The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds From Ancient Sumer to the Enlightenment

by Brian Thornton

  Cruel Bastard

  John enjoyed seeing people suffer but lacked the fortitude to do it himself (except when dead drunk, as in the example quoted above). He favored starving those who displeased him to death, as was the case of Maud of Saint-Valery and her son, whom he locked up in the dungeon of their own castle. But his cruelty didn’t stop there: stories of the ingenious tortures he inflicted on his subjects and his enemies include tales of people roasted alive, blinded with vinegar, and hung by the thumbs. One old goat, a self-styled prophet named Peter of Wakefield, foolishly prophesied that John would not be king after the next anniversary of his ascension. When John got wind of this, he had the man thrown into prison until after Ascension Day had passed, then dragged him behind a horse for several miles and had him hanged. Then he turned around and did the same thing to Peter’s son!

  The one area where John was successful where most of his brothers failed was in siring children. He had at least five legitimate children and twelve acknowledged bastards.

  His greatest failure might also have been his greatest gift to future generations of subjects. In order to pay for his many pointless wars in France, John had bled the country dry. And since he had targeted the Church in these depredations as well, he had no backing when a group of nobles rose against him and forced the concessions that became known as the Magna Carta, an important step in the establishment of democracy, shortly before his death in A.D. 1215.

  Talk about the law of unintended consequences!

  82

  PHILIP II AUGUSTUS

  OF FRANCE

  Cowardly, Duplicitous, and Effective

  ( A.D. 1165–1223)

  By the grace of God there is born to us this night a King who shall be a hammer to the English.

  —Member of the Parisian mob (attr. Gerald of Wales)

  Born in A.D. 1165 to the ailing French king Louis VII, Philip was crowned king at age fifteen after his father suffered a stroke and began to lose his mental faculties. Louis had been a good man, and a lousy king. His son, clever, cowardly, and calculating, would prove a lousy man and a good king.

  Philip did more to strengthen the French crown and expand its power than any other king since Charlemagne. And he did it in large part by destroying the wide-ranging holdings of fellow royal bastard Henry II of England and his quarrelsome bastard sons. Furthermore, he did it by playing them off against each other. Forming close personal friendships with each of Henry’s sons, he supported them in their frequent rebellions against their father.

  Initially, relations between Philip and Henry’s son Richard were good—but they soured. The two went on crusade together in the Holy Land, then began to squabble over who was running the show in their combined military campaigns. Tensions rose. Philip was touchy because he was a physical coward who eschewed most forms of combat. Plus, he saw an opportunity to peel off more of Richard’s properties in northern France while Richard was distracted by crusading in the Holy Land. Claiming that he was needed at home, Philip made ready to withdraw. Richard’s reply was scathing: “It is a shame and a disgrace on my lord if he goes away without having finished the business that brought him hither. But still, if he finds himself in bad health, or is afraid lest he should die here, his will be done.”

  Philip made him pay for the remark. While Richard was still in the Holy Land, Philip presented documents to Richard’s representatives in Normandy, purporting to be from Richard and returning parts of northern France to the French crown. They were forgeries.

  The two monarchs went to war soon afterward, and stayed at war until Richard’s death in A.D. 1199.

  Once the incompetent John succeeded his brother, Philip managed to reverse the roles the two men’s fathers had played: he outwitted the dimwitted English king at every turn, just as Henry II had done with his own father decades earlier. This culminated in Philip’s taking the duchy of Normandy from the English late in John’s reign.

  Bastard Bigamist

  Philip’s first wife died young in childbirth, and in A.D. 1193, he took Ingeborg, the daughter of the king of Denmark, as his second wife. But Philip couldn’t stand the sight of her. Setting her aside, he tried to get the marriage annulled on the grounds that they were too closely related by blood and that he hadn’t consummated the marriage. Not bothering to wait for a dispensation from the pope, Philip married a third time, siring several children by his new wife, Agnes of Merania. But Ingeborg hung in there, refusing to concede that they hadn’t sealed the wedding with sex. Eventually the pope agreed with her, and Philip was forced to accept her back as queen of France in A.D. 1213, by which time Agnes had died.

  83

  OTTO IV OF GERMANY

  Stupid Is as Stupid Does

  ( A.D. 1165–1223)

  —Physically large, with a much-noted resemblance to Richard the Lionheart, whose favorite he was, Otto was by common consent an unreliable braggart, a rather stupid, bungling, inefficient but arrogant man, who let his tongue run away with him and made lavish promises he had no intention of keeping.

  —Frank McLynn, Richard & John: Kings at War

  The son of Henry the Lion, duke of Bavaria and Saxony, and Matilda Plantagenet, this future Holy Roman Emperor was big, loud, handsome, and dumb. Raised in England by his grandfather, Otto was slated at various times to become earl of York and king (by marriage) of Scotland. Both ploys proved to be busts, so his favorite uncle Richard made him count of Poitou.

  Otto looked the part of a king, even if he didn’t possess much ability, and the Plantagenets had big dreams for him. So when Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI died in A.D. 1197, Richard I advanced Otto as a candidate to succeed him as both Holy Roman Emperor and king of Germany (in truth, there wasn’t much difference between the two at that point), hoping to use Otto as a counterweight in his ongoing feud with the French king, Philip Augustus.

  Nearly a decade of civil war in Germany followed, as Pope Innocent III backed first Otto, then one or the other of the two rival claimants of the throne.

  When Philip of Swabia, the leading candidate for the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, was assassinated in A.D. 1208 , the pope switched his allegiance to Otto. In exchange for the pope’s backing, Otto offered him most of the imperial fiefs in Italy, plus the right to appoint all German bishops. Otto had no intention of actually honoring this promise, and once the pope had crowned him Holy Roman Emperor later that same year, he blithely ignored the pope’s insistence on his new rights. Instead, he reconquered all of northern Italy and menaced the pope in Rome.

  Enraged, Innocent (a fellow bastard, and not someone to be trifled with) excommunicated him the next year. This move signaled a shift in Otto’s fortunes. Allied with his uncle John (the king of England) against the other contender for the throne, Frederick of Hohenstaufen (who was allied with Philip Augustus), Otto again invaded Italy, then turned northward, and with his uncle, got flattened in the Battle of Bouvines in A.D. 1214.

  Finished politically, he limped off to his family’s possessions in Brunswick to hide out and lick his wounds. He was deposed as both king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor within a year. Three years afterward he died under mysterious circumstances.

  Bastard’s Demise

  Depending on which source you’re reading, Otto either died of a drug overdose or was stricken by a debilitating illness (possibly dysentery) and begged the local abbot to help him purge himself of his sins in a most colorful manner: “deposed, dethroned, he was flung full length on the ground by the Abbot, confessing his sins, while the reluctant priests beat him bloodily to death. Such was the end of the first and last Welf Emperor.”

  84

  HENRY III OF ENGLAND

  A Saintly King with Locusts for Relatives

  ( A.D. 1207–1272)

  His mind seemed not to stand on a firm basis, for every sudden accident put him into passion.

  —Anonymous contemporary account of Henry III

  In A.D. 1207, a son was born to King John of England, a baby boy wh
o would grow up to be very little like his sour, saturnine father. Sweet-natured, pious Henry III (named for his grandfather, the restless, brilliant bastard Henry II) was generous to a fault, suffered from abandonment issues, and was easily manipulated by his French relatives. The one characteristic he shared with his father was that he was a disaster as a king.

  Henry was, to put it bluntly, a bungler. Weak-willed and vacillating, he tended to follow the counsel of the last person in the room to give him a suggestion. To top it off, Henry never got over either the death of his father or his mother’s literal abandonment of him while he was still a child. Constantly seeking approval and looking about for surrogate father figures, when he married, he allowed his wife’s family (the Savoyards) to dominate his government, enriching themselves in the process.

  Not to be outdone, Henry’s half-brothers by his mother’s second husband swooped down onto England once they were close to adulthood, hoping to cash in on the king’s largesse. They were not disappointed. Henry showered his brothers with titles, property, and honors. He even managed to get one elected bishop of Winchester despite the fact that he was illiterate, still in his teens, and hadn’t spent a day as a priest!

  “The Lusignans” (as Henry’s half-brothers and their followers were known, in recognition that they were the sons of Hugh of Lusignan) repaid Henry’s largesse with repeated acts of violence towards their rivals, looting, pillaging, even killing neighbors, all while Henry turned an uncritical blind eye. This brought them in conflict with the Savoyard relatives of Henry’s wife, and in turn with a confederation of nobles concerned with Henry’s attempts to rewrite the Magna Carta, the document granting English subjects certain rights and privileges that Henry’s father had signed under protest in A.D. 1215.

  The result was two decades of bloody civil war. By A.D. 1265, the fighting had largely ceased, but Henry’s grip on reality, never all that strong, began to lapse. In A.D. 1268, he had a bout of what can only be described as temporary insanity, renounced his Christian faith, and claimed to be a follower of the old Germanic gods Odin and Thor. A week later he came to his senses and proclaimed himself once again a Christian. He died five years later, succeeded by another, more capable bastard: his son, Edward Longshanks.

  Orphaned Bastard

  John died in A.D. 1216, leaving his nine-year-old son as king. In situations such as this, the queen mother usually served as regent, with nobles to help her rule in the underaged monarch’s name. John’s widow, Isabella of Angouleme, had no love for England, though, and four years after John’s death left for France and a second marriage (to a French nobleman named Hugh of Lusignan), abandoning her young son as well as her adopted country in the process. For all intents and purposes the boy king was orphaned while barely into his teens.

  85

  EDWARD I OF ENGLAND

  When the Only Tool You Have Is a Hammer, Use It on the Scots

  ( A.D. 1239–1307)

  Hic est Edwardvs Primus Scottorum Malleus (Latin for: “Here is Edward I, Hammer of the Scots”).

  —Edward I’s epitaph, carved on his tomb in Westminster

  Psychologist Abraham Maslow once famously remarked, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” He might easily have been talking about Edward I, king of England from A.D. 1273 to 1307. In Edward’s case, the hammer was the employment of ruthless, overwhelming, all-consuming violence in order to solve his political problems.

  Born in A.D. 1239, Edward was hobbled from early age with ill health. But where his father, Henry III, was weak-willed and vacillating, young Edward possessed deep resources of both will and fire (he had the so-called “Plantagenet temper”), and managed to make a full recovery.

  His father’s inability to rule coupled with his favoring foreign-born (in other words, French) sycophants over his “natural subjects” led to repeated clashes with his barons. Ironically enough, these nobles were led by the king’s own brother-in-law, the foreign-born (yep, you guessed it, French) earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort.

  Forced by these circumstances to grow up quick (and at 62 he towered over most of his contemporaries, earning the nickname “Longshanks” because of his long legs), Edward quickly developed a reputation as a great warrior.

  During the resulting civil war, Edward fought mostly on his father’s side, and was even briefly a royal captive of Montfort and his allies. In A.D. 1265, A.D , the now twenty-six-year-old Edward, in command of his father’s forces, trapped and killed Montfort and crushed his rebellion at the Battle of Lewes (in Sussex).

  After securing victory at home, he went on crusade to the Holy Land (where he survived an assassination attempt in his tent by whacking his would-be killer in the head with a stool, then wresting the fellow’s dagger from his grasp and using it on him). While there, he learned of his father’s death and returned to England in A.D. 1273.

  Bastard of Wales

  When Edward took the throne in A.D. 1273, he immediately inherited a conflict with the semi-independent principality of Wales on England’s western border. Llewellyn Ap Gryffudd (pronounced “Griffith”), the hereditary prince of Wales, clashed with Edward many times over the years before the prince was finally defeated and killed in battle in A.D. 1282. Afterward, his severed head was sent to Edward as a grim trophy of the successful pacification of Wales. The heir to the English throne has borne the title “Prince of Wales” ever since.

  As king, Edward set about pacifying neighboring Wales, England’s Irish possessions, and pressing his own claim to the Scottish throne. For the next three decades, he was continually at war with his neighbors: building a line of castles on the Welsh marches; invading Scotland time and again; and everywhere Edward went, blood, pestilence, and famine followed him. In one instance, at Berwick-Upon-Tweed, Edward was so enraged by the resistance of the townspeople that when his forces finally took the city, he ordered the entire population slaughtered.

  He didn’t limit his bloodlust to conquered neighbors. Before he expelled the Jews from his kingdom in A.D. 1290, he imprisoned their leaders, hanging 300 of them for no other offense than being Jewish!

  Edward even seized the legendary Stone of Scone, an ancient chunk of rock on which Scottish kings had been crowned since prehistoric times (the Scots would not get the stone back until the twentieth century). By this time, the Scottish king was nothing more than the English king’s puppet. Under Edward’s reign, Wales and Ireland were also completely subjugated for the first time.

  No wonder when the great man died, his son had carved on his funeral slab “The Hammer of the Scots.” What the Scots thought of this is not exactly printable.

  86

  PHILIP IV THE FAIR

  OF FRANCE

  Don’t Let The Name Fool Ya, Redux

  ( A.D. 1268–1314)

  The current occupant is unfit to sit on the throne of Peter.

  —Philip IV of France

  Philip IV inherited a kingdom beyond broke: his father and grandfather had bankrupted the realm with a series of expensive wars of conquest (including crusades to the Holy Land, for which effort and expenditure the French had exactly nothing to show).

  In short order, he turned on those to whom he owed the most money (Jewish moneylenders and the banking house of the Order of the Knights Templar), driving out the Jews and destroying the Templars. Then he insisted on taxing those who had previously enjoyed tax-exempt status—the French possessions of the Catholic Church. This in turn brought the French king into conflict with the papacy, with a surprising result.

  Coming to the throne at the age of seventeen in A.D. 1285, Philip tallied what he owed and what was owed him, realized he was in hock to a lot of different people, and promptly set about wringing as much money as he could out of the kingdom’s Jewish residents. After forcing a ruinous special tax on them from A.D. 1291 until 1303, by which time he’d bankrupted most of the Jews still living in France, he expelled them from the kingdom.

  Then he turned o
n the Templars.

  These crusader knights had paid the massive ransom that got Philip’s grandfather Louis IX released from Egyptian captivity in A.D. 1254. In the decades since, the interest on this loan had continued to accrue. Exempt from taxation and in position to lend and pass along money (like a medieval Western Union), the Templars were loaded and ripe for the picking.

  Rather than make even interest payments on this loan, Philip laid plans, then in A.D. 1307 , seized Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master, and most of the leadership of the order, accusing them of heresy, and torturing confessions out of most of them.

  The result? These proceedings gave Philip legal cover to seize the holdings of the Templar bank and use them to pay his debts. Plus, with the order itself destroyed, there was no one to enforce payment of his own massive debt to the Templars!

  And then there was the papacy.

  Philip insisted on taxing the Church, a move that pissed off the current pope, Boniface VIII, who issued instructions in A.D. 1302 forbidding the French church from paying the tax. When Philip got hold of these instructions, he publicly burned them. Trying the pope in absentia, he questioned his fitness to be pontiff. Moving quickly, he sent French troops to arrest the pope, who died shortly afterward (partly of humiliation). Then he insisted on getting one of his close associates in the French church elected pope, as Clement V. (More on him in Chapter 87.)

  Philip IV died in a hunting accident in A.D. 1314, leaving a far more balanced budget than the one he’d inherited. But at what cost in blood and good will?