A few reasons why history isn’t boring:
Harington, as Catesby, at left, in the midst of plottage.
“Game of Thrones'” Kit Harington produced and starred in the HBO miniseries “Gunpowder,” which we watched last night. I enjoyed it, excluding the drawing-and-quartering but including the costuming, which was superb. Harington is a direct descendant, on his Mum’s side, of the plotter he portrayed, ringleader Robert Catesby–it was Catesby’s sidekick, Guy Fawkes, who was found with several barrels about-to-be-lit gunpowder underneath Parliament and the King, James I, who could have done with a little detonation. The three episodes reminded me of how savagely Catholics were treated in Stuart England.
Elizabeth and I loved “V for Vendetta,” based on a graphic novel.
Fawkes defied the executioner by diving off the scaffold and breaking his neck. In a later incarnation, the film “V for Vendetta,” Natalie Portman falls for him, so sometimes these things work themselves out.
Years before Guy Fawkes, plotters also attempted to blow up James I’s father, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots’ alcoholic, abusive husband. They were heard digging in the the dead of night in the basement of Darnley’s home, so his retainers lowered him out his bedroom window in a chair. Darnley, still clad in his nightie, took off like a jackrabbit as soon as his feet touched the ground. Sadly, for Darnley, if not for anyone else in the British Isles, he collided head-on with the plotters in the dark, who dispensed with their plan to blow him up and strangled him instead.
Darnley, with a little brother. One historian noted that royal blood ran in Darnley’s veins, along with generous portions of Scotch whisky. Mary thought he had beautiful legs.
Mary then married Bothwell, the ringleader of the killers, a terrible public relations move. Posters depicting her as a mermaid–a whore–appeared all over Scotland. She fled for her life to England, where, of course, she began plotting against her cousin, Elizabeth I (Elizabeth intercepted Mary’s baggage once she’d fled Scotland and kept the best jewels for herself).
Mary at thirteen, when she was already discovering that her eyelashes’ flutter could reduce men to puddles.
Mary would be beheaded, ineptly and repeatedly, in 1587, while wearing a blood-red slip beneath her gown. No one told the poor executioner, as he lifted her head aloft for the witnesses, that Mary was also wearing a wig. Her little dog, a Skye terrier, had been cowering beneath her slip and skirts during the execution; he emerged whimpering and, it’s said, died soon after.
Mary has a magnificent alabaster tomb in Westminster Abbey all to herself. Elizabeth lies nearby, sharing a tomb with the half-sister who detested her, Mary Tudor.
Elizabeth died childless. Mary Tudor died thinking herself with child: it was most likely uterine cancer instead. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, delivered the son who would become James I of England.
George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, James I’s favorite. The King thought he had beautiful legs.
So it goes.
A Work in Progress 