Free The Good, the Bad and the Unready by Robert Easton

gormless. Without doubt he was heirless, handing over the mantle of authority to his nephew William.

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    Napoleon the Eagle see Napoleon the LITTLE CORPORAL
    Napoleon the Eaglet
    Napoleon Francois Bonaparte, titular king of Rome, 1811–32
    Napoleon ‘l’Aiglon’, the sickly offspring of‘the Eagle’ (also known as Napoleon the LITTLE CORPORAL ), was never in robust health. This painfully thin ‘king of Rome’ suffered from a persistent cough for most of his life, then contracted tuberculosis in his teens, and died aged just twenty-one when, in the winter of 1832, he literally caught his death of cold while watching a military parade.
    Ladislaus the Elbow-High
    Ladislaus I, king of Poland, c.1260–1333
    Ladislaus may have been small in stature, but he stood tall among his contemporaries as a skilful diplomat, courageous warrior and revered king. At a time of feudal disunity he forged a union between Little Poland and Greater Poland, and won the approval of the pope, paving the way for Polish territorial expansion under his son Casimir the GREAT .
    His tactics were not always conventional. In suppressing a revolt by Germans in Cracow, for instance, he used a simple language test, echoing the ‘Shibboleth’ test found in the Book of Judges in the Bible. Anyone who could repeat and correctly pronounce ‘soczewica, kolo, miele, mlyn ’ was free to go. Those who could not were presumed guilty and duly punished.
      Edward the Elder
    Edward, king of Wessex, d.924
    Danish aggression was running slack, the Mercians (ruled by Edward’s formidable sister Aethelflaed) were in a compromising mood, and the hitherto independent residents of Northumbria and East Anglia were no match for his military supremacy. Peace on all sides ensured an uncommonly calm monarchy for Edward, whose neighbours acknowledged him as their ‘father and lord’ and, denoting rank rather than family relationship, their ‘elder’. Continuing the work begun by his father, Alfred the GREAT , Edward was able to prime England for complete unification, a goal achieved during the reign of his son and successor, Athelstan the GLORIOUS .
    Sophia Charlotte the Elephant
    Sophia Charlotte, mistress of King George I of England, 1675–1725
    The people of England were surprised when they learned that their king, George the TURNIPHOER , was enjoying more than a platonic relationship with his half-sister Sophia Charlotte, not only because she was his sibling but also because she was ugly and enormous. The masses referred to her in elephantine terms while Horace Walpole, that connoisseur of fine things, wrote that she had ‘two acres of cheeks and a swollen neck’.
    Alexander the Emancipator
    Alexander II, emperor of Russia, 1818–81
    The emancipation of the Russian serfs by Alexander II was, according to The Times of London, ‘the first and greatest… of Russian reforms’, but it literally came at a cost, not least to those it was intended to help. Most of the liberated peasants thought that Alexander, whom they referred to as ‘Little Father’, had given them not only their freedom but also their land. To their dismay they found they had to pay taxes, and that annual payments were higher than their former rents.
    English Epithets
    Below are five English noblemen with somewhat florid national epithets. In each case the individual is compared to an ancient hero. Whether their achievements warrant such comparison is a matter of debate.
    Henry Our English Marcellus
    Henry, prince of Wales, 1594–1612
    Given his impressive political acumen and artistic insight, the young Roman Marcus Claudius Marcellus was expected to go far; however, he died aged nineteen, leaving his many virtues to be celebrated by a host of writers, not least by Virgil in The Aeneid . Henry was similarly a multi-talented young man: a superb swordsman, a keen patron of the arts and a man of deep piety. But, like Marcellus, he also died young, in his case at just eighteen, of typhoid,