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The Bitch Goddess

By LORD EGREMONT

NAPOLEON made a mistake about Fortune: he said that Fortune was a ." woman : he went on to ' say that the more she did for him, the more he would require of her. Look what Fortune did for him in the end! Fortune

// diddled him.

One bright May morn- / ing long ago a fortune- teller, holding my wife's pearls in her hand, told her that I would be Prime Minister. My wife told the fortune-teller not to be daft and said that I was not even an MP and had no inten- tion of trying to become one. The fortune- teller said she couldn't help that, indicating that such a necessary preliminary to the office was an irrelevant quibble to one of her central Euro- pean origin. She could see me, she insisted, in No. 10 Downing Street for six years. She was, in a way, right. I was there for six years— as the Prime Minister's secretary.

The best you are likely to get out of going to see a seer is the worst of it. For at best the seer or yourself is likely to get the prognostica- tion just wrong enough to make it useless.

An ancestor of mine, Sir William Wyndham, on coming down from Oxford did the Grand Tour. In Venice a fortune-teller told him to beware of a white horse. William didn't bother much about this until soon after his return to England and out for a walk near Charing Cross, he saw people going in and out of a house. He asked what was going on there. He was told Mat Duncan Campbell, a deaf-and-dumb sooth- sayer and purveyor of miraculous cures, was doing business there. William went in and was startled to be warned again to beware of a white horse.

How Duncan Campbell in his condition corn- municated with his clients I do not know, but what I do know is that he put the wind up William, who decided there and then that he had better be careful about the colour of the horses which he bought.

In 1715 William was arrested as a Jacobite and taken to the Tower of London. As he was led into the Tower he looked up and, lo and behold, there was the white horse of the Hanover coat of arms over the gateway.

So that was what they meant, thought William. After his release he took care not to get into trouble again with King George and so regarded the portent as laid. This was a mistake. For later he was thrown from a white horse and kicked. Nevertheless he survived. Had he been killed, this story would have been neater. But Fortune is untidy. When later William died in his bed, Pope wrote: 'If I see any man merry within a week after this death, I will affirm him no true patriot.'

So much for William, my forebear. Another relative of mine was Harry Hotspur. On July 21, 1403, just before the Battle of Shrewsbury, Harry called for his favourite sword. They had to tell him that they had gone and left it behind in a neighbouring Shropshire village called Berwick, where he had spent the previous night without noticing the village's name. Harry turned pale and said, 'Then has my plough reached its last furrow.' He had been warned by a sooth- sayer that he would die near Berwick. As a Border fighter, he had never doubted that Berwick-on-Tweed was what was meant. He had never before heard of the Salopian Berwick.

Shortly after midday the opposing side put out their banners. Battled was joined. And Harry Hotspur was killed.

In his lifetime Harry was the cynosure of noble youth :

And by his light

Did all the chivalry of England move

To do brave acts. . . . the glass Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves as Shakespeare wrote about him. Fashion was set even by Harry's defects. He had a thickness or hesitation of speech, which was sedulously copied.

When 2,400 years ago Croesus consulted the Delphic oracle about fighting Cyrus, the oracle said, 'Fight him and you will destroy a mighty empire.'

Croesus did so and destroyed his own empire. What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expect generally happens.

If Fortune is, as Napoleon said, a woman, she is a bitch.