All the next day the demeanour of the King continued the same until the evening, when, as they were all at supper, Charles received yet a last warning of his danger from Lillo of Aquila, who was waiting upon him at table.
“Oh, why does your Highness refuse to listen to me?” he whispered. “Fly—fly—there is still time to save yourself.”
But Charles, irritated by Lillo’s persistency, threatened, unless he held his peace, to repeat his words aloud to the King; and Lillo could only bow in submission, whispering as he did so:
“At least, I have done my duty; and now may the will of God be done, likewise, in regard to you.”
At that moment the King rose and confronted Charles with a terrible countenance; so that the latter was now, at last, rudely awakened from his dream of security.
“Ah, traitor, now I hold you in my hand!” cried the King. “Be sure that I will do justice upon you—full justice—for your crimes—your daring to march against my city of Aquila—you, by whose invitation I came to give peace to this miserable land that has groaned so long beneath the burden of you and yours.”
He then went on to reproach Charles with having been, together with his mother’s brother, Cardinal de Périgord, the means of postponing the coronation of Andrew, and so of bringing him to his untimely end; furthermore he accused Charles of designing to obtain the kingdom for himself by his abductive marriage with the Princess Maria, his own, King Louis’, intended bride; which last delinquency had all along rankled fearfully in the King’s mind, so that as he referred to it his voice broke into a shout of fury. And then turning away from the excuses and pleadings for mercy of his victim, he ordered the Voivode, Stephen of Transylvania, to take charge of all the prisoners and to keep them for the night in a room near his, the King’s, own apartment.
The next day King Louis, having visited that balcony in the Castle of Averna from which the dead body of his brother Andrew had been hanged and then thrown into the garden below, sent an order to the Voivode Stephen that he was to have Charles of Durazzo brought by soldiers to that same place and that they were to cut his throat; but the King himself did not stay to witness the execution. And when word of the King’s order was brought to the Voivode he told Charles to follow him, and, together with some soldiers, they went out to the room of the balcony. There the Voivode asked of Charles whether he wished to confess his sins to a priest, who answered in the affirmative, and so one of the monks came to him from the monastery and heard his confession, and absolved him in so far as he was able to do. After which Duke Charles knelt down over against the fatal balcony and commended his poor soul to God, and was killed by having a very sharp knife drawn across his throat (so that his head was nearly severed from his body) by one of the soldiers, whilst another plunged a sword into his heart that he might die quickly. And when the thing was done they threw the dead body of the Duke over the balcony into the garden.
After that King Louis rode away with all his army from Aversa to Naples, being met on the way by a large deputation of nobles and citizens, of whom he took no notice, refusing to acknowledge their greeting or to ride beneath a canopy they had provided for his entry into the capital. On arriving in Naples the King at once gave himself up to the work of vengeance. The first to die was Donna Cancia, who, ever since the death of the other regicides, had been lying in prison; she was burned alive in the Mercato. Soon after Cancia’s death the King ordered the arrest of the Count of Squillace, Godfrey of Marsano, promising to spare him if he would deliver up one of his relations, a certain Conrad of Catanzaro, accused of having been among those privy to the murder of Andrew. To this infamy Squillace consented, saving his life by betraying Conrad to the Hungarian authorities, who had him broken alive, as is related, upon a wheel studded with razor-blades—but I incline to doubt this for more reasons than one.
But instead of assuaging the rage of King Louis, these monstrous executions seem only to have filled him with a further appetite for blood. As during the usurpation of power by Charles of Durazzo after King Andrew’s murder, so now executions multiplied to such an extent that they threatened soon to become the principal medium of government; just as four centuries and a half later, in the time of suppression of 1799, there set in an epidemic of frantic denunciation, the general terror making of society a hot-bed of the basest passions and motives—avarice, cowardice, and hate. And soon the people began to think how they might rid them of the ghastly incubus that had come to prey upon them in the person of the vampire-monarch from Hungary.