Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 341 - The Cadiz Expedition

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

Support the show on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/lionsledbydonkeys We're on Bluesky @lionsledbydonkeys.bsky.social The English launch a raid against the Spanish city of Cadiz. Instead of planning anything whatsoever, the English get drunk on the beach and die. Correction: James VI/James I. Not James IV Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20070311113513/http://history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%20292%201626.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20061003025931/http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/glossary/cadiz.htm https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/cadiz-expedition-1625-m.html https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781315257228-16/expedition-cadiz-1625-ronald-bedford-lloyd-davis

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you ebooks, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets, and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community.

So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys and join the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate. We're simple fishermen living in England in the 1600s. In between bouts of explosive diarrhea and mysteriously coughing up blood, we ply our trade on the high seas, catching flavorless whitefish because that's the only kind of seafood the simple English stomach can digest without dying. Eventually we're called back to port because the king decides he really wants to invade Spain and the Royal Navy does not have enough ships. So we've been conscripted. Despite being men of the sea

nobody wants to listen to us when we point out that we need things like food and water in order to make the journey across the ocean because we are but mere commoners. The concepts of weather are also lost on them and they order us to sail directly into a storm where we all quickly die. Though we die with smiles on our face, rum on our lips, and inside of one another's guts. Happy we won't have to suffer our fate of being English any longer. If you were any luckier you would have just been sent to Ireland to chop down literally 90% of our forests. Somehow Ireland does come up in a bit.

You know what's really funny is I was thinking about this. Hilary Mantle's series about Wolf Hall is basically about Henry VIII. And it's interesting because I can't remember the main character's names. I'm sure if I was actually British if I was raised there, this is like someone who I have to fucking know about. But like his sort of counselor and it's like he runs away from home to become a mercenary because his dad's a piece of shit. The author has done quite a good job of, you know, capturing historical details, but she

winds up writing him basically a sort of like 16th century Baz. Apparently like one of his Welsh relatives intervenes about him being a bastard. He's like, fuck off or I'll stomp you. You leaky eating cunt. And I was just sort of like imagining, yes, basically that guy is eternal. Like the Romans dealt with that guy. You just see a barbarian running down the hills and he's after some snorting powdered mugwort. An XL bully on each arm. The eternal French guy is like a skinny wiry horny man. The eternal French guy is like a skinny, wiry, horny man.

The eternal British guy is just bad. Like he's always bald, he's always big, and he's always just like, hey, that kind of guy. Just that permanently pews face. I love that we have found the time in history where it actually would have been better to live in my father's side of the family's village. Am I getting like pulled into machinery in some unventilated factory and mulch to shit because I'm a child with small hands or am I just like tending some goats in the Anatolian plains?

This sounds lovely. Yeah, nothing bad is ever going to happen here anyway. Or my last name isn't Kasebi. I got a couple hundred more years before things go real sideways. So that sounds like a problem for my kids and grandkids. As a side note, this is just very funny to me. Years, I mean, it's a long time ago, like well over 20 years ago, there was an article in the Atlantic talking about pre Columbus Americas and like, you know, what are the sort of perspectives on civilizations, pre contact, pre Columbian exchange. And one of the things that has stuck in my mind all these years, because I must've read this article in high

school, is that the author asked a bunch of different historians and ethnographers, would you have rather lived in 1491 America or 1491 Europe? And he was like, almost all of them deferred and said it wasn't a fair comparison. The point of their job is not to make these comparisons. But he's like, but I pressed them and out of 28 people I asked, all 28 said I would rather have lived in the Americas. Yeah. Because Europe fucking sucked so bad.

Yeah, like I know my joke was like getting pulled into machinery like the industrial revolution and that wasn't happening yet in the 1600s, but still living in a plague ridden sewer city ruled by absolute dipshits or just living in a village where the outside world doesn't really bother me. At least I have clean air. Yeah, like your family being descendants of like shepherds in the Anatolian Plain are

essentially just Rolf from Ed Edd n Eddy. Ralf Ralfian of the Hermedian Islands. But it's like, yeah, the problems that exist on the Anatolian Plains are severe problems, let's be perfectly honest here, but like pastoral problems are slightly different than, I live in the city of diarrhea water, and the king is too busy screaming about how tobacco is, is a fucking like element of the devil's reign over man

to actually do anything about the diarrhea water. I like my chances having to dodge the occasional roundup of Janissary children. That's like. Okay, okay. So today's story brings us to the shores of Spain where thousands of drunken English people found themselves uninvited, ruining everything they touched

and making an ass out of themselves. No, we're not talking about this year's holiday season, we're talking about the Cadiz Expedition of 1625. Yeah, the spirit of Benidorm is eternal. I love the idea you dig up an artifact from the 17th century in Benidorm, or on the Andalusia area or La Casa del Sol, and it's like middle Spanish written in the funny script and stuff and it's just, please don't do cocaine in our bathrooms. No, it's just like you find this letter in this urn that's praising the fact you can get a pint of ale and a leg of mutton for one piece of silver.

Exactly. It's the instructions to walk off the path to the village elder who can tell you where you can hook up with this hot prostitute. That was the Stansted Airport bathroom stall of its day. The guy who is, like, managing the one prostitute is just the Ur version of Wayne Lineker. As always, thousands of armed dickheads didn't end up on random beach trying to kill one another out of nowhere. There's a long winding backstory to this entire thing largely based on the simple fact that Spain is Catholic and England is Protestant,

leading to multiple wars and proxy wars between them over which group of pedophiles they believed could talk to God on their behalf. England at the time was under the reign of King James IV, famously known as the guy nearly blown to and Ashes by Guy Fawkes, something my fellow Americans have probably only ever heard of because of V for Vendetta and the most annoying people on the internet for a few years. Oh man it was bonfire night the other day and like I live in north west London and the sound of the fireworks going off constantly was like this is the closest I'll ever be to having served in Desert Storm.

I was on the internet when the Guy Fawkes mask became a thing and it never really I never got it because it's like you're championing a guy who wanted a Catholic theocracy bro. I get wanting to blow up the government I guess if you're one of those people but like this is the one? Alright. Oh god, I wish we had a beep on the soundboard. I mean, I was gonna say, yeah, the one time when I wrote- used to write freelance articles, and people got really mad at me about my opinions about guns, one of the people who was trying to talk shit to me was like, obviously a high school kid,

and his profile picture was the V for Vendetta mask with two crossed AR-15s, but if you scrolled through you could see his old profile pictures and the best way I could describe him is 15 year old brother Beringar from Name of the Rose. Like basically just like rotund albino and I was just like, you're not, you're not going to shoot me. I know, you know, brother, you look like, I'm not going to say because mean, even though that person's obviously an adult now, at the time he was a kid kid But I was like Midwest bully light Dashboard of my brain like oh heaven help me. It's time to go back to the old me It was definitely a time in history that was a massive background character to anywhere

I went online in the mid-2000s because of Hugoaving X absolutely killing that part of V for Vendetta. But yeah, it was a certain kind of guy there for a while and they still exist and they're just as annoying. I did see like an incredible fucking TikTok edit the other day of like, so these guys on TikTok, they're like Chinese wig manufacturers and they have these like 26 inch long silk press wigs and just do like videos of them shaking the hair to Nicki Minaj songs, but intercut with that was footage from Fer Vendetta with him with the fucking wig on.

Everybody knows V had the wettest of pussies. That was a Nicki Minaj right? Okay just making sure my fucking- That was Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. Fuck, that doesn't even make sense. Actually, Cardi B and Nicki Minaj have beef, so you're going to irritate. All the barbs are going to come for you now. Don't get me wrong. I am not a Nicki Minaj defender. I am not a Minajian or whatever it is that they call themselves. She's done a lot of fucked up shit.

There is like a twink with a BMI of about 14 and six inch long press on nails that is typing a reply to this episode right now. Thanks for listening to our show though. I'm impressed you could type. Well done. The degree to which you will find these things, which is like countries around the world where they're sort of obligated to, how do you describe this? They have to serve the consumer demands of the dumbest people in the world, AKA people with money who find things on the internet in the developed world. And so they're

just like, whatever. You know what? Yeah, I'll make weird Guy Fawkes masks in the people's 358th Bra Clip factory. Yeah, I'm going to make V for V for Vendetta masks with a Joker mask underneath them, just to be even worse. But I was thinking too about, there was years ago, the total lack of intellectual property stuff when it comes To like their social media is a very funny and this has nothing to do with it But it does have to do with the Spanish language in Spain because things that are buried in my mind About like Spanish and all I can think of is when you're describing like the battle that's about to unfold between dickheads versus other you know Spanish people and the Brits is

years ago, there was this uh There was this restaurant in in Baja, California on the Mexican side. You know what I mean? Like way down south who did an ad for like they're basically just dinner spreads, but they dubbed over shit from one of the Marvel movies with Thanos. And I'm dead serious. Basically they superimposed in like green screened in Thanos just working

throughout the entire thing so it's like playing like max like you sort of stereotypical Mexican music and it's showing all the different food spreads and stuff and then it's just Thanos just fucking shaking it. I was just like you know what I respect it so much. But anyway to get back to the story when some Angloid invades your beach and you just have to hit them with that ja ja ja stare. Because of the King's family line he was the potential heir for the English, Scottish, and Irish crowns which he eventually got in the world's version of the most inbred hat trick imaginable. He was also the guy who connected religion to the English monarchy, created the English version of the divine right of Kings in short?

Kind of a bad guy a real piece of shit. I'll be real with you I knew about James the first but not not James the fourth so it seems like there's a lot of bad James No good J. All James's are bastards That sounds like you're getting made fun of by a Mexican dude, but he's really bad at typing Sounds like you're getting made fun of by a Mexican dude, but he's really bad at typing Ja ja ja ja job and he was also bisexual at minimum hang Possibly gay we we don't entirely know that isn't the part that makes him a bastard I know that one follows the other but those aren't connected the turn of phrase is bisexual Kings for Literal bisexual King a fact that was pretty well known to absolutely everyone,

to the point that while he was ruling Scotland, people called him the Queen. What a legend, like I definitely gave this guy a lighter in Dalton Superstore like three weeks ago, what a king. It gets better while simultaneously being worse, cause this isn't something I'm bringing up for background information, this is very important to how this story gets to where it's going. At the time, at the beginning of our story, the King's favorite male lover was a guy named Robert Carr, the first Earl of Somerset. However, as much as the King loved him, his advisors and the political beings of the court

absolutely fucking hated him. He tended to have way too much sway with the King, and in a way that of course they didn't like. There's also the fact by nature of fucking the King, the King kept giving him more and more official responsibilities and titles he was not prepared for, and rather than learning them, Carr simply pawned all those duties off on a different guy who he was also fucking Who was even less prepared for those jobs and he was you know? This is the thing that always gets me about this It's like if you're if you're the the beloved of the king

It's like why are you having him bestow a job on you and this is like you I really want to work more Right surely like you know what like you want to be keep keeping you know keep yourself Your head below the parrot pad a little bit here. It's like, you know, maybe like give you some lands and some productive things, you know, stuff that's going to make you money and so on. Cause when twink death inevitably happens, you got something to fall back on. You know what I mean? You get some peerages to use. Make me like, I don't know, like a privy counselor. It's like, why would you want to do that? Do you think anyone's like, Oh, I'm sure this guy is really, really good at his job. Yeah. No, no, no. You just you like you just fucking slaying dick well

enough that the king loves you. And now apparently we're peers. Hey, we respect the hustle. So people secure the bag in multiple different ways. Sometimes you got a top from the bottom. That's all I got to say. We started from the bottom. Now we're here. The history of the kings of England, Scotland, United Kingdom, et cetera, there's a lot of topping from the bottom in terms of like their court inner circles. This is not the last time this will happen during the story. And Carr was supposed to marry a woman. Obviously he was not hiding all of his male lovers.

The woman gets jealous and uses her own family's political connections to get his second lover thrown in the Tower of London where he dies. But Carr, now the Lord Chamberlain, had built a large number of very very powerful enemies. And when those enemies saw that the King was kinda given the fuck me eyes to a 21 year old named George Villier while out hunting, they sprang into action. They quickly bought Villier new clothes gave him a makeover. He was juggling him and began bribing other officials until he was put alongside the king in the position of the royal cup bearer meaning he would be right next to the king all the time so it did not take the king long to

drop Carr and begin fucking the new piece at court. Like, look, all I'm gonna say is, it's very congruent for an old queen to take up a 22 year old boyfriend. How dare you! He is 21, sir! Okay, sorry, sorry, 21. We're gonna do age gap discourse on 17th century kings of England. I was just thinking, it's very funny that turning up a beautiful young man in order to put the person in power in an uncompromising situation.

I didn't realize that the plot of the first disc of Final Fantasy VII hewed so closely to middle English history. But you know what? You think I'm making it up. As Cloud Strife, you have to get dressed up and your party has to fucking pick the best outfit to put you in convincing drag so that you can then basically go in and fuck this dude, but instead of fucking him, basically threaten to cut his dick off. Once again, politics upended by the furtive bottom. That's all I'm gonna say. Villier quickly began rocketing up through the ranks at court, kissing ass with the best

of them, and becoming Prince Charles, of course, the king's son, dance instructor along the way. This is a really important position, even though it sounds kind of lame. It is kind of amazing how little, like basically how like officially punished and scrutinized like things were in terms of like religious teachings about homosexuality and how many obviously gay jobs there were at the same time. It's just sort of like, I'm sorry, but like we found the most beautiful twink in the land to be the princess dance instructor. It's just sort of like, do you think that guy is like an eel fisherman?

Somehow we found 17th century Louis Spence and made him the most powerful person in the country. He was knighted. He was given the very apt title of the gentleman of the bed chamber, which was an official role, not just the very apt title of the gentleman of the bedchamber Which was an official role not just the guy who fucks the king, but it is you know yeah 17th century tramp stamp tattoo reads exactly that still somehow. It's barbed wire with butterflies around it or something The king also revived the title of the Duke of Buckingham for him

The king also revived the title of the Duke of Buckingham for him. He was rising through the ranks so much that the House of Covens began to hate him as he had continuously asked for money for more and more projects, and at the time England was quite poor, they didn't have money to give him. And because of his connections with the king, he was allowed to get away with whatever he wanted. Their relationship was so open and obvious, a visiting French artist penned a poem about it, which in case you're wondering, I do have here. Read it.

Read it. Apollo with his songs, debauched young Hyacinth, and he learned the English king wasn't bucking him his fuck. I would say, yeah, whenever they start invoking Apollo and Hyacinthus or, I don't know, Zeus and Ganymede, you kind of know where it's going. Yeah. I mean, like, it was completely open. Nobody was hiding anything.

And this brings us to something called the Spanish match, which was a ploy to marry Prince Charles off to Princess Maria Anna of Spain in the hopes that the political arrangement would finally bring the warring between the two sides to end for good this time. However, I should point out here that this is really an only a popular ploy with the king and Villiers and that's pretty much it. Nobody else, everybody else fucking hated it. The commons hated the idea of any union with the Catholics and in fact demanded that the king go to war with Spain instead, but they refused to vote to grant him money to pay

for the war with Spain, so the king just kind of shrugged it off. Seeing the money issue, the Spanish then upped the possibility of a dowry for the possible marriage, which meant the king was now more interested in marriage Than any war because England is broke as fuck Mm-hmm, and this is a really good way to end the war secure the bag and all these other things I'll end the war if you send me seven of your swarthy a soldier You know, what's funny Tom Joe probably won't get this but Tom you definitely will I looked up George Villier First Duke of Buckingham and all the portraits were like by like Rubens and stuff, and he just looks like Rick Mayall

Like he doesn't look like it's wait like oh, baby They painted him in post-twinx phase look him up man for real look up George Maybe there's maybe two different back then I mean, but I don't know I don't know man He's got he's got a powerful twink death hairline. It takes one to fucking know what he's following along the Tom version of twink death What was that facial hair? Yeah, I'm covered in tattoos going bald. Yeah, finally something we all could agree on But each time either from a religious politics or their own internal court shit, the arrangement of the Spanish match fell through. So Villier and Prince Charles hatched a plan of their own. Fuck the king, fuck the church, we're gonna go to Spain undercover to make the case to

the princess herself. Traveling under the names Thomas and John Smith, they arrived in Madrid on March 7th, 1623. And it may have been there that Villier realized that, I might be in a little bit over my head. See there's actually two reasons why the Spanish had yet to agree to the marriage. For one was the princess flat out fucking refused to marry Charles, mostly because he was Protestant. And for two, the Spanish King never actually intended on marrying her off. He was instead using the entire ploy to keep the English on the hook and out of the 30 years war that was currently boiling through the mainland. As long as the King of England thought that he could marry into the Spanish throne, he

would not commit to war. So these two guys show up and the Spanish court are openly mocking trash talking and shit talking them to their face for showing up unannounced. They're being called a word that begins with M in Spanish. That is very offensive. The king of Spain politely asked the king of England to execute Villier for being a fucking asshole, because when he's confronted with all of this shit at court, he doesn't just leave, Villier starts like shit talking them back, like insulting the Pope, Catholicism,

like they're rap battling in the Spanish court. He is Rick Mayall as fucking Lord Flash heart in the blackheader series. Like everything looks like him. Apparently he acts like him too. He's following in the great gay tradition of reading people for Phil. Like he's just like your shoes, they're ugly. Like why would we marry into this court? Your fabrics are terrible. You call that carmineine that's at best a chartreuse Villier in turn once a supporter of the Spanish match returned to England so embarrassed at his failure and so pissed off about how he was treated he came back championing war against spade effect

because they made him feel sad this is amazing at. At the end of this all, as always, it just goes really bad for Ireland because of this. It's like fun fact. It does. My twink boyfriend made fun of so badly by some Spaniards. Let's just decimate an entire country. I'll give you a sneak peek. Small domino twinkink death large domino plague sweeping through Ireland small domino twink death large domino 400 years later I suffer twink death All I can think of is like Imagining this scene playing out is a film that is actually has incredible writing and comic timing even though like I think it is

It's a little bit slept on in this regard legally blonde and the court scene where they have to prove that the guy Is gay. Yeah, I don't know if you recall this but basically It's so dumb But basically the guys like trying to pretend they actually know there's no way that this he's actually heterosexual And so the guy just leads him through a bunch of like procedural questions and his answers really quick And he's like, what's your boyfriend's name? He's like Chuck. He's like, oh wait, no, no, no, he's nobody He means nothing to me. And then for some reason his boyfriend is in the courtroom He goes you bitch storms out

To me I'm just like that's this but it led to 400 years of more of additional misery on top of misery for Ireland King James the messiest bitch in court Now before he goes to war though, he arranges a new marriage for the prince to Henrietta Maria of France. Fortunately it goes smoothly. Unfortunately in case you're wondering, she was also Catholic. Which made parliament hate him even more for engineering this entire idea. Then as King James continues politicking, he wanted to retake the palatinate for Elector

Frederick V, his son-in-law and King of Bohemia. But he didn't want to do it directly, so he left Villiers to hire some mercenaries to get the job done, so the King could of course later take credit. He hired a guy named Ernst Mansfeld, a Catholic who was fighting for the Protestants. This failed, and the Commons once again blamed Villiers for all of it on top of giving their money to a catholic. Which, you know what, fair enough I guess, this one he does own. He hired the guy. By this point King James was old, sick,

and bedridden. Knowing the commons hated his boyfriend and knowing they might eat him alive once he was gone, the king dissolved parliament and brought in a new one who would be more pro his boyfriend. Who at this point is now just as close with Prince Charles as he was to the king, minus the fucking allegedly. There's also rumors about that one. This parliament also happened to be very very pro-war against Spain, as pretty much any gathering of English people at the time would be. Villiers and Charles were also very pro-war,

who, after March 27th 1625, Charles is now king. King James has finally died. The difference between the two kings is James understood Parliament, even if he kept swapping them out, right? He knew they would yell at him about war, but then they wouldn't pay for it. So to simply ignore them, don't talk openly about war or Spain, we'll leave each other alone, don't want to deal with it, we can't afford it. Charles doesn't understand parliament that well. Now with these two dumbasses in power, King Charles immediately declares war on Spain, acting on both Villiers and the Commons recommendation.

And then the Commons just kind of shrugged and said, Have fun with your war, King. We don't have any money to give you, you're on your own. Yeah, let your no time, King. The King, now confused and worried that he was at a war he couldn't actually fight, at the urging of everyone around him, panicked and demanded Villier to do something about it. Fix this problem that you caused. Villiers in the like, commons, like, whatever version of a toilet stall they have just posting on his close friends. So he's like, fuck, fuck that. I have to do this. I don't know

what to do. Someone help me please. I love the idea that you have like, in those days, like carrier pigeons, but they have a green band around their ankle because it's for close friends only That's my close friend pigeon circle Ville probably rightly assumed shit if I don't figure this out I'm probably going to the Tower of London I have to think of something the English were broke as hell, but the Spanish were Fantastically wealthy owing to the ships of gold and silver being floated back over to Europe from the New World.

His idea was to simply use the Royal Navy to raid those fucking ships and steal the precious metals for themselves, because the English had actually done this before, so they figured why not do it again. They're doing crackhead shit. They're like ripping the copper out of the wall. Rating a Spanish galleon, leaving all the gold behind, but stealing all their copper wire. It is kind of funny.

It's like in the context of geopolitical stuff, if in the modern day there was just like, oh yeah, this is your enemy that you're going to go to war with. Also like, for some reason they've built a train entirely out of money And it's like the carriages the tracks the rails the engines are all also money They're actually burning money to power it and usually what if we just take the train? Billy a scratching his neck and staring at a Spanish galleon as it floats through the ocean like does that think of a catalytic converter?

Romanian George I'm stealing the rudder off the ship. Oh my god. I'm just loving this idea too. It's just like, you know, what are we gonna do? Our treasury is empty, you know, our economy is unproductive. Where England sucks here, it always has. And it's like, meanwhile, you're like the Southampton or something and a Spanish ship goes by and goes like, damn, this boat is slow is slow It's like all this money on board Y'all know how to make a boat go faster when it's full of money what? everybody very confused with the king and And previous Kings fuck boy comes in is like what if we became pirates I?

Mean yeah, it's one of those things where it's like you know I guess You got to think hard when you said you're put your your doom posting on prior like your your close circle on 17th century Instagram and I suppose like pigeon Graham Pigeon exactly. It's like meanwhile meanwhile for like third the the red Label on the leg of the carrier pigeon is meant to just fucking make sure that everybody thinks it's all cool So you're just like, yeah smashing it like a boss or something like that. Posting your like gym, posting gym flex engravings or fucking, you know, like woodblock prints. But what's killing you?

Doing lino cuts on my gym selfies and sending them via carrier pictures. Yeah, yeah, when you get rich enough and connected enough, you have Albrecht Dürer make you fucking jacked as hell for a woodblock print. Dürer is doing woodblocks of yourr straps and sending it to your boyfriends. I keep hiring him because he makes my fuck muscles pop. Villier pitched this idea to the king and the commons and everyone loved it.

Who wouldn't? It's free money for war. The commons decided to fund his operation as much as they could, which wasn't a whole lot, but Villier was now in charge of a lot of things that he had no business being in charge of. For starters, mustering the men and ships that would be needed to pull this whole thing off. He's just like, girls, I'm going to be honest with you. I've serious imposter syndrome right now. I don't know how I've been charged with getting this galleon. I have to get the gold somehow. You know,

this guy isn't responding to my really hot woodblock print that I've sent him. Like I know it's funny though. I'm going to, I'm going to propose on all this. We're, we are, we have been conceived to George, George Villiers as a, as basically like airheaded twink who just happens to get put in this but what it's the opposite what if he's not gay at all and fucking hates it all the time he's like man I really want to be in charge of military logistics I'll do anything. The tactical power bottom. I mean you know what some people got a hustle ands that apparently also apply. You never said what he's grinding on exactly.

Exactly. He's just a roided out muscle guy who loves the army. The problem is, is the commons didn't give him enough money for everything he would need. There's funding gaps that he would have to fill on his own. Putting the war effort on Clarina, I'm gonna pay it off in two extra payments. He's 17th century Kofi. We'll be like, just five pounds, just, just, just.

You're just describing a Patreon for military operations. He's putting up his cash app link on the pigeon when it's flying past. The hardest part is getting the QR code on the wing. Oh no, the algorithm for the pigeon master is downvoting all of my payment links. People aren't seeing my posts. Goddamn pigeon bot farms. Exactly, it's like there's just, you know, being suppressed by the algorithm in the 17th

century is just like a dude who looks like Robin Hood fucking sniping them out of the tree. That's what it looked like to be shadow banned in the mid 1600s And then there's just a Russian guy releasing like pigeons with scam links I mean you joke but this is genuinely what happened with the invention of the printing press You know what the pigeons weren't necessarily that big of a part of it But in terms of just like the dumbest shit you've ever heard getting distributed everywhere like we're just living through, you know

I'm just happy that the pigeons finally got a jobs program Villiers forced the king to put out something called a forced loan I don't know if you're if you're familiar with this concept. It was the king signs of proclamation which Because the king signs a proclamation which forces all of their subjects to loan the crown money. Oh, I know where this is going. It is under the threat of punishment. Like if you didn't pay the loan, this forced loan to the state, or the crown rather, you

would be dragged in front of the privy council for punishment. The government is literally going, hey bro let me hold five dollars. That's exactly what they're doing and they had no intention of paying anyone back which just sounds like stealing because it is and this still didn't work. People are like, you're poor, I'm poor, I have nothing to give you. So the king then asked the head of the Church of England to start asking people for money for him as a kind of religious tithe.

Unfortunately this is going to end up with a lot of people moving to Ulster. However having shaken down his own people for cash there were still other problems. The Royal Navy of the time was not exactly the juggernaut everybody knows them to eventually become. The kingdom was piss broke and had largely let the navy fall into disrepair. So Villier would have to wing it. He began to forcefully impress fishing and cargo ships into this new proposed raiding fleet. That could work.

A lot of countries have impressed civilian ships and slapped cannons on them and called it a day. And they do. You know? This is not something new. But one of the important parts of that entire idea is the ships that you shanghai need to be, I don't know, seaworthy. The majority of the 90 ships he pressed into service were hardly even floating.

The men on those ships needed to be a combination of soldiers and sailors because a lot of naval warfare at the time required boarding actions. You need a mix of the two. And he would have to find these men as well. So he sent his agents across England looking for anyone who would work for free, effectively. They would only be paid once the crews took loot from the Spanish ships. So, you know, they're working on commission. Yeah. It's just like trying to take the Spanish galleon in my like small fishing boat with a pig iron cannon on it. I fire it once and then the boat just like barrel rolls over.

The boat explodes like a Ford Pinto. It feels like, yeah, like look, listening to this, like the Dunkirk evacuation is just basically, you know, one of many instances of the Brits being like, guys with boats, come here. Yeah. We need some blokes with boats. Blokes who fish. Save the nation once again.

Boats you will find are negotiable. Does it float? Fine. Fuck it. We'll figure it out. To crib something else that Milo has said on Trash Tuture is also very funny what you're describing. Having a boat that's so shitty that the concept of rising tides raise all ships just sinks your boat. Hahaha!

Somehow he still managed to find 10,000 men to sign up, which isn't hard to imagine. I mean, if the crown is this broke, imagine how hard the lives these men are leading. You know, they'll do anything for some coin. So 10,000 dudes sign up. Meanwhile the king of Spain is doing money spreads on his close pigeon story. The king of Spain is doing that scene from Breaking Bad where they're just laying on piles of money and smiling. I'm just thinking of the video that was shared on Tosh 2.0 which is I'm showing my age with this but the guy's feeling like I've been had

hundreds just throwing bills everywhere like that but in 17th century Spanish with I don't know ducats pesos. The king of Spain doing the I put a bullet through your fitted got a I will say that if you're going to war with the English because the the English because the boyfriend of the king has basically fucking taken such offense to you, like you are allowed to say that Foo Foo Lame shit, I ain't with it. The Spanish galleon is just blasting you GK, it's floating through the ocean. However, Villier was at least smart enough to know, I cannot possibly command this shit

myself. So he turns the reins over to a guy named Sir John Ogle. Solid name, name alert there. However Ogle would not be in the story for long. He's a hardcore war veteran, he's served on both land and sea, through multiple conflicts, he's quite literally the best man in England for the job. Ogle shows up to where Villier has billeted his sailors and soldiers to inspect them in. It was there he discovered they're either literal children, the elderly, or veterans missing limbs, eyes, or suffering from already debilitating diseases.

Facing commanding a doomed mission full of men who are already mostly dead, Ogle faked being sick so he could resign. I mean, you know, age-honored tradition of like just avoiding work at all possible opportunity. I have to respect it. I got nothing but respect for Ogle. He doesn't catch any of the shit that's about to come. He's just like, looks at everybody, goes, I should probably go get some leeches or something. I can't do this. Yeah, I was like, listen, you know, like ghosts in the blood. I've booked a family holiday.

You know, it's packaged to Greece. We're going to Mykonos. I don't really want to go to Spain. It's too touristy, you know, I'm not touristy. So I have to go to Mykonos. Yeah, well, like, you know, British Army officer going to Greece, fans of sodomy, all that sort of stuff. You know, it's like I'm just really interested in the history. So Villier kicked his command down the road over to a guy named Edward Cecil, first Viscount

of Wimbledon, a man with no naval experience whatsoever. Like with names like that it's not surprising that the default mode of comedy for British liberals is cockwomble shit. With names like that I'm just like, this makes sense. This is just in the blood. Yeah Cecil isn't a guy I want commanding my naval mission or whatever, but he probably is okay at tennis judging from the name. That's all I got from Wimbledon.

I don't know. I'm not proud of that one. Then if that wasn't bad enough, let's talk about where these soldiers and sailors were billeted in the first place. Now normally during times of war back then, soldiers would be put up in inns and taverns throughout a general region. The business owners would make a killing, and they in turn would take care of the soldiers. Everyone would be happy.

But then the crown again, has no money. The soldiers and sailors are not being paid, so nobody could pay the inn and tavern owners. Instead, the king simply forced people to allow soldiers to crash at their houses, hot couching their way across Satha. They're just acting like a fucking touring hardcore band in the 80s. Like, yeah, I got like a big pot of like lentil stew. You could sleep on the floor. Do you want to play in my sitting room? I don't. Yeah, why not? They're hot couching their way across southeastern England.

Just Henry Rollins is just like writing furious letters to send on a pitch. It's like, can we play in your tavern and your in for free? He also made sure to station these soldiers in towns run by people he personally hated as an extra fuck you, cause he knew they'd be a massive drain on their resources. It's sort of like being the king gives you the divine right to create a gathering of the jugalos anywhere you want. Oh god, 17th century gathering is just like, an insane concept. Yield malinko.

Then came the issue of food. Soldiers and sailors obviously needed to eat, and generally that food is the responsibility of the government, in this case the crown, to provide. Instead of doing that, the government simply told merchants and farmers they would pay for their supplies, they would then give that food to the army, and then they never paid those people. Like, they just operated with the mindset of like, yeah we can either cheat these people out of food or just say to the sailors like, listen you're gonna be sailing on the ocean,

what is in the sea if not fish? It's self-sustaining. It's like, just get a spear or a net, you can feed yourself. It's like, if you were going to pull yourself up by your one bootstrap because you're missing your other leg, you're going to take this mission and make the most of it. Like ye olde David Goggins is telling you, it's like, you're not hard enough if you're not sailing to take caddies. They get to pull themselves up by their peg leg strap. And remember these merchants, tavern owners, whatever, had already had to pay that loan to the Crown and now the Crown is stealing their food.

So they're fucking pissed. They stop supplying the army, they don't believe the Crown, they say hey, you know I'm good for it later, right? So then the soldiers aren't eating eating which leads them to riot. And they're all fully armed at this point. Well they have weapons, many of them are missing arms. At this point the show has been running for seven years and I would love if someone actually figured out an accurate count of how many times not feeding your soldiers comes up.

CESUL Every time, very rarely, I'm like yeah this army is very well supplied and they still lost. NIGEL It's like everyone's like oh yeah you run the navy on run sodomy and the lash. It's like no it runs on food and water. CESUL Yeah everything else is just for fun. Now Cecil responded to this riot by putting it down and then taking the men's weapons away from them so they didn't mute me. Now this stopped the riot and stopped

the violence but this also means the soldiers and sailors could not train before going on the mission, which is a problem since most of them had no military training whatsoever, and the ones who did, remember, had one foot in the grave, or possibly not even one foot in the grave. The fleet eventually sets off on October 6th, and immediately runs into problems. For one, pretty much as soon as they set off, one of the few actual warships they had sprang so many leaks it had to return to England or out of St. Then it was discovered that due to a administrative error Nobody had loaded supplies onto the ships. Yeah an administrative error of not having any supplies

They probably just forgot to hire a quarter master. So they're like, yeah There's probably so but there's 10,000 guys here's at least one of them is doing it Yeah, it's like when you really really cut corners on stuff and it really comes back to bite you in the ass thousand guys here, at least one of them is doing it. I don't see what happened that was wrong, I started building this shed the best way possible from the roof down. Yeah I can totally dispose of asbestos because I've watched lots of YouTube videos on it. This has never gone to give me mesothelioma or anything. I mean to be honest with you, there are a lot of British professions back then now that

Googling the thing in front of you and then doing it wrong is a tried and tested way of getting- and back then they didn't have YouTube or Google. So you know what? Like fucking- the fact that it's this ramshackle, honestly like the fact that it succeeded in any way is coming across as a surprise to me. I mean, I once fixed the boiler in my apartment in Yerevan by watching an Indian guy on YouTube

who I could not understand because he was not speaking English by just figuring out what buttons he was pushing. So I'm pretty much an artisan. As soon as they set out, Cecil has to put everyone on less than half rations, otherwise they would starve to death. The grog is going thin, man. Cecil told the men, don't worry, just like your paychecks,

soon we're going to raid these Spanish galleons. They'll have food and water on them for their journey from the New World. We'll steal that, everything will be fine any day now Well Tom's comparison of the the crack heads with the shopping cart going out to steal copper is getting more and more accurate with each detail that you reveal Welcome to the trap ship We're on the great trip the great ship Detroit. I were on the great ship Detroit? I believe there actually was a warship named Detroit if I remember correctly.

Oh god. Now something that Cecil would have possibly known if he knew anything about the sea or ocean weather or perhaps if he asked someone who did or in fact employed anybody who did was that there was a storm coming. The Spanish knew about it and simply sent their ships heading back towards Europe around it, going wide and a different path, meaning they would be nowhere near the English ships, who were now starving, thirsty, and alone as a massive storm slammed directly into them. The flagship, the Anne Royal, nearly sank. Forty of the Ann Royal, nearly sank.

40 of the ships under the command of the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereaux, were blasted so far off course. Cecil just thought they sank. And multiple others were literally smashed to pieces, sending everyone into the ocean to die. Ugh. This is not gonna go well. Yeah, things were going great for the crackhead raiding party, but then they didn't realize

the prepaid SIM card on the phone with the GPS ran out of data. They didn't wait until after 8pm where they wouldn't be charged any minutes on their phone. That is when the Earl of Essex, separated from everyone else, decided, well, we don't have treasure ships, we're gonna have to find something, otherwise these men are gonna mutiny and murder my fucking ass. Or we run out of food find something, otherwise these men are gonna mutiny and murder my fucking ass. Or we run out of food and water, whichever happens first." So he set sail for the Spanish city of Cadiz after being told it was hardly defended.

He sent word to Cecil that he was heading in that direction and took off without waiting for him. Now I should point this out, the Cadiz is on the south east coast of Spain, so it's pretty well into the Mediterranean. That is true. Yeah. It's pretty far. Not exactly right next door.

It's pretty far. Got to go all the way around France and Spain and Portugal and back around again. It's really easy to do when you're in a bunch of ramshackle shit boxes and starving to death. Once again, the crackheads,heads set their sails for glory. Listen, necessity is the mother of invention and what do these people need more than a crackhead and copper is they need food. However, waiting for him to Deez Harbor was a Spanish fleet of around 20 ships, actual

warships. Essex, seeing he outnumbered the Spanish, which is true, immediately ordered his ships into battle. The problem was quantity over quality effectively. His crews were untrained, hungry, and I assume tweaking. So the Spanish began tearing him apart in battle and would have almost certainly won and destroyed Essex's fleet and put the entire end to the story right here and now if Cecil did not show up with the massive weight of his shambling fleet of half sinking ships. But the Spanish couldn't tell from a distance just how worthless these ships and their crews

were of course, so they saw this huge fleet sitting out there like oh fuck we gotta get the fuck out of here and they retreat, leaving the path to Cadiz wide open. However, with one problem gone it only led to another. The English thought Cadiz would be a pushover because once upon a time that had been true, about 30 years before the English raided Cadiz, robbed it blind and burnt the harbor. They figured we did it once, we could do it again. Oh such a fucking 2 world wars and 1 world cup mentality. Since then however Cadiz had been rebuilt and reinforced making it a much stronger place

than it had been before. My enemy has learned absolutely nothing from their previous defeat by me and I assume it will be this easy yet again. Yeah, exactly. Built different, and by that I mean badly. Built different, stupid. Cecil and Essex decided that a nearby fort, Fort Puntel, that overlooked the bay that

Cadiz was in, would be a linchpin for the city's defence. They would have to take it out, storm the beaches there, and then work their way to Cadiz once they took it out. However, Cecil feared the concept of a frontal assault on this fort, and fair enough, that is a good idea. Then he rallied all of his ships into a line and began to shell the piss out of that fort before he sent in his ground forces. Again, good idea. This is the last time I will be saying this about Cecil. While he was doing this, he realized his crews really did not know what they were doing. His ships began to crash into one another.

But eventually they did get into the correct position and begin firing on the fort, firing around 2,000 cannonballs. They did not hit it. They missed. The mental image that keeps coming to me when you describe this as like, Oh, it's the Osaka hotel fight scene from John Wig four, but you've got, you outnumbered the helmet soldiers by an order of 2000 to one, but all of your people are crackheads armed only with nail trimmers. And it's just

sort of like, you do have numerical superiority, but like you may not wind up winning the fight I mean they may have winged the fort a few times But accounts say that it was pretty much undamaged so big swing and a miss you know what they say 2,000 strikes in your out, but don't worry the fort was not as much of an issue as Cecil thought because it had been abandoned the whole time. So they had been attempting to blow it up for hours for no reason. Cecil ordered his men to then attack the fort, rowing to shore and boats, more rickety than the main ones, and several of them sank, leaving men to die or to swim ashore. I feel like if I was one of these guys I'd just run off and be Spanish. Just disappear and be like, yes I will eat this ham that's been hanging up for three

years I don't care. It slaps, it's much better than whatever the fuck it is I'm eating back at like Bumblefuck upon Thames. The wet boiled ham. Like you go from Garmin to like Ham on Iberico, it was like I know which I'd pick. Hey, and at least they'd have food. The entire setting of Sexy Beast is created to make you realize that living in Spain is sick and living in England sucks. I think you could have gotten the vast majority of these sailors to desert by giving them

each a single olive. One guy looks at me and goes, hey, have you guys ever heard of tapas? I haven't either, but I hear there's lots of tiny plates with foods on them. And now we just, we don't even have plates. We have nothing. There's this guy I met, he has a weird accent, he's offered me an olive. I think I'm gonna eat it. I've also eaten the leather off the one boot I was wearing.

So I can't, like I'm chewing on my peg leg to like satiate my hunger, but it's it's just not working. I'm starving to death. No, English people are like beavers. Their teeth grow constantly. It's like the stage four of Lisa needs braces. They're just growing through their head. They need to not the peg legs to to, you know, grind their teeth down. I'm reminded of these stories of things like Royal Navy sailors, you know, washing ashore and surviving, like, and being adopted into communities of Indigenous Australians. And then like years later they run into more English people and they're like, no, I'm not

going back. Fuck that. I would much rather like this life rules. England sucks. The Royal Navy sucks. Like, hell yeah, we're going to throw this kangaroo on the fire and just eat it straight up, burned me. I don't care. It's better than whatever that was. Better than rum, sodomy in the lash. I mean the other flip side of that is the sailors of the Royal Navy going and starting

a pedophile incest island. Oh yeah. What is that? Christmas Island or Norfolk Island? I can't remember which one it is. Tom, do you know which one it is? Christmas Island is the internment camp in Australia. Right. Right. And Norfolk Island is the one where like basically the entire island was accused of yeah sexual crimes I was thinking the pitcairn islands but all good suggestions I hate that there's more than one of these yeah so the the sailors row to shore they find the fort is abandoned but you know they're like okay maybe they left some supplies behind.

They hadn't. There's nothing. It's just an empty kind of bombed out fort at this point. And now they just kind of stand around confused, unsure of what to do next. And there were other issues popping up. For example, they spent so much time bombing the fort that the Spanish now knew that this force out in the water Whatever it was because they weren't entirely sure

Meant more than to do more than just a naval raid right like they they just bombed this fucking place for hours There's soldiers on the beach like some serious shits going on so Cecil hears on 8,000 Spaniards are now on the move and he needed to get around them to get to Cadiz so he plotted a course through the island of Leon. Cecil took command of his troops and went on the march. Cecil didn't know anything about the Isle of Leon he just knew was on a map and that would get him to Cadiz so it was there he discovered that the island of Leon was made up of one giant dry salt marsh.

Which is not good news for a bunch of guys who were already dying of thirst. I mean they're just strips of beef jerky and tattered uniforms at this point and now they're walking into a slow cooker. Sailors unlike horses do not enjoy salt lakes. They marched through the day and finally came to a rest at night near a bunch of houses that were also abandoned. They found exactly zero Spanish soldiers and the same amount of supplies, namely food and water to steal.

But one soldier stumbled into one of the nearby houses and found a basement and discovered it is actually a storage space for hundreds of casks of wine. Oh no, oh no, now we're gonna enter like the primal British energy of British stags in Spain. That's exactly what's going to happen. Oh fuck off. Drunk as fuck but empty stomach. Yeah, exactly. Cecil gave orders to the men that you can drink the wine but only one cask of wine per regiment to relieve their thirst and this is an order given by an officer who has no understanding of how soldiers work anywhere throughout history. Especially people who aren't soldiers who who are kind of in between.

They're just some guys. Volunteered slash press ganged into this expedition. Yeah, to become strange pirates. Soldiers immediately threaten their officers at gun and knife point to step aside and give them the wine. What about give us the fucking wine? Get out of my way. This whole expedition has the same energy as a mid 2000s Danny Dyer movie. The officers quickly give in, they abandon their soldiers leaving them in to get absolutely hammered.

What happened next is best described as a massive armed beach front rager. Thousands of soldiers descend upon the wine like locusts. They get so trashed they drop where they stood, passing out in the sands blind drunk on stolen wine. Because remember, these guys had not been eating, so they're pounding all this wine on an empty stomach. I know nothing about this. I've never, we've never done this before recently. We've never pounded fortified wine with secret herbs that make you crazy.

I don't know if it's stomach. And unfortunately as Brits, they have not yet discovered the sobering magical properties of cocaine. So they're just like, they're like, there's no dealers to text. They're not picking up a bag. They just, just have to sit with the wine. I guess I'll just have more wine. If I drink enough it'll circle back around to being sober. They drank so much that by the next morning Cecil woke up to find his army. Thousands of men were so hungover or still piss drunk that they could hardly move. Cecil, still receiving word that the Spanish were marching toward them, decided that he

had no choice. He needed to pull his men back to the ships. But now his men were, as I say, solidly fucked and half drunk. He demanded they get up, get their shit, put their shoes back on, and start marching. But they refused. So he announced, anybody who refuses to go back to the ships, you'll be left behind. The number of men left behind isn't exactly agreed upon, but is thought to have been at least one thousand. Just lazing around, fucked up on the beach. Everyone else, still hung over but not so bad they couldn't walk, ditched their weapons and packs in the sand as they made their way back to the boats.

Yeah, they're doing like, the thousand that stayed behind did the kind of time on our tradition of you go on holiday somewhere and near the end of the holiday you're like on whatever version of Zoopla or like right moon. It's like, I can move here, I can live here, like I can actually have a really good life here. It's very affordable. It's you know, I don't have to just be a peg leg farmer who owes money to actually know you will just owe money to a Lord. But you know, I was just doing that in Belfast. But I love this place. I wonder if I can afford to live here. Yeah. I tried and true. Yeah. As soon as Cecil was out of sight, the Spanish arrived, fighting thousands of men, passed out on the beach, too drunk to do anything other than vomit and piss on themselves.

So, the Spanish soldiers slowly began to work their way through the ranks of drunk Englishmen, stabbing them to death one by one. I mean, let's be real, a lot of people who live in Benidorm would probably love to do this if they could. I imagine the people at like the Canary Islands daydream about doing this. Oh, I mean, having been there. Yeah. Yeah. Benidorm, the people in Barcelona.

Well, the people in Barcelona probably more than any of the rest of them would love to do this. Yeah. I mean, I would say Tenerife, definitely. Grand Canary maybe less so, but it definitely is in the drunken, sunburned English and Irish zone for sure. Ireland plus Great Britain, you know, English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, everyone getting blacked out, drunk and sunburned. That's just what the Canary Islands are there.

It's the other version of the forbidden satanic zone. It's where you get sunburned and drunk on a beach. Cecil and his men made it back to their fleet and before he could figure out what to do next the Spanish ships returned, blocking his way toward the city of Cadiz. He accepted, well, I'm fucked, the mission's fucked, we gotta get back into the open ocean, possibly get back home. And then the plague happened. Just the outright bubonic plague broke out on the ships. Nobody's entirely sure which ship the plague started on, but it swept through it like,

the plague. But don't worry, Cecil had an idea. The ships needed healthy men to make it back to England, so he would rotate the healthy men from the ships not hit by the plague to the good ships where it had. The actual good warships. Taking the men who were still healthy, putting him on the ships he thought was the most important so he could leave the shitty ships behind and get home with the good ones. It also made sure his warships were fully staffed. Now of course what happened next was, all of these healthy men had been moved into ships

that had been thoroughly infected by the plague, causing them to also get the plague. Now the entire fleet is dying dying of thirst hunger and the plague It's a real devil's triad of trying to you know besiege any fortification 17th century sounds like it rules would be awesome to live in guys isn't it so good we got away from that battle Unharmed as I like a boo-boo pops up on my neck It's like no that's probably not fucking good. I was gonna say Bobo pops up on my neck. It's like oh, that's probably not fucking good. I was gonna say Didn't realize was like I'm so hungry. It looks like you're growing fucking Eskimo pies I actually know those was what used to be your lymph nodes shit man. My armpits are yoked

I'm arm boxing plague vaccine That did not mean Cecil was going to give up though. He got word that another Spanish treasure ship was making its crossing back to the Old World and he meant to rob it, so he had at least something to show for all of the dead men and lost money that had so far been spent on this venture. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I have the plague. far been spent on this venture. But at this point, the expedition had been out for so long the Spanish knew they were on the prowl, so again, the

ship just went around them. Utterly defeated, Cecil went for home, leaving the majority of his fleet behind because he was sick of waiting for them as his numerous plague ships were sinking and had a hard time keeping up with him. Some of this plague fleet limped to Ireland where they appeared at the gates of Galway. Now offence, I'm really hating this prequel to Master and Commander, that's all I'm gonna say. Some of the men were allowed into the town, but once people got a look at them, they're like, oh good fuck, they're bringing horrible pestilence with them and locked them out, but at that point the plague infested

men were already in Galway, causing, you guessed it, an outbreak of the plague in Ireland killing thousands of people. Once again the Brits are a plague on my beloved country, quite literally. Now the rest of the fleet refused to be allowed to land in Galway, just kind of sat there in the harbor, spending time either starving to death, dying of thirst, and dying of the plague, taking turns dumping each other's corpses into the sea, as this slowly claimed, everyone on the ships. I feel like if you were Spanish it would be hard to look at this and not come to the conclusion that like God hates English people.

And you would be right! I mean... Hey, you see the English, they do not have the jamón y berco, they don't have the wine, they don't have the olives. We have everything in Spain. Come, you can have a natural salt lick if you need hydration, you drink the water, you go lick the ground with all the salt on it. What's not to love? Move to Benidorm.

And then I stab you to death. About 3-5 million Jewish people speaking Spanish in North Africa are like, hey guys, I have one slight complaint about Spain. After the expedition returned, it turned into one hell of a fucking scandal. And Essex and Cecil immediately blamed Villier for everything. Which worked. Nobody blamed Essex and Cecil immediately blamed Villiers for everything. Which worked. Nobody blamed Essex and Cecil for anything. They continue on with their careers. Cecil's given a peerage pretty much as soon as he gets home. Parliament didn't care about blaming them.

They wanted to put all of this at Villiers feet. So they moved to impeach him. King Charles countered this, saving his dead father's boyfriend and possibly his own boyfriend and best friend and dance instructor by dissolving parliament once again. He just did like when he was contemplating this, he was doing like the, you know, the single Kevin Bacon dance scene from Footloose.

He's just like trying to express his emotions about his dad's, his dead dad's boyfriend. And he's just like- He has to go dance it out. Yeah, exactly. The Brit, I love that. But I love the consistent theme that the British have always been a plague on southern Spain. The King, King Charles sits on a chair, leans his head back. Water comes from the sky. Kenny Loggins is just being played on a loon. Kenny Loggins is just being played on a loo. The dirt trail down to the danger zone, yeah. There's no highway yet.

With his life saved and his power secure, this did not stop Villiers from fucking up. He continuously attempted to support French Huguenots, who were not Catholic, but the English crown fucking hated them anyway. He did this with full permission of the King, because of course the King just approves of everything he's doing, but he infuriated the Church of England, he infuriated Parliament, everyday normal English people fucking hated him for this, to the point that he was openly declared a public enemy while still holding his titles. People hated him so much that his own personal doctor was lynched by an angry mob for being

affiliated with him. However that never stopped Villier from attempting further expeditions as a kind of crown freebooter, rallying nobles and mint who was cause attempting to help England's sworn enemies like France? Really weird guy. One day on August 23rd 1628 while holding such a meeting at a pub in Plymouth, a man named John Felton who survived the Cadiz expedition, jumped out of the crowd and stabbed him in the fucking neck, killing him. People cheered Felton for the assassination, and as he bashed in the glow of the people,

he was promptly arrested and charged with murder. Now a lot of people, including King Charles and most of the Privy Council, were like, Villier had so many fucking enemies within the court and in life in general, there's no chance that Felton hadn't organized with other people in planning this murder. So they demanded that he be put on the rack and made to talk, say names, you know? Judges and members of the Privy, and members of the privy council, and members of the house of commons, who were all involved, probably, in the plotting, shrugged and said, actually, torturing people is against the law now, we can't.

God dammit, I can't get on the rack voluntarily so my body looks snatched. I'm like doing the limb elongation that weird guys are doing. Charles, once again, the long history begins with being frustrated by the woke judges. Unable to practice his actual rule. Yeah. Also I'm just laughing because like you said, the English are the plague on southern Spain. Drunk on the beach of Cadiz. Getting lost everywhere. Stripping shit out of the walls.

Glassed in a pub. K by a- like this is just- Getting glassed to death on the beach. English- English culture in quintessence here. I would like to believe the Spanish soldiers respected English culture, and instead of simply like murdering them with their weapons on the beach, just beat them to death with glass bottles. We're doing this out of respect! Clang clang clang, clang, clang.

Weaponized pint glasses. They're just a merchant outside the city of Cadiz. Just be like, pint glasses for sale. You look like you need a pint glass. Do you need to kill an Englishman on a beach? Pint glass. That's because Keir Starmer outlawed samurai swords. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The only thing more humiliating would be if they drowned them in sunscreen. Now Felton was executed in November of that same year, and his body was sent to Plymouth as an act of warning for anybody who would plot against the king and his allies.

Instead of it being a warning though, people cheered and drank to his honor even though they faced punishment of having one of their ears cut off for doing so. This did not slow them down, and people kept throwing beer on his body, like not as like a fuck you, but as like, have a drink on me! ALICE Yeah, like a veneration thing. SEAN Yeah. The end.

AHHHH. JUSTIN This is what I meant when I said earlier, that you know, like, when you give a bisexual person the oxcord, this is what you risk. You know what I mean? No, it is just the purest, eternal gay belief that you can do anything. It's like, I'm gay enough, and I'm willing enough, I can sail to Cadiz and seize the fort. I will, the one thing I can give Vilié respect for is knowing I cannot possibly command this

mission. I have to find some other dumbass to do it. I need to recruit Britain's hardest geezer to do it for me. And then he quits. He skies off work and fakes out sick. There is so much eternal English culture represented in this. So fellas, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support us on Patreon, ask us there, or ask

in our Discord, which we also have access to as a supporter of the show. Or you can put it on a plague ship and sail it towards Ireland and we'll answer it eventually. Today's question is, what is the most E4 mafia thing you've ever done? This question requires some explanation first for non-military people. As a former member of the E4 mafia, I feel comfortable explaining this. It is a rank within the military, E4 or specialist in the army specifically, it's called a specialist. What they specialize in? Nothing. for more effort into getting out of work than actually doing their jobs. And there's a lot of very inventive ways soldiers do this.

For instance, my most E4 moment, this actually happened the year before I got promoted, I was put on a detail helping set up an MWR show, which is again an explanation for the non-military crowd. It's a morale show for people. It's like concerts, things for soldiers to go to. This was the Orange County Chopper guys. Oh yeah. I don't know why anybody wants to go and watch people build a pre-assembled motorcycle on

stage and go woo! I believe 38 Special is there because they're always there. It was just like an old shitty band. But this involved building the stage with the stage hands of the Orange County Chopper guys who were all absolute tweakers. But they were using a scissor lift to pull up a piece of the stage. That scissor lift collapsed. It landed on top of every soldier around me other than me. Everybody was fine, they had to be taken to the hospital to be made sure. And then it dawned on me. I could fake it. So looking around, I promptly fell on the ground and started holding my knee. I go to

the hospital, of course I'm there for like 10 minutes or so, but this detail is supposed to last all week. It is Tuesday, right? So the NCO in charge of the detail is kind of forced by the reality of like us as our lift almost just murdered a bunch of guys to just give us the rest of the week off to recover so we can go back to our normal jobs with the army and Monday Right. So I got like a week off work by faking that I got crushed by the Orange County Chopper guy's scissor lift And I spent the whole week in the barracks playing Xbox

Sleeping in it was great. I was probably my most e4 moment. I To be honest with you because I was an officer, I'm supposed to not know about the E4 mafia antics. It's supposed to be kept for me. I'm the guy. Yeah, we can't confirm or deny the things that we're doing, sir. Exactly, that tamps down the fun. Well, the other part of the E4 mafia is officers and senior NCOs know that we are glorified criminals.

If you're missing something that's on a property book, you tell the specialist you know who's kind of like the godfather of the specialist mind, like, damn I really wish we had this, and then you just don't tell them the rest and then that thing magically appears so everybody can get off work on time. You know what you're doing, we know what we're doing, we don't talk about the thing in the middle, which is crime. I was the headquarters company XO. So I was the basically the second in command. It really it's just like a logistics thing for the headquarters company for the whole battalion.

And so I saw a lot of army property stuff and I my my supply sergeant who I won't name said to me one time He's a black dude from Georgia and he was like, yeah, yeah, you're never gonna meet a successful white supply sergeant, they're just not crooked enough. And he told me one time, he said like, yeah, you know, like I have commanders who will be like, oh, I run a flawless ship, you know, I don't have any property lost, and it's like what they don't know is the morning

of their change of command ceremony, me and a couple of the supply clerks were smashing Humvee towbars in half with sledgehammers to break them apart and turn them in as broken materials to count for twice what they actually were counted. They were perfectly good towbars, but if I broke them in half, I could say they were the broken parts of two separate towbars. Every supply sergeant, no matter their rank, is culturally a specialist forever.

They have to be. And the concept of the E4 mafia kind of goes beyond the barriers of the military because we've all done, we've had a job that we fucking hated and we put way more work into not doing that work than it would be to do our jobs with maybe a small cabal of co-conspirators.

So the thing with it from my perspective, the E4, my basic understanding is that E4 is also the senior most rank if you're staying in the army before you are either laterally promoted to corporal or you go and become a non-commissioned officer and become a sergeant. And so it's the position in which you know the most about being in the army without being in charge of anything. And so like you both know how to bully the privates and new kids into doing stuff, but also get out of shit. Like, you know very well to not raise your hand when you're in formation and

someone says, raise your hand if you like ice cream. Um, or it's Friday at like four 55, like anybody have any questions? The E four is the one that looks surrounded, like saying with his eyes, let me have you raise your fucking hands. I'm going to kill you. Yeah. I would say also one of the most e4 things is ever was a an e4 who had been an e6 He got busted down for drunk driving and one of the second lieutenants was like really depressed He was like immensely not great and he got a DUI and this guy who had had multiple DUIs was like man I know he fucked up too. He went, you know, it was it was a cold night. to the bar, he drove home, had the heat on in his car. He's like, trick to get through the gate, is you gotta fucking, you know, put all your windows down on the

highway when you're driving drug, fucking have them all down and then put three of the four of them up right before the gate, but smoke a cigarette the whole time? You know what? They're not going to smell shit. They won't let you through. And I was just like, man, these dudes are speaking from experience. Oh, like my, I have a few of them. One that like immediately came to memory was I remember it's the same job. I was working in a department store. So on a Thursday we would have this like massive delivery of stock from this one supplier. So it's like three floors. And then there's like a back room. That's like all the stuff is stored in. So I was working in the menswear department. So I'd be like, Oh,

this stuff comes in. I have to go up to the store room and like just count everything and then like fold it and put it away. And I would just like do it all really quickly and then just go into like the stock cage, lock the door and just sit there on my phone for like an hour and then come down maybe five minutes before my lunch. And I'd be like, Oh yeah, it was just like there was stuff missing. I had to figure it out, like take it off the invoice and everything. But I, yeah, I'm going on my lunch and I'm going to come back and then I'm finished working two hours. So, um, or alternatively on the Saturday, the guy

who did our goods inwards would be off, which means I would have to do it. So I would have to like show up and the security guy who is a character in and of himself, and maybe I'll tell a story about him at some stage, maybe on a bonus episode, but he would let me in. It was like 6.37am in the morning. I'd have to like go open the back door, take deliveries in, bring them up to the stock room. And then the last thing that I would have to do, because I would finish at like 3pm, the last thing I would have to do was like crush cardboard. So what I would do is I would save cardboard throughout the week so then I could extend my cardboard crushing,

like ripping it apart, throwing it in the big compactor, and somehow make it a three hour job? Hell yeah. I mean, the pure essence of an E4 mafia member, because just being a specialist does not in fact make you a member. It's an attitude. It's taking a 10 second job and turning it into an eight hour affair. Yeah.

That was going to say is that I think working hourly jobs is the best comparison, except in the Army. You have no time is the best comparison except in the army. You have no time and you aren't paid by the hour. So like, I pretend to work you pretend to pay me. Exactly. I have I do have one more before we go because this might surprise both of you. I was a specialist for a very long time. When I was stationed at Fort Knox, it was back when they did officers armor school there.

And I was in 16th Cavalry, which our job when we weren't doing normal soldier stuff was to support that. And the job fucking sucked. So you had officers doing tank training and Bradley training. Obviously I was only on tanks, but the whole crew is lieutenants other than you. Brand new lieutenants. You drive them around because they don't trust lieutenants to drive the tanks. It is awful that the Bullock was always held in like January which is miserable in Kentucky. So I developed a plan and this is an important thing that any specialist learns in the military. If

you look busy, people think you're busy and they'll leave you alone Mm-hmm, so there's it's a clipboard trick. That's exactly what I did I walked around I found a clipboard from the arms room guy And I just walked around the staging area like I was constantly looking for something and then when they were so when they're picking Crews to go out with the lieutenants for training which would last for And when they were picking crews to go out with the lieutenants for training, which would last for 16-20 hours. This is all night operations, day operations, continuous operations. If you get stuck on one of those crews, you're in a world of shit for a couple days.

And these training missions go on for a month. If you can dodge getting attached to one of those tanks, you'd still have to sleep on the field doing menial bullshit, but you wouldn't have to be trapped in a freezing tank with the most annoying fucking people in the army. So when they were coming up with duty rosters to be in the tanks, I found my clipboard and I would wander around until I saw that everybody was picked and then I was done. I was at Fort Knox for two and a half years. I was only on one of those tank crews a single time.

You know, work smarter not harder. Fuck yeah. Anyway boys, that's a podcast, but you host other podcasts. Plug that podcast. I'll make it quick. Trash Shooter, a show about the tech industry being bad and also about British politics. What a Hell of a Way to Dad, podcast about parenting and why you shouldn't join the army. Kill James Bond, feminist film podcast that is extremely funny. Listen to all of them. They're a lot of fun.

Uh, beneath the skin show, about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing and glue factory, a show with no theme, but all riffs and jokes. Um, and yeah, also for anyone interested by the time this comes out, we might have some bin laden, ASS.GIF hats available, but if not, stay tuned for the new year where we'll hopefully make a few of them. This is the only show that I host and thank you for listening to it. If you think what we do is worth your time and money, consider supporting us on Patreon. Five bucks a month gets you almost seven years of bonus content, gets you multiple side series like the history of Armenia, the coupons dispatches, gets you videos, lines led by robots, all that good stuff,

gets you ebooks, audiobooks, access to our Discord, it gets you one plague ship that we pulled from Galway. I dunno, lots of other stuff. So consider doing that, leave us a review and wherever it is you'll listen to podcasts, and until next time Maybe I want that twink assassinated Obliterated but more than that. I want to know where the wine basement at