Unlike his father the dean, Frank Buckland can’t be counted a great scientist, but he was certainly a great popularizer of science: In his endless enthusiasm for the new and hitherto unnoticed he often reads like a one-man Fortean Times.
In 1867 his life changed. A Royal Commission appointed him inspector of salmon fisheries. This was a proper grown-up job, and within a very short time, Buckland had made himself into the UK’s “Mr. Salmon,” mastering all the intricacies of his subject, pioneering new techniques and technology for fish hatcheries, and using his great charm and energy to lead the first nationwide campaign against river pollution. He wasn’t exactly an ecologist, but he did commission firsthand research into the effect of ocean temperatures on the shoaling of fish and the importance of net mesh size in keeping fish stocks at optimum levels. He was also single-handedly responsible for the stocking of the rivers and lakes of India, Australia, and New Zealand with salmon and trout. This proved a rather more successful venture than his earlier scheme to manufacture shoes and gloves from the skin of rats.
Home life for the Bucklands always involved at least two monkeys. Frank’s study, where the monkeys lived, was called the Monkey Room and no writer has better captured the topsy-turvy madness of keeping them as pets. He considered them much superior to all other animals in terms of intelligence: “almost fit to go up for a competitive examination,” as he put it. The monkeys graced all the Bucklands’ social occasions, with outfits to match: Frank particularly liked them in green velvet dresses, trimmed with gold lace. He described them as sometimes having the appearance of well-behaved children (his only child, Frank junior, died at age five); sometimes like snoozing club bores (they loved a fire and had a taste for port and grog—one of them even smoked a pipe); but mostly they were the source of barely containable chaos. He describes his favorite pair, Tiny and “the Hag”—West African guenon monkeys—launching themselves around the house “with the velocity of a swallow.” The Hag took an irrational dislike to Mrs. Buckland’s sister and “very nearly had the dress off her back.” Food was stolen, visitors tweaked, ornaments shattered, other pets terrorized. Given ten minutes in a bedroom by themselves, wrote Frank, “the bill will rival that for the Abyssinian expedition.” Their vast cheek pouches swelled with booty (Frank estimated that the Hag could secrete twenty pieces of candy in each pouch). One afternoon he got them to disgorge “a steel thimble, my own gold finger ring, a pair of pearl sleeve links, a farthing, a button, a shilling and a bit of sweet-stuff.”
But Buckland was not averse to a little anarchy:
Although my monkeys do considerable mischief, yet I let them do it. I am amply rewarded by their funny and affectionate ways… nothing whatever would induce me to part with them. My monkeys love me, and I love my monkeys.
With the Hag, in particular, he developed a close understanding. “I could tell from her look what she wanted; and I am pretty sure she could read my thoughts in her own way.” There are, as he said, “monkeys and monkeys; no two are alike.” She was his constant companion for twelve years and “if ever an animal thought, it was the old Hag.”
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Buckland didn’t sentimentalize his relationship with animals; after all, this was the same man who had enjoyed roasting field mice while still a schoolboy. But he had a close affinity for monkeys that bordered on the inspirational: “Many an idea I have had looking into the dear Hag’s brilliant eyes.” Perhaps this explains why, given all the roasted, boiled, stewed, and puréed animals he had consumed over the years, there is no record of Frank Buckland ever eating a monkey.
Should you be tempted to keep a monkey yourself, consider this last cautionary tale. King Alexander I of Greece (1893–1920), of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, was the second son of King Constantine I and first cousin to the Duke of Edinburgh. As he looked unlikely ever to become king, Alexander lived his role as crown prince to the full: going to Oxford, playing inordinate amounts of football and tennis, and driving racing cars as fast he could. He was an extremely popular and agreeable young man, though somewhat accident-prone. In 1917 he narrowly averted death in a train bombing. On other occasions, he broke a leg while “practicing jumping” and was seriously injured in a car crash after swerving to avoid a stray goat.
His accession to the throne in 1917 came about as a result of his father’s opting to keep Greece neutral during World War I (they were, after all, a mostly German family). The Allies were annoyed by this, and the governments of the UK, France, and Russia issued an ultimatum: Either Constantine leave the country with his pro-German eldest son, or the alliance would recognize the revolutionary Eleuthérios Venizélos as the legal ruler of Greece. This left Alexander in the rather irregular position of inheriting the Greek crown while the two rightful heirs were still alive. Shortly after Alexander’s coronation, Venizélos became prime minister of Greece in any case. He dominated the new king and, though there were reports of clashes, in reality Alexander I was the puppet of the new democratic government.
Not that the regime had long to enjoy his services. Three years into his reign his dog (not very tactfully named Fritz) was attacked by two of his father’s pet monkeys. In defending the dog, Alexander received a severe mauling from the monkeys and died shortly afterward of blood-poisoning.
It is perhaps the only example of a simian-led coup in modern European history, but its effects were far-reaching. Constantine regained the throne and plunged Greece into a disastrous war with Turkey, the effects of which are still felt today. As Churchill observed: “A monkey bite cost the death of 250,000 people.” In 1922, the Greek monarchy fell and the royal family was sent permanently into exile. One of their number was Prince Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, later Philip Mountbatten, born the year before on the dining room table of the Villa Mon Repos, the family home in Corfu. He was carried off to safety in an orange crate.
As any of the subjects of this chapter could have told you, when you keep a monkey you take on their dark feral side as well as their capacity for friendship, intimacy, and joy. Older cultures dealt with this dual nature by according them divine status. The ancient Egyptians worshipped monkeys as cleverer than their own children. They believed that baboon-headed Thoth, their god of wisdom and creativity, was the inventor of writing. India had the noble and ingenious Monkey God, Hanuman, and in medieval China, Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, was powerful enough to cover more than thirty thousand miles in a single somersault.
Human beings, apes, and monkeys all spring from the same evolutionary source. Some of us have tails, some do not, but it often seems that we have more in common than a common ancestor. It’s tempting to wonder, as Descartes did, whether monkeys might be a lot wiser than they’re letting on. That actually, our older cousins are perfectly capable of talking, but are smart enough not to do so in front of us, in case they get asked to do some work.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Who Do You Think You Are?
Titus Oates—Alessandro, Count Cagliostro—George Psalmanazar—Princess Caraboo—Louis de Rougemont—James Barry—Ignácz Trebitsch Lincoln—Tuesday Lobsang Rampa—Archibald Belaney
Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.
LEWIS CARROLL
Many of us daydream about what it would be like to be someone else, but actually passing yourself off as a different person takes a lot more time and trouble. Titus Oates (1649–1705) had good reason to make the attempt.
He was a ghastly child. Sickly, with a permanently runny nose and dribbling mouth, he suffered from convulsions and as he grew older walked with a pronounced limp and developed an irritating voice, halfway between a bark and whine. His face was startlingly ugly, bright red in color and with almost no chin, so that his face appeared to be an extension of his corpulent neck. His character was no more appealing than his appearance. He was dim-witted, dull, and a habitual liar: Nobody liked him, not even his own father. After being expelled from school for cheating his teacher out
of his tuition fees, he went to Cambridge, where he was thrown out of one college for stupidity and sent down from a second one for laziness. Leaving without a degree, he just pretended he had one anyway. This enabled him to get a license to preach from the bishop of London and, in March 1673, he was installed as the vicar of Bobbing, in Kent. So began a fantasy life that would be responsible for one of the most absurd and tragic episodes in British history.
Oates’s father, Samuel, was the son of a Church of England clergyman. As a young man, he had left the church to become a radical Baptist preacher and chaplain in Cromwell’s New Model Army, but by the time Titus was born, he had swung around again and converted back to Anglicanism. This rather flexible relationship with Christian belief was about the only character trait he passed on to his son.
Oates was no more popular as a parish priest than he had been at school or the university. A heavy drinker, he was rude and foulmouthed to his flock and lasted less than two years before they arranged to get rid of him. Returning to the family home in Hastings, he stood in as curate to his father but decided he would rather have the local schoolmaster’s job. So he accused him of sodomy. This blatant lie was quickly uncovered, and to escape a court appearance for perjury, Oates decamped to London and set out to sea as a naval chaplain.
It was on board the Adventure, bound for Tangier, that Oates claimed he first heard rumors of the “Popish Plot” to assassinate Charles II, but his maritime career was cut short when he was discovered performing homosexual acts, or “Italian love,” as it was then more delicately known. Sodomy was a hanging offense; it was only the fact that he was a clergyman that saved his skin.
Undaunted by his narrow escape, Oates bluffed his way into becoming chaplain to the Earl of Norwich. Within a few months, he was sacked for being generally unsuitable and constantly inebriated. His career options rapidly narrowing, he decided to try his luck as a Catholic. Pulling the wool over the eyes of an eccentric (and possibly insane) priest called Father Berry he was received into the Church of Rome in March 1677. Shortly afterward he met Father Richard Strange, head of the English Jesuits. There is strong evidence that Strange became Oates’s lover at this stage—it would be hard to explain why else he would bother with such an unattractive addition to the order.
Strange arranged for Oates to study with the Jesuits at Valladolid under the pseudonym Titus Ambrosius. Once again, it didn’t last long. The Spanish booted him out when they realized he had no grasp whatever of Latin. Oates returned to England, boasting of a divinity degree from the University of Salamanca (which, of course, he had never even visited). Encouraged by Strange to try elsewhere, he enrolled in another Jesuit seminary in France under another false name: Samson Lucy. Here, his engaging personal habits—drinking, smoking, swearing, and lying—made him so unpopular that a fellow seminarian attacked him with a frying pan. In a pattern that was by now tediously familiar, he was expelled and returned to London empty-handed. What fleeting attraction Catholicism had exerted over him had gone. Now all he wanted was revenge on the Roman Church—and the Jesuits in particular—that had so snubbed him.
He didn’t have to wait long. An elderly friend of his father’s, Dr. Israel Tongue, a virulent anti-Catholic, proposed producing some pamphlets using Oates’s firsthand “knowledge” to expose the so-called “Jesuit menace.” Together they hatched what purported to be an undercover report on the Church of Rome’s plans to assassinate Charles II and replace him with his Catholic brother, James. It was a lie from top to tail: a half-digested string of rumors, myths, and suppositions that the two men attempted to craft into a coherent story. It used every emotive device it could muster: a Europe-wide conspiracy at the highest level, private armies being amassed, secret cabals convened in London taverns, large injections of finance from treacherous Catholic families, even a special weapon that fired silver bullets, which would be used to do the deed while the king was out walking.
Charles II did this every day, regular as clockwork. He had even bought a piece of land so he could take his daily “constitutional walk” from Hyde Park to St. James’s without leaving royal soil. Constitution Hill, in what was then called Upper St. James’s Park (now Green Park), got its name from these walks. On August 13, 1678, the king was intercepted on his customary stroll and handed a copy of Tongue and Oates’s ramblings. The document listed the names of nearly one hundred “plotters,” most of them Jesuit priests. Every slight that the twenty-nine-year-old Oates had ever suffered had been poured into one lurid, win-or-bust piece of deception. Charles was unimpressed and inclined to ignore it, putting the matter into the hands of his first minister, the Earl of Danby. His brother James felt differently. He was outraged by the implications and publicly demanded an investigation.
With the “plot” now out in the open, Oates took the initiative. Before a magistrate called Sir Edmund Godfrey, he swore on oath that his allegations were true. He was an energetic but far from convincing liar. His evidence was confused and contradictory. He made forty-three separate charges, naming the names of prominent English Catholics in a more or less random list. Godfrey was skeptical, but Oates was summoned to appear before the Privy Council. Shrewdly cross-examined by the king himself, Oates warmed to his theme. He increased the number of charges to eighty-one—throwing in Samuel Pepys and the archbishop of Dublin for good measure—and then produced his trump card. It was a letter from Edward Coleman, a genuinely fanatic Catholic and secretary to James’s wife, Mary of Modena, Duchess of York, written to Father La Chaise, personal confessor to King Louis XIV of France. Barely had this shocking revelation become the subject of heated debate in every tavern and coffeehouse in London, when a few days later, the body of Sir Edmund Geoffrey was found on Primrose Hill, strangled and impaled on his own sword. The Privy Council jumped to the conclusion that papists were to blame and gave Oates carte blanche to crush the plot. He couldn’t believe his luck. As one contemporary observed: “His greatest pleasure was to speed hither and thither accompanied by soldiers, enjoying complete power to imprison those he chose.” He even took the chance to settle a score by arresting his old headmaster, whom he hadn’t forgiven for expelling him as a boy.
Samuel Pepys was seized and sent to the Tower of London. After the jury took just fifteen minutes to reach their verdict, Edward Coleman was hanged, drawn, and quartered and thirty-four other people—including several Catholic priests and the archbishop of Armagh—were executed for treason. Public panic set in: Anyone even remotely suspected of being Catholic was driven out of London and not allowed back within a ten-mile radius. The House of Commons was searched for gunpowder and there were rumors of a French invasion on the isle of Purbeck in Dorset. By the end of 1678 Parliament had passed the second Test Act ruling that only Protestants could sit in the Houses of Parliament. Anyone in public office had to swear allegiance to the Crown and take an oath of “supremacy” confirming that the monarch was supreme head of the Church of England. Many people—including the king—doubted the truth of Oates’s allegations, but he was rewarded with an apartment in Whitehall, an annual allowance of £1,200, and his own coat of arms.
Gradually, though, public opinion began to turn. No “great plot” materialized. Serious contradictions in Oates’s evidence began to emerge and the judges started to find in favor of those he had accused. In 1681 he was thrown out of his grace-and-favor lodgings. In 1684 he was arrested at a city coffeehouse, tried for defamation, fined the enormous sum of £100,000 (equivalent to almost $20 million today), and thrown into prison for calling the king’s brother James a traitor. Worse was to come when James came to the throne, intent on revenging his fellow Catholics whom Oates’s lies had condemned to death. The one-time savior of the English monarchy was now vilified in pamphlets as a “Buggering, Brazen-faced, Lanthorn-jawed, Tallow-chapt Leviathan.” He was retried, this time for perjury, sentenced to life imprisonment, stripped of his clerical status, and forced to endure a public flogging. He received more than a thousand lashes while being dragged
behind a cart from Aldgate to Tyburn, a distance of more than three miles. To rub salt in the wound, he had to appear five times a year in different parts of London, spending a whole day in the stocks and being pelted with eggs and kitchen slops.
Notwithstanding his horrific injuries from the flogging and regular beatings from his jailers, Oates survived, and with the accession of William of Orange in 1688, he was free once more. Undeterred by his experiences, and his powers of persuasion still intact, he got a job as a royal spy, the new king paying him an allowance to keep an eye on possible French Jacobite plotters. In 1693, hideous though he was, Oates married a wealthy young widow, and despite the sniggering about his homosexuality, the couple went on to have a daughter. Somehow, he got yet another job as a minister, this time as a Baptist. It was no more successful than any of his other clerical posts. One of his parishioners, Heather Parker, disliked him so much that, on her deathbed, she expressly asked that he be barred from attending her funeral. When the day came, Oates’s response was to occupy the pulpit and preach an interminable and irrelevant sermon to delay the ceremony, causing a riot in the church, and being thrown out, yet again, by his own congregation.
It was to be his last expulsion, but not his last appearance in court. In 1702 he was fined at Westminster for hitting a woman over the head with his walking stick. She had confronted him about his sermons criticizing the Church of England and accusing Charles II of being a closet papist. A man in his mid-fifties hitting a woman is particularly pathetic. Prison had not improved his manners or diminished his insolent self-regard. He was what he always had been, an insecure coward and a bully. His delusional fantasies had signed the death warrant of thirty-five entirely innocent men, changed the law of the land, and disrupted the lives of thousands of English Catholics. He spent his last years in obscurity writing religious tracts that nobody read and haunting the Westminster law courts as a spectator. He never tired of complicated, self-justifying stories.
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