Have a heart
Sir: At the risk of upsetting a fellow Oxonian’s sensibilities, Paul Johnson (And another thing, 10 May) seems to be mistaken in writing about the heart of Le Roi Soleil (or at any rate a French king) ending up in the stomach of a ‘Cambridge professor of the rougher sort’. It was William Buckland, reader of Mineralogy and Geology at Oxford and subsequently Canon of Christchurch and Dean of Westminster, to whom Augustus Hare ascribed that ‘honour’.
Buckland, who was a considerable innovator in the English school of geology and described the first dinosaur (Megalosaurus) in 1824, was also a notable eccentric who prided himself on eating his way through the animal kingdom. Hare wrote: ‘Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French King preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, “I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,” and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.’ Professor N.H. Gale MA, PhD, DSc, BSc, ARCS, FSA
Nuffield College, Oxford
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