How to Murder Your Medieval Royal Relatives

You would think that being a member of the royal family would set you up for a life of luxury and security wouldn't you?  Well you would be wrong as being a royal in history has sometimes been a very hazardous occupation, especially if you were a royal child.  If we travel back to medieval times and take a look at the history of the English royal family, you will soon discover that family feuds were common and that several members of the Plantagenet family were murdered or disappeared in mysterious circumstances.  So let us have a look at some of these unfortunate royals and find out a bit more about their tragic fates.

King John's Tomb in Worcester Cathedral

Shortly after the Norman Conquest, King William II, better known as William Rufus because of the ruddy appearance of his face, was one of the first to meet with an untimely end.  This unfortunate monarch was out hunting on a summer’s day in 1100 in the New Forest when an arrow pierced his chest and killed him.  Things being what they were back then, as soon as they realised that their monarch was dead, the rest of the hunting party, which included his brother Henry, promptly departed, rushing off back to secure their own estates leaving William Rufus’s corpse lying on the forest floor.  Even the young Prince Henry high tailed it to Winchester to make sure that he would get his hands on the royal treasury before anybody else could claim it and then went on to London where he had himself crowned King of England within a few days. The contemporary chroniclers claimed that it had not been murder, but had just been an unfortunate hunting accident, but as William Rufus had not been a popular king, either with his barons or the Church, it was perhaps inevitable that rumours would abound that William Rufus had been murdered. It was recorded that it fell to a man called Purkis, who was a local charcoal burner, to rescue the royal corpse and take it on his cart to Winchester.

King John enjoys a generally bad reputation even for a Plantagenet king, as he has been widely vilified through the tales of Robin Hood, the outlaw who robbed the rich to give to the poor, as the wicked prince who was trying to steal the crown of his hero brother, King Richard the Lionheart.  King John probably deserves a lot of this evil legacy, as he spent a lot of time waging war and generally trying to get one up on his elder brothers and fairly regularly fell out with the Pope to the extent that he would be excommunicated and the whole country of England placed under interdict. However, it was the mysterious disappearance of his young nephew Arthur of Brittany that could have been the most nefarious deed of his unsavoury career.  Arthur of Brittany was the posthumous son of John’s elder brother Geoffrey Duke of Brittany, who had been killed in a tournament.  A fatherless royal child in possession of vast estates, fortune and titles would always have the wolves circling, and young Arthur became a pawn in the power games between John, Richard the Lionheart and King Philip II of France.  After Richard the Lionheart’s death, John managed to seize the throne of England, but as Arthur of Brittany had declared himself a vassal of the King of France, the French nobility were keen to place the English crown on Arthur’s head instead.  The new King John was forced to invade France in 1202 to combat this threat and, under the terms of the treaty of Le Goulet, Arthur of Brittany was forced to change his allegiance and acknowledge King John of England as his overlord.

King John fairly swiftly fell out with the French King again, and the Philip II gave his territories of Normandy and Anjou to young Arthur.  Even though he was still only a young teenager, Arthur of Brittany decided to assert his authority in his lands by besieging his own grandmother, the indomitable Eleanor of Aquitaine, in the castle at Mirebeau.  Eleanor of Aquitaine managed to alert King John to her peril and he raced to rescue her and imprisoned his young nephew at the same time.  The youthful prince was first imprisoned at Falaise in Normandy under the stewardship of William de Braose and the following year he was sent to captivity in the castle at Rouen.  Sometime in April of 1203, Arthur of Brittany mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again.  Although nothing was ever proved or officially recorded, the finger of blame was pointed squarely at King John, with rumours saying that the English monarch had killed his young nephew in a drunken rage and then thrown his body in the Seine, or that Arthur had been blinded and the gelded by the King’s agents and had died of shock and blood loss.   Again we shall probably never know the truth of the matter, but if King John did not murder his nephew, what did happen to poor Arthur of Brittany?

So moving up through the centuries, King Edward II was an ineffectual King of England, who was prone to having unpopular favourites and could not keep control of his barons.  He was married to Isabella of France who, when on an official trip to France, met an exiled English baron called Roger Mortimer, and became his mistress.  The new power couple decided that they had had enough of the dithering King Edward II and his latest favourites the Despensers, and invaded England in 1326. Their army met with little resistance, and they easily took over the country, capturing the Despensers and King Edward in the process.  The Despensers were summarily executed and Edward was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle.  Edward II was deposed in favour of his young son, who became King Edward III.

Tomb of King Edward II in Gloucester Cathedral

Although he was in captivity, Edward II still posed a threat to the new administration and he was found murdered on 11^th October 1327, supposedly by agents of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer.  Contemporary chroniclers stated that the unfortunate Plantagenet monarch had either been strangled or suffocated, but in later years a rather more lurid legend grew up that Edward II had been killed by having a red-hot poker thrust into his nether parts.  This gruesome story has never been substantiated and there are historians that argue that, in fact, Edward II was not killed in Berkeley Castle at all but survived in exile on the Continent until around 1341.  But what goes around comes around as they say, and in time the young monarch Edward III grew tired of being dominated by his powerful mother and her lover, so in 1330 he seized Roger Mortimer and had sent him to the Tower of London. Roger Mortimer was accused without even getting a trial and was taken to Tyburn where he was hung, drawn and quartered as a common traitor.

Of course the biggest, baddest, wickedest uncle of them all, at least according to William Shakespeare, is King Richard III, who stands accused by history of murdering his two young nephews, known as the Princes in the Tower.  Before the death of his big brother, King Edward IV, in 1483 he had enjoyed an entirely untarnished reputation.  Unlike his brother George of Clarence, he had always remained loyal to his brother and worked hard in the North at keeping England’s border with Scotland secure.  However, he was not a fan of King Edward’s wife Elizabeth Woodville, and was highly suspicious of the lands and titles that she induced her husband to shower onto her large and rapacious family.  Edward IV’s death in 1483 was both premature and unexpected, and as Richard III had been named Lord Protector, he hastily assembled an army and marched south to meet up with his young nephew, who was now the new King Edward V and was being escorted to London by his maternal uncle Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers.  

Richard had Anthony Woodville arrested and then executed and took his nephew to the Tower of London, the traditional lodging place of English kings before their coronation. The widowed queen, Elizabeth Woodville, had fled into sanctuary with her younger son and daughters, but Richard persuaded her to allow Richard of York to join his older brother at the Tower.  Both the young lads were reported being seen around the Tower of London and playing in the gardens and preparations for Edward’s coronation proceeded.  However, just before the coronation, Richard seized the crown for himself and was crowned as King Richard III.  Sightings of the two young princes began to dwindle and rumours started to fly that they had been murdered to make the throne safer for their uncle.  However, although their supposed murder has been carefully investigated by many historians, there has never been any concrete evidence come to light that Richard III murdered the Princes in the Tower.  In fact, there is no real evidence that they were killed at all, and many stories circulated about their continued existence and several pretenders, such as Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, came forward to declare that they were one or other of the boys.

So as you see, being a medieval royal in England could prove fatal and it was your own royal relatives that you had the most to fear from.  It wasn’t only uncles and wives that could be murderous; Henry IV locked his first cousin Richard II up in Pontefract Castle after he seized the throne and reportedly starved him to death.  So next time that you bemoan how ordinary your life is, remember that there is nothing romantic or exciting about being murdered, however exciting we think that these historic tales are.

King John Tomb image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
King Edward II image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Thomas of Lancaster – An Unlikely Saint?

Religious and spiritual life in Europe in the Middle Ages was dominated by the Catholic Church, and every person from the King down to the lowliest peasant lived lives that were ordered around the beliefs, ceremonies and doctrines of that Church. The medieval world was one where heaven, hell, angels, devils and saints were very real, and every parish church would have had brightly coloured murals and paintings depicting them and the relics of saints were big business.  In order to qualify for medieval sainthood the first step was of course to be dead, a person would also generally have had to have lived a holy, virtuous life, to have been a staunch adherent of the Church with not a taint of heresy, and being martyred for your faith certainly got you extra brownie points.  But one of fastest routes to swift canonisation was if miracles were reported occurring at your tomb, when your relics were present, at where you were killed or if something miraculous occurred when you were being implored in prayer to intercede with God on someone’s behalf.

Although this was quite a stiff set of qualifications to acquire before your name could be put forward to the Pope for canonisation, history did provide some very unlikely candidates.  One of these unlikely potential saints was a member of the English royal family, Thomas of Lancaster.  So how did a powerful, wealthy English baron become revered as a saint after his death, with the Commons petitioning for his canonization in the parliament of 1327 and King Edward III writing to the Pope three times to request that he was elevated to sainthood?  Especially a royal baron who had rebelled against his king and had been executed as a traitor?

Thomas of Lancaster

Thomas of Lancaster was born in 1278 and was a double royal as his father Edmund Crouchback, 1^st Earl of Lancaster was a son of King Henry III of England and his mother was Blanche of Artois, who had been Queen of Navarre before she was widowed. He was destined to become one of the most powerful and influential barons in England, and held many titles and owned many great estates.  Thomas of Lancaster inherited the earldoms of Leicester, Lancaster and Derby, and on his marriage to Alice de Lacey he also became the Earl of Lincoln and Salisbury, 11^th Baron of Halton and 7^th Lord of Bowland. Material wealth and more prestige seem to be all that this marriage brought him, as the couple did not have any children and was reputedly an unhappy one.  In a plotline straight from Hollywood, the unhappy Countess was abducted while she was staying at her manor at Canford in Dorset, by a knight called Richard de St Martin, who was a henchman of the Earl of Surrey, John de Warenne. Thomas of Lancaster was infuriated by this high handed behaviour, so he retaliated by divorcing the Countess and taking a couple of the Earl of Surrey’s castles by force.  This altercation between two such powerful barons was potentially very destabilising for England, so King Edward II was forced to step in and broker a shaky truce between the two men.  Unfortunately for the Countess, her now ex-husband got to keep his earldoms of Salisbury and Lincoln as their marriage contract had stipulated that he held these titles in his own right.

Although he was eventually to rebel, in the first few years of King Edward II’s reign he was a loyal supporter of his royal cousin.  He played an in important role at Edward II’s coronation in 1308, carrying the great sword Curtana that had once belonged to King Edward the Confessor. However, King Edward II was prone to having favourites, who he plucked from obscurity and showered with lands, titles and royal favours. Edward was not a monarch who was particularly skilful at playing the game of medieval politics, and he did not seem to comprehend the depth of his baron’s rage that their king was taking his counsel from lowly-born non-entities rather from themselves. In these feudal times rank, wealth and power were everything, and the senior barons of England, including Thomas of Lancaster, felt that Edward II had snubbed them and insulted them.

It was Piers Gaveston, a particular favourite of Edward II, who seemed to really get under Thomas of Lancaster’s skin and set him on the path to rebellion.  King Edward had raised Piers Gaveston from very humble origins, as he originally had been a mere Gascon squire, to be his most powerful advisor and constant companion. Thomas of Lancaster held Gaveston in total contempt referring to him as ‘the Fiddler’, and when Gaveston appealed to the King for the dismissal of one of Lancaster’s entourage he flew into a rage and planned vengeance.  He withdrew his support for the King and joined with the Lords Ordainers, who where a group of powerful barons who were insisting that Gaveston be dismissed from Court and banished and that they would effectively take over ruling the realm. In 1310-1311 Lancaster used his forces to separate Piers Gaveston from Edward II, and the King was forced to renounce his favourite and send him abroad. The barons also met to create Ordinances designed to curb the monarch’s spending and to impose control over the royal officers.

Edward II was, not surprisingly, very unhappy at this turn of events, and started fighting with the Lords Ordainers during 1312 to regain his royal prerogatives and his cherished companion. Gaveston managed to slip back into England, but he was captured by the barons, including Lancaster, who then tried him and had him executed.  Edward II was forced to pardon the barons, but the Ordinances that they had written were scrapped.  But King Edward was soon to face more grief, as on 23^rd June 1314 he was heavily defeated by the Scots under the command of Robert the Bruce.  Thomas of Lancaster had not accompanied his King on his attempted invasion of Scotland, and had sent the minimum of troops that feudal law demanded to join the royal army. In the following four years after Edward’s humiliating defeat Lancaster was the de facto ruler of England, but had huge trouble with Scottish raids across the border and continuing squabbles amongst the barons.

In the meantime, Edward II had found a couple of new favourites to lavish his attention on who were Hugh le Despenser, 1^st Earl of Winchester and his son Hugh the younger Despenser.  They joined forces with some of the barons who were also discontented with the stalemate of Lancaster’s rule and in 1318 they deposed him and stripped him of his powers to rule.  However, you can’t keep a good rebel baron down for long and Thomas of Lancaster rebelled against the King again in 1321.  His army was eventually defeated at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, and Lancaster was captured. This time there was no escape, and he was summarily tried and condemned by a tribunal comprising King Edward II, the Despensers and the Earl of Arundel.  He was not permitted to defend himself at the trial or have another speak for him, and he was beheaded just outside Pontefract Castle. Edward II also had around twenty of the other rebel leaders executed which was regarded as a shocking number even by the somewhat hardened attitudes of medieval England.

So by now you might well be wondering how a rebel baron, who had divorced his wife, held fierce grudges, and spent his life firmly in pursuit of temporal power and wealth was ever regarded as a suitable candidate for sainthood?  Well it would seem that shortly after his execution, miracles began to occur both at the site of his execution and at his tomb in Pontefract Priory.  These miracles were reported to the King during the parliament that was held in York during April 1322, so they were supposedly occurring within weeks of Lancaster’s death. One chronicler wrote that a blind priest had a dream three nights running that if he went and prayed at the spot of Thomas of Lancaster’s execution that he would be able to see again.  The dream was so powerful, that the priest went to the execution site and prayed.  During his prayers his put his hand on the patch of ground where Lancaster had died, and some dried blood mixed with sand stuck to his hand.  He rubbed this mixture onto his eyes and miraculously regained his sight.  There was also reputedly a drowned child who miraculously revived after being dead for three days when it was placed on the tomb of the executed baron.  Although Thomas of Lancaster was venerated in England as a saint and a martyr because of these supposed miracles, he never officially became a saint as despite all the letters sent to the Pope, he was never canonised. So was this man really a saint, or just a baron who turned traitor against his king and was beheaded for his crimes?

Thomas of Lancaster image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain