The Good, the Bad and the Unready Read Online Free PDF

Black Prince’, by which he is universally known today, did not gain any currency until the late sixteenth century.
    The origins of the soubriquet are unclear. Some suggest that at the battle of Crécy in 1346 King Edward the BANKRUPT put his sixteen-year-old son at the vanguard of his troops in order that he might win his spurs. The teenage prince fought heroically, and for his bravery his fellow soldiers hailed him as ‘the Black Prince’ after the black cuirass (body armour) he was wearing. Others, however, such as the historian Jean Froissart, write that his designation derives instead from his ‘terror at arms’ and ‘martial deeds’.
    In 1361 Edward married his cousin and childhood playmate Joan the FAIR MAID OF KENT and was sent to rule the province of Aquitaine in south-west France. Ten years later he returned to England as bankrupt as his father, having fought against, and lost everything to ‘Peter the Cruel’ of Castile. After several years of bad health Edward finally died in 1386, passing over the kingdom to his only surviving son, Richard the COXCOMB .
    Charles the Blackbird see Charles the MERRY MONARCH
    Elizabeth the Blood Countess
    Elizabeth, countess of Transylvania, c.1560–1614
    While her boorish husband, ‘Ferencz the Black Hero of Hungary’, was away at war, Elizabeth became fascinated by the occult. Believing that bathing in the blood of virgins was the only way to maintain her creamy complexion, she enticed some 600 local young women to her castle in the Carpathian mountains, where they were ritually slaughtered and employed for cosmetic purposes. When the local peasant population ran out, she lured more upmarket women to her lair, until her dastardly beauty treatment was finally discovered. Elizabeth was tried and found guilty and, as punishment, was walled up in a tiny room of her castle.
    Otto the Bloody
    Otto II, king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, 955–83
    Otto, sometimes dubbed ‘the Red’ and ‘Rufus’, in all likelihood on account of the colour of his hair, was a small, brave man, known for his generosity to the Church, knightly virtuosity and occasional acts of impulsive hot-headedness. One such act, in 981, may explain his third nickname, ‘the Bloody’.
    Otto travelled to Rome that year in order to thwart a plotto overthrow him. Upon his arrival, he invited all the chief conspirators, who were blissfully unaware that they had been rumbled, to a banquet. While they were all tucking in, Otto suddenly jumped up and stamped his foot. Armed men rushed into the hall and the emperor unrolled a scroll. Otto read aloud the names of the indicted nobles and, one by one, they were dragged from the table and strangled.
    Bloody Abdul see Abdul the DAMNED
    Bloody Mary
    Mary I, queen of England, 1516–58
    From an early age Mary demonstrated a devotion to the Catholic faith. Sebastian Giustinian, the Venetian ambassador, reports that when she was only two years old she saw Friar Dionosio Memo, the organist of St Mark’s Church in Venice, in the court of her father, BLUFF KING HAL , and she apparently cried out the word ‘priest’ until Memo played for her.
    Later in life, when queen, she considered it her Christian duty to turn the tide of Protestantism which had been flowing through England since the reign of her brother Edward the JOSIAH OF ENGLAND (see ENGLISH EPITHETS ). To this end she married Philip the PRUDENT of Spain (also a devout Catholic) and, having quashed a Protestant rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, restored papal supremacy in England and revived the laws against heresy. Over the following three years nearly 300 ‘heretics’ were hanged or burned at the stake, among them Archbishop Cranmer and Bishops Ridley and Latimer. For permitting these executions, Mary was despised in certain quarters and rumours circulated that she had slept with the devil and given birth to a snake.
    It appears that her nickname is largely due to the virulently anti-Catholic writings of