The Liquor-Soaked Death of Charles II of Navarre

WHAT CAUSED Charles II of Navarre, who supposedly burned to death, to earn the nickname "Charles the Bad?" Kings are not, as a rule, especially good. There was King John, for example, who murdered his nephew to get the throne, and besides that, locked his wife and son in Windsor Castle and left them to starve. They did, but not before his wife had partially devoured her son's remains to keep alive. That's pretty bad. Then there was Stephen of England, who was widely regarded as the worst king in the country's history of bad kings. Stephen was so incompetent (historian Walter Map, who was born shortly after Stephen died, called him a "simpleton") that his two-decade rule was mostly notable for a vicious civil war popularly called "The Anarchy." The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a series of historical documents, commented sternly on Stephen's blood-drenched reign: "men openly said that Christ and his angels slept." That's pretty damning, but Stephen, as bad as he was, isn't remembered by history as "Stephen the Bad."

No, that title belongs to Charles II of Navarre. At first, it's not even clear how he earned such a hateful sobriquet. After all, Navarre is a pretty small area of the world: Currently a province of Spain, Navarre is about half the size of the San Francisco Bay Area. Charles II lived between 1332 and 1387, and his life is marked mostly by petty squabbles over land, hardly worth noting. (His death, on the other hand, is worth comment -- we'll get to that in a moment.) He was a direct descendant of King Louis X, and longed to rule France. He may have been involved in an assassination of a French constable, leading John II, his own father-in-law, to attack Navarre, a small war whose peace was only brokered by Charles II aligning himself with Edward of Woodstock, the Prince of Wales, who was ominously known as the Black Prince. Charles II also had the bad taste to align with British against his native France during part of the Hundred Years War. For a brief while, Charles II seized control of Borgogne, then called the Duchy of Burgundy; and, yes, it is where the wine comes from. Charles II didn't remain in France long, however, and lived the remainder of his life in relative obscurity.

All in all, Charles II lived a pretty usual monarch's life. This sort of internecine squabbling over land has always been common among royals -- it's hardly the sort of thing that would attract much notice. Charles II wasn't known for murdering a progression of his wives, or children, or political enemies, if you ignore the French constable. He may not have been an excellent king in Navarre, but he wasn't an especially bad one, either, and, really, how much of a difference does it make to the rest of the world what happened in Navarre in the 1300s. He was a petty tyrant and lived the life of a petty tyrant, and yet, somehow, he's stuck with an ignominious nickname. He is Charles the Bad. His nickname dates back as far as 1357, and probably has much to do with his ongoing unpleasantness toward France. But, as far as we are concerned, the worst thing about Charles II was his death.

It's hard to find reference to the monarch's terminus. The only source we could turn up was in a book called Paris As It Was and As It Is, a series of letters written by an Englishman, Francis W. Blagdon, in 1801. The tale may be apocryphal, but it's a doozy.

Before we quote Blagdon, a word should be said about the medicinal use of alcohol. Spirits were originally distilled by alchemists, who hoped to find the medicinal equivalent of transmuting base metals to gold. They were looking for what they called the "panacea," a potion that would cure all diseases and extend life forever. With distilled alcohol, they thought they had discovered just that. Alcohol was prescribed as medicine all the way up until the 20th century (even during Prohibition, medicinal alcohol was legal, and many Temperance activists swilled the stuff while condemning those who drank for pleasure). Because alcohol was thought to warm the body, it was sometimes applied directly to the skin of those suffering ailments that resulted in violent shivering; often alcohol-soaked rags were used in this treatment. And that brings us to the unpleasant death of Charles II. Here is Blagdon's description of the event in full:

Charles the Bad, having fallen into such a state of decay that he could not make use of his limbs, consulted his physician, who ordered him to be wrapped up from head to foot, in a linen cloth impregnated with brandy, so that he might be inclosed (sic) in it to the very neck as in a sack. It was night when this remedy was administered. One of the female attendants of the palace, charged to sew up the cloth that contained the patient, having come to the neck, the fixed point where she was to finish her seam, made a knot according to custom; but as there was still remaining an end of thread, instead of cutting it as usual with scissars, she had recourse to the candle, which immediately set fire to the whole cloth. Being terrified, she ran away, and abandoned the king, who was thus burnt alive in his own palace.

And so Charles II earned his nickname. He might have been Charles the Mediocre in life, but his death, engulfed in flaming rags of alcohol, was very bad indeed. (SPARBER)