Should you be tempted to keep a monkey yourself, consider this last cautionary tale. King Alexander I of Greece (1893–1920), of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, was the second son of King Constantine I and first cousin to the Duke of Edinburgh. As he looked unlikely ever to become king, Alexander lived his role as crown prince to the full: going to Oxford, playing inordinate amounts of football and tennis, and driving racing cars as fast he could. He was an extremely popular and agreeable young man, though somewhat accident-prone. In 1917 he narrowly averted death in a train bombing. On other occasions, he broke a leg while “practicing jumping” and was seriously injured in a car crash after swerving to avoid a stray goat.
His accession to the throne in 1917 came about as a result of his father’s opting to keep Greece neutral during World War I (they were, after all, a mostly German family). The Allies were annoyed by this, and the governments of the UK, France, and Russia issued an ultimatum: Either Constantine leave the country with his pro-German eldest son, or the alliance would recognize the revolutionary Eleutherios Venizelos as the legal ruler of Greece. This left Alexander in the rather irregular position of inheriting the Greek crown while the two rightful heirs were still alive. Shortly after Alexander’s coronation, Venizelos became prime minister of Greece in any case. He dominated the new king and, though there were reports of clashes, in reality Alexander I was the puppet of the new democratic government.
Not that the regime had long to enjoy his services. Three years into his reign his dog (not very tactfully named Fritz) was attacked by two of his father’s pet monkeys. In defending the dog, Alexander received a severe mauling from the monkeys and died shortly afterward of blood-poisoning.
It is perhaps the only example of a simian-led coup in modern European history, but its effects were far- reaching. Constantine regained the throne and plunged Greece into a disastrous war with Turkey, the effects of which are still felt today. As Churchill observed: “A monkey bite cost the death of 250,000 people.” In 1922, the Greek monarchy fell and the royal family was sent permanently into exile. One of their number was Prince Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, later Philip Mountbatten, born the year before on the dining room table of the Villa Mon Repos, the family home in Corfu. He was carried off to safety in an orange crate.
As any of the subjects of this chapter could have told you, when you keep a monkey you take on their dark feral side as well as their capacity for friendship, intimacy, and joy. Older cultures dealt with this dual nature by according them divine status. The ancient Egyptians worshipped monkeys as cleverer than their own children. They believed that baboon-headed Thoth, their god of wisdom and creativity, was the inventor of writing. India had the noble and ingenious Monkey God, Hanuman, and in medieval China, Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, was powerful enough to cover more than thirty thousand miles in a single somersault.
Human beings, apes, and monkeys all spring from the same evolutionary source. Some of us have tails, some do not, but it often seems that we have more in common than a common ancestor. It’s tempting to wonder, as Descartes did, whether monkeys might be a lot wiser than they’re letting on. That actually, our older cousins are perfectly capable of talking, but are smart enough not to do so in front of us, in case they get asked to do some work.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Who Do You Think You Are?
Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.
Many of us daydream about what it would be like to be someone else, but actually passing yourself off as a different person takes a lot more time and trouble. Titus Oates (1649–1705) had good reason to make the attempt.
He was a ghastly child. Sickly, with a permanently runny nose and dribbling mouth, he suffered from convulsions and as he grew older walked with a pronounced limp and developed an irritating voice, halfway between a bark and whine. His face was startlingly ugly, bright red in color and with almost no chin, so that his face appeared to be an extension of his corpulent neck. His character was no more appealing than his appearance. He was dim-witted, dull, and a habitual liar: Nobody liked him, not even his own father. After being expelled from school for cheating his teacher out of his tuition fees, he went to Cambridge, where he was thrown out of one college for stupidity and sent down from a second one for laziness. Leaving without a degree, he just pretended he had one anyway. This enabled him to get a license to preach from the bishop of London and, in March 1673, he was installed as the vicar of Bobbing, in Kent. So began a fantasy life that would be responsible for one of the most absurd and tragic episodes in British history.
Oates’s father, Samuel, was the son of a Church of England clergyman. As a young man, he had left the church to become a radical Baptist preacher and chaplain in Cromwell’s New Model Army, but by the time Titus was born, he had swung around again and converted back to Anglicanism. This rather flexible relationship with Christian belief was about the only character trait he passed on to his son.
Oates was no more popular as a parish priest than he had been at school or the university. A heavy drinker, he was rude and foulmouthed to his flock and lasted less than two years before they arranged to get rid of him. Returning to the family home in Hastings, he stood in as curate to his father but decided he would rather have the local schoolmaster’s job. So he accused him of sodomy. This blatant lie was quickly uncovered, and to escape a court appearance for perjury, Oates decamped to London and set out to sea as a naval chaplain.
It was on board the
Undaunted by his narrow escape, Oates bluffed his way into becoming chaplain to the Earl of Norwich. Within a few months, he was sacked for being generally unsuitable and constantly inebriated. His career options rapidly narrowing, he decided to try his luck as a Catholic. Pulling the wool over the eyes of an eccentric (and possibly insane) priest called Father Berry he was received into the Church of Rome in March 1677. Shortly afterward he met Father Richard Strange, head of the English Jesuits. There is strong evidence that Strange became Oates’s lover at this stage—it would be hard to explain why else he would bother with such an unattractive addition to the order.
Strange arranged for Oates to study with the Jesuits at Valladolid under the pseudonym Titus Ambrosius. Once again, it didn’t last long. The Spanish booted him out when they realized he had no grasp whatever of Latin. Oates returned to England, boasting of a divinity degree from the University of Salamanca (which, of course, he had never even visited). Encouraged by Strange to try elsewhere, he enrolled in another Jesuit seminary in France under another false name: Samson Lucy. Here, his engaging personal habits—drinking, smoking, swearing, and lying— made him so unpopular that a fellow seminarian attacked him with a frying pan. In a pattern that was by now tediously familiar, he was expelled and returned to London empty-handed. What fleeting attraction Catholicism had exerted over him had gone. Now all he wanted was revenge on the Roman Church—and the Jesuits in particular— that had so snubbed him.
He didn’t have to wait long. An elderly friend of his father’s, Dr. Israel Tongue, a virulent anti-Catholic, proposed producing some pamphlets using Oates’s firsthand “knowledge” to expose the so-called “Jesuit menace.” Together they hatched what purported to be an undercover report on the Church of Rome’s plans to assassinate Charles II and replace him with his Catholic brother, James. It was a lie from top to tail: a half-digested string of rumors, myths, and suppositions that the two men attempted to craft into a coherent story. It used every emotive device it could muster: a Europe-wide conspiracy at the highest level, private armies being amassed, secret cabals convened in London taverns, large injections of finance from treacherous Catholic families, even a special weapon that fired silver bullets, which would be used to do the deed while the king was out walking.
