QI The Book of the Dead

Hinchingbrooke, the country estate of his grandfather, Henry, and it was there, shortly after Oliver was born, that he was abducted by grandpa’s pet monkey. The creature grabbed the baby from his crib and made for the roof. Servants rushed to bring mattresses into the courtyard to soften his fall if the animal dropped him, but for several minutes the monkey ignored them,hopping from ridge to ridge with young Oliver clamped under his hairy arm. The assembled company at last enticed the beast down and the future Lord Protector of England was returned unharmed. There is no record of how they did it – though modern monkey-handlers recommend that a dish of jam usually does the trick.
    As far as we know, Cromwell never kept a pet monkey himself – it would have been rather surprising if he had – but in the frontispiece of a 1664 satirical cookbook, purporting to be by his wife, Elizabeth, she appears with a monkey on her shoulder. The illustration portrays her as a plain-looking frump and the anonymous author refers to her throughout as ‘Joan’ (the stock name for a scullery maid), mockingly remarking that Whitehall had been turned into a dairy and that her ‘sordid frugality and thrifty baseness’ was ‘a hundred times fitter for a barn than a palace’. The monkey on her shoulder is there to make a monkey out of Mrs Cromwell, letting everyone know she is a jumped-up country bumpkin and reminding readers of the old proverb, ‘the higher the monkey climbs, the more you can see of its arse’.

     
    For several centuries, monkeys had been the favoured pet of queens: ‘Joan’ Cromwell’s monkey also implies that she was ‘aping’ her royal betters. Monkeys that appear in portraits of actual queens are coded symbols for lust, childish exuberance, bad decision-making or a weakness for the occult. All these qualities were brought together in the most famous of all monkey-owning queens, Catherine de’Medici (1519–89). Also known as ‘The Black Queen’, ‘Madame La Serpente’ and ‘The Maggotfrom Italy’s Tomb’, she was the most powerful woman in Europe for over forty years.
    Catherine was the great-granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the man who bankrolled the Florentine Renaissance, but she didn’t have an easy start in life. As a merchant’s daughter, she was technically a commoner and, within weeks of her birth, an orphan too. Things looked up a little in 1523, when her cousin was elected Pope Clement VII. Aged only four, she became a bargaining chip in the endless marital poker game of European royal politics. Then, in 1527, the Medicis were overthrown in Florence. Catherine was taken hostage and imprisoned in a series of convents.
    By the time she was twelve, she had been made to ride through the streets on a donkey jeered by an angry crowd and survived a planned attempt on her life which would have seen her lowered naked in a basket outside the city wall in an attempt to trick members of her own family to shoot at her. (They were besieging ‘their’ city at the time.) When Florence surrendered, Catherine was summoned to Rome by her papal cousin, who greeted her with tears in his eyes. Within months, he had wangled her engagement to Henry, Duke of Orleans, second in line to the French throne. Pope Clement was delighted. With the usual Medici gift for understatement, he proudly announced ‘the greatest match in the world’.
    Henry’s father, Francis I, was also pleased and very keen to help. On the couple’s wedding night in 1533 he stayed in their bedchamber until he was sure ‘each had shown valour in the joust’. Despite this promising start, it was ten years before Catherine bore Henry a child. That she survived as his wife bears testimony to her strength of will and shrewd political instincts.

    It certainly wasn’t her looks that did it. Although she was said to have ‘delicate features’, she was short with a ‘too large mouth’ and the trademark bulging eyes of the Medici. Despite her trim figure and a beauty regime that involved applying a daily face mask of pigeon dung, the Venetian ambassador was moved to say that she looked good ‘only when her face is veiled’. Yet she had a definite sense of style, shocking the French court with her racy two-inch-high heels and her steel corsets, made by her husband’s armourer and the secret of her 13-inch waist. She was a game girl, too – she hunted enthusiastically until she was well into her sixties and introduced