Royal Murder Page 7

  Arthur Have you the heart? When your head did but ache

  I knit my handkercher about your brows —

  The best I had, a princess wrought it me —

  And never did I ask it you again. . .

  In the play Hubert relents and later, in Scene III, Arthur attempts to escape disguised in “ship boy’s semblance”, and in leaping from a wall injures himself fatally, expiring with this couplet: —

  “O me! my uncle’s spirit is in these stones:

  Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones.”

  An equally melodramatic but more widely accepted account described how the king took Arthur out in a rowing boat on the Seine one night. There were only the two of them in the small craft, and when John judged he was out of earshot of the castle, he suddenly plunged his sword into the unhappy prince. He rowed a league with the corpse huddled in the bows, then tied the anchor stone to its neck and heaved it over the side. If he thought the evidence of the crime had vanished with the concentric ripples, John was wrong — murder will out, and in this case a fisherman found the corpse in his net.

  To my mind the most likely explanation is to be found in the somewhat similar description given in the Margam Chronicle, “After King John had captured Arthur and kept him alive in prison for some time, at length in the castle of Rouen after dinner on the Thursday before Easter when he was drunk and possessed by the Devil, he slew him with his own hand, and tying a heavy stone to the body cast it into the Seine. It was discovered by a fisherman in his net, and being dragged to the bank and recognised, was taken for secret burial.”

  This is much more in keeping with what we know of John and his background. It is hard to imagine him taking Arthur on the dark river to perform such a premeditated deed himself when as monarch he merely had to give the word for a secret execution. The words “possessed by the Devil” give the clue. John had his share of black Angevin temper which was considered to be a symptom of the family’s satanic blood. John’s father Henry II had brought about Becket’s death by a sudden surge of rage; on occasions he would writhe on the ground in demonic fury and gnaw the rushes, or even bite his attendants.

  It is easy to imagine King John — restless with wine and angry that his recent advantage was ebbing away — entering his nephew’s cell to try yet again to persuade him to renounce his alliance with Philip of France, only to be boldly told by Arthur that, though he may be a prisoner, in the eyes of God and the people he is still the rightful heir to Richard’s crown. Suddenly a combination of frustration and wrath engulfs the king — his hands reach for the prisoner’s throat, or he lunges with his dagger. . .

  In a letter written to his mother on April 16, 1203, John stated that God’s Grace had stood him in better stead than he could possibly indicate. Some historians believe he was referring to Arthur’s death thirteen days earlier.

  The Annals of Magram were written in a Cistercian abbey of that name in Glamorgan whose patrons were the De Braose family, and therefore it was quite possible that William de Braose may have confided in the monks the true fate of Arthur. It was William who captured him at Mirebeau, and who was his first gaoler at Falaise. Not only that, William had been one of the first barons to support John’s claims after King Richard’s death, and as a close companion of John on his Continental campaigns he must have had knowledge of many royal secrets.

  Was it this knowledge which led to his tragedy?

  As a reward for his initial support King John granted him valuable lands in Wales and Ireland, but in 1207 he suddenly took back the land in Wales and seized three of his castles there. John claimed that it was because he was deeply in debt to the exchequer, but — as with so many incidents in John’s reign — we do not know the real reason for De Braose’s downfall.

  Roger of Wendover wrote that when the king demanded the De Braose children as hostages William’s wife Matilda told the emissary, “I will not deliver my sons to your lord, King John, for he foully murdered his nephew Arthur, whom he should have cared for honourably.”

  After such a remark she could expect little mercy. To escape the royal wrath the family (which included two sons) sought refuge in Ireland with William’s son-in-law Walter de Lacy.

  It must have been something much more than debt — after all the De Braose possessions had been confiscated — which, in May 1210, made King John assemble an army, supported by a company of mercenaries, at Haverford with the intention of crossing the Irish sea to punish the family and those who had supported it. William failed to appease the king by agreeing to pay a fine of 40,000 marks, and on June 20 the royal host landed at Waterford. A force was sent to take Hugh de Lacy’s castle at Carrickfergus, which surrendered after Hugh and Matilda escaped by sea to Scotland, where she and her elder son were eventually captured by a Scottish lord who presented them lo the English king.

  The dreadful fate of Matilda and her son — which turned many feudal lords against John — was to be sealed in a dungeon in Windsor with only a sheaf of oats and a piece of raw bacon. Some weeks later the door was unlocked and it was found that the mother had gnawed at her son’s flesh before starvation claimed her.

  The murder of Arthur was the watershed in John’s career, after it nothing seemed to go right for him. As soon as rumours of the prince’s fate spread it consolidated his enemies. King Philip vainly summoned John to appear in Paris to account for his prisoner, later claiming that the supreme court of France had found the English king in absentia guilty of murdering his nephew. Meanwhile the Bretons, furious at the disappearance of their duke, joined with the French and Poictevins in invading Normandy. John found that many of his Norman barons were untrustworthy, some of them preferring to open their castle gates to Philip’s forces rather than defend them for him. The most shattering blow fell when news reached the king in England that Chateau Gaillard, that bastion against the French which Richard had proudly dubbed his “beautiful daughter”, had fallen to its besiegers on March 6, 1204. By summer King Philip had control of all Normandy; Anjou, Maine and Touraine fell one after the other so that within two years all that remained of John’s Continental territories was a portion of Aquitaine.

  In 1205 John began his famous quarrel with the Church over a disputed election to the archbishopric of Canterbury. Pope Innocent III consecrated the English candidate Stephen Langton against John’s wishes, and when the king refused to recognise him Innocent placed an interdict on England, which meant that church services were suspended throughout the kingdom and the only offices priests were allowed to perform were to baptise babies and hear confessions of the dying. Later John was excommunicated and in 1212 the Pope went further and issued a bull deposing him, King Philip of France being instructed to carry out the sentence.

  The English king realised that he had to make peace with Rome and in May, 1213, he met Pandulf, the papal legate, at Dover and agreed to Innocent’s demands that he should acknowledge Langton, recall the bishops he had banished, compensate the monasteries he had oppressed. More dramatically he did homage for his kingdom, first surrendering it to the Pope and then receiving it back as a fief of Rome.

  Although he was reported to have lain on the ground and sobbed when he was absolved, John had the satisfaction of knowing that the threat of French invasion was over now that he had the Pope’s protection — well worth an oath of fealty.

  From now on John’s quarrel shifted from the Church to his own magnates. At a Great Council in London Archbishop Langton produced Henry I’s charter and encouraged the barons to demand its renewal — an action that was ultimately to lead to John being forced to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymeade on June 15, 1215. The king had no intention of keeping the charter. He travelled along the south coast, loading his treasure aboard ships and, according to Matthew Paris, was “constantly raging, biting and tearing his nails, muttering and gnashing his teeth, cursing his father and mother, raving and saying that he had twenty-five kings over him” — referring to the number of barons at Runnymeade. He petit
ioned the Pope and his old enemy King Philip for aid, while Pandulf excommunicated the barons which polarized them into two factions, one of which invited the Dauphin of France to come to England to lead them while the other became the royalist party. In October, 1215, civil war began.

  At first fortune favoured the king who secured Rochester and then marched north to Berwick. In April of the next year he reached Dover, from where he planned to send a fleet across the Channel to trap the Dauphin, Prince Louis, in Calais. A storm dispersed his ships and soon afterwards the prince arrived in Thanet.

  John retreated to Winchester, after which his army prowled in the west of England until in September John decided the time was right to go on the offensive again. He took Cambridge and entered Lincolnshire to bring the east of England under his control and create a barrier between his southern enemies and those in the north. On October 12 his column was moving in the direction of Swineshead Abbey, and to reach it the army had to cross the Wellstream estuary (now known as the River Ouse) which was five miles across when the tide was out.

  Behind the lines of troops straggled the king’s baggage train which included wains carrying his treasure. In the autumnal mists the slow moving vehicles missed the track and their wheels sank in quicksand. The king had reached the north shore when he realised there was something amiss. He turned his horse and rode back but it was too late — tidal waters were sweeping in from the sea and swamping the train with its terrified animals and equally terrified wagoners and retainers. Roger of Wendover wrote, “The ground opened in the midst of the waters and whirlpools sucked in everything, men and horses.”

  Bitterly King John left the scene of the disaster and reached the abbey sick in heart and body — he had been suffering from fever and dysentery on the march. Now he made his condition worse by indulging in a supper of new cider and peaches.

  According to an ancient tradition it was at Swineshead that John himself became a murder victim. Holinshed wrote: “. . . after he lost his armie, he came to the abbeie of Swineshead in Lincolnshire, a monke, being mooved with zeale for the oppression of his countries, gave the king poison in a cup of ale whereof he first tooke the assaie, to cause the king not suspect the matter, and so they both died in manner at one time.”

  This is quite possible as death was close to the king when he left the abbey and continued to Sleaford and then on to Newark. He had to be carried on a makeshift litter for the last part of the journey. He reached the Bishop of Lincoln’s castle at Newark on the 16th, and here he lay dying until the night of the 18th when he expired — to the accompaniment of a shrieking wind which caused the superstitious to cross themselves — halfway through making his will in which he named his elder son Henry as his heir.

  Shakespeare in his play gave the king the following death scene:

  Prince Henry: How fares your majesty?

  King John: Poison’d; ill-fare; dead; forsook; cast off;

  And none of you will bid the winter come

  To thrust his icy fingers in my maw;

  Nor let my kingdom’s rivers take their course

  Through my burn’d bosom; nor entreat the

  north

  To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips

  And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you

  much:

  I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait

  And so ingrateful you deny me that.

  Prince Henry: O! that there were some virtue in my tears;

  That might relieve you!

  King John: The salt in them is hot.

  Within me is a hell; and there the poison

  Is a fiend confin’d to tyrannize

  As unreprievable condemned blood.

  Although Shakespeare is an inaccurate historian, he may have been closer to the truth than even he realised in those final lines.

  Contents

  CHAPTER FOUR - The Murder of Edward II

  “He perishes on the rocks that loves another more than himself.“

  FOR THE VISITOR the mellow bulk of Lanercost Priory — especially when first glimpsed through the graceful arch of its shattered gateway — is a highly evocative monument to the Border’s unruly past. Today it is partly a dramatic ruin, partly a lofty and beautiful parish church, which stands close to the line of Hadrian’s Wall a few miles east of Carlisle, and, if tradition is to be believed, is the result of an ancient murder.

  Founded in 1166 by Robert de Vaux, legends aver that it was an act of expiation by Robert for having killed the deposed Saxon proprietor Gilles Bueth. After various attempts to regain his inheritance the Saxon had been invited to a meeting by the Norman, and at this he was treacherously assassinated. Until 1536, when Henry VIII made his initial attack on the Church and dissolved monasteries worth less than £200 per annum, Lanercost had more than its share of vicissitudes. Several times it was ransacked and razed by raiding parties from the North. The cost of rebuilding was so high that the priory’s lands had to be sold off to pay for it. But despite the depredations of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and King David, Lanercost’s highest point of historical drama came in 1307 when Edward I wintered there prior to a campaign by which he intended to fulfil his obsessive dream of permanently crushing the Scots. At the end of February that year his son Prince Edward requested that his late mother’s territory of Ponthieu should be bestowed on his friend Piers Gaveston along with the title of Count of Ponthieu. This caused the old king to explode with wrath, and the tranquillity of the cloisters was shattered as his battle-trained voice thundered: “You baseborn whoreson! Do you want to give lands away now, you who have never gained any? As the Lord lives, if it were not for fear of breaking up the kingdom you should never enjoy your inheritance!”

  Then, according to William of Hemmingburgh, the furious monarch went up to his son and “seized his hair with both hands, pulled it out until he was tired, and then turned him out of the room.” Following this outburst Piers Gaveston was banished from England and Prince Edward was made to swear upon the Host that he would never recall him without the consent of Parliament. Contemporary writers mention the scene in their chronicles, giving such reasons for the banishment as “the undue intimacy which the young Lord had adopted towards him (Gaveston), publically calling him brother”; that the prince “was determined to tie an unbreakable bond of affection with him above all mortals”, and that King Edward realised that “his son, the Prince of Wales, had an inordinate affection for a certain Gascon knight”. This friction caused by the prince’s affection for his boyhood companion was the first link in a tragic chain which was to end twenty years later with the most horrific death ever suffered by an English king.

  History books down the centuries have portrayed Edward II as a weak ruler fawning on his favourites; there are suggestions of perversion and charges that he despised convention. Yet in our more liberal age his character can be viewed more sympathetically than in his own day — we now applaud the “common touch” in our royalty; in the 14th Century Edward was too democratic. In his Concordance of Histories, Robert Fabyan wrote: “This Edward was fayre of body and great of strengthe, but unstedfast of maners and vyle in condycions; for he would refuse the company of lords and men of honour, and haunte hym with vylans and vyle persones; he also gave hym to great drynkage and lyghtly he would discour thinges of great counsayle.”

  And what about his relationship with Piers Gaveston? With our 20th Century psychology the reasons for it become more understandable when we examine his lonely childhood and early background. To be homosexual today is mercifully no longer a crime, so it would ill-behove us to sit in moral judgement on Edward, if indeed he was one. Thus, after six and a half centuries, we have perhaps the best chance to recognise the king for what he really was — one of history’s most complex and tragic characters.

  The fourth but only surviving son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, Edward II was born at Carnarvon Castle on April 25, 1284. His warrior father was just completing his conquest of Wales, and t
radition says that he presented his baby son to the Welsh chieftains as “one who spoke neither French nor English and should be their ruler.” Thus Edward became the first Prince of Wales. While still a young child he was betrothed to Margaret of Scotland who died in 1290. The boy probably found it difficult to mourn the little girl but a few months later he shared the tremendous grief of his father when his mother died. For thirty-six years Queen Eleanor had accompanied Edward I on his campaigns, sharing his dangers and triumphs, and now that death had taken her from his side the king was in despair. When he escorted her body from Grantham to Westminster, he ordered the setting up of crosses wherever the black-draped cavalcade halted to rest.

  After the queen had been interred in Westminster Abbey, where William Torel’s gilt bronze effigy of her is still the most beautiful in the English pantheon, King Edward resumed his harsh way of life with a vengeance, suppressing revolts in Wales, campaigning in Scotland and waging war in Flanders against England’s traditional enemy the French. The lonely little prince who, with his older sisters married, might as well have been a royal orphan, was left in the guardianship of Sir Guy Ferre. This distinguished courtier and poet found that his charge had great skill as a horseman and was keenly interested in music. On the other hand the old knight frowned upon the boy’s love of buffoons and theatrical performances, no doubt wishing that he would show the same enthusiasm for the chivalric exercises which were considered more befitting for his royal station. Contemporary authors complained that as the child became a youth he preferred the company of common folk, such as thatchers, blacksmiths and sailors, to that of his peers. Other complaints were that he was “given to the company of harlots” and he was over fond of gambling. What made the latter charge worse was that his favourite game was a wholly plebeian one which today is known as Pitch and Toss.

  In these pursuits the prince was enthusiastically abetted by Piers Gaveston, the son of a Gascon knight, Sir Arnaud de Gaveston, who was one of the king’s old comrades-in-arms. This handsome, intelligent youth had been appointed a squire of the royal household during a campaign in Flanders, and had so impressed the king that in 1298 he was made an official companion of the prince who was two years his junior. A chronicler related that when Piers was presented to Prince Edward “the King’s son . . . fell so much in love that he entered upon an enduring compact with him, and chose and determined to knit an indissoluble bond of affection with him, before all other mortals.”