William Rufus’s unpopularity carried with it profound political implications. The general dissatisfaction with William’s regime made it much easier for his elder brother Robert to gain support. Robert Curthose had inherited the dukedom of Normandy from their father. Understandably, and almost inevitably, there was mounting rivalry between the two brothers over the throne of England, which must have appeared the greater prize. Many of the barons were ready to support Robert as a replacement for William as king. There was a rising of these barons in 1088, only a year after William came to the throne. It was organized by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who wanted to replace William with his brother Robert. But William proved to be ruthless, strong and purposeful enough to crush this rebellion. There was another rebellion by the barons seven years later, in 1095.
Like his father, William Rufus had enormous military strength. He was able to fend off major open rebellions and maintain control over his kingdom. Given the extraordinary circumstances – an alien king, the younger son of a usurper, an unpopular ruler – it was remarkable that he hung onto power for a full thirteen years before meeting his death, whether it was accidental or not. He was even able to defeat the king of Scotland, Malcolm III, and replace him with a client-king, the Saxon prince Edgar Atheling. He also managed to gain control over his father’s entire legacy when his brother Robert wanted to join the crusade. Robert mortgaged the duchy of Normandy to him, leaving him in charge there during his absence.
While Robert was out of the way on the First Crusade in 1095, William used the respite from sibling rivalry to secure his borders with Scotland and Wales. He ordered the building of Carlisle Castle and a chain of forts along the Welsh border to stem the raids on the marcher barons by Welsh brigands. William’s barons continued to complain about his high level of taxation. In particular, they complained to William’s younger brother, Henry, who had been waiting ever since their father’s death to seize his brother’s throne if ever an opportunity arose. William was under threat from not one but two brothers.
William never placed any trust in his barons, which may explain why he never won their loyalty, and he never trusted his brother Henry. Perhaps he had good reason. It was after all Henry who suggested the hunting trip in the New Forest. But the nagging question remains: why did William agree to ride off into the New Forest with a brother he profoundly distrusted and a band of noblemen whose loyalty he knew he could not depend upon? He must have known that any one of them could have killed him at any time. Or did William trust in the magic aura of kingship? Did he imagine the fact that he was the king was sufficient protection, that they would stop short of anything as terrible as regicide? That seems unlikely, as he had watched his own father invade England in 1066 and slaughter the incumbent Saxon king on a hill near Hastings.
The night before his death, William’s sleep was disturbed by a nightmare. He dreamt that the men he was about to ride out with would kill him. At an unconscious level, then, William knew very well that he was taking a terrible risk. Yet still he went. The reasons why he acted as he did that day are still not known. The whole question of who shot the arrow that killed him – and why – form the core of the mystery. But whichever theory we support, the fundamental question remains that William took a huge and essentially avoidable risk in agreeing to go hunting with these men.
A contemporary account by Orderic Vitalis described the preparations for the hunt.
An armourer came in and presented him [the king] with six arrows. The king immediately took them with great satisfaction, praising the work and, unconscious of what was to happen, kept four of them himself and held out the other two to Walter Tirel, saying, ‘It is only right that the sharpest be given to the man who knows how to shoot the deadliest shots.’
This may be accurate reporting, but the detail has too much dramatic irony about it to be credible, and perhaps a biblical reminiscence of Jesus’s remarks to Judas, another friend and betrayer. Orderic was helping to assemble a mythic version of the murder.
During the fatal hunt, which took place on 2 August 1100, an arrow was shot that found its way to the king’s chest. It is not known who shot the arrow, but it was said at the time that the culprit was a powerful Norman baron, Sir Walter Tirel, the Lord of Poix. We know from the account of Peter of Blois that Walter Tirel had recently arrived in England from Normandy and was welcomed to join the king’s table. After the banquet was over, the king invited his new guest to join the hunt. The hunting party spread out through the woods near Brockenhurst as they chased some running deer. The king and Walter Tirel became separated from the others. That, according to Peter’s account, was the last time the king was seen alive.
Walter fired a wild shot at a stag, a shot which missed its target and hit the king in the chest instead. It was not a fatal shot, but William fell from his horse onto the shaft, which drove deep inside him, piercing the lung. Walter tried to offer aid, but there was no help he could give the dying man. Walter feared he would be charged with murder, panicked, mounted his horse and fled.
It was said that the death of the king, William II, Rufus, was an accident, but there are several aspects of the story that arouse suspicion. One was the behaviour of the hunting party immediately afterwards. The entire body of men rode off to leave the king to die alone, quickly drowning in his own blood. Incredibly, the king of England’s body was left unattended in the woods, abandoned at the spot marked today by the Rufus Stone.
Another reason for doubting that the shot that killed William was fired accidentally was Walter Tirel’s reputation as a master bowman. Tirel was someone who was extremely unlikely to shoot wild, and some chroniclers said so at the time. He was unlikely to make the very basic mistake of shooting his (one) hunting companion. These two circumstances together make the incident look very much like murder and a conspiracy to murder at that.
The king’s corpse was discovered by a local countryman, a charcoal-burner named Purkis, who took it to Winchester on his cart. The following day he was buried in a modest grave and with few signs of grief. These circumstances too point to an organized conspiracy. The contemporary chroniclers report that all his servants were busy attending to their own interests, as would be likely with a major change of regime, and that few if any of them cared about the funeral.
The king died unmarried and therefore without any legal offspring. His younger brother Henry succeeded to the English throne as he had been hoping and, we must suspect, planning. The speed with which Henry secured the treasury at Winchester and had himself crowned king, just three short days after his brother’s death, suggests a fair amount of pre-planning. That in turn suggests that Henry knew in advance that William was going to die, and that means that the accident must have been arranged. Henry stood to gain most by William’s death, so if there was a conspiracy to kill William, it is most likely that Henry engineered it. In the three-cornered struggle for the English throne, this interval when Robert was out of the way was the very best moment Henry could have chosen to have his brother assassinated. With William killed while Robert was away in Palestine, Henry was in the very strongest possible position to gain the English throne, and he made sure of it by having himself crowned immediately, before Robert could return. All of this points directly to a political coup engineered by Henry.
The Church chroniclers studiously avoided blaming Henry for the assassination. They were very pleased and relieved to have Henry on the throne, describing him as ‘a young man of extreme beauty, much more astute than his two brothers and better fitted for reigning.’ He was a safer king than William as far as the Church was concerned; he released the Church’s estates, imprisoned Ranulph, the Bishop of Durham, and recalled Archbishop Anselm from exile. Possibly Henry did all these things precisely to buy the Church’s approval, not out of piety. The Church could not condone a political assassination, so it turned a blind eye to it, preferring the more convenient interpretation of the events as an accident.
Shortly afterwards, Robert heard the news
and came racing back from the crusade. He mounted an invasion to try to unseat Henry and take the English crown for himself. Peter of Blois was keen to blame this too on Ranulph who, he said, escaped from prison, ‘repaired to Normandy, and in every way encouraged the Duke thereof, Robert, the King’s brother, to invade England.’
So, the dead king had two brothers, both of whom had excellent motives for killing him or having him killed, as both wanted to be king in his place. In theory Robert could have been involved in a joint conspiracy with his brother Henry. On the face of it, it would appear that only one of the brothers could have gained from William’s death – only one could gain the throne of England. On the other hand, in 1096 Robert had pawned the duchy of Normandy to William for 10,000 marks in order to finance his participation in the First Crusade. It is not clear how Robert would have been able to buy back his duchy on his return. Certainly it was extremely convenient as far as Robert was concerned for William to die in 1100; on his brother’s very timely death, Robert regained possession of his duchy without having to pay for it. So, while Henry gained the English crown, Robert regained his duchy at no cost. Both brothers after all had a great deal to gain from William’s sudden death.
On the other hand, no definite evidence of Robert’s implication in the conspiracy has emerged, and the fact that the murder happened while Robert was as far from England as it was possible to be, in the Holy Land, implies that the plot was instigated by Henry and his supporters. It is possible that there was some discussion between them before Robert left, and that Robert intimated that he would like to see William removed; Robert may have consented to a violent resolution to the problem and left Henry to organize it.
But was Walter Tirel really the hitman? The chroniclers were unequivocal about Walter Tirel. He was the man who officially shot the fatal arrow, but there is no record of any form of retribution against him. He was not tried; he was not executed; there was no retribution; there were no sanctions. These facts also point to a palace conspiracy. Indeed it is possible that all of those who went out hunting with the king that day wanted him dead, and Tirel was simply the one who drew the shortest straw.
More intriguing still is the possibility that Tirel did not kill William at all. One contemporary document has survived to indicate that he may not have been guilty. The document was written by one of the greatest men of the time, a man of impeccable honesty and with no political interest in vindicating or incriminating Walter Tirel. He was the great Norman Abbot Suger. Suger was a friend of Tirel’s and he gave Tirel shelter during his self-imposed exile in France after William’s death. The two men evidently liked and trusted one another. While he was Tirel’s host, Abbot Suger had many opportunities to talk to Walter and they evidently had many conversations about the events of that fateful day. What Suger wrote down, summarizing these conversations, is very revealing.
It was laid to the charge of a certain noble, Walter Tirel, that he had shot the king with an arrow; but I have often heard him, when he had nothing to fear nor to hope, solemnly swear that on the day in question he was not in the part of the forest where the king was hunting, nor ever saw him in the forest at all.
This means that Walter was afterwards claiming that he was not alone with the king at all. He was apparently with the main party, elsewhere. If Walter was not alone with the king, there is the clear implication that someone else was, and that their identity had to be concealed. Given all the circumstances, the most likely suspect must be the king’s brother, Henry. In the aftermath of the assassination, Walter may have been persuaded that someone had to take the blame for the shooting, and that Henry himself, now to be king, could not be tainted with the crime. For the good of the kingdom and the safety of his tenure of the English throne, Henry must seem to be blameless. The murder of William Rufus was a particularly shocking crime. It was a triple crime, not just murder but regicide and fratricide as well. The reign of the new king, Henry I, would have been blighted from the beginning if he had been suspected of his brother’s murder. Usurpers often, though not always, went the way of their predecessors. Henry VII was a notable exception.
Walter Tirel was perhaps persuaded that, in the best interests of the kingdom, he should accept the blame for the king’s death. An official version of events reduced his culpability by making the shooting entirely unintentional, and this made it possible for him to retreat into self-imposed exile without punishment. Tirel was never given any advancement, but Henry was adamant that he should not be punished in any way for what had happened. That in itself implies that Henry knew that Tirel was innocent, and is consistent with Henry himself being the real assassin.
Henry and Walter Tirel are not the only suspects. There were many barons who had plotted against William during the previous decade and some were in the hunting party; one of them could have been the assassin. One family in particular was suspected at the time, and for that reason should be given serious consideration. The Conqueror put his trust in Richard de Clare, appointing him to his ruling council and giving him the title Chief Justiciar. In this exalted position, Richard acted as the king’s regent while William was across the Channel in Normandy. Immediately after William the Conqueror’s death, Richard de Clare took part in a barons’ rebellion that was intended to oust William Rufus and put Robert on the English throne. The rebellion failed partly because Rufus was a powerful warrior, partly because a significant number of Norman barons in England still supported him at that time.
William Rufus attacked the rebels’ strongholds at Rochester, Pevensey and Tonbridge. Tonbridge Castle was owned by Richard de Clare. After a two-day siege at Tonbridge, de Clare was obliged to surrender to the king and he was punished by having both his castle and the town of Tonbridge beside it burnt down. De Clare was in addition forced to retire to a monastery, where he died three years later. Richard de Clare’s daughter Adelize, interestingly, was married to Walter Tirel.
Richard de Clare was succeeded by his son Gilbert, who was allowed to inherit the family estates, including the burnt-out town of Tonbridge and its wrecked castle. Gilbert was more circumspect than his father, though not necessarily out of any liking for the king. He fought beside the king in the campaign against the Scots and possibly against the Welsh, too. Gilbert de Clare and his younger brother Roger were both members of the fateful hunting party in the New Forest. Either one of them could have been persuaded to assassinate the king for Henry. Whether either of them fired the arrow, it is probable that they were privy to the conspiracy. There was a flurry of activity following William’s death. Henry rushed to Winchester to gain control of the royal treasury; he had himself crowned king as quickly as possible. In this race to present both England and his elder brother with a fait accompli, Henry was given conspicuous support by the de Clare brothers. Access to the treasury was vital for a number of reasons, not least to enable Henry to buy off his thwarted brother with an annual pension of £2,000, the price of his compliance with the coup.
The de Clares were such conspicuous supporters of the new king, and their father Richard de Clare had been so flagrantly humiliated by William, that many people suspected at the time that the de Clares had plotted the murder with Henry. They were rewarded on a scale suggesting that this was the case.
It seems unlikely that the official Henrician version of what happened is true. If Tirel and the king were really the only two men in that part of the wood, who were the witnesses who supplied the colourful details about the king’s death? Obviously the king himself did not live long enough to give any account of what happened, and we know from Abbot Suger’s comments that Tirel himself repeatedly denied that he was anywhere near the scene, so he could not possibly have supplied the circumstantial detail either.
This is how William of Malmesbury described the event in the 1120s, just twenty years afterwards.
The sun was now declining, when the king, drawing his bow and letting fly an arrow, slightly wounded a stag which passed in front of him. The stag was still runni
ng. The king followed it for a long time with his eyes, holding up his hand to keep off the power of the sun’s rays. At this instant Walter decided to kill another stag. Oh gracious God! The arrow pierced the king’s breast. On receiving the wound the king uttered not a word, but breaking off the shaft of the arrow where it projected from his body. This speeded his death. Walter ran up, but as he found him senseless, he leapt upon his horse and escaped with the utmost speed. Indeed there were none to pursue him. Some helped his flight; others felt sorry for him.
Some details could have been reconstructed after the body was discovered, such as the breaking of the arrow shaft, but most of William of Malmesbury’s account must have been fabricated – unless there were really several people present at the scene.
Even the location has been disputed. The three-sided Rufus Stone, actually a mid-nineteenth century replacement made of cast iron, is generally thought to be close to the spot in the forest where the king fell. It bears the following wordy inscription dating from 1865:
Great Unsolved Crimes Page 3
