Mortal Monarchs: 1000 Years of Royal Deaths

by Suzie Edge

Being hit in the face with an arrow was not necessarily an immediate death sentence. At least two other monarchs can testify to that. Henry V of England (whilst he was Prince of Wales) and Philip II of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) both had battle arrows pulled from their skulls and survived.

The story of what happened to William the Conqueror did not end there. Of course not. As soon as the King was dead, pillaging broke out and the nobles around him went off to protect their own lands and belongings. They left behind servants who pilfered all the King’s belongings for themselves, even his finery and clothes, leaving his body unceremoniously dumped on the floor of his bedchamber. It is a story often repeated to demonstrate the consequences of being an unliked king.

William had woken early, having had rather a lot to drink the night before. He was startled from a dream where he had had a conversation with the devil, who told him that he would be seeing him tomorrow. He was also told by the monks that they had had visions of terrible things ahead. William was not impressed or bothered, so they went hunting that afternoon.

With these questions over his succession, Henry grew anxious and paranoid. He had, after all, already survived an assassination attempt by one of his own daughters. Juliane went for Henry with a crossbow because he had blinded two of her daughters, his own granddaughters. This sacrifice was in payment for the blinding of another child who was in his custody. Now, worried for his life, Henry would move beds often and he increased the royal guard around him. He slept with a sword and shield nearby and frequently had nightmares of being set upon.

The commentary of decay, so vivid in the descriptions of the deaths of both Henry I and his father William I, wonderfully gruesome stories as they are to tell, should not be taken at face value. They represent so much more than simply trying to put us off our breakfast. They tell us exactly how the kings in question were thought of and how the writers of these stories wanted them to be remembered. Christians believed that a deceased person’s body resists decay. Such stinking, revolting putrefaction suggests moral corruption and a fate that their bodies deserved in death. Make no mistake: this is how the chroniclers wanted us to remember these men.

Becket insisted that the Church was above the law. Henry did not accept this – for him the laws of the royal court were greater than the Church – and so the power struggle continued. ‘Will someone rid me of the troublesome priest,’ he muttered. Some quote Henry as saying ‘turbulent’, some say ‘meddlesome’ – either way, Becket was certainly troublesome. Four knights took the King at his word. They entered the cathedral at Canterbury and brought down the defenceless archbishop. They spilled his brains and blood onto the flagstones before the cathedral altar as he quietly spoke, ‘For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.’ Henry would later walk barefoot into Canterbury, paying penance at the altar of the cathedral where Becket had been murdered. At least Henry recognised that this was the greatest mistake of his reign and he regretted it for the rest of his life.

Henry’s mood was always up and down, this way and that. He suffered a mental illness thought perhaps to be bipolar disorder. For some it was merely the passion of the Plantagenets. He was the first of the Plantagenet kings and his possible bipolar condition became a familial issue that haunted him and his descendants. Henry was always on the move, never stopping. It was said that he liked to keep everyone guessing. He made arrangements to meet people early and then would turn up late. He said one thing and did another entirely.

Medieval queens were seen as passive diplomacy pieces in the game of thrones. There was no need to tell stories about their death that would function as a comment on their lives or morals. Queens were simply written out of stories, not mentioned unless their deaths left their husbands without an heir. There was no real need for chroniclers to make political statements about the deaths of queens, but more was made of how the kings mourned. It was all about them.

Even John’s parents, Henry and Eleanor, argued over who was their favourite son. John was even called Lackland, as there were no lands of the Angevin Empire given to the fourth-born son.

The atmosphere during John’s reign was so toxic that many believed the end of the world to be nigh, but fortunately the world did not end as predicted in 1212.

Henry managed to get the crown back from de Montfort when his son Edward took down the rebel, defeating him at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. De Montfort’s head, complete with his own testicles draped as decoration across his nose, was eventually sent to his grieving widow, Henry’s own sister Maud. It was sent the long way round, via different cities of course, for maximum exposure.

In Henry’s brain, the accumulation of multiple small strokes killed him. Each stroke insult might be unnoticed at first, but together there could be cognitive or physical decline that becomes more obvious. With each thrombotic attack on the vasculature of the brain, he became a bit weaker, a bit more confused, a bit less able to function. The nineteenth-century physician William Osler commented on such declines – he said, ‘These people take as long to die as they did to grow up.’

Edward I of England had perhaps the most memorable nickname of any king: he was called Longshanks, on account of his having remarkably long legs. Henry III was only 5 feet 6 inches tall, but his son Edward was 6 feet 2. Along with his fearsome reputation for his ruthless fiery temper and a clear need for anger management classes, his height made him an intimidating figure.

in 1286 Alexander III, King of Scots, accidentally rode his horse off a cliff in a storm, breaking his neck in the process,

Once again a mortal monarch died of the painful, messy disease of dysentery, the gut infection strong enough to disable, dehydrate and kill. Edward met the same end as King John. It is easy to imagine that John might have been murdered and Edward could have died in battle. Instead both were brought down and humbled by bloody diarrhoea. Edward knew this was a bad case, he knew he was dying. He asked that his bones be kept as relics, to be carried before any English army heading into battle against the Scots so that he might witness English supremacy over those north of the border.

If Edward made any smart moves, falling out with his queen was not one of them. Nor perhaps was telling people that he carried a knife in case he might see her. Or if he had no weapon that he might crush her between his teeth. There was no love lost between this royal couple.

‘My beauty great, is all quite gone,My flesh is wasted to the bone.’ From the tomb of the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral

Richard grew up to be a self-centred young man who had nothing but contempt for those around him. Whenever the King opened his mouth to speak, he offended someone.

royal manor of Isleworth on the Middlesex bank. Richard loved the palace but when his wife died there, he cursed the place and had it razed to the ground. Richard became even more erratic and at his wife’s funeral he even became violent, horrifying those around him by beating the Earl of Arundel with a stick for daring to arrive late and then trying to leave early.

If Richard was starved to death then he was unique among monarchs. Over the centuries, the modes of a monarch’s death matched those of the population as a whole, with trauma and infection giving way to lifestyle-related chronic health problems, but no other king died of not eating enough. Whilst there was always a threat of poison, arrows, daggers, dysentery and falling from horses, monarchs did not have to worry about not having anything to eat. Whether his starvation was voluntary or inflicted by his jailers, we can’t know. As with many of the stories told about dying kings, this is a fitting ending for Richard considering he continued his lavish lifestyle while plague and famine dogged his people.

There was evidence of eleven distinct injuries that had been deep enough to leave marks on bone. Nine of them were to the head and two of those could have been fatal. The most likely fatal blow was to the base of the back of the king’s head. He had a large, sharp force trauma to the inferior aspect of the skull. A blade had sliced through the bone, laying bare the brain tissue, slashing through the brainstem that controls the autonomic functions of breathing and heartbeat and through the nervous tissue that ran down his crooked spine. The blade left a mark on the inside of the skull on the opposite side, meaning the metal carved right through the brain. Richard would not have known much about it.

Richard’s face was not badly touched, unlike many of the remains discovered in a mass grave at the Wars of the Roses battlefield at Towton, which had been shockingly mutilated. It was important to keep his face intact, to confirm that he was indeed dead.

Richard’s remains were interred at Leicester Cathedral in 2015. The ceremony was deliberately designed to honour the reburial of a medieval monarch. The funeral cortège first took Richard’s coffin to Bosworth before making its way to the consecrated ground of the cathedral. Thousands came to pay their respects before he was interred in a coffin made by his living relative, cabinetmaker Michael Ibsen.

During Henry’s reign a strange disease plagued England. First seen after Bosworth, it spread in an odd manner and affected the wealthy over the poor, the middle-aged rather than young and old, and it preferred the countryside over the crowded cities. It was a fast killer; sufferers could be perfectly well at breakfast and dead by dinner. Nobody knows what sweating sickness was, what caused it, or how it disappeared so quickly. Nor does anyone know why it seemed to have been isolated to England. It was even known as Sudor Angelicus, English Sweat. The first outbreak started in the autumn of 1485, just after Bosworth. Henry of Richmond was due to become Henry VII but had to wait for his coronation as sweating sickness was claiming lives around him. All five outbreaks had ended entirely by 1551. The illness burned itself out, killing a lot of people on the way. The first symptom was a feeling of apprehension and impending doom. This was followed by shivers, rigors (the uncontrollable shaking of the muscles), giddiness, arthralgia (pain in the joints of the neck, shoulders and limbs). Then the sweating started. The sweating was so bad that clothes and bedding were drenched. It smelled terrible. Palpitations and thirst lasted for a few hours, followed by an exhaustion that just begged for sleep. Close your eyes though and you probably would not be opening them again. Dehydration and exhaustion carried sufferers away, fast.

Wasting was a classic sign of tuberculosis. Until the last century the disease was called consumption as it slowly consumed the bodies of sufferers, wasting them away.

Tuberculosis is caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis which has had such a hold on humans that it is estimated by some to have caused the deaths of one in seven people who ever lived.

Henry VII was not alone. TB is thought to infect 2 million people worldwide even today. Hippocrates recognised the predilection of the disease for young adults. John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, dubbed it ‘The Captain of all these men of death’, in his work The Life and Death of Mr Badman. It has also been called the Robber of Youth and the Graveyard Cough. In Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, a description refers to ‘grievous consumption’ which took the soul from the body and caused a person to ‘lie in sickness . . . a long time wasting away.’ Phthisis is derived from the Greek, meaning ‘to waste away’.

He bought walking sticks complete with whistles so that he might summon help if he fell. He ordered spectacles for his failing eyesight, and he became reliant on a wheelchair and a man-powered stairlift. His weight went up to 28 stones, nearly 400 pounds.

Not only was Henry knocked unconscious for a couple of hours, but he also sustained wounds to his legs. His wounds festered for over ten years. It was said that the stench from Henry’s seeping ulcerated leg wounds was so bad that it filled the nostrils of people three rooms away. Henry and his physicians tried all sorts of lotions and potions. Whilst many today point the finger solely at diabetes, the wounds may have been an osteomyelitis. Osteomyelitis is a debilitating infection within the bones that can produce tracking fistulae, abscesses that become tunnels leading to the skin and the outside. These channels were his body’s way of allowing the drainage of the pus from the wound. Henry had constantly discharging sinuses.

Henry was referred to as Old Copper Nose, but the nickname had nothing to do with his actual nose or syphilis, but rather the debasing of the coinage during his reign. Cheaper metals were added to the coins, allowing for minting at lower costs. Rubbing of the coins revealed a copper nose in the middle of Henry’s likeness and so the name caught on.

Whatever was occurring genetically, Henry’s final illness came in 1547. Thirteen years earlier an act of parliament made it not just illegal, but treason, to talk about the King’s death. Speculation was met with execution. We do not therefore have a lot of medical records about Henry’s last days.

In May 1536, only a few months after Catherine’s death, the most alarming event shook London and the world. A queen of England was about to be executed by her husband. Accusations of adultery, incest, conspiracy and sorcery against the King were fabricated by a monarch desperate for a male heir. This was an entirely new scenario; a queen had never been executed before.

Katherine had been brought up in a household lacking discipline and education. It appears she was used and abused by the men around her. Growing up she was led astray by the girls and boys around her as well as being preyed upon by her music teacher. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and Katherine’s uncle, brought his young niece to court to serve as lady-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves. He had plans for his future. Forty-nine-year-old Henry showered seventeen-year-old Katherine with gifts and land, and they were soon married.

When Jane was told that she would be queen, she wept. She did not want to be queen, ‘It is rightfully Mary’s crown’ she is supposed to have said. This is the sort of line Mary might have wanted her to say. Jane later told Mary that she wept because she was upset about the death of her cousin, the King.

If James VI of Scotland (and I of England) turned up to hospital today the staff would have to wheel his medical notes about on their own trolley, so vast was his list of ailments.

As a child, James had a drunken wet nurse who was accused of leaving him unable to walk before he was six years old with her bad milk.

Black clothing was handed out to thousands of mourners on the streets, despite the King’s hatred of crowds. James was known for shouting and cursing at anyone whose gaze lingered a little too long for his liking. He would not have appreciated his funeral procession.

Doctors tried the Stewart remedies of bleeding, cupping, scarification and shaving of the head, but none of them worked. Stewart corpses must have looked quite a sight.

Ferocious battles were fought between Charles’s supporters and those who wanted more say in ruling matters. It tore the country apart. The parliamentarians came out on top and a captured Charles was put on trial. He sat upon the crimson-lined chair in Westminster Hall, facing his accusers. The King, wishing to be heard, tapped his cane on the shoulder of John Cook, the chief prosecutor, but the cane’s silver head fell off and rolled across the floor. If anyone needed a sign of what was to come, surely that was it.

He was notably different to the serious religious figures of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. It almost feels like Charles II brought colour back to England. After all, Charles did say, ‘God will never damn a man for allowing himself a little pleasure.’

The young Charles was charming, gracious, self-disciplined and pleasant. He continued to be so, even into his final hours, sitting up on his deathbed and apologising for taking so very long to die.

As the public health messages would warn, two minutes with Venus, two years with mercury. ‘Then fall apart and die’ probably took up too much space for the poster.

As with Queen Elizabeth the century before, Mary contracted the tiny virus without any feeling or warning, but she soon started to feel tired and fevered. Fearing the worst, Mary got her affairs in order. She always feared the worst, but this time she was right. She destroyed all the papers that she did not want anyone else to see, burning diary pages and letters. At first it was thought she might have measles, but pustules came to tell a different story. Both of William’s parents had died from the smallpox and now it was taking his wife. The King was so upset he moved into her room and slept on a cot beside her, crying through the night. Having survived smallpox himself it was understood that he was unlikely to succumb again. Mary’s immune system was humbled by the replication of the virus within her cells.

She was laid to rest at Westminster Abbey and William wore a lock of her hair close to his heart for the rest of his life.

Queen Anne had seventeen pregnancies and yet when she died, she, as many monarchs before her, died without an heir to pass the crown on to.

As they drove on in the carriage to Osnabrück, the King slept a quite ‘unnatural sleep with deep snoring’. He was carried up a secret staircase to avoid publicity and put to bed. ‘I’m done,’ he said and took his last breath.

As she lay dying she told her husband that he should find another wife. No, he said, but I will take mistresses if that’s OK. In his seventies, hard of hearing and blind in one eye, the King’s libido remained as enormous as his wigs, and at his funeral his many mistresses were inconsolable.

When the Prince of Wales visited his ill father, the sight made him burst into tears, enticing the King to attack his son, throwing him against a wall. ‘I am not ill,’ he said, ‘but I am nervous.’ He went on to hold imaginary parades and talk to long-dead old friends.

He was restrained with ropes and a straitjacket, the idea being that inflicting such suffering would most certainly lead to a change in behaviour. If his patients did not do as Willis instructed, they were met with sanctions the brutality of which we find hard to swallow today.

With George, we’ve entered the modern period of chronic lifestyle-related ill health. For the monarchs to come there was going to be less of a threat from infection and more the threat of lifestyle and excess. In this way, the manner of their deaths reflected the future health of the nation. Beyond famine and war, the monarchs’ deaths were a sign of things to come for everyone.