Free ASSASSINATIONS AND CONSPIRACIES (True Crime) by Rodney Castleden Page A

so if there was a conspiracy to kill William it is most likely that Henry engineered it. In the three-cornered struggle for the English throne, this interval when Robert was out of the way was the very best moment Henry could have chosen to have his brother assassinated. With William slain while Robert was in Palestine, Henry was in the strongest possible position to gain the throne, and he made sure of that by having himself crowned immediately, before Robert could return. Everything points to a political coup engineered by Henry.
    Henry was not blamed for the assassination by any of the Church chroniclers. They were very pleased and relieved to see Henry on the throne, describing him as ‘a young man of extreme beauty’ and ‘much more astute than his two brothers and better fitted for reigning’. He was a safer bet than William, releasing the Church estates, imprisoning Ranulph and recalling Archbishop Anselm from exile. It is possible that Henry did all these things precisely to buy the Church’s approval, rather than out of piety. When Robert raced back from the crusade on hearing of William’s death, he mounted an invasion to try to unseat Henry. Peter of Blois was keen to blame this too on Ranulph who, he said, escaped from prison, ‘repaired to Normandy, and in every way encouraged the Duke thereof, Robert, the King’s brother, to invade England’.
    Walter Tirel was named by chroniclers as the man who shot the fatal arrow, but there is no record of any retribution. There was no trial, no execution, no sanction, no penalty. That too looks as if he acted as part of a larger conspiracy. Maybe all those who went out with the king that day wanted him dead, and it was simply Tirel who drew the short straw. But it is also possible that Tirel did not kill William Rufus. There is one contemporary document that suggests he was innocent of the killing. The great Norman Abbot Suger was a friend of Walter Tirel’s and he gave Walter shelter during his self-imposed exile in France. They evidently liked and trusted one another. Suger had many opportunities to talk to Walter and they had many conversations about the events of that fateful day. What Suger wrote is very revealing:
It was laid to the charge of a certain noble, Walter Tirel, that he had shot the king with an arrow; but I have often heard him, when he had nothing to fear nor to hope, solemnly swear that on the day in question he was not in the part of the forest where the king was hunting, nor ever saw him in the forest at all.
    This means that Walter was afterwards claiming that he was not alone with the king: he was with the main party, elsewhere. If Walter was not alone with the king, who was? The most likely candidate is the king’s brother, Henry. Walter Tirel may have accepted the arguments that someone had to be blamed for the shooting and that Henry, the next king of England, could not be tainted with the crime. For the good of the kingdom, and the safety of the tenure of the English throne, Henry must seem to be blameless. Walter Tirel was never given any advancement that we know of, but Henry was adamant that he must not be punished in any way for what had happened.
    William Rufus was a horrible man, and he had two brothers, one younger, one older, both of whom wanted his throne. It is not at all surprising that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him and replace him. The most surprising aspect of the whole episode is that after ten years of staving off threats to his safety William went off into the woods with his murderers. Did he perhaps know that a conspiracy had closed so tightly about him that there was nothing he could do to avert the inevitable? As he rode off, had he perhaps already accepted that assassination was inevitable?

Thomas Becket 
    1170

     
    Thomas becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was born the son of a wealthy London merchant in 1118. He was boarded out at