1066 and All That

William I, king and conqueror of England, died on this day in Rouen in 1087 at the age of about 59.

William was the bastard son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, by the daughter of a tanner whom Robert met and fell in love with at a dance. When William was 8 his father died, leaving William as a young duke in the hands of stewards and tutors. While many of his protectors lost their lives to treachery, William survived to adulthood in part with the help of Henry I of France, yet he gained considerable skill as a combatant while he was growing up. When he was 18, the Normans revolted against his rule, and with Henry's help he managed not only to put down the rebellion but to expand his territory.

In 1051 he began to cast his eye across the English Channel, where his elderly distant cousin Edward the Confessor ruled without an heir. Meeting with Edward, William secured (or at least thought he secured) Edward's promise that William should be the King of England after Edward's death. To shore up his chances, William captured Harold Godwinson, the powerful Earl of Wessex, and extracted a similar promise from him. Nevertheless, Harold considered himself under polite duress, and privately believed that the Normans were no match for his superior Anglo-Saxon forces, should the question ever come up in battle.

Edward died on January 5, 1066, and within 24 hours Harold had himself proclaimed King of England, despite his promise to William. Infuriated by Harold's lack of chivalry, William gathered an army and with the support of Pope Alexander II (who was impressed with William's commitment to monastic reform), William landed on the beach at Pevensey, wearing around his neck the relics upon which Harold had sworn his allegiance to William as a stern reminder.

Harold's Anglo-Saxon army were initially busy in the North fighting Danes, but marched to meet William at the Battle of Hastings. The Anglo-Saxons were well positioned and initially did some damage to William's army, unseating William from his own horse three times. Concerned that his soldiers would think he had been killed, William fought much of the battle bare-headed. He countered Harold's initial success by drawing the Anglo-Saxons into a valley and instructing his archers to change from a flat trajectory to a high angle for maximum penetration. As the battle approached a stalemate, one of the Norman arrows mortally wounded Harold (some say in the eye), and the English retreated.

From Hastings William tried to enter London, and was initially repulsed. After some thought, however, the people of London gave in (due to a lack of credible candidates to fill Harold's void), and crowned him King of England on Christmas Day, 1066 at Westminster Abbey.

For the next five years, William ruthlessly and stubbornly put down a series of minor rebellions in England, and gradually turned to governing. Although the Norman culture was somewhat backward compared to that of the Anglo-Saxons, the inquisitive, imitative Normans adopted much of what they had conquered, even as William installed his own Norman noblemen in English earldoms and his own church leaders in positions of authority. In 1086, William showed his sense of statesmanship by commissioning the Domesday Book, a leviathan survey of people, lands and property throughout England which became a veritable handbook for generations of his descendants who ruled there.

William, who grew stout and bald in middle age, died as a result of an injury he suffered while skirmishing with the army of Philip I at Rouen. He was succeeded in England by his boorish son William Rufus.

Judging by the persistence of William the Conqueror's popularity over the years, it is as if one might imagine that all English history is traceable to William's conquest at Hastings in 1066, and everything occurring before it lies in the obscurity of the Dark Ages.

Exile in France

Childeric III, known as "Childeric the Lazy," King of the Franks (743-deposed 751), the last of the Merovingian kings of France, died on this day in 755 in a monastery near St. Omer, France.

In modern times France has been generous to deposed rulers of other countries, giving shelter to such characters as the Shah of Iran and Bebe Doc Duvalier, among others, after their ignominious defeats, in varying degrees of faroukian splendor. Such generosity has not generally been given to France's own, however, as the French Revolution amply proves.

Even before that, Childeric III learned this lesson first-hand. Childeric III became king of the Franks in 743, during the end of a period marked by the relative weakness of the kings' authority as compared to the power wielded by mayor of the palace in Paris. While the exact political reasons are obscured by history (although Childeric's sobriquet may provide at least a germ of an answer), mayor Pepin the Short asked Pope Zacharias for permission to sack Childeric III and take over the Frankish throne. Permission was granted, and Pepin confined Childeric to a monastery in the south, where one assumes he did not stroll around jauntily in caviar-stained silk shirts.

Edward the Elder

Edward the Elder, king of England (899-925), died on this day in 925 at Farndon-on-Dee, Mercia at the age of about 53.

The second and eldest surviving son of Alfred the Great, Edward grew up watching his father fight the Danes, and had developed a strong sense of mission as guardian of England's future by the time succeeded his father in October 899. Although the Witan (the Anglo-Saxon council of elders) moved quickly to proclaim him king, his cousin Athelwold (son of the late King Ethelred I, Alfred's brother and predecessor), upset about Alfred's last will and testament, had himself proclaimed king by the Danes and Angles in York and began to lead a revolt in East Anglia. Two years later, Athelwold died in battle, and Edward was able to broker an uneasy peace with the Danes in the East, but he would spend the next eight years shooing the pesky Danes out of the North. By 915, Edward had completed a chain of fortified towns from Chester to Witham, after which he pursued the equivocating Eastern Danes, finally getting them to submit to his rule in 920.

His success against the Danes attracted the attention of the kings of Scotland and Strathclyde, who declared their submission to Edward in exchange for his help with the Norse who were attacking them -- ultimately resulting in Edward having achieved overlord status over all of Britain (except for the Norse settlements in York, Orkney and the Western Isles) by 922. His sons Athelstan, Edmund and Edred would all succeed him.

Unready

King Ethelred II, known as "the Unready," died on this day in 1016 in London.

Ethelred's life did not begin auspiciously. At his baptism (around 968), he "made water in the font" (i.e. urinated), which St. Dunstan interpreted to mean that the English people would be slaughtered in his lifetime.

The half-brother of King Edward the Martyr, Ethelred assumed the English throne as a youngster following his half-brother's murder in 978 -- although there was widespread speculation that Ethelred was complicit in the crime. This fact made it more difficult for him to raise an adequate defense against the encroachment of the Danes in 980. He rashly ordered a general massacre of Danes in England on St. Brice's Day, 1002, resulting in the murder of the sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, the King of Denmark, who eventually conquered the island and forced Ethelred to flee in 1013.

Following Sweyn's death, Ethelred was reinstated to the throne, only to face a decisive onslaught by Sweyn's son Canute, resulting in the installment of Ethelred's son Edmund to the throne, and Canute's virtually certain accession, shortly before Ethelred's death.

Ethelred's well-suited nickname, "Unready," was derived from a play on his name: "Ethelraed" meant "noble counsel," to which was added "Unraed" meaning "no counsel" or "ill counsel." The epithet was later mistranslated as "Unready."

The Scourge of God

Attila, king of the Huns, known as the "Scourge of God," died on this day in 453 around the age of 47.

For hundreds of years, the mysterious Huns, a nomadic tribe from the Asian steppes, had been chipping away at the fringes of the Roman Empire, and the terrible cavalry invasions of the Huns under the leadership of Ruga during the early 400s were so successful that Rome paid an annual tribute to the Huns to keep themselves safe from further attacks.

After the death of his uncle Ruga in 437, Attila and his brother Bleda jointly assumed the kingship of the Huns, Bleda handling the government administration and Attila leading the military through invasions of much of modern-day Hungary, Greece, Spain and Italy -- destroying Sofia and Belgrade and leaving their riverbanks covered with human bones.

Attila was much more aggressive and unpredictable than his uncle, and his looks and bearing alone inspired fear in both his enemies and his subordinates: he had a disproportionately large head, swarthy complexion and fierce eyes which his own generals could not look directly into without shuddering. In 445, Attila executed his pesky brother and ruled the Huns by himself under his iron fist. Initially, in order to avoid further incursions, the Byzantines and the Romans each sought to appease Attila in their own ways: the Romans named him as one of their own generals and gave him a stipend, and Byzantine emperor Theodosius II acceded to Attila’s frivolous requests for increases in the tribute payments from 350 pounds of gold to 700 to 2,100 pounds per year. With his earnings, Attila lived a luxurious, somewhat decadent lifestyle, drinking excessively, carousing with his multiple wives and even indulging in cannibalism (according to medieval tabloids).

Finally in 450, the Byzantines began to tire of paying homage to Attila, and Theodosius II plotted to assassinate Attila. Attila quickly discovered the plot, and prepared to attack the Byzantines; however, the sister of Roman emperor Valentinian III, Honoria, sought Attila’s protection after having being caught in an affair with her servant against her family’s wishes, sending her ring to Attila and promising him half the Roman Empire if he would come and rescue her from imprisonment. Attila changed his plans and turned to the Roman Empire to demand his bounty as a matter of right. Although he was repelled in Gaul by the Roman general Flavius Aetius at the Battle of Chalons (451), Attila regrouped somewhat and turned his attack directly on Italy in 452, ravaging Aquilea, Milan and Padua until he was met by Pope Leo I near Mantua. Leo I threatened Attila with the wrath of St. Peter if he were to approach Rome, and Attila -- perhaps short of supplies and fearing that the Byzantines were coming after him, perhaps realizing that Honoria probably wasn’t worth the trouble -- turned tail and returned to the Great Hungarian Plain to take another young wife, Ildico.

After a mighty wedding feast, Attila retired to the bridal chamber, dead drunk, and his nose began to bleed. By the next morning, he had either bled or choked to death. Within 20 years or so, Attila’s empire was in ruins, disintegrating without the personality of its ruthless leader to keep it intact.

Le Vert Galant

Henry IV, king of France (1589-1610), known as "Le Vert Galant," was born on this day in 1533 in the castle Pau in the Pyrenees.

A direct descendant of Louis IX and a grandson of writer Marguerite of Navarre, Henry was baptized as a Catholic but joined the French Protestants (Huguenots) under his mother's influence, and he fought on their side during the religious civil wars which ravaged France during the 16th century. When his mother died in 1572, Henry became king of Navarre and married Margaret of Valois, the daughter of the powerful Catholic regent of France, Catherine de Medicis.

Catherine had consented to the marriage to placate the Huguenots; nevertheless, it is surmised that she was complicit in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which thousands of Protestants, including several important Protestant leaders, were rounded up and murdered six days after the "scarlet nuptials"of Henry and Margaret. Henry himself barely escaped the attack by pretending to submit to a forced "conversion" to Catholicism, and the civil wars resumed with even greater fury following the Massacre. When Henry III was assassinated, Henry of Navarre claimed the French throne for himself.

He was, however, a pragmatist. Realizing that he could never hold the French throne as a Protestant (the Huguenots represented only about 10% of the population), Henry converted to Catholicism with a display of earnestness, stating for the record that "Paris is well worth a mass," and thereafter began the arduous process of receiving papal absolution for his sins against the faith from Clement VIII. With the Catholics and the more politically realistic Huguenots supporting him, Henry took the revolutionary step of issuing the Edict of Nantes (1598), granting nobles the right to conduct Protestant services, permitting Protestantism in certain towns (not Paris) and promising that Protestants would enjoy the same civil rights as Catholics. The Edict quelled the Huguenot rebellion, but only after Henry took charge of the wary court system and imposed the Protestant detente upon the countryside.

Having settled the religious wars, Henry paved the way for the rebuilding of the nation through the enforcement of taxes and the initiation of public works projects (a 17th century "New Deal," a la FDR), building canals, roads and bridges.

It was said that Henry's mother sprinkled wine on his tongue when he was born to give him the right spirit. Whether it was the right spirit or not, it certainly seemed to foreshadow Henry's boisterous appreciation for wine, food and beautiful women, hence his nickname ("Le Vert Galant," or the "gay old spark"). Enormously popular by the end of his reign, Henry was assassinated on May 14, 1610 in Paris by a crazed fanatic who believed that he was a menace to the Catholic Church. Henry's killer was fed to wild dogs by Henry's incensed subjects.

Clovis

By the time Clovis acceded to the leadership of the Franks, the Roman Empire was in a shambles: puppet emperors had been under the control of the Suevians since 456, but the Suevian power-broker Ricimer had died in 472, and the last person to hold the title of Roman emperor, the 16-year old boy Romulus Augustus, abdicated in 476. While Clovis' father Childeric still had to contend with stray Roman armies, by 481 these armies were little more than lost patrols. Clovis took the opportunity to drive the Romans out in 486, defeating (and decapitating) Syragius, the son and successor of the Roman governor of Gaul, Aegidius, and the model for the Arthurian romance Sir Sagramore the Foolish. After defeating Syragius, Clovis began to plan his conquest of the other "barbarians" along the Rhine.

He chose as his wife Clotilda, a devout Catholic and the orphaned daughter of a brother of the Burgundian king Gontebaud; Gregory of Tours later suggested that Clovis's choice of spouse was meant to unnerve Gontebaud, who had supposedly murdered Clotilda's father. In any event, Clotilda had attempted to convert the pagan Clovis at the time of their marriage, but it wasn't until Clovis found himself having trouble with the Alemanns that Clovis relented. He vowed to become a Christian if he defeated the Alemanns; and after he defeated them, he received baptism amid great pomp and circumstance from St. Remigius on Christmas Eve, 496 -- becoming the first Christian king of the Franks and enjoying the cooperation of the Church thereafter.

Conspiracy theorists suggest that Clovis' baptism was actually the consummation of a bargain struck by the Roman Catholic Church -- that in exchange for the Church's support in temporal affairs, Clovis and his progeny would renounce the Merovingian claim that the family line began with the union of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalen. If conspiracy theories about Roswell, Marilyn, Kennedy and Elvis have got you scratching your head, imagine what motivates a modern mind to hatch a conspiracy theory focusing on the baptism of a Frankish king from the 5th century. Today's Merovingian partisans mourn the reign of the independent-minded Dagobert II (676-9) as the last true Merovingian king under the bargain, and regard the papally-supported Carolingian coup which relegated Merovingian figurehead Childeric the Lazy to a monastery in 751 as the last semi-bloody deed in the silencing of the radical Christianity of Jesus' half-brother, James the Just; on the other side of the coin, the anti-Merovingians claim that the Merovingians went underground through organizations such as the Knights Templar and are at present the unseen powers behind international industry and finance.

Clovis subsequently took on and defeated Clotilda's uncle, Gontebaud, king of the Burgundians and one of the last sponsors of the Roman emperors, in 500, and went after the Visigoths, killing Alaric II, king of the Visigoths, at Toulouse in 507 -- thereby extending the Frankish kingdom to include much of modern France and Germany. He established his court at Paris, thereby establishing the city as the preferred capital of Gaul (or France) for centuries, where he promulgated the earliest Frankish canon of written laws and meddled poorly in church affairs. According to custom, when Clovis died (on this date in 511 in Paris at the age of about 46) his kingdom was split among his four sons, two of whom (Childebert I and Chlotar I) emerged as dominant kings of the Frankish realm for a time.

Elizabeth I

"When I was fair and young and favour graced me/ Of many was I sought their mistress for to be/ But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore/ Go, go, go, seek some other where/ Importune me no more." -- Elizabeth I.

Taking power as a 25 year-old and reigning for 45 years, Elizabeth was the star at the center of the 16th century English universe, which produced the foundations of the British Empire, lasting British Protestantism, Shakespeare and the beginnings of the English Renaissance. She was not only popular with the English people, but a shrewd judge of political talent, a careful diplomat and a poet whose military dispatches were even beautifully written.

She was born on this day in 1533 in Greenwich. Before she was 3, the head of her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been ordered off her mother's shoulders by her father, Henry VIII, and within 2 years, she was declared to be an illegitimate child when her father remarried to Jane Seymour, the mother of Elizabeth's half-brother, Edward VI. Elizabeth nonetheless received a first-rate education, and being trained as a Protestant was encouraged to repudiate traditional authority and seek her own conclusions.

Henry VIII designated Elizabeth as third in line for the throne, behind Edward and her half-sister Mary, which catapulted her to superstar status. With ivory skin, auburn hair and delicate hands, she became the object of feverish courtship by power-hungry nobles -- in particular, Thomas Seymour, a handsome, ambitious cad who, though married to Catherine Parr, engaged in chasing Elizabeth around her house, slapping and tickling her whenever he could; his plots against the throne eventually resulted in his execution, however, and some credit his execution with hardening Elizabeth's amorousness for the rest of her life.

After the death of Edward VI and the brief attempt to install Lady Jane Grey on the throne, Elizabeth was proposed as a Protestant alternative to her staunchly Catholic half-sister Mary as Queen, but Elizabeth wisely pleaded illness and declined the invitation. While Mary reigned, Elizabeth quietly waited, initially banished to the Tower of London as a traitor, surviving Mary's murderous jealousy with intelligence, patience and courage.

Upon Mary's death, on November 17, 1558, Elizabeth was crowned Queen at Westminster. Although the dying Mary had urged Elizabeth to keep England Catholic, Elizabeth knew that England had become irreversibly Protestant, Mary's campaign of terror against heretics notwithstanding, and Elizabeth followed her own moderate, pragmatic conscience by establishing the Church of England as the State Church, with herself as "governor." When the citizens of Oxford asked her how they should bury the bones of disinterred Catholic saints and recently burned Protestant martyrs, her reply was similarly practical: "Mix them," she is said to have advised.

Beyond England's religious difficulties, the nation was impoverished when she took the throne, and was ripe for the taking by either France or Spain. European observers all expected Elizabeth to marry and settle the question of England's alliances, but Elizabeth became adept at using potential suitors as diplomatic and political pawns while she girded England for the coming storm. Married to the throne instead, she chose extraordinarily talented advisers, such as William Cecil, for many years her chief advisor; Francis Walsingham, her security chief who protected her from the many murder plots which erupted in her day; and Walter Raleigh, her Lord Chancellor. She never let any of them rise too high, however -- not even her favorite, the less talented but handsome Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester -- and ruled alertly as a fearsome autocrat.

In 1570, Pope Pius V attempted to speed up the European conquest of England by excommunicating Elizabeth from the Catholic church, thus freeing English Catholics to defy her authority and fight against her alongside the Catholic monarchs of Europe; but Elizabeth's policy of toleration resulted in a united England, and no revolt followed. It wasn't until 1588, when it was clear that Elizabeth would not marry and all other incursions had failed to weaken Elizabeth's power, that Philip II of Spain sent his Spanish Armada of ships to the coast off Cornwall. Her chief sea-dog Francis Drake directed the use of fire-ships against the Spanish fleet as it rested near Calais, panicking the Spanish and sending them North toward bad weather and English defeat.

Her attention then turned to colonization in the Western hemisphere, where the Spaniards had previously reaped so much gold. At 51, she became infatuated with the young Earl of Essex, and her indulgence almost cost her the throne when Essex led a rebellion against her in 1601; he was executed for his antics. Elizabeth died not long afterward, grudgingly (as she preferred not to speak of her own death or questions of succession) naming James I as her successor.

Being a central figure in the development of Anglo-American culture, she has been portrayed on film often, memorably by Sarah Bernhardt (The Loves of Queen Elizabeth, 1912), Bette Davis (twice, in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, 1939, and The Virgin Queen, 1955), Glenda Jackson (twice, on TV in Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth R, both 1971), Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love, 1998), Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth, 1998) and Helen Mirren (on TV, in Elizabeth I, 2005). For a good laugh, try either Miranda Richardson in Blackadder II (TV, 1985) or Quentin Crisp in Orlando (1992).

Celebrity Poker: Albania, 1935

From an era long before "Celebrity Poker" became a staple of basic cable TV -- indeed, from an era before there was basic cable TV . . . this little New Yorker story, vintage 1935, illustrates another kind of celebrity poker:

A quartet of gentlemen adventurers connected with the Standard Oil Company, and headed by a Mr. Owen, have just returned from Tirana, the capital city of Albania, with a surprising little tale. Seems that after a strenuous summer of surveys in the Balkans, they came to Tirana with hopes of finding excitement and gaiety. Tirana, however, turned out not to have any night life at all: no night clubs, no theaters. After a late dinner, the four retired to their hotel suite and settled down to an evening of draw poker. Beside them, a tall French window overlooked a darkened city. Far away across the city, a light shone in the royal palace; elsewhere there was nothing. In about ten minutes, the telephone rang. Mr. Owen answered and was addressed first in Italian, then in French, and finally in English. He replied in English, and a small sad voice inquired, "Is it bridge or poker?" He said it was poker. "This is King Zog speaking," the voice went on. "I wonder if I could come over and take a hand." Owen told him to come right ahead. He arrived 15 minutes later, played for the rest of the evening, and lost the Albanian equivalent of $1.50, after which he bought them a round of drinks at the hotel bar. Seems he keeps a telescope at the palace, and manages to get in quite a little night life that way.

Eleanor of Aquitaine

Aquitaine, a region comprising the southern third of France which roughly corresponded with one of the 3 Roman divisions of Gaul, was at the beginning of the 12th century a fading independent duchy, still free from the control of any kingdom, but not on the strongest footing. William X, the duke of Aquitaine, had witnessed his province shrink from its zenith of power under his grandfather, and was not an especially formidable ruler. At the age of 38, William died of food poisoning on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, and left his only surviving child and heir, his 15-year old daughter Eleanor ("Alia-Aenor," or the "other Aenor," after her mother, Aenor de Chastellerault), as the ward of Louis VI ("the Fat"). Within just a few days, the opportunistic Louis arranged the marriage of Eleanor to his own son, the future Louis VII, thereby claiming Aquitaine for France.

Or so one would have thought at the time -- but Eleanor would grow to be a most resourceful woman, succeeding at playing a man's game (statecraft) while using every tool available to her as a woman. Within the corridors of 12th century European power, she was a foremost strategist of the gender politics of her time.

Young Louis, who succeeded his father to the French throne shortly after their wedding, was a boy better suited for reading than horseplay in general, but his piety led him to direct the Second Crusade to the Holy Land. Eleanor, now the mother of his eldest daughter, dutifully followed her husband from post to post, subtly transforming herself along the way from a compliant ingénue to a boisterous lady-to-be-reckoned-with. Her emotional dominance over the monkish Louis was clear, and soon there were rumors that she had committed adultery with, among others, Saladin, who would become a leading soldier of the Syrian army. (The affairs may have been real enough, but the liaison with Saladin was probably a revisionist fantasy.) Upon their return, Louis sought an annulment of their marriage from Eugenius III on the grounds of consanguinity (close kinship -- never mind that Eleanor was already the mother of his 2 daughters). Eugene granted the annulment in 1152, and in the bargain Eleanor managed to regain possession of Aquitaine.

Wasting no time at all, the 30-year old Eleanor turned to the one man outside of the Holy Land who most threatened Louis' sovereignty, a 19-year old boy named Henry who had extensive French holdings and a clear shot at the throne of England -- seducing the impetuous boy and securing him as her next groom. At her coronation as Henry's queen in Worcester a few years later, Eleanor declared, with an astute sense of her own life's purpose, "I am queen of England, by the wrath of God!"

Now Aquitaine, Anjou, Normandy and England were all under one banner, and it was inevitable that the hen-pecked Louis would have felt slighted; so Louis sent his forces against Henry. Check by bloody check, the bitter rivalry of two kings over Eleanor and her huge tracts of land initiated a conflict that would plague both England and France for decades.

Meanwhile, Eleanor bore Henry 5 sons and 3 daughters -- certainly enough progeny to guarantee the succession to all of Henry's realm, but more than enough to give Henry a lifetime of grief. Henry and Eleanor began to grow apart as Eleanor advanced in age, and Eleanor relocated to Poitiers, setting up her own trend-setting court (which became a center of artistic and literary taste) and using her sons as weapons against the philandering Henry.

In 1173, she returned to London to help her sons Henry, Richard (her personal favorite), Geoffrey and John lead a rebellion against King Henry, but her husband had her placed under house arrest for the next decade while he negotiated with his hot-headed boys. Following the deaths of Henry the Younger and Geoffrey, Eleanor's favorite son Richard became the natural successor to Henry, who died in 1189, a man broken and defeated by Eleanor's skillful uses of maternal power.

Richard promptly went off on the Third Crusade, leaving Eleanor as regent of England. Eleanor kept her youngest son John in check, who was attempting to mount his own rebellion while Richard was off fighting infidels; but after Richard's return and subsequent death, she fought to preserve John's authority, throwing off the challenges of her own grandson, Geoffrey's son Arthur of Brittany, in his attempts to overtake John's French territories. She also attempted to play her hand in diplomacy, again to preserve John's authority, by crossing the Pyrenees at age 78 to seize her granddaughter, Blanche of Castile, and deliver her to the French court to marry the future king, Louis VIII; it was Eleanor's hope, in the years immediately before her death (on this date in 1204 at Fontevrault, France, at the age of about 82), that the alliance would cause an end to the feud between the English and French monarchs; but Philip II kept up his assaults, resulting in John losing all of his French lands except for a portion of Poitou and his mother's beloved Aquitaine.

Henry FitzEmpress

The son of Matilda, the conquering "Lady of the English" and Geoffrey Plantagenet, the Count of Anjou, Henry "FitzEmpress" (born on this day in 1133 in LeMans, France) grew up with his mother's mercurial nature and with seemingly inexhaustible energy, which powered both his delight in hunting and the outdoors as well as an appreciation for literature. While his mother fought Stephen of Blois for the English throne, his father acquired Normandy and installed Henry as the duke of Normandy in 1150. Henry's French holdings increased with the death of his father the following year (leaving him with Anjou and Maine) and with his seduction by and marriage in 1152 to Eleanor of Aquitaine, a woman 11 years his senior who had divorced Louis VII of France.

By the time he was crowned king of England (after Stephen's death in 1154, in accordance with Stephen's ultimate submission to the claims of Matilda's line), Henry II of England held more French territory than the king of France, and more of Earth's territory than any previous English king. As king, Henry focused on reestablishing royal prerogatives which had fallen to waste under Stephen's weak reign. Not only did this involve successful raids against the Scots and the Welsh (and a papal bull issued by English Pope Adrian IV in 1155 giving Henry hegemony over Scotland, Wales and Ireland), but it meant a full-scale political battle against the Church over the independence of ecclesiastical courts and his ability to tax the Church's wealth.

He secured the election of his friend and close advisor, Thomas a Becket, as archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, by which he had hoped to get his way; unexpectedly, however, Becket stubbornly stuck to Church principles, and by 1164, the two were no longer speaking to each other as Becket was forced into exile in France. Through the intercession of Pope Alexander III, Becket returned to England in 1170 under an uneasy detente with his old friend. Henry's intemperate rhetorical question -- "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" -- overheard by some literal-minded knights sent them to Canterbury on December 29, 1170, where they murdered Becket in the Cathedral.

Becket's murder sent shockwaves around Europe, and though Becket did not die under Henry's direct orders, Henry felt obliged to go to Becket's tomb barefoot and prostrate himself before it, praying for forgiveness and subjecting himself to public humiliation.

Much of the remaining years of Henry's reign were taken up with disagreements among himself and his sons Henry, Richard, Geoffrey and John. He chose young Henry as his successor in 1170, but young Henry desired more than the title of heir apparent; and the more that young Henry clamored for power, the more that Richard and Geoffrey began to distance themselves from Henry II. Young Henry died of a fever in 1183 and Geoffrey died in a tournament accident in 1186, leaving Henry II in support of his favorite, John, in opposition to his disaffected wife Eleanor and her favorite, Richard. However, the news that John had joined Richard's army against Henry II broke his spirit; and after reaching an agreement with King Philip II of France, who had used the wrath of Henry's sons to gain their complicity in taking back certain French territories, Henry died of a massive hemorrhage at the age of 56.

Eleanor's influence won the day as Richard was installed as Henry's successor.

Egbert of Wessex

Egbert, king of Wessex (802-39) who came to be known as Bretwalda, or king of the English (829-39), died on this day in 839 at the age of about 69.

Although Offa, king of Mercia (757-96), is often credited as the first of the regional overlords of England to be recognized as "king of the English," it is generally accepted that Egbert is the first king in the line of English royalty we know today, in part because his progeny have retained the throne, through his grandson Alfred the Great and his descendants Henry II, Henry VII, James I, George I, Victoria and, eventually, Elizabeth II.

The beginning of his career showed more swagger than promise: a son of the murdered king of Kent, Ealhmund, the 16-year old Egbert brashly put forth his name to the Wessex council of elders for the vacant throne of Wessex after the murder of Cynewulf in 786, but under Offa's influence, the Wessex seat went to a middle-aged rival, Beorhtic. Egbert shrewdly left Wessex for Offa's court, but Beorhtic grew concerned that Egbert might be a troublesome juvenile rabble-rouser; while negotiating with Offa over a proposed marriage to Offa's daughter, Beorhtic asked that Egbert be placed in his custody.

Seeing through Beorhtic's potentially deadly designs, Egbert fled England, and by 792 he had found refuge in the Frankish court of Charlemagne at Aachen. Tracing Charlemagne's steps as the Frankish king conquered new lands and grappled with administration and laws was an advanced tutorial on the art of kingship for Egbert, but his presence at court also secured for him an alliance-by-marriage with the Franks as he wed Redburga, one of Charlemagne's nieces.

Through subtle diplomacy, important reminders of his traceable lineage back to the first king of the West Saxons (the 6th century lord Cerdic), and occasional displays of authority on visits from the continent, Egbert kept in touch with the Wessex council of elders, and after the death of Offa in 796 and Beorhtic in 802, at the age of about 32 Egbert was recalled from Aachen and elected king of Wessex.

He spent the earliest years of his reign biding his time, cultivating support among strong nobles and bishops until 815, when he devastated the independent kingdom of Cornwall and brought it under his authority. In 825, he faced an invasion by Offa's successors in Mercia, but he beat them handily at Ellendun in Wiltshire. With his troops on the ready, he turned his heels and quickly marched on Kent (where he drove out the local king), and more or less bloodlessly (and permanently) conquered the entire southeast of England. He joined the kingdom of East Anglia in fighting against Mercia on its own turf in 829, and marched on to conquer Northumbria later that year.

With these regions (save East Anglia) in his grasp, Egbert succeeded in bringing most of England south of the Humber under his protectorate, giving him the status of Bretwalda -- "for one brief shining moment," as Lerner and Loewe would say, since Mercia managed to throw off Egbert's rule by 831. Nonetheless, Egbert continued to assert his status as Bretwalda. In his final years, he sent his son Ethelwulf to rule in Kent, and spent much of his time planning the tactics by which his vassals fought the pesky Danes who began to nibble at the edges of England around this time. He is said to have been buried at Winchester.

Edward the Confessor

The young man who came to be known as Edward the Confessor (who died on this day in 1066 at the age of 62) had no idea that he would ever be the king of England. His father, Ethelred the Unready, had 6 sons by his first wife Elgiva -- which certainly decreased the odds that Edward, one of 2 sons by Ethelred's second wife Emma, would ever be called upon to lead. Things didn't look any better when his father was deposed by the Danes.

When Ethelred died, Edward's mother Emma married the new Danish king of England, Canute. Thus, after a childhood in the cloisters at Ely, Edward was sent to his mother's folks at the court of the duchy of Normandy, where in addition to attaining manhood amid Norman customs, he met and befriended the toddler who would grow up to be William the Conqueror.

When Edward's younger half-brother King Hardicanute (his mother's son by Canute) died in 1042, the nobles in England cast their eyes around the twisted carnage of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish royal lines looking for a successor, and found the unassuming Edward -- the last surviving son of the last Anglo-Saxon king, the stepson of the greatest Danish king, and to boot, a tall and handsome man who certainly looked the part. To guarantee a quick and peaceful succession, Godwin, Earl of Wessex, engineered Edward's coronation at Winchester Cathedral on Easter Sunday, 1043.

At first, the 39-year old king exhibited no particular talent for the job. Though charming, he was not considered to have a very strong personality and was much more interested in spiritual pursuits; so for a time, Edward relied on the powerful presence of Godwin, both for advice and execution. To cement his relationship with Edward, Godwin married his daughter Edith to him, but Edward never consummated the marriage. For all intents and purposes, Edward was married to the Church, and he devoted himself to the building of Westminster Abbey.

Meanwhile, Edward populated his court with Normans, a habit which eventually caused tension between himself and Godwin. In his conflict with Godwin, Edward demonstrated the kind of strategic intelligence that helped him to maintain the throne for more than 20 years; although he would banish Godwin when his needling of the Normans became too heavy-handed, Edward realized this would not be popular with his English subjects, so with his order to remove Godwin from the premises in 1051, he also repealed the danegeld, a tax the Danish kings levied on the English to pay for protection against pirates.

With Godwin in exile, Edward's old friend William of Normandy came to court for a visit, during which time, William would later claim, Edward agreed that he would nominate William as his successor. In 1052, however, Godwin and his sons invaded England, and although Edward was willing to fight, his council of nobles did not want a civil war. Edward was thus forced to pardon Godwin and make Godwin's son, Harold Godwinson, his heir apparent.

In his final years, though he still favored William as his successor, Edward was content to turn over most of his duties to Harold while he tended to the Abbey's progress and occasionally hunted. Edward's ambivalence would ultimately trigger the fight that resulted in one of the most famous battles in history, between Harold and William, after his death -- the Battle of Hastings, and the ensuing Norman Conquest, of 1066.

A week before he succumbed, he had other things on his mind: living to see the consecration of Westminster Abbey, and knowing that he would be buried there. For his devotion to the Church, Pope Alexander III canonized Edward in 1161, and Edward's body was transferred to a new shrine in the then recently rebuilt Abbey.

The Dagobert Code

On this date in 679, an obscure 28-year old warlord styled as Dagobert II was assassinated in the Foret de Woevre, near Stennay, Lorraine.

One thing about being on the losing side of history, especially 7th century history, is that there is no one left to tell your side of the story with any accuracy. Nonetheless -- call it "underground history," call it "pop culture revisionist fantasy," if you will -- here in the 21st century there is a persistent suggestion (whiffs of which have been taken up famously, for example, in Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, and in Larry and Andy Wachowski's Matrix film trilogy) that the Merovingian dynasty of French kings met their end as a result of the breach of a bargain between Clovis I and Pope Anastasius II: specifically, that in exchange for Clovis' baptism and renunciation of a centuries old claim (embarrassing to the Church) that Clovis' family was directly descended from Jesus Christ, that the Church would be prepared to support Merovingian claims to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire.

For Clovis to have been seduced by such a bargain was the fatal error, according to the theorists, because by placing his progeny in a position of deriving their legitimacy from the Church, he guaranteed that the Church would, little by little, take all meaningful authority and legitimacy away from the Merovingians when it was politically expedient to do so.

To the most devoted theorists, Dagobert II was the last defiant Merovingian claimant to the throne. By 651, when Dagobert was born to Sigibert III, even though the Merovingians still retained their royal titles, the authority of the Frankish kings had already been largely usurped by the "mayors of the palace" -- in this case, an administrator named Grimoald. When Sigibert died in 656, Grimoald immediately dispatched the 5-year old Dagobert into the care of the bishop of Poitiers so that he could place a pliable family member on the throne.

Although Grimoald's intent may have been to have the child murdered, the bishop was apparently reluctant to carry out the deed. Instead, the bishop exiled the child to Ireland, to be raised in the monastery at Slane. There Dagobert found a mentor in St. Wilfrid, who educated and prepared him to assume royal duties. In 671, Dagobert married a Visigoth princess and moved to Rennes-le-Chateau, where he convinced his mother to back his claim to the Austrasian throne of the Franks. With the help of St. Wilfrid (who perhaps saw in Dagobert an instrument of mending fences between the Roman and Celtic wings of the Church), Dagobert was crowned king in 676.

Dagobert moved quickly to consolidate his authority and, in defiance of his former mentor, raised a larger treasury at the expense of the Church with the aim of reconquering Aquitaine, which had seceded from Merovingian territory about 40 years earlier. Dagobert's independence apparently caused significant distress among both ecclesiastics and secular administrators, and legend has it that the then-current mayor of the palace, Pepin the Fat (grandfather of Pepin the Short, the first Carolingian king of France), ordered Dagobert's assassination, which came at the hands of one of Dagobert's servants, who lanced him in the eye (a la Harold II and William Rufus of England) as Dagobert rested during a hunting trip.

The Church apparently did not pause to grieve Dagobert's death, and there is little evidence of him left in the records and contemporary histories of the Frankish line. On the other hand, Dagobert had enough of a cult following among his subjects to merit canonization as a saint -- not by the Church, but by a local conclave -- in 872. Modern conspiracy theorists see Dagobert's death as the beginning of an underground period of Merovingian activity by which, through shadowy organizations such as the Knights Templar and its shadowy subcommittee, the Prieure de Sion, the Merovingians have secretly regained control of the seat of European power and have promoted the European Union as a second Holy Roman Empire to replace the one they lost, controlling (in Lyndon-LaRouchian terminology) the prime levers of international industry and finance.

If that is the case, perhaps there is no good doggone reason to cry over "spilt Dagobert" today; indeed, it is sometimes unclear whether today's Merovingian conspiracy theorists stand in favor of, or against, the legacy of Dagobert II.

Alfred the Great

George Vertue's 18th century lithograph of the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great (at left) says a great deal about Alfred's status within British culture. Vertue depicts the king as a vigorous middle-aged king, at the height of his powers -- bearded, crowned and wearing an ermine-lined robe. For Vertue and his fellow Britons, Alfred is the archetype of English royalty.

Although he would not receive the title "Great" until the 16th century, Alfred's memory has persisted through history with almost Arthurian mythic proportions. Without doubt, he embodied the virtues that the English people often seem to cherish most: evident military might and scholarly diligence.

King Ethelwulf's youngest son would seem to have gained a taste for both at his father's knee, accompanying him on his pilgrimage to Rome to visit Pope Leo IV and his trip to the Frankish court of Charles the Bald. Although Ethelwulf was probably grooming Alfred for a religious career, when his older brother Ethelred died at the hands of the Danes in 871, the Witan council passed over Ethelred's two sons in favor of Alfred as the new king of the West Saxons.

Almost immediately, Alfred found himself locked in a flip-flopping series of battles with the Danes. He was not a man of great personal physical strength, but he was tactically adept, and though he kept the Danes at bay, he concluded that buying peace was better than wasting any further time with fighting by the end of the first year of his reign. He used the purchased peacetime to rebuild his army, which he began to use when the next wave of Danish chieftains began to move on him in 876.

In 878, a Danish army surprised Alfred at his court in Chippenham, causing Alfred to flee into the marshes. While he regrouped, legend had it that Alfred disguised himself as a harper, entering the Danish camp to spy, and incurring the wrath of a swineherd's wife for burning cakes left in his care. If true, Alfred was none the worse for the scolding, because later that year he maneuvered the Danes into a defeat at Ethandune.

During the peaceful years that followed, Alfred created 25 new fortifications around his kingdom, developed schools (decreeing that the sons of all freemen should learn to read and write in English, and then Latin), revised the law code of the old West Saxon king Ine and introduced it to his people, encouraged scholars to join his court, commissioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and even translated works from Latin into English (notably Gregory the Great's Pastoralis). By 885, Alfred had also developed the English navy into a formidable fleet, which helped him (along with those fortifications) to stave off the Danes during renewed onslaughts in 885 and from 893 to 897.

After putting the Danes away for one last time, at age 50, Alfred succumbed to a chronic illness that dogged him through much of his adulthood -- assumed by some to have been the royal malady, porphyria -- on this date in the year 899.

Anne of Cleves

Today is the 490th anniversary of the birth of Anne of Cleves, the fourth of Henry VIII's six wives.

After the death of Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour (not the TV doctor), days after she had given birth to his first legitimate son, it was inevitable that Henry would be looking for a new wife.

Executive dating was in many ways as thorny a chore in the 16th century as it is in the 21st century. Anne of Cleves might have been the top search result for an Internet dating query by the king, had the Internet been around in 1538 and had the king asked for "a pretty European noblewoman of child-bearing age whose state has not turned its back on England after its secession from Catholic jurisdiction."

England had, indeed, become isolated from the rest of Europe after Henry's break from Rome, so Henry's chief minister Thomas Cromwell was anxious for Henry to form an alliance with the principality of Cleves in Germany, a Protestant state allied to Saxony and the league of Lutheran princes. Still, Henry worried about whether Anne was pretty enough, so he sent his court portraitist Hans Holbein to Cleves to paint her. Holbein's portrait of Anne (see above), said by many to be a superior likeness, showed her to be a delicate and demure fraulein. Satisfied, Henry had Cromwell proceed with the marriage negotiations.

Anne traveled from Cleves to Richmond in the middle of the harsh winter of 1539, and Henry was so impatient to see his new bride that he rode through bad weather from Greenwich to Richmond, catching her, no doubt, at the end of an arduous journey, and perhaps not on her best hair day. Henry took one look at her and said, "I like her not," later referring to her as a "Flanders mare." On top of Henry's disappointment in her appearance, Anne did not otherwise seem to be cut out for English court life: she spoke only German, and did not possess the talents of the typical lady-at-court -- i.e., she did not sing nor play an instrument nor read -- although she apparently knew how to sew very well.

With his statesman's cap on, however, Henry knew it was too late to stop the wedding, but he couldn't bring himself to consummate the marriage, and arranged for a divorce six months later. Anne accepted the title "King's sister," and Henry provided for her most generously for the rest of her life, giving her the royal palace at Richmond and Hever Castle (where Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn, had grown up). Henry blamed Cromwell for the whole fiasco, and before the year was out, had him executed.

There are many possible morals to this story; in particular, I like "Beware of single European women who take a good picture," and "Be careful about setting your boss up on a blind date -- especially if he's the king."