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In this newsletter a couple of weeks ago I wrote about the need for leaders to nurture a little self-doubt as a way of staying real. But I wouldn't go this far...
In the book, Mad Kings and Queens: History's Most Famous Raving Royals by Alison Rattle and Allison Vale, I discovered a monarch with...umm...issues.
Robert III was king of Scotland at the turn of the fifteenth century. As a boy he was timid and suffered injuries in a riding accident that left him physically and mentally frail.
He didn't ascend the throne until he was fifty. His self-esteem was so shot by then that he couldn't even bring himself to use his own name as his royal title, so instead of King John, he took the name of his father, Robert II.
Robert was lost in serious depression and became, over time, a hopeless recluse, withdrawing from public life and abandoning all semblance of rulership.
When his brother, the Earl of Fife, announced that Robert III was not fit to rule, he sighed and shrugged. Unable to assert himself, he finally handed over his kingdom to his brother.
"Deeply insecure and crushed by the burden of his disastrous reign," Rattle and Vale write, "his depression took its final hold. He refused food and water, which helped to hasten his decline. Before he died, Robert announced that he was not fit to be buried alongside other Scottish kings; he felt too unworthy, and requested that his final resting place be a dunghill."
They're not kidding. I repeat...he wanted to be buried in a dunghill.
He asked that his epitaph say: "Here lies the worst of kings and the most miserable of men."
Nope...don't go that far. | 
