On February 21 back in 1437, King James I of Scotland was assassinated. If you read about his life, you’re probably wondering why it took so long.

He actually made it to age 42 despite his brother being murdered by his uncle, spending 18 years as a prisoner of the English (for whom he fought against France during that period), taxing heavily, taking some Scots nobles hostage and executing others, stealing public money and all that.

His son and successor, James II, was killed by an exploding cannon, after 23 eventful years dodging plots or engaging in them. He was 29 when he died.

His son and successor, James III, was killed in battle (or just possibly assassinated after it), after 28 years of ruling badly, twisting justice and quarreling with his own family, possibly having one of his brothers murdered, and spending part of his reign a prisoner of disaffected nobles. He was 36 when he died.

His son and successor, James IV, described by Wikipedia as “generally regarded as the most successful of all the Stewart monarchs of Scotland” was killed in the disastrous battle of Flodden field on September 9, 1513. He is the last monarch of Scotland, or anywhere in Great Britain, to be killed in battle. At age 40.

His son and successor, James V, died shortly after a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Solway Moss in December 1542, either from a nervous breakdown or just one of those things. He was 30 when he died.

So, who wants to be next? And why would you call him James?

Actually they didn’t. They went with James V’s daughter “Mary Queen of Scots” whose turbulent life included marriage to the French dauphin (he died) and her first cousin Lord Darnley (he was murdered) and James Hepburn, 4^th Earl of Bothwell (who apparently murdered Darnley), fleeing south from a revolt to seek the protection of her first cousin once removed Elizabeth I (Mary’s grandmother was Henry VIII’s sister, don’t you see?) whose throne she had previously claimed, spending 18 and a half years in custody then being executed for plotting to assassinate Elizabeth at age 44.

So at that point they went with another James, Mary’s son, dubbed “the wisest fool in Christendom” by the cunning French king Henri IV (assassinated in 1610 aged 56), who actually contrived to become king James I of England and die peacefully in bed at age 58, setting the stage for his own son Charles’ disastrous reign ending in execution by the English.

What is amazing about this brutal soap opera is that a crucial factor is all kinds of people’s determined, even desperate, as well as devious efforts to secure the throne of Scotland. Och aye, it’ll be greet, I’ll be king, I’ll have fancy food, pretty mistresses, a big pile of actual wood for my fire and… a dagger in my wame.

Why not just throw yourself off a high point at Sterling Castle right away and save everyone including yourself a lot of trouble?

On this day in history France laid a claim to Texas. Thanks for coming out.

No, really. On February 20 of 1685 one René-Robert Cavelier, more familiar as the “Sieur de La Salle” or “Robert de La Salle”, established Fort St. Louis on Matagorda Bay, on which basis France briefly and ineffectually claimed part of Texas.

Now the obvious objection is that there were already people living there who may unaccountably have considered it theirs. But whatever the merits of such a claim, it didn’t stand in the way of European empires claiming stuff. (And it’s not all one-sided; most of the people living anywhere had acquired it by at least equally dubious and bloody means, killing or chasing off the previous inhabitants. And all the perfidy in keeping agreements was not on the European side. It was primarily a matter of the cultural and technological imbalance being so extreme that Europeans won almost all the fights; on this see Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.)

What did stand in the way of it becoming Le Texas was the ineffectiveness of the French Empire in actually settling things. La Salle and others performed prodigious feats of exploration and there was always this dream of a Francophone nation built on the two great rivers of North America, the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, pinning in the English settlements on the east coast and creating a superpower. And why not?

I’ll tell you. It’s because the French empire was bureaucratic, overly centralized and intolerant of diversity or private initiative. As a result, it was always a thinly-populated loss-making venture. (The same is true of the Spanish Empire, by the way, a hugely impressive geographical entity that by and large consisted of very small dots of actual settlers controlling huge areas because of the imbalance referred to above.)

The French government actually managed to make settling in new territory less attractive than staying in France where, for all the faults of French government, there seems to have been a robust culture that protected people from the whims of bureaucracy. Venture into the New World, where initiative and enterprise were vital, and some bewigged know-it-all would minutely regulate you.

That the habitants made a success of Quebec despite this problem shows how tough and determined they were. But the fact remains that the white European population of New France was just 55,000 at the end of the Seven Years’ War, as against well over a million British settlers in their North American colonies. French Louisiana had perhaps 5,000 whites and as many black slaves. Meanwhile Spain’s Florida colony had only about 4,000 inhabitants of European derivation more than two centuries after its mid-16^th-century founding.

As for French Texas, well, it existed on a map. For three years. Until 1688 when the locals killed the 20 remaining adults and enslaved the five children, by which point La Salle had been killed by one of his own men.

Oh, and in the name of the amusement park Six Flags over Texas and other such promotions. And in some golden fleurs-de-lis on the back of the Texas state seal. Sic transit absentia gloriae mundi.

Please don’t think I’m obsessed with Lithuania. Not that there’s anything wrong with it either. But I’m still thinking about these alternative histories of Eastern Europe, generally happier than the chaos that drew in predatory neighbours from the Ottomans to the Czars to the Prussians and on into the 20^th century. And so I’m struck by the fact that on February 19, in 1594, Sigismund III was crowned king of Sweden.

“Sweden?” you cry. “How did Sweden get in here? Don’t you know one shore of the Baltic from another?” Well, yes. But the fact is that Sigismund had already been head of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since 1587, on his mother’s side, and would remain so until he died in 1632. Becoming king of Sweden as well, on his father’s side might have made the Baltic a Swedish-Lithuanian-Polish lake (or whatever you’d call the thing, Swithlandish or something), extending the generally benign political culture of Scandinavia into Eastern Europe. And Sweden was in those days a power to be reckoned with, not the pious pacifists of modern times, to the point that the Danish national anthem celebrates fighting them off over 200 years including the memorable line “Through Gothic helm and brain it passed”, it being Danish King Christian VII’s sword.

Alas, this even greater Lithuania was not to be. Poor Sigismund got the Swedish boot from his own uncle, Charles IX, just five years later, and spent decades trying in vain to get the crown back. Apparently he was a pretty good king and a fairly enlightened man, though unsurprisingly there is much historical and popular controversy about him. But the key thing is that he was a king in Eastern Europe and there was just too much trouble to cope with.

It didn’t help that Poland really did have a system where votes in Parliament had to be unanimous, which Sisigmund managed to overcome. But in addition to endless wars to regain the Swedish crown, he found himself fighting the Grand Duchy of Muscovy (he even captured Moscow, which is impressive but as Napoleon found not always useful), the Turks, and his own nobles, and toward the end he got rather fed up and withdrew into family matters and the performing arts.

It’s hard to blame him. It’s easy to blame him for his Swedish wars, which helped sap Lithuania’s strength. But on the other hand, if he’d won, we might be regarding him as one of the great constructive figures in European history. Even if one of his maneuvers did involve the Hohenzollerns inheriting the then Duchy of Prussia, with unfortunate consequences down the road that no one could have foreseen.

One can always pick nits, and he had his flaws. But as I said in an earlier post (Feb. 17), it’s just not a good idea to be in Eastern Europe. The neighbourhood is too chaotic to settle down, which is why there’s still a France but no Swithland despite the best efforts of old Sisigmund III.

There’s a French expression “boire la grande tasse” meaning to drown. I do not know if George Plantagenet would find it funny.

I say that because (a) I am pedantic and (b) it was on this date, February 19, that he was executed by being drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. At any rate, that’s the story we got from Shakespeare who would never ever lie about historical events leading to the rise of his patrons, the Tudors, especially not in his play Richard III about the murdering hunchback.

Sorry. I digress. The point is, George Plantagenet, a.k.a. the 1^st Duke of Clarence, was the brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV and Richard III and thus another uncle of the “Princes in the Tower” whose mysterious disappearance was so helpful to the Tudors in seizing the throne especially as it got pinned on Uncle Richard.

Mind you Clarence, as he was known, was not their uncle at the time, having been dispatched by Edward in 1478, five years before the Princes were imprisoned in the Tower of London never to be seen again. And you can see why.

Clarence had schemed to oust his own brother, siding with the rival Lancastrians in the Wars of the Roses at the urging of his father-in-law, the Earl of Warwick a.k.a. “Warwick the King-maker” and getting himself declared next in line to Henry VI’s son Edward who enjoys the unusual distinction of being the only heir apparent to the English throne to die in battle, at Tewkesbury in 1471.

If it sounds like a soap opera with unusually graphic violence, it is. History is so interesting I see no need to make anything up. By 1471, in fact, Clarence had changed sides again, and was pseudo-reconciled with his brother King Edward IV. (I can’t help it that there are so many Edwards rattling around, including by the way Edward V, the elder of the two vanished Princes in the Tower. It was a popular royal name going back to the days of Wessex; Alfred the Great’s son and successor was Edward the Elder, to distinguish him from Edward the Martyr and Edward the Confessor.)

It didn’t work out. Clarence was increasingly unstable, which is saying quite a bit given his previous history, and after he joined another revolt against his brother one of his close associates was arrested and under torture confessed to trying to murder the king using black magic. Which shows you how much use torture was in eliciting accurate testimony. I think most of us would confess to being King Edward IV, the Duke of Clarence or the butt of Malmsey wine to make it stop.

Anyway, Clarence didn’t get it, trying to rouse parliamentary opposition to Edward, and was himself arrested, tried for treason without being brought into court and with the king himself acting as chief prosecutor, which rarely ends well. So he was declared guilty of “unnatural, loathly treasons” by Parliament, which is a lovely phrase unless it’s about you, and privately executed, which I guess is better than being publicly drawn and quartered or something along those dreadful lines. But what of the wine, you say?

Well, we don’t know for sure whether they actually dunked him in the drink and if so why. Some say it’s a reference to his excessive fondness for tipple. Others say he chose it as better than the alternatives. Still others believe it may have arisen by mistake from his body being transported for burial in a barrel after he died (apparently this was also done with Nelson, not as a mark of disrespect but as a preservative). But we do know he wasn’t beheaded because someone dug him up and it was still attached.

At any rate, given the standards of the time and his own conduct, if he did go that relatively painless and pleasant-smelling way he probably caught a break he didn’t really deserve. And left us all with this strangely compelling image of a famous nobleman being drowned in a butt of wine and wondering why and what Malmsey is anyway. (It’s a sweet variant of Madeira wine which is itself already sometimes sweet, and fortified. But if I get into all the details it will last longer than the Wars of the Roses.)

By the way, Clarence had two children who survived into adulthood but neither survived the Tudors. His daughter Margaret was executed by Henry VIII and his son Edward, the last legitimate direct male Plantagenet heir, was executed by Henry VII for “trying to escape” or “being in the way” or some such thing.

Maybe George Plantagenet should have picked a side and stayed with it. Against the Tudors nothing was very safe. But what he did was so reckless he’s lucky he only wound up famously drowned in booze.

Just saying.

Where are they now? I’m thinking partly of the Teutonic Knights, who got handed their armour in the Battle of Grunwald on February 17 back in 1410. But I’m also thinking of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which did the handing.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Lithuania is right where it always was, on the Baltic, the western- and southernmost of the Baltic states, right on one of history’s highways of trouble. All you have to do is Google it. But don’t go confusing Lithuania with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was a lot bigger.

Even Grunwald, whose name seems boringly to mean “Green Forest” as opposed to I know not what, perhaps a black, blue or purple one, is some ways off, in Poland. But that was just peanuts to the Grand Duchy, which at its greatest extent under Vytautas the Great (don’t worry, only the self-consciously Lithuanian know who he was) after the semi-union with Poland and conversion to Catholicism stretched all the way to the Black Sea and contained much of the late lamented Kievan Rus’. So what happened?

Not the Teutonic Knights, who apparently targeted the thing because it was pagan and the Christian thing to do was to whack them with bits of hard sharp metal until they adopted your gentle, enlightened ways. They lost the battle and never really recovered their former glory. Rather, there was this apparently irresistible tendency of Eastern European powers to disintegrate, stuck somehow in a kind of borderland between the frightening dynamism of the West and the grim relentless Asiatic onslaught of the Mongols then post-Mongol Russia.

In a way it’s too bad. Some kind of cohesive polity on the eastern frontier of the German-speaking lands, especially one with the usually tolerant attitude of the Grand Duchy in matters of religion and ethnicity, would have been a great improvement on the gradual Russian/Prussian division of the whole area, with hapless Hapsburg Austria playing divide and conquer while gradually itself decaying from within.

In the end it couldn’t be done. The Grand Duchy, like Poland, gradually ebbed away and was ultimately gobbled up by Prussia, Austria and mostly Russia. The re-emergence of a genuinely independent Lithuania, now a NATO member, is a happy footnote to the story provided Putin’s Russia doesn’t manage to sneak up and swallow it again.

As for the Teutonic Knights, well, they sort of hung in there as a charitable order after being disbanded by Napoleon, and had the honor of being banned by Hitler. Which beats their buddies at Grunwald, the Livonian Order, which packed it in for good back in 1561.

Still, it’s odd to think that names to conjure with in those days would now have this distinctly Duck Soup feel to them while places like England and France are still major factors in history. It can’t be mere coincidence or pure accident of statesmanship; England and especially France had more than their share of bad leaders.

So, another Robson’s rule of history. Don’t put your country in Eastern Europe. Fate won’t be kind to it.

Speaking of disasters at sea, remember the Maine? Yes, the battleship U.S.S. Maine, which blew up and sank in Havana Harbor on Feb. 15, 1898 taking hundreds of sailors with her. It precipitated the Spanish-American War even though as far as we can tell it was just one of those deals where stuff explodes all the time.

Well OK. It doesn’t. But badly made war materiel does and despite what you might think given the U.S. navy today, the Maine (ACR-1) was, well, a piece of floating junk.

For starters, she was constructed as an armoured cruiser to match the growing menace of, um, the Brazilian navy and other Latin American forces. Which gives you some idea right off the bat of the decrepit state of the American navy at the time. And if it doesn’t, consider that during the “Corinto Affair” between Britain and Nicaragua the U.S. sent a gunboat that sank ignominiously en route.

Anyway, they built the Maine… slowly and badly. Indeed, she was obsolete by the time she entered service, featuring such trailing edge weapons as a ramming bow. Launched in 1889, she was commissioned in September 1895. And despite conspiracy theories about treacherous Spanish sabotage, she apparently exploded due to a coal fire setting off her magazines.

This conclusion is still disputed by some, but is the consensus now. And it makes sense; the last thing the Spanish wanted was to provoke a war with the United States that even they realized would end quickly and very badly for them. As indeed it did.

“Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!” became a rallying cry that made peace impossible subsequently. And honestly the world was probably a better place for the increase in American power that resulted from the embarrassingly lopsided victory over the decrepit Spanish empire, which couldn’t even defeat an enemy whose ships blew themselves up. Mind you, other outcomes in Cuba than the American protectorate might have worked out better for the U.S. as well as for Cubans themselves.

In any case, in addition to the sad loss of life at the time, it’s disconcerting to reflect on the inflammatorily false nature of a key rallying cry approaching the war. And weird to think that if the Americans had built better warships diplomacy might have settled the Spanish conflict.

Nothing says Valentine’s Day like flowers and chocolate. Except perhaps a burst of automatic weapons fire.

Anyway, that was the view of Al Capone and his associates, who on February 14 1929 had seven members and associates of a rival Chicago gang murdered in a garage on the north side of the city. The “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” has been famous ever since.

It’s curious, looking back, to reflect that the 1920s must have been an innocent time, by our standards, because the scale of the killing shocked people so profoundly even though they knew what gangsters were like. And in important ways they have not changed; one of the victims did not die immediately but was transported to hospital where, as the contemporary phrase has it, he refused to cooperate with police.

Riddled with no fewer than 14 bullet wounds, and clearly dying, Frank Gusenberg defiantly told police questioners “No one shot me.”

No one was ever convicted of doing the killing. Mind you, some pretty strong suspects were identified and one was sent to jail for murdering a police officer in a separate incident while two others were apparently beaten to death by Capone himself. Crime does not pay.

Capone himself, riding as high as high can be in 1929, was indicted for tax evasion in 1931, jailed, and succumbed to syphilis, which led to his death from cardiac arrest after securing early release on the grounds of debility.

A certain perverse glamour attaches to high-rolling criminals including Capone despite their deeds and their fates. And somehow it has given the sordid slaughter in that garage some kind of weird mystique. Perhaps in those more innocent times it seemed especially cold to commit the murder on a day devoted to romantic love, even given the general lack of sentimentality of gangsters. Today it wouldn’t surprise us if they did it on Christmas. But it seems to have ended nearly as badly for those who did the killing as those who were lined up against the wall.

My advice is to go with the flowers and chocolate and forget the Tommy guns.

What was she thinking? Other than “I am an idiot”? I refer to Catherine Howard, 5^th wife of Henry VIII overall and the second to be beheaded, on Feb. 13 1542.

Now I have no use for Henry VIII. Not his statecraft and certainly not his domestic affairs. One of my rules of history is do not marry Henry VIII. And I’m very glad his efforts to impose absolutism in England were resisted in Parliament and elsewhere. But Catherine Howard, who to be fair was at least partly a pawn for her ambitious relatives and their schemes to restore Roman Catholicism in England, should have realized that if you do marry the king, even if you are in your late teens and he is nearly fifty, you really truly should not take lovers.

I mean it. Not even one, never mind several. Especially if you are less than discreet, as she was, bad things will happen. People will find out. You will get caught. And then you will get beheaded.

Again, I do not for one moment excuse Henry, a monster personally and a would-be tyrant. Once he started pursuing a woman her choices were limited especially if her family was dangling her like bait. But reading the story of Howard and her lovers, also executed, I just cannot answer one key question.

What was she thinking?