A count's death, a city's fall, and a queen's coronation

On June 1st, 1191, Philip, the Count of Flanders, an occasional character in my Angevin series, died at the siege of Acre, very soon after his arrival. He gave the Angevins a fair amount of grief during his long career and I am sure he was no favorite of Eleanor’s either, for he accused her niece Isabel, her sister Petronilla’s eldest daughter, of adultery, putting the alleged lover to death in a rather gruesome fashion and using the accusation as an excuse to seize his wife’s inheritance, the rich county of Vermandois. If I seem skeptical about the charge, many of his contemporaries were, too. He did, however, do Richard a very good turn and Philippe Capet a very bad one in Sicily, backing Richard up when he declared that he could not wed Philippe’s sister Alys because she was reputed to have been his father Henry’s mistress. Here is a brief scene from Lionheart between Richard and Philip, page 186.
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While Richard had little interest in discussing his father’s carnal conquests, he did want to know why Philip had taken such a risk. “You’re going to pay a price for your honesty, as you well know. Not many men would have dared to defy Philippe like that, for he’s one to nurse a grudge to the end of his earthly days. Yet that does not seem to trouble you.”
“And you want to know why.” Philip leaned back against the altar and was silent for a moment. “Ah, hellfire, Cousin, I’d think the answer would be obvious. I am nigh on fifty and there are mornings when I feel every one of those fifty years, thanks to aging and the joint evil. I can no longer ride from dawn till dusk without aching bones, find the pleasures of the flesh are losing their allure, and I’ve had to face the fact that I’ll not be siring a son to follow after me. At this point in my life, I do not much care about disappointing Philippe Capet. What matters is not disappointing the Almighty. This is the second time I’ve taken the cross. The first time I had less worthy motives, for I had it in mind to meddle in Outremer’s politics, hoping to see the Leper King’s sisters wed to men of my choosing. As you know, that did not happen. Now I’ve been given another chance and I mean to make the most of it. Most likely I’ll die in the Holy Land, but to die fighting for Jerusalem is not such a bad fate, is it?”
Richard had never expected to feel such a sense of solidarity with Philip, for they’d been rivals for as long as he could remember. Now he found himself looking at his cousin through new eyes. “No, it is not such a bad fate at all,” he agreed, although he did not share the older man’s fatalism. He was confident that he would safely return from Outremer, for surely it was not God’s Will that he die in a failed quest.
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And of course the Count of Flanders did die in the Holy Land, although not as he probably anticipated and surely wanted—storming the barricades, sword in hand. He died, instead, of one of the many illnesses that swept the siege camp, disease actually killing more crusaders than the Saracens did.

And on June 1st, 1204, both Henry and Richard were surely spinning in their graves like tops, doubtlessly making the nuns of Fontevrault wonder if their abbey church had been struck by an earthquake, for on this date, the capital city of Normandy, Rouen, fell to the French king.

Lastly, on June 1st, 1533, Anne Boleyn was crowned as Queen of England. It was probably a very triumphant day for her, but we know how that turned out.