The Great Cat Massacre Read online

  Archer resigned from the position of Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and released a statement in which he claimed he had never met Coghlan but that she had phoned him out of the blue to say a newspaper was alleging he had had sex with her. ‘Foolishly, I allowed myself to fall into what I can only call a trap in which a newspaper has played a reprehensible part. In the belief that this woman genuinely wanted to be out of the way of the press and realising that for my part any publicity of this kind would be extremely harmful to me and for which a libel action would be no adequate remedy, I offered to pay her money so that she could go abroad for a short period. For that lack of judgement, and that alone, I have tendered my resignation,’ he explained.

  The Star, not a newspaper to back off, then went one step further and alleged Archer and Coghlan had enjoyed a bit of rumpy-pumpy in a dodgy hotel, the Albion, on 9 September 1986.

  After this outrage, Archer could take no more and sued for libel. Just before the trial, the newspaper realised it had made an error and amended the date of the romance to 8 September. It also fleshed out Coghlan’s character, pointing out that she specialised in kinky stuff.

  During her evidence at the trial, Coghlan described the scene in the Albion: ‘Nothing much was said because it was over so quickly. He commented on my nipples. I had no difficulty seeing his face. I was lying on top of him the whole time.’

  But Archer had an alibi for that night. He had, he claimed, had dinner at a restaurant with the editor of his books and his film agent, Terence Baker. And he had gone home after the time that Monica Coghlan claimed they were together.

  The trial was notable for the lunacy of the judge, who famously informed the jury that they should trust Archer’s wife, Mary, because she had ‘fragrance’, before summing up Archer: ‘You may think his history is worthy and healthy and sporting. What is always a great attribute of the British is their admiration, besides their enjoyment, of good sports like cricket and athletics. And Jeffrey Archer was president of the Oxford University Athletics Club [Archer always claimed to have gone to Oxford, which was untrue: he had attended a teacher training college affiliated to the university] and ran for his country. Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel, round about a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning?’

  The answer, of course, was ‘yes’.

  Archer received damages of £500,000 – the highest ever recorded at that time. Over the following years, he rebuilt his political career and, in 1999, became the Conservative candidate to be the first elected Mayor of London. Then Ted Francis, like a fat puma, pounced.

  On 21 November 1999 Francis revealed to the press that, before the original libel trial, Archer had asked him to write a letter to his solicitor falsely stating, and offering to testify, that they had had dinner together on the night of 9 September 1986, the date that the Star had first claimed the tryst had happened in the Albion. Francis added that Archer had faked an entry in his diary to put them together that night. But when the Star changed the date, Francis was forgotten.

  Francis’s revelations revealed Archer as a man fully prepared to commit perjury and to ask others to commit it in his libel case. Helpfully, Francis provided a tape of Archer asking him to lie.

  Archer’s career – let alone his mayoral candidacy – duly sank faster than the Titanic. He did his best, claiming that he had only asked Francis to lie because he wanted to protect the identity of a young lady he was really dining with. People wondered who the mysterious female could have been (if she existed at all). Some speculated that it was his former assistant, Andrina Colquhoun. If so, it would make her possibly the most dangerous dinner companion in the world, given that Lord Lucan had been due to dine with her just before he mistakenly killed his nanny in 1974.

  Francis opened the floodgates. It appeared that Terence Baker, who had since died, had told a friend he had given Archer a false alibi for the night of 8 September, the night actually argued over in court.

  None of this would have happened if Archer had remembered that the tryst had taken place on 8 September, and therefore he had no need of a false alibi for the following night.

  Archer’s fall from grace ended with his imprisonment for two years for perjury and perverting the course of justice, and was at least partially responsible for Ken Livingstone being elected Mayor of London. It also managed to remind the British public that even though the Tories were no longer in power, they were still the party of sleazy sex scandals. Surprisingly, Mary Archer, clearly a fan of Tammy Wynette, stood by her man.

  SLIP OF THE TONGUE – JOHN PATTEN’S MINISTERIAL CAREER GOES UP IN SMOKE, 1993

  John Patten was Education Secretary in John Major’s Cabinet from 1992 to 1994. His career came to an end when, not stopping to think it through, during a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference, he publicly described Birmingham’s head of education, Tim Brighouse, in somewhat unusual terms. To be precise, he stated: ‘Birmingham has put this nutter in as their chief education officer. I fear for Birmingham children with this madman let loose wandering round the streets, frightening the children.’

  The teachers of Birmingham duly had a whip-round, raising more than £25,000, which enabled Brighouse to sue for libel. He won substantial damages, which he donated to charity, using some of it to set up the University of the First Age, which encourages children to partake in extra-curricular activities.

  As well as putting a dent in the government’s plans to centralise the education curriculum and reposition it along more traditional lines, the affair forced Patten to resign from government and vacate his seat at the next election. Don’t worry, though, he was made a peer as compensation.

  His wife, Louise, is the granddaughter of the replacement second officer on the Titanic, Charles Lightoller, who was responsible for many of the deaths that night by misinterpreting the order of ‘women and children first’. Getting the wrong end of the stick, he put only women and children in the lifeboats and cast them away even if there were many empty seats that could have been filled by the waiting men – at one point, he ordered 30 men out of a lifeboat at gunpoint, thus condemning them to a pointless death. Don’t worry, though, he managed to find a seat for himself and lived to a ripe old age.

  * In fact, the Sharps’ main claim to fame at that time was that they and their six siblings would occasionally sail up rivers on a barge playing music (Granville liked the kettle drums). One such gathering can be seen in a famous family portrait by Johann Zoffany. In ‘The Family of William Sharp: Musical Party on the Thames’, Granville holds up some sheet music for his sister playing the harpsichord, while William, a French Horn enthusiast, can be seen standing at the back, waving his hat.

  Some time after completing the work, Zoffany was ship-wrecked off the Andaman Islands and was forced to eat one of his fellow sailors. The historian William Dalrymple writes in his book White Mughals: ‘Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal’, yet Dalrymple provides no evidence for this somewhat sweeping claim.

  * Castlereagh was, for instance, perhaps the only member of a nineteenth-century Cabinet to challenge and fight another member of the Cabinet to a duel over a point of foreign policy, having fought Lord Canning with pistols on Putney Heath on 21 September 1809. Supposedly, Canning followed the gentlemanly convention of the time of firing his pistol into the air – in order to maintain the honour of having fought, but without the danger of actually hurting his opponent – while Castlereagh took careful aim but still only managed to hit Canning in the thigh, somewhat surprising him.

  History is littered with battles lost because of poor choice of tactics. Armies that ran when they should have fought (or fought when they should have ran), commanders who attacked with infantry when an artillery barrage could have decimated their opponents, or spies who gave away their own secrets. But far more insidious is the role of the ‘regimented’ military mindset, which results in quartermasters who refuse
to hand over desperately needed bullets in the midst of a battle because the correct paperwork has not been filled out; or officers who continue blindly on a suicidal course even when they know the order has been issued by mistake.

  Another danger is that soldiers are taught to expect success (an army that predicts defeat is far more likely to experience it), so the warrior who finds himself being roundly trounced often also finds himself without a plan B and has to make it up as he goes along. Both Bonnie Prince Charlie and Simon Mann found out what can go wrong when this happens.

  FRIEND OR FOE? – THE BATTLE OF BARNET, 1471

  It was a thick dawn mist that did for the Lancastrian forces at the Battle of Barnet during the Wars of the Roses. Through the fog, the Lancastrian Earl of Warwick mistook the silver star on the standard of his ally, the Earl of Oxford, for the sun of the Yorkist Edward IV. Warwick and his men fell upon Oxford’s men, who, despite being a little taken aback by this sudden turn of events, fought back bravely and succeeded in killing Warwick.

  The Yorkists were but spectators in the battle, which they largely won by default since the Lancastrians seemed more intent on wiping each other out than fighting their actual enemies.

  GENEROUS TO A FAULT – WILLIAM THE SILENT PAYS FOR HIS OWN ASSASSINATION, 1582

  The violent repression of Catholics under Elizabeth I, with long wars between those following the Church of Rome and their Anglican rivals, began not in England but in the Netherlands.

  William the Silent, aka William of Orange, was the Protestant leader of the Dutch armed revolt against their Catholic Spanish Hapsburg rulers.* The Hapsburgs – his former employers – responded by putting a price on his head: 25,000 gold coins for anyone who would knock him off. The declaration by Philip II of Spain is notable for its poetic fury:

  We had scarcely turned our back on the Netherlands before William of Nassau began to endeavour, by sinister arts, plots, and intrigues, first to gain over those whom he believed to be malcontents, or haters of justice, or anxious for innovations, and then, above all, those who were suspected in the matter of religion.** These he flattered and attracted by fine words and vain promises. He was the instigator and chief author of the first protest which was presented by certain young gentlemen who daily frequented his house and stable.***

  Moreover, with the knowledge, advice, and encouragement of the said Orange, the heretics commenced to destroy the images, altars, and churches in a disorderly manner, and to desecrate all holy and sacred objects, especially the sacraments ordained of God.**** Yet, by divine grace and the foresight of the duchess of Parma, our very dear sister, matters were remedied, and he was forced to retire from our dominions, breathing out threats of vengeance in his rage.

  He began, through his agents and satellites, to introduce heretical preaching where he found it possible, persecuting all the good pastors, preachers, monks, and upright persons, and hunting many of them from the region. Then he had a number massacred; or rather, he tried to avoid the responsibility for a massacre carried on by some of his adherents, until the estates, greatly incensed by this cruelty, demanded an account of the affair, when he pretended that it was displeasing to him. Then he introduced liberty of conscience, or to speak more correctly, confusion of all religion, which soon brought it about that the Catholics were openly persecuted and driven out, and the churches and monasteries, whether of men or women, broken up, ruined, and levelled with the ground.

  Although a married man, and although his second wife was still alive, he took to himself a nun, an abbess who had been solemnly sanctified by episcopal authority, and her he still keeps; a most disreputable and infamous thing.

  For all these just reasons, for his evil doing: as chief disturber of the public peace and as a public pest we outlaw him forever and forbid all our subjects to associate with him or communicate with him in public or in secret. We declare him an enemy of the human race, and in order the sooner to remove our people from his tyranny and oppression, we promise, on the word of a king and God’s servant, that if one of our subjects be found so generous of heart and so desirous of doing us a service and advantaging the public that he shall find means of executing this decree and of ridding us of the said pest, either by delivering him to us dead or alive, or by depriving him at once of life, we will give him and his heirs landed estates or money, as he will, to the amount of twenty-five thousand gold crowns. If he has committed any crime, of any kind whatsoever, we will pardon him. If he be not noble, we will ennoble him for his valour; and should he require other persons to assist him, we will reward them according to the service rendered, pardon their crimes, and ennoble them too.

  Over the next few years, William became accustomed to people he knew, as well as complete strangers, trying to kill him. In 1582 a Catholic servant named Juan de Jáuregui shot him with a pistol, but had stuffed too much powder into it, so that it exploded, blowing his own thumb off and setting light to William’s hair. William’s guards leapt on De Jáuregui and stabbed him to death before beheading him. It wasn’t a complete loss for De Jáuregui, though – a bullet did pierce William’s neck. William survived, however, because his servants spent the next 17 days in round-the-clock shifts, holding the wound closed.

  Next up in the William assassination stakes were a couple of Spaniards who tried to poison him but were arrested before they could do so; then a Frenchmen named Le Goth, who planned to poison some eels, knowing William was fond of them – but he made the schoolboy error of mentioning his plot to a friend of William’s who notified the authorities; then a Dutchman called Hans Hanzoon who tried – twice – to blow William up, once at his palace and once in church. But William the Silent remained stubbornly alive.

  It all came to an end, however, when William literally paid for his own death. A young Frenchman, Balthasar Gérard, came into his service claiming to be the son of a Protestant who had died fighting the Catholics. William sent him on a diplomatic mission to France but when, some time later, William noticed Gérard hanging about the palace and looking shifty, he asked him why he was still there.

  Gérard, who hadn’t the first clue how he was going to go about killing William and was such a hopeless assassin that he didn’t even have a weapon, told William that the reason he had not left for Paris was that he couldn’t afford to buy shoes for the journey. William gave him 12 crowns to buy himself some suitable footwear. Gérard bought a gun and some bullets and shot William dead with them that afternoon.

  In revenge, William’s guards tied Gérard’s wrists behind his back and suspended him by them from an overhead beam. They then whipped him, poured salt into the wounds, and cut his hands off. Following this, they cut off his breasts, salted him again, pulled out chunks of his flesh with hot pincers (followed by another salting), disembowelled him, tore out his heart while he was still alive and showed it to him, and finally cut him into four pieces.

  The effect of all this in England was electric. Queen Elizabeth I herself wrote to William’s widow, saying she hoped ‘the authors of this execrable act [will have reason to wish] that they had never been born’.

  Her courtiers began detecting Popish plots everywhere (not without reason, when the Pope heard of the killing, he ordered all the church bells in Rome be rung in celebration) and it became English law that no one could carry a pistol within two miles of a royal palace. Some of Elizabeth’s supporters even formed a secret association to ensure that if she were murdered no one who might have been behind it – i.e. Mary, Queen of Scots – would succeed to the throne. They convinced Elizabeth to sign Mary’s death warrant, just in case.

  The fear sparked by the assassination even led to war. England was so worried that the Spanish could take over the Netherlands and use the Dutch ports to invade Britain she entered the Netherlands’ war against Spain, resulting in the Spanish attempt to invade Britain that ended with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

  KEEP ’EM HAPPY – THE ASSAULT ON CÁDIZ, 1625

  When Britain launche
d an attack on Spanish ships in the port of Cádiz on 1 November 1625 as part of the ongoing hostilities against Spain, things started off pretty well. Then Sir Edward Cecil landed with a number of his troops to defend against the Spanish soldiers who were rushing to the scene. Better described as a mob than an army, the Britons were forced to march through the hot day without food or water. As night fell, they made camp beside some old buildings. It turned out that these buildings were wine stores. Cecil, concerned for his men’s happiness, said they could drink one butt of wine per regiment – strictly no more.

  The soldiers, however, paid very careful heed to the bit about ‘drink the wine’ and not so much to ‘one butt only’. On empty stomachs and dehydrated, they got as drunk as students and proceeded to forget about the enemy, preferring to shoot each other in drunken brawls. When Cecil ordered that the rest of the wine be poured away, they threatened to kill him. For the rest of the night, the officers were much more scared of being shot by their own men than by the Spanish and hid in their lodgings.

  As dawn broke, 100 men were still so drunk they couldn’t even stand and had to be left behind while their comrades marched off. They may have come to regret this overindulgence shortly before the Spanish troops turned up and killed them all.

  As their sober comrades sailed back home, Cecil continued to show his natural capacity for command. It turned out that Plague had broken out on some of the vessels and they could not properly sail, so he ordered that two men from each ship where there was no Plague be moved onto an infected vessel to be replaced on the healthy boats by two men from those where the highly virulent disease raged. The results will come as no surprise to anyone: Cecil managed to wipe out a good part of his army without them firing a shot.