The True History of the Blackadder (21 page)

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A voice that has been embedded in the national psyche for decades, not least thanks to the government’s official ‘Protect and Survive’ nuclear attack public information films and his apocalyptic narration for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’.

Parte the Third:

THE VIRGIN BASTARD

WITH HENRY TUDOR
establishing the most efficient internal government and secure royal line in late-medieval Britain, it’s not surprising that the system inherited by his granddaughter in 1558 should have been one of unprecedented sophistication and power. Elizabeth’s time on the throne would usher in revolutions in literature and warfare, but as a time of espionage and intrigue, the Elizabethan era also stands alone. Thanks to the machinations of her spymaster Francis Walsingham and the delicate balance of power between Protestant England and her Catholic neighbours, the Queen’s reign was a hotbed of secrecy, plot, murder, mystery and cunning planning. So many differing and unverifiable claims can be made about Elizabeth’s forty-five-year reign (Did she hide a bastard by Dudley or Seymour? Had she colluded with Dudley to kill his first wife? Was she Shakespeare? Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?) that it would be very easy for our Blackadder Chronicler to drop in a celebrated forebear, right in the heart of the Tudor court, in its first flush of post-Bloody Mary jubilation.

Especially in this early part of her rule, Elizabeth’s flirting with her favourites and teasing of both her council and the Princes of Europe with promises to wed and deliver an heir ensured that there would be so many posthumous claimants to the Virgin Queen’s deflowering that one more favourite (albeit one who has escaped any mention in primary sources of the period) would make little difference. However, what nobody would expect such a claimant to suggest is that Elizabeth I was, for at least the last two-thirds of her reign, a psychotic cross-dressing German called Ludwig.

The issue of Elizabeth’s sexuality has been so hotly debated for centuries that the question of her actual
sex
is seldom addressed. Until the Queen was approaching her fifties, her doctors regularly testified that her reproductive organs were still capable of providing a healthy child. Although medicine may not have been the most advanced of sciences in the sixteenth century, it would be hoped that a royal physician could recognise a Prussian package when he saw one – but then who could say that any quack, violently threatened by his monarch to keep well away from the crown jewels and to report that all was well, would dare to defy her, or him?

Certainly, the bulk of the history of the Lord Edmund Blackadder (1529–66), one-time Lord High Executioner and part-time explorer, depicts the sovereign as girly in the extreme. The Lord’s exact line of descent from Prince Edmund Plantagenet is never entirely settled in the Chronicles, with different claims that he was his great-, or great-great-grandson. But it’s easy enough to posit that any determined bastard spawn of Prince Edmund could have convinced the wily Henry VII that his silence on the little matter of Henry’s thrashing at Bosworth was easily bought, with a new title and perhaps a Blackadder Hall to call home. The next Edmund in line, identified in the Chronicles as Cardinal Blackadder, Keeper of the Privy Rolls, would have thrived in the debauched and dastardly environment of Henry VIII’s court. Any noble given licence to hang around the royal toilet was in effect the closest to the seat of power in the whole kingdom, and the family prospered, until Henry VIII’s death (here claimed to be murder at the Cardinal’s hands) led to Queen Mary’s reign of terror, and exile for the whole family, whereupon Cardinal Blackadder was said to have frittered away the family fortune on ‘wine, women and amateur dramatics’. This left his impecunious but dashing son ill-suited to dallying with Elizabeth when she took to the throne, and yet here he is claimed to be her real favourite, making all but daily visits to the Queen’s palace at Richmond.

Lord Robert Dudley has always been recognised as the closest thing to a real love in Elizabeth’s life, but it may be telling that the dates for Lord Blackadder’s time at the heart of the Elizabethan court begin in 1560 – two years into the Queen’s reign, and the same year that Dudley’s chances of ever marrying Elizabeth were nixed by the questionable suicide of his terminally ill wife Amy Robsart, in the summer. Perhaps with her hopes for Dudley dashed, Elizabeth turned to another intimate, the handsome Edmund, her ‘Ned’. Elizabeth’s numerous favourites are well documented, from Raleigh and Essex to poor Sir Christopher Hatton, who went to his grave unmarried, still proclaiming his love for the redhead ruler. Yet there is no Edmund on record – perhaps the most tantalising equivalent known to historians would be Thomas Butler, ‘the Black Earl’, a childhood friend of Elizabeth who grew to be a witty charmer, nicknamed ‘my black husband’ by the Queen. As an Irish noble, however, he is clearly not our man.

This problematic stretch of the Chronicles does suffer greatly from being dramatically at odds with the established record. Although purporting to cover the years 1560–66, Edmund’s comic tragedy is studded with impossible claims for the time – Shakespeare is mentioned despite having just been born, and Raleigh himself was only a youth in the 1560s, not to return from the New World until 1581 – bringing with him sweet tobacco, not potatoes. Although it’s possible that a forgotten member of the Percy family could have been at court in this time, the Chronicle also features the ever-present figure of Lord Melchett, who remains mysterious to history, while there is no mention of the Queen’s constant adviser William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Perhaps the Lord High Treasurer was unwell during Lord Blackadder’s visits, but the complete lack of any mention does seem fishy, as Cecil was the man to conquer, if Edmund stood any chance of wooing the Queen. Why Cecil also neglected ever to acknowledge such a favourite of Elizabeth (and a noble who allegedly discovered Australia two hundred years early, no less) is a question the Blackadder Chronicler fails to address. Perhaps
the one note of verisimilitude in this passage comes from the depiction of one of the Queen’s closest servants, Blanche (not Bernard) Parry, who had been in the Queen’s service since birth, serving as her wet nurse, and would loudly and happily tell all and sundry, right up until her death in 1590, that she had rocked the sovereign in her cradle.

Of course, if Prince Ludwig was in power under the guise of Elizabeth Tudor, it’s only natural that he would destroy every mention of the one man who came closest to vanquishing him, the ‘Indestructible’ master of disguise. If such a German prince had existed at this time, he would probably have to have been an unpopular son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II. Perhaps paternal neglect, being considered too short, greasy and spotty to be acknowledged in the family record, could have been enough to spur Ludwig on to killing his way to a throne, even if it did then mean spending forty years in a dress. But then, if the bloodshed of Prince Ludwig’s revenge was as horrific as described in the Blackadder Chronicles, it’s a wonder that anyone was ever in a position to record the death of Lord Edmund, and the real Elizabeth, at all.

But is that reason enough to dismiss entirely the theory that Queen Elizabeth I was a man, from 1566 until her death in 1603? Professor Pollard certainly believes so. ‘Whilst there is the legend of the “Bisley Boy”, which does indeed suggest that the young Princess Elizabeth was swapped for a man, the clue to its authenticity comes in the title “The LEGEND of the Bisley Boy” and even in the florid pages of this story there is no mention of “Ludwig the Indestructible”. The Blackadder Chronicles of this date also present other insurmountable problems – the completely different make-up of the court, the failure of any protagonists from outside the Chronicles to be present at the place and time (and even age) that they are known from elsewhere and, perhaps most significantly, the fact that the only surviving manuscript of this section of the Chronicles appears to have been written in the margins of a copy of the
Racing Post
.’

This is of course sheer wilful arrogance, when discussing a time as murky and duplicitous as the Elizabethan reign. Whoever it was who gave up the ghost at Richmond Palace on 24 March 1603, man or woman, Tudor or German, they took with them enough secrets to provoke a thousand conspiracy theories, and the one concerning Prince Ludwig would surely not be the least likely of them all. Besides, from the Blackadder family’s point of view, Ludwig’s massacre of the Elizabethan court and successful hushing up of his transvestite usurpation was at least delayed payback for Henry Tudor’s own dishonest takeover – the Tudor dynasty ending as it had begun, with one ambitious bastard, and a stack of dead bodies.

Chapter 3

BLACKADDER II

I try, Madam … And then, ten minutes later when I’ve got my breath back, I try again

Enrolling at Manchester University in the late 1970s may not have had the same cachet as going up to Oxford or Cambridge, but the ancient academies could never have hoped to hold their position as the near-exclusive training grounds of Britain’s educated comics forever, and the thriving revue traditions at institutions like Manchester and Bristol, many with a commitment to taking shows up to the Edinburgh Fringe, were sure to add to the nation’s wealth of entertainers eventually. By 1979 Manchester had already turned out two of the greatest comics of the next decade, Mayall and Edmondson, who had both been conspicuous stars of the university’s drama course – long-haired self-proclaimed genius Rik was going out with his tutor’s daughter, Lise Mayer, and Ade, already on his first marriage, was the lead in most of the department’s biggest productions, and liked trying to ride his motorbike up the stairs in Rik’s student house.

The anarchic duo who staged plays about God’s testicles in the refectory to try and get their Equity cards couldn’t have failed to leave an impression on the freshers they left behind, but they equally wouldn’t forget about one eager bespectacled writing machine from two years
below – even if Edmondson claims his earliest memory of the first year in question is Mayall shouting, ‘Duck! Ben Elton’s coming up the drive!’

‘As soon as Ben arrived, he started writing,’ Mayall recalls, astounded. ‘First years don’t do that! He got to know everyone very quickly, and he was casting! You know, meeting people, getting to know them, seeing who the best actors are, and churning out plays, really fast.’ ‘I didn’t
really
know them,’ Elton admits, ‘Rik and I were sort of pally – he used to take the piss out of me, basically – and I never really knew Ade … Rik was a couple of years above me, and my God, did he let that be known! He used to pretend he didn’t know my name, that was his great joke, he’d say, “Oh hi, fresher, what’s your name again?” I mean, we’d been working together for years. I was always the little farty fresher … But he came to see one of my plays, and he must have thought it was funny because two or three years later when he and Lise Mayer were starting to write
The Young Ones
and they felt they needed another element, they thought of me.’

BENJAMIN CHARLES ELTON B ORN : 3 May 1959, Catford, London