BLIND AMBITION The Last Roman Emperor

I believe that ambitious people tend to be unhappy people. Take Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus as an example, (or, Caesar Augustus, for short) ,who was the first Roman Emperor -  beginning about 27 B.C.  He was the most ambitious man of his age. He invented the Roman Empire. And he lived longer than all but a couple of the Emperors who followed him. He had a big funeral in 14 A.D. That's something you get only if you are very ambitious.

Augustus’s last words were, “Did you like the performance?” To which my response is, “In retrospect, it was just okay”.  I say this because his show ended in a huge bloody confusing mess which I shall now attempt to explain as best I can.  Suffice it to say that if Augustus had seen just how sorry his empire would end up, he might have rolled over in his grave, if he still had one. He didn't, because the barbarians scattered his ashes in 420 A.D. as they burned Rome the first time. That is just one of the ways they earned the title of barbarians. Anyway, the really messy part starts 470 years after Augustus, with Emperor Julius Nepos.

Nepos had been the Governor of Dalmatia and he got the job as Western Emperor in 474 A.D. because he was just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, and because he was married to the niece of Leo I, the Byzantium Emperor, and because he was willing to pay for an army to defeat Glycerius, the guy who had knocked off the previous western Emperor.

Now, Nepos is Latin for "nephew", and - what a surprise - that is also the root of the term “nepotism”, which tells you almost everything you need to know about this guy.

Nepos was supposed to bring peace and order to the capital of the Western Empire, the capital of which was then at Ravenna (above). Caesar Augustus (him again) had established the port of Ravenna in the first century B.C. as the home for the western Roman fleet. By the fourth century A.D., with the barbarians carrying off half the Roman forum in a fire sale, the capital had been moved here because Ravenna was surrounded by swamps and marshes, which offered protection from the invading hordes, of which there were plenty around at the time.. 

But, boy, did Nepos ever screw things up. He started out badly by not killing Glycerius. Instead Nepos took him prisoner and shipped him off to Salona, the largest port back in Dalmatia. And he had Glycerius ordained as a Bishop, giving him a steady income. Nepos was assuming, I guess, that this act of charity would win Glycerius’ loyalty.  But, as they say in the Emperor business; "No good deed goes unpunished", and an Ex-Emperor not dead is an ambitious Bishop.

So low had Western Empire fallen that the next invading hoard didn’t even have to invade, because they were already there. Half the army Nepos hired to defeat Glyceriys was made up of German barbarians – er, I mean, mercenaries - about 30,000 of them who had been fighting for Glyceriys, until Nepos bribed them to fight for him. These Germans were led at this opportune moment by an ambitious man who had been a secretary to "Atilla the Hun". His name was  Orestes. And he does not seem to have been very bright.

And that is probably why the new Emperor, Nepos, figured that Orestes would not catch  on when he ordered him take all his German troops and march them off to defend Gaul. But Orestes had a Roman wife, who was clever enough to catch the catch in his new orders.

I suspect it was his wife who explained to Orestes what Nepos was really up to, i.e. getting the Germans out of Italy and away from the center of power. Wives have a way of pointing out to their husbands when they are being particularly dense. Anyway, it was probably she who suggested that Orestes should offer the Germans their own villas and farms in Italy, which could be stolen from the Roman patricians who currently owned them. And since Nepos would be up the paddle-less creek if the Germans refused to go, Nepos offered Orestes and his Germans some very nice Roman properties.

But that surrender did not assuage the Germans, it emboldened them  And on 28 August, 475, the Germans marched off to Ravenna,  to occupy the royal  palace.  Emperor Nepos could have stayed and fought, but then he would not have been Nepos.

Neops jumped ship in the harbor of Ravenna, and sailed home for Dalmatia, taking his purple robes with him. Behind Neops' inglorious exit, Orestes walked into the capital, where, instead of crowning himself as Emperor, he did something so smart I suspect it was again  his wife’s idea; he put the crown and the purple robes on his son.

The twelve year old boy was crowned Emperor Romulus Augustus, on 31 October, 475 A.D.– on what would eventually become Halloween, for any prophets with a sense of irony.

Of course Orestes was still the power behind the throne, and that was why the graffiti artists labeled their new Emperor “Romulus Augustulus”, which is the Latin diminutive version of the name – meaning “Little Romulus”.  It was the kind of nasty political joke which graffiti artists had been scrawling on the walls of Roman back alleys for a thousand years. And it is further proof of the old adage that historians spend centuries struggling to learn from dusty records and scratches on walls what they could have discovered in just five minutes talking to any guy on any street corner in ancient Rome, if they could just find one alive today.

One of histories’ greatest mysteries, unexplained by the dusty records, is why, having won such power and wealth so easily, Orestes then went back on the promise to his fellow German mercenaries and refused to hand over the patrician’s lands to them. Of course the Roman Patricians paid him off. That was always going to happen. But did Orestes think 30,000 Germans were not going to notice they were being stiffed. Again, I suspect, the answer is that poor old Orestes was just not very bright. And by this time he had probably decided he didn't need his nagging wife any longer. Another stupid man.

Anyway, the Germans noticed Orestes had stiffed them, and they quickly rose up under their new commander, Odoacer.  And this time they were joined by a lot of the regular Roman soldiers who decided to get their own share of the spoils. So in 476 A.D., they all marched on Ravenna. Unlike Nepose, the brave, courageous, dull headed slow thinking Orestes didn’t have the common sense to run for it.  He stayed and fought . Badly.  Orestes was captured just outside the city, and duly chopped into tiny little pieces.

On 4 September 476 A.D.  15 year old “Little Romulus” gladly handed over his crown to Odoacer. Romulus was thus, according to most historians, the last Roman Emperor, ever. He had been emperor for barely 10 months. His puberty lasted longer than his nobility.  Some stories say that Odoacer gave Romulus a pension, but that seems a little likely to me. Odoacer was not a stupid man. 

It is said the little-last Emperor and his entire family were packed up and shipped them off to prison in Campania, in Southern Italy.  And I hope Romulus was contented there. You see, history seems at times to be the story of ambitious people getting everybody else into trouble, and this kid never had a chance to be ambitious, even if he were so inclined.

The truth is, almost nobody got out of this particular story by natural causes. Poor old Nepos was murdered on 25 April, 480 A.D., by his own servants, who were probably in the pay of Glycerius,. Odoacer rushed in to fill the political vacuum in Dalmatia, repaying Glycerius by appointing him Archbishop of Milan.  Odoacer then settled down to run his little empire.

But this Dalmatian land grab attracted the suspicions of the new Byzantium Emperor, Zeno (above), who, being Emperor, was suspicious of anybody as ambitious as himself. So he offered a pile of gold to the Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, if he would cut Odoacer down to size.

Theodoric laid siege to Ravenna for three long, bloody years. Finally, with both armies suffering from hunger and plague, Theodoric offered Odoacer a truce, which Odoacer agreed to. However, at the celebratory banquet on 2 February 493 A.D., Odoacer said something offensive and without warning Theodoric fell on Odoacer and with his bare hands strangled him to death. The repetition of the stupidity and violence in this story is a bit depressing, I agree.

Little Romulus would outlive most of them but only because he was younger to start with. Legend says he died about 509 A.D., not yet 35 years old, but still residing in his prison outside of Naples. And considering the fate of all the ambitious people in this story, that was a long, if not a happy, life.

Amino Domina, Roman Empire.

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YOU CAN'T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN. George Lyon and his sperm

I believe we all know people who have clearly chosen the wrong profession; doctors sickened by the sight of their patients, bartenders opposed to public intoxication and politicians with an unhealthy reverence for the truth. But it is hard to imagine a man who applied himself for so long to a profession for which he had less talent, whose career path was more pockmarked with failure, an individual with more of a supplementary destiny for disaster than Mr. George Lyon, from the little English village of Up Holland, Lancaster.  George called himself the “King of the Robbers”. But although George made his living as a thief, he was a natural born lover. He just never figured out how to make a living at it.

The village gets its name from the same source as the nation of the same name. In the middle ages a “holland’ was a bolt of cotton cloth, and during the 18th century the rolling hills and plains of Lancashire, in northwest England, were one of the world’s great cotton growing regions, along with the western section of what would become the Netherlands.

So wealthy did one cotton growing Lancashire family become that they took the name “de Holland”.

The de Hollands are known as an “ill-fated” family primarily because of Robert de Holland who established the village of Up Holland on a ridge, midway between the towns of Wigan and Skemersdale, in 1307. 

In a power play between the vacillating King Edward III and the bold and decisive Earl of Lancaster, Robert initially sided with Lancaster. But Edward unexpectedly acted decisively and Lancaster uncharacteristically dithered and so Robert switched sides just before the Battle of Boroughbridge, on March 16, 1322 - at which Lancaster was killed. The King won but he never fully trusted Robert again and had him thrown into jail. Robert stayed there until 1328 when somebody did the King a favor and chopped off Robert de Holland’s “ill-fated” head.

By the time George Lyon was born on a back street in Up Holland in 1761, the cotton plantations of Lancashire were feeding the birth of the industrial revolution. Initially weaving was a home business, where working families bought a hand loom on time for two pounds , usually from the same employer who bought the finished cloth from them. For the rest of his life, when asked to give a profession, George always said “Weaver”, but it is likely he worked at it only as a child, “…carding and spinning cotton… until I became of sufficient size and strength for my father to put me into a loom”, as William Radcliffe explained from his own life.

In the late eighteenth century there were as many as 75,000 hand loom weavers in Britain. Then in 1785 the Reverend Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom, which could be operated by children, and the income of weavers began to plummet.

But George was not qualified to claim he was the victim of economic displacement because he had already established a career as an inveterate thief. In 1786, at the age of 25, George was arrested for mugging a man on the Kings Highway in Wigan. This was a hanging offense, but instead of death, George was sentenced to be lugged, or “transportation”, to the American colonies.

Perhaps as many as 50,000 convicts a year were shipped to America in chains, most being sold into indentured servitude for seven years. That would make convicts the single largest source of emigrants to America in the century leading up to the revolution. Mostly this heritage has been whitewashed out of the history books, but it does explain Doctor Samuel Johnson’s 1769 description of Americans as “…a race of convicts (who) ought to be content with anything we may allow them short of hanging.”

But although George was sentenced to seven years in the penal colony of America, there is no record he ever made it transoceanic. However, I am of the opinion that he did, and that at the end of his term George was forcibly returned to England as an undesirable, even in a convict nation, leaving a trail of his genes behind him.

In 1793 the officials of Up Holland were unpleasantly surprised to see George Lyon in the flesh, returned from exile and free as a bird. There had been expectations the reprobate would be scalped by a Red Indian or an offended husband or at least drowned at sea. 

The primary complaint does not seem to have been that George was a master criminal so much as a legendary local Lothario. He was married, but according to a May 1809 letter by Miss Ellen Weeton, “In two houses near together, there have been in each, a mother and daughter lying in (giving birth), nearly at the same time; and one man (the notorious George Lyon) reputed to be father to all four!”

Branded as a serial fornicator, George Lyon indisputably ever was. But his reputation as a highwayman rests on a single escapade, when he and two partners decided to hold up the mail coach which carried cash for the Maypole Colliery. One afternoon George and his two accomplices rendezvoused at the Bull’s Head Pub in Up Holland and drew attention to them selves. At an opportune moment they slipped out to the barn, mounted their rented horses and were waiting at the Tawd River Bridge as the mail coach bound for Liverpool approached.

The plan was for George to block the road and fire two shots to convince the coachman to stop. Then while George held his third flint lock pistol on the driver the accomplices would take the money box and rob the passengers. Unfortunately George had not taken the weather into account. It was raining heavily, and when George pulled the triggers, the hammers of his two pistols slammed onto wet powder. Unharmed the coachman whipped the horses around George and the coach wheels splashed him as it galloped past.

Having failed as a highwayman George returned to his primary profession, and his hobby as a thief. But I believe it was the official outrage over George’s favorite leisure pursuit which prompted the government’s investment in a professional “thief taker” named John McDonald. By representing himself as a fence McDonald was able to buy stolen goods from George, paying for them with marked money. In October of 1814 George was arrested, and after a brief trial, on 8 April, 1815, he was sentenced to be hanged. The sentence was not unusual for the time. Of the 213 people hanged at Lancaster Castle between 1800 and 1865 only 20% had been convicted of murder. The rest had been sentenced for burglary, lying under oath, arson, or rustling cattle or sheep.

Judgment day for George was Saturday, 22 April 1815, in the hangman's corner of Lancaster Castle (above).  

At about noon, dressed in his best black suit and well shined jockey boots, George was led from the Drop Room by John Higgens, 'The Gentleman Jailer', and delivered into the hands the hangman.  A crowd of 5,000 witnessed as the noose was slipped around George's neck. The trap door was opened on the low platform. George dropped about three feet and then slowly strangled to death. As the Lancaster Gazette recorded, “After hanging the usual time (an hour) the bodies were taken down…and given to their friends for internment.” 

A huge crowd attended the funeral back in Up Holland, a large section of which included George's progeny.  George Lyon, king of the lovers, was dead at fifty-four. He was buried next to his mother, sharing a grave with his legal daughter, Nanny Lyons, and it is her name on the stone that caps their shared grave.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e4xSSaEq04
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lyon_(highwayman)

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BLOOD AND GUTS AND NO SEATBELT The Death of Patton

I think the simplest way to describe George Smith Patton junior  is in his own words: as “an outgoing introvert”. He was a poet and a life long klutz, constantly bruising himself and falling off his polo ponies. An Olympic athlete and swimmer, he lost a marksmanship competition in the Stockholm games of 1912 because he was too accurate - the judges ruled his later bulls eyes, which went through the same holes as his earlier bulls-eyes, were misses. They were not.

In 1932 Patton led the U.S. Army’s last cavalry charge - against a “bonus army” of protesting U.S. army  World War One veterans.  He was a lifelong anti-Semite, who smuggled a copy of Hitler’s anti-Semitic “Nuremberg Laws” back to the United States so it could be preserved as an example of the dangers of religious bigotry.

His father served under Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, and a great-uncle was wounded at Picket’s Charge, defending black slavery. But while others refused, Patton requested a regiment of Black tankers be assigned to his Third Army.

Between mid-July  1944 and May 1945 Patton's 3rd Army moved further and faster than any army in history.  Patton's soldiers captured 765,000 German soldiers, killed 144,000 and wounded 387,000 more. In late May of 1945, when he made a brief trip home to Los Angeles, he was greeted by a parade and a cheering crowd of 100,000 at the coliseum.   But despite his contributions to the victory,  on 2 October, 1945 George Patton was removed from command because he refused allow Germany to starve (Joint Chiefs of Staff directive #1067).

The orders of his dismissal were insulting and they were meant to be. General Eisenhower forbid Patton from making any public statements or to speak to the press on any issue. As a result there was no explanation as to why he had suddenly lost his beloved Third Army. But  he was still assigned to Europe,  which kept him out of sight and away from microphones back in America. It was as if General Eisenhower was already running for President.

On the Saturday before he was scheduled to return to the United States for the Christmas holidays Patton had dinner with his chief-of-staff, Major General Hobart R. “Hap” Gay. According to Gay, Patton had reached a momentous decision. After a lifetime of service, “I am going to resign from the Army,” Gay quoted Patton as saying. “For the years that are left to me, I am determined to be free to live as I want to and to say what I want to”.  Patton had inherited a family fortune and he now intended to use the independence that money provided to finish his memoir, “War As I Knew It”, and tell his “unvarnished truth” about Eisenhower and General Marshall and General Omar Bradley. Had he done so, there can be little doubt, Patton would have shown himself to be a complicated conservative politician. 

The next day, Sunday, 10 December 1945,  Gay and Patton set off at 7 a.m. for a hunting trip in the forests outside of the Bavarian Cathedral town of Spry. It was a cold and overcast morning.

They traveled in two vehicles, a half ton truck driven by Sergeant Joe Spruce with their luggage and rifles, while the Generals rode in a 12 foot long 1938 Cadillac Fleetwood sedan, all steel and chrome with a spacious interior, powered by a Detroit V-6 block engine, and driven by Patton’s regular driver, 20 year old Private first class Horace L. Woodring. Fewer than 600 of these cars had been built and how this one got to Europe is unknown.

Part of the limousine’s stylish additions included a window and divider between the driver and the passengers’ compartment, and a small rectangular silver plaque on the divider with the word “Fleetwood ” embossed in sweeping script.  About 11:30 they exited the autobahn at Mannerheim and took route 38 south.

On the outskirts of the devastated city the two vehicle convoy came to the multiple tracks of the bombed out railroad yards (above).  Here Sergeant Spruce sped ahead, while the Cadillac was required to stop for a short freight train.   Woodring then crossed the tracks and resumed his speed of about 30 miles an hour.

He wrote later that the road was clear ahead except for an on-coming 2 ½ ton truck – a deuce and a half – about a half mile up the road.  Stretching along both sides of the road was the overflow from a quartermaster’s tank repair depot - burned out and broken tanks parked on both shoulders.

As they sped past this detritus Patton, who was sitting on the right side of the rear bench seat, commented on the wastage of war.  One tank caught his attention and he turned his body and pointed off to the left, saying, “And look at that heap of rubbish”. Gay turned to look to look and so did Woodring, the driver. It was 11:48 a.m.

The approaching truck suddenly turned to its left, into the repair yard, directly across the path of the Cadillac. Woodring slammed on his brakes, but it was too late. At impact the truck was going no more than 15 miles an hour - the Cadillac probably less than twenty. But nobody in either vehicle was wearing a seat belt. The big Cadillac slid a few feet and then thudded into the right side of the turck's  external fuel tank. The impact was so light that the fuel tank was not even cracked.

The front chrome grill of the Cadillac however was shattered like a boxer's front teeth, and the left front wheel hub was twisted and broken off, revealing the tire beneath (above). But the massive steel frame of the Cadillac then performed its unintended function and transferred most of the force of the accident directly to the passengers’ bodies. Sitting in the backseat, General Gay was thrown forward and then back against the seat. And Patton, who was already leaning forward and half turned to his left, was thrown off the bench seat and fell against the divider, his forehead striking the Fleetwood plaque, tearing a small section of skin and bending his neck sharply backward. In recoil he then fell across Gay on the seat.

Patton (above left)  immediately asked Gay  (above right) if he was hurt. “Not a bit, Sir”, Gay assured him. Gay then asked, “And you, General?” Patton immediately replied, “I think I’m paralyzed. I’m having trouble breathing, Hap.” Woodring helped Gay out from beneath Patton, made sure help had been summoned. He then approached the driver of the truck, Private Robert Thompson. Woodring would later contend that Thompson was drunk, but Patton insisted that no actions be taken against the truck’s driver.

A doctor and an ambulance quickly arrived, and at 12:45 p.m. Patton was admitted to the 130th Station Hospital at Heidelberg, Germany.  An x-ray instantly revealed what the doctors suspected; a simple fracture of the third vertebra with a posterior dislocation of the fourth vertebra, also known as the Hangman's Fracture.

In short, Patton had broken his neck and was paralyzed from there down. There was still a chance he could recover, but the doctors could not be certain until the swelling of his spinal cord had gone down.

Patton was taken to surgery and two “Crutcheld” (fishhook) tongs were inserted below his cheek bones to apply traction to his neck. By the next morning the traction had reduced the dislocation, but the swelling had not yet gone down.

To the constant stream of senior officers who visited him, Patton was cheerful. In private to his nurse he was depressed and frightened. Eisenhower did not visit, nor did  Patton's immediate superior, General Bradley . Then on the morning of 12 December Patton reported that he could move his left index finger, slightly. His wife arrived that morning, having been flown from California. She warned the doctors that the General had a history of embolisms.

On 13 December 1945, Patton showed strength in his left arm and right leg. But that was as far as the improvements were to go. Abruptly the sixty-one year old began losing ground. He was given plasma and protein, as albumen. On  20 of December Patton reported trouble breathing. An X-ray confirmed that he had a blood clot in his right lung. He was now suffering from pneumonia and was placed on oxygen. Late on 21 December, 1945  Patton whispered to his wife, “It’s too dark. I mean too late.” Shortly afterward he died, from injuries which could have been prevented with a simple seat belt.

The official cause of death was listed as heart failure. On Christmas Eve, 1945, in a pouring rain, General George S. Patton was laid to rest in the U.S. military cemetery at Hamm, Luxembourg. As the casket was lowered a chaplain repeated one Patton's favorite sayings: "Death is as light as a feather."

I would prefer to remember General George S. Patton by something else he said. “Anyone, in any walk of life, who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition." But I fear I will always remember that but for a simple seat belt, it was, as he once predicted, “A hell of a way to die.”

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