For as long as I can remember I have been aware of the fact that Prince Rupert of the Rhine—the most celebrated cavalry commander of the English Civil War—possessed an unusual dog. Where I first came across this arcane scrap of knowledge, I cannot say. Possibly it was at my village primary school, where I was certainly introduced to Alexander the Great and his horse, Bucephalus. More likely, perhaps, I stumbled across Prince Rupert’s dog in one of the many books about the Civil War which I devoured during my teens. All I can say for sure is...

Any attempt to piece together the true history of Prince Rupert’s dog must begin by surveying what previous writers have had to say upon the subject, for while the surprisingly large body of literature that has grown up around that animal is accurate in many respects, it also contains a number of myths and misapprehensions which the present book seeks to correct. Commentators on the prince’s dog have been legion over the past 160 years. First in the field was the Victorian writer Eliot Warburton, whoseMemoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers, first published in 1849, may be said...

Any study of the supernatural legends which wrapped themselves around Prince Rupert and Boy during the English Civil War must begin by examining the childhood and family background of the prince himself. It is almost superfluous to observe that Rupert enjoyed the most exalted royal lineage. His father was Frederick V, elector of the Rhineland Palatinate, and one of the foremost Protestant rulers in Europe. His mother was Elizabeth, the only surviving daughter of King James I of England. Born in 1596, Elizabeth grew up to be a beautiful, spirited girl, who was immensely popular with James’s subjects, not least...

Towards the middle of August, Rupert and his companions landed safely at Tynemouth, near Newcastle.¹ By this time, England was already on the brink of Civil War. In the Midlands, Charles I was preparing to raise the royal standard and to summon his loyal subjects to assist him against the ‘rebels’ in Parliament. Meanwhile, his opponents were assembling a large army near London under the command of Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex. Rupert—who had been assured by Henrietta Maria that Charles planned to appoint him as General of the Royalist cavalry—knew that there was no time to...

Early in the morning of Friday 6 January 1643, Prince Rupert clattered out of Oxford with five regiments of horse and two regiments of dragoons and rode off to the east.¹ The prince’s destination was Cirencester, the honey-coloured Cotswold town which was one of the strongholds of Gloucestershire puritanism and which had long been a thorn in the Royalists’ side.² Cirencester contained a strong Parliamentarian garrison—one which not only blocked Oxford in to the west, but also made it difficult for men and supplies to reach the king from Wales. Now Rupert was determined to capture the town and...

Over the course of the preceding chapters, we have already encountered some of the key ingredients which T.B.’s ventriloquist threw into the pot as he set about the creation of ‘Boy’. The first was a nugget of hard fact, Prince Rupert possessed a dog of unusual appearance. The second was a soupcon of hostile assertion, the previous suggestions of the prince’s enemies that Rupert was a shot-proof shape-shifter. The third was a twist of sardonic mockery, Cleveland’s jest that the Roundheads regarded the prince’s dog as ‘a Devill’. We may be confident that, when the anonymous author of what would...

It is impossible to say how many copies of theObservationswere printed, let alone how many copies were sold, but the fact that the pamphlet went through at least three separate editions in early 1643 strongly suggests that T.B.’s satirical portrait of Boy enjoyed considerable commercial success. The flood of allusions to Boy that subsequently appeared in other ephemeral publications points the same way. During February and March 1643, three entire pamphlets responding to theObservationswere published, each of them accompanied by vivid wood-cuts, while over the coming months, references to Boy continued to surface in propagandist material...

Seventeenth-century Englishmen and women possessed as keen an appetite for fresh sensation as their twenty-first-century counterparts, and, although Boy had been splashed all over the public prints during the spring and early summer of 1643, by the autumn of that same year a contemporary observer might well have been forgiven for concluding that the dog’s fifteen minutes of fame were almost over. Few allusions to Boy appeared in the popular press between September and December 1643, while no further images of him are known to have been produced during these months. It is easy to understand why Boy’s press-profile should...

The Battle of Marston Moor marked the end of Boy’s life but it did not mark the end of the black legend that had grown up around the prince’s dog. On the contrary, as the following chapter will show, the collection of strange stories about Boy, about his royal master and about Royalist witches in general which had been put into circulation by the rival polemicists during the first two years of the Civil War would continue to circulate for months, even years, to come—and would continue to stir up a mixture of amusement, anxiety and genuine apprehension in...

It is fitting that our final glimpse of the ‘historical’ Boy should appear in what may well have been a forged letter, for, in essence, the story of Prince Rupert’s dog is the story of a 368 year-old hoax—a hoax which took in many people at the time and which has gone on taking them in ever since. As the preceding chapters have shown, all that we know for certain about Boy could be written on the back of a beer-mat. We know that the dog was given to Rupert at Linz during the late 1630s; we know that...