The Monarchs

The Monarchs: William II (1087-1100) - The Conqueror's Son

William Rufus - the Red - inherited his father's conquered kingdom and ruled it with hard, irreligious energy. Then an arrow killed him in the New Forest, in circumstances debated for nine centuries.

William II is the king history remembers by his nickname and his death. Rufus — the Red — called so for his ruddy complexion or his red hair, he was the second Norman king of England, the son who inherited his father's conquered kingdom and ruled it for thirteen years with a hard, worldly, irreverent energy. And then, one August day in the New Forest, he was struck through the chest by an arrow and killed, in circumstances so murky that historians have argued for nine centuries over whether it was an accident or an assassination.

He is one of the more disreputable and less admired English kings — greedy, brutal, contemptuous of the Church, and, by the standards of his own pious age, shockingly irreligious. The monks who wrote the chronicles of his reign despised him, and their hostile portrait has largely shaped his reputation. But he was also an effective and formidable ruler who held together and expanded the realm his father had won, and the real William Rufus is a more capable, if no more likable, figure than the villain of the monastic sources. His reign, and above all his mysterious death, remains one of the intriguing puzzles of the Norman age.

Key Facts

Reigned: September 26, 1087 to August 2, 1100
Born: around 1056 in Normandy
Parents: William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders
Second son of the Conqueror, inheriting England while his elder brother took Normandy
Never married and left no children
Began the building of Westminster Hall, the greatest surviving monument of his reign
Died: August 2, 1100, shot by an arrow in the New Forest; buried at Winchester Cathedral

The Conqueror's Chosen Heir

William Rufus owed his throne to his father's judgment and his elder brother's disfavor. William the Conqueror had several sons, and on his deathbed in 1087 he made a fateful division of his dominions. To his eldest son, Robert Curthose — with whom he had quarreled bitterly and who had even rebelled against him — he left the patrimony of Normandy, the ancestral duchy. But England, the great prize he had conquered, he left not to Robert but to his second surviving son, William Rufus, who had remained loyal. The youngest son, Henry, received only silver.

This split of England from Normandy was a recipe for conflict, and it dominated the politics of the age. Many of the great barons held lands on both sides of the Channel and now owed allegiance to two different lords, brothers who were rivals. Early in his reign, Rufus faced a serious rebellion by barons who wished to reunite the two territories under his elder brother Robert. Rufus crushed it, and thereafter he turned the tables, waging war to bring Normandy under his own control. When Robert pawned the duchy to raise money to go on the First Crusade in 1096, Rufus effectively took over Normandy as its ruler, reuniting his father's dominions under his own hand. He was, in this, a capable and aggressive ruler who not only held England but extended his power — a real achievement that the hostile chroniclers tend to underplay.

William II, Rufus, in a later engraving - the second Norman king of England

The Rule of Rufus

William Rufus was, above all, a soldier and a man of the world, with little use for the piety and moralizing of the age. He was a strong and effective king who kept firm order in England, defended and expanded his borders — pushing against the Welsh and the Scots and securing the north — and ran an efficient, if rapacious, government. He was well served by a ruthless and brilliant administrator, Ranulf Flambard, who devised ingenious and much-resented methods of squeezing money out of the kingdom to fund the king's wars and his lavish court.

It was Rufus's relationship with the Church that most blackened his name. He was widely regarded as irreligious, even blasphemous — he mocked sacred things, doubted openly, and treated the Church primarily as a source of revenue. He deliberately kept bishoprics and abbacies vacant after their holders died, so that he could pocket their rich revenues for the crown — a cynical and lucrative abuse that scandalized the faithful. His quarrels with Anselm, the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury, over the rights of the Church versus the crown grew so bitter that Anselm went into exile. Since it was churchmen who wrote nearly all the surviving accounts of the reign, it is little wonder that William Rufus comes down to us as a monster of greed and impiety. The portrait is real but partial: to the monks he was a villain, but as a king he was formidable and largely successful.

Westminster Hall

Amid the wars and the exactions, Rufus left one great and enduring monument. He built Westminster Hall, begun around 1097, as the centerpiece of a grand new royal palace at Westminster — and it was, when completed, one of the largest halls in Europe, a staggering statement of Norman royal power. When it was shown to him, Rufus is said to have remarked, characteristically, that it was not half large enough, and was a mere bedchamber compared to what he had intended to build.

Westminster Hall survives to this day, its walls essentially those Rufus raised, though its magnificent hammer-beam roof was added later under Richard II. For over nine centuries it has stood at the heart of English public life — the setting of coronation banquets, of the great state trials including those of William Wallace, Thomas More, and Charles I, and of the lying-in-state of monarchs. Queen Elizabeth II lay in state there in 2022. It is the oldest building on the Parliamentary estate and one of the most historically significant rooms in the world, and it exists because a king remembered mainly for his greed and his mysterious death also built on a scale to match his ambition.

The Quarrel with Anselm

The defining conflict of William Rufus's reign, apart from his wars, was his long and bitter struggle with Anselm of Canterbury — one of the greatest churchmen and thinkers of the medieval age, and a figure as saintly and unworldly as Rufus was cynical and profane. Their clash was a clash of opposites, and it did much to fix the king's reputation for impiety.

Rufus had deliberately left the archbishopric of Canterbury vacant for years after the death of the previous archbishop, so that he could seize its enormous revenues for the crown — exactly the kind of cynical exploitation of the Church that scandalized his contemporaries. Only when he fell gravely ill in 1093 and, fearing death, was seized by remorse, did he agree to appoint the reluctant Anselm, a renowned scholar and abbot who genuinely did not want the office and is said to have had the pastoral staff forced into his clenched hand.

Once installed, Anselm proved an immovable defender of the rights and independence of the Church against royal encroachment, and the two men were soon locked in bitter conflict — over Church revenues, over the king's authority, over which of the rival popes England should recognize. The dispute grew so intractable that Anselm went into exile rather than submit to the king's demands. It was a foretaste of the great struggles between crown and Church that would run through the medieval centuries, culminating decades later in the murder of Thomas Becket. To the monastic writers who recorded it, the saintly Anselm driven into exile by the grasping, godless Rufus was the perfect emblem of the king's wickedness — and it is a large part of why William Rufus has come down through history as one of the great villains among England's kings.

The death of William Rufus in the New Forest, 1100, from Bowyer’s History of England

The Arrow in the New Forest

On August 2, 1100, William Rufus went hunting in the New Forest — the great royal hunting preserve his father had created in Hampshire — and he did not come back alive. During the hunt, he was struck through the chest by an arrow and killed. The party scattered in confusion and panic, and the king's body was left where it fell, eventually carried to Winchester on a charcoal-burner's cart, and buried in the cathedral there with little ceremony.

The circumstances have never been settled, and they constitute one of history's enduring mysteries. The official account was that it was a hunting accident — that an arrow, shot at a deer by a nobleman named Walter Tirel, glanced off a tree and struck the king by mischance. Hunting accidents were common enough, and the New Forest was thought unlucky for the Conqueror's family; another of the Conqueror's sons had died there years before.

But suspicion has always clung to the death, for one glaring reason: the person who benefited most acted with remarkable speed and decision. The king's younger brother Henry was in the hunting party that day. The moment Rufus was dead, Henry did not stay to mourn or to see to his brother's body; he rode straight for Winchester to seize the royal treasury, and then to London, where within three days he had himself crowned king as Henry I. This was the behavior of a man who was either extraordinarily quick to seize an opportunity or extraordinarily well prepared for one. Walter Tirel, who supposedly loosed the fatal arrow, fled abroad immediately and never returned, later swearing he had not even been near the king. Whether Rufus died by genuine accident, or was assassinated in a plot masterminded by his ambitious younger brother, will almost certainly never be known. But the speed and ruthlessness of Henry's seizure of the throne have kept the question alive for nine hundred years.

Legacy

William Rufus left no children — he never married, and there was gossip in his own time about his personal life and his all-male, notoriously fashionable court — and so the throne passed to his brother Henry, whether or not Henry had helped it on its way. Henry I would prove a strong and long-reigning king, and it was through Henry's line, and the disputed succession that followed, that England eventually came to the Plantagenets.

Rufus himself is not much mourned or admired. The monastic chroniclers gave him a thoroughly bad press, and his greed, his brutality, and above all his contempt for the Church ensured that his reputation never recovered. He is remembered as a hard, worldly, irreligious king, and as the victim of the most famous mysterious death in medieval English history. But the fuller picture is of a genuinely effective ruler who held his father's conquered kingdom firmly, reunited England and Normandy, kept good order, and built one of the great buildings of Europe. He was not a good man by the lights of his age, and perhaps not by ours, but he was a capable king — and the hall he raised at Westminster has outlasted, by nine centuries, the monks who despised him and the mystery of the arrow that killed him.

Places Connected to William II

Westminster Hall, London. His greatest monument, begun around 1097 and still standing at the heart of the Palace of Westminster — the setting of coronations, state trials, and royal lyings-in-state for nine centuries.
The Rufus Stone, New Forest, Hampshire. A monument marking the traditional spot where the fatal arrow struck him in 1100, deep in the royal forest his father created.
Winchester Cathedral. His burial place; his remains are thought to lie in one of the mortuary chests atop the choir screen, mingled with the bones of other early kings.
The Tower of London. The White Tower, begun by his father, was largely completed in Rufus's reign.
Carlisle, Cumbria. Which Rufus took from the Scots in 1092, securing England's northwestern frontier and founding the city and castle.