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afterwards.
     
The sun was now declining, when the king, drawing his bow and letting fly an arrow, slightly wounded a stag which passed in front of him. The stag was still running. The king followed it for a long time with his eyes, holding up his hand to keep off the power of the sun’s rays. At this instant Walter decided to kill another stag. Oh gracious God! The arrow pierced the king’s breast. On receiving the wound the king uttered not a word, but breaking off the shaft of the arrow where it projected from his body. This speeded his death. Walter ran up, but as he found him senseless, he leapt upon his horse and escaped with the utmost speed. Indeed there were none to pursue him. Some helped his flight; others felt sorry for him.
     
    Some details could have been reconstructed after the body was discovered, such as the breaking of the arrow shaft, but most of William of Malmesbury’s account must have been fabricated – unless there were really several people present at the scene.
    Even the location has been disputed. The three-sided Rufus Stone, actually a mid-nineteenth century replacement made of cast iron, is generally thought to be close to the spot in the forest where the king fell. It bears the following wordy inscription dating from 1865:
     
Here stood the oak tree on which an arrow shot by Sir Walter Tyrell at a stag glanced and struck King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, on the breast, of which he instantly died, on the second day of August, anno 1100. King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, being slain, as before related, was laid in a cart, belonging to one Purkis, and drawn from hence, to Winchester, and buried in the Cathedral Church of that city.’
     
    But not everyone believes that the Rufus Stone was raised in the right place. Some believe the king met his end at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu.
    William Rufus was a horrible man, even by the standards of medieval rulers. He had two surviving brothers, one older and one younger than himself, who both wanted his throne. Both of them had the strongest of motives for wanting him dead. It is not at all surprising that there was a conspiracy to assassinate and replace him. The thing that is most surprising is that after ten years of staving off threats to his safety William went off willingly into the woods with his murderers.
    A curious but significant fact that has been overlooked is that William’s brother Richard died long before (in 1081) at the age of twenty-four – in a hunting accident in the New Forest. Perhaps Henry was remembering this portentous and life-changing event from their younger days when he set up the ‘hunting accident’ in the New Forest for his brother William.

Edward Ii

     
    Like William II, Edward II was an English king who met his end under mysterious circumstances. While William’s death was alfresco, out in the New Forest, Edward’s was a claustrophobic death in a castle dungeon – or so it is thought. The appalling death of Edward II took place on 21 September 1327, in a chamber in Berkeley Castle. The deposed king was forty-three years old, constitutionally strong, and his murderers tried several different ways of killing him before he eventually died. The road to this terrible death was a long and complicated one, involving power struggles among nobles, personal rivalries, personality clashes, heterosexual and homosexual love affairs, and an adulterous queen who was ready to depose her own husband out of revenge.
    Edward II was born in Wales. He was the baby born in Carnarvon Castle to Eleanor of Castile in 1284 and presented to the Welsh by Edward I as their Prince of Wales. He was seen as a weak king because he preferred quiet rustic pursuits to soldiery; indeed he would probably have