What Really Happened to Arthur of Brittany? King John’s worst crime?

In 1203, a teenage prince disappeared inside a royal prison. The boy was Arthur of Brittany, nephew of King John of England, and arguably the true heir to the English throne. According to one medieval chronicler, John got drunk, murdered the child with his own hands, tied a stone to the body, and threw it into the River Seine. However, other sources say that Arthur died whilst trying to escape, passed away from natural causes, or simply vanished. So, what really happened to the missing prince? Today on History Calling, we investigate one of the darkest mysteries of European medieval royalty, the short life and alleged murder of Prince Arthur.

Arthur I, Duke of Brittany, was born on the 29th of March, 1187, which happened to be Easter that year, in Nantes. His father, Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, was the fourth son of Henry II of England, and was already deceased at the time of Arthur’s arrival, having died the previous August. His mother was Constance, Duchess of Brittany, and he had one older surviving sibling, a sister called Eleanor. Now, to understand why Arthur would ultimately come to such an unfortunate end, you need to know what the line of succession looked like by the end of the 12th century. Henry II had five sons. His oldest, William, had died as a young child. His second boy was also called Henry, but he died without issue in 1183. Son number three was Henry’s eventual successor. He was Richard I, also known as Richard the Lionheart, and he ruled England between 1189 and 1199. Then, he too died childless. As we’ve already heard, son number four, Arthur’s father Geoffrey, was long dead by then, too. And this left Arthur with what we would consider the best blood claim on the throne upon the Lionheart’s demise, and the one whom Richard had recognized as his heir back in 1190. He was still only 12 years old, though, and living in France. Instead, it was his paternal uncle, the fifth and last son of Henry II, who took the English throne. This was King John, the villain of the Robin Hood stories, and the villain of this one, too.

We don’t know that much about Arthur’s short life. Initially, he lived with his mother, and as far as I can tell, he always resided in what is now modern-day France. A pawn of King Richard, he was separated from his mother in 1196, who was kidnapped and imprisoned by her second husband, Ranulf, Earl of Chester, possibly on Richard’s orders, and King Richard invaded Brittany and attempted to seize the boy. He was thwarted though by Arthur’s loyal retainers, who managed to get him to the court of King Philip II of France. When his mother was released from captivity in 1197, she retook custody of him, and they had returned to Brittany by early 1199. From whence they patched things up with Richard, Arthur renounced any fealty to Philip, and began, despite his youth, to be involved in the governance of his realms. When Richard died in April 1199, having been shot in the shoulder, Arthur and his uncle John were actually together in Brittany. Had Arthur been in England or traveled there very fast, perhaps he and his supporters could have made an attempt on the throne, but they weren’t. In the medieval period, succession laws weren’t set in stone as they are now, though even nowadays, they can occasionally be changed, and many people preferred an adult male who was a known quantity in England to 12-year-old boy apparently raised entirely overseas. Also, Arthur and his advisers were not trusted by some of the most prominent men in England, including William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. And there was the argument that as Henry II’s son, John was the better claimant than a grandson due to a closer blood relationship. In this climate, John was able to slip away, have himself proclaimed Duke of Normandy, then get back to England before Arthur and his followers could catch up with him. Once there, he was crowned its king. His mother, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, also held control of that Duchy on his behalf. Arthur, meanwhile, retained control over many of his French lands, notably Angers, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Brittany, and threw in his lot with King Philip once more.

Over the next few years, John and Arthur’s forces engaged in various attacks on one another as both tried to secure their positions, with Arthur attacked at Tours and bailed out by King Philip in 1199, who then had to take the child back under his protection for a brief spell. Arthur, his mother Constance, and King John did make a peace deal in September 1199, though they then stuck away from John’s court, apparently fearful that the king was about to imprison his young nephew. So, really, there wasn’t that much trust there no matter what deals they were officially making. Philip then turned on them, making an agreement with John in 1200 that saw Arthur stripped of most of his possessions other than Brittany, which he had inherited from his father. And actually, his mother was the daughter of the previous Duke of Brittany as well. To make matters worse, Duchess Constance died in September 1201, leaving Arthur orphaned. It was at this point that he was invested as the Duchy’s Duke, though he refused to do the required homage to John the following Easter, and was heartened by the fact that Philip and John had fallen out over John’s high-handed treatment of the prominent Lusignan family of Poitou and Philip himself, which resulted in Philip declaring John a misbehaving vassal duke and forfeiting the English king’s French lands in Anjou, Aquitaine, and Poitou. This brings us to March 1202, when Arthur was at Philip’s court and was summoned by John to come meet him near Argentan, near Falaise in Normandy. Please be kind about my French pronunciations. Arthur refused and was soon after engaged to Philip’s daughter Marie, then aged only six. The French king and the young Duke of Brittany further enraged John when Philip knighted Arthur and the duke performed homage to him for all of John’s newly confiscated lands. Philip then sent the boy to attack the castle of Mirebeau, where Arthur’s grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine was holed up. Truly, this was one epically dysfunctional family. Eleanor wrote to John for assistance, which he very quickly gave, arriving at the castle on the 1st of August to find it already largely captured and his mother trapped in the keep. With the element of surprise on his side though, John turned the situation around very fast. His forces decimated those of Arthur and at the end of the battle, Arthur himself was at last captured by his uncle. It was the beginning of the end for this boy. The 15-year-old was taken to Falaise and imprisoned there. I am unaware of any truly contemporary source dating to 1202 or 1203 telling us what supposedly happened next. And instead, what we have are a series of chronicles and a poem, which we usually cannot tightly date, but which seem to come from the following decade or later and which don’t explain where they got their information. Just bear these limitations in mind as I take you through what they say.

We start with Ralph of Coggeshall, an English monk and chronicler who was abbot of the Abbey of Coggeshall in Essex from 1207 until 1218 and who died after 1227. He wrote a lengthy account of Arthur’s fate, seemingly in the 1220s at the latest, but perhaps earlier, and there is no indication in the text as to what the source of the information was. He said that the great magnates of Brittany were revolting in order to get their young duke back, leading John’s counselors to suggest blinding and castrating the boy so that he could no longer rule or be used as a figurehead. John ordered three servants to go to Falaise and carry the sentence out, but two fled rather than comply, and when the third came to the castle where Arthur was being held in chains and told the boy’s jailer, Hubert de Burgh or Hubert de Burgh if you wanted in English, what was to be done, de Burgh and the other soldiers present couldn’t bear to let it happen. When Arthur heard what was to become of him, he begged for either complete mercy or to be killed rather than so disfigured. The orders were not carried out, but Hubert put out a full story that they had been and that Arthur had died as a result and been buried in the Abbey of Saint-André. When the Bretons heard this though, they went ballistic and swore to depose John and he was forced to say that Arthur was in fact still alive and well.

Another source is William the Breton, meaning he was from Brittany where Arthur was duke. He was writing in about 1216 in a poem by the achievements of the French King Philip II and claimed that John had tried to persuade his servants, including the boy’s jailer, William de Braose, to kill Arthur, but could find no one willing to do it. Therefore, having had Arthur locked up in a tower room, John went there himself, ordered the boy to be brought out to him where John was waiting in a boat in the harbor in the River Seine, and took him out onto the water. Arthur begged his uncle for mercy, but instead John grabbed the boy by the hair and stabbed him to death, cutting the body into pieces and dumping it in the water about 3 mi away. How reliable is this source though? Given how much later it was written and that it is a poem designed to talk up Philip, not John, we might expect some artistic license and some anti-John propaganda. Furthermore, some crucial information is lacking, like a date. Also, how would William the Breton know what took place on the boat with John and Arthur? He mentions no one else being present. Are we to believe that John shared details of this heinous crime with other people and these details made it to William? It’s not impossible and William the Breton seems to have been writing just after John’s death, which was in 1216. So, maybe the fear of angering that king had now passed and he was willing to share what he had heard. On its own though, the source is quite problematic, but something which may strengthen its basic account of what happened is the fact that another source says much the same thing.

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The next source to consider is the Annals de Margam with an N at the end, written in the Welsh Abbey of Margam with an M in the 1220s. It tells us that when King John had captured Arthur and had kept him alive for some time in prison, at last in the tower of Rouen, on the Thursday before Easter, after dinner, drunk and full of a demon, he killed him with his own hand, and with a great stone tied to his body, he threw him into the Seine. The body was found with a fisherman’s net, that is, a dragnet, and drawn to the shore and recognized, and it was secretly buried in the priory of Bec, which is called St. Mary of the Meadow, because of fear of the tyrant. Now, the 1220s is a long time after the events described, and it’s possible these annals were influenced by the William the Breton poem. However, the writer provides very specific extra details, like an exact date, the fact that John killed Arthur after dinner, and the fate of the body. And these do have a ring of plausibility about them, and suggest that this is not a simple copy of Breton’s work. Furthermore, the Abbey of Margam was patronized by William de Briouze, one of John’s closest servants at the time of Arthur’s alleged death, and a man who had actually had custody of the duke for a time. He could well have been the source of the information provided in the pages of its chronicle. Michael Jones, writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, even floats the idea that de Briouze supplied information to William the Breton for his poem as well. Why would he share such damaging information, though? Well, because he and the king fell out in catastrophic style by 1210, when John had de Briouze’s wife, Matilda, and eldest son murdered, supposedly by having them locked up and starved to death in either Corfe or Windsor castles. There is even an infamous story that Matilda took to chewing on her deceased son’s fetus as she went mad with hunger. I have a video about this whole episode, which I’ll leave linked for you. Of course, this horrific act might also mean that William de Brewes was making up a story about John killing Arthur to destroy the reputation of the man who had killed some of his family. You can read his motivations in either way. Or you might choose to believe that William the Breton and or the monks at Margam heard this story somewhere else entirely. Furthermore, de Brewes died in France in 1211, years before the Breton and Margam sources were written up, meaning that if he was the source, his account wasn’t fresh at that time and couldn’t be rechecked with him. Still, no matter the sources for this poem and chronicle, it is interesting that the idea of Arthur being murdered by John himself and dumped at the Seine shows up twice.

Moving on to an account given by English monk and chronicler Roger of Wendover, who was largely based at St. Albans Abbey, who wrote in the 1220s or 1230s in his Flowers of History, and he also did not set any sources for his information. He said that after some lapse of time, King John came to the castle of Falaise and ordered his nephew Arthur to be brought into his presence. When he appeared, the king addressed him kindly and promised him many honors, asking him to separate himself from the French king and to adhere to the side of himself as his lord and uncle. But Arthur ill-advisedly replied to him with indignation and threats, and demanded of the king that he should give up to him the kingdom of England with all the territories which King Richard possessed at the time of his death. And since all those possessions belonged to him by hereditary right, he affirmed with an oath that unless King John quickly restored the aforesaid territories to him, he should never enjoy peace for any length of time. The king was much troubled at hearing his words and gave orders that Arthur should be sent to Rouen to be imprisoned in the new tower there and kept closely guarded. But shortly afterwards, the said suddenly disappeared. In the same year, King John came to England and was crowned at Canterbury by Hubert, Archbishop of that place, on the 14th of April. And after this, he again sailed for Normandy. On his arrival there, an opinion about the death of Arthur gained ground throughout the French kingdom and the continent in general, by which it seemed that John was suspected by all of having slain him with his own hand. For which reason, many turned their affections from the king from that time forward wherever they dared and entertained the deepest enmity against him.

Now, you’ll note that Roger of Wendover doesn’t actually offer any specific explanation as to what happened to Arthur, though he repeats the rumor that he was personally murdered by John. And it may interest you to know that he also claimed that one of the things which got Matilda de Preux into such trouble was the fact that she had publicly stated that John had murdered Arthur, too. The chronology is very muddled, though. John was crowned at Westminster Abbey in 1199 and didn’t capture Arthur until 1202. Nor can I find any information to suggest another coronation at Canterbury. Historian Richard Huscroft, book linked below for you, has argued as well that we shouldn’t take Wendover’s words too seriously, saying, “This,” meaning the account of Arthur’s fate, “is not the only episode from John’s reign for which Wendover is the only evidence, and his reliability has often been questioned.” John was certainly active in January 1203, but this does not mean that Wendover was describing real events. More likely, this is an account of what Wendover thought should have happened in the circumstances. He is highly critical of John throughout his account of the reign and may have used this fictitious encounter as a device to highlight John’s careless disregard for honor and loyalty and Arthur’s stirring but doomed sense of duty. To this extent, he would have seen it as a legitimate fabrication. I can’t tell you if Wendover’s information was correct or not, but I would advise taking this much later unreferenced source with at least a pinch of salt.

For that same reason, you might want to treat the work of Matthew Paris with some skepticism, too. He was a monk only born in about 1200 and so only a child at the time these events occurred. He arrived at St. Albans where Wendover was also frequently based, remember, to begin life as a monk in 1217, 14 years after Arthur’s apparent death, and died himself in 1259. More problematic than his chronological and geographical distance from the events he was describing, though, is that he clearly copied Wendover’s Flowers of History when he wrote in his own Chronica Majora that “After some time had passed, King John came to the castle of Falaise and had his nephew Arthur brought before him there. When he had been led into his presence, the king began to address him with flattering words and to promise him many honors, urging him to withdraw from the king of the Franks and to adhere faithfully to him as his lord and uncle. Arthur, however, following foolish counsel, replied to the king with indignation and threats, demanding that he restore to him the kingdom of England with all the lands and possessions which King Richard had held in his possession on the day he died. And since all these things were owed to him by hereditary right, he declared with an oath that unless he restored all the aforesaid to him quickly, he, John, would never enjoy lasting peace. When King John heard these things, he was greatly disturbed. He ordered that Arthur be sent to Rouen and that there he be confined in the new fortress and kept under stricter guard. But not long afterward, that same Arthur suddenly disappeared in a manner almost unknown to everyone. Would that it had not been as hostile rumor reports.”

Despite this blatant plagiarism, which adds nothing new to the story, Paris is not without his uses. In another of his works entitled Historia Anglorum, he adds the following details to the tale. From that time on, what became of him is almost unknown to everyone. Nevertheless, some have said that, wishing to escape secretly, he was drowned in the Seine and thus perished, his body not being found. Others affirm that, falling into despair from bitterness of heart, he wasted away within himself and so died. But the French, whose testimony because of their hostility should not be fully trusted, assert that he was killed either by the hands or by the command of King John. So, Matthew Paris admits that no one really knows what happened to Arthur, and he lists the most popular rumors known to him, including that Arthur died a natural or even accidental death. It’s worth saying, too, that he had some good patrons, like John’s sons, Henry III and Richard, Earl of Cornwall. So, he may have had some excellent sources for gathering up the gossip about what happened to Arthur, even if gossip is all that it was.

Where does this leave us, then? Well, the thing that all of these sources have in common is the belief that Arthur died during his imprisonment by John. Furthermore, most of them blame John outright or insinuate that he did the deed. None of them are really great sources, because, as I’ve already explained, none of the writers were eyewitnesses to what occurred. They were all written much later, and we don’t know where they got their information, though we can speculate in some cases. This story has some striking similarities to the disappearance of the so-called princes in the tower in 1483, who were widely suspected of being killed on the orders of their own paternal uncle, Richard III, so that he too could claim the English throne. And just as in that case, my personal opinion is that the usurping uncle did it. I think Arthur was murdered in 1203 at the age of barely 16, and I don’t think it was a natural death because in that case John could have displayed the body to demonstrate that the boy hadn’t been murdered. The fact that he didn’t publicly address what had happened to Arthur, just as Richard would maintain a stony silence about the fate of his nephews, is pretty damning in my eyes, especially given the reputational damage it caused them both all across Europe. The story that John personally killed the boy and dumped him in the Seine seems the most likely to me for the simple reason that it shows up twice and there is a possible source in the person of William de Braose, but truly we’ll never actually know for certain what happened and I concede that it could have been something else. I’m curious to hear your thoughts though. Leave me a comment below telling me what you think happened to Arthur and for your next hit of History Calling, may I suggest either my video on the supposedly gruesome fate of Matilda de Braose and her son or my take on the princes in the tower in which I go through all the evidence for you. Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.