QI The Book of the Dead

too much wit for a woman, and too little honesty for a queen.’
    If part of the appeal of monkeys for royalty was their rarity and peculiar miniature-human quality, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that real miniature humans also found themselves at court.Catherine de’ Medici practically farmed her troupe of dwarfs, keeping them dressed in finery and making sure they had a whole retinue of servants to look after them. She even arranged inter-dwarf marriages and encouraged them to breed. The strange fascination that dwarf sex exerted is another link with monkeys: both were seen as helpless victims of animal lust. Getting monkeys and dwarfs to play together was even more fun. Here’s an account of a wrestling match between a dwarf and a monkey, arranged for the entertainment of Cosimo I de’Medici not long after he became Duke of Florence in 1537:
    The dwarf had two injuries, one in the shoulder and the other in the arm, while the monkey was left with his legs crippled. The monkey eventually gave up and begged the dwarf for mercy. The dwarf, however, didn’t understand the monkey’s language and having seized the monkey by the legs from behind kept beating his head on the ground. If My Lord the Duke hadn’t stepped in, the dwarf would have gone on to kill him. The dwarf fought naked, having nothing to protect him except a pair of undershorts that covered his private parts. Suffice it to say that the dwarf was the victor and he won ten scudi in gold .
     
    Cosimo’s great-granddaughter, Henrietta Maria, Charles I of England’s queen, was another monkey and dwarf enthusiast. Her court favourite was the most celebrated of all English ‘little people’, Sir Jeffrey Hudson (1619–82), keeper of the royal monkey.
    Jeffrey Hudson was born in Oakham, Rutland. He was the son of a bull-baiting butcher ‘of lusty stature’ and no one could understand why he was so small. Local theories ranged from his mother choking on a gherkin while pregnant to dark rumours about his parents keeping him in a box. Actually, he suffered from growth-hormone deficiency, caused by a misfiring pituitary gland.
    At the age of eight he had reached only 18 inches in height. His father, sensing an opportunity for betterment, took him to his employer, the Duke of Buckingham. The duchess, Katherine, was entranced. Her husband was the king’s ‘favourite’ at the time and very probably his lover, too. This did not please the queen, so the duchess decided to present Jeffrey to her as a gift: a peaceoffering from one wronged wife to another. She arranged for the little man to arrive at court inside a cold venison pie. Jeffrey then leapt out, bowed and marched up and down the table in a full suit of armour. He was an instant hit. The queen invited him to enter her service, gave him a servant of his own, and put him in charge of her pet monkey, Pug.
    Jeffrey soon found his niche as a court entertainer, making friends with a 7½-foot-tall porter called William Evans. They developed an act together where Evans would pull a loaf of bread out of one pocket and Hudson out of the other and proceed to make a sandwich. The two were often seen together in public and a number of London pubs were named in their honour. Together with a later arrival, Thomas Parr, who claimed to be 151 years old, they were known as the ‘Three Wonders of the Age’.
    Jeffrey was more than just a curiosity: he was bright and audacious enough to act as a diplomat for the Stuart court. At the age of eleven, he was part of an embassy sent to France to bring back a midwife for the pregnant Queen Henrietta Maria. The ambassadors were granted an audience by Marie de’Medici, the queen’s mother, who was so taken with Jeffrey that she presented him with £2,000 worth of jewellery. This was an enormous sum of money. Jeffrey’s father, by comparison, probably earned around £10 a year as a butcher.

    In the 1620s and 1630s, the French coastal town of Dunkirk was an independent Flemish state and a notorious pirate base. It was these ‘Dunkirkers’ who intercepted the royal ship on its way back across the Channel, stealing Jeffrey’s newly acquired jewels and kidnapping all the members of the party. The group were a little too ‘hot’ for the pirates, though, and they were quickly released. The incident inspired a mock epic, Jeffreidos (1638) by William Davenant, which featured an unnerving assault on the dwarfish hero by a hungry turkey-cock.
    As he grew older, Jeffrey