘the Restorer of the Orient’.

  Finally the victorious Aurelian turned his attention to the west and, thanks in part to the treachery of Tetricus, the commander of the Gallic Empire, he speedily recovered Gaul and Britain. He returned to Rome in triumph and won his last honorific from the Senate – that of ‘Restitutor Orbis’ or ‘the Restorer of the World’. In just four years he had done what some had deemed impossible, giving new life and hope to an empire that was on its knees. Certainly Aurelian was impressed with his own achievements, describing himself on his coins as ‘Deus et Dominus’, ‘God and Lord’.

  Edward the Robber

  Edward IV, king of England, 1442–83

  Edward was publicly dubbed ‘the Robber’ after his slaughter of the forces of Henry the MARTYR at Towton, where he confiscated much of the land belonging to Lancastrian sympathizers. Privately, others saw him as a robber of something far more precious than land and claimed that he was ruled not by his brain but by another organ of his body. Edward was a handsome monarch. He had a winning smile and a mane of golden brown hair, and stood just over six feet three inches with his boots off… and he got his boots off a lot.

  There is ample evidence that he was a debauched womanizer of the worst kind. According to his contemporary Dominic Mancini, Edward ‘was licentious in the extreme… [and] pursued with no discrimination the married and the unmarried, the noble and lowly’. Sir Thomas More adds that ‘he was of youth greatly given to fleshly wantonness’, while the French critic Philip de Commynes suggests that his death, of an unknown illness at age forty, was due to his excessive ‘devotion to pleasure’.

  Until the twentieth century the general consensus among historians was that Edward had no merits at all. For some, his ‘robbing’ of the life of his brother George, first duke of Clarence, who was allegedly drowned in a vat of malmsey wine, epitomized a degenerate, cruel life. A few modern historians, however, have portrayed him in a more flattering light, as an astute leader who brought a measure of political stability into a divided realm, his talents in the bedroom matched by his skill at domestic government.

  Erik the Romantic

  Erik XIV, king of Sweden, 1533–77

  Erik asked both GOOD QUEEN BESS and Mary the MERMAID to marry him. They both turned him down. He then popped the question to a number of German princesses. They, too, declined. His many proposals earned him nothing more than a nickname. Erik did eventually tie the knot, with Karin (‘Kitty’) Mansdatter, his mistress, but his reign was noted more for his insanity than his romance, with Erik stabbing courtiers for no reason, claiming to be his brother John, the duke of Finland, and sentencing two guards to death for ‘annoying the King’. An indignant John deposed Erik and threw him in prison where, tradition has it, someone poisoned his pea soup.

  Erik the Romantic

  Ruby Nose see NOSE ALMIGHTY

  Otto Rufus see Otto the BLOODY

  William Rufus

  William II, king of England, c.1056–1100

  In the summer of 1100 a charcoal burner was travelling through the New Forest when he happened across the still-warm body of his king. Reverently he lugged it on to his cart and hauled it to Winchester, where it was buried with due, but not elaborate, ceremony. The nation hardly shed a tear for their mean, selfish and now-dead king.

  In life William had been a cruel and coarse dandy of a man who had little taste for anything beyond hunting and military exercise, and who alarmed many of his subjects with his crass ostentation. Once, for example, when one of his chamberlains produced a new pair of shoes for him, William asked what they had cost. ‘Three shillings!’ he exclaimed. ‘You son of a whore! Since when has a king worn shoes as cheap as those! Go and buy me some for a mark of silver!’ The chamberlain duly left court, but went and bought a second, equally priced, pair of shoes and lied that they had indeed cost a mark.

  William may well have thought that he cut a dash, what with his shoes, fashionable clothing and long hair with its centre parting, but all his subjects saw was a short, stocky, pot-bellied tyrant, a vain, blasphemous cynic whose only notable features were his red hair (for which he received the moniker ‘Rufus’) and his ruddy complexion, which became particularly inflamed when he was excited.

  With tolerable certainty we can accept that a nobleman called Walter Tirel fired the arrow that killed William. Whether it was deliberate or an accident, with the arrow first glancing off a hart and then ricocheting off a tree before ending up in the king, is a matter for debate.

  [S]

  William the Sailor King

  William IV, king of England, 1765–1837

  In 1779, at the age of fourteen, William went to sea. Starting as a humble able seaman, he rose through the ranks, seeing action off Cape St Vincent, participating in the relief of Gibraltar and serving under Nelson in the West Indies. In 1788 he took command of his own frigate.

  Like many a sailor, William had a girl in every port. His ‘best girl’ was actress Dorothea Jordan, with whom he lived for twenty years, but he left her when she took to the bottle. At the age of sixty-five he finally added the title of ‘King’ to that of ‘Lord High Admiral’. By now the former sailor appeared, at least from a distance, like a respectable old admiral. When one came nearer, however, it was obvious that this garrulous, undignified grouch with a curiously pear-shaped head had neither the bearing nor manners of a grand old man of the sea. William drank and gambled to excess, spat in public and was considered to be extremely dim.

  In polite circles William may have been called ‘the Sailor King’, but popularly he was known as ‘Silly Billy’. Once, it is alleged, he was visiting Bedlam asylum for the insane when a patient pointed at him and yelled out, ‘Silly Billy! Silly Billy!’ The name stuck.

  George the Sailor Prince

  George V, king of England, 1865–1936

  The fifteen years that Prince George spent as a naval officer on HMS Britannia and HMS Bacchante were the making of him as king. Fifteen years of discipline, doing what he was told and saluting others instead of being saluted himself moulded him into a young man with a categorical sense of duty.

  George had no desire to be king, but on the death of his elder brother Albert (known as ‘Eddy’ to the family) he was prepared to live the life that a nation expected of him. Although a private man, preferring stamp collecting to public display, he visited the Grand Fleet no fewer than five times during the First World War, and made even more visits to his army.

  ‘The Sailor Prince’ will always be associated with the seaside resort of Bognor Regis in West Sussex. In 1928 George spent some weeks in Bognor recuperating after a severe bout of septicaemia. Eight years later as he lay dying, his wife, Queen Mary, suggested he might visit the town again. George’s reply was ‘Bugger Bognor!’ –allegedly his last words.

  Erik the Saint

  Erik IX, king of Sweden, d.1160

  Under the guidance of an Englishman called Henry who became the first bishop of Uppsala, Erik strove to promote his Christian faith among the Swedes. He erected churches, appointed preachers and, notably, promoted marriage as an institution in which wives as well as husbands had a right to family property. Using evangelical methods similar to those of ‘Vladimir the Great’ (see Great… but NOT THAT GREAT), he led an expedition to Finland where he forced the inhabitants, at the point of a sword, to be baptized.

  Back home in Uppsala, Erik was on his way home after hearing Mass when a Danish prince hacked him to death, and it is widely held that a spring immediately appeared on the very spot where he was murdered. Almost overnight his bones became an object of veneration, and ‘St Erik’ became t
he patron saint of Sweden. A statue of the holy king – a young knight carrying the sword and banner of the realm – became an obligatory accessory in all churches, a memorial to a pious monarch and a symbol of dawning nationalism.

  Louis the Saint

  Louis IX, king of France, 1214–70

  In his Life of Saint Louis, John, lord of Joinville, writes of the king’s considerable wisdom, a trait for which many dubbed him ‘the Solomon of France’. The tall, good-humoured Louis would often hold court in the wood at Vincennes, where, leaning against an oak tree, he would listen to people’s complaints and administer justice, a practice that won him considerable public acclaim. But it is for his piety and religious devotion that he is most remembered.

  In moral uprightness Louis led by example. He heard Mass daily, and the sermons that he loved to hear inspired him to go on crusades, during which his sufferings merely increased his faith. Back in France he upbraided John of Joinville for saying that he would rather commit thirty mortal sins than become a leper, and indeed Louis shocked his subjects by publicly kissing lepers’ hands. In 1254 he passed laws making blasphemy, gambling and prostitution criminal offences.

  Some thought such piety unbecoming in a king. His simple attire of woollen tunic and sleeveless jacket was deemed too modest for a monarch, while his lavish generosity to the Church and the poor was considered unattractive self-aggrandizement. Soft-spoken Louis, canonized less than thirty years after his death, took such complaints in his stride. ‘I would rather have such excessive sums as I spend,’ he countered, ‘devoted to almsgiving for the love of God than used in empty ostentation and the vanities of this world.’