Houses of Interest: Rutland

It is only right and proper that the ECW travelogue turns it's attention to England's smallest County, and the home of 'England's smallest man', Captain Jeffrey Hudson. Purposefully, slightly wonky picture so I know who keeps nicking my pictures and not crediting me Jeffrey was variously known as the 'Queen's Dwarf', or 'Lord Minimus'; he was gifted, at age 7 to Queen Henrietta Maria via the medium of a large pie, from whence he leapt, dressed in full cuirassier armour, at a banquet at Burley-on-the-Hill. Jeffrey's life was the stuff of a blockbuster movie script. Unfortunately much of what we do know about his life has been clouded by Sir Walter Scott's embellishments (bloody Victorians!). If anyone's life story did not need embellishing, it is Jeffrey's. He killed a man and was exiled to France; was kidnapped by Barbary pirates; enslaved in North Africa; and, imprisoned on his return to England in the 1670s for being a Catholic...