On May 18 of 1152 Henry II of England, the “almost Great,” married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the truly remarkable. Before congratulating the groom you might want to take a look at the turbulent personal and political consequences. But if you think the Middle Ages was a time when women had no rights and no social status, you might want to look at her and think again.

Eleanor was a member of the Ramnulfid dynasty whose name makes me think those Vikings were getting everywhere in the 9^th century including Aquitaine. She was queen consort of France from 1137 to 1152, during which time she took an active part in commanding troops during the Second Crusade, and then Queen of England from 1154-1189. This marriage may have been in large measure dynastic in origin given that she was 18 years older than him. But she remained a spectacular beauty and bore him 8 children including Richard Coeur de Lion and John Lackland and was a patron of the arts and an ardent schemer who actually spent most of the last 16 years of her marriage imprisoned for supporting a revolt by her son Henry and two of his brothers against her husband Henry, before becoming regent while Richard wandered about on the Crusades or languished in captivity on his way home.

Many years ago my grad school roommate was a huge fan of the soap opera film The Lion in Winter about Henry II’s later days amid scheming sons and an imprisoned wife, with Peter O’Toole as Henry, Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor, Anthony Hopkins as Richard (!) and a young Timothy Dalton as Philip II of France (I didn’t know he was classically trained; Dalton I mean, not Philip). I don’t know if it was absolutely right on the historical details. But it certainly captured the general feel.

Even the wretched John, for some reason Henry’s favourite son, joined in the revolt-against-dad fun right toward the end, contributing apparently to Henry’s death partly from a broken heart. And there was no mistaking the outsized influence of Eleanor even in captivity. And when she became regent, freed on Richard’s orders by the remarkable William Marshal, she signed her orders “Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England” and nobody dared say otherwise.

Obviously she was not typical, of medieval women or women generally. But nor was Henry II; most medieval men did not enjoy his powers, privileges or troubles, though doubtless many had plenty of their own. And whatever you think of Henry’s decision to marry Eleanor, on which he seems to have had grievous doubts over the years as did her first husband Louis VII, there’s no doubt she was an amazing figure who showed that there was plenty of space in the Middle Ages for a women of character and determination to live large on the public stage.

On this date in history, May 17, the Papal States were annexed by France. Again. For the fourth time, actually. In 1808. Would it be fair to ask on what basis?

The fundamental answer seems to be “Vae victis!”, the immortally ominous response “Woe to the vanquished!” given by the Gaulish chieftain Brennus when the beaten Romans complained that he was taking more tribute than they had agreed to. Accompanied by the vivid gesture of throwing his sword onto the balance so they had to pay yet more gold. But it’s also an interesting reflection on the rather aimless rapacious aggression of radical regimes.

One is permitted to have doubts about the existence of the Papal States as a temporal fiefdom of Popes who, going back into the Renaissance, had not always shown themselves moral exemplars in their geopolitical conduct. But how did that make them the rightful prey of Revolutionary France? Yet its armies showed up in 1791, 1796, 1800 and 1808, seizing, releasing and seizing again.

Now to be fair the first time, in 1791, they seized the Comtat Venaissin and Avignon which at least were technically in France. But the northern Legations bagged in 1796 were not, nor were the whole bunch glommed in 1800 and again in 1808.

When Napoleon overreached against the Anglosphere and came a cropper in 1814, they went back to the Popes, whose secular administration again failed to impress a great many people. And with the liberal revolutions of 1848 across much of Europe, the Italian branch included creating a Roman Republic in 1849 and forcing the reform-minded Pius IX to flee. When he came back with French troops in 1850 he was in a different mood.

What? French troops again? Yes. Under Napoleon III, famously in Marx’s phrase the farce to his uncle’s tragedy. His occupation was more reactionary vainglory than revolutionary rapaciousness. But it too didn’t work, like virtually everything else involving the words “Napoleon III.” And in 1870, as he was busy losing the Franco-Prussian War, the Italians marched into Rome while other supposedly Catholic states twiddled their thumbs and stilled their tongues.

The Pope was not impressed and after much sulking an accord in 1929 created Vatican City. At least this time the rest of the Papal States, being notably full of Italians, went to Italy, where most of them wanted to be anyway.

Not France, whose earlier lunge for them showed the morally hollow sanctimonious chronic aggression typical of radicalism.

You have to be careful quoting Lincoln, Einstein and other luminaries because they are “quotation magnets” to whom people unwittingly or unscrupulously attach things they feel that they should have said, especially online. But I’m not about to. Instead I’m going to quote something Marie Antoinette never said but should have.

Let them eat cake.

This phrase is a persistent mistranslation of “Qu’ils mangent les brioches.” And it’s funnier in a bitter way in the original, because brioches are a kind of egg-and-butter-rich pastry bun that one might conceivably make from flour if you had flour. Not even Ms. Antoinette, more properly Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen or Mrs. King Louis XVI, could have assumed French peasants routinely made cakes of the pink icing and little shepherdesses decoration sort.

It’s also a deliberate calumny to underline how out of touch she was. Or whoever you want to insult. Because it is important in the name of historical accuracy to emphasize that the line was pinned on all sorts of clueless aristocrats before being attached to her fancy frock. Or simple shepherdess dress. Or whatever elaborate costume she currently had on. It was an all purpose “down with the rich” insult that generally carried a venomous hope that, one day, “Qu’elle mange ses mots.”

The thing is, regrettably, the apocryphal line fit Marie Antoinette to a brioche. I feel some minor sympathy for her in that her situation in life made it easy to be clueless; as the 15^th child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and the redoubtable Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, publicly married to the future Louis XVI at age 14 on May 16 1770, she was insulated from reality in a pampered way from the get-go. But even if cluelessness was made easy for her, Marie Antoinette seems to have plunged into the role with unseemly enthusiasm.

She schemed at court, she spent wildly, she spun elaborate self-flattering PR schemes. She even had a rustic retreat built within Versailles, L’Hameau de la Reine, where she could play at shepherdess at enormous cost to the real shepherds and subsistence farmers of France whom she despised from a great distance. When she did become more involved in affairs of state in her 20s, her efforts were counterproductive in frivolously disastrous ways.

She thus became enormously unpopular in ways that became self-reinforcing. Scandals and outrageous stories developed a habit of sticking to her. Including the infamous “Affair of the Diamond Neckless” involving an absurdly costly gift Louis XV had made for his mistress Madame du Barry, but he died of smallpox and she was banished before it could be finished, and the jewelers’ subsequent desperate efforts to get someone royal to purchase it created the sort of intrigues in which the insular, self-absorbed French court specialised and which Dumas could have exploited and in fact did.

Marie Antoinette was not only cleared of guilt in the affair in court, she seems to have been quite innocent in this particular matter. But she was as sticky as an undercooked brioche, and that’s her own fault.

Given what happened to the ancien régime and the French royal family including her, it’s a pity she didn’t really scornfully, vacantly, or vacantly scornfully utter that line since it became her epitaph anyway. But in fairness to her, she didn’t.

Would you marry Mary Queen of Scots? Even if you managed to remember that she wasn’t Elizabeth I’s older sister “Bloody” Mary but her cousin once removed and that rather than being an ineffective Catholic tyrant she was an ineffective semi-Catholic would-be tyrant. The answer is still no, right?

Wrong. At least if you’re the 4^th Earl of Bothwell, James Gordon. Mary already had a husband when he first met her, the King of France in fact. But he died when she was nineteen (they had been married when she was sixteen after being betrothed when she was five, having become Queen of Scotland at six days old). Her mother-in-law, a Medici, became regent and Mary wisely bailed.

Wisely kind of ran out on the ship back to Scotland, where she married her first cousin Lord Darnley. But the marriage was unhappy. So unhappy that six years later, in 1567, his house exploded and he was found dead in the garden. Bothwell was widely suspected of doing or arranging the deed (as Darnley had in turn arranged the murder of Mary’s private secretary who, many thought, was the father of the child nominally conceived by Mary and Darnley). But Bothwell was acquitted and promptly married the queen, after divorcing his existing, second wife on rather contrived grounds that may have included her not wanting her house to explode and be found dead in the garden.

For some reason this marriage bothered people. The post-explosion one, I mean. Within a month an uprising had captured Mary and forced Bothwell to flee. Just over a month later Mary had to abdicate in favour of her infant son James VI (later James I of England) whose turbulent family history may partly explain his own deplorable character. Bothwell fled to Denmark, ran into his jilted first wife (d’oh) Anna Throndsen, was imprisoned at her behest in the dreadful Dragsholm Castle, and died insane, perhaps from having been chained to the same pillar for ten years, wearing a groove in the floor as he paced and contemplated his wretched lack of judgement or possibly blamed it all on somebody else.

I’m all for ambition, within limits. It must be ambition for legitimate ends, reached by legitimate means. I’m pretty sure marrying Mary Queen of Scots fails the first test, and in Bothwell’s case it definitely failed the second. And while the kind of intrigues swirling round the Scottish court tended to mean that people came to bad ends whether they thoroughly deserved them or sort of didn’t, he absolutely got what he had coming.

So although it’s unlikely to arise, a friendly piece of advice. Don’t marry Mary Queen of Scots even if you know who she was. In fact especially if you do.

On May 14 back in 1264, King Henry III of England was captured at the Battle of Lewes by Simon de Montfort. Enough with the battles, kings and captures, you may be saying. But as we explain in our documentary Magna Carta: Our Shared Legacy of Liberty, what matters in such situations is not who hit who with a sword but why and what happened afterwards.

This battle arose because various barons including Montfort, the king’s brother-in-law if you like dynastic complications, were very unhappy with Henry’s weak, spendthrift, slippery and ineffectual reign. It was by no means their first go at the king, nor the first victory after which they tried to get him to reform his ways. But the important thing is the aftermath.

They didn’t cut off his head, or worse. Instead they dragged him to Westminster, summoned a parliament, the “model” parliament that first included knights and burgesses representing the common man and allowed to speak on questions of high policy, and before that parliament forced the king to reaffirm Magna Carta and its companion Charter of the Forest.

As we note in the documentary, it all went sour for Montfort after that. In 1265 he was defeated at Evesham by Henry’s son Edward, the future Edward I, and they did cut off his worse. But remarkably, in rallying support for his cause and his father’s, Edward himself invoked Magna Carta, claiming that Montfort and his allies were not observing it.

When both sides are invoking liberty to justify their cause, it can just be lip service. But not in the English-speaking world, at least not until recently. Indeed, after Henry was restored and then died in 1272, Edward as king maintained Montfort’s precedent of summoning parliaments including commoners, to whom he pledged that there would be no taxation without representation. And it was expressly enacted during his reign, and that of his grandson Edward III, that any law contrary to Magna Carta was null and void.

This constitutional settlement, and this conception of the constitutional order, is directly relevant to our constitutional discontents today because Canada in 1982 received a very strange and deformed Constitution that apparently grafted an ersatz American-style Bill of Rights onto a struggling British-style parliamentary system. I have even had one person say they would be inclined to support our “True, Strong and Free” project to fix our Constitution if we proposed getting rid of the Charter but not if we proposed modifying it because it simply doesn’t belong in a Parliamentary system.

Our Charter is indeed a highly defective instrument, sharply different from the American and British Bills of Rights and their Magna Carta predecessor in having the egregious Section One bolthole saying “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” But it is a mistake to think of the 19^th-century British system in which Parliament could do anything, though it generally didn’t want to, as being real or pure parliamentary self-government.

From the 13^th century on at least until the 18^th, the British system was not one in which legislators could do anything whatsoever. There was a higher law, expressed in Magna Carta and deriving from the people, further clarified in the 1689 Bill of Rights, that said their liberties were inviolate even at the hands of duly constituted authority.

Our own Charter was an attempt to revive such a system. Unfortunately it was badly botched, not only by the inclusion of collective “rights” that violate individual ones but even more by the lethal Section 1. There’s nothing like that in Magna Carta and with good reason. And what we need is to get back to a system in which the fundamental rights of Canadians are guaranteed by a document that emanates from the people and that their representatives, whose mandate to deliver peace, order and good government by prudent legislation and moderate taxation does not include the capacity to alter fundamental law especially where our liberties are concerned.

If bloody medieval barons and monarchs with their apparently petty quarrels could understand it and act on it, we can too.

Yikes! This is the anniversary of the Cumberland Compact signed on May 13, 1780 establishing the fundamental law of a region that would later become part of Tennessee. And I don’t just say lend me your ears. You might lose them outright.

The first horse thief convicted under the new laws did. He was put in the stocks in 1793 for an hour, given 39 lashes in return for both ears, and his cheeks were branded with an H and a T. So at least they could spell. Sort of. One of the 256 signers of the Compact just put down an X.

In fact that thief, John McKain Jr. was lucky. Less than a decade later they had their first capital case. One Henry Baker was hanged for stealing a horse.

They didn’t mess around in Cumberland. A woman caught stealing soap and thread was stripped to the waist and given nine lashes which, I assure you, were not gentle. But here’s the thing.

The people there took a very dim view of property crimes. They wanted law to be harsh in this regard. Possibly they had a point; it’s noteworthy that either the horse thieves were very good at it or rather rare since it is 13 years between the signing of the compact and that case. And they didn’t just lynch people. At least not always. The Cumberland Compact provided that people charged with capital crimes would be taken to North Carolina for formal trial until Tennessee became a state, which it did in 1796, before Henry Baker’s case came up.

The main thing is that it was done via popular sovereignty. Even hillbillies in what was then the back of beyond established a government not merely by writing down the laws, but by gathering in a kind of primeval state of equality and drawing up a social contract. Philosophers like to imagine such a thing happening in theory. But in the British colonies in North America, before and after the Revolution, it happened in practice, from the Mayflower Compact to this one and beyond.

It’s easy to scoff at rubes who provided that the 12 judges elected by all men 21 and over were to be paid in deer skins (1,000 per year), while county clerks were to get 500 raccoon skins and so on. But at least they were electing their governors unlike, say, the French nobility. And they had the right to recall any of the judges they decided weren’t up to the job, the first such recall provision in the United States.

So yes, they said “ain’t” and cut people’s ears off and paid them in hides. But they understood self-government. And if you sneer at that, a posh accent just makes it worse.

Remember good old Queen Berengaria? Yeah. Me neither. If I told you Britain once had such a queen, sort of, you’d be likely to tell me it’s not really an English name or that things were weird under the Saxons. But actually Berengaria was crowned queen on this day, May 12, in 1191. See, she was the wife of Richard I, “Coeur de Lion”. And she would be.

For starters, it’s not an English name. She’s actually from the House of Jiménez and if you associate that name with Spain, given that we’re talking Middle Ages, you’re fairly obviously right. Sort of. Her father was Sancho VI of Navarre and her mother was Sancha of Castile. I guess she’s lucky she wasn’t Sanchita or something even if you don’t find Berengaria especially euphonious.

As for Richard murmuring it amorously, we’re not sure. It was an arranged marriage and not apparently very well arranged. Not much is known about her; even her birth is estimated at between 1165 and 1170. And she is famous, if that’s the right word for somebody so obscure, as “the only English queen never to set foot in the country” though it is not impossible that she did drop by after Richard croaked in 1199.

What? She didn’t visit the kids? Well no. There weren’t any. And if she’d wanted to visit her husband England wouldn’t have been a promising spot since in his 10 years as king Richard spent less than six months there, all of it rapaciously raising money. He was bigger, better looking and a much better fighter than his infamous younger brother John, but not really a better king and certainly not the hero of the Robin Hood stories.

He did take Berengaria with him on the start of the Third Crusade, and if that’s his idea of a honeymoon you can maybe see why the marriage wasn’t a huge success. But it’s also worth noting that Berengaria spent most of her time in Richard’s extensive French possessions, giving generously to the church despite predictable trouble prying her widow’s pension from John’s grasping clutches after 1199.

The upshot of all this, besides John being as bad as they say and Richard being far worse than his reputation, is that national boundaries and allegiances were not the same kinds of things in those days. I don’t just mean not in the same places. I mean really conceptually different.

It’s not odd that Richard would have had a Spanish wife and regarded his title of King of England as just one and possibly not the most important. It would have been odd if it had been otherwise. Richard’s mother, the impressive and more than slightly scary Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II of England, wanted the alliance with Navarre to safeguard the southern borders of Aquitaine and improve relations with Castile whose queen was, of all people, Eleanor’s daughter and Richard and John’s sister, “Eleanor of England.” (Meanwhile another sister, Joan, was Queen of Sicily.)

Anyway, Eleanor of A actually had to drag Berengaria to Sicily to marry Richard, because he’d left on the Third Crusade without, possibly, ever seeing the woman he was going to marry. After various adventures Richard and Berengaria got hitched on May 12, 1191 in Cyprus, which Richard had just captured to rescue the shipwrecked Berengaria from its ruler Isaac Comnenus. Berengaria was crowned queen of England that same day by the Archbishop of Bordeaux and the Bishops of Évreux and Bayonne all of which, you might be prompted to point out, aren’t technically in England.

We do not know what happened next, at least in the sense of them doing the sort of thing husbands and wives traditionally do especially on honeymoons. We do know Berengaria left the Holy Land before Richard, who got captured on the way home, was eventually expensively ransomed, and went to England where she didn’t join him.

Richard went back to war, this time against the King of France, prompting Pope Celestine III to tell him to go see his wife and be faithful to her. Richard actually did start taking her to church regularly. And apparently she was very upset when he died, though whether from genuine love or political concern is not clear. She never did get John to pony up most of her pension, but his son Henry III did, and Berengaria gave money to the church, entered a convent and was buried in L'Épau Abbey in Le Mans.

That such a person could have been queen of England without ever going there shows what a cosmopolitan society medieval Europe was. Mind you, the rest of her life tends to suggest that cosmopolitanism ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Remember Spencer Perceval? He died on May 11. In 1812. In this he is not alone. But what is unusual about him is that he’s the only person to have been either solicitor general or attorney general of the UK and subsequently Prime Minister. Oh yeah, and the only British Prime Minister ever assassinated.

One of his successors, Benjamin Disraeli, famously said “Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”. And if it had, the assassination of Spencer Perceval wouldn’t be the key exception. Indeed, even if you sit there during games of Trivial Pursuit thinking “Let it be British Prime Ministers… Let it be British Prime Ministers…” you may not be quite as up on Perceval as on, say, Churchill, Disraeli, Thatcher or one of the Pitts.

Perceval was in fact a follower of William Pitt, though in those happier days of loose party discipline he always called himself a “friend of Mr Pitt” rather than a Tory. And he was PM for the better part of three years.

They were fairly tough years. But it doesn’t mean he was a bad PM. He entered politics late. But he rose quickly, holding the solicitor-general and attorney-general posts in the Addington Ministry and Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in the Portland Ministry (speaking of PMs you never heard of and neither did I). He ran into considerable trouble with fairly weak parliamentary backing, including the king being bonkers, the economy being a mess and Luddites going about smashing machinery. But he managed to wage war against Napoleon effectively in Spain, and was rallying politically when a disgruntled businessman shot him dead in the lobby of the Commons.

It’s hard to miss a man who you never noticed. But evidently Perceval opposed hunting, gambling and adultery, at least one of which would still be thought admirable today. He also supported abolishing the slave trade. But he opposed Parliamentary reform, something hard to explain today.

Mind you, he had twelve children so I guess he had some hobbies that have retained their popularity. But what’s odd isn’t that somebody murdered a British Prime Minister, given lax security and the amount of violence that has attended other powerful posts there throughout history, including its kings. The odd thing is that Perceval is the only one to suffer such a fate.

It’s also odd by the standards of political assassination that the man who shot him, John Bellingham, seems to have had a thoroughly rational grievance against the government and even against Perceval himself, not one that justifies assassination of course but not something deranged even in the sense of being driven by political fanaticism. It concerned his own arguably shabby treatment by the British government.

It’s a very good thing that Britain has been otherwise free of assassinations of Prime Ministers. As is Canada being so mercifully free of political assassination of any sort that the cases of D’Arcy McGee and Pierre Laporte stand out in our memories.

So it’s hard luck on Perceval that he should have been the exception and not even have become a famous piece of trivia in consequence. But it’s good news for Britain that he was the exception.