The Cathars and the Start of the Inquisition

For many of us the Inquisition brings up frightening images of black robed men questioning terrified prisoners, torturing them and then having them burned at the stake. Most of us also associate the Inquisition with the Spanish Inquisition in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, which was set up to guarantee the orthodoxy of people who had converted to Catholicism from Islam and Judaism. So you may be surprised to learn that the Inquisition had actually been set up much earlier in the 13^th century by the Papacy, in response to a heresy that had swept the Languedoc region of south west France. This heresy that so alarmed the Church, was Catharism, a dualist sect that believed that the material world was intrinsically evil and ruled by a dark deity that was sometimes called Rex Mundi or King of the World and that the god of light and goodness, whom they worshipped, existed entirely in the spiritual realms. The Catholic Church dominated most of Europe during the Middle Ages, and this Church, headed by the Pope in Rome, demanded that the beliefs and rituals that they espoused were adhered to rigidly and uniformly across the continent. Even powerful rulers could not escape the controlling hand of the Church, as the Pope routinely punished Kings who stepped out of line by excommunicating them or putting their lands under interdict, which punished the whole populace by closing churches and not allowing sacraments such as marriage, baptism or anointing of the sick to take place.

Cathars Being Expelled From Carcassone 1209

Although many heretical sects sprung up during the Middle Ages, it was the Cathars who seemed to be especially loathed by the Church of Rome. The Languedoc in medieval times was a vibrant, prosperous region that was culturally diverse and unusually tolerant of other religions. The Catholic Church also enjoyed an incredibly bad reputation in the region, as the local clergy were regarded as lazy, ignorant, grasping and dissolute. They were so venal and corrupt that they had become figures of fun, and increasingly the local populace was failing to pay their tithes and even laughed off the excommunications that the hapless clergy handed out as punishments. Practise what you preach certainly was not one of their mottoes and even Pope Innocent III scathingly referred to the clergy of Narbonne as ‘dumb dogs who can no longer bark’. In sharp contrast, the Cathar holy men and women, who were known as Perfect, led stringently ascetic lives of prayer, self denial, fasting and preaching.  Not only that, the Cathar Perfect were also supremely indifferent to what their followers, known as credentes, did in their material lives, as everything concerned with matter was tainted by evil. So activities that horrified the Catholic Church, such as not paying taxes, not attending church services, drinking too much, or having sex before marriage were not judged, and until a soul chose to follow the hard path of a Perfect and free themselves from the endless cycle of reincarnation, regarded as irrelevant. The Cathar Perfect preached a litany of peace, light and tolerance and even believed in the spiritual and material equality of women, much to the horror of the medieval Catholic Church.

At first the Papacy tried to stem the tide of heresy by debate and persuasion. Pope Innocent III sent three papal legates, Arnold Amaury, Peter of Castelnau and Brother Raoul into the Languedoc to bring the heretics back into the fold of the true faith. Although Innocent III’s instincts would have been to toss the Cathars straight onto the nearest bonfire, they had powerful protectors in the local nobility. These nobles, men such as Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, Count Raymond Roger of Foix and Viscount Raymond Roger Trencavel, were themselves in the main Cathar sympathisers, who had relatives and friends who were Cathar Perfect. These local noblemen provided the venues for these debates, which attracted huge crowds of spectators, between the papal legates and the Cathars, and provided security for the heretics. These intense, theological debates could last as long as a week, with the Cathars airing their extensive knowledge of the New Testament and using the example of their blameless and holy lives against the Catholic’s arguments of orthodoxy and submission to an all powerful Church.  The three papal legates travelled the length of the Languedoc, trying to cajole and argue the heretics back to orthodoxy, in great style, with a large retinue and all the pomp due to the Pope’s representatives. However, they were rarely welcomed in a town or village and were treated with derision and even death threats. By 1206 the three papal legates were exhausted and admitting defeat in Montpellier, when they were approached by two Spanish friars, one of whom was the future St Dominic and founder of the Dominican order. The two Spaniards suggested a different approach and persuaded the weary legates to resume their journeying, but this time to travel on foot, begging alms and living the simple, ascetic lives of their Cathar Perfect opponents. So they took to the road again, accompanied by two Spaniards, but their level of conversions back to the ‘truth faith’ was still pitiful.

Innocent III’s patience was beginning to wear thin and in 1200 he issued a decree that allowed for the property of a convicted heretic to be seized by their persecutor, and also ensure that their family was disinherited.  Moreover, the decree stated that any Catholic who refused to ferret out and hunt down heretics was also liable to lose all their property and possessions. A major thorn in the flesh of the Pope, was Raymond VI of Toulouse, who had made a career out of being excommunicated, and would routinely promise to hunt down the heretic Cathars and then never quite get around to it. As the debates were not producing converts in any great numbers, Innocent III had come to the conclusion that a military campaign would have to be undertaken against the Languedoc to bring it back into submission to the Church. He tried to interest the rulers and nobility of Europe in this undertaking, but unfortunately for him Raymond VI of Toulouse was in theory a vassal of King Philippe Auguste of France, and these feudal loyalties kept the French ruler from the fray. However, in 1208 the spark that Innocent III needed to fuel his war plans was ignited, when one of the papal legates, Peter of Castelnau, was murdered on the road, after having spent time negotiating with Raymond VI on the subject of his latest excommunication and set of punishments. Raymond, who had been heard threatening Peter of Castelnau, was the prime suspect and voluntarily submitted himself to the humiliation of a public scourging before fleeing north to join the Crusade that was now massing against the Languedoc.

For the next few decades the Languedoc was torn apart by invading armies, who besieged towns, destroyed crops, and held mass burnings of any Cathars and their sympathisers that they could get their hands on.  The Cathar Perfect themselves did not fight or take part in any of the violence, but their credentes and many of the local Catholics fought valiantly to defend them. One of the most famous quotes of the conflict reputedly uttered by Arnold Amaury just before the massacre at Béziers in 1209 was ‘Kill them all, God will know his own’, showing that the Crusaders were at least equal opportunity killers. However, for the Catholic Church, even after all the bloody years of warfare, they still had not totally eradicated the Cathars and their followers.  They needed a new way to mop up the remnants of the heresy and to ensure that it could never flourish again. The bishops had always had the option of calling a diocesan court to interrogate and condemn heretics, before they were ‘relaxed to the secular arm’ for a swift and fatal trip to the bonfire. However, many bishops did not show the rigour and enthusiasm for pursuing heretics that the papacy would have liked, and so when Gregory IX ascended the papal throne in 1227 he appointed special papal legates, gave them wide sweeping prosecutorial powers and sent them into the Languedoc to deal with the Cathars once and for all. These papal attack dogs offered cash bounties to anyone who was willing to denounce a Cathar, with the added bonus that the heretic’s property would also be seized and split between the informer, the Church and the Crown.  But even with these cash incentives, the local population showed no real enthusiasm for betraying their neighbours, and the numbers of Cathars betrayed remained small.  So in 1233 the Pope put together a task force, recruited from the Dominicans, dedicated to the total suppression of Catharism and installed these papal inquisitors in Albi, Toulouse and Carcassonne.

St Dominic Presiding Over a Cathar Burning by Pedro Berruguete

These inquisitors were experts in breeding an atmosphere of terror and suspicion, were excellent administrators and record keepers, and were not prone to showing any mercy. They were, unsurprisingly, despised by the Cathars and their sympathisers, and also by the local clergy, as they were backed directly by the Pope, so could ride roughshod with impunity over the local religious administration. The way it worked was that the inquisitor would arrive in a town or village with his clerks and armed guard and set up shop. After a swift consultation with the local churchmen, the inquisitor would then summon all men over the age of fourteen and women over the age of 12 to make a profession of orthodox faith. Any person who did not comply was put first in the queue for questioning. Any Cathar Perfect caught up in the proceedings would always the first to be winkled out, as the swearing of oaths was against their beliefs. The rest of the population was then read a sermon that exhorted them to examine their lives for any potentially heretical activities and gave them a seven day period of grace in which to denounce themselves or their neighbours. The inquisitors had a wide range of offenses in their armoury to prosecute people with, including being a Cathar Perfect, an offence which always attracted the death penalty, protecting a Perfect, giving the melioramentum when meeting a Perfect, being a witness the Cathar ritual of the consolamentum, or simply not being prepared to grass on your friends. The only way to prove decisively to the Inquisition that you had forsaken your heretical activities and associates was to name names, the more names the better, as the Inquisition was putting together an exhaustive register of all the Cathars and their sympathisers who had managed to survive in the Languedoc.

If you were unlucky enough to have been interrogated by the Inquisition you would have been subjected to hours of repetitive questioning that was designed to unsettle you, and make you wonder who exactly it was that denounced you and what they had told the inquisition about you and your family. You probably would have not been told what the charges were against you, as that would have given you the right to know who had accused you. If you wanted a lawyer to speak for you, the unfortunate lawyer would swiftly find themselves condemned also for supporting heresy.  Appeals were not allowed, and like modern referees in sport, the inquisitors’ decision was final. Over the years, the inquisitors began to introduce torture, and by 1252 the use of torture had been officially sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV in his papal bull ad extirpanda.  Supposedly, only one session of torture was allowed in order to obtain a confession, but the resourceful inquisitors found many ways to get around this inconvenient ruling, as well as other rulings such as not torturing underage children, not shedding blood or killing prisoners under torture.  However, technically the inquisitor could not even get the ball rolling unless people were prepared to denounce their neighbours or even their own family members, as to secure a conviction the inquisitor had to get two witnesses.

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, there were always people who were ready to take this opportunity to rid themselves of a few enemies, and then as the list of names grew larger, the net of the inquisition was able to be cast ever wider throughout the community. The craftier locals when they were called for questioning gave out the names of members of the community who were already dead. The inquisition called their bluff in a manner that horrified the locals, as they then went to the local cemetery, disinterred the corpses of the accused deceased, marched the rotting corpses through the streets and then flung them into the flames of a hastily lit bonfire. The inquisitor would then move on to the surviving family members of the deceased heretics, seizing their property, imposing tough penances on them, throwing them in prison or making them wear garments that had a yellow crosses sewn on them to mark them out as being associated with heresy.

Not surprisingly, the Dominican inquisitors were hugely unpopular and feared throughout the Languedoc, and there were incidents where the inquisitors were abused, thrown down wells or severely beaten. By 1243 the Catholic authorities were seriously unamused at this harassment of their chosen representatives, which had been exacerbated by the massacre of two inquisitors and their retinue at Avignonet in 1242. The decision was taken that the last Cathar refuge, the fortress at Montségur, would be besieged and the Cathar Perfect and credentes sheltering behind its walls would be wiped out. After months of siege Montségur fell and around 200 Cathars were burned, although, in a rare fit of clemency, the garrison of the fortress were free to go if they abjured their support for heresy. The back of the Cathar heresy had been broken, but the Inquisition machine was implacable and relentless in its need to destroy every last trace of the heresy that so revolted them, and so they continued to terrorise the Languedoc for a hundred years after the end of the Albigensian Crusade, until the very last Cathar Perfect, Guillaume Bélibaste was burned at the stake in 1321.

Unfortunately, the inquisition would go on to grow and develop for the next six hundred years and bring terror and suspicion to many countries in Europe and Latin America, and thousands of innocent souls would lose their lives so that the Catholic Church could maintain its iron grip on the hearts and minds of Christendom. The Languedoc before the ravages of the Albigensian Crusade and the ensuing persecutions of the Inquisition had been a vibrant, tolerant, prosperous land, full of culture, learning and joy, but by the time that the inquisitors had left, the region was a ravaged, empty shell. The Languedoc was now just a poor, backwater region that had been assimilated into the kingdom of France and even these days it could be said that it has not fully recovered economically from these tragic events.

Cathar image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
St Dominic Presiding Over a Cathar Burning by Pedro Berruguete 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

Mystery People of History – Perkin Warbeck, Prince or Pretender?

Few mysteries of history have fascinated us as much and prompted so much speculation as the mystery of the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower.  Were the two young princes really murdered in their beds, and if so who by and why? Or were they somehow spirited away from the Tower of London in secret and taken to a safe place to live out their lives in obscurity?  Against the chaos and political instability of that period of English history known as the War of the Roses, it is perhaps not surprising then that several figures came forward during the reign of King Henry VII claiming to be one of the lost princes and becoming a focus for rebellion, and one of the most famous of these royal pretenders was a young man know as Perkin Warbeck.

After Henry VII defeated King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and claimed the English throne by right of conquest, his main tasks were to secure his kingdom and win the loyalty of his nobles and people.  He married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter King Edward IV, in an attempt to further legitimise his claim to the English crown and unite the Lancastrian and Yorkist factions, even though to do this he had to overturn the ruling that had declared that she and all her siblings were illegitimate due to their father’s alleged pre-contract of marriage with Lady Eleanor Talbot.  But if Elizabeth of York and her sisters were once again recognised as being the legitimate children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, then so too were her two brothers, King Edward V and Richard, Duke of York.  Many historians consider that to have overturned this ruling, Henry VII must have believed that the two young princes were indeed already dead, as if either of the two boys were still alive, they had a much greater claim to the throne than Henry himself, and he knew that there were still powerful forces both in England and across Europe who would back a Yorkist claimant to the throne.

Perkin Warbeck

One of these powerful forces was Margaret of Burgundy, the sister of the two dead kings Edward IV and Richard III and the aunt of the Princes in the Tower, and it was at her Court that Perkin Warbeck first came to public attention and claimed the throne of England. It is not known whether Margaret of Burgundy genuinely believed that Perkin Warbeck was her nephew or whether she was fully aware that he was a fraud and groomed him in the ways of the Yorkist Royal Family in order to create a focus of rebellion against Henry VII.  The other major European player to get involved was King Charles VIII of France, and both he and Margaret officially recognised Perkin Warbeck as King Richard IV of England.  For a while Perkin Warbeck was feted across Europe, attending the funeral in Vienna of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, and gaining the recognition of his successor Maximilian I, spending time at the French Court in 1492 and then residing at the Court of Burgundy. However, in 1492 Charles VIII signed the Treaty of Etaples with England to prevent a threatened invasion of France and part of the treaty was an agreement to expel Perkin Warbeck from French territory.  Warbeck’s presence in Burgundy rattled Henry VII so much that he imposed a trade embargo on Flanders in 1493, even though this would lose England a great deal of revenue.

Perkin Warbeck’s first foray into rebellion against the English crown had been in 1491 when he arrived in the Irish city of Cork, which had long been a Yorkist stronghold. The good people of Cork thought that Warbeck was actually the Earl of Warwick, the son of the hapless George, Duke of Clarence, who had been attainted for treason and executed in the Tower of London after trying the patience of his brother Edward IV one time too many, who was currently being held captive by Henry VII.  Warbeck’s English was apparently not very good, but he managed to deny his being the Earl of Warwick and declare himself as Richard, Duke of York. However, little became of this rebellion and he was forced to return to Europe.

With the support of Margaret of Burgundy, he tried his hand again in 1495 and landed with a small force in Deal on the Kent coast.  His small force was effectively routed and Warbeck was forced to sail on to Ireland without even disembarking onto English soil.  Once in Ireland, he gained the support of the Earl of Desmond and laid siege to the town of Waterford, but was once again unsuccessful.  He fled to the Court of King James IV of Scotland, where he was graciously received, given a pension of £1200 a year and the hand of the Scottish King’s cousin, Lady Catherine Gordon, in marriage.  At that time James IV was happy to use any means at his disposal to rile Henry VII, so he encouraged Perkin Warbeck to use his pension for funding for attempting to mount an attack across the English border.  However, Warbeck received no support whatsoever from the English and was forced to retreat back into Scotland.  Henry VII may still at this point in his reign have felt insecure on his throne, but he had set up an effective network of spies and had rooted out and dealt with any English supporters of Perkin Warbeck.  In 1495, Sir William Stanley was tried and executed for treason due to his support of Warbeck and the Yorkist cause, which is ironic in the light of the fact that he was the very same William Stanley who switched sides at the Battle of Bosworth ensuring the defeat of the Yorkist King Richard III. Henry VII’s steward Lord Fitzwalter was also attainted and executed and it seems that they were being informed on by one of their co-conspirators Sir Robert Clifford, who was secretly working for Henry.  Clifford’s reward for his participation in the conspiracy against the crown was not the more usual short trip to the scaffold but a full pardon and a hefty reward.

After Warbeck’s failed attempt to enter England, James IV of Scotland gave up on the idea of being a thorn in the side of the English King, and signed the Treaty of Ayton that brought him peace with England and Henry’s daughter Margaret Tudor as a bride. Warbeck was once more expelled and returned again to Ireland to make another attempt at laying siege to the town of Waterford.  This attempt was swiftly defeated and he was chased from Ireland by four English ships.  Left with only a handful of supporters, Perkin Warbeck sailed to Cornwall, where he hoped to capitalise on the discontent still fomenting there after the uprising that had taken place only a few months earlier. The Cornish people welcomed him and declared him King Richard IV on Bodmin Moor.  The support of the Cornish swelled his army by 6000 and he marched on Exeter and then on to Taunton.  Henry sent an army to counter Warbeck’s rebellion, and when Warbeck heard that this force had sighted he fled to Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, where he was captured. Henry VII was initially merciful to Perkin Warbeck, allowing him to stay at Court under supervision.  However, he attempted to run away, so was removed to the more secure environment of the Tower of London.  In 1499 he allegedly tried to escape again, this time supposedly in the company of the real Earl of Warwick, and was hanged at Tyburn.

So was Perkin Warbeck really Richard, Duke of York?  It is popularly believed that he was actually a Fleming born in Tournai in around 1474, the son of a French official called John de Werbecque and his wife, Katherine de Faro, and that he had spent his boyhood years working as a servant in several different households. He then became an apprentice for a fleece merchant called Pregent Meno, and it was while he was working for Meno that he first arrived in Ireland and declared himself to be Richard, Duke of York.  Perkin Warbeck also supposedly bore a strong resemblance to the dead Yorkist monarch, Edward IV, and it has been speculated that Warbeck could actually have been Edward’s illegitimate son. But what of Margaret of Burgundy’s support of Perkin Warbeck.  Would she really have supported an imposter as her nephew?  Would she really have wanted a non-royal foreigner on the throne of England, however much she despised Henry VII’s regime?  She declared that she recognised Warbeck as Richard of York because of certain birthmarks on his body and his supposedly detailed knowledge of what life had been like living in the English Royal Household.  In return for Margaret’s support, Warbeck had to promise to return all her lands in England to her that had been confiscated after the Battle of Bosworth when he gained the English crown. But was this enough to make her support an imposter? 

Moreover, if Perkin Warbeck really spoke such poor English and was uneducated, would sophisticated monarchs like Maximilian I and Charles VII even have deigned to let him into their presence, let alone backed him as a pretender to the throne of England? In the 15^th century class was all important, and people rarely moved out of the milieu into which they had been born.  There was also a mystique and a reverence surrounding royal blood, and preserving royal bloodlines and family ties was regarded as all important, so encouraging someone who had worked as a servant to make a bid for a crown would have been almost unthinkable.  After all, the real Richard, Duke of York had been excluded from the possibility of ever sitting on the throne of England purely because his father might have made a pre-contract of marriage with another woman before he married Richard’s mother Elizabeth Woodville.

Like all great historical mysteries, we shall never probably really know the truth about Perkin Warbeck.  Perkin Warbeck made a confession before his execution that gave his parentage and early history, some of which has been backed up by documentary evidence.  But was he forced into this confession by Henry VII, who would have been very eager to ensure that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that that Perkin Warbeck was an imposter and not a Yorkist prince? Most likely he was just an apprentice from Flanders, who by chance bore an uncanny resemblance to a dead king and was in the right place at the right time, but there is always the chance, however slight, that he really was Richard of York and that he had been spirited away from his imprisonment in England and brought to Europe for safety.

Image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Famous Royal Mistresses – Prinny and Mrs Fitzherbert

When is a famous royal mistress not a royal mistress? When perhaps, like Mrs Fitzherbert, she may actually have been a royal wife? The British Royal Family has been much in the news recently, with the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton having just taken place at Westminster Abbey, but members of our Royal Family have throughout history found themselves the centre of attention, written about in newspapers and pamphlets and even finding themselves in the centre of a scandal. One royal who was no stranger to scandal was George, Prince of Wales, the son of King George III and Queen Charlotte, who went on to become Prince Regent and then King George IV. Known to his friends as ‘Prinny’, Prince George led a decadent life at the head of a group of beaus and dandies known as the Carlton House Set, spending his days gambling, drinking, decorating his houses and running up a huge amount of debt. When he was a young man, George was handsome and a great favourite with the ladies, but as he grew older the ravages of his lifestyle caused him to become bloated and pile on the weight, prompting Beau Brummell to utter his famous caustic remark ‘Alvanley, who’s your fat friend?’  Prince George also enjoyed an extensive and varied love life and had many mistresses throughout his life, but perhaps he ever only truly loved one of them?

Mrs Fitzherbert

The lady in question is known to history as Mrs Fitzherbert, although she was born Maria Ann Smythe on 26^th July 1756.  She was the eldest child of William Smythe and Mary Ann Errington, who were Roman Catholics and well-connected with the British aristocracy, as her mother was a half-sister of the Earl of Sefton. She was sent to Paris for her education, but was married at the age of 18 to Edward Weld, a wealthy Catholic landowner who was 16 years her senior. Unfortunately for the young Maria, her new husband was thrown from a horse only three months after their wedding, without having yet made a new will. This left the young widow in dire financial straits and in desperate need of a new husband to support her, so three years later she wed another older man, Thomas Fitzherbert of Swynnerton in Staffordshire. This time she was ten years younger than her spouse, and the couple had one son who tragically died very young. She was widowed again on 7^th May 1781, but this time she was more fortunate in the inheritance stakes as she gained a smart house in Park Street, Mayfair and a healthy annual income.

When she came out of mourning, Mrs Fitzherbert was sponsored into the glittering whirl of London Society by her uncle Lord Sefton and her half-brother Henry Errington. She was now a very eligible young widow, and probably had many suitors. But in the spring of 1784 she was introduced to the very cream of this Society, when Maria Fitzherbert caught the eye of the 22 year old Prince of Wales when she attended the opera in the company of Lord Sefton. Although, at 27, Mrs Fitzherbert was older than Prince George, the impressionable young prince was smitten and immediately began to pursue her. Rumours soon started flying around Polite Society that Mrs Fitzherbert was the Prince’s latest mistress. The pair seemed to be genuinely in love, and in July 1784 her besotted prince offered her a ring as a gift. The ring was initially refused, but Mrs Fitzherbert finally accepted the gift, after Prince George threatened to commit suicide. The ecstatic Prince believed that this acceptance of his ring meant that Maria Fitzherbert had agreed to marry him,  and knowing that marrying the Prince would be nigh on impossible she escaped to Europe.  Maria Fitzherbert’s whereabouts were eventually traced, and she returned to London in December 1785. It was at this point that the couple underwent a secret marriage ceremony in the drawing room of Mrs Fitzherbert’s house in Park Street.

So why was there so much secrecy surrounding this wedding? It was because under English law the marriage was regarded as invalid. This was because George was the Prince of Wales and the 1689 Bill of Rights stated that any heir to the throne who married a Roman Catholic would be lose their place in the succession and the Royal Marriage Act of 1772 required that the King’s consent had to be obtained before one of his children could wed. As Mrs Fitzherbert was a Roman Catholic and it was highly unlikely that King George III would give consent to his eldest son and heir marrying a Catholic widow, the couple can have been only too aware that it was unlikely that their marriage would ever be recognised by the Royal Family and legitimised. We may never know why the couple took the risk of getting married in secret, but there were rumours flying around Society at the time that Mrs Fitzherbert was pregnant, and being a Roman Catholic may well have been deeply worried about having a child out of wedlock. It must be remembered that before she met the Prince of Wales, Maria Fitzherbert had led the life of a very respectable woman and had a high standing in the Society of which she was a part. In fact, they had to approach three different clergymen before they found one who would perform the ceremony, and it was one of the Prince of Wales’s own chaplains, the Reverend Robert Burt who finally agreed. There has been speculation that Reverend Burt only agreed because the Prince had agreed to pay off his debts or even got him out of debtor’s prison, but there is no real evidence to support this, and Burt came from an affluent family who had made their fortune in the West Indies.

The rumours continued to fly about the Prince of Wales and Mrs Fitzherbert, but they lived together as a married couple until 1794. It was Prinny’s extravagance and decadent lifestyle that was to be their undoing as he had reached a point where he was unable to discharge his debts. He had already once been financially bailed out by his father, the King, and so to ensure that he stayed in his father’s good books, Prince George finally agreed to marry a foreign, protestant princess called Caroline of Brunswick. To complicate matter further, in 1794 George started a romantic liaison with Frances Villiers, the Countess of Jersey, who was strongly counselling him to marry Princess Caroline and get rid of his mountain of debts. Lady Jersey was very keen on retaining her status as his royal mistress, and felt that Caroline of Brunswick was much less of a threat to her position than Mrs Fitzherbert, a lady who he had been in love with for nearly a decade. The question has to be did Prince George really believe that he was already married, and if so was he worried and unhappy that in some people’s eyes he was committing bigamy by marrying another woman? Although how do you divorce someone that you may or may not be legally married to? When the Prince broke off his relationship with her, Maria Fitzherbert fled first to Margate, and then to Marble Hill in Twickenham, ending up in Ealing in the October of 1795.

It is quite safe to say that the Prince’s marriage to Caroline of Brunswick was a disaster, and by 1799 Prinny was once more back in the arms of Mrs Fitzherbert. They lived together in Brighton until around 1807 where Mrs Fitzherbert owned a house called Steine House that had been designed for her by the architect William Porden, and the Prince was building his fantastical piece of Eastern architecture, the Brighton Pavilion. The couple seemed to have had a shaky relationship for the next two years, but it seems that they had finally parted forever by 1811, the Prince having embarked on what would be a 12 year long affair with the somewhat curvaceous Lady Hertford.

Mrs Fitzherbert continued to live quietly in Brighton in Steine House until her death in 1837, and she was buried in the Roman Catholic church of St John the Baptist in the Kemp Town area of the town. One of the big questions asked about Mrs Fitzherbert was whether or not she ever bore the Prince of Wales any children? There were those rumours of her pregnancy at the time of her morganatic marriage, and many people believe that James Ord, who was born in 1786, was that child. James Ord was taken to the United States and became a Jesuit priest there, but left the order to first join the US Navy and then the US Infantry. However, In Maria Fitzherbert’s will there is no mention of a son, but in the second codicil she does make references to ‘two dear children’ who were Mary Ann Smythe and Mary Dawson-Damer. Mary Ann Smythe became Mary Ann Stafford-Jerningham after her marriage and was nominally a niece of Mrs Fitzherbert, and Mary Ann Dawson-Damer was known as the daughter of Admiral Lord Hugh Seymour and his wife Lady Anna Horatia Waldegrave. The Seymour’s son was one of the executors of Mrs Fitzherbert’s will and received a minor bequest from her, and his father has been a lifelong friend and confidant of the Prince of Wales. However, until concrete historical evidence comes to light, the question of whether Mrs Fitzherbert had any natural children with the Prince Regent will remain unanswered. The two women mentioned in her will may well just have been children that she had been very attached to and felt motherly towards, and we perhaps may never know the truth about James Ord either.

So to the world, Mrs Fitzherbert, may have been nothing more than another famous royal mistress, but I think that she sincerely believed that she was the true wife of the Prince of Wales. And although Prinny left her to make a marriage of convenience with a foreign princess, and enjoyed several other mistresses during his lifetime, it does seem that Mrs Fitzherbert was the woman who held his heart and whom he loved until his dying day. After his death in 1830, it was discovered that the recently deceased monarch had kept all of the love letters and correspondence that had passed back and forth between him and his beloved Mrs Fitzherbert, but, unfortunately for us, these undoubtedly fascinating documents were then destroyed. The new king was William IV, a brother of George, who offered Mrs Fitzherbert a dukedom when he came to the throne, to compensate her for all of the trials and tribulations that she had suffered at the hands of his sibling. Maria Fitzherbert turned this honour down stating that ‘she had borne through life the name of Mrs Fitzherbert; that she had never disgraced it, and did not wish to change it’. This was a lady who had done what she did for love and not to gain money or fancy titles; she just wanted to live her life as the beloved wife of her prince.

Image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Paneb – An Ancient Egyptian Bad Boy?

Have you ever heard of Paneb, the notorious Ancient Egyptian bad boy? These days we hear horror stories on the news all too often about people who commit murder, violence, and theft and display general bad behaviour. But would it be any comfort to you to know that these stories are nothing new, and that even in a small worker’s village in Ancient Egypt there was one of these rascally characters living and, for a while at least, flourishing?

This ancient Egyptian villain of our story was a man called Paneb, and he was born in the workman’s village of Deir el-Medina around 1244 BC during the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Deir el-Medina was a unique community set in a hollow of the cliffs on the west bank of the Nile at ancient Thebes, peopled by the workmen who cut and decorated the magnificent tombs of the pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings and their families.

Our bad boy Paneb was one of these workman, and he would have worked long hours in the dark, hot, stuffy conditions of the pharaoh’s tomb.  Paneb had been raised in the home of his adopted father Neferhotep, who had also generously provided Paneb with his education. At Deir el-Medina, jobs were passed down from father to son, and Paneb succeeded to Neferhotep’s coveted position as one of the two foremen of the gangs of workmen in the Valley of the Kings. Paneb, however, was not the type of guy who would repay these kindnesses with the respect and consideration due to his adopted father.

Deir el-Medina - Own Image

However, before we go on any further with Paneb’s tale of debauchery and criminal behaviour, we have to ask how come we know so much about an ordinary ancient Egyptian workman? Well we know so much about Paneb’s dubious career because of a remarkable papyrus, the Papyrus Salt 124, which is now housed in the British Museum.

Papyrus Salt 124 was probably initially found at Deir el-Medina and it arrived in the British Museum from the collection of the early 19^th century collector and Egyptologist, Henry Salt, who had obtained it in the Luxor area.  Putting an exact date on the papyrus is problematical, although a clue comes from a later recorded event where one of Paneb’s descendants in year 29 of the pharaoh Ramses III referred to Paneb’s trial taking place during the time of the Vizier Hori.

However, Hori fulfilled the office of Vizier from the reign of the pharaoh Siptah through to the reign of Ramses III, a period of many years.  The first translation of the papyrus was not released until 1870, when it was published by François Chabas with a short summary, and the first translation into English was in 1929 by Jaroslav Cerny. Papyrus Salt 124 is in the form of a letter to the Vizier of the day, Hori, and consists of  a list of accusations against Paneb all designed to let the Vizier know that Paneb was not fit to hold the post of foreman in the Valley of the Kings. The letter was written by a scribe called Amenakht, who, as he was Paneb’s adoptive father’s brother and believed that the post of foreman should have been his, was not what we might have called an uninterested and unbiased party.

It is fair to say that Amenakht did not hold back when it came to his accusations against Paneb, and the papyrus mentions murder, adultery, tomb robbing and general debauchery.  So whatever the truth is about these accusations, it is clear that he had managed to very badly rub Amenakht up the wrong way. Paneb was a married man and had produced at least ten children with his wife the Lady Wabet, but according to Amenakht’s accusations, this did not stop Paneb from committing adultery and even violating women of the village against their will.

One of the bitterest accusations in the papyrus is that Paneb had violated the Lady Yemyemwah against her will on top of a wall, which was very unwise of Paneb if it was true, as this lady was Amenakht’s sister. He also managed to fit in a very lengthy affair with a lady of the village called Hunro, who herself had gone through three different husbands in this time.  One of Paneb’s sons, who was called Aapakhte, was almost as disreputable as his father and even got involved in some of his exploits with the ladies.

Drunkenness and fighting were apparently a way of life for Paneb, and he reputedly managed one night to scrap with and injure nine successive men. Before his adoptive father Neferhotep was killed, Paneb had himself chased him and threatened to kill him. Neferhotep was murdered on the orders of a shadowy figure called ‘Msy’.  It is not really known who this ‘Msy’ was, but it could have been an ephemeral Pharaoh called Amenmesse or one of his agents.

By this time the area around the ancient city of Thebes was very unsettled, with the Pharaoh Seti II fighting for dominance in the region with Amenmesse, although evidence shows that Amenmesse did gain control over Thebes for several years during Seti II’s reign. Whether Paneb was involved in this incident is not known, but it was alleged that Paneb had bribed the Vizier Pra’emhab with a gift of five of Neferhotep’s servants in order to persuade him to give him Neferhotep’s job as foreman.

 Paneb also seemed to have had a very casual attitude towards other people’s time and property, even if the property belonged to pharaoh himself.  When he was promoted to foreman he was working on the tomb of Seti II, and one of the accusations in the papyrus was that he stole stone from the tomb and had the workmen use this stone to build pillars in his own tomb at Deir el-Medina.

He also allegedly took a chariot cover, a statue, and some fine oil, incense and wine that belonged to pharaoh. In the Valley of the Kings the tools used by the workers were very valuable, but that did not deter Paneb from taking them and even breaking one before he could return it. It seemed as though he used the workmen as his own personal workforce, as he made them build a plaited bed for him and also made their wives weave clothes for him.

Paneb was also accused of tomb robbing, which was regarded as a very serious crime because to disturb the eternal rest of a pharaoh was regarded as sacrilege. His rebellious act of sitting on the sarcophagus of Seti II, would have been seen as a hugely disrespectful act. Among the objects that he purloined from tombs supposedly included a mummified goose from the tomb of one of Ramses II’s daughters and a bed and other funerary articles from the tomb of a fellow worker called Nakhtmin.

No one is really sure what happened to Paneb in the end. Soon after these accusations were made against him, Paneb and his son Aapakhte disappear from the records of the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina. Some experts believe that he was executed for his crimes, as there is an ostraca dating from year 5 of Ramses III which refers to the ‘killing of the chief’.

This chief could well have been Paneb, but as there is no name mentioned on the ostraca, it may not have been him. Also this would have meant that Paneb would have been around 67 when he was executed, which was a very great age for an ordinary Ancient Egyptian worker. Paneb is also known from his damaged tomb in the cliffs at Deir el-Medina and also from a carved offering table that would have once stood at the entrance of his tomb, so that his descendants could make their offerings to their deceased ancestor.

So do you think that Paneb was really as bad as he was portrayed by the obviously bitter and resentful Amenakht? Or was he just a bit of character, who liked a bit of drunken debauchery and petty crime, which made it easy to make all those accusations stick?  Unless some further evidence is unearthed from the sands of Egypt, we shall probably never really know, but Paneb’s story shows that despite the passage of the years and our advanced technology, we are not so different from those Ancient Egyptians, and that human nature never really changes.

How To Murder Your Tudor Royal Relatives – King Henry VIII

So how many of his own relatives do you think that King Henry VIII murdered?  Well of course he would probably argue that he had them legally executed and that after all he was the king? Most of us these days would be horrified at the idea of sending one of our nearest and dearest to the block, but even now the police will always have a good look at the relatives first if someone is found dead in suspicious circumstances.  Medieval monarchs were known for being fairly ruthless when it came to removing obstacles in their path, but it has to be said that when it came to permanently taking out his relations when they crossed him, Henry Tudor was in a class of his own.  So who were these unfortunate family members who met their ends on the scaffold on either Tower Green or Tower Hill?

Henry VIII was only the second king of a new dynasty; a dynasty that was founded on a very weak claim to the throne and by defeating the previous incumbent, Richard III, at the Battle of Bosworth.  His father Henry VII had been fairly restrained when it came to executing relations, but that could have partly been due to the fact that he had not been blessed with very many.  Henry VIII was determined to secure his new Tudor dynasty which meant eliminating any possible rivals for the throne as well as filling his own nursery with healthy Tudor sons to succeed him.  History was to prove, however, that he would be rather more successful with the former than with the latter.  His father Henry VII had married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York to both strengthen his claim to the throne and to bring to an end the years of military conflict that was called the ‘War of the Roses’.  Elizabeth of York came from a much larger family than her husband and those that survived into Henry VIII’s reign arguably had a stronger claim to the throne than he did.

Henry VIII

The first family victim of Henry VIII proved to be Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk who was beheaded in 1513.  Edmund de la Pole was the son of Elizabeth of York, Duchess of Suffolk, a daughter of Richard Duke of York and also sister to King Edward IV.  His elder brother John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln had been named as the heir to the throne by Richard III, but after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 he pledged his allegiance to the new monarch Henry VII.  He soon rebelled, however, and joined the campaign to put Lambert Simnel on the throne in 1487 and was killed at the Battle of Stoke.  This left Edmund as the most serious Yorkist claimant to the English throne, and in 1491 Henry VII allowed him to succeed to the title of Duke of Suffolk, although he was later demoted back down to being an Earl.  In 1501 he decided to shake the dust of the English court off his shoes and escaped abroad to live at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian.

But fate was not kind to Edmund de la Pole, as Maximilian’s son Philip of Burgundy’s ship was blown off course and stranded him on English shores during his journey to lay claim to the throne of Castile and was captured by Henry VII.  As Philip of Burgundy really didn’t have time to hang around the English Court, he entered into a bit of horse brokering with Henry, and agreed to exchange Edmund de la Pole in return for his freedom, as long as there was an agreement that the Earl of Suffolk would not be physically harmed.  Edmund de la Pole was to be safe as long as Henry VII was alive, but as soon as Henry VIII took the throne his days were numbered.  Totally lacking his father’s scruples Henry had this potential threat to his security executed in 1513, his flimsy excuse being that he needed to ensure that nobody could take it into their heads to make the Earl of Suffolk a focus for rebellion while he was away campaigning in France.

The next royal relative to meet their end courtesy of the axe was Edward Stafford, 3^rd Duke of Buckingham in 1521.  The Duke of Buckingham was a cousin of Henry VIII’s mother, as he was a son of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham and Katherine Woodville, who was the sister of Henry’s maternal grandmother.  His father Henry Stafford had also been executed by Richard III, so you could say that this grisly fate ran in the family.  During the reign of Henry VII, Edward Stafford has his father’s lands and titles returned to him and took an active part in the life of the court.  He married Lady Eleanor Percy and they had four children together.  All was going swimmingly until 1510 when the Duke discovered that Henry VIII was having an affair with his sister, the Countess of Huntingdon. The Countess’s enraged husband packed her off to a convent, but it is thought that Henry carried on seeing her until 1513.  The royal cousins patched up their quarrel, but around 1520 Henry VIII launched an investigation against the Duke of Buckingham on suspicion of his having been involved in treasonous activities.  He was arrested and tried in 1521 on charges of plotting the King’s death and listening to prophecies that foretold the King’s death.  It would seem that Henry VIII had already decided on the outcome of the trial, as he personally questioned some of the witnesses. The Duke of Buckingham was executed on Tower Hill on May 17^th 1521, and an Act of Attainder was brought against him in 1523.

In probably what was the most infamous act of his blood stained reign, Henry VIII had another cousin, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, executed in 1541.  Margaret Pole was the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence and Isobel Neville, and her brother Edward, Earl of Warwick had been executed in the wake of the Perkin Warbeck rebellion by King Henry VII.  She was married off to Sir Richard Pole, a relative of Henry VII’s mother Margaret Beaufort, and they had five children.  For much of her life she was very much in favour at the Tudor court, and was governess to the young Princess Mary.  She fell out of favour during the reign of Anne Boleyn as she remained fiercely loyal to her royal charge, but was reinstated after the fall and execution of the queen. One of Margaret’s sons, Reginald Pole was vehemently opposed to the King’s divorce and had written to Henry VIII from Italy clearly and with great scholarship outlining his objections to the divorce and the changes in the royal succession.  He was made a Cardinal by the Pope in 1536 and named as the papal legate to England.  Henry VIII took umbrage at what he perceived as Reginald Pole’s lack of support and arrested his brother Lord Montague and his mother, Margaret Poles on suspicion of treason.

Montague was executed on Tower Hill in 1538, but his mother was held in custody at a house belonging to the Earl of Southampton until early 1539, when she was taken and imprisoned in the Tower of London. She suffered greatly while in prison, as she was by this time an elderly lady of 67, and was not even given enough clothing to keep her warm, but it was generally thought that she would eventually be released.  However, in 1541, following a rebellion led by Sir John Neville in Yorkshire, Henry VIII decided to summarily execute the Countess. The legend is that she refused to lay her head on the block as she asserted that she was no traitor and had committed no crime, and so was pursued around the scaffold by the headsman who had to hack the poor old woman to death.  However, it is also said, and perhaps more likely, that the executioner was a novice who thoroughly botched the job, hacking at the Countess’s neck and shoulders before managing to sever her head. Whichever version is the correct one, it would be true to say that Margaret Pole did not have an easy passing from this life.

So, as you can see, Henry VIII was more than prepared to eliminate any perceived or real rival to his throne and power, and being a blood relative was not enough to save your skin.  Of course, Henry VIII’s most famous victims were two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, but they probably deserve an article all too themselves!

Henry VIII image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Cathar Heresy – Count Raymond VI of Toulouse

During the time of the Albigensian Crusade, the most powerful nobleman in the Languedoc was Count Raymond VI of Toulouse.  When we look at momentous events in history like the Albigensian Crusade, it is sometimes only too easy to lose sight of the fact these were real people that were involved. That it was the personalities and temperaments of these individuals that helped to shape the events that unfolded around them and in the case of someone as powerful as Count Raymond, even be pivotal in deciding what happened next.
So what did it mean to be the Count of Toulouse at the end of the 12^th century? Raymond was born into the mighty Saint Gilles family in 1156, at a time when the Languedoc was a prosperous and cultured region in the south west of France. It was a patchwork of petty nobles and fiefdoms, with the Counts of Toulouse holding the largest swathe of territory.  His many titles included Marquis of Provence, Count of Melgueil, Duke of Narbonne and Count of Agen. 

The largest portion of Raymond VI’s lands he held as a vassal of the King of Aragon, but he also held lands in Provence from the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of England and the King of France. This inevitably led to conflicting loyalties and the need for a great skill in diplomacy when dealing all these different interests. At the end of the 12^th century, the city of Toulouse was one of the largest in Europe, with only Venice and Rome being bigger.  It was a centre for the poetry of the troubadours, courtly love, commerce and was also very welcoming and tolerant of different cultures and religions.

So what type of person was this pre-eminent nobleman of the Languedoc? In contrast to some of the other nobles of the region, who liked nothing better than waging war, besieging castles and raiding monasteries, Raymond VI preferred using diplomacy to secure his estates and further the interests of his dynasty.  He was a cultured man and a poet, but he also enjoyed a reputation as a lecher. In this he seems to have been a chip off the old block, as he spent much of his early career stealing his father’s mistresses. His own mother, Constance, fled back to the court of her brother the King of France after Raymond’s father allegedly mistreated her and had her marriage annulled.

This was another pattern that Raymond would repeat, as he was also  to enjoy many marital adventures, marrying at least five times, and maybe even six.  His first wife was Ermessende, Countess of Melgueil, who died after only a few years of marriage in 1176. Raymond VI then married Beatrice of Béziers, a strategic match as she was a sister of Roger II Trencavel, another powerful Languedoc nobleman. They had one daughter Constance of Toulouse, who grew up to marry King Sancho VII of Navarre.  The couple divorced in 1189, with Beatrice apparently choosing to become a Cathar Perfect.

His next marriage to Bourgogne, a daughter of King Amalric II of Jerusalem, also ended in divorce in 1194. Then in 1197 he won the hand of Joan of England, who was a sister of Richard the Lionheart and the infamous King John. Joan was so impressed with her marriage she ran away from Raymond in 1199 to become a nun.  The poor lady died in childbirth shortly after, providing Raymond with his only male heir, the future Count Raymond VII of Toulouse (1197-1249). It is believed he then married a daughter of Isaac Comnenus of Cyprus, or at least had a relationship with her. The last of his wives was Leonor, a daughter of King Alfonso II of Aragon and Sancha of Castile. It would seem that being an ideal husband was not one of Raymond’s strengths.

It would seem that in the early days Raymond VI of Toulouse enjoyed a near perfect life as a medieval nobleman; he was wealthy, powerful and knew how to enjoy himself. However, there were clouds gathering on the horizon, and his nemesis would prove to be none other than the Catholic Church.  Unfortunately the Vatican would come to regard Raymond VI to be almost as big a menace as the Cathar heretics he refused to persecute.  For Raymond VI was to find himself truly stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place and was destined to turn excommunication into an unfortunate career choice.

For in the lands of Count Raymond of Toulouse, there flourished a heresy that was anathema to the Church of Rome. This heresy was Catharism, a form of Christianity that believed the world and our material life was inherently evil and the god they worshipped was a purely spiritual being that only dwelt in the heavenly realms. As the Catholic Church was an earthly institution, the Cathars regarded it with the same suspicion they held any other material entity. Although outwardly a good Catholic, Raymond was very supportive of the Cathar cause.  Many of his own family and friends were Cathars, as were many of his retinue and vassals.  He also appointed Jews to official positions in his administration, in direct contrast to the lot of Jewish population in most of the rest of Christian Europe.

When Innocent III became pope in 1198, one of his first acts was to pardon Raymond VII, who had been excommunicated for his somewhat irregular dealings with the Saint Gilles monastery. However, Innocent III was expecting substantial rewards for this act of clemency, and that reward was for Raymond VI to start showing some real zeal for ridding his lands of the stains of Cathar heresy and also to rein in his noble’s enthusiasm for appropriating Church property and murdering priests.

The local churchmen, however, were themselves a problem and Raymond VI was a great friend of one its most degenerate members, Raymond of Rabastens, the bishop of Toulouse. This enterprising clergyman had managed to bankrupt his diocese by paying mercenary troops to wage war against his own flock, which did nothing to endear him to his superior in Rome and did nothing to boost Raymond’s reputation either.

Events began coming to a head in 1207. The petty nobility of the Languedoc, who were vassals of Raymond, were busy fighting amongst themselves and employing mercenaries to do so. They were also in conflict with their liege lord, Raymond.  A papal legate, one Peter of Castelnau, travelled among these nobles exhorting them to drop their private wars and turn their energies towards persecuting the Cathars instead.  They agreed to this demand, but Raymond refused. He had no stomach for persecuting his own people and moreover, needed the paid mercenaries to achieve his territorial ambitions.

His punishment was to be excommunicated once again, which office the papal legate Peter of Castelnau performed in front of a large crowd, publicly humiliating Raymond. Unfortunately, being excommunicated meant that, in theory, Raymond VI was now once more beyond the pale and that his nobles and followers were no longer under any obligation to their liege lord.  To get out of this bind, Raymond made the promise he would rid his lands of both Cathar heretics and mercenaries, which led to him being restored to favour in August 1207.

However, it soon became apparent to the Pope that Raymond had no intention of fulfilling either promise and a list of his offences against the Church was drawn up. This extensive list of misdeeds included stealing Church property, being a Cathar sympathiser, allowing Jews to hold public office and not showing senior clergymen their due respect. He was once more excommunicated, so he invited the papal legate Peter of Castelnau to spend some time at his estates in Saint Gilles so he could renegotiate his position.

These negotiations, predictably, did not go well and culminated in Raymond threatening his papal guest in front of witnesses. Peter de Castelnau left in high dudgeon, but unfortunately for Raymond, disaster struck when he was murdered on the road by an unknown assailant. The identity of the murderer was never discovered, but it more than suited the Church to make Raymond VI responsible for this crime, although he was never tried for it. 

The murder was the spark Pope Innocent III needed to spur the monarchs and nobility of northern Europe into action.  In 1209 a Crusade was amassed to march south on the Languedoc and, although Raymond VI protested his innocence, he had to voluntarily subject himself to a public whipping in the square at St Gilles in order to have his excommunication revoked. He was also ordered to get on with eliminating the Cathars, purge his retinue of Jews, renounce any of his rights to the monasteries on his land, and make an apology to any clergymen that he had upset.

In order to protect his estates, Raymond VI reluctantly gathered together a fighting force and joined the Crusade; his logic being that if he was with the advancing army they would give his lands a wide berth. To say this move did not go down well with the other large landowners of the Languedoc, such as the Trencavels, was an understatement as it meant the Crusade would inevitably concentrate their efforts on their lands instead.

The towns of the Languedoc were besieged and fell one by one. First Béziers was sacked and the inhabitants were massacred and then Carcassonne was taken by trickery.  At the end of the campaigning season the ruthless northern baron, Simon de Montfort was named the new Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne.  Raymond VI returned to Toulouse, where he still refused to persecute the heretics and also gave sanctuary to Cathars fleeing from the lands of Simon de Montfort, who was zealous in upholding his Catholic duty when it came to matters like heresy. Rather predictably, this led to Raymond once more being excommunicated in 1209. To make matters even worse, the civic government of Toulouse was also excommunicated and the city placed under interdict, so no religious sacraments could be carried out.

Raymond and his advisors travelled to Rome to plead their case directly with Pope Innocent III, who partially restored Raymond back to ecclesiastical favour and ordered a tribunal to be set up to investigate. The tribunal had been ordered by the pope so that Raymond VI would have a chance to exonerate himself, but the papal legate Arnold Amaury had no intentions of letting Raymond off the hook lightly or with any dignity. He spoke first at the tribunal, and put forward a defence that Raymond should not be allowed to speak, as he had been proven to be a liar and a perjurer. Raymond was not given the chance to defend himself and was punished by having his excommunication indefinitely extended. 

To support Raymond VI, who was his vassal, King Pedro II of Aragon totally bypassed the rightful Trencavel heir and recognised Simon de Montfort as his vassal in his place. The implicit deal was that by making this conciliatory gesture, the papal legates should return the favour by restoring Raymond to his lands and the full favour of the Catholic Church.  However, Arnold Amaury the papal legate, was not prepared to play the game and handed Raymond VI a document containing terms that left him and King Pedro literally stunned.

The legate demanded that all of Raymond’s property and possessions were forfeit to the Crusaders, that Raymond was to demolish all of his castles and strongholds, that Raymond and his subjects could only partake of one meal containing meat a week and that they all had to dress in rough, brown robes. And the real sting in the tail was that Raymond was to take himself off to Palestine and remain there until the Church allowed him to return.  Not surprisingly these terms were not acceptable to Raymond VI and he rode back to his estates, never to join the Crusade again.  Equally not surprising was the fact that Raymond was excommunicated again.

Seal of Raymond VI of Toulouse

During the campaigning seasons of 1211 and 1212, Simon de Montfort and his force of Crusaders rampaged through the lands around Toulouse burning, destroying and massacring. Eventually in 1215 Simon de Montfort besieged the city of Toulouse itself, which led to Raymond VI having to accept the insulting conditions laid out by the papal legates.  He had his lands taken off him and he had to flee to the sanctuary of the court of his former brother-in-law, King John of England. However, such was the depth of papal spite against the beleaguered Count of Toulouse that the Pope threatened King John with excommunication if he continued to harbour him, so Raymond was soon sent packing from the English court.

Raymond decided to once more plead his case directly to Pope Innocent III and went to Rome to attend the Fourth Lateran Council accompanied by Raymond Roger of Foix. The Pope initially was sympathetic to Raymond’s pleas and he started to believe there might be a positive outcome. But the usual behind scenes politics took place and the outcome was that Raymond was forced to hand over his lands and possessions to Simon de Montfort. The only consolation he was given was that he retained the titles of Marquis of Provence and Beaucaire for his son and heir.

Once more an exile, Raymond VI sought sanctuary at the court of Aragon where he amassed an army and retook his city of Toulouse in 1217. Simon de Montfort and the Crusaders besieged the city in 1218 in an attempt to gain it back, but the mighty warrior that was Simon de Montfort was killed in June of that year. A major thorn in Raymond’s side was now gone and de Montfort’s son Amaury was not the fighting machine his father had been. 

So by the time of Raymond’s death in 1222, he managed to retake most of his lands.  However, because his last excommunication had never been lifted, he had had to abdicate in favour of his son before his death or his estates would have been forfeited.  The final indignity of Raymond VI’s life was that because of his excommunication at the time of his death he was denied a Catholic burial – a truly Christian act!

‘May you live in interesting times’ is a Chinese curse, and Count Raymond VI of Toulouse certainly enjoyed some very interesting times in his life. As the Catholic Church saw it, he had brought it all on himself because he refused to light the bonfires for the Cather heretics to roast on across his domains.  But although Raymond VI had to duck and dive at times and make promises he had no intentions of keeping, surely this was more honourable than persecuting his own family, friends and vassals for their religious beliefs?

Raymond VI may have been a lecher, paid mercenaries to do his dirty work and was happy to help himself to Church property, but he was also a tolerant man who refused to bow to any pressure to persecute heretics, even if this put him beyond the favour of the established Catholic Church for eternity.

Image Raymond VI of Toulouse Wikimedia Commons Public Domain