Edward II: The Unconventional King (48 page)

Kent’s execution for a non-existent crime would make far more sense if the plot was real, Edward II was alive, and Kent, William Melton and the others really were on the brink of freeing him from Corfe Castle. The merciless speed with which the earl was tried and killed suggests that Isabella and Mortimer knew the plot was a genuine one and nearing fruition. The thought of the former king at liberty outside England, with powerful allies such as the duke of Brabant, the earls of Mar and Buchan and even the pope – Kent claimed to have the support of John XXII, whom he visited to discuss Edward’s ‘deliverance’ in June 1329 – must have been extremely threatening to them. From the evidence we have, it is possible to work out how events were meant to unfold. Simon Swanland’s men would try to gain access to Edward at Corfe and give him the money, clothes and shoes ordered by Melton from Swanland. It may be that Melton wrote to more men he trusted at this time to ask for other provisions to be taken to Edward as well, but the letters have not survived. It may also be that he had heard Edward’s life at Corfe, though safe, was not comfortable, hence his wish to provide warm fur-lined clothes, coverlets and hangings for him, or perhaps these items were intended for the chilly sea journey from Dorset to Sussex in the late winter of 1330. John Gymmynges, another former Despenser adherent and valet of Edward II’s chamber, and his cousin, a monk of Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight, were to provide three sailing vessels to take Edward and the earl of Kent to Kent’s castle at Arundel. Kent evidently had it in mind to be present in person when Edward was freed. A writ to all the sheriffs of England declared that the earl ‘had made alliance on both sides of the sea to assemble a force of men-at-arms’.
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Perhaps he intended to take this armed force and either attack Corfe or, using his authority as a son, brother and uncle of kings, simply demand entry and leave with Edward. The three boats may have been intended to carry the men-at-arms as well as Kent and Edward. Kent’s confession only says that after they had reached Arundel Castle, Edward would have been taken ‘whithersoever should have been appointed’, presumably in consultation with Melton, their other allies and of course Edward himself.
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Unfortunately, Kent made the fatal error of asking his wife Margaret Wake to write a letter to his brother, telling him, ‘I shall ordain for you that you shall soon come out of prison’. He was betrayed by John Deveril and Bogo de Bayouse of the Corfe garrison, who sent the letter to Roger Mortimer.
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The earl, a brave honourable man, died on the scaffold in Winchester on 19 March 1330. He left his heavily pregnant widow Margaret and three small children, one of whom, Joan, was the mother of Richard II.

And there is other evidence which points to Edward II’s survival past 1327. Sometime in the 1330s, an Italian papal notary called Manuel Fieschi, a nobleman by birth and appointed bishop of Vercelli in 1343, wrote a fascinating letter to Edward III. In it, he explained how Edward II escaped from Berkeley Castle in 1327, which story Fieschi claimed to have heard from the mouth of Edward himself. A servant, also called his custodian, told Edward that Thomas Gurney and Simon Bereford were coming to kill him. To save himself, Edward killed a sleeping porter, and, using the porter’s keys to let himself out of the castle, fled with the unnamed servant and went to Corfe, where he stayed for a year and a half. Meanwhile, Edward said, the porter’s body was buried as his at Gloucester. When at Corfe, he heard that his half-brother Kent had been executed, so he left there and went to Ireland, where he remained for nine months, that is, until Roger Mortimer’s arrest and execution in late 1330. Dressed as a hermit, he briefly touched at Sandwich, from where he sailed to Normandy and travelled through France to Avignon, where he met John XXII and spent fifteen days with him, in secret. Edward then travelled to Brabant, Cologne and through Germany to Milan, to the hermitage of
Milasci
(probably Mulazzo in the Val di Magra); he stayed there for two years, and, finally, moved on to the hermitage of Cecima in the diocese of Pavia, where he remained for another two years.
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Although the letter does not state directly that Edward II was still alive at the time of writing, neither does it say that he was dead.

In their belief that Edward died at Berkeley in 1327, many modern historians reject the contents of the letter, but have failed to explain adequately why an Italian churchman would have written such a letter to the king of England had he not firmly believed that his father was alive. Blackmail has been suggested as Fieschi’s motive, but had Edward III known for certain that his father was dead, of course blackmail could never have been effective. Edward II himself, who certainly saw his father’s body in July 1307, would never have been susceptible to a blackmail demand over Edward I still being alive. The mere existence of Fieschi’s letter implies that that it was known to at least some people in Europe that there was doubt over Edward’s death and that Fieschi knew Edward III had not properly seen his father’s body. Even if we assume that Fieschi was deceived by a clever impostor, though his letter nowhere refers to the man he met as such – he calls him ‘your father’, i.e. Edward III’s – this still implies his uncertainty about whether Edward had truly died in 1327 or not, and he must have had some reason for this doubt.

The letter contains a chronological error: Kent’s execution followed two and a half years after Edward’s supposed murder, not eighteen months as the letter states, though perhaps this is just a scribal error. The letter is in some ways problematic, for example the notion that Edward could escape from Berkeley simply by killing one man. After the Dunheveds successfully attacked the castle and seized Edward, it is most unlikely to have been guarded by only one porter, who moreover was asleep at the time. Edward’s fleeing to Corfe Castle, and staying there for so long without the garrison noticing or recognising him, is also hard to explain. The letter names Thomas Gurney and Simon Bereford as Edward’s would-be killers, though the November 1330 parliament found Gurney and William Ockley guilty. Then again, Simon Bereford was condemned to death at this parliament for aiding Roger Mortimer in all his felonies, including presumably the murder of Edward II. Edward knew Gurney and Bereford, who were knights, but surely had no idea who the man-at-arms Ockley was, and if we assume that Edward really did meet Manuel Fieschi, perhaps he heard that Gurney had been sentenced to death for his murder and that Bereford had been executed, and put two and two together. The detail in the early part of the letter, which describes Edward’s attempt to sail from Chepstow in October 1326, being captured by Henry of Lancaster in Glamorgan and escorted to Kenilworth and later Berkeley, ‘his’ heart being sent to Isabella, John Maltravers being at Corfe in September 1327, is accurate and much of it could not have been known to an outsider. Edward’s putting to sea at Chepstow on 20 October 1326, for example, is mentioned in no chronicle and is known only from his last chamber account, which fortunately still survives.
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If the man who met Manuel Fieschi and told him this story was not Edward II, he must have been someone very close to him.

There is another Italian connection with Edward. When his son Edward III was in Koblenz, Germany, in September 1338, his wardrobe book records a payment to William le Galeys, ‘who says he is the king’s father’ and who was taken to Edward III by Francisco the Lombard, i.e. of Lombardy in Italy. At Antwerp a few weeks later, the same man, now called Francekino Forcet or in modern spelling Francisco Forcetti, received money for his expenses looking after William le Galeys, who ‘calls himself king of England and the father of the present king’. The name le Galeys means ‘the Welshman’, and Edward II was of course born in Wales.
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As with the Fieschi letter, there is nothing in Edward III’s wardrobe book which names le Galeys as an impostor or says that his claim to be the king’s father was false, and the keeper of Edward III’s wardrobe, William Norwell, had known Edward II well and served him from 1313 onwards.
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At a time when royal pretenders were almost invariably executed, as with John of Powderham in 1318, William le Galeys met Edward III at the king’s expense and spent time with him and perhaps Queen Philippa (Edward and Philippa’s son Lionel was born in Antwerp in November 1338).
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Almost certainly le Galeys was the same man who met John XXII and Manuel Fieschi. Two of Edward II’s closest friends bore the name William, the archbishop of York and the abbot of Langdon, so if William le Galeys really was the former king, this might explain the name he took.

One final piece of evidence to consider in relation to Edward II’s survival is the testimony to the November 1330 parliament of Thomas, Lord Berkeley, Edward’s joint legal custodian at Berkeley Castle in 1327. Lord Berkeley’s father-in-law Roger Mortimer was sentenced to death at this parliament, and executed on 29 November. Berkeley’s brother-in-law and Edward’s other custodian, John Maltravers, was sentenced to death in absentia for his role in the entrapment and execution of the earl of Kent some months before, as were John Deveril and Bogo de Bayouse. Thomas Gurney and William Ockley were also condemned to death in absentia because they ‘falsely and treacherously murdered’ Edward II. Berkeley was asked how he wished to acquit himself of complicity in the king’s death. His very odd reply, as recorded by a clerk in Latin, was: ‘He never consented to his death, either by helping or by procuring it, and he never knew of his death until this present parliament.’
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Lord Berkeley thus stated that he hadn’t known Edward II was dead until he came to parliament, when the king was meant to have died in his own castle more than three years previously. Berkeley’s words have often been translated and interpreted over-elaborately to make them fit into the notion that Edward was killed at Berkeley Castle: that Lord Berkeley really meant he didn’t know Edward had been murdered, or that he didn’t know the circumstances of his death. His words, however, simply mean ‘he never knew of (or about) his death until the present parliament’. No more, no less.

It is true that no fourteenth-century chronicle says that Edward survived, and all say he died in 1327, giving a wide variation of causes of death, including that he died naturally or of illness or grief. This wide variation, in fact, demonstrates how little faith we should place in chronicle evidence for Edward’s supposed death. None of them knew what happened at Berkeley and they were merely repeating stories they had heard or giving what they thought was a plausible explanation for the sudden death of a previously strong and healthy forty-three-year-old king. The people who knew about Edward’s death or otherwise, Mortimer, Berkeley, Maltravers, Gurney, Ockley and probably Isabella, never spoke publicly about it, and chroniclers were as prone to believing and repeating mere rumour as anyone else, and frequently did so, especially near the end of Edward II’s reign. Men who knew Edward well and cared about him, such as his half-brother Kent and his loyal friends, such as the archbishop of York, Stephen Dunheved, the earl of Mar and the abbot of Langdon, are a more reliable source for what happened to him than chroniclers who never saw him and in many cases were writing decades later and hundreds of miles away. Even Adam Murimuth, the only chronicler in the south-west of England in September 1327 (albeit almost a hundred miles away from Berkeley, in Exeter) changed his mind about the cause of death, saying at first somewhat cryptically that Edward died ‘by a trick’, then later that he was suffocated. Clearly Murimuth, though a clerk in royal service, had no more reliable information than anyone else, and also wrongly thought that Maltravers was one of Edward’s killers. It was widely believed in 1327 and beyond that Edward was dead, as the information came from seemingly the most authoritative source there could be, his son the king himself. Yet the young Edward III immediately began spreading the news solely on the basis of Thomas Berkeley’s letter, long before he could have sent anyone to Berkeley Castle to verify that it was true, and there is no evidence that he ever sent anyone there at all to see his father’s body. And here came Thomas Berkeley to parliament three years later and announced that despite sending this letter, he had not previously known of the former king’s death. As Ian Mortimer points out, ‘the whole edifice of chronicle and record evidence that Edward II died was founded on a deception’.
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Having accepted in 1327 that his father was dead and spread the news without checking, having attended Edward II’s funeral and marked the anniversary of his death every year, Edward III had no choice in 1330 but to continue the charade. To this end, Thomas Gurney and William Ockley were convicted in parliament of having killed him, but evaded execution. Roger Mortimer, also charged with Edward’s murder, was hanged, but he was convicted on thirteen other charges which demonstrate Edward III’s fury at his mother’s favourite usurping his royal power. The young king was always going to execute Mortimer; adding the charge of killing Edward II made no difference, and confirmed in people’s minds that the former king truly was dead. The last thing Edward III would have wanted was for him to be known to be alive, which might have resulted in civil war and the young king accused of treason, even forced to give up his throne to his father. Edward II’s deposition was of very dubious legality and it was by no means impossible that he could have made himself king again, though whether he would have wanted to is another matter. Still, Edward III could not take the risk.

The main reason why Edward was murdered in 1327, so the argument goes, was that a deposed king is always dangerous, and that the plots to free him and perhaps restore him to the throne threatened Isabella and Mortimer, who thus had him killed to safeguard their position and that of Isabella’s son. Edward II restored to power would certainly have had Mortimer cruelly executed and probably made strenuous attempts to have his marriage to Isabella annulled, so on the face of it they did have a strong motive to want him dead. The earl of Kent, however, knew Isabella (his sister-in-law and first cousin) and Mortimer very well, as did William Melton, and evidently they had good reasons for believing the pair had not had Edward killed. A motive to kill, or what we perceive with centuries of hindsight to be a motive, is not evidence, and when examining Edward II’s deposition and presumed death we must remember that the murders of other deposed English kings, Richard II, Henry VI and Edward V, lay far in the future. Simply because we know that their successors had these later kings murdered to protect themselves does not necessarily mean that in 1327 anyone in England assumed Edward II should suffer the same fate. Edward’s deposition was a new and revolutionary act in England, which we must not forget in the knowledge that it later became reasonably common. Henry IV had his cousin Richard II killed in 1400, and Edward IV his more distant cousin Henry VI killed in 1471, but Edward II was succeeded by his son, who was no patricide and who would be sure to punish anyone who hurt his father when he came of age.