Killers in Cold Blood

by Ray Black

  Ironically, Henry was accorded the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ by Pope Leo X as recognition of his work against the Protestants. With his newfound papal favour, Henry began to consider approaching the Vatican about the possibility of divorcing Queen Catherine. Their only surviving child was female – Mary (I) – and Henry wanted a male heir to the throne. Catherine was too old to produce more children, so Henry decided that a new wife was in order.

  Henry had his eye on a potential new queen named Anne Boleyn, so he instructed his politicians to negotiate an annulment of his marriage to Catherine. The Pope refused and tensions began to ferment between Henry and the Vatican. After eight years of political wrangling, Henry finally had enough and declared his marriage null and void in 1533. He then married Ann Boleyn in secret. When the pope discovered the truth he excommunicated Henry from the Catholic Church. Henry simply responded by declaring himself head of the Church of England. Anne Boleyn happened to be a Protestant, so the new church followed those lines, although still retaining some Catholic vestiges.

  Having married Anne Boleyn, something had changed in Henry. He had grown omnipotent in temperament and fickle with it. After three years Anne had only produced another daughter – Elizabeth (I). He chose to trade Ann in for a new model in 1536. To escape his second marriage, he trumped up charges of infidelity and had Ann beheaded before marrying Jane Seymour. She gave birth to his short-lived heir Edward VI, but died following childbirth.

  Henry married his fourth wife Anne of Cleves in 1540, but wanted out before the year was finished, so applied for his second divorce. His fifth wife Catherine Howard was married in the same year and lasted two more years before becoming the second wife to lose her head. His sixth wife Catherine Parr became the only one to avoid both divorce and beheading, but only because she outlived Henry, who died in 1547.

  When Henry turned his back on the Catholic Church in 1533 he had to deal with the many Roman Catholics still living in England at the time. There were many monasteries scattered over the country, so Henry encouraged their persecution and repression. By 1536, he was ready for a more proactive approach to the Catholic problem, so he initiated a period in English history called the Reformation. It was so-called because it resulted in the dissolution of the monasteries so that the religious infrastructure was ‘reformed’ into one of Protestant values. In 1539, Henry ordered that the surviving monasteries be razed to the ground, signalling the end of Roman Catholicism and diverting total control of ecclesiastical affairs to the Crown.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that Henry VIII was a ruthless monarch. It is true that he chose execution as a means of dealing with certain members of court, including Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, but it was in part because of the law at the time. His chief minister Thomas Cromwell was a famous example of this.

  Cromwell had been instrumental in the downfall of Anne Boleyn, but he also arranged Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves following the untimely death of Jane Seymour. His marriage to Anne remained unconsummated because Henry couldn’t bring himself to arousal as she was so unattractive. Cromwell had shown Henry a portrait of Anne by Hans Holbein in which she had a pleasant appearance, so he agreed to the marriage. He was duly shocked when he met her in person, but had to go ahead with the betrothal for political reasons. Henry’s embarrassment eventually caught up with Cromwell, who was arrested on the charge of treason and executed as a traitor to the king.

  Anne Boleyn’s downfall began when she miscarried a son and heir to the throne. A number of male courtiers and aristocrats were arrested by Cromwell on the charge of having affairs with the queen. It is not clear whether the queen actually did commit adultery, but the king clearly wanted to end the marriage, so she went to trial without any prospect of being found innocent. She was executed along with the accused men, who included her own brother George Boleyn, accused of incest.

  Catherine Howard’s story was slightly different, in that she definitely did have an affair. Before she caught Henry’s eye she began a relationship with a courtier named Thomas Culpepper. That relationship continued behind Henry’s back. As rumours surfaced Catherine attempted to silence people by appointing them positions in court. Francis Dereham was among those shown favour and he turned out to have had an affair with Catherine before Henry had met her. Catherine, Culpepper and Dereham all went to the block.

  The fall of the axe was a common punishment in Tudor times, so Henry would have regarded it a reasonable sentence. He was omnipotent as monarch at that point in history, so any behaviour that saw him betrayed or embarrassed was punishable by death. His actions probably had greater impact on the many Roman Catholics in his kingdom. The dissolution of the monasteries and the reformations of the Church would have caused widespread upheaval across the land. In 1534, a Treason Act was passed that to deny Royal Supremacy over the Church was to commit high treason and so punishable by death.

  Thomas More, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII, was a Roman Catholic who refused to acknowledge the king’s claim to being the head of the Church of England and paid with his life by the axe in 1535. Another victim of the new law was William Tyndale. He was a Protestant reformer who translated the Bible into English and distributed it under Henry’s nose. His punishment was partial strangulation followed by burning at the stake.

  These two examples demonstrate clearly that Henry showed equal distain towards both the Catholic and Protestant faiths, which is why his new Church of England was something of a hybrid of the two. Interestingly the faiths of his six wives had been a mix, so perhaps that played a part in Henry’s decision to settle at a compromise. That way all of his people would grow to accept it rather than rise up in rebellion as some had done in certain parts of the country. Civil war was thus avoided at that stage in English history.

  An intriguing consequence of Henry’s actions against the Catholic Church was that Britain grew to be the leading light in scientific progress. In turn, it would become the dominant force in industrial modernisation. Elsewhere in civilized Europe scientists would face Catholic inquisitions and charges of blasphemy for daring to suggest that natural laws dictated and explained the way things work. While scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo would be persecuted on the continent, Newton and others would be celebrated in England.

  Ivan the Terrible

  You’d have to have a pretty bad reputation to earn the epithet ‘the Terrible’, so what was so terrible about Ivan? Well, the answer is that he went one better than Cesare Borgia, who famously killed his own brother. Ivan actually killed his own son – also called Ivan – in a fit of blinding rage during a row. This act of filicide, as it is technically known, removed the heir to the throne. As it happened the argument was catalysed by the fact that Ivan, the elder, had beaten his daughter-in-law, causing her to miscarry. So, he had in fact removed two possible heirs to the throne in one fell swoop of madness. When he died his kingdom was left to his younger son Feodor, who was wholly unfit to reign and childless to boot.

  Ivan the Terrible was properly known as Ivan Vasilyevich, or Tsar Ivan IV of Russia. In truth his popular name arose due to a whole list of atrocities during his reign, topped off by killing Ivan the younger. His reign formally began when he was aged just three years, but he didn’t actually assume the role of tsar until he was fourteen. His formative years had been spent being generally mistreated and neglected by the people charged with looking after him – families of aristocrats, or boyars, known as the Shuiskys and Belskys. Consequently, he grew into a young man with an intrinsic hatred of boyars and a malicious streak that was expressed by his cruelty to animals. The signs for his lack of mental stability in later years were already there as a teenager, just like Vlad the Impaler.

  Despite his burgeoning penchant for cruelty, Ivan spent the first nine years of his reign in positive and constructive mood. He did much to expand the realm of Russia, turning it into the multiethnic region it remains today with its mix of races and religions. This included the conquest of Siber
ian and Tatar (Central Asian, Mongolian and Turkic) regions, to the north-east and east of Russia.

  Things started to go wrong though when Ivan fell seriously ill in 1553. His wife Anastasia died at the same time and Ivan suspected the boyars of having murdered her with poison. This was in part because they has refused to swear an oath of allegiance to his infant son – Ivan the younger – in case Ivan died of his illness. When Ivan eventually recovered his health the boyars had hell to pay.

  He wrought vengeance on the boyars so that many were brutally murdered whether guilty or innocent. By 1565, Ivan was so paranoid about his position that he had formed a police state called the Oprichnina in which he was omnipotent, so that the boyars held no sway over his power. His personal guard were known as the Oprichniki. They dressed in black and had a ruthless reputation, something like that of Hitler’s SS.

  The latter years of Ivan’s reign saw his mental health progressively deteriorate. At the same time, he set his sights on expanding his kingdom westward so that he might establish sea trade links with Western Europe and elsewhere via the Baltic Sea. This resulted in prolonged periods of warfare with Scandinavian and Eastern European nations who resisted his attempts at invasion. Added to the terrors of war there came the plague, which swept through the region leaving economic collapse in its wake as already beleaguered populations were decimated.

  Ivan became more and more introspective within his policed realm. He seems to have suffered from severe manic depression, or bipolar condition as it is now called, for his periods of mania were punctuated by periods of calm. He was known to fluctuate from orgies of sexual depravity and violence to locking himself away in a monastery for the purpose of prayer and fasting. Lithium tablets were unavailable in his day, so his illness progressed until he became a liability to himself – by now he was both mentally and physically impaired by his horrible affliction.

  Without a stable and coherent leader the Oprichniki fell into disarray. Their leader Malyuta Skuratov let the power go to his head and took matters into his own control. Before long they were committing atrocious massacres wherever and whenever they came across resistance to their regime. The depopulation of areas resulted in famine and disease so that Russia became a fragmented nation. One of the worst atrocities occurred at a place called Novgorod. The city had already lost about 10,000 people to the plague. Now it lost tens of thousands more as the Oprichniki did their worst.

  By the 1580s, Ivan had metamorphosed into a raving maniac. This was when he lashed out at his daughter-in-law, for wearing immodest clothing it is said. One thing led to another and Ivan ended up guilty of two counts of manslaughter – his eldest son and unborn grandchild were dead, killed by him in a state of thoroughly diminished responsibility. The final years of his life were spent flying in and out of fearsome rages, earning him a reputation as a monster capable of rape and murder.

  Ivan the Terrible finally died in 1584 at the age of fifty-four. Legend has it that he died setting up a chessboard in the company of Bogdan Belsky, a member of one of the boyar families he had loathed from childhood. His remains were disinterred in the 1960s for scientific analysis, and it was discovered that he had high levels of mercury in his body. It is possible that the Belskys had gradually poisoned him with the mercury, but he may also have been taking a mercury compound as a treatment for syphilis. Either way, the mercury would certainly have played its part in his madness, as would the syphilis if he had had that, too.

  It seems likely that Ivan the Terrible was probably not quite so terrible after all, rather just suffering from madness brought about by a combination of mental illness, prescribed treatments and possible poisoning. The reason why poisoning was so popular was because it was so difficult to prove as a method of murder in those days. Unlike now, there were no chemical tests that could be done to detect the presence of poisons, so cause of death was often recorded as an illness that best suited the symptoms.

  A number of letters or epistles have been attributed to Ivan the Terrible, which were sent to various men under his rule. They reveal a sharp-minded, intelligent man who used his writing skills to make his point in no uncertain terms. He was particularly scathing of the boyars and monks whom he saw as hypocrites, for they claimed to live ascetic lives but did anything but. This riled him in particular because they were openly critical of his own way of life, which was characterised by all forms of indulgence. He saw himself as more honest, as he would indulge and then periodically repent for his sins so that he could start again with a clean slate.

  Much has been made of his epithet ‘the Terrible’ anyway, because ‘terrible’ is, apparently, a mistranslation of the Russian word ‘grozny’. The Russians gave him his nickname when he seized a place called Kazan during his early reign. A more accurate translation would be ‘dreadful’ or ‘fearsome’ because they were alluding to his prowess at ruthless conquest, as opposed to his temperament as a person. In short, Ivan has been dealt a bad press over the years. It would be true to say that he was pretty terrible but not that terrible.

  Gilles de Rais

  For reasons not adequately explained by psychologists, some boys grow into adulthood as paedophiles. That is to say, they identify children as their objects of sexual desire and cannot find sexually mature adults attractive. When Gilles de Rais was alive, in the fifteenth century, the concept of paedophilia as a sexual deviance was something unheard of, and there certainly weren’t any words to describe the condition. Nevertheless, a paedophile is most certainly what he was, for he tortured, raped and murdered unknown numbers of children in an attempt to sate his sexual appetite. To some criminologists, he is the first recorded paedophile serial killer.

  Gilles seems to have had a fairly uneventful childhood, save for the fact that he was born into a privileged French family and his parents died by the time he was ten or eleven years of age. He was subsequently raised by his godfather. When he was sixteen he moved to the court of Dauphin under Charles the Victorious, who would later become King Charles VII of France. By 1427, he was a commander in the Royal Army. He saw action against the English and Burgundians while under the leadership of Joan of Arc, whose successes led to the coronation of Charles VII in 1429.

  Following the wars, Gilles retired from military service and began a more sedentary life. He had inherited a vast fortune but enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, which soon meant that he had squandered most of it. Without any prospect of earning the kind of money he was used to spending, he allegedly began to look for guidance of a supernatural kind. This led him towards the occult under the tutelage of a Florentine sorcerer named Francesco Prelati. The sorcerer promised Gilles that he would regain his fortune if he began sacrificing children to appease the demon who was causing his misfortune.

  It appears that Gilles put two and two together to make five. Since he had a predilection for young children, he decided that he may as well begin sacrificing them and get some sexual gratification from it at the same time. Having been given licence to slaughter innocents by the sorcerer, he naturally embarked on his criminal career with the enthusiasm and gusto of a child with a new-found hobby.

  In 1440, some five years after his retirement, Gilles made an error of judgement that would lead to his arrest. He kidnapped a clergyman named Jean le Ferron following a dispute at a local church. This prompted the Bishop of Nantes to investigate the whereabouts of the clergyman. When Gilles’ home was searched it was littered with the evidence of his murderous crimes. The Bishop approached the Duke of Brittany, who was moved to allow the rescue of the clergyman. Gilles was simultaneously arrested on suspicion of infanticide along with his two henchmen Henriet and Poitou.

  Gilles’ fate was now in the hands of both the government and the Church. He was to be tried in two courts of law – one secular the other ecclesiastical. He was indicted for murder and sodomy in the former and heresy in the latter. When Gilles realised that the game was up he opted to admit his crimes to avoid being tortured into a confession, as was the way in those
days. Even so, the trials still took place and revealed just what a monster Gilles had become in his pursuit of carnal fulfilment. In fact, much of the transcript of the trials was subsequently destroyed because the judges deemed it too disgusting in detail to survive in documented form. One detail that seems particularly shocking is that Gilles’ henchmen were complicit in his crimes, for it was they who acquired the children for him and assisted him in the execution of his despicable wrongdoings.

  Surviving testimonies make difficult reading even now, as they describe how so many children were lured to their deaths under false pretences. Gilles had a preference for blonde-haired and blue-eyed boys, who looked something like he did as a child. However, he made do with any boys or girls made available to him. He tortured and raped them, before mutilating them and then ejaculating over their dying bodies. The corpses were then decapitated so that the heads could be displayed as trophies and compared with one another for beauty.

  It was a macabre tale by anyone’s standards, so the three men were found guilty of their crimes and hanged at Nantes on 26 October 1440. It is perhaps interesting to note that Gilles repented for his sins the day before and wept while expressing his remorse. The Catholic Church rescinded its punishment of excommunication so that Gilles could make his confession. He wasn’t afraid of death but he was afraid of the belief that he would be consigned to an eternity of hell and damnation in his afterlife.

  As Gilles had a preference for children who were effectively clones of himself as a child, it may be that he had either a narcissistic personality or one of self-loathing, perhaps both. There is a phenomenon known as psychological ontogeny, which is expressed by the subjects inability to see themselves as adult because they have an inner wish to return to childhood – the time when they were happiest. It may be that Gilles’s personality was fashioned in that kind of way, so that he had the physical sexual desires of an adult but the affections of a child, so that paedophilia was the outcome.