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Yet it is a historical fact that gentlemen, and cads for that matter, do prefer blondes, ceteris paribus. The business of ‘going blonde’ is very ancient (and by no means confined to women). In the Royal Book of 1484 there is an assertion: ‘They arrange theyr heer lyke wymmen and force it to be yellowe, and yf they be blacke, they by crafte make them blonde and abourne.’ According to the OED some philological historians believe that the original Teutonic word ‘blond’ actually meant ‘dyed’, ‘the ancient Germans being accustomed to dye the hair yellow’. My guess is that the Anglo–Saxons, who were predominantly blond, triumphed over the Norman–French ruling class in the 13th and 14th centuries partly because of hair colour, the rich and powerful selecting wives from the blonde gene pool. The replacement of French by English was due as much to blonds as to the vigorous superiority of the English language.
Charles II, who was brought up partly in France, noticed the English preference for blondes and deplored it. He was very tall and dark, being described in a parliamentary ‘wanted’ poster — while on the run in 1651 after the battle of Worcester — as ‘Charles Stuart, a black man two yards high’. His height he got from Queen Anne, his tall Danish grandmother, and possibly also from his great-grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, who was five foot ten, an alarming height for a mid-16th-century lady. (She was taller than all three of her husbands, as well as miscellaneous lovers.) Charles got his dark looks from his French mother, Henrietta Maria, who was ‘black as my hat’ as people used to say when I was a boy. Charles was swarthy, perhaps saturnine is the word. A great theatregoer, he complained that at Drury Lane and Covent Garden the ‘goodies’ were always played by blonds and the ‘baddies’ by dark-haired and dark-skinned actors. Once in the theatre, disgusted by a production of Macbeth in which the murderers were noticeably dark, he exploded, ‘Pray, what is the meaning that we never see a Rogue in a Play, but, Godsfish! they always clap him on a black Periwig? When it is well known one of the greatest Rogues in England always wears a fair one.’ He was alluding to his bitter enemy, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a Blond Beast.
And come to that, what about the Blond Beast? The term occurred in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), as follows: ‘Das Raubthier, die prachtvoller nach Beute und Sieg l
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