The Assassin King

Royston insisted on them staying for a cold lunch, during which Anna persuaded him to email Elias about her uncle’s visit, while Oliver won permission to return with a crew to film him and his statue both. Rarely had Anna met anyone quite so eager to please. Yet, for some reason, it left her feeling sad. ‘What a lovely man,’ said Oliver, as they set back off for Lincoln. ‘Though what was all that business about arsenic and twelfth-century kings?’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Anna, raiding Oliver’s glove compartment for a fresh tube of extra strong mints, to clear the lingering taste of Royston’s hummus from her mouth. ‘Dysentery was rife back then. They fertilised their fields with raw human waste, for goodness sake. And kings were just as vulnerable as anyone else, what with all the travelling and feasting they did.’

‘Nice way of avoiding my question,’ said Oliver, pulling up at the junction with the A17. ‘How many are we talking?’

‘Twelfth-century English kings? Who died from what might plausibly have been arsenic poisoning?’ She ran briskly through them in her mind, gave a little grimace. ‘All of them.’

‘It’s not as bad as it sounds. There were only six.’

‘Since when does six out of six constitute an “only”?’ He beckoned for a mint for himself, popped it in his mouth. ‘Did people want them dead?’

‘They were kings. Of course people wanted them dead.’

‘Come on. You know what I mean.’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘First up is Henry I. He took over from William Rufus, who himself died in dodgy circumstances. He managed to stay on the throne for the first thirty-five years of the century, despite multiple attempts to kill him, including by one of his own daughters. But it was dysentery that got him in the end, supposedly from eating too many eels. A surfeit of lampreys, in the famous phrase.’

‘Arsenic poisoning number one.’

‘Dysentery death number one,’ corrected Anna. ‘Anyway, there was a major dispute over the succession, between Henry’s nephew Stephen and his daughter Matilda – not the one who’d tried to kill him. They spent fifteen years fighting over it before finally agreeing a truce under which Stephen got to rule for life, after which he’d be succeeded by Matilda’s eldest son.’

‘Don’t tell me. Stephen promptly contracted dysentery and died.’

‘It took about a year, but yes, pretty much. That put Matilda’s eldest son on the throne. Henry II, first of the Plantagenets. He was so desperate to avoid another war of succession that he made his eldest son co-regent when he was still only a teenager. Confusingly, the son was named Henry too, so people took to calling them Old King Henry and Young King Henry. The Old King kept all the power, though, and the Young King grew so frustrated by this that he rebelled. His dad defeated him easily enough, and forgave him too. But he kept him even further from power than before, so that he spent the next few years travelling around the continent with his best mate William Marshal, beating up the flower of European nobility at tournaments.’

‘William Marshal? He’s your thesis guy, yes?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’ It had been the dawn of the chivalric age, and tournaments had been the great new entertainment. They might have been designed with Marshal in mind, not just a skilled horseman and warrior, but a virtual giant too, at least for the era, well over six foot tall, and broad and powerful to match. His exploits and his charisma had made him a celebrity, feted in courts across Europe. ‘But the Young King eventually got bored of the life, and rebelled a second time.’

‘I’m going to take a wild guess here. He got the squits and died.’

‘So the Old King murdered his own son?’

‘This is Royston’s theory, not mine,’ sighed Anna. ‘But it’s fair to say that he had a genuine problem. His son was king too, remember, which made him sacred. Trying and executing him for treason would have been profoundly shocking, while imprisoning him wouldn’t really have solved his problem, for his son had too many powerful friends who’d have loved to see him on the throne. So his death was certainly convenient. Not that the Old King could have done it himself. He was on the other side of France at the time. But he was the one who got rid of Thomas Beckett by wondering aloud why no one would rid him of his turbulent priest, so it’s hardly unthinkable that he asked the same about his son, and some ambitious knight took him up on it.’

Anna slid him a look. ‘It was over eight hundred years ago. How the hell would I know?’

‘Fair enough. So that’s Henry, Stephen and the Young King. You owe me three more.’

‘Okay. The Young King’s death made Richard Lionheart heir presumptive. Unhappily for his dad, he was every bit as impatient as his brother had been, only a far better soldier. He allied with the King of France, went to war and won. Which gave him the same headache his dad had had. He could hardly imprison or execute him, so it was a stroke of luck for him when he died almost immediately from stomach troubles.’

‘Making Richard king. But wasn’t he killed by a crossbow?’

‘He was wounded by a crossbow. But not that seriously. He died because of complications that there shouldn’t really have been.’ Medieval Europeans had been far better about hygiene than most people thought. They’d kept their homes and towns proudly clean. They’d washed regularly, and with soap. They’d known the importance of dressing wounds properly too. William Marshal himself was testament to this, when taken captive as a young knight after being badly wounded in the leg. According to his own account, he’d likely have died had a kindly woman not taken pity on him, smuggling fresh linen into his cell in a hollowed out loaf of bread. ‘So there’s always been a suspicion that he was poisoned by the bolt itself or by one of his doctors. The French actually tested his remains for arsenic. It was inconclusive, but still.’

‘The fact that they tested them at all…’

‘Exactly. And then of course Richard was succeeded by John, who you already know about. Making six.’

‘You can really test for arsenic after all this time?’ frowned Oliver. ‘What about the others? Could they be tested too?’

‘John, for sure,’ said Anna. ‘He’s still buried in Worcester Cathedral.’ They’d opened his tomb back in the eighteenth century, expecting to find it empty, only to be startled by the skeleton inside, dressed in modest clothes and with so few kingly goods that it had been taken as further confirmation of his lost baggage train. ‘They keep his thumb on display in their archives. Though good luck persuading the bishop.’

‘You’d be surprised what people will agree to when you stick a camera in their face,’ said Oliver. ‘And the others?’

‘Henry II is in Fontevraud, I think. And the Young King is definitely in Rouen. I guess you could always ask. But Stephen’s grave was dug up a while back, and there was nothing there. And Reading Abbey is just a ruin now, so you’ll never be able to prove Henry I either.’