The King Killed By An Arrow And The Brother Who Profited

On this day, 5 August 1100, a man was crowned King of England in a suspiciously swift succession — just three days after his elder brother, the reigning king, had died in a forest with an arrow through his chest.

The new king was Henry I.

The dead king was William II, known as William Rufus — “the Red.” And whether Henry gained his throne through ruthless luck or murder has been argued over for more than nine hundred years. It remains one of England’s oldest royal cold cases.

William Rufus was the son of William the Conqueror. He was an effective but harsh ruler, heavily criticised by many chroniclers — especially churchmen, whom he had alienated through taxes, political pressure, and his conflicts with Archbishop Anselm. He was not universally hated, but he had enemies. And on 2 August 1100, he rode out to hunt in the New Forest, the great royal hunting ground created by his father.

He was accompanied by a small group of nobles. His younger brother Henry was part of the wider hunting party. So was Walter Tirel — also called Walter Tyrrel — a French nobleman traditionally named as the man whose arrow killed the king.

The Horror

As evening came on, the hunters separated among the trees. The exact sequence is uncertain, because the surviving accounts were written after the event and do not perfectly agree. But the broad facts are clear: William Rufus was struck in the chest by an arrow and died in the New Forest.

Later chroniclers supplied the famous version of the scene. William and Tirel, they said, had been pursuing a stag. The king fired and missed. Tirel then released an arrow that went astray — perhaps after striking a tree, perhaps after glancing from the animal — and hit William in the chest. One account claimed the dying king fell onto the shaft, driving it deeper.

But no contemporary witness left a reliable, detailed statement. Even the famous cry — “Shoot, in the name of God, shoot!” — belongs to later storytelling rather than securely documented fact.

What is not in doubt is that the King of England was dead in the forest. His companions did not mount a public inquiry. Walter Tirel fled to France and never returned to England. Later in life, he reportedly denied that he had fired the fatal arrow.

The king’s body was not given an immediate royal procession. Tradition says it was found by a local charcoal-burner, often named Purkis, who loaded the dead king onto a cart and took him to Winchester. The image is unforgettable: England’s king carried from the forest not by bishops or barons, but by a common man with a work cart. Yet the Purkis story, like much of the episode’s detail, may have grown through later local tradition.

The Modern Relic

The truly suspicious part is what happened next.

Henry did not wait.

Immediately after William’s death, Henry rode to Winchester, where the royal treasury was held. Whoever controlled the treasury had the money to reward allies, secure armed support, and claim the government. Henry seized it.

Then he rode to London.

On 5 August — just three days after William’s death — Henry was crowned King Henry I at Westminster Abbey. He did not wait for Archbishop Anselm, who was in exile. Instead, Maurice, Bishop of London, performed the coronation.

It was breathtakingly fast. It was also politically brilliant.

Henry was not the eldest surviving son of William the Conqueror. His brother Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, had the stronger claim by seniority. But Robert was returning from the First Crusade and could not reach England in time. Henry understood that a crown seized quickly could become a crown defended.

And William Rufus died at exactly the moment Henry needed him to.

So was it an accident — or murder?

The case for accident is real. Hunting with powerful bows in thick woodland was dangerous. Arrow wounds could be fatal within minutes, and accidental deaths on hunts were not extraordinary. William’s older brother Richard had died in the New Forest during a hunt, and a nephew also died there under similar circumstances. The forest had a grim reputation long before William Rufus entered it.

But the case for murder has never vanished.

The man traditionally blamed for the arrow fled overseas. No formal investigation followed. The king’s companions scattered. Henry seized the treasury immediately and took the crown before his absent elder brother could contest it. If Henry had known that William would die, historians argue, his actions afterwards are exactly what we might expect.

Yet those same actions could also belong to a politically gifted prince exploiting an unexpected disaster before someone else seized the kingdom.

No source proves Henry ordered the killing. No source proves Walter Tirel deliberately aimed at the king. And no source can eliminate the possibility that an arrow in a dangerous forest found the wrong target.

Historians still disagree. Some see an accident, followed by Henry’s mercilessly efficient opportunism. Others see the most successful royal assassination in English history — one so well arranged that no investigation was ever allowed to begin.

The relic of that strange evening still stands in the New Forest. The Rufus Stone marks the traditional place where William II fell. The current monument dates from the 19th century, and the exact site of the death is disputed, but the forest still holds the memory of the king who went hunting and never came home.

William Rufus is long dead. Henry ruled England for thirty-five years. Walter Tirel vanished from the story across the Channel. And the central question has survived them all:

Was Henry I simply the luckiest prince in England?

Or did the crown on his head begin with an arrow in his brother’s chest?

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