Charles the Bad’s Death Was as Horrible as His Life
Charles the Bad (1332 – 1387) was a French magnate with extensive holdings in Normandy and other parts of France. In 1349, he became king of Navarre, a small kingdom on the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain. He was known as “the Bad” because of his intrigues, bad faith dealings, betrayals, dishonesty, and double crosses.
He plotted with the English to betray France during the Hundred Years War, leading to his arrest and imprisonment by the French. Charles escaped from prison and 1357, and began a series of intrigues with a variety of French parties, betraying nearly all, one after the other. As a result, Charles was forced to renounce most of his holdings in France. In 1378, he was forced to cede his remaining French holdings when new treachery was unmasked, in which Charles not only planned to betray France to the English, but to also poison the French king while at it.
Charles’ reputation was no better in Spain, where he allied with Peter the Cruel of Castile against Peter IV of Aragon in 1362, only to switch sides the following year. Castilian armies invaded Navarre and Charles was forced to flee. Out of allies, having betrayed them all, Charles was forced to agree to a humiliating treaty that reduced him and his realm to Castilian clients.
His end came in 1387, when an illness led a physician to prescribe that he be swaddled from head to foot in linen steeped in alcohol. A maid, tasked with securing the linen snugly around the king’s body by sewing it in place with yarn, discovered that she had no scissors with which to snip the excess yarn. Improvising, she reached for a candle to use its flame to burn off a section of yarn. The alcohol-infused cloth caught on fire, and Charles the Bad, tightly swaddled in the burning linen, was unable to escape. He suffered horrific burns, and lingered for weeks in extreme agony before finally succumbing.