February 1, 2012

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Besides, Bess – who liked cards, games, sweets and dirty dancing – was more of a bad-boy type. She was delighted to play cougar to her “Frog,” François, the flirty young duke of Alençon, though the great love of her life was her childhood playmate, Robert Dudley, whom she made Master of the Horse and then Earl of Leicester (and who’s been played by lots of studs, including Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes and Tom Hardy). Leicester (pronounced “Lester”) scandalized the court by being too familiar with the queen, while his sickly wife, Amy, stayed at home. When Amy was found dead at the bottom of a staircase – a possible suicide – it fanned rumors of a murder driven by the queen’s illicit love.

Perhaps not so ironically, Bess would later flirt with Dudley’s dashing stepson, the Earl of Essex, who unlike his stepfather had the bad sense to overstep his political bounds and lost his head.

But the famed “Virgin Queen” probably really was so. After Alençon left to help the Protestant cause in the Netherlands and she lost her last chance for marriage and children, Elizabeth penned this sonnet:

“I grieve and dare not show my discontent,

I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,

I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,

I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.

I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,

Since from myself another self I turned.”

It concludes:

“Or let me live with some more sweet content,

Or die and so forget what love ere meant.”

The queen who was described as “more than a man but less than a woman,” was married only to her country.

“Yet this I esteem the most glory of my crown,” she told Parliament in 1601, “that I have reigned with your loves.”

Windsor (love) knots

England’s current royal family, the House of Windsor, is certainly no stranger to amorous scandals, producing one of the greatest love affairs of the 20^th century as well as one of the greatest icons.

Many members of the Greatest Generation were probably schoolboys and girls tuned to the radio when Edward VIII abdicated his throne in 1936 for “the woman I love” – Wallis Warfield Simpson – a tale Madonna retells in her directorial debut, “W./E.,” opening Feb. 3. Wallis was everything the Brits despised – an American upstart and a gay divorcée, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. When it became clear that she could not be a queen to Edward’s king, he chose consort over crown and country. The two led a glamorous, jet-set life that sometimes crossed paths with the likes of Liz and Dick.

Tag Topics: Antony and Cleopatra, Charles and Diana, Edward and Mrs. Simpson, Georgette Gouveia, Henry VIII, Liz and Dick, the six wives of Henry VIII

by Georgette Gouveia

February 1, 2012

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Olympias Defamed

Alexander killed Daddy. Much was made of Philip wearing white robes. Rig a dummy with white robes. Grab a knife. Stab. Hit anything vital? Alexander was beside Philip when he fell, knife in back. It was up to the loving son to twist the knife caringly enough to make sure it killed. WHY? Because a man in his mid-40s with an injured arm and only one eye wasn't going to make it back alive from Persia.In which case, what would happen? Macedonian kings received their legitimacy from the acclamation of the army. The army would be in Persia. Who would they acclaim to succeed the throne? The strongest general there. Who would then send assassins to kill Alexander and all his family. Just as Alexander sent assassins to kill that likely general and all his family as soon as Philip was dead. Two members of that family were the mother and son Olympias is accused of killing and maybe she did...but it was simply common practice to leave no threat alive.

History is written by the winner. It was unthinkable that Alexander the Great was a patricide. Blame mum. Blame black magic. Blame sex. Blame anyone but the man beside Philip when he was stabbed. But look up the odd reaction of Alexander's old tutor, Aristotle, when he was asked about it. No "Of course he wasn't involved!" More a wandering catalog of the Everybody Does It variety. And then there's the two-Pausanias nonsense. They tried to say Philip's devoted bodyguard Pausanias did it. But there must have been strong pushback from some source because next they said THAT Pausanias died and a bad mad one took his place after which the story was sexually embroidered first with gang rape by members of Philip's staff which was later changed to Philip himself bring the rapist thereby becoming responsible for his own murder.

HOWEVER, how does that explain the immediate execution of the two Lynkestis brothers? What did they have to do with it? Wasn't Alexander of Lynkestis the very first to proclaim Alexander king? Think: quid pro quo.

Because Philip wore white, NOBODY SAW HIS KILLER. Stage trick: the eye follows white. A man dressed as Philip's bodyguard comes from behind, stabs the king in the back "under his ribs" and runs out. Alexander's friends pursue him. The body of Pausanias, dead or near dead, is brought into the arena. KILLER CAUGHT. Lynkestis proclaims Alexander king. Alexander executes Lynkestis' brothers as being part of the "plot" removing rivals for the Lynkestis domain. Murder solved, life goes on.

A few years later Alexander the Great arrests Alexander of Lynkestis for plotting to kill him and keeps him in prison for years. Wonder why he thought the guy was into killing kings.

It had to be done and sex had nothing to do with it. A man with a blind side was dead meat in battle and Alexander and everyone related to him was dead if Philip died in Persia. But history couldn't cope with that.

Posted by Abigail Quart May 22, 2012 00:31:50

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