Last night I stayed up entirely too late, absorbed in Paul Johnson’s book ‘Heroes’, of which I will write more anon.
The book was worth the price of admission if only for reminding me of the reply Lord Lovat gave to a heckler while being conveyed to his execution.
Lord Lovat was a Scots noble who came out for the Bonnie Prince in The ’45. (That is, he sided with the Stuart pretender Charles Edward Stuart when he attempted to wrest the throne of England and Scotland from the House of Hanover in 1745.) Lord Lovat became the last noble to be executed in the Tower of London shortly thereafter.
While on his way to the execution ground, an old woman shouted from the crowd, “They’re going to hang you, ye old Scotch dog!”
He replied, “I believe they are, you old English bitch.”
One of my hobbies is collecting historical examples of snappy comebacks and famous last words.
Everyone knows Winston Churchill’s great comeback to, “Winston Churchill, you are horribly drunk.”
“Madam, you are horribly ugly. But in the morning I shall be sober.”
But only real aficionados of the comeback know the one from a conversation between a Roman matron and a woman of then-Celtic Gaul around the first or second century AD.
The Roman matron charged that Celtic women were, well – sluts.
The Celtic woman replied, “Our customs are more in accordance with the laws of nature than yours. For we consort openly with the best of men, while you debauch yourselves in secret with the vilest.”
Lord Lovat’s utterance falls in both categories, snappy comebacks and famous last words.
Another example might be Ethan Allen on his deathbed. Allen was a militant atheist, and when a doctor tried to comfort him thus, “General, I fear the angels are waiting for you.”
He replied, “Waiting are they? Waiting are they? Well damn them let ’em wait!”
We love last words that show courage and class and inspire us to believe that we too might die well, no matter what the circumstances.
Who could forget the Viking warrior who, when struck near the heart with an arrow, pulled it out, looked at it and said, “My king has been good to me, there is much fat around my heart roots.”
And some can move you to tears. The sweet and unaffected goodness of Marie Antoinette for example. As she mounted the scaffold to the guillotine, she accidentally stepped on the foot of the executioner and said, “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.”
Equally touching is the story of John Jacob Astor, at the time the richest man in the world.
After an apparently messy divorce, Astor 46, married an 18-year-old woman named Madeline. Because this was a public scandal they took a two-year holiday abroad to let things cool down a little. But when Madeline became pregnant they decided to return to New York.
Unfortunately they booked passage aboard the Titanic.
After the Titanic hit the iceberg, the Astors were about to board one of the last remaining lifeboats when John Jacob saw a woman approaching.
He turned to his wife and said, “The ladies have to go first. . . . Get in the lifeboat, to please me. . . . Good-bye, dearie. I’ll see you later.”
Courage and class indeed!
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After Paul Johnson reminded me of Lord Lovat’s bon mot, I googled “famous last words” and found this treasure of a site, ‘Last Words’: http://www.sanftleben.com/Last%20Words/lastwords.html
It is divided into: fictional last words, real last words, epitaphs, farewells, and last stands.
Check it out.
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