Free ASSASSINATIONS AND CONSPIRACIES (True Crime) by Rodney Castleden

Did he imagine the fact that he was the king was protection enough – that they would stop short of anything as terrible, as utterly taboo, as regicide?
    William had a disturbing nightmare during the night before his final day. He dreamt that the men he was about to ride out with would kill him. At an unconscious level he knew he was taking a terrible risk. Yet still he went. The reasons why he acted as he did that day are still not known.
    What is known is that during the hunt, on 2 August, 1100, an arrow was loosed that found its way to the king’s chest. It is not known who shot the arrow, but it was said at the time that it was a powerful Norman baron, Sir Walter Tirel, the lord of Poix. According to Peter of Blois, Walter had recently arrived from Normandy and was welcomed to join the king’s table. After the banquet was over, the king invited the new guest to join the hunt. An account by Orderic Vitalis described the preparations for the hunt:
     
. . . An armourer came in and presented to [the King] six arrows. The King immediately took them with great satisfaction, praising the work, and unconscious of what was to happen, kept four of them himself and held out the other two to Walter Tirel . . . saying ‘It is only right that the sharpest be given to the man who knows how to shoot the deadliest shots.’ 
     
    Once the hunt was under way, the hunting party spread out through the woods as they chased some running deer. As they did so, the king and Walter Tirel became separated from the others. That was the last time William Rufus was seen alive. Walter fired a wild shot at a stag, which missed and hit the king in the chest instead. It was actually not a fatal injury, but William fell from his horse onto the arrow shaft, which then drove deep inside him, piercing his lung. Walter tried to offer aid, but there was no help he could give the dying man. Walter feared he would be charged with murder, panicked, mounted his horse and fled. It was said that it was an accident, but there are several aspects of the story that arouse suspicion.
    If the king’s death was an accident, why did the rest of the company ride off to leave the king to die alone, quickly drowning in his own blood? Incredibly, the king of England’s body was just left unattended in the woods, abandoned at the spot marked today by the Rufus Stone. It has been argued that the nobles abandoned William’s body, because the law and order of the kingdom died with the king, and they had to flee immediately to their estates to secure their interests. Another peculiarity of the ‘accident’ scenario is that Sir Walter Tirel had a reputation as a master bowman, someone who was very unlikely to shoot wild, and someone who was unlikely to make the basic mistake of accidentally shooting his (one) hunting companion. The circumstances make the incident look very much like murder and a conspiracy to murder at that.
    The body was found the next day by some countrymen. One of them, a local charcoal-burner by the name of Purkis, loaded it onto his cart and dutifully took it to Winchester for burial, blood dripping from the body all the way. In Winchester Cathedral the unmourned king was buried in a modest grave. Contemporary chroniclers said that all his servants were busy attending to their own interests, as would be likely with a significant change of regime already under way, and that few if any of them cared anything at all about the funeral.
    The king died unmarried and therefore with no legal offspring. His younger brother Henry succeeded to the English throne as he had been hoping. The speed with which Henry secured the treasury at Winchester and had himself crowned king – only three short days after his brother’s death – suggests a fair amount of pre-planning. That in turn suggests that Henry knew in advance that William was going to die. He stood to gain most by his brother’s death,