Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds Read online

  His enemies celebrated his demise in a nasty little couplet: With John’s foul deeds all England is stinking

  As does hell, to which he is now sinking.

  John’s innovations as king of England often suffer the same fate of his baggage caravan: They get lost in the muck. Rarely has a kind word been said of him over the centuries. The Histoire des Ducs de Normandie et des Rois d’Angleterre, composed in 1220 (just four years after John’s death) by the subordinate to one of John’s own generals during the civil war, described him as “A very bad man, cruel and lecherous.” The thirteenth-century chronicler Matthew Paris, who succeeded the opinionated (and fanciful) Roger of Wendover as the historiographer at the parish of St. Albans, co-opted Roger’s negatively embellished version of John’s life, referring to the sovereign John as “nature’s enemy.” Gerald of Wales believed John to be “the most atrocious tyrant on record.” According to the Barnwell annalist, “[H]e was generous and liberal to aliens [foreigners] but he plundered his own people; he ignored those who were rightfully his men and placed his trust in strangers; before his end his people deserted him, and at his end few mourned him.” Even the nineteenth-century historical biographer Kate Norgate noted John’s “superhuman wickedness.”

  He was cruel, he was paranoid, and he was petty. Certainly when the accounts are tallied they tend to render King John more villainous than virtuous. But on his sheet of credits should be included his reform of the English currency system, continued strides in the reformation of the country’s judicial system, the formation of a navy, and an entire reconfiguration of governing. Because John could not rely on baronial support, he declared the whole kingdom of England a commune, and “all men, great or humble, should swear to uphold it.” In doing so, he instituted a greater form of self-governance and called on the burghers to defend their own towns. Armies could then be raised independent of feudal lords, mustering a national levy when appropriate, to be coordinated by the king’s own law officers, the chief constables of the various shires.

  In 1209, when the price of grain soared due to poor crops, John ordered his sheriffs to provide cheap loaves for the impoverished. He also routinely fed great numbers of the poor, although the gesture may have been a superstitious penance for his perpetual disregard for Church doctrine, such as eating meat on fast days and going hunting and hawking on Sundays and other holy days.

  During John’s reign London Bridge was completed, with a chapel at its center. And on the west coast of England, he founded a port of trade and access to Ireland, which had been one of the territories made over to him in 1185, when his father, Henry II, was still king. Although John’s reign over England lasted less than seventeen years, he was Lord of Ireland for just over three decades.

  Henry, the nine-year-old son of John and Isabella of Angoulême, succeeded his father on the throne of England. He was crowned Henry III on October 28, 1216. John’s death ended up bringing the rebel barons into the royal fold, because none of them had any quarrel with young Henry, and vastly preferred to see him wear the crown than Philip’s son, the foreign Louis of France. Louis’s forces were routed in August 1217, and on September 12, peace was restored to England.

  Henry III ruled England for fifty-six years. Despite his parents’ bad reputations, he was a good son and a noble king. In him, John—for all his vindictiveness, paranoia, and cruelty—had left England a very fine legacy indeed.

  VLAD III OF WALLACHIA

  “Vlad the Impaler”

  1431-1476

  RULED ROMANIA: 1448; 1456-1462; 1476

  IN 1897 LONDON STAGE MANAGER-TURNED-AUTHOR BRAM Stoker had an international bestseller on his hands with his novel about a vampiric Transylvanian count named Vlad Dracula. The inspiration for Stoker’s doomed romantic antihero was a fifteenth-century Romanian prince. But the real Vlad was far more of a monster than any Victorian gothic novelist could have imagined. He also merits a niche in the pantheon of royal pains who had terrible, psychologically scarring childhoods. Nonetheless, while Vlad’s boyhood may have shaped his adult behavior, it cannot excuse it.

  Capricious, vicious, and malicious, Vlad Dracula—who would become known far and wide within his lifetime as “Vlad the Impaler”—was born in the citadel of Sighişoara, Transylvania, to an exiled member of the Wallachian nobility, known as Vlad II, and his wife, the Moldavian Chiajna (also spelled Cneajna) or princess, daughter of Alexander the Good.

  Wallachia, a region roughly the size of New York State, is now the southern part of Romania, but in the Middle Ages it was a principality located to the immediate south of Transylvania, separated by the rugged Carpathian Mountains. Although the senior Vlad was a descendant of the house of Basarab, Wallachia’s ruling family, the prince, or voivode, of Wallachia did not rule by hereditary sinecure. Instead, the voivode was elected by the (often corrupt) boyars, the region’s landholding aristocracy. And if a prince was expecting too much of them, financially or militarily, they were quick to replace him. Might made right as well, and there were as many coups and usurpations of the throne as there were legitimate elections.

  In 1431, the year of little Vlad’s birth, dad Vlad had taken an oath to protect and defend the Holy Roman Empire against the encroaching Ottomans, becoming one of only twenty-four knights in Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund’s Societas Draconis, or Order of the Dragon. This meant that the elder Vlad was permitted to spiff up his knightly wardrobe and accessories with the emblem of a dragon and was henceforth known to his people as Vlad Dracul—Vlad the Dragon, in Romanian. The status-conscious new knight was terrific about showing off all his cool new dragon gear, but he would prove less enthusiastic about keeping his oath to the emperor.

  When he returned home to Wallachia he discovered that his half brother Alexander Aldea had usurped his throne. On the outs with his people, not to mention his own family, Vlad senior fled to Sighişoara, a walled medieval city, fortified by guard towers at its gates. It was there that his second son, baby Vlad, was born.

  From his own father, little Vlad, called Vlad Drăculea or Dracula—“son of Vlad the Dragon”—would learn the hard way that vows were made to be broken.

  Young Vlad lived in a world where three vast empires vied for dominion over the geography as well as the religion of its subjects. Most of western Europe was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which practiced Roman Catholicism. Wallachia and Transylvania were located in the increasingly shrinking Byzantine Empire, a realm that incorporated elements of the exotic East and the Christian West, practicing a religion known as Eastern Orthodoxy. However, the Wallachians’ appearance, at least in terms of dress, more closely resembled that of the Muslim Turks, whose Ottoman Empire sat to their east. The Ottomans were constantly trying to gobble up portions of the Byzantine Empire in the hopes of eventually conquering the Holy Roman Empire as well; their ultimate goal was to convert all of Europe to Islam. Wallachia lay directly in the Ottomans’ path, so by default it was the line of first defense.

  In 1436, when little Vlad was barely five years old, his father decided it was high time to reclaim his throne. The only problem with this grand idea was that he lacked the forces to do it. Although Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund offered his moral support, no military support was forthcoming. So Vlad Dracul formed a strategic alliance with princes Ilias and Stefan of neighboring Moldavia. The price for their support was that the elder Dracul should espouse their sister Eupraxia (and begin a new family with her). Obviously, that meant he’d have to ditch his current wife, the mother of little Vlad and his elder brother, Mircea, even though she had also been a Moldavian princess (albeit from a family that had fallen from power). Evidently Vlad didn’t think this was such an onerous demand, although it made his children’s mother the odd woman out. While there is little enough information about her, historians assume that she was sent packing—possibly back to her parents—and out of her young sons’ lives forever.

  With the aid of Moldavian troops, Vlad senior marched into Wallachia’s capital city of Târgov
işte. After grabbing the crown from his dying half brother, he relocated his family, which by now included little Vlad’s baby half brother, Radu cel Frumos—“Radu the Handsome.”

  In Wallachia, Vlad junior received the typical education of a medieval princeling, tutored by an old boyar, a noble from the realm’s ruling class. The boy learned literature and languages and the skills required to become a knight. That same year, 1436, although he would not turn five until November, Vlad Dracula was initiated into the Order of the Dragon. He would grow up to be the ruthless son of a ruthless father.

  The elder Vlad had a fluid concept of loyalty. He routinely cut deals with his enemies and consistently betrayed his friends. After Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund died in 1437, Vlad violated his oath to defend the empire and instead signed a peace treaty with the Holy Roman Empire’s archenemies, the Ottoman Turks. Their combined forces promptly invaded Transylvania.

  But the new emperor had a champion, János Hunyadi, a Hungarian nicknamed “the white knight.” Because of the era’s shifting sands of international diplomacy, both the senior and junior Vlads would end up having a love-hate relationship with Hunyadi that lasted until the Hungarian’s death in 1456.

  In 1441 Hunyadi journeyed to Târgovişte to parley with the elder Vlad, inviting him to join a crusade against the Turks. Vlad hedged his bets, as he often would (a tactic his namesake would adopt as well), and opted to remain neutral, blithely looking the other way as the Ottoman army invaded Transylvania.

  But Hunyadi successfully repelled their forces. For good measure he kicked Vlad senior off his throne and out of Wallachia. When Vlad fled to the Turks seeking asylum, they imprisoned him instead. He must have been surprised to learn that everyone else was as duplicitous as he was.

  Having handily sacrificed his first wife to political expedience, Vlad didn’t blink when one of the terms of his release in 1443 was the forfeit of his two youngest sons, Vlad and Radu, as hostages. The two boys found themselves imprisoned in a fortress seven hundred miles away while their double-crossing father was permitted to return home and reclaim his title as prince of Wallachia.

  Imagine Dracula’s reaction when at the age of twelve or thirteen he learned that his dad had used him as a bargaining chip. Although the Turks would provide young Vlad with an excellent education and treat him fairly well (when they weren’t brutally whipping him for having a bad temper and an insubordinate attitude), he was extremely wounded by his father’s callous and cavalier behavior toward his own sons, and would never trust the man again.

  The youthful Vlad proved himself to be quite the astute student, alertly observing events around him. While he was a captive in Turkey he picked up some nifty tips on torture and mutilation and witnessed his first impalements. This method of execution commonly practiced by the Ottomans would eventually become the Wallachian prince’s bloody and brutal signature.

  In time, Vlad junior and Radu were moved to Adrianople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, five hundred miles closer to Wallachia. There they were raised in the court of the sultan, Murad II. But the boys’ life there was not all sunshine and roses. The fifteenth century was a violent one across the globe and Murad made sure that if his enemies made the mistake of crossing him, they didn’t get the chance to do it again. Two Serbian princes he had captured were blinded with hot irons after they were caught writing clandestine letters to their father. Vlad and Radu got the message.

  During his sons’ captivity, Vlad II performed another political flip-flop. Judging that it was the best course for Wallachia, he allied himself with his former adversary, János Hunyadi—an extremely risky move, given that he was breaking his oath to the Turks, who still had custody of his children. As part of Vlad’s strategem to play both sides at the same time, he personally remained neutral, but sent his oldest son, Mircea, off to fight in Hunyadi’s crusade against the Muslims.

  Rather than punish the elder Vlad for his duplicity, the sultan recognized that the Wallachian boys were worth more to their father alive than dead, so he compelled the Wallachian prince to sign a peace treaty with the Turks in order to secure his sons’ release. Vlad seemed to have no qualms about switching sides again; and in 1446, at the age of sixteen, Vlad Dracula was released.

  But he would never see his traitorous father again. In addition to his foreign enemies, the elder Vlad had plenty of detractors within Wallachia as well. Two generations earlier, his family had splintered into two warring factions: the Drăculesti and the Dănesti. Both sides were descendants of the ruler Basarab and each of them vied for primacy in Wallachia.

  At the end of December 1447, the teenage Vlad received a visit from a boyar who had been a friend of his father’s. The nobleman brought the boy two gifts: the sword and the medallion that Vlad senior had received when he became a knight of the Order of the Dragon. Then came the bad news. Vlad’s father had been murdered in the marshes of Bălteni by members of the rival Dănesti clan, at the instigation of his sometime friend and frequent adversary, the Hungarian “white knight,” János Hunyadi. The violence didn’t stop there. The assassins had blinded young Vlad’s older brother, Mircea, with hot irons and then buried him alive.

  Although his father’s idea of parental devotion had been to ship him off to his enemies, Vlad had been too thoroughly indoctrinated in the culture of revenge to ignore the man’s death, much less his brother’s. His life now had a purpose: to avenge their murders.

  In September 1448, while Hunyadi was busy launching yet another crusade against the Turks, Vlad Dracula seized his opportunity to grab the throne of Wallachia without a fight. But his triumph was short-lived, and by the end of the year, the barely seventeen-year-old Vlad was both homeless and throneless. Only two months after he had claimed the crown, an ally of Hunyadi’s, Vladislav II, drove the youth out of office and out of town, pushing him all the way into Adrianople. Not so coincidentally, Vladislav II was a member of the Dănesti branch of Vlad’s family—the same faction that had been responsible for the murder of Dracula’s father and brother.

  The next few years were fraught with political assassinations and ever-shifting alliances. In 1451 Vlad found himself on the run from Hunyadi’s army for several months, yet the following year, the Hungarian leader changed his tune entirely, offering the twenty-year-old Vlad a job guarding the southern border of the Holy Roman Empire from the threat of Turkish invasion. Vlad was stationed in the city of Sibiu, just fifty miles from his birthplace of Sighişoara. In exchange, Hunyadi pledged to help Vlad retake the throne of Wallachia. Vlad spent the better part of the next five years on the battlefield.

  Bubonic plague was sweeping the region, and citizens were fleeing in droves. On August 11, 1456, Hunyadi, too, became a victim of the deadly disease. It was sweet revenge. But Dracula was far from satisfied. Everyone who’d had any connection to the deaths of his relatives would pay the price. Vlad seized the opportunity to grab the throne. He marched over the Transylvanian mountains with a modest force and confronted Vladislav II on the battlefield. His adversary retreated but was cut down on August 20 by Dracula’s supporters. The Impaler himself might even have participated in the killing of his nemesis.

  Vlad entered Wallachia’s capital city, Târgovişte, in August 1456. Taking up residence in the stone castle where he had spent his boyhood, he declared himself prince.

  As Prince of Wallachia, Vlad began to make peace treaties with his neighbors and even agreed to pay the Turkish sultan—now Mohammed II, the son of Murad II—an annual tribute, permitting Mohammed’s armies to march through Wallachia on the way toward distant territorial conquests. When his subjects learned of these apparent concessions, they weren’t sure whether Vlad was naive or canny.

  However, the new voivode was far less welcoming to the boyars, Wallachia’s aristocratic, landowning ruling class who for centuries had been accustomed to sharing power with whoever happened to be prince. They had long made trouble for the voivodes by seeking to control the workings of the government themselves.
<
br />   On Easter Sunday, 1457, Vlad invited two hundred boyars and their families to an enormous feast. His guards surrounded the boyars as they were getting up from the table. Vlad scanned their faces in an effort to guess their ages, or asked them pointed questions about how many princes’ reigns they had lived through. He was trying to determine who among them was old enough to have participated in the plot ten years earlier to oust his family from Wallachia, and who might have had a hand in the assassination of his father and brother.

  Several dozen of the older boyars were immediately ushered outside and taken to a place beyond the city walls, where one by one they were impaled upon stakes. The ground became stained with blood. But Vlad wasn’t finished. Instead of leaving the mangled corpses where they lay, he had their bodies artistically arranged in rows along the hillside as a warning to other would-be traitors. The site soon became known as the Forest of the Impaled.

  What emerged as Vlad’s favorite method of dispatching his enemies was a particularly slow and brutal form of torture and death. Vlad Dracula was by no means the only medieval ruler to favor impalement (the Turks used it to great effect as well), but he was certainly the only autocrat to raise it to an art form, and it was observed that he took particular enjoyment in it as well. The stake was oiled and honed to a point—but not too sharp, so as to cause maximum pain. Then it was inserted into the victim’s anus and forced through his body until it came out his mouth. The “express” version of the torture involved impaling directly through the torso. Age was no guarantee of absolution; Vlad was known to have impaled infants through their mothers’ chests. For additional amusement, on occasion he impaled people so they would hang upside down on the stakes. Death was far from instantaneous and it delighted Vlad to watch his anguished victims slowly expire.