Ill-timed parties, from Belshazzar to Boris

Rulers who revel while their people perish

By Jonathan Beckman

During the dog days of lockdown, when I was so starved of company that I struck up conversation with every shop-keeper, delivery driver and lamppost I encountered, I dreamt of parties. It wasn’t just the thrills I missed – the tinkle of laughter, the pirouette through a room of friends and benevolent strangers, the sudden condensation of a droll remark on the tip of my tongue – but the irritants too. I felt nostalgia for near-static toilet queues where half the people crossed their legs and the other half rubbed their noses. I missed the sight of a flotilla of fag-butts bobbing in abandoned glasses. I yearned to be backed into a corner by a man describing to me at great length the strategy for his next car purchase.

As it turned out, that is exactly what was going on at 10 Downing Street, which seems to have resembled a rolling stag-do more than a command centre during Britain’s greatest public-health crisis in a century (did some mistake the street name for an instruction?). Take a close look at one of the many photos of crammed white boards that Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former chief adviser turned antagonist, regularly posts, and you’ll probably find frenzied calculations about whether it’s possible to squeeze in a whisky tasting before the karaoke if the boys look sharp.

There is perhaps a deeper reason for the public outrage than just the stench of hypocrisy. Parties are a form of idolatry and the object of worship is ourselves. They celebrate our milestones, our achievements, our ongoing happiness. What monsters must these civil servants and special advisers be to drink and cackle at a time when human life had never felt so fragile? As history shows, the confidence of celebrants is frequently ungrounded. The gods look down and mock us.

Remote work Belshazzar’s feast, sixth century BC

As anyone who has ever had to explain a house party that’s got out of hand to their parents or the police knows, it’s the uninvited guests who cause the most trouble. Such was the case with the feast held by the sixth-century Babylonian king, Belshazzar. The tables were decked out with spoils looted by his predecessor Nebuchadnezzar, when he destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and brought the captive Judeans back east with him. But if there’s one person you don’t want to disturb enough for them to knock at your door and tell you to turn the music down, it’s God.

Suddenly a spectral hand appeared and inscribed an inscrutable phrase on the wall: Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin (in Rembrandt’s painting the Hebrew words are written vertically, Chinese-style). At this apparition, Belshazzar quite literally pissed himself and begged his soothsayers to interpret. Sadly they were stumped – possibly because they weren’t up to snuff, possibly because they couldn’t read Hebrew script. The only person able to throw light on the situation was Daniel, a captive Judean. The news wasn’t encouraging. Belshazzar’s days were numbered; he’d been weighed in the balance and found wanting; his kingdom would be divided. Scripture doesn’t record whether the party ever recovered its vibe, but Belshazzar managed to avoid the hungover clean-up. He was murdered that very evening.

Flattening the kerbs Nero, first century AD

It’s not that Nero didn’t have any wholesome pastimes. He enjoyed sculpture, painting and singing, even if his repertoire, with hits such as “Orestes the Matricide” and “The Blinding of Oedipus”, tended towards the macabre. He wrote poetry and forced the public to sit through his readings. He raced chariots, though the rules were warped in his favour (at one Olympic games, he toppled out of his seat, narrowly evaded being trampled by horses, yet was still declared victor).

But few figures in history have conjured up such a baroque set of depravities with which to amuse themselves. He gelded a young boy called Sporus and married him in a lavish mock wedding. Having dressed up as a wild animal, he would ravage the genitalia of men and women tied to stakes. Did Nero sleep with his mother? The ancient historian Suetonius can’t say for sure, but he certainly adopted a concubine who was her spitting image.

The circumstances of the fire in Rome, which left Nero famously unperturbed, are disputed. The city was constructed out of combustible building materials. The blaze may have been an accident or deliberate arson on the part of an emperor who wanted to level the city and rebuild it in his image. Nero may have been out of town at the time or accompanying the conflagration on his lyre from the roof of his place. But as another impulsive, party-loving leader may be about to find out, there is a limit to the public’s tolerance of their rulers’ extravagances. A revolt of Nero’s legionnaires in Gaul and Spain precipitated the abandonment by his supporters (Nero was particularly enraged when one of the chief rebels criticised his execrable lyre-playing). In the end, the emperor was struck by stage fright. He botched his own suicide and was finished off by one of his freedmen.

Wear a masque The ball of the burning men, 1393

Charles VI of France was not cut out for kingship. He suffered intermittent bouts of madness, believing himself to be made of glass and scurrying around his palace baying like a wolf. On one occasion, while riding into battle, he charged at his own nobles, who were forbidden by protocol from fighting back. Yet even he was not to blame for the fiasco that came to be known as the Bal des Ardents, or the ball of the burning men.

Queen Isabeau, Charles’s wife, had organised a masque to celebrate the third marriage of one of her ladies-in-waiting. Charles and five other young bucks dressed up as wild men of the woods in highly flammable costumes made from bunches of hemp stuck onto linen with pitch and resin. This may have been an era before health and safety regulations, but common sense reigned: attendees were specifically prohibited from bringing in burning torches, an instruction ignored by Charles’s envious brother, the Duke of Orléans.

Inevitably, one performer brushed against the flame and caught alight. Charles survived thanks only to the quick thinking of the Duchess of Berry who used her capacious skirt as a fire blanket. The others were not so lucky. One of the nobles burned to death on the spot. Another three lingered in agony for a few days before expiring. In the aftermath, Charles’s psychological health deteriorated further. He was heard begging to die. Orléans became regent for a time though got his comeuppance in the end. He was assassinated in 1407 with an axe to the head.

Sour dough Marie Antoinette, 18th century

One ought to feel a certain sympathy for Marie Antoinette. On marrying Louis XVI, she left her loving family for the chilly formality of the French court. Austria, her motherland, had historically been France’s enemy and many hangers-on at Versailles viewed her with suspicion. Her husband barely seemed to know what sex was, let alone take an interest in her.

No wonder she retreated into her own private quarters. Her hobbies were hardly Neronian. She gambled and conducted a prolonged flirtation with a Swedish count, which may have teetered over into an affair. At her palace in Petit Trianon near Versailles, she built a hamlet with a mill and a working dairy farm where she could let her hair down playing the milkmaid.

But her desire for a private life was weaponised against her during the French revolution. Writers of anonymous libels dubbed her “L’Autrichienne” (a portmanteau best translated as “The Habsbitch”), who held orgies behind closed doors where she humiliated her husband and coupled indiscriminately with men and women, commoners and the king’s brother. The revolutionaries thought that her intimate gatherings served as cover for plots to sell out the country. With every evening she had spent playing cards, she was dealing out her doom.

A social distance Duchess of Richmond’s ball, 1815

The battle of Waterloo was almost lost for the sake of party. Believing that hostilities wouldn’t commence for at least a fortnight, the Duke of Wellington assured the Duchess of Richmond, wife of one of the British generals stationed in Belgium for the campaign against Napoleon, that she might hold a midsummer ball without “fear of interruption”.

Almost all the top brass of the British Army attended, including the Iron Duke himself (in William Thackeray’s novel “Vanity Fair”, the feckless George Osborne, shortly to die, wangles an invite and spends the evening ignoring his wife). Yet the party had barely started when rumours began to spread of a skirmish between French troops and Britain’s Prussian allies. Wellington tried to maintain his poise, but those who knew him well could make out the concern on his face. The pace of dispatches increased as the evening wore on. Yet Wellington remained, politely flirting with the ladies and issuing orders to his men.

The crowd thinned out as officers returned to the regiments and the proceedings took on an air of melancholy: many guests realised this might be the last time they saw their loved ones. Some departed so late that they had no time to change into their combat uniforms, and fought the next day in evening dress. This was the last dance for a number of the gallants. Sir Alexander Gordon had his leg amputated on the battlefield of Waterloo and died the following day. Wellington would later claim it made perfect sense for him to spend the eve of the fight at the Duchess of Richmond’s: it was, after all, the one place he was certain to find his officers.

Isolated The shah’s party, 1971

The starriest party of the 20th century was held in the ruins of the ancient Iranian city of Persepolis in 1971. The five-day revel was attended by more than 60 heads of state, including Haile Selassie, Tito and the Ceausescus. Communists hobnobbed with royalty, dictators broke bread with democrats. Imelda Marcos rubbed shoulders with Grace Kelly, by then princess of Monaco.

The ostensible occasion for the event was to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Iranian empire by Cyrus the Great. The real purpose was to show the world that Iran was a coming power and that Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the shah, was an inspired moderniser. Thousands of trees were planted in the desert and hundreds of sparrows were flown in from Spain to sing on their branches (they couldn’t stand the heat and kept falling, lifeless, to the ground). The organisers flung up a city of pavilions to accommodate the guests. Food came courtesy of Maxim’s, a soigné Parisian restaurant, where chefs regarded cooking as an opportunity to stuff anything in sight with truffles and foie gras. The guests drank an un-Islamic quantity of champagne, whisky and claret.

The shah styled himself as Cyrus redivivus and argued that the Cyrus Cylinder, an ancient document now housed in the British Museum, contained the world’s first bill of rights. This comparison might have resonated better if Iran’s secret police hadn’t had a global reputation for torturing dissidents – and if nearly half of the country hadn’t been living in poverty. When the shah was overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979, the ayatollahs made sure to remind their new subjects how he swanked while they starved. It was a long hangover.

Jonathan Beckman is deputy editor of 1843 magazine

IMAGES: GETTY, BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, ALAMY

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