Five strange deaths

Brahe died of uremia caused by acute urinary retention — eleven days of fever after a Prague banquet at which he reportedly thought it impolite to leave the table to relieve himself. The Kepler-poisoning theory was popular for decades. The 2010 exhumation ruled it out.

At about 7 a.m. on 25 October 1760, George II rose, drank his usual chocolate, walked into the small adjoining closet, sat down on the close stool, and died of an aortic dissection. His German valet heard the fall. The pose has been a quiet English embarrassment ever since.

Faure died on 16 February 1899 in the Salon Bleu of the Élysée Palace during a private afternoon with Marguerite Steinheil. The official cause was apoplexie foudroyante. The actual cause was a sudden cerebral hemorrhage during a sexual encounter. Clemenceau's epitaph: 'He wanted to be Caesar; he was only Pompey.'

False. The cricket-ball story appears in the memoirs of Lord Hervey (his political enemy, published posthumously in 1848) and was repeated by Victorian historians for over a century. The 1751 autopsy by royal physician Frank Nicholls actually found a pleural empyema — a chronic respiratory abscess, almost certainly from tuberculosis. There was no external chest injury at all. The cricket ball was invention.

False — almost certainly. The red-hot-poker story first appears in the Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, written around 1355, about thirty years after Edward's death at Berkeley Castle. Contemporary sources from 1327 say only that he died of natural causes; sources from the 1330s say he was suffocated. The poker detail was a later elaboration intended to fit a theological judgment about his sexuality. Modern historians regard it as invention.