Royal Murders: Hatred, Revenge and the Seizing of Power

by Dulcie M Ashdown

Overview

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 resopnsible 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752469195
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	08/26/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	695 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dulcie M. Ashdown is the author of numerous books on British and European history, including Tudor Cousins.

Read an Excerpt

Royal Murders

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By Dulcie M. Ashdown

The History Press

Copyright © 2011 Dulcie M. Ashdown
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6919-5

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CHAPTER 1

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.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Royal Murders by Dulcie M. Ashdown. Copyright © 2011 Dulcie M. Ashdown. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

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,

Editorial Reviews

Popular history writer Ashdown recounts a thousand years of European monarchs being bumped off by sword, arrow, bomb, bullet, and maybe witchcraft. She also describes the harrowing punishments inflicted on the attackers if they were caught and had not acquired enough power by the act to protect themselves. She includes less known examples from Scandinavia, Spain, and some of the eastern European dynasties. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews