Handsome Millard Fillmore? We are Amused
Today is Victoria Day in Canada, a holiday originally set to honour the birthday of Queen Victoria. This reminded me of the story of how Queen Victoria supposedly called President Millard Fillmore the handsomest man she'd ever seen. But according to Marie Schnurr, one of the curators of the Fillmore House Museum, the statement is disputed.
To see if I could find a source for this story, I got the book "Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President" by Robert Rayback from my bookshelf. I read the portion about Fillmore's visit to Great Britain in 1855 and found this entry at page 397:
"A visit to the London docks turned into a tour of the winehouses. For the first and only time in his life - for he was a temperate man - Fillmore became 'slightly fuddled my merely moistening his lips with such a variety of liquids.' Like all tourists, he walked through Westminster Abbey; but at the Bank of England, unlike other tourists, he had the guidance of the Bank's governor, who encouraged him to 'heft' a million pounds sterling. Fillmore left no account of his presentation at the Court of St. James, though tradition developed in America that Her Majesty Victoria pronounced him the handsomest man she had ever seen."
I have been unable to locate any further sources on this, but in my research I was amused to come across this book by author George Pendle, entitled "The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President." In the book, Pendle writes a bogus biography in which he claims that Fillmore saved a woman from a shark attack and received good reviews for his minstrel show performance ("he had the audience guffawing mightily"), was a prolific inventor ("he never received proper credit for vulcanizing rubber or designing the cooling Tea-shirt")prevented the assassination of Andrew Jackson and survived the Battle of the Alamo.
If only half of it were true, Fillmore could shed his nickname of "The Rodney Dangerfield of Presidents".
To see if I could find a source for this story, I got the book "Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President" by Robert Rayback from my bookshelf. I read the portion about Fillmore's visit to Great Britain in 1855 and found this entry at page 397:
"A visit to the London docks turned into a tour of the winehouses. For the first and only time in his life - for he was a temperate man - Fillmore became 'slightly fuddled my merely moistening his lips with such a variety of liquids.' Like all tourists, he walked through Westminster Abbey; but at the Bank of England, unlike other tourists, he had the guidance of the Bank's governor, who encouraged him to 'heft' a million pounds sterling. Fillmore left no account of his presentation at the Court of St. James, though tradition developed in America that Her Majesty Victoria pronounced him the handsomest man she had ever seen."
I have been unable to locate any further sources on this, but in my research I was amused to come across this book by author George Pendle, entitled "The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President." In the book, Pendle writes a bogus biography in which he claims that Fillmore saved a woman from a shark attack and received good reviews for his minstrel show performance ("he had the audience guffawing mightily"), was a prolific inventor ("he never received proper credit for vulcanizing rubber or designing the cooling Tea-shirt")prevented the assassination of Andrew Jackson and survived the Battle of the Alamo.
If only half of it were true, Fillmore could shed his nickname of "The Rodney Dangerfield of Presidents".