QI The Book of the Dead

number was Prince Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, later Philip Mountbatten, born the year before on the dining-room table of the Villa Mon Repos, the family home in Corfu. He was carried off to safety in an orange crate.

     
    As any of the subjects of this chapter could have told you, when you keep a monkey you take on their dark feral side as well as their capacity for friendship, intimacy and joy. Older cultures dealt with this dual nature by according them divine status. The ancient Egyptians worshipped monkeys as cleverer than their own children. They believed that baboon-headed Thoth, their god of wisdom and creativity, was the inventor of writing. India had the noble and ingenious Monkey God, Hanuman, and in medieval China, Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, was powerful enough to cover more than 30,000 miles in a single somersault.
    Human beings, apes and monkeys all spring from the same evolutionary source. Some of us have tails, some do not, but it often seems that we have more in common than a common ancestor. It’s tempting to wonder, as Descartes did, whether monkeys might be a lot wiser than they’re letting on. That actually, our older cousins are perfectly capable of talking, but are smart enough not to do so in front of us, in case they get asked to do some work.
    * It’s possible that she inherited the monkey from her father-in-law: a long-tailed monkey appears in a miniature portrait of Francis I and his courtiers.
    * His contemporaries found it difficult to agree on how to spell his name – probably because his fame spread by word of mouth. Here are some of the many versions recorded: Rhembrant, Rheinbrand, Reijnbrand, Rhaerbrant, Rimbrantt, Rembrand, Remblant, Reijnbrant, Rembrando, Rheimbrand, Rijnbrandt, Rimbrandt, Rem Brant, Reijmbrant, Renbrant, Reynbrant, Rymbrandt, Rheinbrandt, Rhijnbrandt, Reimbrant, Rhinbrant, Rinebrant, Rynbrant, Rijnbrant, Reinbrand, Rimbram, Rhinbrand, Rhimbrant.

CHAPTER EIGHT
     

Who Do You Think You Are?
     
     
    Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle .
LEWIS CARROLL
     
    M any of us daydream about what it would be like to be someone else, but actually passing yourself off as a different person takes a lot more time and trouble. Titus Oates (1649–1705) had good reason to make the attempt.
    He was a ghastly child. Sickly, with a permanently runny nose and dribbling mouth, he suffered from convulsions and, as he grew older, walked with a pronounced limp and developed an irritating voice, halfway between a bark and whine. His face was startlingly ugly, bright red in colour and with almost no chin, so that his face appeared to be an extension of his corpulent neck. His character was no more appealing than his appearance. He was dim-witted, dull and a habitual liar: nobody liked him, not even his own father. After being expelled from school for cheating his teacher out of his tuition fees, he went up to Cambridge where he was thrown out of one college for stupidity and sent down from a second one for laziness. Leaving without a degree, he just pretended he had one anyway. This enabled him to get a licence to preach from the bishop of London and, inMarch 1673, he was installed as the vicar of Bobbing in Kent. So began a fantasy life that would be responsible for one of the most absurd and tragic episodes in British history.
    Oates’s father, Samuel, was the son of a Church of England clergyman. As a young man, he had left the church to become a radical Baptist preacher and chaplain in Cromwell’s New Model Army but, by the time Titus was born, he had swung round again and converted back to Anglicanism. This rather flexible relationship with Christian belief was about the only character trait he passed on to his son.
    Oates was no more popular as a parish priest than he had been at school or university. A heavy drinker, he was rude and foul-mouthed to his flock and lasted less than two years before they arranged to get rid of him. Returning to the family home in Hastings, he stood in as curate to his father but decided he would rather have the local schoolmaster’s job. So he accused him of sodomy. This blatant lie was quickly uncovered and, to escape a court appearance for perjury, Oates decamped to London and set out to sea as a naval chaplain.
    It was on board the Adventure , bound for Tangier, that Oates claimed he first heard rumours of the ‘Popish Plot’ to assassinate Charles II, but his maritime career was cut short when he was