Two qualifiers need to be addressed right away: “history” means a very long time, since humans have been, well, human for some 200,000 years. “Worst” is not a synonym for “expensive.” Now then, let us put on our boots and plunge into the muck that is the pool of most uncomfortable divorces in history.
5. *Cricket Cricket*
Worst divorces often come from the worst people. Maybe they are not bad individually, but when the two of them get together — whoa! She and he may fit together like puzzle pieces, but many couples leave the world puzzling over what they possibly thought was going to happen when their worlds collided. Take, for example, our #5, the cricketer Graeme Smith and his pop singer wife, Morgan Deane Smith.
It was true love when the two married in 2011. They had two children before Graeme accidentally texted Morgan that he wanted a divorce. Accidentally? Yup. He thought he was texting his lawyer. Ouch!
She took to the Twittersphere in June, 2015, accusing Graeme of being a lousy father who did not pay for food or for his children.
Okay, so we don’t know a lot about the game, but that is not playing cricket in our book.
4. Big Chuck
Frankish King Charlemagne — whose name translates as Charles the Great, or “Big Chuck” to almost no one at the time — comes in at #4. Charles spent a rather unpleasant year married to Desiderata, daughter of the Lombard King, and bearer of a name meaning “that which is wanted.”
Except Chuckie did not really want Desi, divorced her, and sent her back to her Dad. Result? The Franks and the Lombards went to war. Whatever you think of Virginia divorces today, they only metaphorically lead to war. The Franks and Lombards really went at it.
Desi was swept aside into history’s dustbin. Chuckles went on to create the Holy Roman Empire.
3. Clubby Hubby
Tiger Woods. Need we say more? We suppose we have to about our #3 worst divorce, if only to remind everyone not to do stupid stuff. Woods thought very highly of himself — he had 19 known mistresses before Swedish model Elin Nordegren ended their six-year marriage in a divorce splashed across headlines worldwide. How could it not be the stuff of headlines, when it started with Nordegren chasing Woods with a golf club, and he crashing into — let’s get this list right — some hedges, a curb, a fire hydrant and a tree. She chased him down in — wait for it — a golf cart. He passed out in the street and she smashed out the windows of his Escalade.
To review: she was a Swedish model, and Tiger still felt compelled to have 19 mistresses.
2. Julius Skeezer
Only from the relative safety of some 2000 years distance can we talk about Julius Caesar in casual, even critical, terms. He was pretty darn powerful in his day. We have a whole month in the calendar — July — named for him even now. He divorced his second wife, Pompeia, for what today might seem insubstantial grounds (what we in Virginia might call “no fault” grounds).
Pompeia threw a nice ladies’ night out sort of Roman party. Nothing flashy, all very proper, except one guest was a man in women’s clothing. Say what you will about togas, they can hide a lot. As usually happened at prim and proper Roman parties involving Vestal Virgins, everybody got pretty rip-roaring drunk and the dude (whose name really was Publius Clodius Pulcher) came on, hard, to Pompeia. That was totally uncool, and he was prosecuted for sacrilege, but the stain was there. Pompeia was damaged goods.
Julius said simply (in Latin, of course), “My wife ought not even to be under suspicion.” Some modern scholars translate his words as, “I need a handy excuse to dump Pompeia.”
1. Napoleon Complex
He was not unusually short — let’s get that out of the way for starters. Napoleon Bonaparte was unusually ambitious, though, which makes his the worst divorce in history for being a complete, callous butthead. His beloved wife, Josephine, had trouble producing an heir to the throne. (While, you know, they were both having affairs like rabbits, and she had already produced kids in a previous marriage, but of course the no-kid thing was all her fault.) Always classy Napoleon bid her adieu.
The 41-year-old Napoleon married 19-year-old Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, who bore him an heir (named Napoleon II — big surprise, right?). A couple of years later Napoleon had the nerve to introduce two-year old II to Josephine. We can imagine how great that went over.
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