For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of
kings…
All hail, Thane of Cawdor
Macbeth’s
first step toward self-destruction is to be named as Thane of Cawdor, a
position that becomes available at just the right moment when the current
incumbent is executed for treason.
It is in this context that Malcolm, in describing to Duncan the death
scene of the outgoing Cawdor, utters a couple of lines endlessly plundered by
later British historians to characterize the final exits of a thousand hapless
historical characters:
…nothing
in his life
became
him like the leaving of it…
This
might be said to apply to Macbeth himself (Shakespeare’s stage direction reads
“Re-enter MACDUFF, with MACBETH's head”) and indeed is generally relevant to
numerous exemplars of Brittanic majesty since times immemorial. It would be easy to begin the Royal
Death Trip in Anglo-Saxon times, but as the Norman dynasty seems more
interestingly accident prone, let’s pick it up with William of Normandy, the Conquerer. About twenty years after the Conquest
William, now back on the Continent, when riding about being evil one day, had
the misfortune to be thrown by his stumbling horse not upon the ground but upon
the pommel of his saddle. If you
have ever seen one of these things, you might imagine that it would smart
should it penetrate your groin or abdomen. Few things are more unpleasant than being stabbed by a sharp
object, but one of them is being stabbed by a blunt object. Such was the end of William the
Conqueror.
William
II, son of the Conqueror, was a real chip off the old block. He was known as William Rufus (“Red”
William), a sobriquet that, needless to say, derived from the color of his
beard rather than the tenor of his politics. He shed this mortal coil in 1100 in the following somewhat
undignified circumstances. Accompanied
by some friends and relations, including a younger brother, he had gone hunting,
or rather chasing deer in the
New Forest. (Remember none of these English kings could actually speak English,
so it was all about la chasse.) Unfortunately one of his fellow chasseurs sent an arrow through his
upper body. It is not clear that
this was entirely accidental, since the presumed shooter immediately took off
for France while the younger brother (destined to be Henry I) rushed off to
grab the throne before yet another brother, the rightful successor, could get
back home to claim it. William
Rufus was left to die in misery on the forest floor. Some rustics eventually hauled the bleeding royal remains
back to Winchester “in a rude farm cart”, as one of the sources put it. What a comedown for a king! Sick
transit, indeed.
Friendly
fire was something of a specialty among the Norman aristocracy, who were even more
accomplished at shooting their companions of the chase than Vice-President
Cheney. Of course the friendliness
of the fire that ended the career of Richard the Lionheart may be doubted. He was shot through the shoulder by a
surly teen-ager, thus allowing the witticism that “The Lion was killed by an
Ant”. Actually it wasn’t the arrow
that killed him, but the gangrene.
It’s never so much the original scandal as the coverup, in this instance
a filthy bandage.
In
a family blog such as this one it would be indelicate to mention, except
somewhat obscurely, the painful end of Edward II in 1327. It involved a red-hot poker and—well,
anyone familiar with Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” will grasp the Begriff. The chronicler Geoffrey le Baker puts
it thus: “cum
ferro plumbarii incense ignito trans
tubam ductilem ad egestionis partes secretas applicatam membra spiritalia
post intestinas combusserunt.”
Ouch.
But
it is worth noting that aberrant gastronomy played a not insignificant role in the
morbidity of the Anglo-Norman royalty.
Indeed the demise of Henry I himself was itself notable, for it is he
who famously died of a surfeit of
lampreys. That is the
canonical historical expression.
It wasn’t an excess of lampreys, or a superabundance of lampreys, or
even simply too many lampreys; it was a surfeit
of lampreys.
Lampreys (a hemi-demi-surfeit thereof)
Now
as you undoubtedly know a lamprey is sort of a combination of a mollusk and a
water moccasin, to wit, “any of an order (Hyperoartia) of aquatic vertebrates
that are widely distributed in subarctic regions in both fresh and salt water
and resemble eels but have a large suctorial mouth.” I have to tell you that lampreys really suck, and if you
study the iconographic evidence you might well conclude that a single lamprey could
constitute a surfeit, indeed rather more
than a surfeit. We have reasons to
suspect, however, that Henry I’s fatal surfeit consisted in no less than two
dozen of them. This would seem to
be a world record unsurpassed even in Erasmus’s immortal colloquy called “On
Fish-Eating” (Ιχθυοφαγια), to which I refer the interested reader.
lampreys really suck
Under the unifying rubric of suicidal gluttony we should probably include the demise of John Lackland (Jean sans Terre) in 1216, brought on by binging on unripe peaches and sweet wine. As his name will forever be associated with Runnymede (where he reluctantly signed the Great Charter) it is seems entirely condign that he should expire of a vinous flux. Death by alcohol was of course not always voluntary, as is illustrated by the celebrated circumstances of George, Duke of Clarence (1449-1478). Although the brother of two kings (Edward IV and Richard III), the duke never quite made it to the throne. It was not for lack of trying, as he was a sordid conniver of the lowest order (“false, fleeting, perjured Clarence” is what we find in Shakespeare’s Richard III.) Attaindered on a charge of treason, he was allowed to choose his own mode of execution. He is believed to have been drowned in a butt of Malmsey in the Tower of London. Way to go, Clarence!
