No, captain, it definitely isn't history...*

The Slug undoubtedly knows how to press my buttons and does so for his own private amusement quite often. Sometimes, however, the joke is shared as was the case late last week.

I came home to find a book on my desk, a neat little hardcover in dust jacket in good order throughout and an intriguing title. He stood there and watched and waited with a shit-eating grin on his face in anticipation of the fireworks. They weren't long in coming. In fact I didn't get as far as digesting the whole of the sub-title without snorting.

The book is about claimants to the English or British crown. Without having seen this book, and the turf it covers, any list of "Pretenders" I'd have put together would have included Perkin Warbeck, Lambert Simnel and a string of increasingly decrepit Stuarts. The list could be padded out with a number of people who were legitimate claimants who did not succeed in pressing their claim, and those who were not precisely legitimate or best available alternatives but who succeeded however briefly in pushing a claim but they're two somewhat different kettles of fish.

Any ho, the list is a bit eccentric, and one entry in it caught my eye as the Slug knew it would. I discarded the rest and turned straight to the potted biography. I railed, I raged, I cursed, I wept, I gasped, I groaned in disbelief. All the while the Slug was just outside having a not so crafty fag and enjoying my fury from a safe distance.

So here's a test, and my advice is to deploy some seriously tangential thinking: the challenge is to identify this "Pretender" using only the following highly selective quotations from said biography for clues. As further assistance I've done no tinkering with the order in which they appear in a narrative that is or purports to be strictly chronological.

• "Famous as the overmightiest of subjects."
  
• His record is "one of power without achievement".
  
• "His royal pretensions became reality only for his ... descendants, and then in abundance"
  
• "Although uncrowned, he was acknowledged as the real ruler of England" for a period of some years.
  
• "Not once, despite constant suspicion, did he reveal himself openly as a pretender to the English throne."
  
• His "posthumous triumphs were not matched during his lifetime. In a career of paradoxes he became one of the most celebrated warriors in a family renowned for fighting."... "He himself ended a long military career as the most redoubtable campaigner in Europe..."

Can you guess who it is yet?

• "Extraordinary power and influence appear to have resided in a very ordinary man."
  
• "Nothing could seem less in character than the two actions for which [he] most deserves the gratitude of posterity. Not a man known for his cultural interests..."
  
• "A man of orthodox piety..."
  
• "... no pretender before or since has had such resources of his own at his disposal."
  
• "To achieve his ambition he now turned to diplomacy and proved surprisingly adept. His enemies may not have liked him, but they trusted and respected him." (!)
  
• "At home the unsuccessful quasi-king was unpopular."
  
• "Nevertheless, this voluntary retirement when most in demand does not suggest a diminution of ambition." "[He] was disappointed and bitter and heartily sick of playing second fiddle. His gesture signified 'king or nothing'."
  
• "Whatever his intentions, he was, too, a man of some principle, adhering to a code honoured in his age and class."
  
• "He was haughty and had no skill or even interest in courting the public. Although open-handed and often a friend of the poor, he stood on his dignity and never condescended."
  
• "Charged with the responsibility for making settlement with [a foreign power] the most formidable knight of the world of chivalry became transformed into the most eminent of European diplomats."
  
• "In England he was able to impose some semblance of order on the prevailing anarchy without reviving suspicion."
  
• "When [his wife] died he felt free to marry ... his mistress ... No one rebuked him for it."

Eventually I gave up being livid and laughed.

*as in, Its history Jim, but not as we know it.