Ah, 4 March! So, it must be…? Yes, of course: 416th anniversary of the day a message from the Lords to the Commons about the naturalisation of the Scots, delivered by Sir John Croke, was interrupted by Henry Ludlow MP’s thunderous fart.
We don’t actually know if it was ‘thunderous’, but it was definitely audible. Fellow MP Robert Bowyer later noted in his diary that the sound came from “the nether end of the House…whereat the Company laughing the Messenger was almost out of Countenance”.
(No, obviously, I am not sniggering like a child at the deployment there of the phrase “nether end”. I am a high-minded person with a legitimate interest in history, thank you very much.)
Bowyer was also gracious enough to note that — since Ludlow’s father, when he’d been an MP, had farted during a committee meeting — “this seemeth Infirmity Naturall, not Malice”.
But the most important thing about the event was that it
It opens with the unimprovable couplet
Never was bestowed such art
Upon the tuning of a Fart
and continues:
No one can say who wrote it, because it kept being written down, recited, improvised upon, written down again… so it has multiple authors, and existed in many versions. As Michelle O’Callaghan at the University of Reading says:
(I’m not an expert, but “impromptu versifying” would appear to mean, as you probably suspect, getting shitfaced, reading bits out to your 17th century mates, and making up more bits, some of which you remember to write down, and some of which drift away in a haze of booze.)
“One of the longest and most careful copies in circulation” is kept at the Bodleian Library, and has been published by Alastair Bellany at Rutgers University and Andrew McRae at Exeter on their Early Stuart Libels site.
And long it certainly is, running to over 200 lines in that edition. Some of them are a bit ‘you had to be there’, but it definitely has its moments…
And it wasn’t the last fart heard in a parliamentary session. In Canada in 2016, the government was accused of treating the province of Alberta “like a fart in the room”, which prompted a hilariously po-faced intervention about ‘unparliamentary language’.
…but the most recent I could sniff out was aired in Kenya’s Homa Bay regional assembly: “Honourable Speaker, one of us has polluted the air and I know who it is.”
Still, in the words of “one of the most popular political poems circulating in manuscript in the seventeenth century”…
