The Book of Ancient Bastards (25 page)

Sounds Better Than
“William the Bastard”

(CA. A.D. 1028–1087)

He was over all measure severe to the men who gainsaid his will. He was a very rigid and cruel man, so that no man durst do anything against his will. . . . He had earls in his bonds who had acted against his will; bishops he cast from their bishoprics, and abbots from their abbeys; and thanes he kept in prison; and at last he spared not his own brother.
—The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

The man who conquered England in order to press a weak claim to its throne was born a literal bastard in Normandy (northern France) around A.D. 1028 to Robert I, Duke of Normandy, and a woman named Herleva. Before his death in A.D. 1087, he proved one of the most ruthless bastards of the Middle Ages, taking an independent kingdom and turning it into a personal fiefdom. In more high-fallutin’ language: a conqueror.

William hosted his cousin Edward the Confessor (later king of England) while the latter was in exile, and claimed after the Confessor’s death that he had promised to make William his heir. When Harold Godwinson was selected to be king instead, William invaded England, famously defeating the English at the Battle of Hastings in A.D. 1066. With Harold killed in the battle (arrow in the eye), there was no one to stand in William’s way, and he was crowned king on Christmas Eve of that year.

What followed were six years of consolidating power through replacing high-level Anglo-Saxon church and government leaders with his own family members and drinking buddies, and putting down rebellion after rebellion through a series of bloody campaigns and fierce reprisals. A telling indicator of William’s success in grabbing the levers of power in England and holding on with both hands: when he was crowned king, the landowning aristocracy in the kingdom (called thegns) numbered around 4,000, all of them Anglo-Saxons. By the year he died, that number had been reduced to two.

William doesn’t seem to have been all that interested in actually living in England once he’d conquered it. Instead, he used the kingdom both to reward followers with grants of land and titles and as a giant piggy bank to fund his far-more-important-to-him wars against the king of France, his neighbors in Flanders and Anjou, and (of course) his own rebellious son, Robert Curthose, who went on to succeed him as duke of Normandy on his death.

Grown morbidly obese in his later years, William sustained life-threatening injuries in a fall from a horse while (go figure) campaigning in France in A.D. 1087. Lingering near death for several weeks, he had time to both regret and confess his sins, reportedly saying at one point: “I am stained with the rivers of blood that I have spilled.”

He died shortly afterward, and during his funeral service his already corpulent decomposing body swelled to such a size that it broke open his coffin and sickened the assembled mourners with the stench it gave off. An ironic footnote to the life of the grandson of an undertaker!

Yet Another Literal Bastard

Referred to by even his own subjects in France as “Guillaume-le-Batard” (“William the Bastard”), the future King William I of England was constantly reminded (especially by his foes) that the family business of his maternal grandfather was that of an embalmer.

When Your Vows Forbid You to Shed Blood, Use a Big, Heavy Club Instead

(CA. A.D. 1030–1097)

God forbid that I should touch the Bishop of Bayeux,
but I make the Earl of Kent my prisoner.
—William I the Conqueror of England

The younger half-brother of William the Conqueror, Odo went from being the bishop of a minor holding in Normandy to the second-most-powerful man in England in less than a year. Once ensconced as William’s regent (and earl of Kent), Odo ran the country with little interference from his brother, as long as he kept sending the new king plenty of revenue from his conquered subjects. Odo took the opportunity to skim from the tax revenues, making himself wealthy and powerful enough to fancy himself a viable candidate for pope.

Though a priest is forbidden to shed blood, Odo was an active participant in both the planning and the execution of his brother William’s invasion of England in A.D. 1066. In battle, he wore armor and carried a heavy oaken club that he used as a weapon in place of a sword (thereby getting around the whole “shedding blood” thing).

In recognition of Odo’s crucial assistance, William made him his regent. It was Odo who set about consolidating his brother’s conquest, centralizing the government, and serving, in addition to all of his other duties, as England’s first chief justice.

By the early 1180s, Odo had amassed such wealth and made so many connections that he dared to dream that he might one day go where neither Frenchman nor Englishman (since as a Norman he was technically both) had gone before: getting elected pope. At about this time, he began laying the groundwork for taking the Holy See: buying a villa in Rome, laying out massive amounts of gold in the form of bribes to the large number of church officials whose support would be needed if he were to become pontiff, even hiring a small mercenary army to protect himself and his interests once he became pope.

Once William got wind of Odo’s pontifical ambitions, he came back to England himself, took one look at the books (because no earl, no matter how powerful, ought to have been able to afford the outlays that Odo had been making!), and called kid brother to account.

Odo languished in prison for years until William’s death in A.D. 1187. Freed by William’s son William II Rufus, Odo promptly set about rebelling against the new king, supporting the claims of his older (and more pliable) brother Robert. The rebellion was crushed and Odo was banished. Eventually going on crusade, he died in Sicily on his way to the Holy Land in A.D. 1097.

Bastard Justice

Since the office of chief justice was newly created by the Conqueror, no one was sure just how far the duties of the person filling the position should extend. In Odo’s case, he wasn’t just the highest-ranking legal officer in the realm, he also served as both the head tax man and the de facto finance minister. In an interesting bit of unsurprising irony, one of only two surviving records of a court case involving Odo by name is a case in which he appeared not as presiding judge but as the defendant in trial involving the illegal seizure of church land. He was found guilty and had to forfeit the land and make restitution.

How Much Penance Can One King Do?

( A.D. 1050–1106)

I want there to be no peasant in my kingdom so poor that he cannot have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.
—Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV

The original author of a quote attributed to twentieth-century American bastard populist politician Huey Long was a king who spent his life and his reign locked in a political struggle with the Catholic Church over control of both the church itself and most of central Europe. Henry IV became ruler of the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither “Holy” nor “Roman” nor truly an “Empire,” more a hodgepodge of secular German and Italian principalities loosely strung together) in his mid-thirties, many years after he had inherited the German throne (to which he ascended at the age of six).

Kidnapped at age twelve and forced to serve as the figurehead of a government run in everything but name by German Catholic Church officials, Henry even married an heiress chosen by his church masters. Once he reached his majority (in A.D. 1068), he attempted to divorce her, but threat of excommunication from the church sufficiently cowed him, and he backed down.

Because Henry had little support from among Germany’s nobles, he supported the papacy in its wars against Norman brigands in southern Italy for much of the next two decades, as he needed the Church’s authority to survive in power.

After becoming Holy Roman Emperor in A.D. 1084, Henry got into a tug-of-war with the pope, a fellow German named Gregory VII. Henry wanted to be allowed to appoint high-level churchmen (cardinals, bishops) to empty positions within Germany himself, instead of accepting the pope’s appointments. This was pure politics: clergy who owed their cushy positions to the king were more likely to support the king in disputes with the papacy, whereas papal-appointed clergy would obviously look to Rome for guidance.

Gregory VII responded to Henry’s attempt to circumvent papal power by excommunicating him, literally kicking him out of the church. An excommunicated monarch, the pope claimed, was illegitimate in the eyes of God, and his subjects were not required to either pay taxes or obey his laws.

Henry famously did penance by standing outside a mountain castle where the pope was riding out a snowstorm for two days before being granted an audience with the pope. Gregory accepted Henry’s penance and reversed his excommunication.

But in A.D. 1105, Henry ran afoul of a different pope (Victor III), who promptly excommunicated him again (this time for going back on the oath he had given Gregory). His own son betrayed him, forcing him to abdicate in his favor. Henry IV died the next year, still attempting to regain his throne.

Bastard’s Son and Successor

Ironically enough, the son who forcibly deposed Henry IV was his second son, also named Henry, who owed his own position as king of Germany to his father’s decision to elevate him to the throne in A.D. 1099 instead of his elder brother Conrad, who was in rebellion against Henry IV at the time. Six years later this “more loyal”(but certainly equally ambitious) of the two sons would betray his own father on the grounds that an excommunicated king had no legitimacy to rule his subjects!