No partridge. Augustus was suspicious his food might be tampered with, so he wouldn’t eat anything except freshly picked fruit and veggies, taken under his own eye. What he didn’t know was that his wife Livia snuck out and coated some of the pears with poison beforehand. I think it was her, or her son Tiberius, who condemned the tree, but I’ll have to get the book out again to be sure. Lots of detail in those things.
“Pro-or-anti-because of ideology” is something that a good many people do: it can be hard to achieve the ideal of appreciating the quality of someone’s work, setting aside less positive aspects of the person. An uncle of mine was able to take this ideal position, concerning Evelyn Waugh – whose political and social views and attitudes were in every way, the extreme opposite of my uncle’s; plus he was aware that as a private individual, in his dealings with other folk, Waugh was notoriously a very nasty person. However, my uncle found the guy’s novels, works of genius which he enjoyed immensely.