Tutankhamun’s Erected Final Detail
26. King Tutankhamun’s penis was mummified while erect.
27. King Henry VIII was once arrested and then imprisoned for assaulting a police constable with his walking stick. When the police constable was informed he had jailed the King of England, he feared execution. Instead, he was commended by Henry VIII for his dedication to duty.
28. George V did not want his son Edward VIII to become a King and told his private secretary that ‘After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in 12 months.’ After George’s death, Edward was King for 10 months and 3 weeks before giving up the throne.
29. There was a Polish King Augustus II nicknamed “The Strong” because he could break horseshoes with his bare hands and loved fox tossing, a sport where you throw foxes with a sling. One of these events had 1235 foxes, hares, badgers, and wildcats. He had several mistresses and fathered as many as 382 children.
30. After Hawaiian King Kamehameha was hit in the head with a paddle by a frightened fisherman during a battle, he not only spared the man’s life but decreed a “Law of the Splintered Oar” protecting civilians in a war. It is still part of Hawaiian law in the State Constitution.
31. The Vikings looted Paris in 845 and stayed until King Charles the Bald gave them 5,670 pounds of silver and gold.
32. King Herod “The Great” feared that nobody would mourn his death, so he ordered a large number of distinguished men to be killed when he died in order to create greater widespread sorrow. His son and sister never carried out his request.
33. King George VI was outraged when the South African government told him that, during his 1947 visit there, he should only shake hands with white people. He called his South African bodyguards “The Gestapo.”
34. French was the first language of every English king until Henry IV (15 April 1367 to 20 March 1413).
35. The ancient Greek city-state of Sparta had no walls because the Spartan king Agesilaus pointed to his fellow citizens, who were armed to the teeth and the most formidable soldiers in Greece, and said, “Here are the walls of the Spartans.”
Queen Olga’s Fierce Revenge
36. A Russian queen named Olga had nobles buried alive, set the royals on fire, killed everyone at her husband’s funeral, and burned the rest of their town with birds, because they had killed her king.
37. Legend says Canute, the 11th century Viking king of England, Denmark, and Norway, once ordered the tide to stop. He meant to show his privy council that no person is all-powerful and that all people must yield to forces beyond their control, including the tides.
38. King Tutankhamun had a club foot, feminine hips, and an overbite. He had Kohler’s disease. DNA shows that the Pharaoh’s parents were certainly brother and sister.
39. To celebrate his rise to the throne, King Ingjald invited the neighboring kings to a feast and then vowed to expand his kingdom by half or die trying. While the other leaders were drunk, Ingjald burned the building and took their lands for himself, carrying out his vow overnight.
40. Redbad, the last pagan King of Frisia in northern Netherlands, would not convert to Christianity because he said he would rather spend eternity in Hell with his pagan ancestors than in Heaven with his enemies.
41. Only 5 years after it was invented, the King of Spain sent the smallpox vaccine around the world, keeping it in 22 orphans. Its creator, Edward Jenner, wrote, “I don’t imagine the annals of history furnish an example of philanthropy so noble, so extensive as this.”
42. The Red Hand became the symbol of Ulster because, in a myth, a boat race was held to choose the king, with the first to reach the shore winning the crown. One possible king saw that he was losing, cut off his hand, made it red with blood, and threw it onto the shore, winning the race.
43. King Kalākaua of Hawaii was the first king to travel around the world.
44. King Edward VII was too heavy to button his suit jacket all the way. To avoid offending the king, everyone else copied him, and that is how a trend began.
45. King Edward I constructed the biggest trebuchet ever to besiege a Scottish castle. The huge trebuchet frightened the Scots so much that they attempted to surrender, but Edward sent them back so he could use his new weapon to fire 300 lb projectiles at the castle.
Royal Reward for Farting
46. Roland The Farter was a professional flatulist who received a manor and 30 acres of land in return for amusing King Henry II.
47. A widely repeated story says the word Sirlion comes from an incident in which King James I of England, while entertained at Hoghton Tower on his 1617 return from Scotland, was so taken with his steak that he knighted the beef loin, which was afterward called “Sir loin”. There is no dependable evidence for this explanation, and scholars generally regard it as a myth.
48. Although Alexander the Great conquered the known world, he never tried to attack the city-state of Sparta.
49. When Jai Singh, the Maharaja of a princely Indian state, went to the Rolls-Royce showroom in London, he was insulted when the salesman suggested he could not afford the car. He bought ten of them, sent them to India, and instructed that they be used to collect and carry garbage.
50. In 2010, the head of King Henry IV of France was discovered preserved in the attic of a retired tax collector.
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