Famous b******s (born out of wedlock)
Created | Updated Oct 21, 2003
FAMOUS B*******S -- AND THE COMING LACK OF THEM
By h2g2 researcher Lanky
First published November 2002
(Here a b*****d is taken to be a child apparently born outwith a regularized marriage. As will be seen, b******s [sometimes called illegitimate children] have little or nothing of which they need feel ashamed -- perhaps even the opposite. And many more children would have been *conceived* outwith marriage.)
The failure of successful men to have plenty of b*****d children is one problem the West is up against today. In the past, English kings on average sired more b******s than they had legitimate offspring. In Sweden of 1850, fully 50% of births were to unmarried women. Today, however, Western men are letting breeding with adolescent girls be done largely by spotty and drunken youths of distinctly mediocre IQ.
Presumably mature Western men today lack the opportunities once provided by having young domestic servants and plenty of farmland and outbuildings; and they can easily provide abortions when a girlfriend gets pregnant. (In the past, the girl would have been able to persuade some poor local lad to marry her, but today that will be much harder because the local boy will be more streetwise and may have been using contraception.) Another problem is that too many successful men may be spending all their spare time on Internet pornography because they fear the costs that divorce would involve if they were caught with a young mistress. The French, of course, manage these things a little better, with wives tolerating mistresses -- but pregnancies are still rare.
Incidentally, b*****y would have been eugenic in effect: only the higher quality offspring of rich men would have been supported and other infants would have been literally killed (often by the roundabout process of farming them out to wet nurses or "baby farmers" [who advertised frequently in the Daily Telegraph] in the country who in fact neglected them). It is arguable that surviving b******s themselves actually had pretty successful track records, e.g. {apparently -- assuming all adoptees were b*****s and no virgin births occur}:
Moses, King Solomon, Aristotle, John the Baptist, Jesus, Nero (r. 54-68), Pope Boniface I (418-22), Pope Gelasius (492-6), Pope Agapitus (535-6), Pope Theodore (642-9), Charlemagne, Charles Martel, the semi-legendary figures King Arthur, Gawain, Roland, Conchobar and Cuchulainn, King Harold I, William the Conqueror, Adrian IV (1154-9) King Edward III (r. 1327-77, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1515), Erasmus, Luther, Pope Clement VII (r. 1524 to 1534), Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) (r. 1533-1584), Queen Elizabeth I (was the only one of Henry VIII's four children who did not have congenital syphilis, and her mother, Anne Boleyn, was notoriously frisky), Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Jean d'Alembert (1717-1783), Jean Jacques Rousseau, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington Carver, James Smithson [founded the Smithsonian] (1765-1829), Booker T. Washington, August Strindberg, Alexander Dumas fils, Edgar Allen Poe, Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eartha Kitt, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Nancy Reagan, Nelson Mandela, Mike Tyson, Bill Clinton [his mother believed he was not conceived by her husband -- Sun.Telegraph, 28 x 03, Review, p. 10] Newt Gingrich, Fatima Whitbread [Olympic Athlete], Malcolm X and Leo Blair [father of Tony Blair].
And those are only the b******s we *know* about -- for today we realize that one family man in ten has a genetically b*****d child who calls him Daddy [BBC TV 1 programme by Lord Winston, November 2002], often unknown to the cuckold for some while, and this presumably applied in the past also. (Even this supply of b******s must be in decline now that DNA testing has arrived on the scene.)
Among English kings the records for near-certain production of b******s would be held by Henry I (20) and Charles II (16). Priestly production of b******s was always notorious: in 11th-century Spain and Switzerland, parishioners insisted that any priest must have a concubine as a measure of protection for their own wives. America's Thomas Jefferson sired at least six b*****d children. Nor were married women uninvolved: of the six children of Lady Melbourne [wife of the statesman Lord Melbourne, 1779-1848, one was fathered by the Prince of Wales, one by Lord Egremont, and one by an unknown sire.
Perhaps Shakespeare's 'Edmund' got it right?—
"... Why b*****d? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? b******y? base, base?
Who in the lusty stealth of nature take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake? ...
... I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for b******s!"
-- Edmund, Gloucester's b*****d son, in King Lear
Just a thought:
"[In nineteenth-century England,] the proportion of first children conceived extramaritally ([genetic] bastards and 'shotgun-wedding' children) may have reached three fifths."
Ferdinand MOUNT, 1982, 'The Subversive Family.' London : Jonathan Cape.
By h2g2 researcher Lanky
First published November 2002
(Here a b*****d is taken to be a child apparently born outwith a regularized marriage. As will be seen, b******s [sometimes called illegitimate children] have little or nothing of which they need feel ashamed -- perhaps even the opposite. And many more children would have been *conceived* outwith marriage.)
The failure of successful men to have plenty of b*****d children is one problem the West is up against today. In the past, English kings on average sired more b******s than they had legitimate offspring. In Sweden of 1850, fully 50% of births were to unmarried women. Today, however, Western men are letting breeding with adolescent girls be done largely by spotty and drunken youths of distinctly mediocre IQ.
Presumably mature Western men today lack the opportunities once provided by having young domestic servants and plenty of farmland and outbuildings; and they can easily provide abortions when a girlfriend gets pregnant. (In the past, the girl would have been able to persuade some poor local lad to marry her, but today that will be much harder because the local boy will be more streetwise and may have been using contraception.) Another problem is that too many successful men may be spending all their spare time on Internet pornography because they fear the costs that divorce would involve if they were caught with a young mistress. The French, of course, manage these things a little better, with wives tolerating mistresses -- but pregnancies are still rare.
Incidentally, b*****y would have been eugenic in effect: only the higher quality offspring of rich men would have been supported and other infants would have been literally killed (often by the roundabout process of farming them out to wet nurses or "baby farmers" [who advertised frequently in the Daily Telegraph] in the country who in fact neglected them). It is arguable that surviving b******s themselves actually had pretty successful track records, e.g. {apparently -- assuming all adoptees were b*****s and no virgin births occur}:
Moses, King Solomon, Aristotle, John the Baptist, Jesus, Nero (r. 54-68), Pope Boniface I (418-22), Pope Gelasius (492-6), Pope Agapitus (535-6), Pope Theodore (642-9), Charlemagne, Charles Martel, the semi-legendary figures King Arthur, Gawain, Roland, Conchobar and Cuchulainn, King Harold I, William the Conqueror, Adrian IV (1154-9) King Edward III (r. 1327-77, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1515), Erasmus, Luther, Pope Clement VII (r. 1524 to 1534), Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) (r. 1533-1584), Queen Elizabeth I (was the only one of Henry VIII's four children who did not have congenital syphilis, and her mother, Anne Boleyn, was notoriously frisky), Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Jean d'Alembert (1717-1783), Jean Jacques Rousseau, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington Carver, James Smithson [founded the Smithsonian] (1765-1829), Booker T. Washington, August Strindberg, Alexander Dumas fils, Edgar Allen Poe, Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eartha Kitt, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Nancy Reagan, Nelson Mandela, Mike Tyson, Bill Clinton [his mother believed he was not conceived by her husband -- Sun.Telegraph, 28 x 03, Review, p. 10] Newt Gingrich, Fatima Whitbread [Olympic Athlete], Malcolm X and Leo Blair [father of Tony Blair].
And those are only the b******s we *know* about -- for today we realize that one family man in ten has a genetically b*****d child who calls him Daddy [BBC TV 1 programme by Lord Winston, November 2002], often unknown to the cuckold for some while, and this presumably applied in the past also. (Even this supply of b******s must be in decline now that DNA testing has arrived on the scene.)
Among English kings the records for near-certain production of b******s would be held by Henry I (20) and Charles II (16). Priestly production of b******s was always notorious: in 11th-century Spain and Switzerland, parishioners insisted that any priest must have a concubine as a measure of protection for their own wives. America's Thomas Jefferson sired at least six b*****d children. Nor were married women uninvolved: of the six children of Lady Melbourne [wife of the statesman Lord Melbourne, 1779-1848, one was fathered by the Prince of Wales, one by Lord Egremont, and one by an unknown sire.
Perhaps Shakespeare's 'Edmund' got it right?—
"... Why b*****d? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? b******y? base, base?
Who in the lusty stealth of nature take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake? ...
... I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for b******s!"
-- Edmund, Gloucester's b*****d son, in King Lear
Just a thought:
"[In nineteenth-century England,] the proportion of first children conceived extramaritally ([genetic] bastards and 'shotgun-wedding' children) may have reached three fifths."
Ferdinand MOUNT, 1982, 'The Subversive Family.' London : Jonathan Cape.
