A sad ghost

Thankfully not as much happened on August 25th; yesterday’s Note left me exhausted! On August 25, 1192, Hugh, the Duke of Burgundy, died at Acre after a brief illness; naturally the Bishop of Beauvais accused Richard of poisoning the duke. Richard was then very ill himself with malaria, lying close to death at Jaffa; one chronicler reported that he finally started to recover after learning of Hugh’s death. Here is my scene from Lionheart:
* * *
“I had a message tonight from Isabella. She says that Hugh of Burgundy died at Acre five years ago.”
Richard started at him. “I think,” he said, “that I’ve just gotten my sign.” Henri did not know what that meant, but it did not matter; his uncle was smiling, the first real smile he’d seen on Richard’s face since he’d been stricken with the quartan fever.
* * *
I hope Richard is too busy in the afterlife to browse the Internet, for I shudder to think of his reaction if he read Wikipedia’s description of Hugh as “a most trusted ally of Richard Lionheart.”
On August 25, 1227, Genghis Khan died; anyone ever see the film in which he was played by John Wayne? Not Hollywood’s finest hour, or Wayne’s, either.
On August 25, 1227, Louis IX died at Tunis, possibly of typhoid, on his second crusade. He was the only French king to be canonized and was the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s granddaughter, Blanche of Castile. Not a king I like very much, but an important one.
And on this date in 1482, Marguerite d’Anjou died at age 52. Edward IV had allowed her to return to France in 1475, but her father, Rene of Anjou, showed no interest in her plight and she had to scrape by with a pension from Louis XI, who first forced her to renounce any claims to Anjou. She was living at Chateau Dampierre near Saumur when she died. She was buried in Angers Cathedral, but her tomb was one of so many destroyed during the French Revolution. Her death seems to have attracted little notice on either side of the Channel. Louis demanded that her dogs be sent to him; Louis liked dogs. I think of her as a sad ghost in the years after Tewkesbury, mourning her son and what might have been.
This last death is not medieval, but on August 25, 1688, the famous—or infamous—pirate Henry Morgan died in Jamaica. I had to mention Henry as he was Welsh; he was also one of the very few pirates who managed to get himself knighted.