Today, the anniversary of three deaths: one that wasn’t supposed to happen, because Henry II, Count of Champagne and King of Jerusalem, was only 31, but on this day in 1197 had a slight mishap with a window.
There was also a death that was supposed to happen #OTD in 1945, but didn’t:
…and it’s the 936th anniversary of William I dying because the king of France called him fat. Well, more or less. The story comes from Robert Chambers’ Book of Days, and begins with the Conqueror busying himself with grabbing some land, which seems in character.
Philip of France provokes the old bugger by making a jibe about his girth.
The ‘churching of women’ is a blessing ceremony to give thanks for the birth or adoption of a child. i.e: “William’s huge; he must be pregnant”. Ho, ho, Phil — very satirical. Billy the C is Not Amused by this, and is moved to violence. Quite considerable violence:
Unfortunately for William, now apparently not a slim man, and in his late 50s, this expedition was to be the end of him:
“He languished under this hurt for some weeks at Rouen”, and then was gone (and most sources now say it was the 9th. Pfft.) Anyway, this was, apparently, not the final indignity William suffered.
William had only been feared, never loved. Now that he was no more, his servants and great officers thought only of their own interests. His body was left almost naked on the floor, and was buried by monks, without the presence of any relative, or any one who cared for the deceased There being no coffin, and the body proving too large for the grave of masonry designed for it, it was necessary to force it down; in doing which it burst. Incense and perfumes failed to drown the stench thus diffused through the church, and the people dispersed in horror and disgust.
Chambers then adds to the posthumous insults by rounding off with:
Such was the end of one of the greatest potentates who ever lived — one who had driven human beings before him like cattle, but never induced any one to love him, not even one of his own children.
