HISTORY, ETC: THE WORST PRINCES IN HISTORY

The Queen stripped Prince Andrew of his ranks and titles last week - but she isn’t the first English monarch to have struggled to keep her family in line

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Exactly what Queen Elizabeth II said when she stripped her son Andrew of his military titles and royal style of HRH last week none of us know. No doubt it was an awkward conversation. But it was probably not as awkward as one that took place some six hundred-odd years earlier when another English monarch fell out with their son.  

‘You bastard son of a b****!’ bellowed the king, on that occasion. ‘As the Lord lives, were it not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance!’ He slapped the prince about, tore out some of his hair, then threw him out of the royal presence.

That king was Edward I. The prince was his son, Edward of Caernarfon, the future Edward II. The issues at stake between them were not the same as those between the present Queen and her son: Edward senior was furious that Edward junior had tried to grant away English royal possessions in France to his favourite and (probably) lover, Piers Gaveston.

But there is one basic truth that connects the two cases, which is the fact that hereditary monarchy is a crap-shoot.

Family-based royal rule has been a popular way for humans to arrange their affairs for at least three thousand years. It has its advantages, as a means of cultivating tradition and a sense of national continuity down the ages.

Yet monarchy has deep flaws too. Very clear ones. For one thing, you can’t choose your family. For another, every family contains at least one total f***-up. (At least one.) And it is a recurring truth of history that when you patch family psychodrama onto the fabric of statecraft, sooner or later things are gonna get fugly. 

I have no special comments to make here on the Prince Andrew case, other than the obvious: the courts have yet to decide anything, Andrew is innocent until proven guilty, but the man seems to have had some awful friends, no taste and no judgement. Yet history tells us Andrew would not be the first to demonstrate those failings. A quick glance through my own area of interest, the English Middle Ages, is enough to tell us that.

So who were the worst Princes in history? I have picked five from the Plantagenet era Who would make your list? Let me know in the comments. And I’ll round up your best suggestions in Friday’s edition of First Draft, the History Etc podcast.

5. Robert Curthose (c.1051-1134)

Robert Curthose’s tomb in Gloucester cathedral (Getty Images)

Robert was the eldest son of William the Conqueror and a prominent leader of the First Crusade. But he had a long history of quarrelling with his family, to the point of taking up arms against them. Things first got nasty in 1077 after Robert’s younger brothers, the future kings William II Rufus and Henry I, played a prank on him in which they tipped a chamber pot on his head. Disgusting? Yes. Unforgivable? Apparently so. The fallout from s***gate was literally a war. In the course of his life thereafter, Curthose rebelled against his father and his brother William; in the early 1100s he lost a long power struggle with Henry I, who imprisoned him in Devizes and Cardiff castles for more than two decades.

4. John Lackland (1166-1216)

John as king, annoying some animals (Getty Images)

Before he was Bad King John, the youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine was Pretty Terrible Prince John. As the baby of the first generation of Plantagenet children, John was both over- and under-indulged. He was the most loved, but the least rewarded with lands and titles, hence his nickname ‘Lackland’. And John was a troublemaker from early in life. Sent to Ireland in the 1180s he upset the local rulers by pulling their beards. In the last years of Henry II’s reign, John betrayed his father, rebelling against him and breaking his heart. And when his brother Richard I the Lionheart became king and went east to lead the Third Crusade, John tried to usurp his authority, give away valuable lands to the French, and collude with the king’s enemies to have him jailed indefinitely. His atrocious reign, which began in 1199 and ended in 1216 after Magna Carta and amid a civil war, should not really have been much of a surprise.

3 Simon de Montfort (c. 1208-1265)

Simon de Montfort, blowing his own trumpet, as per (Getty Images)

Okay, okay, an interloper. Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, married into the Plantagenet royal family, rather than being born to it. But once he was in there, he did his best to blow up the entire edifice of monarchy, while making it look like he was the one being victimised and oppressed because everyone else was vile and determined to do him over. (As Morrissey once sang, stop me if think you’ve heard this one before.) Having married King Henry III’s sister, Simon borrowed heavily from other members of the royal family on the promise that the king would guarantee the loans, stormed off in a huff on crusade, came back and tyrannised the king’s subjects in Gascony, then returned to England to lead a massive rebellion in which he captured Henry at the battle of Lewes and briefly took over government himself. In 1265 Simon was killed at the battle of Evesham. His enemies hung his testicles on his nose. Moral: things can always get worse.

2. The Black Prince (1330-1376)

The Black Prince with his father, Edward III, and some dead guys (Getty Images)

Edward of Woodstock, better known as the Black Prince, is usually given a hero’s billing, since he was in the thick of some of England’s most sensational victories in the Hundred Years War - notably at the battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). But there is much to count against Edward III’s eldest son, too. At Crécy he fought so rashly (or naïvely) that he was briefly captured, and lucky to escape a battlefield which saw such great warriors as King John of Bohemia cut down. Later in life the Black Prince was responsible for the brutal sack of Limoges. And his marriage to Joan of Kent produced one of the worst and most unhinged kings of the entire English middle ages: their son Richard II. Royals are royals and blood is blue, but this does tend to be what happens when first cousins marry. The young Black Prince features heavily in my forthcoming novel, Essex Dogs. He is not entirely heroic.

1. George, duke of Clarence (1449-1478)

The Wars of the Roses was not a wonderful advertisement for hereditary monarchy. As I argued in my 2014 book The Hollow Crown, the emphasis placed on blood-right as the highest argument for authority made for appropriately bloody politics. The chaotic series of rebellions, coups, counter-coups and depositions in the mid-fifteenth century produced a sort of wild-west atmosphere, in which royal authority was unstable and there was a strong incentive for those close to the king of the day to grab as much for themselves as they could, while they could. That was certainly the attitude of George duke of Clarence, one of Edward IV’s two brothers, who sucked up to Edward when land and riches were on offer, and abandoned him when he felt he could get a better deal elsewhere. He eventually crossed Edward one time too many and was executed for treason, supposedly drowned in a barrel of wine. ‘False, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence’, Shakespeare called him. George was every bit unscrupulous as his younger brother Richard III, but stupider and less capable. And that’s saying something.

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