#I once wrote a fairytale about an orangoutang named King Drumpf

[roamingholiday]

Friday, July 7th 2017

Divorce, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.

The program took us to Hampton Court Palace, King Henry VIII’s home. The train ride was unmemorable, apart from the fact that we were all exhausted and spent most of it leaning on each other and staring in vague confusion at the sunlight, because this was the first train we’d taken above ground.

One of our professors was with us, but the other was at the airport meeting his family, and of course it turned out that the tickets were with him, so we had to wait about two hours for him to get from Heathrow to Hampton Court.

We were let go for those two hours to go find lunch, and four friends and I ended up at a pub. Very pleasant, fairly British, though we ended up being a little late back to the group after the two hours were up because we got very lost before we actually found the pub, because given the single main road and very simple directions, of course we did.

This is a map of Hampton Court:

The castle itself is stunning, but the gardens are really a work of art. We did, of course, get hopelessly lost more times than I care to admit.

My favorite part actually was the interior of the castle, if only because it was a fairly hot, sunny day, and the castle at least was cool. There were also quite a few architectural references to the Roman Empire, which I understood and took great pleasure in explaining to my companions. Each of the gates, for example, had pillars with a different famous Roman emperor’s face carved into them, like so:

(A translation, if you’re confused: Iulius, or Julius, full name Gaius Julius Caesar, Imperator, here meaning Emperor, though a more accurate title would be Proto-Emperor Who Was Actually Crowned Dictator For Life Which Is An Entirely Different Thing Belonging To An Entirely Different System Of Government But Then Was Stabbed To Death A Month Later So I Don’t Blame You For Forgetting The Difference. That’s hard to fit on a plaque, though.) 

I gave biographies of the more entertaining ones, though I honestly don’t know how much my friends believed me. I was accused, more than once, of making things up, though I swear it’s all true. Ancient Rome was a time, really.

I just kinda assume that if you’re reading this blog, you’re okay with me getting distracted from real life to tell stories about people who’ve been dead for millennia. So in no particular order:

AUGUSTUS

The first emperor, who was not actually an emperor. Showed up at eighteen after the death of his adopted father (Julius Caesar, you may have heard of him, it was an unexpected death, so to speak), took over the senate, then the country, then the known world, vaguely in that order. Small and sickly (and ginger, interestingly enough), which was one of the reasons that no one, say, just hypothetically speaking, stabbed him twenty three times in the middle of a senate meeting because they thought he was getting too powerful. There was no point in going to all the trouble of planning an elaborate assassination when the dude they were planning on assassinating was probably going to die in a year or two of whatever fatal illness he’d caught that particular time. Of course, that all means that Augustus lived to be 75 years old and died peacefully in his bed of old age. Who woulda thunk it.

Ruled for forty years. Arguably one of the most influential people to ever exist. Innately likable. Not prone to wandering around claiming to be king of the universe, unlike some Caesars that could be mentioned. Had quite possibly the most beautiful propaganda machine in human history. 

HADRIAN

Brought back beards. (Julius Caesar killed beards, by the way. In case you were wondering.) Really liked the Greeks and hellenization. (Hence the beard.) Had a Greek boyfriend. (Of course, who didn’t back then.) Responsible for the construction of Hadrian’s Wall, which is a Roman wall going through England, with Roman forts placed sporadically along it. (I have walked along it briefly. It is very large. Very wall-like. Long. Kinda twisty. Excellent structure, for something built thousands of years ago. Not surprising, Romans were famous for their infrastructure.) The wall represents the largest the Roman empire ever got. The instant that the boundaries of the empire were defined with the wall, the empire began to shrink. We have letters from soldiers writing home from their post along Hadrian’s Wall. They mostly say things like Wow I Understand Why Pants Are Important, and Please Send More Socks. Romans did not like England.

NERO

I am as alarmed as I’m sure you are to know that Henry VIII thought that Nero was a good enough role model to put his face outside his castle. I’m not surprised, but I am alarmed. Nero was the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned, which is not an entirely historically accurate statement, because fiddles hadn’t been invented yet, but he definitely did sit back and wait for the massive fire that destroyed countless insula (apartment buildings for the super poor) to burn itself out, and then had built on the ashes of those homes a palace that he called the Domus Aurea (Golden House), which contained a 35.5 m bronze statue of himself.

He’s also notable for having killed his mother. It took him a couple goes, though, because he tried to have her bed’s canopy rigged to fall on her in her sleep, and she survived, and he tried to have her poisoned, and she survived, and he tried to send her out on the sea in a boat that was built to collapse beneath her in the middle of the water, but she swam to shore and survived. Eventually he just sent a guy to stab her, because clearly nothing else would work.

After I finished my entirely delightful rendition of Roman Emperors And Their Exceedingly Odd Lives, we took a tour through the castle, in which we saw many beautiful rooms and innumerable pieces of exquisite artwork, including this wonderfully heterosexual wallhanging:

And this truly alarming statue, which I think is supposed to be a dolphin:

I won’t explain every single room in detail for you, mostly because I don’t think I could, and also they were pretty similar after a while. Very large. Lots of stuff on the walls, not a lot of stuff on the floor. High ceilings. Sometimes had a red velvet throne in the center. No discernible bookshelves, anywhere, which is way more alarming than the carving glorifying Nero out front.

This painting was in an alcove, and I was the first one to see it, which meant that I had the pleasure of watching each of my friends wander past, notice it in their peripheral vision, do a double-take, and then leap back with the same horrified expression that I assume I had, the first time I saw it.

This wooden man was standing in a corner of the courtyard, with no plaque to explain what exactly his purpose was. He appeared to be screaming. I don’t know why, though if I had an irresponsible, childish, delusional, narcissistic maniac as the leader of my country, I might be screaming too. Oh, wait. 

Once we’d exhausted the interior, we went out to see the gardens, and promptly got hideously lost. Our original intent was actually to find the maze, which we knew was somewhere outside, but of course the gardens themselves were apparently enough of a maze to stump all of us for a good hour. Stunningly beautiful, though. I particularly liked the hedge tunnel, because it was long and shady and reminded me of something a character from an old movie might run dramatically through.

There was also a hidden garden that could only be seen through strategically placed holes in a large shrubbery, which is why the angle of this photograph is wonky.

After walking in circles in the sun for a very long time, we eventually consulted the map, and after the map was removed from my hands and turned the right way up by people who are clearly more competent than I am, we actually found our way to the maze, which was rather anticlimactic after we spent so much time looking for it. Turns out it was all the way on the other side of the castle, which is why we couldn’t find it. It was a proper hedge maze, though, which was very cool, and we did hit a dead end twice, which meant it wasn’t entirely a waste of time.

We could have gone in to the castle again, after the maze, or took some time to explore the rest of the gardens, but to be quite honest it really was very hot that day, and we’d been outside in the sun long enough to feel rather dizzy, so instead we found a little cart and paid a surprisingly reasonable amount for about a dozen water bottles to split between the five of us, and also some ice cream for good measure. We met back up with the rest of our group in enough time to get the seven o’clock train back to London, and there ended our day at the palace of the President of the United States King Henry VIII.