Royal Murders E-Book

Dulcie M Ashdown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This book examines the motives, means and consequences of the murders among members of Europe's ruling families over the last 1,000 years. Plucking true stories due to their historical significance and sheer intrigue, this book relates violent deaths amid royal splendour and the overthrow of tyrants by oppressed populations. Methods vary from sword and arrow, to bomb and bullet, to alleged witchcraft. Settings range from Russia to Portugal; British examples include the involvement Mary Queen of Scots may have had in her second husband's murder and a search for the facts behind Shakespeare's portrayal of the murderous usurpers Macbeth and Richard III. But in European history there has been no royal murder to rival Russia's Tsar Ivan the Terrible, a homicidal maniac responsible for thousands of deaths, whose dramatic killing sprees are examined here. Dulcie M. Ashdown takes on a journey through the dark and tragic side of royal history: from Richard III through to the recent controversy surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Leseprobe

ROYAL MURDERS

ROYAL MURDERS

DULCIE M. ASHDOWN

First published in 1998 This edition published 2009

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved © Dulcie M. Ashdown, 1998, 2000, 2009, 2011

The right of Dulcie M. Ashdown, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 6919 5MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 6920 1

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

A Note on Names

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Sword and Arrow

2. A Woman’s Weapons

3. A Family Affair

4. Scotland

5. Murder by Magic

6. For God’s Sake

7. Killing No Murder

8. Russia

9. Marksmen, Madmen and the Infernal Machine

10. Crowned Killers

11. Propaganda by Deed

12. The Assassin’s Heyday

13. The Bullet that Started a War

14. A Few Among Many

15. Echoes of Bomb and Bullet

16. Beyond Belief

Sources and Further Reading

By the same author

Queen Victoria’s Mother

Queen Victoria’s Family

Ladies-in-Waiting

Royal Paramours

Princess of Wales

Royal Children

Royal Weddings

Victoria and the Coburgs

Tudor Cousins

Over the Teacups (anthology)

Christmas Past (anthology)

. . . let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings –

How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos’d,

Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d,

All murder’d – for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court . . .

Shakespeare, King Richard II: III, ii

A NOTE ON NAMES

It would be impossible to style all the foreign names consistently. I started off determined to use the indigenous styles, because in seeking books on foreign subjects I suffered from inconsistencies such as Joanna, Joan, Jane, Jeanne and Giovanna for one woman, a queen of Naples. It was not too difficult until I reached the chapter on Russia, when it occurred to me to ask: surely it was ridiculous to write about Piotr the Great, Ekaterina II and Nikolai II? At that point I thought of changing every name already written, to put it into a familiar English form: Knud to Canute, Henri to Henry etc. Then I thought of King Umberto of Italy and King Ludwig II of Bavaria: Kings Humbert and Lewis?

So the names in this book are a compromise: foreign where possible (Ivan – not John – the Terrible) but the English form where that seemed sensible (William – not Willem – the Silent).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due, as ever, to the staff of the British Library, the British Library’s Colindale Newspaper Library and above all the London Library; also to Jon Henley of the Guardian, who has kindly supplied me with information on Sweden, for the last chapter, and finally to my mother, who has typed some hundred thousand words.

INTRODUCTION

In March 1982, I attended a party at which her Majesty the Queen was the guest of honour. While the Queen circled the room, occasionally pausing to speak to one of the guests, I stood chatting (with some awe) to a famous naturalist. He was well known to members of the royal family and had a piece of news for the Queen about some recent phenomenon of British bird life. When the Queen approached, he stepped forward, and as he did so, three men suddenly appeared at our left and right and from behind the Queen. With a slight wave of her hand, the Queen halted them, and she and the naturalist conversed for a few minutes before she moved on.

For the first time, I appreciated the vigilance of the Queen’s bodyguards. It seemed to me that royal security was admirable. I was mistaken. Despite the fact that, the previous year, there had been two IRA plots to kill the Queen, and a man had fired at her as she rode to the ceremony of Trooping the Colour, royal security was still lax. In June 1982 a man was able to enter Buckingham Palace unobserved on two occasions and even to invade the Queen’s bedroom. He was not an armed assassin but he might have been.

Royal security has tightened considerably since then, but Elizabeth II still lives with the knowledge that at any moment, at home or abroad, she may be killed by a ‘madman’ – or by a terrorist. So far, there have been only threats and false alarms but the Queen can never be entirely certain of her safety. Today or tomorrow she may again become the target of bomb or bullet. And her fears for herself are compounded by those for her children and grandchildren.

Although the British queen is by no means the only head of state to need protection from would-be assassins, in recent years the threat to monarchs and members of their families has in fact diminished as power has been transferred to elected representatives of the people. Between 1898 and 1913 four European kings, a queen and an empress were assassinated, and there were attempts on the lives of several monarchs and members of their families; in 1914 the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated; in 1918 the Russian Tsar, his wife and his children were murdered. Since then, only one European king has been assassinated (in 1934). However, attempts on and threats to the life of Spain’s King Juan Carlos, by ETA, the Basque terrorists in the 1990s show that the danger remains.

Royal murder is older than recorded history, for legend told of it long before reliably factual history was recorded. The Bible has instances, and so do the records of several pre-Christian era cultures. However, this chronicle of Europe’s royal murders begins in the Middle Ages, as it seems wise to avoid the uncertainties of ancient history. There is one important omission: the Byzantine Empire. So numerous were the murders of (and by) Byzantine emperors and of (and by) members of their families that recounting them might double the length of this book. In fact, the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon filled several volumes with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which traces in detail the lives of Byzantium’s rulers to their fifteenth-century demise.

Not all royal murders have been assassinations. The term ‘assassination’ means the killing of a public figure for a matter of principle. ‘Murder’, on the other hand, encompasses a range of personal motives: anger, hatred, revenge, jealousy, greed etc.

The royal murders perpetrated before the sixteenth century were largely committed by people with personal motives – usually the usurpation of a monarch’s power; only a few can be called ‘tyrannicide’, the killing of a tyrant, which does qualify for the term ‘assassination’.

In the sixteenth century, the killing of prominent figures – monarchs, statesmen, noblemen – had a new motive: religion. After the European Reformation, it was widely regarded as heroism to kill a Protestant or a Catholic monarch, depending on one’s own religious convictions. Inventive theology blended with the medieval philosophy of tyrannicide to justify acts that were generally the work of fanatics.

Tyrannicide resurfaced in England in the seventeenth century, in France in the eighteenth, with Kings Charles I and Louis XVI brought to trial, convicted and executed. While their judges justified the kings’ deaths as punishment for crimes, those deaths have also been called ‘judicial murder’ – a debatable point.

‘Death to the tyrant’ was also a slogan of the nineteenth-century revolutionaries, but their aspirations sometimes included the ending of the monarchical system as well as the killing of individual monarchs. Political murders – assassinations – proliferated in the late nineteenth century, during the last years in which European monarchs wielded real power in government.

However, the term ‘royal murder’ has two faces: not just the murder of monarchs but murder by monarchs and members of royal families. Often the two overlap, when one king is murdered by – or by order of – the man who takes his place: in England, for example, in the fifteenth century, with the murders of two (arguably three) kings by their successors. But there are also monarchs who have been accredited with murder on a large scale, and none more famously than Ivan ‘the Terrible’, Tsar of Russia, who was responsible for the death of thousands of men, women and children, many of them personally supervised by the man who delighted in the most hideous forms of torture ever devised.

For centuries, the extent of a monarch’s power was so great that it is no wonder that claimants fought for crowns, usurpers killed for them. And it is no wonder that, over the past couple of centuries, it has been thought unreasonable that one person, a monarch, should wield power that is denied to millions of people. Monarchs have clutched so fiercely at their cherished power that in many countries it has had to be prised from them by violent means. Even those who are today ‘constitutional monarchs’, some mere figureheads, have been threatened by those who resent their personifying the power of government and of an ‘establishment’ that jealously hoards its privileges, refusing to share them with those not born among the elite. As long as there is such inequality of power and wealth – and it is impossible to envisage its ending – there will be people who regard monarchs as personal enemies or as ‘enemies of the people’. It seems unlikely that the last royal murder has been committed.

’I love a good murder,’ say the readers of detective fiction, and the inventive genius of the crime writer is untiring. But in factual history there are stories that rival any fiction ever written. Some are whodunits, some why-dunits; some have a twist of motive or means or the murderer’s temperament that adds a thrill of surprise or horror. And when these historical murders are those of monarchs – of men and women whose lives have the glamour of power, wealth and fame – they may affect the life and well-being of a nation. In the context of royal murder, mere names in history books, associated with wars and laws, ceremonial and pageantry, are transformed into people with recognisable personalities, as victims of murder or themselves murderers.

These stories, reflecting changes of motive and means as the centuries pass, may be viewed as relating the development of monarchical government and of the opposition to it, but they also present a compendium of the human emotions and aspirations that have caused men and women to challenge ‘the dread and fear of kings’.

CHAPTER ONE

SWORD AND ARROW

To anyone who lived a thousand years ago (and for several centuries afterwards and certainly in all the centuries before), modern Britain would seem like a heaven of peace, inhabited by angels.

For centuries, life was held cheaply: murder was committed frequently and not only in the course of a robbery or rape but deliberately, for the avenging of a wrong or to hasten an inheritance, and heedlessly, in a rage of anger. As to punishment for crime, beheading was the least to fear, a quick and thus merciful end reserved for the elite. Hanging might be supplemented by the drawing of entrails before death, the dreadful plunging of the hand into flesh to extract the heart; then the body was quartered, each limb tied to a different horse and the four driven apart; those quarters would be sent to various parts of a city, county or even country, depending on the magnitude of the crime or the fame of the criminal, to serve as a warning to others. On river bridges and city gates, severed heads were set on poles, to meet the gaze of passersby; birds pecked out the eyes, and the flesh rotted to reveal the skull. Public executions and punishments were popular forms of entertainment.

There were many royal murders in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages,* usually the work of a claimant to a throne. A ruler’s combination of power and wealth was a temptation irresistible to those who had – or believed they had – a claim to the throne. The main danger was the transfer of power at the death of a ruler, when rival claimants might dispute – and fight. A disputed succession divided a kingdom’s loyalty, raised civil war and left the kingdom a prey to outside enemies. The succession of father to son thus emerged in the Middle Ages as being the safest way of ensuring a crown’s peaceful transition. Monarchs (notably Henry VIII, King of England) went to extraordinary lengths to ensure a father-son transfer of power.

Revenge was also frequently a motive: one murder might beget another. King Radomir of Bulgaria was murdered by his cousin Jan Vladislav in 1015: Jan Vladislav had a claim to the throne, but he was also the son of a man whom Radomir had had murdered. As king, Jan Vladislav had Radomir’s immediate family killed too; that was a way of ensuring that there would be no one to seek revenge in the future.

Some monarchs did not need an excuse for murder, only the power to avoid retribution. Clovis, King of the Franks, has generally been accounted a great king, from the evidence of his conquests and the admiring words of Gregory of Tours, his chronicler, but even Gregory had to admit that Clovis had consolidated his kingdom by killing off relatives and appropriating their lands. Clovis extended his borders by guile as well as conquest. In the first decade of the sixth century he persuaded Chlodoric, son of Sigebert ‘the Lame’, King of the Rhineland Franks, to kill his father. When Chlodoric had done so, he went through his father’s treasure chest to find a reward for his friend Clovis, but as he bent over the chest, one of Clovis’s men came up behind him and split his skull with an axe. Clovis informed the Rhineland Franks that Chlodoric had killed Sigebert and had himself been killed, and he offered himself for the kingship. Needless to say, he was accepted.

Meagre as Gregory’s history of Clovis’s reign may be, it is more than can be found for the majority of monarchs of the period. Many of the stories of kings, saints and warriors that have come down to us are mere legend – and they were the only people of interest to storytellers. It was only very gradually that ‘real history’ emerged from fictionalised accounts of a nation’s heroes, and the transition is too blurred for the two to be distinguished.

The Danes were fond of stories. Their sagas may stretch back hundreds of years beyond the identifiable points of their early history. One such story is that of Prince Amled – and it may sound familiar.

Once upon a time there were two brothers, Horvendel and Fenge, who were co-rulers of Jutland. Fenge killed Horvendel, in order to rule alone, and he married Horvendel’s widow, Geruth. Horvendel’s only son, Prince Amled, was afraid that Fenge would kill him too, to prevent his challenging for the crown, so he pretended to be mad – and thus harmless. But Fenge still suspected Amled and sent him off to England, with two companions, to deliver a letter to the King of England. Amled was wary: he killed the two men sent to watch him and opened the letter. It requested the King of England to kill Amled. So he destroyed the letter and, still journeying on to England, stayed there for a year. On his return to Jutland, Amled was welcomed with apparent pleasure by King Fenge. After the celebration banquet, when the King’s warriors were lying around drunk, Amled covered them all with carpets and set light to them. Then he went into Fenge’s chamber and ran him through with his sword. At a gathering of the people the next day, Amled was proclaimed king.

This story was, of course, the basis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the archetypal tragedy in which ‘the stage is littered with bodies’.

In fact, Scandinavia produced more medieval regicides than any other country. In the Dark Ages, it was the rule rather than the exception for a king’s reign to end in his violent death, and as the Middle Ages opened, with the Vikings’ incursions into western Europe and the British Isles, little changed.

For example, there was the killing in the mid-ninth century of the Viking warrior Ragnar Lodbrok, condemned by Ælla, King of Northumbria, to die in a snakepit, after he had been taken prisoner in the aftermath of battle. In 867, Ælla was himself defeated by Ivar, son of Ragnar, and he was sentenced to the most painful of ritual deaths: the outline of an eagle was carved in the flesh of his back, the skin turned over to reveal his bones, and salt rubbed into the wounds. Ivar was also responsible for the murder, in 869, of St Edmund, King of East Anglia, who was tied to a tree and shot full of arrows. In pagan defiance of Christianity’s insistence on burial, Ivar had Edmund’s corpse beheaded and the head cast away in the woods. According to legend, when Edmund’s men went out searching for it, the head called out to them until they found it and took it for burial.

After some two centuries of armed incursions into England, in 1016 Knud (Cnut or Canute), King of Denmark, became King of England. He left his Norwegian brother-in-law Ulf to govern Denmark while he was in England. During one of the King’s visits to Denmark, he and Ulf had a disagreement over a game of chess, and rather than admit defeat, Ulf got up and left the game unfinished. Knud called him a coward; Ulf retorted that it was Knud and his Danes who were the cowards, in their recent war with the Swedes, reminding Knud that a Norwegian fleet had rescued the Danes from a sea battle. Knud brooded on the insult and the next morning sent a man to kill Ulf as he knelt at the altar rail in St Lucius’ church. Later the King repented what he had done, and he paid his widowed sister Estrid the ‘bloodfine’ due from a murderer to the victim’s family.

A century later, Ulf’s grandson Nils was king of Denmark and, as was usual, he employed various members of his family to rule the provinces that made up his kingdom. His nephew Knud Lavard governed the province of Slesvig – and governed it so well that Nils’ son Magnus was jealous, certain that Knud Lavard would be chosen as the next king, as there was still no automatic father-son succession to the Danish throne. In January 1131, Knud Lavard was on his way home from spending Christmas with the King when Magnus caught up with him, resting in a wood, and murdered him. Three years later, Knud Lavard’s death was avenged when his half-brother Erik Emune killed Magnus in a battle at Fotevig. King Nils fled, but he made the mistake of seeking shelter in Slesvig, where Knud Lavard had been popular. As the King had the gates of the castle bolted behind him, he heard bells peeling out from the nearby town. They were the bells of the Guild of St Knud, of which Knud Lavard had been master and whose members were all sworn to avenge the death of a murdered brother. They took the castle and killed King Nils.

In the thirteenth century, four Danish kings in succession were murdered, three of them within a decade of each other. The first was King Erik ‘Ploughpenny’ (named from his taxation of peasants by the number of ploughs they owned), who ruled between 1241 and 1250. He was allegedly killed at the orders of his brother Abel, who had festering grievances against Erik. Abel’s knights beheaded Erik and threw his body into the River Sli, loaded with chains so that it would sink the more easily. Abel not only swore to his people that he had not killed Erik but had twenty-four knights support him on oath; but apparently no one believed the perjurers. Nevertheless, when Abel was killed two years later, it was not in revenge for his brother’s death but for the wrongs he had done a wheelwright, Hans of Pelvorm, who accosted him on the road and killed him with a sledgehammer.

Erik and Abel’s brother Christoffer was the next king, reigning between 1251 and 1259. He resented the wealth accumulated by the Danish Church and the privileges that his predecessors had granted to the clergy; in his attacks on the Church, he went so far as to imprison the Archbishop of Copenhagen, bringing down a sentence of excommunication on himself and his council. Some of the Danish clergy continued to administer the Eucharist to the King, however, in defiance of the Church but probably in fear of their lives. When Christoffer died suddenly, on 29 May 1259, it was widely believed that he had been given a poisoned wafer at Mass by Abbot Arnfast – who significantly became a bishop on the Archbishop’s release.

Christoffer’s ten-year-old son Erik, who succeeded him, had scarcely any peace in his kingdom throughout his entire reign. The Church continued to challenge royal power; so did the King’s cousins, with their claims to independent power in their provinces. At last, in 1286, even Erik’s own retainers turned against him. Resting in a barn on the night of 22 November, after a hunt, the King was set on by men who left fifty-six stab wounds in his body.

In most of these Scandinavian murders, the murderer – or the man who ordered the murder – came to power through his crime. Not so in the case of King Erik. His son, another Erik (aged eleven), succeeded him, and his murderers were proclaimed outlaws and were forced to flee. They took refuge in strongholds along the Danish coast and became virtual pirates by their preying on shipping. It was many years before Denmark was free of them, some dying of natural causes, others captured and brought to justice.

In view of the high proportion of Scandinavian royal murders that were family affairs, it is a wonder that any man could trust his brother, but apparently the princes Erik and Valdemar of Sweden had no suspicions when, in 1317, their brother King Birger invited them to spend the Christmas holiday with him at Nyköping. He said that his castle there was too small to accommodate their servants – the well-armed retinue without which no nobleman travelled. So Erik and Valdemar were left unprotected when Birger had the gates of his castle locked and the drawbridges raised. When the princes’ friends heard that they had been imprisoned, and began to gather an army to demand their release, Birger neither panicked nor prepared to make a stand against them. He simply abandoned the castle, throwing the keys into the water of the moat. Erik and Valdemar were left to starve before their friends arrived. And Birger’s motive for killing his brothers? Some years earlier, they had forced him to sign over to them a great measure of independence for the provinces they governed under him. Although Birger regained power there through his brothers’ deaths, they resulted in a national uprising. Birger’s (innocent) son was executed in revenge, and he died in exile.

The stories of Scandinavian royal murders show how common was murder within royal families there. Almost every European royal dynasty can also offer an example of murder by a brother, a cousin or even a wife. Thus it is not surprising that the murder of England’s King William II in the year 1100 has been attributed to his brother, who became King Henry I, despite the ostensible ‘facts of the case’ presented by the chroniclers.

William II, King of England, who reigned between 1087 and 1100, was, according to the chronicler William of Malmesbury, a ‘well set’ man, ‘. . . his complexion florid, his hair yellow; of open countenance; different coloured eyes, varying with certain glittering specks; of astonishing strength, though not very tall, and his belly rather projecting; of no eloquence but remarkable for a hesitation of speech, especially when angry’. Another chronicler, Gaimar, wrote: ‘. . . he was always happy and creating mirth. He had a red beard and blond hair, on which account and for which reason he had the surname of “the red king”’ – or William ‘Rufus’.

Gaimar’s account of William is full of praise for the justice he meted out and the peace he established in England: ‘This noble king, through great courage, held his kingdom with honour.’ Another chronicler, Ordericus Vitalis, disagreed: ‘He was liberal to his military men and foreigners, but the poor natives of his realm were severely oppressed and he exacted from them what he so prodigally bestowed on foreigners.’ William of Malmesbury was in two minds:

Greatness of soul was pre-eminent in the King, which, in process of time, he obscured by excessive severity; vices, indeed, in place of virtues, so insensibly crept into his bosom that he could not distinguish them. . . . At last, however, in his latter years, the desire after good grew cold, and the crop of evil increased to ripeness; his liberality became prodigality, his magnanimity pride, his austerity cruelty. He was . . . of supercilious look, darting his threatening eye on the bystander and, with assumed severity and ferocious voice, assailing such as conversed with him.

From a much greater distance in time and with the benefit of scholars’ analysis of plentiful evidence, William II appears to have been an extremely competent king, who exercised masterful control over his kingdom; stood no nonsense from the Church, whose higher clergy were always on the lookout for means of extending their power; bought off the elder brother who might have made trouble; and made his mark on the Continent, where he conquered the French county of Maine.

The elder brother was Robert, Duke of Normandy. He had been passed over, for the crown of England, in the will of their father, William I, but since the principle of primogeniture – the transition of property from father to eldest son – was not in force in the English royal succession, William II had no fear that Robert would oust him on a point of law. As long as William kept control of England and its nobles, he was safe from any pretension of Robert’s. In fact, after a bout of arms, the brothers had come to an agreement: Robert mortgaged Normandy to William in return for the money that would outfit his army for a crusade in the Holy Land.

Had the third brother, Henry, not been ten years younger than William and only twenty when their father died, he might have put forward his own claim to the throne, for he was the only one of William the Conqueror’s sons to have been born after the Norman duke seized the English throne. Thus Henry could claim the throne by ‘porphyrogeniture’: he was ‘born to the purple’, the son of a king. Still, as William II was unmarried, Henry had only to wait for him to die and he would inherit the throne. Or would Robert challenge for the throne should William die? In the summer of the year 1100, it was known that Robert was on his way back to England; he had just married; would he one day claim England for himself and his heirs, as a rival to Henry?

So if anyone had a motive to kill William II in 1100, it was his brother Henry, anxious to establish himself on the throne before Robert of Normandy came home.

Tradition records that it was one Walter Tirel who was said to have fired the fatal arrow, though it is not easy to establish a motive for him to have done so. In fact, the chroniclers of the period generally agreed that Tirel killed the King accidentally, when William was struck by an arrow that Tirel had fired at a deer. However, according to Suger, Abbot of St Denis in France, ‘I have often heard him [Tirel] assert on his solemn oath, at a time when he had nothing either to fear or hope, that on that day he was neither in the part of the forest where the King was hunting nor saw him at all while he was in the wood.’

Walter Tirel was lord of Poix in Ponthieu and was one of the foreigners whom Ordericus Vitalis noted were so attractive to William, though in fact all England’s nobles were foreigners after the Norman Conquest, when William I had divided up his new kingdom between his relations, allies and vassals. Tirel was the brother-in-law of Roger and Gilbert de Clare, both of whom were in the hunting party in the New Forest on Thursday 2 August 1100, when William II was killed. So was the King’s brother Henry.

It has been suggested that the Clare brothers were employed by Henry to engineer the death of the King. It seems unlikely that Tirel was their confederate. More likely, they used him as a scapegoat, perhaps ensuring his safe escape from England but not defending him from the charge that Tirel obviously knew to be untrue – that he had fired the arrow that killed the King. And was it the Clares who saw to it that the story of Tirel’s loosing the arrow became established as ‘fact’ by such frequent repetition that the chroniclers came to record it, even though Tirel himself denied it? Who did fire that arrow must remain a matter for conjecture.

Some quarter-century after the death of William II, William of Malmesbury wrote of that afternoon of 2 August 1100:

The sun was now declining when the King, drawing his bow and letting fly an arrow, slightly wounded a stag which passed before him and, keenly gazing, followed it, still running, a long time with his eyes, holding up his hand to keep off the power of the sun’s rays. At this instant, Walter, conceiving a noble exploit, which was while the King’s attention was otherwise occupied to transfix another stag which by chance came near him, unknowingly and without power to prevent it, oh gracious God!, pierced his breast with a fatal arrow.

Gaimar wrote:

The King was in the thick part of the forest near a marsh. An inclination seized him to shoot at a stag which he saw go into a herd; he dismounted near a tree; he himself had his bow bent. The barons dismounted in every direction and beckoned the others who were near. Walter Tirel also dismounted; he was very near the King; close by an elder tree, he leaned his back against an aspen. As the herd passed by and the great stag came in the midst of it, he drew the bow which he held in his hand; by an unhappy fate he drew a barbed arrow. It happened that it missed the stag. It pierced as far as the heart of the King. An arrow went to his heart but they knew not who bent the bow; but the other archers said that the arrow came from the bow of Walter. There was an appearance of this, for he fled immediately . . . .

Ordericus Vitalis wrote: ‘. . . a stag suddenly running between them, the King quitted his station and Walter shot an arrow. It grazed the beast’s grizzly back but, glancing from it, mortally wounded the King, who stood within its range. He immediately fell on the ground and, alas, suddenly expired.’

Whatever Tirel did or did not do, the hue and cry was raised against him. Even as he was riding hell for leather to the coast, Henry was taking possession of his brother’s treasury, in nearby Winchester, and then making for Westminster, where he had himself proclaimed king. Everything went so smoothly that it is easy to believe that Henry had made his plans before his brother’s death.

However, there is another version of the story of the death of King William II, one that does show Walter Tirel as the murderer but which also has William as a willing victim. This is the version that was offered by the anthropologist Margaret Murray in her book The God of the Witches, published in 1933. She propounded the theory that William II was a pagan, a member of that Old Religion that survived in England long after the coming of Christianity (see pp. 73–4). As king, William was also high priest, and he was the sacrifice to the Nature gods whose death would bring his people good fortune: his blood, falling on the earth, would fertilise it to bring rich harvests. Margaret Murray supported her theory with ‘proof’ chosen from the chroniclers’ stories, notably an incident in which William gave Walter Tirel his arrows, remarking that ‘. . . the sharpest arrows should be given to him who knows best how to inflict mortal wounds with them’ (Ordericus Vitalis). The chroniclers disagree about what happened after the arrow struck the King. According to Ordericus Vitalis, he ‘. . . fell to the ground and . . . suddenly expired’, but Gaimar has a devoutly Christian William calling out to be given the Holy Sacrament – calling out four times, in fact, but without hope, for the hunters were too far from any church; one of them gave him ‘herbs with all their flowers’ instead (which may have some pagan significance). But William of Malmesbury, the first of the chroniclers to record the death of William II, has his own story: ‘On receiving the wound, the King uttered not a word but, breaking off the shaft of the weapon where it projected from his body, fell upon the wound, by which it accelerated his death.’ He may have done so to spare himself the pain of a long-drawn-out dying or it may have been part of the ritual of sacrifice.

The fact that the death of William II is still being treated as a ‘whodunit’ nine centuries later either speaks well of the efficiency of his murderers or testifies to a general unwillingness to treat any sudden death as an accident.

It would be tempting to characterise all medieval European monarchs as brutal, vicious, merciless, but there were degrees of evil even in their natures. The Angevin dynasty, for example, was renowned for its members’ hasty tempers and spur-of-the-moment violence, where others might be more coolly and deliberately cruel.

Legend has it that the counts of Anjou, whose offspring sat on the thrones of England and Jerusalem, were descended from a man who brought home from his travels a beautiful wife, whose origins no one knew. Soon people began to notice that she never stayed in church throughout the Mass but withdrew at the last moment before the consecration of the host. One day, a knight deliberately trod on the hem of the Countess’s gown, and she was detained long enough to witness the elevation of the consecrated host – whereupon, with a terrible shriek, she flew out of the window, never to be seen again. She was the Devil’s daughter, Melusine, and her descendants were renowned for their fiendish tempers.

King Henry II, half Angevin by birth, had the Angevin temper. It was demonstrated in his dealings with his own family: he kept his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, imprisoned for years (see p. 27), and when he died, he was in the midst of a war against his sons. But Henry’s chief infamy was the murder of his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, which was done for his benefit if not at his command.

Becket was a remarkable man on many counts. In an age in which the highest offices of state and the highest ranks in the Church were almost entirely the prerogative of the nobly born, Becket, the son of a merchant, became both Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury. He became Chancellor in 1155, just a year after Henry II’s accession to the throne, when the King was gathering able men for his government, and he used his position as a powerbase, to gain access to the whole spectrum of power: he even rode to war with the King and mounted military campaigns on his own account, though he had spent the first twenty-odd years of adult life as a priest, scholar and lawyer.

When, in 1162, Henry appointed him archbishop of Canterbury, Becket prophesied that it would be the end of their friendship, for the interests of Church and State were certain to clash. Not only did he change in externals (wearing a hairshirt, becoming a vegetarian, spending hours in prayer) but he began to place loyalty to the Church’s interests above loyalty to the King. He insisted on the Church’s full rights: Church land confiscated by the King must be restored; men convicted by Church courts must not be sentenced in lay courts; taxes from which the Church had been granted remission should not now be demanded. The mounting tension between the King and the Archbishop ended with Becket’s being named a traitor, in 1164, and fleeing to France. In retaliation, Becket excommunicated his enemies – notably those bishops who had resented his leapfrogging them to become primate of England. Eventually papal envoys managed to patch up the quarrel, and on 1 December 1170 Becket returned to England.

King Henry was in France that month, and news began to come in that in England the newly returned Archbishop of Canterbury was excommunicating everyone who had ever opposed him – even that he was gathering an army. These reports came largely from the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of Salisbury and London, who had themselves been excommunicated and were making a last-ditch attempt to unseat Becket before he managed to regain control of the English Church. The reports were untrue, but Henry II believed them. With a show of the notorious Plantagenet temper, he roared ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’

Among those who heard Henry were four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, William de Tracy, Hugo de Morville and Richard le Brito. They entered Canterbury on the morning of 29 December and went, unarmed, to confront the Archbishop at home. After high words, they left. In the darkness of the midwinter afternoon, they entered the cathedral; now they were in full armour, and they carried swords. The Archbishop stood at the altar of the chapel of Our Lady. Words were exchanged but soon enough the swords were at work: Becket was struck down, his skull cleft by a heavy blow.

When the news reached King Henry, he shut himself away for three days; when he emerged, he was wearing sackcloth, the marks of ashes on his head. Later he sent word to the Pope that he had played no direct part in the murder, but he was willing – almost eager – to accept the penance that Alexander III imposed: to finance 200 crusading knights, to acknowledge the ancient rights of the Church and restore its property, and in future always to recognise the rights of the English Church and Papacy.

The murder of Thomas Becket, apparently at his command, obviously frightened Henry II at the time, but it did not make a saint of him. Becket, on the other hand, was canonised as St Thomas of Canterbury in 1173.

John, King of England, the youngest son of Henry II, succeeded his brother Richard on the throne in 1199 and reigned until 1216. Traditionalist history books have always vilified John, because the chroniclers of his time were all against him: the chroniclers were churchmen, and John was excommunicated by the Pope in 1208 and England laid under an interdict for six years. Admittedly King John did much to earn his bad reputation, but there have been worse kings whose reputations have been enhanced rather than blackened by the historians of their reigns. John is remembered as the ‘wicked prince’ of the Robin Hood stories and as having rebelled against his father; then there was the challenge to his rule posed by his barons, and his capitulation to them in granting Magna Carta; and finally, John is remembered for having had his own nephew murdered. This incident, immortalised in Shakespeare’s eponymous play, is King John’s ultimate condemnation.

When King Richard died, his heir might have been his nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, son of the late Duke Geoffrey, who was senior to John. However, the strict laws of inheritance were not yet in force in England, and the mature John was obviously a more desirable king than Arthur, who was only thirteen years old. Besides, had the crown been offered to Arthur, John would have been sure to challenge for it. Inevitably, Arthur grew up resenting the loss of his ‘rights’; in 1202 he did homage to the King of France, Philippe Augustus, for French counties that in fact belonged to his grandmother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, showing his uncle John that he would know no peace in his French domains while France was Arthur’s ally.

When the octogenarian Queen Eleanor heard that her grandson Arthur and his small army were heading towards her, she left the abbey of Fontevrault, where she had expected to live out her last years in peace, and headed for the fortifiable town of Poitiers. But Arthur was close; Eleanor had to seek refuge in the castle of Mirebeau and, when Arthur took the town that surrounded it, she became a virtual prisoner. However, before his arrival, she had managed to send a message to her son John, and now he arrived with his army to relieve her. Eleanor was released, Arthur captured. That was in August 1202; for the next nine months, Arthur was held a prisoner in Rouen. The King ordered his captor, Hubert de Burgh, to blind and castrate the Duke, but he refused.

On Maundy Thursday, 3 April 1203, King John was staying in Rouen. That night he got drunk and, whether because of his state or needing it to give him courage, he killed his sixteen-year-old nephew with his own hands. He and another man went out in a boat on the River Seine and, having tied a heavy stone to the body, to make it sink, threw it into the river.

The veracity of the story can scarcely be doubted. John’s companion that night was William de Braose, and the chronicle in which the story first appeared was written in a monastery in Margam, in Glamorgan, of which William was a patron. Further, when William de Braose fell from royal favour, some five years later, and the King demanded that he send his young sons to be hostages, William’s wife Matilda refused, saying that she would not entrust them to him because he had murdered his nephew.

Of course, it was suspected that the King was responsible for Arthur’s death, but there was no proof. The body had risen to the surface of the Seine when it became caught in a fisherman’s net, and had been taken away for secret burial, but only someone with inside information could have been as certain as Matilda de Braose seems to have been. She, her husband and their children fled to Ireland, but in 1210 they fell into the King’s hands. John allowed William to go to his French estates to try to raise money for a ransom, but before he could return, Matilda and their eldest son died in prison. Report had it that they had been deliberately starved.

Many other deaths were credited to John. In May 1194 he had had 300 captives beheaded at Evreux, after a rebellion. In 1212 he hanged twenty-eight Welsh boys whom their fathers had given as hostages for their obedience to the Crown. Nevertheless, repulsive as such acts may be today, such things happened in every European country in the early Middle Ages – and in some places long after. It was not these incidents but the interdict imposed by the Papacy on the English Church between 1208 and 1214 that really shocked the monk-chroniclers and ill-disposed them to King John. They told, with relish, not only the story of how the King forced a Jew of Bristol to reveal the hiding-place of his treasures, by having one of his teeth knocked out each day until he spoke, but also such tales as that of the loaf illicitly baked on a Sunday (the holy day and holiday) which ran with blood when a knife cut it. The more colourful details of many a medieval royal murder may also owe something to a monk’s imagination.

On the night of 9 September 1238, a man gained access to the palace at Woodstock in Oxfordshire by climbing through the window of the King’s bedroom. He was carrying a knife and was intent on killing Henry III, King of England. Fortunately, the King was not in his own bed but in that of his wife, in another room. Also, one of the Queen’s ladies was still awake: Margaret Bisset, ‘a holy maid’, was singing psalms by the light of a candle. When she heard the man moving about – and actually ‘asking in a terrible voice where the King was’ – she raised the alarm by screaming. The King’s attendants came running and broke open the door to the Queen’s room, which the man had just bolted.

The King and his attendants recognised the man immediately. He had presented himself at Court only the previous day and had been thought to be mad, because he had said to the King, ‘Resign to me the kingdom which you have unjustly usurped and so long detained from me.’ There was, in fact, no doubt about Henry’s right to the throne, and he had been ruling more than twenty years already, so he could afford to be merciful: he prevented his men from inflicting any violence on the madman. After the murder attempt, however, the man had to be taken more seriously. He confessed that he had not come to kill the King on his own account but had been sent by one William Marsh.

Now the King understood the motive. William Marsh was the son of Geoffrey Marsh, who had been in the royal service until April 1234, when he had been suspected of and executed for killing Richard de Burgh, the Earl Marshal – or at least he had been made the scapegoat for the killing. William Marsh had sworn vengeance on the King for his father’s execution and had taken to piracy, based on Lundy island, off the Devon coast. Although Marsh’s hired assassin was, of course, immediately executed, he himself was not brought to justice until 1242, when he was hanged, even though he claimed not to have been guilty of the attempt on the King’s life.

One interesting point about this story, as retailed by the contemporary chronicler Matthew Paris, is the sentence, ‘He . . . confessed that he had been sent there to kill the King, after the manner of the Assassins . . . .’ This term was not a generalisation but referred to a Middle Eastern sect that specialised in the murder of specific victims, named by their leader and selected either for the sect’s own benefit or because someone had paid them to ‘do the deed’.

There has been some controversy over the origin of the word ‘assassin’. On the surface, it seems to derive from ‘hashish’, alias marijuana, thought to have been used by the sect. More likely, the name derived from the Arabic ‘assasseem’, ‘guardians’, for members of the sect claimed to be guardians of the secrets of Paradise.

The story told by European travellers – including the famous Marco Polo – was as follows. The sect controlled the mountainous region south of the Caspian Sea. Its leader, called ‘The Old Man of the Mountains’, had young men brought to his castle, drugged into unconsciousness and carried through a secret passage to a garden in a beautiful valley, in which they were treated to a brief experience of a sensuous paradise. Emerging from the dream, back in the Old Man’s palace, initiates were told that they could earn eternity in Paradise by obeying him implicitly: they were to be trained to kill, at his command, and if it so happened that they were themselves killed, they would go immediately to the Paradise for which they now craved.