Friday

Good morning,

Quote of the day:

“Those that try to appear wise among fools, to the wise appear foolish.”

                                Marcus Fabius Quintalianus

I have launched a two pronged assault on two different historical eras. The first one is the siege of the city of Troy by King Agamemnon and his brother King Menelaus and their associated navies and infantries. The Greek kingdoms governed by Agamemnon and Menelaus did indeed exist and has been proven by archaeological evidence. However, the actions of said kings against the city of Troy (including Helen of Troy) were written by Homer in his immortal novels The Iliad and The Odyssey. Homer's great writings obviously mixed actual events and mythology. The problems is figuring out what is myth and what is actual fact. There is no question that the city of Troy existed. The city was uncovered by a German archaeologist many years ago. It is near the Aegean Sea in western Turkey. But knowing for sure that there were warriors like Achilles, Ajax, Hector or people like Helen, Paris and Priam are real or a stupendous feat of the imagination of Homer, will never be proven...but it is fun to read the words of a genius like Homer.

The second one is the turmoil in England after the death of Henry VIII. A few years before his death Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church over a divorce issue. He founded the Church of England which is always lead by the King or Queen of England. He presented an edict that his heir to the throne would be of Tudor (Henry's family name) blood and most of all a Protestant. This edict was passed into law by Parliament. Henry had three children that survived him, one male and two females. They were Edward, Mary and Elizabeth. Being male, when Henry died Edward took the throne at the age of 9 as King Edward VI. One of the people in the line of succession was Lady Jane Grey who was married to Guilford Dudley, the son of John Dudley also known as the Duke of Northumberland. The Duke opined that if Edward were to expire, the next in line would be Mary, but she was a dedicated Catholic and her rise to the throne would not be allowed and would eventually lead to Lady Jane Grey. With this in mind he decided to slowly kill Edward which would lead to Lady Jane Grey taking the throne as Queen with his son Guilford as King. Northumberland had Guilford under his thumb and knew that with this control he would become enormously more powerful and wealthy. He had several followers of this line of thought hoping to reap some of the windfall that they hoped would come. Northumberland made a deal with an apothecary (pharmacist) that gave him small doses of arsenic which he fed to Edward beginning when Edward was about 12. Edward eventually died a horrible death at the age of 15. Under the influence of immense political pressure, Lady Jane Grey very reluctantly took the crown and became Queen. However, soon after this Northumberland treachery was found out and the infamous shit hit the fan beginning with the suicide of the apothecary. All of those involved in this cabal, especially Lady Jane herself, were arrested and thrown into the Tower. Elizabeth was also arrested and while in the Tower Elizabeth and one of Northumberland's sons also named Robert who was also imprisoned, struck up a relationship that lasted for the rest of their lives (their relationship is one for the ages and I will include it in one of m future blogs). Several of those involved were found guilty of treason. The men were sentenced to being hanged, drawn and quartered and the women were sentenced to being burned at the stake. Elizabeth and Robert were exonerated and freed. Mary, now Queen, stepped in and changed the sentences to beheading. This was essentially an act of mercy since a beheading would be painless...maybe. When Henry VIII split from the Catholic Church the land and properties of the church were divided among different persons of royalty and influence. Mary was allowed to become Queen and remain a Catholic as long as those that had stolen the property of the church were allowed to keep them. The executioner did his job and heads literally rolled, y'all, beginning with Northumberland and ending with Lady Jane. I am now into the first few days and months of Queen Mary and yet more turmoil is afoot. More about this real life adventure will follow later.

Speaking of poison one of the sneakiest assassinations of all time involved poisoning. A British diplomat was allegedly targeted by Russia during the Cold War. They assigned a Bulgarian trained assassin the job of eliminating this diplomat. One day the diplomat was walking down a street in Sofia, Bulgaria with the assassin right behind him carrying an umbrella. It wasn't a normal umbrella, it had a hypodermic syringe full of curare hidden in the tip. The assassin walked past the diplomat, stabbed him the leg and kept walking. The diplomat lasted about 8 hours and was unconscious for most of the time. Curare is a poison derived from a plant only found in the Amazon river basin. Curare is very rare and kills by relaxing the muscles and death arrives from asphyxiation when the lungs quit working. Not only that, it is a powerful sedative and will put you to in a coma very quickly. This meant that the diplomat could not tell anyone what happened. Much later on with the collapse of the Soviet Union the truth was revealed.

This Date in History September 18

1955 On this day Ford Motor Co. delivered its 2,000,000 V-8 engine. They had started producing V-8 engines 23 years before to satisfy the world’s lust for speed and power in their automobiles and their has been no let up since. I have owned a Ford V-8 in a Crown Vic that I drove for years but it finally gave up the ghost after much neglect on my part. But it was brave and always trying up to the last. I donated it to Goodwill for a tax deduction. It was still running but not very well.

1964 The “Mother Road” Route 66 essentially disappeared as a new 4 lane highway is built in its place. In a previous lesson I told y'all about how in 1926 a group of automobile fans got a bunch of money together and started building the Lincoln Highway which turned out to be Route 66, that was it’s birth, here is it’s death. There are so many tales about the old Route 66 that I don’t know where to start. There was a very popular TV show about it, “Route 66”, about 2 guys just traveling the country in a red Corvette. Not to mention the song “Get your kicks on Route 66”. Route 66 was the home of many, many cheap roadside attractions, cheap hotel and restaurant, etc. It was Americana, y'all. Now it is gone in favor of going fast from point A to point B. What a damn shame. What have we become? We don’t want to stop and smell the roses anymore.

1862 That epitome of ineptness US Gen. George B. McClellan fails to follow a severely mauled CSA Army of Northern Virginia, CSA Gen. R. E. Lee commanding after the Battle of Antietam or the Battle of Sharpsburg as those that are “unreconstructed” call it. McClellan was yelled at almost immediately by A. Lincoln and General Henry Halleck that this was the US chance to crush Lee’s army and end the war. But the timid McClellan waited 3 days to even begin a chase because he thought Lee had over 100,000 troops when in reality he had Lee outnumbered 3 to 1. I personally think that McClellan just did not have the stomach for combat as it was prosecuted in those days and would avoid it if he could. Because of his ineptness the war went on for 2 ½ more years and cost the lives of thousands upon thousands of Americans.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow.