The Good, the Bad and the Unready by Robert Easton

politics. Certainly George did not like city life, preferring cricket and flying kites to court functions and the theatre. He was in fact one of the first London commuters, regularly galloping twenty miles back to rural Windsor after eating a hasty supper at St James’s Palace. There he would pen articles for the scholarly periodical Annals of Agriculture and prepare parliamentary speeches on diseases among horned cattle.
    In his later years George used a lathe to make a set of ivory buttons, for which some dubbed him ‘the Button-Maker’, but most people today remember him for the last years of his life when he was intermittently mad. Anecdotes from this period abound. In a particularly popular story, he was said to have got out of his coach in Windsor Great Park and – in a notable lapse of botanical know-how – shook hands with an oak tree because he was under the impression it was Frederick the GREAT .
    Charles the Fat
    Charles III, Frankish king and Holy Roman Emperor, 839–88
    Incongruously, the vastly overweight Charles was known during his own lifetime as ‘Karoleto’ or ‘Little Charles’ to distinguish him from Charles the BALD . It was not until some four centuries later that he received his more common epithet of ‘the Fat’. Obesity, however, was not his most pressing medical condition.
    Charles suffered from a debilitating illness that exhibited itself in regular savage headaches and the occasional spectacular seizure. His condition made it virtually impossible for him torule, and so in early 887 the emperor underwent a surgical skull incision – a trepanation – in the hope that this might bring relief. If it did, it was temporary. Charles died the following year while in exile in Swabia.
    Henry the Fat
    Henry I, king of Navarre, c.1210–74
    After a four-year reign, marked, it is said, by dignity and diplomacy, ‘Enrique el Gordo’, or ‘Henri le Gros’, died. According to most of the received accounts, this youngest son of Theobald the TROUBADOUR ( see NOBLE PROFESSIONS ) suffocated on his own fat.
    Louis the Fat
    Louis VI, king of France, 1081–1137
    Philip the AMOROUS , Louis’s father, was so overweight that he was forced to hand over the day-to-day administration of the kingdom to his comparatively trim son. But Louis was no slouch in the obesity stakes either. Predisposed to both gluttony and corpulence, he was so fat that after the age of forty-six any horse that he sat on simply buckled.
    In his account of the deeds of Louis, the abbot and historian Suger wrote that in 1126 his body was so ‘weighed down by burdensome folds of flesh’ that ‘no-one, not even a beggar, would have wanted or been able to ride a horse when hampered by such a dangerously large body’ Presumably the horse would have had similar objections.
    Sancho the Fat
    Sancho I, king of Castile and Leon, d.967
    When Sancho came to the throne in 956 he was so fat that he could hardly walk, let alone ride a horse. As such, he could only sit and, with difficulty, raise a finger in protest as rebels underhis cousin Ordono stormed the palace and forced him into exile. A few years of dieting later, however, and Sancho was back. The new, improved and slender Sancho marched on León with a large Muslim army and successfully recovered his kingdom.
    George the Fat Adonis at Fifty see George the BEAU OF PRINCES
    George the Fat Adonis at Forty see George the BEAU OF PRINCES
    Edward the Father of English Commerce see Edward the BANKRUPT
    Frederick the Father of His Country see BARBAROSSA
    Christian the Father of His People
    Christian III, king of Denmark, 1503–59
    When Christian assumed control of the kingdom in 1536, the predominantly Catholic Danish state council was understandably rather cagey about having an ardent Lutheran as their king. Their fears were well founded. Within two weeks of his accession he had every bishop arrested and thrown into prison, their offices abolished and their lands permanently confiscated. The