Thomas Becket was not born to any of this. His father was a London merchant, a man named Gilbert, comfortable enough but not noble, and Becket climbed the way clever men climbed in the twelfth century—through the church and through sheer usefulness, through being the most capable man in any room. He caught the eye of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was sent to study, was given responsibilities, proved himself, and rose to become Chancellor of England under Henry II, the second most powerful office in the kingdom. In that role, he became something more than a minister to Henry.
The two men were close in a way that went well past politics. They hunted together, drank together, argued and joked and rode and feasted together. Becket, as chancellor, lived in a style so lavish it outshone the king’s own household, throwing banquets, leading soldiers in the field during Henry’s wars, dressing in silks and furs. There is a famous scene where the two of them are riding through London in winter, and Henry, seeing a beggar shivering in thin rags, wrestles the expensive fur-lined cloak off Becket’s own back, laughing, and hands it to the astonished beggar.
That was the texture of the friendship—rough, intimate, and full of play. So when the Archbishopric of Canterbury, the most senior position in the entire English church, came open in 1162, Henry handed it to his friend over Becket’s own reluctance, fully expecting that he had just installed a loyal ally at the head of the church, a man who would smooth the path for royal power in the long grinding quarrel between the royal courts and the church courts over who had the right to judge a clergyman accused of a crime. He thought he was placing his own man in the chair. He could not have been more wrong.
That expectation died fast. Becket took the archbishop’s office and seemed to become a different man, or perhaps the man he had always meant to be. Once he had the excuse, he resigned the chancellorship without asking, which already unsettled Henry, who had wanted his man holding both offices at once. Becket gave the second one back and kept only the one that would let him oppose the king.
He started defending the church’s privileges with the same stubborn energy he had once spent serving the crown. To Henry, the change felt like a personal betrayal rather than a policy disagreement, because the two things were never really separate between them. The argument hardened around a document called the Constitutions of Clarendon, drawn up in 1164, which tried to pin down royal authority over the clergy in writing. The piece that mattered most concerned what people called criminous clerks—clergymen accused of serious crimes, even murder, who could claim trial in church courts where the worst punishment was usually defrocking rather than death.
Henry wanted those men handed over to royal justice, to the rope and the block like anyone else. Becket, after first seeming to bend and accept the constitutions, pulled back and refused them. The refusal turned a quarrel into a war between two stubborn men who had once loved each other. There was a council at Northampton where Becket was hit with crushing financial demands clearly designed to break him, and rather than submit, he fled, crossing in disguise to France and throwing himself on the protection of the French king and the pope.
The exile lasted six years—six years of letters and threats and failed reconciliations conducted across the channel. When he finally came back to England in December of 1170, it was not a peace. It was a man returning to a country that no longer had room for him, and he seems to have known it. He crossed the channel anyway, and the manner of his return reads in hindsight like a man walking deliberately toward something he had already accepted.
He sent word ahead, settled his affairs, and behaved in several accounts like someone who did not expect to live very long, even speaking openly of his coming death. Almost as soon as his feet touched English soil, before any of the old wounds could begin to close, he confirmed the excommunication of the bishops who had taken part in his absence in crowning Henry’s eldest son as junior king. That coronation had been Canterbury’s ancient and jealously guarded right to perform, and it had been carried out instead by the Archbishop of York and others, deliberately, as a calculated insult to Becket while he was stuck powerless in France. Excommunication was not a small or symbolic thing.
It cut a man off from the sacraments, from the company of other Christians, from any hope of salvation. Becket had just done it against some of the most powerful churchmen in the kingdom, very publicly, within days of landing. The excommunicated bishops did not wait around to plead with him. They sailed straight for Normandy to lay their complaint before the king, and they reached Henry’s Christmas court carrying exactly the sort of grievance most likely to detonate the king’s temper.
The news reached Henry during the Christmas court, carried by the excommunicated bishops, who had every reason to make it sound as black as possible. And Henry came apart. You have probably heard the version where he cries out, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest? ” That line is one of the most famous sentences in English history, and Henry almost certainly never said it.
The wording we all know is a polish job smoothed into that neat shape centuries later. The men who were actually present recorded something raw and angrier and far less quotable. Edward Grim, the clerk who was about to watch the murder happen with his own eyes, set down a version in which Henry rages that he has nourished and promoted in his own household a pack of cowards and traitors, faithless men who would stand by and let their lord be treated with such contempt by a single lowborn clerk. There was no clean order in it.
No name was spoken, no instruction to kill. It was the venting of a furious, betrayed, exhausted king in front of the armed men who served him, the way powerful men have always vented when they want a thing done but cannot afford to be heard asking for it. Four of the men in that room decided, or chose to hear, a command inside the rage. The knights who acted on it would later be able to say truthfully that the king had given no order, and a man would still be dead on a cathedral floor.
Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton were not nobodies, not hired thugs, but men of standing, some of them former vassals of Becket himself from his days as chancellor, which adds a layer of the personal to what they did. They crossed the channel separately, quietly, by different routes, and reconverged at Saltwood Castle in Kent, which belonged to Randolph de Broc, a man with his own long list of grievances against Becket. They arrived in Canterbury in the early afternoon of the 29th of December. Here is a detail that tells you something about the strange hesitation running underneath the whole day: they did not storm in with weapons drawn.
They left their mail coats and their swords outside, hidden under a mulberry tree in the courtyard, and walked into the archbishop’s hall as men come to talk. Becket was finishing his dinner. They sat down with him among his clerks and would not return his greeting. Then FitzUrse began to deliver the king’s demands—that Becket go to Winchester to answer for himself, that he absolve the excommunicated bishops.
Becket refused, and as the exchange went on, his refusals grew sharper, and the knights’ threats grew louder until the room was full of shouting. The knights sprang up, told the monks present to guard the archbishop and keep him from fleeing, and stormed back out to arm themselves. It was getting toward dusk, and the monks around Becket were frantic, trying to move him into the cathedral for the Vespers service, partly out of routine and partly in the desperate hope that the sanctity of the great church might shield him where words could not. He resisted at first, unwilling to look as though he were fleeing.
They half pushed, half carried him through the cloister and in through a side door as the knights came back armed in mail, swords drawn, with an axe among them taken up to break down doors if they had to. The monks tried to bar the heavy door of the cathedral behind them. Becket would not allow it. He turned and ordered the door opened.
The line he is supposed to have said, recorded by more than one of the witnesses, is that it is not right to make a fortress out of a house of prayer, that the church should not be barred like a castle. The door came open. The knights came through into the dim, half-lit transept in the failing winter light, calling out for the traitor. FitzUrse shouted into the gloom, “Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to the king and the kingdom?
” And out of the shadows, Becket answered them, came down a few steps from the stair toward the altar rather than hiding, and said, “Here I am, no traitor to the king, but a priest of God. ” He could have hidden. The cathedral was a warren of crypts and side chapels and dark corners, and the monks were begging him to hide. He walked toward the voices instead.
What happens next we know with a level of detail almost unheard of for the twelfth century, because five separate eyewitnesses wrote accounts, and several of them were standing within arm’s reach of the killing. Edward Grim, the visiting clerk, was the closest. William FitzStephen, who had served Becket for years, was there in the cathedral. John of Salisbury, the great scholar, was nearby.
Between them they preserved the scene almost minute by minute, and the accounts agree on the essentials in a way that makes the whole thing unusually solid for the period. The knights did not kill him immediately. They first tried to seize him, to drag him out of the cathedral, because even now there seems to have been some idea of arresting him rather than butchering him on consecrated ground, or perhaps of killing him outside so the murder would not pollute the church. They laid hands on him, tried to hoist him onto FitzUrse’s back to carry him out.
Becket, who was a big, strong man, fought them. He grabbed FitzUrse, shoved him back, called him a pander, a pimp, told him he owed him fealty, and in the struggle nearly threw one of the armored knights to the floor. He would not be moved. He clung to a pillar, set his feet, and refused to be carried out of his own cathedral, bowing his head and commending himself to God and Saint Denis and the saints of the church.
It was that refusal, that immovable resistance, that seems to have tipped the knights from manhandling into killing. Edward Grim was the only one who did not flee or shrink back when the swords finally came up. He had only arrived at Canterbury a few days earlier. When the first blade swung, he threw his own body and his own arm into the path of the sword to shield Becket.
The sword sheared into Grim’s arm between the elbow and the shoulder, very nearly severing it, an injury that would trouble him for the rest of his life. And the blade continued on with enough remaining force to slice into the crown of Becket’s head, drawing the first blood, cutting the tonsure, the exact place that had been anointed with holy chrism at his consecration as archbishop. Becket did not fall. He felt the blood run down over his face and eyes, and he wiped it away with his forearm.
When he saw the red on his sleeve, he is recorded as saying that he commended himself and the cause of the church to God, to the blessed Mary, and to the patron saints of the cathedral. A second blow struck him on the head in the same place, and still he kept his feet, swaying. Then he sank slowly, deliberately, to his knees and then onto his elbows, folding himself down toward the pavement, composing his body as if for prayer. As he went down, he was heard to murmur that for the name of Jesus and for the protection of the church, he was willing to embrace death.
He was down now, kneeling and bent forward over the cold stone, no longer resisting, his hands folded, his head bowed and exposed. And the third blow is the one Edward Grim could not stop describing for the rest of his life. One of the knights, generally identified as Richard le Breton, struck Becket’s lowered head so violently that the sword sheared clean through and continued down and shattered against the stone floor beneath him, the blade snapping in two on the pavement, the force of it that great. The whole upper portion of Becket’s skull, the crown that had been anointed when he was made archbishop, was severed and came away.
Grim, a clerk reaching for language to hold something that should never have to be held, wrote the line that has carried down through eight and a half centuries. He wrote that the blood, white with the brain and the brain no less red with the blood, stained and reddened the floor of the cathedral, that it painted the pavement with the colors of the lily and the rose, the white of the lily and the red of the rose. A man who had just watched his archbishop’s brains spread across the stones, standing there with his own arm half cut through and bleeding, found in the middle of his horror a phrase about flowers. People remember that sentence not because it is beautiful, though it is, but because it is the sound of a human mind trying to survive what the eyes have just shown it, reaching instinctively for something ordered and lovely to lay over something that has no order and no loveliness in it at all.
That was not quite the end of the desecration. A fifth man had come into the cathedral with the knights—not one of the four, but a clerk who had attached himself to them, a subdeacon named Hugh of Horsca, remembered by the bitter nickname Hugh Mauclerc, which means something like Hugh the bad clerk. He stepped up to the body as it lay there. He set his foot down on Becket’s neck, planting it on the neck of the man whose blood and brains were still spreading across the floor, using the corpse as a brace.
And he put the point of his weapon into the opened skull and deliberately scraped and scattered the brains out across the pavement, scooping them onto the stones, so that nothing whole would remain to be gathered. As he did it, he called out to the others that they could leave now, that this one would not be getting up again. The knights turned and went, and on their way out of the precinct they did not flee in horror. They looted the archbishop’s palace, seizing horses, gold and silver plate, vestments, and Becket’s own documents and papers, loading up what they could carry.
Then they rode off north into the winter dark, leaving the monks alone in the cathedral with the broken thing on the floor. The monks were left with the body, and what they found when they came to prepare it changed everything. Becket’s reputation up to that moment, even among many churchmen, was that of a proud, worldly, difficult politician who had picked a fight he could have avoided. The monks undressed him for burial, and under the fine outer vestments of an archbishop they found layer after layer of clothing growing rougher as they went down.
At the very bottom, worn directly against his skin, a hair shirt of coarse goat hair. And the hair shirt was not empty of life. As the body cooled, the lice and vermin that had been living in the garment, feeding on him, began to crawl out of the seams in such numbers that a chronicler describes them seething and boiling over the edges of the cloth, like water boiling over the rim of a pot. The monks watching apparently broke into a kind of helpless weeping and laughing at the same time, an awful overflowing of feeling.
Here in front of them was the evidence that this proud man had been secretly mortifying his own flesh, punishing his own body in private the entire time they had judged him. One historian put it about as plainly as it can be put: it was the hair shirt, and not the murder, that truly made the martyr. The monks buried Becket quickly the very next day down in the crypt, partly out of grief and partly out of fear, because there were rumors that the killers might return to drag the body out to behead it again or hang it on a gibbet. The treatment reserved for a traitor’s corpse rather than a saint’s.
The news went out from Canterbury and moved across Europe faster than almost any news of that century. An archbishop, the highest churchman in England, cut down inside his own cathedral near the altar during the days of Christmas by knights of the king’s own household—it violated every protection the age believed in at once: the sanctuary of the church, the sanctity of a priest, the truce of the holy season. The Pope, when word reached him, was said to have shut himself away for days and refused to speak to any Englishmen. Henry II, the king whose anger had set the whole thing moving, understood at once the scale of what had landed on him.
He had not, by his own account, ordered the killing, and the distance between a furious outburst and an explicit command became the hinge his entire defense would hang on. He shut himself up and fasted and wept, partly from grief for the friend and partly from sheer political terror, because the most dangerous thing imaginable had just been done in his name. The miracles started almost at once. Within roughly a decade, the monks of Canterbury had recorded over seven hundred of them attributed to Becket—cures of blindness and paralysis and leprosy and madness, drownings reversed, the dying called back.
The blood and brain matter on the floor did not get washed away and forgotten. The faithful soaked it up with cloths. It was gathered into a vessel. Before long it was being diluted with water into something called the water of St.
Thomas, sold to pilgrims as a healing draft, a literal commodity made from a murdered man’s blood. The speed of his canonization is genuinely startling for the period. He was made a saint by Pope Alexander III in February of 1173, a little over two years after the murder. The four knights were excommunicated and, after a period in which they sheltered at Hugh de Morville’s castle in the north, sent on a fourteen-year penance to the Holy Land.
The tradition that hardened around them is that none ever came home. And Henry II, the friend who had ranted in that room in Normandy, eventually made his own pilgrimage of a very different kind. In the summer of 1174, with his sons in revolt against him and his reign seeming to come apart, he came to Canterbury, dismounted before he reached the cathedral, and walked the last stretch barefoot through the streets as a penitent, his feet cut on the stones. At the tomb he knelt, confessed, and bared his back.
And the monks and bishops of the cathedral each took a turn striking him with a rod, blow after blow, while he prayed at the grave of the man he had helped to kill. Whatever mixture of genuine remorse and hard political calculation drove it, the image is its own kind of strange: a king of England scourged at the tomb of his murdered archbishop. A whole economy of pilgrimage grew up over the spot where the brains had been scraped from the floor—an industry of inns and badges and relics that sustained Canterbury for centuries. Two hundred years later, Chaucer’s pilgrims are still riding toward that exact place.
All of it grows out of one bad temper, four armed men who first left their swords under a tree, and a sword that broke on the floor of a church. Becket’s killers at least meant to leave a recognizable body behind. The next man was not granted even that, because the people who killed him set out very deliberately to make sure there was no whole body left to bury at all. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, gets remembered now mostly for the respectable part of his career: he summoned commoners to a parliament, an early step on the long road toward representative government.
Strip away the later admiration, though, and put him back in the heat of the summer of 1265, and he is something far simpler and more dangerous: the losing side of a brutal civil war, a man whose enemies had decided that merely defeating him was not enough, that he had to be unmade, obliterated, removed from the world so completely that there would not even be a body left to honor. Montfort was not even English by birth. He was French, a younger son of a famous and ferocious crusading father, and he had come to England to claim the earldom of Leicester through his grandmother, marrying the king’s own widowed sister, Eleanor, in a secret ceremony that scandalized the court. For years he was the king’s brother-in-law and sometime favorite.
And then, as Henry III’s misrule and favoritism toward foreign relatives curdled the barons against him, Montfort became the hard, uncompromising leader of the opposition, a man with a reputation for rigid principle, fierce temper, and a conviction that he was carrying out God’s will. The men who came to hate him, Prince Edward chief among them, did not hate him as a stranger. They hated him as a former intimate who had humiliated the crown, beaten the royal family in battle, and held the king and the heir as prisoners. That kind of hatred, the hatred for someone who was once inside the family, is the kind that does not stop at killing.
At the Battle of Lewes in May of 1264, Montfort, outnumbered, won an extraordinary victory, capturing King Henry III in open battle along with the king’s brother Richard, who was famously dragged out of a windmill where he had taken refuge. And most valuable of all, the king’s son and heir, Prince Edward—the tall, hard, physically imposing young man who would one day become the king they would call the Hammer of the Scots. With the king and the heir both held in his custody, Montfort effectively ruled England for more than a year. It was the high water mark of his life.
But in the spring of 1265, Edward escaped. The story, and it has the ring of the prince’s own cleverness about it, is that during one of his permitted rides under guard, he asked to try the paces of his keeper’s horses one after another until every animal was blown and exhausted, and then at the agreed moment swung up onto a fresh horse that had been held in readiness and simply rode away. The escape plan is often credited to the wife of a powerful marcher lord named Roger Mortimer, a woman named Maud de Braose. Hold that name lightly for now, because she is going to come back into this story near the end of it in a way you will not enjoy.
With Edward loose, the royalist cause came roaring back together. On the 4th of August 1265, the elder Montfort found himself near the town of Evesham, hemmed into a tight loop of the river Avon, with the only bridge out blocked by Mortimer’s men, facing a royal army roughly twice the size of his own. He had also been deceived in the cruelest possible way. Edward’s forces had captured the banners of Montfort’s son at Kenilworth, and they came marching up under those very banners, so that Montfort and his lookouts at first believed the relief column had arrived, and only realized as the troops drew close that they were looking at their own deaths dressed in the sun’s colors.
A storm was gathering over the field as the armies closed, the sky going dark in the middle of the day. Montfort was a professional soldier to the marrow, and he read the field that morning for exactly what it was. He is supposed to have said, half in bitter professional admiration and half in resignation, that they had learned that order of battle from him, that the very formation now closing in to kill him was his own teaching turned against its teacher. And then, more quietly, that they should commend their souls to God, because their bodies belonged to the enemy.
What made Evesham different from an ordinary medieval battle, where a wealthy nobleman was usually worth far more captured and ransomed alive than killed, was a decision Prince Edward made beforehand. He selected a squad, around twelve men according to an eyewitness account that survives in the records of the College of Arms, and gave them a single assignment: cut through the fighting, ignore everyone else, find Simon de Montfort, and kill him. Not capture. Kill.
This threw out the unwritten rules of war between noblemen, the whole system of ransom and chivalric restraint, and turned the battle into something closer to a targeted execution carried out inside a massacre. The fighting itself was short and lopsided, perhaps two hours from start to finish, and something like four-fifths of Montfort’s army died on the field. A chronicler, Robert of Gloucester, wrote that such was the murder of Evesham, for battle it was none. He reached for the word murder deliberately.
The squad cut through to Montfort in the thick of the fighting, where he had dismounted to fight on foot among his men once his horse was gone. They brought him down and they killed him. Which hand struck the fatal blow is one of those things the sources genuinely disagree on. The Mortimer family tradition gives the kill to Roger Mortimer himself.
Robert of Gloucester names a man called William de Maltravers as the one who actually did the butchery. Let both names stand side by side, because the disagreement is old and real and unresolved. What is not in doubt is that this was an execution and not a battlefield death in the ordinary sense. And then the squad did the thing they had truly been sent to do, the thing that turned a death into a statement.
They went to work on the corpse where it lay. They cut off his head. They cut off both his hands. They cut off both his feet.
And they cut off his testicles, and they took those and draped them across his dead face, hanging one on either side of his nose. None of this is a rumor pulled from some lurid later legend. It sits in the London Civic Chronicle, compiled by a man named Arnold FitzThedmar within months of the event, reported back to the mayor and the sheriffs of the city of London, set down almost in the dry register of municipal business as a fact that everyone knew. In that condition, the mutilated, castrated head was packed up and sent across the country as a trophy, a gift to a specific person: to Maud, the wife of Roger Mortimer, at Wigmore Castle.
A second account has the testicles stuffed into the dead man’s mouth rather than hung across his face. The difference between the two versions hardly matters. When this grim package arrived at Wigmore Castle, she did not recoil from it. She had the head brought into the great hall and set up where everyone gathered could see it, displayed during a feast held that very night to celebrate the victory, the head still mounted on the lance point it had been carried in on—a severed, castrated head presiding over the high table at a victory dinner.
Robert of Gloucester’s line about the head being sent to that foul woman, Maud the Mortimer, carries a contempt that survives the seven and a half centuries between his pen and your ears. The rest of him went out across the country in pieces, scattered like cuttings handed out from a garden. This was a known and deliberate practice along the Welsh Marches, the violent borderland between England and Wales, where displaying the dismembered pieces of a defeated enemy functioned as a kind of grim currency between lords—what one modern historian has called a culture of dark trophies. One of Montfort’s hands was sent from one marcher lord to another.
A foot was sent onward to Llywelyn, the prince of Wales, with whom Montfort had been allied, the gift carrying its own pointed message about what became of the prince’s friends. The monks of Evesham kept a hand of their own quietly as a relic. One of Montfort’s own surviving followers took a foot away with him and treated it from then on as something holy, an object of veneration. And his son, the younger Simon, who had been racing south to reach the battle, arrived too late to do anything but see his father’s head raised on a pike against the dark storm sky.
That was the last sight he had of his father, and he carried it into a long, embittered exile in Italy where years later he and his brother would murder their cousin Henry of Almain in a church in Viterbo in revenge for Evesham, hacking him down at the altar in front of horrified witnesses. The mutilation at Evesham did not end at Evesham. It went on breeding violence for years, one severed family answering another. What little remained of the body, the trunk and whatever the squad had not carried off, was gathered up by the canons of Evesham Abbey and buried in front of the high altar.
Almost immediately, ordinary people began coming to the grave to pray, treating the murdered earl as a saint and the ground itself as holy. This irritated King Henry III enormously. He declared that a man who had risen against his anointed king deserved no sacred resting place, and the remains were moved somewhere quieter and more hidden to break up the gathering cult before it could harden into something the crown could not control. It did not entirely work.
A book of miracles accumulated around Montfort’s name, somewhere near two hundred entries—cures and visions and rescues credited to the dead earl. He was never officially made a saint. But the people who had no stake in that calculation made him one anyway in their own way. From a body scattered deliberately across a whole country, we move to a death where the cruelty was gathered up instead and concentrated into a single hill on a single freezing March morning, where the man dying could lift his eyes and look down the slope at the castle he had loved most in all the world, and where the whole point of the thing was not to hide the killing in the chaos of a battle, but to stage it slowly in public with an audience.
The next two deaths belong together, because they happened within a year of each other under the same king, and the two men involved stood on opposite sides of the very same battle. One of them won that battle, one of them lost it, and both of them ended up executed as traitors anyway by the same king. That pairing tells you almost everything about the dangers of serving Edward II of England—a man who inherited a strong and feared kingdom from his ferocious father, Edward I, and proceeded to lose nearly all of it through favoritism, incompetence in war, and an apparently total inability to manage the great men around him. Start with the man who died first.
Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, was the single wealthiest nobleman in England—the holder of five separate earldoms—and first cousin to the king himself, grandson of King Henry III, with royal blood on both sides of his family. For a time, he was the most powerful man in England after the king, and arguably more powerful than the king in practice. He led the baronial opposition and was the man most directly responsible for the killing in 1312 of Piers Gaveston, the Gascon knight Edward had loved and showered with titles and favor past all reason. Gaveston’s death was itself an ugly business that fed directly into Lancaster’s own.
Captured by the barons, Gaveston had been promised his life, and then Lancaster and his allies seized him, gave him a hasty mockery of a hearing in which he was not allowed to speak in his defense, and had him run through and beheaded on Blacklow Hill on Lancaster’s land, with Lancaster watching. Edward never forgave it, and he nursed that grievance for a decade. By the early 1320s, the rise of new royal favorites—the Despensers, father and son, grasping and rapacious in the way Gaveston had been but far more dangerous—pushed the kingdom finally into open civil war. Lancaster’s rebellion went badly from the start, marked by hesitation and half measures.
He marched north, possibly hoping to link up with the Scots. And at the Battle of Boroughbridge on the 16th of March 1322, his force was caught at a crucial crossing over the river Ure. The man holding the bridge was Andrew Harclay, the northern knight we are coming to next, and Harclay had packed the narrow bridge and the ford with dismounted men-at-arms and spearmen in the tight schiltron formation he had learned from years of fighting the Scots. Lancaster’s attempt to force the bridge collapsed in blood.
During the night, much of his army simply melted away. He was taken the following morning almost without resistance and brought under guard to Pontefract Castle—his own, his favorite of all his many residences—which had been seized by the king’s men while he was off losing his war. There is a specific and deliberate cruelty in being condemned to death inside the walls of the home you loved best. They put Lancaster on trial in the great hall of his own castle before a tribunal stacked entirely with men who hated him, including the king himself.
The central feature of the proceeding was that Lancaster was given no chance to speak. He was not permitted to answer the charges read against him, not permitted to have anyone speak in his defense, not allowed counsel. He simply stood and listened as his death was pronounced. This was a deliberate and exact echo of the rough, lawless way Gaveston had been put to death a decade before—a mirror held up so that Edward could repay the old injury measure for measure.
The charges piled up. Treason chief among them—the rebellion itself, the levying of war against the king, and the damning evidence of secret correspondence with the Scots, letters in which Lancaster had apparently used a code name for himself, calling himself King Arthur in his dealings with James Douglas. The sentence was the full traitor’s death. And then, because Lancaster was of royal blood, the drawing and the hanging were set aside as beneath a man of his rank, and they left only the beheading.
A small mercy folded inside an enormous cruelty. The Brut Chronicle gives us the day in real, miserable detail, built entirely out of humiliations stacked one on top of another. When Lancaster heard the sentence pronounced in his own hall, he wept and cried out, “Alas, St. Thomas, fair father, shall I die in this way?
” They set on his head a worn and ragged hood, an old torn thing not worth a halfpenny, jammed onto the head of a man who had worn coronets. They stripped away his fine clothing. They put him on a thin, sorry gray mount with no proper saddle and a worn old bridle, the meanest animal they could find. And as they led him out through the gates of his own castle, a crowd had gathered along the route, and the crowd threw snowballs at him, pelted him with snow and filth and mud as he passed.
He bore it, and he kept praying aloud as he went, lifting his bound hands toward heaven. They led him up a small hill just outside the town, a low rise from which, if he lifted his eyes, he could look back and down and see Pontefract Castle itself sitting there in the snow while he knelt outside its walls, waiting to die. And they made him kneel facing north, towards Scotland. This was the final calculated insult, forcing his own body to point toward the Scottish enemy he had been condemned for conspiring with.
By some accounts, he asked to be allowed to face east toward Jerusalem and was refused and turned forcibly back to the north. Then the execution itself went wrong. The first stroke failed to take the head. By the accounts that survive, it took two strokes, and some sources say three, to sever the head of Thomas of Lancaster.
His body was taken in by the monks of the Cluniac priory at Pontefract and buried near the altar. And then, against every wish King Edward had, the thing the king most wanted to prevent happened anyway, and happened fast. Ordinary people began treating Thomas of Lancaster as a saint and a martyr. Within weeks, crowds came to pray, so many that the king tried to post guards to keep pilgrims away from the grave and tried to have the cult suppressed from the pulpit.
None of it held. A painted tablet of Lancaster was set up in St. Paul’s in London and became a site of devotion until the king ordered it removed. His hat and his belt were borrowed and passed around as holy relics—the hat laid on the heads of people suffering from headaches and madness, the belt wrapped around women in the agony of childbirth to bring them safely through.
These objects were still being used that way right up until the Reformation tore the whole practice down two centuries later. The more brutally Edward had erased his cousin, the more powerfully the dead man’s legend grew. The crown got its execution. It did not get the silence it wanted.
The man who had actually beaten Lancaster at Boroughbridge was a hard, capable knight from the far north of England named Andrew Harclay. And the reward he received for that victory less than a single year later was a death so much worse than the one Lancaster suffered that it almost reads as the universe trying to balance some terrible ledger. Harclay was not born into the high nobility. He was a Cumberland man, a knight of the violent Anglo-Scottish border, and he had made his name doing the brutal, unglamorous, unending work of holding England’s northern frontier against the raids of Robert the Bruce.
For years he defended the city of Carlisle, holding it through a major Scottish siege in 1315 when Bruce himself brought up siege engines and assault towers, and Harclay’s garrison threw them back. Boroughbridge was the peak of his career. King Edward, delighted to have his great enemy delivered to him, raised Harclay on the spot, creating him Earl of Carlisle and girding him with the sword of the earldom with the king’s own hands, lifting a border knight into the highest rank of the nobility in a single ceremony. So understand exactly what Harclay was at the start of 1322: a self-made soldier the king had personally honored, decorated, and elevated, trusted with the defense of the entire northern march.
But Harclay had spent his whole life fighting the Scots up close, close enough to understand something the king in the soft and distant south did not want to hear. The war could not be won. Not under Edward II, not with a crown either unwilling or simply unable to actually defend its northern subjects. The people of the north were being destroyed, their fields and villages burned, their cattle driven off into Scotland, their families killed or carried away to be ransomed.
The final straw came late in 1322. Edward led a great campaign into Scotland that achieved nothing, found the country stripped bare before him, so his army starved, and on the retreat the king was very nearly captured at Old Byland, fleeing in undignified haste. For Harclay, something seems finally to have broken. At the very start of 1323, on his own authority and without asking anyone’s permission, knowing exactly what it would look like, he rode to Lochmaben and sat down with Robert the Bruce and negotiated a peace recognizing Bruce as the rightful king of an independent Scotland in exchange for a firm end to the raids and the burning and the bleeding of his people.
He was a soldier choosing the welfare of the living over the pride of a crown. To Edward, it was treason, flat and naked and unforgivable—a great noble going behind the king’s back to deal directly with the enemy, recognizing the very Scottish independence the crown had spent decades denying. A local rival of Harclay’s, Sir Anthony de Lucy, arrested him by a trick, walking in among Harclay’s men inside Carlisle Castle with armed followers and concealed weapons and seizing the Earl while he sat in his own great hall dictating letters. On the 3rd of March 1323, what they staged for him was not really a trial at all.
It was a ceremony of unmaking, scripted and public, designed above all to be watched and remembered. They told him plainly to his face that he was a traitor to the king, and that the king’s will was that he be reduced to nothing, so that other knights of lesser degree, watching or hearing of it, would be afraid to do the same. And then they took him apart in stages, deliberately narrating each step aloud as they performed it. They hacked the gilded spurs from his heels.
They took his knight’s sword and broke it over his head—the same sword, or what stood for the same sword, that the king had girded on him with his own royal hands barely a year before. They stripped him of his furred mantle, his hood, his furred coats, his fine belt. And as the last of it came off, one of them spoke the line that formally ended his standing as a man of any rank at all: that now he was no knight, but a knave, a nobody, a common criminal. They unmade him on his living body before they ever began on the body itself.
Then came the part that Lancaster, by royal blood, had been spared: the full and unmerciful traitor’s death in every one of its stages. He was stripped to a shirt, tied to a hurdle, and dragged by horses through the streets of the very city he had defended for years, past the people he had kept alive through siege and raid, out through the gates to the place of execution at Harraby, a low hill just south of Carlisle. The Lanercost Chronicle, written not far from where these events happened and broadly sympathetic to the northern man, dwells on his composure. Hearing what was about to be done to his body, the disemboweling and the burning and the quartering, Harclay is recorded as answering without apparent fear that they might divide his carcass among themselves as they wished, and that he commended his soul to God.
He was hanged by the neck. And then, while the life was still in him, he was cut down. He was stretched out and his belly opened and his bowels and entrails drawn out of his living body, and those entrails were burned to ash in a fire kindled in front of him while he could still for whatever few moments remained see and feel it being done. Then he was beheaded.
And then the man, finally and mercifully dead, was hacked apart into four quarters. They distributed him in the same fashion Simon de Montfort had been distributed two generations earlier, except that now it was carried out as cold, recorded official procedure rather than the hot improvisation of a battlefield. His head was sent first to the king so that Edward could look upon the face of the man he had raised and then destroyed, and from there it was carried to London and set up on a pole on London Bridge, where it remained exposed to the weather and the birds and the eyes of every traveler entering the city for five years. The four quarters of his body were dispatched under guard to four towns across the kingdom—Carlisle and Newcastle and York and Shrewsbury—so that the man who had given his life to defending the North now hung rotting in pieces across that same North as a lesson to anyone tempted to mistake their own judgment for the king’s.
It was not until 1328, after Edward II had himself been deposed and murdered and his young son Edward III sat on the throne, that Harclay’s sister, a woman named Sarah de Leuburn, was finally granted royal permission to go and collect the scattered pieces of her brother—to gather the four quarters down from their four towns and take the weathered skull from London Bridge and bring them together at last for Christian burial. A woman traveling the length of the country, town by town, to retrieve the rotted quarters of her own brother from four sets of city gates and a bridge, five years after they were nailed up. She buried what she could recover in the parish church at Kirkby Stephen. His conviction for treason was never formally reversed.
He had been right about the war, and being right saved him from absolutely none of it. The last of our five takes us out of England entirely, across the channel and the breadth of Europe, down into the dukedom of Bavaria. And the whole texture of the story changes when we get there. No battlefield this time.
No rebellion, no army, no treason against a crown. The four men we have followed so far were all players in the great game—archbishops and earls and rebels, men who had taken their chances in the violent contest for power and lost. The last of them was none of those things. She held no office, commanded no soldiers, threatened no throne in any way she chose.
Her entire crime, the whole of what she had done to earn what was done to her, was to be loved by a young man whose father had decided that love was an inconvenience to be drowned. A young woman who loved the wrong man, and a father-in-law who concluded that the cleanest available solution to that love was a river in autumn. Agnes Bernauer was born somewhere around 1410, and almost everything about her early life is uncertain. The tradition makes her the daughter of an Augsburg barber surgeon named Caspar Bernauer, though even his existence cannot really be confirmed.
What can be said with reasonable confidence is that she was a commoner. She came from Augsburg, a wealthy free city of merchants and craftsmen. And around 1428, she crossed paths with a young man named Albert, almost certainly at a tournament—a glittering public event where the sons of dukes came to be seen, and where a beautiful woman from the merchant town below might catch a prince’s eye across the lists. The young man was no ordinary admirer.
Albert was the son and sole heir of Duke Ernst of Bavaria-Munich, one of the most powerful princes in the German lands, a Wittelsbach, member of a dynasty that had ruled in Bavaria for generations. His marriage was not his own to give. A duke’s heir was a piece of dynastic property, his eventual wife chosen to seal an alliance with another princely house. Bavaria in this period was fractured, split among rival branches of the same Wittelsbach family who eyed each other’s territories and watched each other’s marriages and inheritances like hawks.
The unimpeachable nobility of an heir’s blood on both sides was a weapon and a shield in those rivalries. A duchess pulled up out of an Augsburg barber’s household gave every rival branch an opening, a reason to question whether Albert’s future children were fit to inherit. Albert knew all of it, too. And he took Agnes anyway.
He brought her first toward Munich and then settled her at Straubing on the Danube, in territory he governed, and he lived with her openly as if she were his wife, gave her a household, treated her as his lady. There is real reason to think the two of them may have actually married in secret somewhere around 1432, which would change everything, transforming Agnes from an embarrassing mistress—the sort of thing a noble family could tolerate and outlast—into something far more dangerous: a commoner with a genuine, sacramentally valid claim to one day be a duchess, and any children of the union with a claim to the duchy itself. A mistress dies or is set aside and is forgotten. A wife is a permanent fact, and her sons are heirs.
That distinction is most likely what killed her. To Duke Ernst, all of this was a slow-motion catastrophe aimed straight at the heart of the Wittelsbach line. Ernest tried the ordinary pressures first. He pressed his son repeatedly to put the woman aside.
And Albert, who seems to have loved her past the point of calculation, refused. Worse than refused: he declared openly that Agnes was already his lawful wedded wife, that the thing was done and sealed before God. With that declaration, the situation became, in Ernst’s eyes, impossible to manage through any normal means. There was, as far as the old duke could see, exactly one solution left that would actually solve the problem at its root, permanently and beyond appeal.
If the marriage could not be undone by persuasion, then the marriage could be ended the only other way a marriage ends. The wife could be removed entirely. He waited until his son was safely out of the way. A hunt was arranged, conveniently far from Straubing, drawing Albert off into the field with companions for days, long enough for the thing to be done before he could possibly hear of it and ride back.
With Albert gone, Duke Ernst moved. He had Agnes seized. The charge they fixed on her was witchcraft, and the precise shape of the accusation matters, because it was the only charge that could make her killing look like justice rather than murder. The claim was that she had used sorcery to ensnare the young prince, that no natural woman of her low station could possibly have drawn the heir of Bavaria into so binding and unreasoning a love by ordinary means.
And so it must have been magic, a spell, a bewitching. The accusation of witchcraft was the standard, reliable, legally usable instrument across medieval and early modern Europe for transforming an inconvenient woman into a criminal who could be lawfully condemned and put to death. It worked precisely because it could almost never be disproven. How does a woman prove she has not enchanted a man who plainly loves her?
The very strength of Albert’s devotion became, in this twisted logic, the evidence against her. There is little sign that any real trial, anything resembling a fair hearing where Agnes could answer the charge or call anyone to speak for her, ever took place. The conclusion came first, and the proceeding, such as it was, came after. The sentence was death by drowning, a method with old and deliberate associations to witches and to the disposal of women.
And on the 12th of October 1435, they carried it out from the bridge over the Danube at Straubing. And here the record gives us something far more harrowing than a clean sentence quietly carried out. The chronicler Andreas von Regensburg, writing close to the event, set down what actually happened when they threw her from the bridge. Her hands and her feet had been bound for the drowning, the standard way of ensuring a condemned person could not save themselves.
But one foot had either worked loose in the struggle or had never been fully tied in the first place. And with that single free foot, Agnes managed to do what no one watching can have expected. She swam, bound, in the cold gray October water of one of the great rivers of Europe, the current pulling at her. She fought her way back toward the surface and kept herself up and worked herself toward the bank, kicking with the one foot she had.
And she was crying out the whole time, calling for help in a voice the chronicler describes as woeful and miserable and broken—the voice of a person drowning slowly and not yet dead and still, against all reason, hoping. She got close to the shore. Close enough to be seen clearly. Close enough that for a moment it must have looked as though she might actually live.
And the executioner who had pushed her from the bridge saw her nearly reach the bank, and he did not feel relief or mercy. He felt fear, because the one thing in the world more dangerous to him than drowning this woman was failing to drown her—was having to go back to Duke Ernst and report that the witch had swum free in front of a crowd. So he ran. He ran along the riverbank, keeping pace with her in the water, and he caught up a long pole, one of the poles used to push boats, and he reached it out over the water and worked the end of it down into her long hair, where it would catch and hold, and he twisted it tight.
And then he used that pole to force her head back down beneath the surface of the river and to hold it there, leaning his weight on it, pinning her under the water while she struggled at the end of her own hair until at last the struggling weakened and slowed and stopped, and Agnes Bernauer drowned a few feet from solid ground. Let me separate what is solid here from what the centuries added. Agnes’s story did not stay in the fifteenth century. It became a national legend in Bavaria, retold and reshaped for four hundred years, fuel for a famous nineteenth-century tragedy by Friedrich Hebbel and later a folk opera by Carl Orff.
The bath house girl, the elaborate love scenes, the tender speeches, the noble defiance—those belong to drama and not to the record. What stands on documented ground is leaner and in its way worse for being so plain. The relationship itself is real. Albert’s refusal to give her up is real.
Duke Ernst’s order to kill her while his son was away is real. The pretext of witchcraft is real. And so is the absence of anything resembling a fair trial. The drowning from the bridge over the Danube at Straubing on the 12th of October 1435 is real, recorded close to the time by more than one chronicler.
And the most harrowing detail of all—the free foot, the desperate swim back toward the bank, the cry for help, the pole twisted into her hair to hold her under—comes not from the romantic legend at all, but from Andreas von Regensburg, a chronicler writing within living memory of the event. The legend softened her death into tragedy and gave her last words and noble dignity. The chronicle gives her something more disturbing and more human: a woman fighting to live in cold water, and a frightened man with a pole making sure she could not. When Albert returned from the hunt and learned what his father had done in his absence, he came close to tearing Bavaria apart over it.
He renounced his father openly, refused his obedience, and allied himself with one of Duke Ernst’s bitter political rivals. For a stretch of months, it genuinely looked as though father and son would go to open war over the body of a drowned woman. In the end, they were reconciled within a matter of months. Within a year, Albert had made exactly the respectable, advantageous marriage his father had wanted from the beginning, taking Anna of Brunswick to wife in 1436, and going on to a long and successful reign as Duke, remembered by history as Albert the Pious.
But Albert did not simply forget her, whatever else he did. He endowed a perpetual mass for Agnes, an annual memorial in a Straubing cloister, paid for in money and obligation, so that her soul would be prayed for in perpetuity. And Duke Ernst, the man who had given the order, paid to have a chapel built for her in the cemetery of St. Peter’s in Straubing as an act of expiation, a quiet admission carved in stone that something had been done that needed atoning for, though he never called it murder and never stood trial for it.
Dukes did not stand trial. The chapel still stands today and people visit it. Inside is a red marble tomb effigy of Agnes carved with a rosary in her hands and two small dogs at her feet—the conventional medieval symbols of piety and faithfulness given in death to a woman her own killers had condemned in law as a witch. Her actual body was never recovered from the river.
The Danube kept that part, carried it off downstream and never gave it back. So the grave the Duke paid for marks a death rather than a burial, a fine carved monument with no one underneath it, raised by the very man who had made certain there would be something to atone for, over a woman whose only recorded crime was being loved by the wrong man and being born too low to be allowed to keep him.
