Red-haired and royally shafted

Tyrrell steadied himself, drew back his nocked bow and fired at the startled stag. The arrow ricocheted off a tree and plunged deep into William’s chest. William fell from his horse and, for a few lingering moments, bled to death on the forest floor.

The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that updates relating to the podcast, a touch of humour and a dash of "lots more". 27th July 2025.

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Happy Sunday Reader!
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I am lucky enough to live in the New Forest, a National Park planted in the mid-South Coast of England. It has been my home for dog walking and cycling for over 40 years.
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The acidic, nutrient-poor soil has allowed the landscape to remain unspoilt for centuries. The low, rolling landscape and miles of untouched, often boggy heathland are wonderfully preserved, punctuated only by the relaxing tones of a myriad of streams and rivers.

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The forest’s roots go back 10,000 years to the end of the last Ice Age when woodland started to replace the stark tundra landscape. Archaeological evidence indicates a human presence on the forest from the Mesolithic Period (c10,000 - 4,000 BCE).
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In the early 5th century, three Germanic peoples migrated to Britain and settled in different geographical areas; The Angles (‘England’ is derived from ‘Angle-land’) settled in the Midlands and North, the Saxons across much of the South and the Jutes holding one small pocket in the South East and one covering today’s Isle of Wight and parts of Hampshire. The New Forest is situated on the border between Saxon and Jute territories.
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These three populations laid the foundation for Anglo-Saxon England.
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The Anglo-Saxons established settlements across the forest, where their communities flourished for five centuries. However, everything would change with the arrival of William the Conqueror and the Norman Conquest in 1066.
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William proclaimed the New Forest a royal forest, to be cultivated exclusively for royal hunts, with deer and wild boar the favoured game.
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Strict forest laws inhibited the rights of local inhabitants. Settlements that had outlasted Viking raids and numerous royal dynasties were destroyed and depopulated, solely for the pleasure of King William.
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At the time of the 1066 invasion, William’s third son had turned 10 years old. William Rufus - so called for his red hair - lived in Caen in northern France with several siblings. As the third son, William expected to lead a life of relative obscurity. However, when his brother, Richard, died unexpectedly, that was about to change.
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Upon the death of William I in 1087, his titles and lands were divided between Robert and William Rufus. Robert inherited the Duchy of Normandy in France, while William Rufus was granted the Kingdom of England. Robert was resentful, having expected to inherit both Norman and English lands.
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There were also the barons to consider, the noble elite rewarded with large estates in return for their loyalty to the King. Those who held estates in both England and France were unwilling to serve two different masters.

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William Rufus became William II in September 1087. His reign was dominated by crushing rebellions at home, fighting his brother in Normandy and feuding with the clergy as he plundered church coffers. He excelled at making enemies on multiple fronts.
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Rufus sought relief from these constant conflicts by hunting in his beloved New Forest.
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Each hunt was an elaborate affair. The chief huntsman would invite the nobles and organise the dog handlers and beaters.
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The selected few would gather at a nearby hunting lodge. A wholesome breakfast would be consumed, and ‘stirrup cup’, usually wine or port, taken to toast the hunt’s good fortune and strengthen the nerves for the hazardous pursuit ahead.
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The chief huntsman then instructed the hunters on the stag’s location, the deployment of beaters and hounds, and their own positions for the upcoming chase.
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With a blast of the hunting horn, the chase would begin. The eager hounds were set loose and the beaters worked their way through the undergrowth, crying out and beating the earth with their sticks and clubs.

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The noblemen were now committed; their horses saw to that. Beyond pursuing their quarry, riders needed to side-step trees, vault fallen logs and duck low-hanging branches while maintaining their breakneck pace.
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​The quality of their horsemanship was a matter of life or death.
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​Eventually, the panicked animal would burst into a clearing only to face a hail of arrows from strategically positioned archers.
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The stag was rarely lucky enough to succumb to a single blow. More commonly, as he writhed on the ground from multiple arrow strikes, the lead noble would climb down from his horse, raise his sword and plunge it into the stricken beast.
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With the kill complete, the festivities could begin.
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On one such occasion, 925 years ago this Friday, 2 August 1100, William Rufus was enjoying the hunt. He was accompanied by his brother, Henry, his most skilled archer Sir Walter Tyrrell* and a host of his closest noblemen.
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Tyrrell and Rufus charged through the forest amidst the madness of dogs barking and beaters screaming. As a stag appeared in an opening, the king dismounted, putting his hand to his face to shield it from the sun.
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​In a heartbeat, the course of English history was derailed.​
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Tyrrell steadied himself, drew back his nocked bow and fired at the startled stag. The arrow ricocheted off a tree and plunged deep into William’s chest. William fell from his horse and, for a few lingering moments, bled to death on the forest floor.

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The reaction to the incident was as shocking as the incident itself. Leaving the King where he fell, Tyrrell mounted his horse and galloped at full speed non-stop to France, never to return.
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The hunting party scattered - they knew that retribution could be swift and often unrelated to the facts.
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William’s younger brother Henry also bolted. But he wasn’t fleeing. Henry rode hard straight to Winchester to secure the Royal Treasury for himself. Even in the 12th century, those with the money held the power.
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​Henry was claiming the throne while life was draining out of his abandoned brother back in the forest.
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​William Rufus was found later in the day by a bemused charcoal burner. The peasant loaded the dead King onto his rudimentary cart as he would a slaughtered stag; no ceremony, just another dead weight.
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The unexpected delivery of the royal corpse was without precedent. What to do? Rumours of a conspiracy were already circulating. Like a classic Agatha Christie novel, there was no shortage of possible protagonists.
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Walter Tyrrell might have been an assassin acting under orders. William’s younger brother Henry, crowned just days later, had most to gain. Then there were the nobles, the Church and a near-endless litany of haters who would have willingly delivered the fatal arrow.
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William II was buried with undue haste at Winchester Cathedral. No fanfare, no mourning, no tomb. The king who had derided the church, displaced the peasants of the New Forest and revelled in extravagance, had been delivered to a cathedral by a peasant, afforded no pageantry and hastily deposited in an anonymous vault.
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​The king was dead. Long live King Henry I.

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*I have used today’s locally accepted spelling of Tyrrell - for instance, the Sir Walter Tyrrell pub stands close by the understood location of Rufus’ death. Some sources refer to Tirel, Tyrell, Tirell. They are one in the same.

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Dates with History

Today...

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in the small, Dutch village of Groot-Zundert. His family was deeply religious, his father a Protestant pastor.
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Vincent endured a rather bizarre ritual during his childhood. A year to the day before Van Gogh's birth, his elder brother Vincent had been stillborn. Vincent would regularly pass his brother’s headstone, bearing his own name and birthday, as he played in the cemetery.
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While there is no direct evidence linking Van Gogh’s brother’s death to the melancholy that later plagued him, this very personal early encounter with mortality may have shaped both his worldview and his artistic vision.
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Van Gogh’s early career was littered with failure. He failed as an art dealer, a teacher and a preacher. He exhibited erratic behaviour from an early age, marked by unpredictable mood swings and difficulty maintaining relationships.
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Vincent only started painting when he was 27 years old. His brother, Theo, was an art dealer and had encouraged him to pick up a brush, having seen the quality of some of his sketches.

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When Van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886 to live with Theo, he soon fell into a pattern of smoking, heavy drinking and poor eating.
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However, the move had introduced him to the world of Impressionist art. Vincent transformed his painting style.
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The dark palette was abandoned. He would become a master of colour and light. He would use bold, energetic strokes to capture the essence of a scene rather than a literal representation of what he saw.
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Van Gogh emerged as a pioneer in Post-Impressionist art, alongside Paul Gaugin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the father of the movement, Paul Cézanne.
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In December 1888, Van Gogh moved to the small Provençal town of Arles, hoping a change of scenery and fresh Mediterranean air would improve his health. Instead, all he found was isolation and escalating mental illness.
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Despite this illness, or perhaps because of it, Van Gogh produced 187 paintings during his one-year stay in Arles. Among these were a second Sunflower series, seven versions of sunflowers in vases painted simply to decorate his yellow house. In 1987, 'Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers' sold at Christie's, London, for $39.9 million.
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Van Gogh also continued his obsession with self-portraits. In Paris, he had painted himself 28 times. A further seven were to follow.
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These seven self-portraits appear to provide a chronology of Van Gogh's deteriorating health from 1888 to 1889.
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For instance, 'Self-Portrait' (1889) seems to reveal a marked decline in health since 'Self-Portrait as a Painter' (late 1886), his last before leaving Paris. (Take a look at the paintings below.... what do you think?)
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It seems that Van Gogh was painting himself to death.

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The artist Paul Gaugin had joined Van Gogh in Arles, but they clashed immediately.
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This sent Vincent into a spiral of depression. He became moody and argumentative, and his behaviour increasingly bizarre.
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One night, Gaugin stormed out of their apartment. In response, Van Gogh picked up a razor blade and sliced off his left earlobe with surgical precision.
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With blood spraying across his easel, Vincent wrapped the ear in paper, walked through the streets of Arles and delivered the organ to Rachel at a local brothel for safekeeping. Rachel feinted as he calmly left and walked back home.
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The following morning, the police found Van Gogh unconscious with barely enough blood to support human life. But he survived and while recovering, painted more self-portraits, including the iconic ‘Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear’.

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Within months, Vincent had presented himself to the asylum at Saint-Remy where he would paint perhaps his most famous work, ‘The Starry Night’.
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Van Gogh continued to paint prodigiously until 135 years ago today, 27 July 1890.
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That morning, Vincent left his small attic room at the Auberge Ravoux, strolled into the fields just outside Auvers-sur-Oise and shot himself in the chest.
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By nightfall he had staggered home and layed down on his bed. Two days later, 29 July 1890, with Theo by his side, Van Gogh died.

Out of curiosity...​
Although his artistic career lasted only ten years, Van Gogh produced more than 860 paintings.
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However, the European art market wasn’t ready to appreciate Post-Impressionist art. In fact, Van Gogh sold only one of his paintings during his lifetime. ‘The Red Vineyard’ fetched 400 francs in 1890, shortly before his death, worth approximately $2,000 today.
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As a result, Van Gogh struggled financially throughout his life, relying on support from his brother Theo.
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Van Gogh’s final self-portrait, ‘Self-portrait without a Beard’, painted while in the asylum as a gift for his mother, sold for $71.5 million in 1998 (approximately $140 million in today’s money).
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The most ever paid for a Van Gogh was $117.2 million for Orchard with Cypresses in 2022.

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Friday…

Have you ever heard of Hicham El Guerrouj? Neither had I. Hicham is the current holder of the world mile record.
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In 1999, he set a time that was an astonishing 13 seconds faster than Roger Bannister’s famous 1954 achievement as the first to run a mile in under four minutes.
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Nobody remembers who came second.
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And so it was for the American electrical engineer, Elisha Gray, born 190 years ago this Friday, 2 August 1835. In February 1876, Elisha submitted his original patent application for ‘Transmitting Vocal Sounds Telegraphically’. He would be forever remembered as the man who invented the ‘telephone’.
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That is, were it not for the patent submission earlier the same day by a rival for ‘Apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically’.
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As it turned out, that rival submission was 5th in the queue at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Elisha's was 39th.
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The rival’s name - Alexander Graham Bell.
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The relatively unknown Elisha Gray died in January 1901.

Question of the Week

Who was Henry VIII's most trusted adviser? He masterminded the English Reformation, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon?

And Finally…

Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac was a French nobleman born in Paris in 1619 to the Lord of Mauvières and Bergerac and Espérance Bellanger, a King’s Counsel.
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With such esteemed parentage, Cyrano received the best education and unrestricted access to the prominent intellectuals of the day; writers, philosophers, scientists and polymaths.
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Cyrano served in the military as a young adult, most notably as an officer at the 1640 Siege of Arras, 110 miles north of Paris, then part of the Spanish Netherlands.

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This was early in the Thirty Years’ War (yes, it was exactly 30 years duration), where Europe was busy self-destructing as it had done at regular intervals since the Norman invasion of 1066.
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The war was a complicated weave of religious and political disagreements. Although it had started out as a religious dispute, the conflict evolved into a power struggle.
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​Catholic France had joined the Protestant Dutch and Scandinavians at an early stage to fight the Catholic Spanish Habsburgs who held power in the Holy Roman Empire at the time. Too much power.
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The Franco-Spanish War became a sub-plot to proceedings, although it would rage for more than ten years after the Thirty Years War had ended. The Siege of Arras was therefore a sub-sub-plot.
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The French had surrounded the small Spanish garrison town of Arras on 22 June 1640. Ironically, by the turn of August, it was the French who faced starvation as the Spanish forces had cut off their supply routes.
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However, 385 years ago on Sunday, 2 August 1650, François de l’Hospital broke through Spanish lines to resupply the French forces. Inside the garrison, Spanish troops by then were forced to eat rats to stay alive. A week later, the Spanish capitulated.

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Cyrano de Bergerac was wounded during the siege, marking a premature end to his military career. He turned to writing - and, as it happens, Cyrano excelled at that, too.
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He was a pioneer of science fiction but is better remembered for his play, Le Pédant Joué (1654), a theatrical comedy noted for its wit, unbridled imagination, for challenging the conventions of the time and setting the tone for modern satirical works.
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Cyrano may have drifted into obscurity over the coming centuries if it hadn't been for the French poet and dramatist, Edmond Rostand, who wrote a play over 200 years later in his honour.
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As an emerging playwright in his mid-20s, Edmond was inspired by Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac more for his flamboyant style, bravado and wit than for his writing. Rostand’s research would lead to his sixth play, and career-defining work, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ (1897).

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Cyrano de Bergerac was a love story.
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Cyrano possessed every trait of a romantic hero but one: he couldn’t summon the courage to tell his cousin Roxane how much he loved her.
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Rostand personifies Cyrano’s deep insecurity by endowing him with a famously large nose.This exaggerated feature becomes an all-consuming source of self-consciousness for Cyrano.
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Believing his appearance renders him unlovable, Cyrano is unable to declare his love for Roxane, convinced she could never feel the same.
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One day, Roxane asks to meet with Cyrano at the local bakery. Before he can express his feelings, Roxane tells him she has fallen in love with Christian de Neuvillette, Cyrano's fellow soldier in the French Guards.
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Roxane assumed that Christian’s handsome appearance must be matched by an equally poetic soul. In her world, love could only blossom through poetry, intelligence and the intoxicating seduction of language.
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​Christian had the beauty, but not the words; Cyrano had the words, but not the beauty.
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​Cyrano was devastated. Nevertheless, the true gentleman would help Christian win the heart of Roxane. One evening, he accompanies Neuvillette to her house.
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As Christian gazes up at Roxane on her balcony, awkwardly miming his lines, Cyrano hides out of sight and speaks the words she wants to hear, the words that he had so desperately wanted to tell her. The masquerade was working. Roxane was falling deeper and deeper in love.

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The story then moves on to the Siege of Arras, where Cyrano breaks through enemy lines each day to post love letters to Roxane, supposedly from Christian. But they were his words, his letters. Tragically, Christian is killed during the siege.
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In yet another act of selfless chivalry, Cyrano composes a farewell letter from Christian to Roxane. She would keep the bloodstained letter in a silken pouch and perpetually wear it around her neck.
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Roll forwards 14 years. Cyrano continues his weekly visits to Roxane, who has withdrawn to a convent and remains in perpetual mourning for Christian.
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In a cruel twist of fate, Cyrano is mortally wounded when a heavy log falls on him, perhaps maliciously. Despite his injury, he makes one last visit to Roxane.
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As he slumps into a chair, he asks if he can read Christian’s last letter to her. He recites the letter from memory, at which point Roxane realises they were his words all along.
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Roxane had been in love with Cyrano, not Christian.
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​Then Cyrano dies, symbolically standing upright against a tree.
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The real Cyrano de Bergerac died 370 years ago tomorrow, 28 July 1655.
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Out of Curiosity

You may recognise this love story from Steve Martin’s 1987 film adaption, 'Roxanne'.
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The film is a modern take on Rostand’s original play, with Martin playing the role of Charlie, the Fire Chief in a small Washington ski town (Cyrano), complete with an outsized nose, of course. Daryl Hannah plays Roxanne.
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The story has been adapted for film many times, including at least 12 feature films with stars such as James Mason, Gérard Depardieu and Kevin Kline playing the lead role.

Talk to me...

I receive some wonderful feedback from readers who add colour to the historical snippets that I publish. If you have any thoughts to add to some of today’s topics, or from previous weeks, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an email at steve@battingthebreeze.com.
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Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.

Question of the week… answer

Henry VIII’s most trusted adviser throughout the formative years of his reign was Thomas Cromwell.
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Cromwell’s downfall can be traced back to his part in arranging Henry’s marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. Henry found her appearance so displeasing that he was unable to consummate the marriage.

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Cromwell was held responsible. His public humiliation handed political rivals the opportunity to plot his downfall. He was falsely accused of heresy and of scheming to marry Princess Mary, the future Queen Mary I.
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Thomas Cromwell was sentenced to death without trial. The death warrant was signed by Henry VIII himself.
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Four hundred and eighty-five years ago tomorrow, 28 July 1540, Cromwell was beheaded at Tower Hill, London.
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In a darkly ironic twist, Henry VIII married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, on the same day, a few miles up the road at Oatlands Palace, near Weybridge.