The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds From Ancient Sumer to the Enlightenment

by Brian Thornton

  of Rodrigo Borgia as pope

  One of the early Renaissance popes whose conduct exemplified the deep systemic corruption of the Catholic Church at the end of the Middle Ages, Alexander VI was a Borgia and is more famous today not for being pope, nor even for his many excesses, but for being father of the infamous Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia (yes, those Borgias).

  Completely ignoring the prohibition against clergy having sex, Borgia had several mistresses, and at least four children by one of them, an Italian woman named Vanozza dei Cattanei. Elevating nepotism to an art form, he filled high-level papal government positions with family members (including his own son Cesare, whom he made a cardinal while still a teenager, even though the boy hadn’t spent a single day as a priest).

  Spanish-born Rodrigo Borja (later changed to the Italian spelling of “Borgia”) followed his uncle to Rome when the latter became Pope Callixtus III in A.D. 1455. After that, his ascent through the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was rapid, culminating in his being elected pontiff in A.D. 1492.

  Although a talented administrator (a welcome change from the incompetence of several of the most recent popes), Alexander VI was a debauchee of the first order.

  Just one of many examples of the tenor of the depravity at Alexander’s papal court was the so-called “Ballet of the Chestnuts,” a theme party put on by Alexander’s son Cesare (by this time a cardinal in the Catholic Church without ever having become a priest) in his apartments in the Palazzo Apostolico in Rome in A.D. 1501. Among the attendees: the pope (Cesare’s daddy), a number of cardinals, and fifty prostitutes whose clothes were auctioned off, and who were then required to crawl around the floor on hands and knees, picking up hundreds of chestnuts dropped there for the purpose of getting these prostitutes on all fours and keeping them there. Every chestnut retrieved garnered the woman retrieving it a cash bonus.

  And of course while they were down there, all those godly men in attendance got busy gettin’ busy with them. Male orgasms were kept track of by an attendant, and the guy who had the most over the course of the party won the contest. The originator of the Orgasm Game? None other than Pope Alexander VI!

  The Truth about These Borgia Bastards

  Lucrezia Borgia, one of history’s great villainesses, gets a bad rap. Hardly the poison-brewing succubus contemporary chroniclers made her out to be, Lucrezia was a pious, God-fearing woman and, as far as we can tell, a loyal wife to her various husbands. The problem was her vicious brute of a brother Cesare, who killed indiscriminately in pursuit of ultimate power. Included among his victims: at least one of Lucrezia’s husbands and one of his and Lucrezia’s brothers!

  99

  RICHARD III OF ENGLAND

  Hunchback? No. Child-Killer? Probably

  ( A.D. 1452–1485)

  I would my uncle would let me have my life

  though I lose my kingdom.

  —King Edward V of England

  Made infamous by Shakespeare’s play, Richard III of England has come down through history as a monster who seduced the widow of the rightful heir to the English throne in order to get at her immense wealth; set up his own brother to be tried and executed for treason against their eldest brother, Edward IV; and most notoriously usurped the throne on the death of the aforementioned brother/king, took his two nephews prisoner, and quietly had them murdered in the Tower of London once he’d secured his hold on the throne.

  The youngest brother of King Edward IV, Richard, then duke of Gloucester, was one of Edward’s most trusted advisors and generals by the time Edward consolidated his reign. After the rival claimant to the throne, Edward of Westminster, was killed in battle, Richard married his widow Anne Neville. This was no mean feat since Richard was rumored to have had a hand in killing her husband in the first place!

  In A.D. 1483 , when Edward IV died, Richard became regent for Edward’s underaged sons. He moved quickly to secure physical control of the boys, managing to kidnap both of them and send them to “protective custody” in the Tower of London.

  Next, Richard moved to have them declared illegitimate on the grounds that their father had been engaged to someone else when he secretly married their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, in A.D. 1463. His supporters on the regency council agreed with Richard that this was a clear case of bigamy, and that all of the dead king’s children were illegitimate and therefore unable to succeed to the throne.

  Just like that, Richard, duke of Gloucester, became Richard III, king of England. Neither of the princes was ever seen or heard from again. Some historians speculate that someone else did them in, but it doesn’t make much sense for someone else to have killed the boys, because no one else could have profited from their deaths as much as their uncle.

  Richard had precious little time to enjoy his ill-gotten crown, though. Within two years, he was facing open rebellion in the person of a distant cousin of the Lancaster kings, Henry Tudor, who landed in England at the head of a small army and was quickly joined by many of Richard’s own lords. Attempting to put down this rebellion, Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last English king to die in battle.

  Hunchbacked Bastard?

  Throughout his play Richard III, William Shakespeare consistently portrays the Duke of Gloucester and last Plantagenet king of England as a hunchback. There is no evidence from contemporary sources to support this claim, and it’s pretty clear that Shakespeare was borrowing the notion from authors who wrote during the reign of Richard’s successor Henry Tudor. These authors (including Shakespeare) curried favor with the Tudor monarch by vilifying Richard and representing Richard’s alleged crooked spine as an outward manifestation of his inner villainy.

  100

  HENRY VII OF ENGLAND

  The Cheap Bastard’s Guide to Solidifying Your Hold on Power

  ( A.D. 1457–1509)

  He was of a high mind, and loved his own will and his own way; as one that revered himself, and would reign indeed. Had he been a private man he would have been termed proud: But in a wise Prince, it was but keeping of distance; which indeed he did towards all; not admitting any near or full approach either to his power or to his secrets. For he was governed by none.

  —Sir Francis Bacon

  A distant cousin of the Lancastrian dynasty defeated by Edward IV, Henry Tudor was a young Welsh nobleman who bounced around Europe living mostly in exile until popping onto the scene in the early 1480s and challenging Richard III’s hold on the English throne.

  Once he’d seized power, Henry VII proved a capable, if ruthless, ruler. Determined to end nearly a century of civil war, he settled the succession question for decades to come by marrying a princess of the opposing York family. Not fond of crowds, suspicious of the nobility, and so tight with money that his wallet squeaked on the rare occasions when he opened it, Henry VII ruled for a quarter of a century unloved by his indifferent subjects, and died virtually unmourned by them as well.

  Inheriting a realm bankrupted by decades of civil war, Henry early on hit on a number of ways to make ends meet with the nobility footing the bill. He staffed his retinue with nearly twice the number of retainers as any previous English king, then set up royal visits to his most wealthy landowners (most of them dukes and earls, guys with lots of land and lots of money). A “royal visit” consisted of Henry and his entire court descending on a given lord’s country estate and staying there for from two weeks to a month, with the lord in question having the honor of feeding, housing, and entertaining the king and his retinue. This had the double effect of keeping his greatest nobles too poor to fund rebellions against him, and of saving the crown itself an awful lot of money!

  Doubly a Bastard!

  Henry Tudor’s blood connection to the royal House of Lancaster was twofold: on the one hand, his grandfather, Owain Tudor, a squire serving in the Lancaster household, secretly married Catherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V. She had four children by Tudor before the marriage was annulled (with the result that all four of their children
were declared illegitimate) and Tudor was thrown into prison for a time. One of Owain’s sons by this liaison, Edmund Tudor, grew up to marry Lady Margaret Beaufort. For her part, Margaret was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s younger son, who was also father of the future king Henry IV. Her grandfather was the first of four illegitimate children John of Gaunt had with his then-mistress and future wife Katherine Swynford. Both of Henry Tudor’s blood claims to the throne of England came to him through illegitimate lines (although in the case of the Beauforts, that line was later declared legitimate by king and parliament), so this English king was quite literally doubly a bastard!

  Another way in which Henry filled the kingdom’s coffers was through marrying his eldest son Arthur to a wealthy Spanish princess named Catherine of Aragon, who brought with her a peace treaty with Spain and an enormous dowry. When Arthur died suddenly shortly after the wedding, Henry, rather than return the girl and her dowry to her father, simply got a dispensation from the pope and prepared to marry her off to his second son, Henry. As we shall see in the final chapter, this move, a money-saving gesture, had far-reaching unintended consequences of its own!

  101

  HENRY VIII OF ENGLAND

  Where to Begin?

  ( A.D. 1491–1547)

  We thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly, but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects: for all the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the Pope, clean contrary to the oath that they make to us, so that they seem to be his subjects, and not ours.

  —King Henry VIII of England

  It is fitting that we close out our study of ancient bastards with a quick look at this last of the truly medieval monarchs. After Henry, no king of England would ever have so much license to do as he pleased.

  The second son of Henry VII, young Henry didn’t become heir to the throne until the age of ten. He succeeded his father at age eighteen, and inherited a well-ordered realm with a full treasury, thanks to his penny-pinching, reclusive father’s programs as king. When he died thirty-eight years later, Henry would leave a vastly different England to his own heirs: a bankrupt treasury, a different official state religion, and (the last thing he wanted) a simmering succession crisis.

  How he got there is an interesting story that could fill dozens of volumes (and has). For starters, chalk it up to the parsimony of his father: Henry VII had married his son Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of the king of Spain, in return for a huge amount of gold and silver. When Arthur died four months after the marriage, Henry refused to return Catherine or the money. The crisis was resolved when Henry VIII took the throne, got the pope’s blessing to marry his brother’s widow, and did so that same year.

  The problem was that Catherine couldn’t give him a male heir. Only one of their children lived to adulthood: Mary (the future “Bloody Mary”). So Henry decided to divorce her and marry someone else who could give him the heir he desperately wanted.

  The only problem was that there was a different pope by this time, a pope who owed his throne to the most powerful king in Europe: Charles V Hapsburg, king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor. And Charles V just happened to be the beloved nephew of the woman that Henry now wished to set aside.

  So the pope said no. And Henry, who had actually been named “Defender of the Faith” for writing a tract excoriating the new Protestant sects in Germany, did the unthinkable: he broke with the Catholic Church, founded the Church of England, with himself as its head, dissolved the monasteries in England (pocketing both their property and their wealth), and began marrying a series of women intended to give him a male heir.

  Purposeful bastard.

  Bastard and His Wives

  In the end, Henry had six wives (and an untold number of mistresses, including the sister of one of these wives). Two of his wives were beheaded for “treason” (adultery committed by a queen was considered treason at the time, and they were accused adulterers), and one died giving him the only legitimate male child who lived past infancy (his successor, Edward VI). Only two of them, Anne of Cleves, whom he divorced, and Catherine Parr, his last queen, outlived him.

  By the time of Henry’s death, even the notion of monarchy was changing. The question of male heirs became ever-more irrelevant. In fact, Henry did sire arguably the greatest monarch ever to rule England, an effective, diligent, intelligent ruler who outfoxed every opponent and made England a player on the modern stage in ways of which Henry could have only dreamed.

  It’s unlikely that this royal bastard even considered the possibility that the heir he so desired would actually be a woman, and a great one.

  Elizabeth I—in many ways an even bigger (and more effective) bastard than her old man.

  How’s that for a “modern” notion?

  Index

  A

  Acre, Battle of, 178–80

  Adalgis, 146

  Aelfgifu, 156, 157

  Aemilianus, Scipio, 51, 52

  Aethelgifu, 156

  Agincourt, Battle of, 217

  Agnes of Merania, 189

  Agrippa, Marcus, 104

  Agrippina, 109–10, 114–15

  Akhenaton, 6–8

  Alcibiades, 27–28

  Alcmeonid family, 22, 28

  Alexander the Great, 37–43, 54–55

  Alexander VI, Pope, 223–24

  Alfred the Great, 156

  Alhambra Decree, 220

  Alienus, Aulus Caecina, 121

  Alleghieri, Dante, 199

  Alys of France, 171

  Amenhotep III, 6

  Amenhotep IV, 6–8

  Amyntas IV, 35

  Anna, 155

  Anne of Cleves, 231

  “Antiochus Epimanes,” 49

  “Antiochus Epiphanes,” 49

  Antiochus III, 48–49

  Antiochus IV, 48–49, 58

  Antiochus VIII, 53

  Antiochus IX, 53

  Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, 133–34. See also Elagabalus

  Antonius, Antyllus, 102

  Antonius, Marcus, 60, 86–87, 98–102

  Aper, Arrius, 137, 138

  Appian, 53, 56, 65, 76

  Aquillius, Manius, 56

  Aristagoras, 24–26

  Arnulf, King, 150

  Arsinoe, 46–47

  Arsuf, Battle of, 180

  Arthur, son of Henry VII, 228, 230

  Augusta, 131

  Augustus, Aurelius Commodus Antoninus, 125. See also Commodus

  Augustus, Philip, 172, 179, 183–84, 186, 188–90

  Augustus, Tiberius Caesar, 104–11

  Aurelius, Marcus, 125

  B

  Bacon, Sir Francis, 227

  Balas, Alexander, 53

  Bardas, 152–53

  Basil I, 152–53

  Basil II, 154–55

  Bassianus, Varius Avitus, 133. See also Elagabalus

  Bathsheba, 15

  Battle of Acre, 178–80

  Battle of Agincourt, 217

  Battle of Arsuf, 180

  Battle of Bedriacum, 120–21

  Battle of Bosworth Field, 226

  Battle of Bouvines, 191

  Battle of Hastings, 161

  Battle of Lewes, 195

  Battle of Nancy, 222

  Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 140

  Beaufort, Margaret, 228

  Bedriacum, Battle of, 120–21

  Belisaurius, 144, 145

  Belshazzar, 16, 17

  Benedict IX, Pope, 158–60, 181, 199

  Berengaria, 179

  Blagdon, Francis, 210

  Blanche of Bourbon, 206

  “Bloody Mary,” 230

  Bolingbroke, Henry, 214–15

  Boniface VIII, Pope, 198, 199

  Borgia, Cesare, 223, 224

  Borgia, Lucrezia, 223, 224

  Borgia, Rodrigo, 223

  Borja, Rodrigo, 223

  Bosworth Field, Battle of, 226
/>
  Bouvines, Battle of, 191

  Browning, Robert, 150

  Brutus, Lucius Junius, 61, 62

  Brutus, Marcus Junius, 62, 95–98

  C

  “Cadaver Synod,” 151

  Caepoinis, Servilia, 96

  Caesar, Augustus, 102, 104, 106. See also Octavian, Gaius Julius Caesar

  Caesar, Gaius Julius, 59, 62, 68, 86, 91–99, 101, 105, 112, 114

  Caesar, Julia, 101

  Caesar, Tiberius Augustus, 106–7

  Caesarion, 59, 102

  Caligula, 107, 110–12, 143

  Cambyses, King, 18, 19, 20, 21

  Caracalla, 131–32

  Carinus, 135–36

  Carloman, 146–47

  Carus, 137, 139

  Cassius, Gaius, 97–98

  Catherine of Aragon, 230–31

  Catiline, Lucius Sergius, 71–73, 99

  Cato the Elder, 93

  Cato the Younger, 93–94

  Cattanei, Vanozza dei, 223

  Cerda, Charles de la, 210

  Cethegus, Cornelius, 76–78

  Charlemagne, 146–47

  Charles IV of France, 222

  Charles VI of France, 216–17

  Charles VII of France, 221

  Charles the Bad, of Navarre, 209–11

  Charles the Terrible, 221–22

  Chlorus, Constantius, 141

  Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 72–73, 86–88, 90, 99, 102

  Cinna, Lucius Cornelius, 74–75

  Claudius, 112–14

  Cleisthenes, 28

  Clement V, Pope, 198–200

  Cleopatra II, 51

  Cleopatra VII, 58–60

  Cleopatra Thea, 53–54

  Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, 100, 102

  Commodus, 110, 125–26, 130, 143

  Conrad, 166

  Constantia, 141

  Constantine the Great, 140–42

  Constantine VI, Emperor, 149

  Constantine VIII, 154

  Constantius II, 142–43

  Conti, Lotario dei, 181