Special Guest Blogger: Pope Stephen VI

These days, you might get a handful of different Popes over your lifetime if you're lucky, but in my day it seemed like just about everybody in Rome got to be Pope for a day if they were backed by the right family and i had the Dukes of Spoleto backing me so i got handed the funny hat and was told that i needed to stamp my authority hard and fast lest i be deposed or assassinated like so many before me, so i came up with a beauty of an idea and put a dead former Pope, Formosus, on trial.
The Spoleto's were all for it as Formsus was the other side's guy so i had the festering corpse dug up from the grave where it had been rotting for the previous seven months, dressed it in the full Papal garb and propping it up on the stand, hurled insults at the stinky dead Pope and accused him of perjury and of having acceded to the papacy illegally.
Obviously he was dead and couldn't answer for himself so in the name of fairness and to knacker my original idea that he would be found guilty by virtue of refusing to answer the questions, a terrified teenage deacon was sat behind the former Pope to answer on his behalf.
At the end of the trial Formosus was convicted by me and everyone in the Court and the punishment was to have his three 'blessing fingers' cut off before throwing the corpse in a commoner's grave but then i thought that was probably too good for him so had him dug up again and thrown in a river.
Things went a bit awry when his body washed up on the river banks a few days later and the public failed to accept a trial for a dead guy was fair and they turned on me and rose up and deposed me and Formosus's conviction was overturned and the trial of corpses was also prohibited, hence why you never see dead people people in the dock anymore.
I was imprisoned where i was strangled by a Formosus supporter who was much more popular amongst the common folk than i had anticipated but although my papacy lasted less than a year, just like the putrid smell of rotting Pope in the courtroom, my name lingered for much longer.