Adolf Hitler was vegetarian (or so Wikipedia says). Apparently, he covered his eyes during movies that showed cruelty to animals. Of course, he wasn’t above slaughtering a few million innocent people.
King Henry VIII was playing table tennis when Anne Boleyn was executed. This is true. It was in Horrible Histories.
Macbeth was widely regarded as a great Scottish king; his predecessor, Duncan, was not. Never let Shakespeare do your history homework for you.
The band Pink Floyd hated Andrew Lloyd Webber because he allegedly plagiarized some music from them for his 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera. Frankly, given how absolutely amazing his music is, I’d forgive him. Pink Floyd did not. They wrote a song involving him getting his fingers crushed by a piano lid.
Vlad Dracul of Romania liked eating his dinner among the rotting, impaled bodies of his enemies. He also liked nailing turbans to Turks’ heads. Just the sort of guy you want as your king, right?
One of Louis XIV’s chefs, Vatel, committed suicide because a shipment of lobsters hadn’t arrived on time. Let’s hope that’s just red sauce on your plate.
Some people think Jack the Ripper was a woman – a midwife, to be precise. Midwives often get covered in blood during the course of their jobs, so many people wouldn’t suspect them. Though, really. I would think anyone would suspect a blood-soaked woman strolling around London clutching a knife and a kidney.
Thomas Jefferson fell in love with an Englishwoman, Maria Cosway. He wrote her a 4,000 word love letter titled The Dialogue of Head vs. Heart. Gee, what a romantic guy.
