The Death of a King

Dunheveds and I plotted treasons so great that we were constantly under sentence of death. When the Dunheveds were broken, I fled England, thinking I would be safe in France. It is so ironical that Death crossed the Channel with me.
    I survived on my wits for years but I suppose my luck has just run out. The Dunheveds will turn in their graves laughing and be the first to meet me in Hell. I told the notary I had something to say and I can see that the clerk writing this is becoming impatient because, so far, I have said very little. I am not going to tell all. Why should these bastards, who are going to hang me, know everything I did? I could shake thrones with my knowledge. Stephen Dunheved could have done that, too. He and his clever brother, but they are dead. Isabella, the old bitch, saw to that. Poor sods! They came so near to success, now the grand design is nothing more than their bodies rotting in the ground while I rot in this piss-pot or a gaol.
    Time is passing, so I will begin at the beginning. I was born in Hampshire. My parents were free peasants. My father had earned his freedom and then expanded his holding and could boast of twenty bovates of land and an oxen team to till them. His immediate overlord was the Bishop of Winchester, but my father always bragged of his independence. My mother too was proud of their status but was, unfortunately, too wearied to rejoice in it. She bore ten children but only four survived into adulthood. I was the only boy and so my parents doted on me. They spoilt me, gave into me and so I began my long journey both to the priesthood and this gaol.
    Let me explain. Although my parents were free and I, too, was free-born, we were still peasants. My father had to work from morning to night. His arms, neck and back developed muscles like a bull and he was almost as coarse as one. He smelt of a mixture of beer, sweat and urine. I can never forget his thick roughened fingers, ingrained with dirt, pushing food into his mouth, which was then swilled down with huge draughts of rude ale. My mother would gaze at him adoringly before turning to me with the admonishment to grow up and be like him. I knew I could never be. I hated the work, the dirt, the grunting of my parents in bed at night, which invariably seemed to leave my mother pregnant. Another little bundle to be wrapped in rags and dumped in a small, simple hole in the graveyard.
    But where could I go? A life of military service? I considered it but was sharp enough to realize that it was easy to go but so few came back. While those who did return were cripples who had to live off charity. I recall a group of lads volunteering to be part of the Bishop of Winchester’s contribution to Edward I’s great force of 1297 against the Scots. I remember watching them go. I ran alongside them admiring their new boiled-leather jackets as they swung down some leafy long-forgotten sunny lane. None came back. They got trapped in some God-forsaken Scottish bog and were slowly slaughtered like a group of dumb oxen.
    At first, I never considered the church for our vicar, Father William, was even dirtier and coarser than my father. He could just about mumble a few words of Latin. His sermons were incomprehensible and he was invariably drunk. I always remember a story about my father’s going to see him about the marriage of one of my sisters. Father William had to consult the blood-book, which records the blood-line relationships in the village. It is the church’s surety against incest and consanguinity, as well as guaranteeing that the village’s idiot population did not develop even further. Evidently Father William got the book down from behind the altar and then sat down to consult it. My father knelt near him for a while, then, when this became too protracted, rose and crossed to Father William, only to find our reverend priest trying to read the book upside down. My father’s shouts of outrage could be heard the length and breadth of the village. Poor Father William hid in the church tower for days. My father was a powerful man with a reputation for an evil temper at the best of times.
    No, Holy Mother Church did not attract me. Then, all at once, matters changed. My father used to make visits to Winchester, and in the summer of my thirteenth year, he grandly announced that I could accompany him. It was a great honour. I had been no further than my village, and Winchester was as near to me as heaven is now. It was a day I shall