Physically, Richard was gorgeous. He spoke fluent French. He even wrote poetry in French. In fact he didn't speal English at all. He was tall and athletic, with red hair and soft grey eyes. He also had a passion for violence and poetry that was the romantic ideal in the 12th century. And most of the press in the English speaking world remains favorable towards Richard even now; but then he only spent 6 months in England in his entire life, so they never got to know him very well.
Richard was the favorite and eldest son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the smartest, most lovely, most duplicitous women of her age and clearly one of the worst mothers ever born. This woman should never have had children. Doctor Phill would have had a field day with her. Richard was also the second son of Henry II, the smartest of the smart and violent Plantagenet Kings. Richard was like his father in every way, except he was more violent and less smart.
With the help of his mother, Richard finally cornered his sick and elderly father and took him prisoner. Richard then had the satisfaction of hearing his father call him “a bast-rd” from his death bed. And you thought you didn't get along with your old man. But it was the rights of nobility that raised Richard's simple neruoses to the level of a full blown psychosis.
Placing a crown on his head instantly converted Richard Plantagenet into Richard I, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Ireland and Cyprus, Count of Anjou and Nantes and Overlord of Brittany, also known as Richard Coeur de Lion, or Richard the Lion Heart.
Richard celebrated his coronation in June of 1189 by having the local Jews, who had showed up bearing gifts for him, whipped and flogged. He followed this by a general massacre of all the Jews in London and in York. Baldwin d’Eu, the Archbishop of Canterbury, summed up Richard's theory of nobility this way, “If the King is not God’s man, he had better be the devil’s”. And Baldwin should know, being the son of a liaison between an Archdeacon and a nun.
The first thing the new King did, after cleaning up all those Jewish corpses, was to lay heavy taxes on everybody to pay for a Third Crusade, to rescue the Holy Land from the Muslims, and to save Richard's immortal soul from punishment for all the sins he had already committed. “I would have sold London if I could have found a buyer,” said Richard, in a statement his loyal subjects in England never heard.
In May of 1191 Richard’s army of 40,000 knights and 40,000 footmen arrived on the island of Cyprus, where Richard threw the local Christian ruler into a dungeon in chains, pillaged the island for even more money and slaughtered any Christian who objected. Being on Crusade not only cleaned up Richard's past sins, it earned him a pass on any sins he might committ while on crusade; the Pope had said so.
After annexing Cyprus as his personal property, Richard then moved on to the Holy Land, where he joined the King of France and other European nobility in slaughtering Muslims, Christians and Jews without discrimination as to race, religion, age or sex. During the siege of Acre Richard had servants carry him about the fortifications in a sedan chair while he took pot shots at the defenders with a crossbow.
When Acre fell, (and while its citizens were being slughtered) Richard’s banner and that of Phillip of France were planted on the cities’ walls. So was the banner of Leopold V, of Austria, who figured he was entitled as the sole representative on this crusade of the Holy Roman Emperor, who had died enroute. But Richard disagreed and had Leopold’s banner torn down. Well, Leopold already had a problem with Richard because Leopold was related through his mother to the ruler of Cyprus, whom Richard had imprisoned. And the instant his banner floated down to the gutters of Acre, Leopold pulled his army out of the Crusade and sailed for home. 
Within a month Phillip of France had also gotten fed up with Richard and he sailed for home, leaving the Lion Heart with only about a third of his army left, and burdened with more than 3,000 Muslim prisoners captured at Acre. The Muslum leader, Saladin, wasn't willing to pay the ransom Richard was demanding, So Richard had all the prisoners executed.
That little faux paux ensured that Saladin, who had been trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the Christians, would continue the war just to make Richard bleed as much as possible. At the same time Richard’s overbearing personality had produced a rebellion in Cyprus, which eventually forced him to sell his island conquest to a cousin.
Richard's arrogance and ignorance also led to the election of the anti-Richard crusader, Conrad de Montforrat as the new King of Jerusalem. That made Conrad the leader of the Christian army, which made him Richard’s boss. And Richard did not like bosses. Richard's participation in the crusades came to a bloody end on April 28, 1192, when Conrad was stabbed to death on the streets of Tyre by two Muslim assassins. So low had Richard’s reputation fallen that everyone assumed (and still assumes, I must add) that Richard had financed the murder. It was all based on flimsey evidence, but with Richard it was always the wise choice to believe the worst. HIs ego had finally run out his string.
In September 1192 Saladin finally decided to provide Richard with enough of a fig leaf to let him escape the hole he had dug for himself. Salidin agreed to allow Christians to visit Jeruselum at anytime of year, something he had secretly negotiated with Conrad de Montforrat, before Conrad had been murdered. Richard could now claim to have secured the religious freedom of the Holy Land, even if nobody outside of Richard's sycophants believed that.
Richard had gone on Crusade with a full war chest, 80,000 men and strong allies in France and the Holy Roman Empire. That money was now gone and most of the army was dead. Richard was leaving the holy land with just a handful of personal bodyguards and with every political power broker in Europe gunning for him. He had to sneak back home. And he didn't make it.
Just before Christmas 1192, at an inn outside of Vienna, his old enemy Leopold V caught up with him. Richard was arrested while dressed as a lowly pilgrim. And it is interesting to note that there was not even a rumor that "the Lion Heart" so much as slapped the men who captured him.
Richard was hustled off to Durnsetin castle, high above the Rhine River. And once he was safely under lock and key Leopold set the price for his release at 65,000 pounds of silver. Who, the nobility of Europe must have wondered, would pay three times the annual income of the English crown to free the most pompous, most arrogant and most violent English King there was?
His mommy, that’s who; Eleanor of Aquitaine laid out her personal fortune, and put the squeeze on churches, the nobility, merchants and peasants from the mountains of Aquitaine to the beaches of Normandy, to the misty shores of Ireland. Of course, at the same time Richard’s own younger brother John, together with Phillip the king of France, were offering 80,000 pounds of silver if Leopold would just hold on to Richard for another year. I guess you could say that Eleanor won this contest, in that, in February of 1194, King Phillip sent brother John the following terse note, “Look to yourself. The devil is loose.”
And so he was. Richard might have wanted to pay back the entire continent for his bad treatment, but his ransom and his own boorishness and love of destruction had bankrupted his own lands, so that he could no longer afford to make war on his neighbors. So for the last five years of his life Richard the Lion Heart had to be content with butchering his own subjects, slaughtering them with all the zeal and blood lust he had once displayed on the international stage.
And then in the spring of 1199 Richard heard a rumor that a cache of Roman gold had been discovered in the Limousin region of the Aquitaine, a region so wealthy (before Richard) that luxury autos of a later age would later be named for it. There was no gold, but Richard the Lion Heart, Richard the Dunder-Head, Richard the Rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread, immediately laid siege to the walled city of Charlus and demanded payment of the non-existant gold. And it during that siege that a brave young patriot named Bertrand de Gurdon pierced Richard’s shoulder with a crossbow bolt. You know how you say to yourself about violent and dangerous leaders, "I wonder why somebody doesn't just shoot him"? Well, somebody finally shot Richard. Gangrene set in and the arrogant jackass was finally dead on Tuesday April 6, 1199, dying in his mommy's arms. As a final insult they buried Richard at his father's feet, in Rouen Cathedral at Fontefrault.
On his deathbed Richard had insisted that the young crossbowman Bertrand was to be pardoned and set free with 100 shillings, but of course that didn’t happen. Instead one of Richard’s captains, named Mercadier, had the boy skinned alive and hanged. It was a fitting legacy for one of the most violent lunatics of the middle ages, made King, as the thinking at the time was, by the grace of God.
- 30 -
Big Jim owned a stable in St. Louis, but that was just his dodge. He was “a born crook” and the high pillow to hundreds of finders, passers, runners, smashers, bindle stiffs, butter and egg men and fake-a-loo artists, in short everyone and anyone who passed the queer soft on to unsuspecting marks. So with Ben doing a decade in the Joliet caboose (above) you would guess that Big Jim would to be looking for a new slant. Instead he came up with a plan that was a real bunny; he would steal the body of Abraham Lincoln, and exchange it for the live body Benjamnn Boyd - plus $200,000, just as an afterthought.
Late in January of 1876 Big Jim reached out to one of his Chicago passers, Ben Sheridan, who was looking for a vacation anyway after getting pinched and jumping bail. Ben was a cool customer and played the Jasper in his fancy suit with a full beard. Big Jim figured him as the man who knew just how far he could push the bulge.
The rectangular granite monument sat atop the highest point in the cemetery. Two curving, confusing corridors met in the center of the marble monument at two rooms. In one room rested the body of Mary Todd Lincoln. In the other rested the President’s sarcophagus.
The monument itself was surrounded by tall oaks that would hide any nighttime visitors. The cemetery was two miles outside of town, the room containing the sarcophagus had but a single padlock on its gate, the groundskeeper lived elsewhere, there were no bulls on duty at night and questioning a custodian revealed that the casket itself had been sealed with simple plaster of Paris.
By the end of June things looked so Jake to Sheridan that he took a night off to relax. And that was when he stuck his foot in it. Drunk on corn in a local "can house" (above), Sheridan boasted to a chippy that on the night of July the third he was going “steal old Lincoln’s bones”. Well, the chippy called copper, which is to say she notified the local bulls, and in the morning the buttons paid a visit to Sheridan’s establishment just to let him know the caper was blown. Big Jim was not happy. He repossessed the liquor stock, locked the tavern tight and ordered the whole crew back to Chicago.
That fall, in the back room of The Hub, a saloon at 294 West Madison Street in Chicago, Big Jim met with his second choice of conspirators; Terrence Mullen (above), the bar owner, and a passer named Jack Hughes (below).
They caught the night train for Springfield and arrived at six on the morning of November seventh, and checked into the St. Charles Hotel. In their luggage they brought a can of blasting powder, a six foot fuse, a small file and a saw. They gang caught some sleep, leaving a call for 10:30 A.M. After breakfast Louis Swegles and Jack Hughs paid a visit to the monument. Hughes assured his fellows they wouldn’t need their tools to open the locked gate on the tomb. “I could fall against it and open it,” he boasted. Terry Mullen wanted to be certain, so that afternoon he stole an axe from a hardware store.
About nine o’clock that night they slipped into the looming silent monument. While Swegle held the lantern, Mullen began to saw through the padlock that Hughes had shown such disrespect for. And almost immediately the saw blade broke. Mullen was reduced to working the padlock with the file. It felt like it was going to take forever.
After waiting a few moments for Swegles to reappear, Hughes and Mullen decided it would be better if they waited outside. They were standing under an oak tree a hundred feet away from the service door when they heard the crack of a gunshot echoing from inside the monument. Being experienced theives, they ran for it. Outside the cemetery walls they boarded the last streetcar for the night bound for downtown Springfield, and heard more shots and shouting behind them. Hughes and Mullen did not return to their hotel, but split up and made their seperate ways out of Springfield on foot.
By November 9th Mullen was back in Chicago, tending bar at the Hub as if nothing had happened. Two days later Swegles reappeared with a harrowing tale of having escaped the bulls by the skin of his teeth. A week afterward Hughes showed as well. They were all thinking themselves very lucky to have escaped the Bulls. 
Oddly enough there was no law in Illinois against grave robbing, so Hughes and Mullen were convicted only of the theft of Lincoln’s coffin, value set at $75.00. They were sentenced to one year each at hard labor and then dissappeared from the pages of history. Big Jim would be convicted in 1880 of a land fraud in New Mexico Territory, and end up serving his time in the Joliet prison, the same institution once occupied by his onetime printer, Ben Boyd.
There Nicolas used his precious funds to buy paper and ink and set himself up in business on the street near the Cathedral of Saint-Jacques la Boucherue, (the butcher) as a scribe. The church (the bell tower, the only remaining structure) was at the center of the Paris market, Les Halles, the “stomach of Paris”, created in 1183 by Philip II. It was the financial core of the metropolis. And Nicolas, surrounded by butchers, bakers and sellers of everything from rare silks to local farmers’ produce, wrote and copied letters for a fee. Any merchant wishing to communicate with his clients or suppliers or debtors outside of Paris would pause at the cathedral the same way later generations would visit a telegraph office. And in time Nicolas moved from being a simple scribe into the greatest and most dangerous opportunity available to an ambitious young Christian in 14th century Europe; usery.
“Nicolas Flamel”, she whispered dramatically, “is the only known maker of the Sorcerer’s Stone.”
As recently as 1311 Pope Clement V had declared that charging interest on a loan was heresy for a Christian, and punishable by death at the stake. It was the function of Jews in medieval Europe to be the money lenders, and they were restricted from doing any other business with gentiles, leaving ambitious Jews little choice but to go into banking or money lending. The only problem was that every time the French nobility found their debts piling up they simply expelled the Jews and seized their property, as did the misnamed “Phillip the Fair” in 1306, Charles VI did again in 1394.
Nicolas’ entry into banking was natural. When writing a letter for a merchant demanding payment of a debt, he would offer to forgo his usual fee in exchange for a percentage of the repayment. If the debt were not repaid Nicolas would not be paid. But by insisting in the letter that any payment be sent to him rather than directly to the merchant, Nicolas insured that his percentage – often upwards of 50% - was paid before the merchant recieved a sou. It was easy to keep this secret since the merchant was a co-conspirator and equally as guilty as Nicolas, in the eyes of the church.
“It is certain that he had been seen often walking along the Rue des Lombards, and furtively entering a small house at the corner of the Rue des Ecrivains and the Rue de Marivault. It was the house built by Nicolas Flamel, in which he died about 1407, and which, unoccupied ever since, was beginning to fall into ruins, so greatly had the hermetics and alchemists of all countries worn away its walls merely by scratching their names upon them…It was supposed that Flamel had buried the philosophers stone in these cellars, and for two centuries alchemists from Magistri to Father Pacificque, never ceased to worry the soil, until the house, so mercilessly ransacked and turned inside out ended up crumbling into dust under their feet.”
About 1370 Nicolas married a widow, Perenelle. They lived frugally in a modest house on the Rue des Escrivains, in order not to attract attention to Nicolas' business - call it the Silas Marner syndrome. They had no children. In 1407 Nicolas built a shop at 51 rue de Montmorency (above,now a restaurant) where he employed other scribes and artists to create illuminated manuscripts. The most promimently dispalyed, no doubt, were the copies of ancient texts of alchemy. On the second and third floors of the house (now the oldest still standing house in Paris) Nicolas sheltered the poor, as he did in several other houses he owned and built in Paris.
‘True, Sir. The two favorite studies of my youth were botany and mineralogy, …I have regretted I were not a man that I might have been a Flamel, a Fontana or Cabanas”
During his lifetime Nicolas endowed large sums to la Boucherue cathedral, and endowed seven churches, fourteen hospitals and three chapels; the church was no more likely to ask questions about the source of that income than a modern politician. 
