by Ed West
It was said of the younger William that ‘he was loathsome to almost all his people, and abominable to God’. That, however, was a priest’s view, and the new king made the mistake of alienating the clergy, and because most history was written by monks, William became the subject of many allegations, among them that he indulged in devil worshipping and homosexuality. One clergyman described his horror at the goings-on at the new king’s court: ‘The model for young men was to rival women in delicacy of person, to mince their gait and to walk with loose gesture and half naked.’ Churchmen complained that unlike the hard men who hung around his father, the court was now full of ‘prostitutes and parasites’.
Rufus, who had different color eyes and a stammer (possibly a result of his shouting father), and like his brother Robert was no intellectual, was also criticized for wearing a beard and long hair, a new fashion among Anglo-Norman aristocrats copied from the English. A chronicler called Orderick wrote of him: ‘He had no lawful wife. But he gave himself insatiably to obscene fornications and frequent adulteries. Soiled by his sins, he set a guilty example of shameful debauchery to his subjects.’ Apparently Rufus also held Roman-style orgies, but considering his father had murdered thousands, perhaps history can forgive his son a few Freddy Mercury–style escapades.
His blasphemy and contempt for Church finances further infuriated the priests; the king would regularly shout religious obscenities, his favorite being ‘God’s face!’ which, although rather tame by modern standards, upset the authorities. When a nobleman complained that the king was taking all the Church’s cash, he simply replied: ‘What is it to you?’ And even when a monk told Rufus that he had foreseen his death in a dream, the king shrugged it off; being a monk, he said, ‘of course, he dreams for money’.
Worst of all William II had garnered a reputation for trying to extort money from any source available, and his cronies did likewise. Most notorious of all was the bishop of Durham, Ranulf Flambard, whose nickname meant ‘incendiary’, so called because of his thinly-veiled attempts to scam as many people out of as much cash as was possible: ‘he skinned the rich, ground down the poor, and swept other men’s inheritances into his net’.6 Another one of William’s tactics was to give bishops long holidays so his favourites could use their properties while they were away; he also kept church positions empty so he could rake in the money they generated.
William Rufus was also addicted to food, and almost ate himself to death in 1093. He had made a promise to the Church when he thought he was dying about being a good Christian and doing whatever they said, but afterwards he went back on everything he had said.
After Archbishop Lanfranc had died in 1089 the king left the see vacant for four years but eventually invited Anselm, abbot of Bec in Normandy, to replace him. Anselm refused. The king begged, and then he ordered everyone in the chamber to prostrate themselves before the churchman. He refused still. The courtiers then pulled Anselm by his head, and gave him the staff, and when he refused they prised open his fingers—and they then cried out ‘Long live the bishop’. He was carried to the nearest church for his installation, still protesting.
The relationship didn’t last, however, and only four years later William had Anselm exiled. The two men had disagreed on a range of ecclesiastical issues, in the course of which the king declared of his archbishop that, ‘Yesterday I hated him with great hatred, today I hate him with yet greater hatred and he can be certain that tomorrow and thereafter I shall hate him continually with ever fiercer and more bitter hatred. As for his prayers and benedictions, I spit them back in his face.’7
Just as his brother had predicted, within weeks Bishop Odo was conspiring to cause trouble, provoking a rebellion against Rufus with the backing of Robert, who also sought the crown of England. However this revolt was rather half-hearted, and only two major noblemen were involved, another Eustace of Boulogne and the villainous Robert of Bellême. Bellême, the grandson of the bishop who had strangled his wife and burned down his own cathedral, was notorious even for the standards of the day, described as ‘Grasping and cruel, an implacable persecutor of the Church of God and the poor … unequalled for his iniquity in the whole Christian era.’ He had his wife put in a dungeon, and as one historian described him: ‘In a society of ruffianly, bloodthirsty men, Robert of Bellême stands out as particularly atrocious; an evil, treacherous man with an insatiable ambition and a love of cruelty for cruelty’s sake; a medieval sadist whose ingenious barbarities were proverbial among the people of that time’.8 He inspired the medieval folk story Robert the Devil, about a nobleman who discovers Satan is his father, which later became an opera. The conqueror had distrusted him so much he had garrisoned his castle, a highly unusual move.
Threatened with another invasion from Normandy, William II offered the English fairer laws if they fought with him against his brother. Promises which he had no intention of keeping. The Chronicle says ‘he promised them the best law that ever was in this land; and forbade every unjust tax and gave me and their woods and their coursing—but it did not last long’.9
In fact when in 1094 Rufus proposed invading Normandy, and lots of English soldiers turned up with ten shillings for their provisions (raised by every taxpayer in the district), he took their money then sent them home,10 like a proto-internet scam. When Lanfranc had once told off William for lying all the time he replied ‘Who can be expected to keep all his promises?’
The country faced yet another fratricidal civil war, but luckily events far away came to the rescue. In 1095 Pope Urban II preached a crusade to win back the Holy Land for Christendom; it came about after the Byzantine emperor called for western Christian help following a series of defeats to the Seljuk Turks, although the Greeks would soon regret inviting the Latin Christians east.
Robert was among those who volunteered to go and fight, and to raise funds he loaned Normandy to his brother William, raising the money by extorting money from landlords and pillaging the Church. Various aristocrats went off, among them not just Robert but also Edgar Atheling, William’s mild-mannered son-in-law Stephen of Blois, who was married to the famously strong-willed and bossy Adela, and Eustace of Boulogne’s sons Godfrey and Baldwin. Also along for the ride was that paragon of Christian virtue Odo, who died en route in Italy.
By January 1098 they were all starving outside of Antioch. Stephen of Blois wrote to his wife saying that it was a terrible place and that ‘throughout this winter we have endured intense cold and incessant rain’. Stephen had enough of the whole thing and went back home, but his wife eventually forced him to return, wearing him down with ‘these speeches and many more like them’.11 This time he died, but by the sounds of things death might have been a release for Stephen.
Ghastly though it was, unlike subsequent crusades this one was at least successful, and in 1099 they captured Jerusalem and rather set the tone for the next few centuries by massacring all the Muslims and, for some reason, Jews. Along the way they had killed countless eastern Christians too, because they were either too stupid to understand the difference or didn’t care. Eustace’s son Godfrey of Boulogne became Defender of the Holy Sepulchre in 1099 and was succeeded by his brother Baldwin the following year, who took the title King of Jerusalem. Compared to this, ‘king of England’ seems like a pretty so-so job title.
With Jerusalem conquered, Robert was desperate to get back to avoid his brother taking over Normandy forever. As it happens William was having something of a hard time himself and things were going badly; well as bad as they could be, really. In August 1100 he was out hunting in the New Forest when one of his party, Walter Tirel, accidentally shot him, the king making it worse by trying to pull out the arrow shaft. Luckily his loyal brother Henry was nearby, and had the killer quietly sent to France and let off, while he quickly rushed to Winchester to claim the throne. Within three days Henry had himself crowned, having turned up with a heavily armed retinue and suggesting to the clergy they make him king.
What’s also strange is t
hat Tirel mistook Rufus for a deer when, even if the sun was in his eyes, he was supposed to be the best shot in the land; it was even stranger that Henry happened to be nearby with Tirel’s brothers-in-law, who were both subsequently given gifts of land. There’s always been a touch of suspicion about the way William II died in a mysterious hunting ‘accident’, but it was a dangerous sport and accidents without inverted commas were also quite frequent—the Conqueror’s second son Richard was killed in the exact same forest around 1070, and there were no conspiracy theories at the time.12 But if it was not an accident, then it was lucky for Henry, since Robert was still on his way back from the Holy Land. The eldest brother had been broke when he left but now he had not just the glory of winning back Jerusalem, but had also picked up a beautiful and rich wife on the way back.
The sacrilegious king was buried at Winchester Cathedral, which collapsed the following year. Most believed it was a sign from above, although William of Malmesbury simply pointed out that ‘it was badly built’.
William was not a success, but he did leave one great legacy in Westminster Hall, which he built so he could fit in his new marble throne. When it was completed he had said: ‘It is big enough to be one of my bedchambers’. It’s still there, the oldest surviving part of the Palace of Westminster, and was where the Queen Mother was laid in state after she died in 2002.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Nineteen Long Winters When Christ and His Angels Slept
As one historian said of King Henry I, ‘From the moral standpoint he was probably the worst king that has occupied the throne of England’.1 Relentlessly greedy, cruel and sex mad, he was clever enough to keep the Church onside so he could concentrate on his main interests—sex and money. A thickset man with black hair, ‘a steady gaze and an unfortunate tendency to snore’, during his long reign Henry managed to sire between twenty-two and twenty-five illegitimate children by up to eight different mistresses, which is to date the English royal record.2 Still, at least the Church couldn’t accuse him of being gay. Although not husband of the year by any measure, Henry’s chronicler/propagandist William of Malmesbury said of him that ‘All his life he was completely free from fleshly lusts, indulging in the embraces of the female sex, as I have heard from those who know, from love of begetting children and not to gratify his passions’. I’m sure he hated every minute of it.
Soon after becoming king he had married Edith, the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland and Edgar Atheling’s sister Margaret, so giving Henry both peace with the Scots and a greater claim to rule the English.3 He had to change his wife’s name to Matilda because the Normans refused to accept anyone with an English name; however the Norman aristocracy thought Henry had gone native and mockingly referred to the royal couple as ‘Godric and Godiva’ and Henry as ‘King of the English’. Born in Yorkshire and able to speak the native language, he was the only Norman king who was genuinely popular, partly at least because he made a sop to tradition, such as reestablishing county and local courts ‘according to the laws of Edward’ (the Confessor). But this was all for show, for ‘he could flatter the English when he had need of their help, but he really detested them’.4
Like the Conqueror, he was notoriously greedy, and obsessed with the idea that someone might be ripping him off somewhere, and this led to the great innovation of his reign. King Henry wanted to make the kingdom more efficient, and so ordered that every sheriff bring him each county’s revenues twice a year; here he would personally count out the money (a pound was the weight of 240 silver pennies, the currency of Anglo-Saxon times) on a large table with a chequered cloth, or exchequer, on top of it. As a result the new government treasury became known as the exchequer, and has remained so ever since; today the head of the British Treasury is called the Chancellor of the Exchequer. (Henry also founded the country’s first zoo, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire.)
The king’s greed chimed with his ruthless violent streak; after replacing all the coins in 1124, because of their poor quality, he ordered all the kingdom’s coin producers to come to him where he condemned half of them to have their right hand and genitals cut off.5 It was this no-nonsense approach to law and order that gave him his nickname the ‘Lion of Justice’, this sort of outright cruelty being popular with most of the population. The Chronicle says of Henry I: ‘In his time no man dared do wrong against another; he made peace for man and beast.’
Henry kept the bishops onside, but he was cynically pious; he made a grand gesture of promising to honor the Church, but like his brother he also kept bishoprics vacant so he could take in the money. His favorite oath was ‘By God’s death’ but no one seemed to mind, because he didn’t interfere with Church finances. Henry promoted Roger of Salisbury to archbishop because he said Mass the quickest, and tried to make his doctor archbishop of Canterbury, although the bishops blocked it as they thought it an inappropriate job for a man who inspected women’s urine. The great lasting religious contribution of his reign came from one of his knights, Rahere, who was struck with malaria on a pilgrimage to Rome and promised to build a hospital in London if he recovered. He did, and St Barts in central London is today the capital’s oldest hospital. As well as helping the sick, Rahere was also an enthusiastic jester, and would regularly juggle in front of amused inpatients as they arrived at the hospital.
Unlike his elder brothers Henry was educated to a high degree, his nickname, beauclerc, meaning ‘fine scholar’, and he once said that an illiterate king was little better than a crowned donkey. Education did not make him a better person, however, and in many ways he was the most sinister of all of William’s family; in 1090 Henry was fighting Norman rebels with his brother Robert against William and dealt with one, Conan Pilatus, by throwing him out of a castle window, despite the man pleading for his life. During a hostage situation with a rebel knight and his own illegitimate daughter, he ordered two of his granddaughters to be blinded; their mother Juliana de Fontevrault tried to assassinate him afterwards, with a crossbow. And he once blinded a Norman minstrel who sang a song critical of him; in comparison his elder brother Robert was like a harmless upper-class buffoon.
Curthose returned from his religious duties in 1101 and prepared to invade England. He might have won, but foolishly agreed to negotiations. Under their agreement, Henry made him heir in England and gave him a pension on condition he go back across the channel; then in April 1105 Henry invaded Normandy where he burned down Bayeux Cathedral. The following year, on September 28, 1106—forty years to the day after the Normans arrived in England—an Anglo-Norman force under Henry defeated and captured Robert.
The Conqueror’s eldest son was kept prisoner in Cardiff for twenty-eight years, living to the age of eighty, by which time he was so bored that he had learned Welsh, but he had left behind a son, William Clito. In 1119 Clito had joined forces with the French king Louis the Fat to drive Henry out. With customary ruthlessness Henry burned down another cathedral, at Evreux, to drive out the opposition, although this time he had got approval of its bishop and promised to rebuild it afterwards. Clito fought in direct conflict with his cousin, Henry’s son William ‘Adeling’; they were around the same age, seventeen and sixteen respectively, and both their names meant ‘throne-worthy’, one in Latin and the other in English. When they fought at Brémule in August 1119 Henry’s side was victorious and Clito fled with Louis the Fat—who as his name suggests wasn’t the greatest warrior in the world. The next day Henry returned Louis’s warhorse with its trappings and Adeling sent back Clito’s horse ‘with a selection of rich gifts for his defeated cousin in an exquisitely judged gesture of chivalric condescension.’6 A year later Louis recognized Henry and his son as rulers of Normandy, and after this triumph his followers gathered at the port of Barfleur in November in order to sail back to England. They were in celebratory mood.
The king’s boat had sailed ahead, and William Adeling was behind on board the White Ship, the most state-of-the-art and luxurious vessel of the age, which was captained by the son
of the very man who had brought the Conqueror over in 1066. Alongside him were two hundred other high-spirited young Normans, including Richard of Lincoln, Henry’s favourite bastard, and another of the king’s backstreet offspring, the Countess of Perche. Before setting sail some ‘three casks of wine’, a staggering 775 litres, had already been emptied by the passengers and crew7—four bottles per person. Henry’s favourite nephew Stephen was on board but could not drink because of a stomach upset; alarmed by the state of the crew, he asked to be put ashore.
Being paralytically drunk, the seafarers naturally thought it a great idea to accept the revellers’ dare to catch up with the king’s ship ahead of them. The boat hit some rocks, and became one of several thousand to end up at the bottom of the channel, and most were killed below decks. The drowning youngsters were so close to land that their screams could be heard ashore, but were mistaken for hijinks, and they were left to die. William initially escaped in a lifeboat, only to go back to try to save his half sister—they were overwhelmed and all died.
After an hour only a butcher called Berold and a nobleman, Geoffrey Fitzgilbert, clung on to a raft and in the night the latter drifted to his death. Berold survived because of the rough sheepskin jacket ‘so unlike the waterlogged silks and furs that had dragged the drowning courtiers down’; he was rescued by fishermen the next day.
In the morning, and with no sign of the boat, concern grew and then the worst fears were realized when bodies starting floating ashore. As news broke, the court fell into mourning—almost everyone had lost a loved one—but it was many hours before a lowly pageboy was chosen to tell the king. Henry had to retire to a separate room, not wanting his subjects to see him cry, and for the remaining years of his life he was a broken man.