QI The Book of the Dead

began to excite attention from the ladies. Paintings show him to be attractive and properly proportioned (if small) with large blue eyes and a mane of blond curls. He was fond of boasting that, as a young man, he had slept with at least fifteen court lovelies and in 1641 he was the master of ceremonies at the ‘bedding’ ceremony following Charles’s daughter Mary’s wedding to William of Orange. As she was just nine years old, ‘consummation’ only required the royal couple to touch bare legs. However, much to the puzzlement of the Dutchman, she had been sewn into her nightdress – until Sir Jeffrey sauntered in, wielding a pair of shears.
    During the Civil War, Jeffrey commanded of a troop of horse in the king’s army, after which he always referred to himself as Captain Jeffrey Hudson. When the war was lost, he accompanied the queen to her court-in-exile in France. In this more informal atmosphere, Jeffrey found himself subjected to teasing by the cavaliers. To nip this in the bud, he issued a challenge to the brother of William Crofts, the captain of the queen’s guard, and a duel was arranged. Croft made the fatal error of turning up with a water pistol. Jeffrey wasn’t amused. He had used his idle hours well and was an accomplished marksman. He shot Croft cleanthrough the forehead. The queen managed to get his death-sentence commuted to exile, so Jeffrey set off back for England. With singular bad luck, he once again fell victim to pirates – this time the rather more serious Barbary corsairs from North Africa – who sold him into slavery in Algiers. He remained there for the next twenty-five years.
    No one is quite sure how or by whom Jeffrey was ransomed and returned to England but, in the intervening years, he had more than doubled in height: a growth spurt he put down to the trauma of being repeatedly buggered by his Turkish captors.
    At just under four foot, he was decidedly tall for a working dwarf so he returned to Rutland. For a while he sat at home, like a real-life hobbit, smoking and drinking ale and telling tales of his exploits, but in 1678, poor and bored, he decided to move back down to London to see if the new king would employ him. It was unlucky timing. London was in the grip of the Popish Plot organised by his fellow Rutlander, Titus Oates. As a well-known Catholic and royalist, Jeffrey, even in his new taller incarnation, was instantly recognisable so he found himself thrown into the Gatehouse prison. Later released, he received a small honorarium from the king for services rendered (though never specified), but it wasn’t enough to save him from penury. Captain Jeffrey Hudson, whom the playwright Thomas Heywood had called ‘the prettiest, neatest, and well-proportioned small man that Nature bred’, died in obscurity, his small body buried in a secret grave reserved for Catholic paupers.

     
    Poverty also stalked the life of another famous monkey owner, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69). Rembrandt was an almost exactcontemporary of Jeffrey Hudson and like the Englishman enjoyed the fruits of fame while still young. But unlike the randy little courtier he had earned his pre-eminence through hard work. He toiled through his teens, denying himself the ‘the normal pleasures of young men’ although he was fully aware of what he was missing. ‘I love those decadent wenches who do so trouble my dreams,’ he later confessed.
    By the time Rembrandt arrived in Amsterdam in 1630, he was ready for success, money and love. All three came quickly. In less than two years he had painted forty-six portraits of the great and the good of his adopted city, making himself wealthy in the process. Merchants, lawyers, local dignitaries and their wives fought one another for the chance to sit for him. At the age of twenty-six Rembrandt was, as the film-maker Peter Greenaway put it, ‘a cross between Mick Jagger and Bill Gates’: young, successful, good at business and full of swagger. Like Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo before him, he signed his work with his first name, which is what we still call him. In 1633 he added a ‘d’ to his signature, where previously he had just been ‘Rembrant’. No one knows why, but it obviously mattered to him because he kept it for the rest of his career. *
    In the same year, he met and married Saskia van Ulenborch, the daughter of an extremely affluent Amsterdam family. As wellas being attractive and fond of the high life, Saskia was an excellent