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dismantled after capture by parliamentary troops in 1643. This is Bolingbroke Castle, birthplace of Henry and origin of his rather unimaginative epithet. The castle was the chief seat of the duchy of Lancaster, and it was said to be haunted by a ghost that looked a bit like a hare or a rabbit, which would race between the legs of whomever it came across, sometimes knocking them over as it made its escape.
    Bomba
    Ferdinand II, king of the Two Sicilies, 1810–59
    Ferdinand’s oppressive reign sparked off numerous political disturbances, culminating in a popular uprising in Sicily in 1848. His response – a massive bombardment of several cities, especially Messina – earned him the nickname ‘Bomba’, while his son Louis was given the diminutive title ‘Bombalino’ for a similar attack on Palermo in i860.
    Ivar the Boneless
    Ivar, king of Dublin and York, c.794–872
    Identifying the historical Ivar is problematic since he lived in an era in the no man’s land between possible fact and probable legend. According to the late tenth-century Chronicle of Aethel-ward and other sources, Ivar was the leader of the Danish ‘Great Army’ which invaded England in 865, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle names him as the brother of Halfdan the BLACK (see COLOURFUL CHARACTERS ). Theories on the origin of his nickname abound:
    •   The sexual theory: he was impotent.
    •   The sarcastic theory: he was actually a giant.
    •   The scribal-error theory: some monk confused exos , meaning ‘bonelessness’, with the Latin exosus , meaning ‘detestable’.
    •   The hubristic theory: a ninth-century story tells of a sacrilegious Viking whose bones shrivelled up inside him after he had plundered the monastery of Saint-Germain near Paris.
    •   The medical theory: he was a disabled dwarf who suffered from brittle bone disease.
    His deeds are similarly confusing. Was he really responsible, as some sources attest, for the murder of St Edmund, who was tied to a tree, filled with arrows and then decapitated? And did he and his men really slaughter babies as they went on their conquests, and practise cannibalism? The problems of separating truth from fiction remain.
    Boney see Napoleon the LITTLE CORPORAL
    Bonnie Prince Charlie
    Charles Edward Stuart, pretender to the English throne, 1720–88
    Charles Stuart was a handsome young man and was very popular with some of the ladies of Edinburgh when he captured the city in 1745 as part of his vain attempt to secure the throne for his father, James the WARMING-PAN BABY . Some of the women went to great lengths to lay their hands on a lock of his hair, and miniature portraits of ‘the Highland Laddie’ were all the rage.
    After his crushing defeat at the battle of Culloden Moor against ‘William Augustus the Bloody Butcher’, his popularity waned significantly. Popular legend has it that one Flora Mac-Donald helped him escape by disguising him as her maid Betty Burke, and as a result Charles ended his days in Italy not as a ‘Young Pretender’ but as an old, worn-out and unattractive alcoholic.
      James the Bonny Earl
    James Stewart, second earl of Moray, d.1592
    Suspecting that James, the second earl of Moray, had been involved in a plot against his life, James the WISEST FOOL IN CHRISTENDOM issued a warrant for his arrest, and asked George Gordon, the sixth earl of Huntly, to oversee the matter. Huntly was more than happy to oblige since he hated the Bonny Earl with a passion. When he found James, who had holed up at his mother’s house on the coast of Fifeshire, Huntly did more than just arrest him. He set the building on fire, causing James to rush out and race to the beach where he was hacked down at the water’s edge.
    James was a good-looking man (hence his appellation ‘bonny’) and it is said that when Huntly gashed James’s cheek with a sword, James proudly exclaimed, ‘You have spoilt a better face than your own.’ His distraught mother took the corpse to Holyrood