Edward II: The Unconventional King (49 page)

Pretending that the king was dead gave Roger Mortimer and Isabella all the advantages of a truly dead king without the disadvantages of committing regicide and, in Isabella’s case, the murder of her own husband. There is nothing to suggest that the queen, despite her rebellion against the Despensers and by extension Edward, desired his death, or that she was under Mortimer’s thumb and would have stood by without protest as he had Edward murdered. It is far more probable that she refused to allow him to be killed and demanded that another solution be found.
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Isabella was never accused of any role in it, and although it is understandable that Edward III might wish to draw a veil over his mother’s complicity in his father’s murder, her affectionately referring to Edward in 1325/26 as her ‘very sweet heart’ and her ‘very dear and very sweet lord and friend’, publicly grieving for the collapse of their marriage and avenging herself savagely on the man she held responsible for it, sending Edward gifts and wishing to visit him in 1327, suggest that she still loved him, not that she loathed him and wanted him dead. It is a huge step from anger and grief to having your husband and the father of your children killed in cold blood, and there is no evidence that she ever took this step. Isabella, daughter of two sovereigns, sister of three kings, who knew from the age of three that she would marry Edward and be his queen, was a woman with a profound and sacred sense of royalty, and it is hard to imagine how she could have tolerated the murder of a man as royal as she herself. After Isabella and Mortimer fell from power, her son Edward III treated her with every respect, and she lived an entirely conventional life as a dowager queen. She was not, as is still often stated today, locked up at Castle Rising and she did not go mad. She died at Hertford Castle in August 1358 and was buried at the Greyfriars church in London with the clothes she had worn at her wedding to Edward in 1308, and with his heart on her breast. It is merely a romantic myth that she chose to lie next to Roger Mortimer; he was buried in Coventry.
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The fact remains that a body was buried at Gloucester in December 1327, and if it was not Edward II’s, whose was it? This is a question we unfortunately cannot answer; likewise, we cannot know whether the man standing in for the former king died naturally or not. Edward himself thought the sleeping castle porter he killed was buried in his place, but it seems unlikely that such a man would fortuitously resemble him closely enough to be passed off as him. Edward was tall and uncommonly strong. Then again, we know from tomb excavations that Hugh Despenser’s nephew Hugh Hastings stood five feet ten inches, and Archbishop William Melton, who came from a humble family in Yorkshire, was six feet tall.
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Clearly men of such height were not unknown in England in the early fourteenth century, and not only among the nobility. As the body at Berkeley was almost certainly embalmed shortly after death and covered with waxed cloth, including the face, it need not have resembled Edward too closely as long as the height more or less matched. Even if the face was visible, pale and sunken in death it might still have fooled the visitors who only saw it superficially. Or perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps one of the knights or abbots who saw it told the earl of Kent or others of his suspicions. For the first month after death, the sergeant-at-arms William Beaukaire, who had been pardoned at Hugh Despenser’s castle of Caerphilly some months before, guarded the body, presumably to stop anyone examining it too closely, before it was carried on a funereal carriage to Gloucester.

In working out what might have happened to Edward II (though we can only speculate), we can try to combine the information given by William Melton and Manuel Fieschi in their letters. Melton claimed that Edward was in a safe place at his own wish or command, Fieschi that Edward escaped from Berkeley and went to Corfe with a servant, where he was received in the prisons there. It is hard to imagine that Lord Berkeley didn’t send out search parties for Edward or that he could have remained at Corfe, which had a garrison and people often coming and going, without being spotted. And yet if Edward genuinely was alive, as so much evidence indicates, plans must have been made to fake his death, remove him from Berkeley and hide him elsewhere. We can try to reconcile the information given by Melton and Fieschi: a possible scenario is that Edward was allowed to ‘escape’, but himself genuinely thought he was escaping, so that the story he told Fieschi was true, so far as he knew. This could also explain Melton’s belief that Edward was in a safe place by his own doing, which he had heard indirectly from Edward himself. Moving Edward through the countryside from Gloucestershire to Dorset with a large armed guard would be noticed, but his travelling in the company of only one man would attract little or no attention, so it may be that this was one reason for his ‘escape’ and that the unnamed servant mentioned in the Fieschi letter who helped him was in on the plot. The usual men on watch at Berkeley Castle would have been removed from duty, with only one porter remaining so that Edward would not be suspicious about being allowed to walk out of the castle too easily. Perhaps a man was intentionally chosen for his height, so that if he died during Edward’s supposed escape, his body could be used in place of the king’s. The servant would have instructions to take Edward to Corfe, perhaps by telling him he had supporters waiting there. At some point Edward heard of ‘his’ funeral held at Gloucester and that his heart had been sent to Isabella. Somehow the news that he was at Corfe got out and in 1328/29 reached the ears, by different information sources, of Edward’s brother Kent, the archbishop of York and others. Although Edward thought he was free, in reality he was still under guard with the knowledge of some of the Corfe garrison, until Kent and others came close to freeing him in early 1330. At this point, Edward was taken to Ireland, and from there ultimately to Italy, as the rest of the Fieschi letter tells us. It is likely that at no point in his afterlife was Edward genuinely free, but always watched very closely, if not exactly incarcerated. He met the pope in Avignon in 1331 and his son in Koblenz in 1338, taken there by Francisco Forcetti, and at some point in around 1335 met Manuel Fieschi and told him his story.

Taken individually, all the pieces of evidence that Edward II survived past 1327 could be explained away, if we wish. Kent, Melton, Mar and their many supporters were misled by false information and, fond of Edward, carried away by their own wishful thinking. Manuel Fieschi was taken in by a well-informed impostor. Thomas Berkeley told parliament that he hadn’t previously known that Edward was murdered and his words were written down confusingly. William the Welshman was a deluded subject of Edward III whom the king spent time with and magnanimously forgave for pretending to be his royal father. But taken as a whole, the pieces build a very strong picture that Edward II did not die at Berkeley in 1327. So, then, where did he die? Most probably in Italy, in the hermitage of Sant’Alberto di Butrio high in the hills near Cecima in the province of Pavia, where Manuel Fieschi says he lived. Both the Val di Magra where Edward first went or was taken (where Mulazzo is located) and the area around Cecima were then dominated by the Fieschi family, and the sergeant Francisco Forcetti also had ties to the Val di Magra.
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An empty tomb in the hermitage of Sant’Alberto is claimed as Edward’s to this day and shown to visitors, and it has long been accepted in Italy that Edward died in that country.
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Or perhaps his body was returned to England and buried in his tomb at Gloucester after all, and his heart removed to be sent to Isabella for her to be buried with later. Edward III made a pilgrimage to Gloucester in March 1343, the first time he had visited since 1337.
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. We cannot know for sure when Edward died, though Ian Mortimer has suggested 1341 or early 1342, as the early 1340s saw a flurry of Edward-related activity: Queen Isabella founded a chantry in Coventry in 1342 to pray for the soul of her husband; as noted, Edward III made a pilgrimage to Gloucester in 1343; and at the parliament of May 1343, the king passed on the title of prince of Wales, the one title his father had never given up to him, to his eldest son.
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Edward of Caernarfon would then have been in his late fifties.

Objections to the idea that Edward lived on in Italy after his ‘death’ are usually rooted in incredulity. The red-hot poker story has been repeated as fact so many times that it can be difficult to grasp that it didn’t happen. Throughout history there have been other tales of famous people living on secretly after their deaths, which understandably leads many people to the conclusion that Edward’s story must likewise be a myth; but Edward’s afterlife was testified to by an archbishop, bishops, earls and many others who knew him well. It is also hard for some to imagine that a king, especially one as extravagant as Edward, might have been able or willing to live in obscurity and as a hermit at that. But Edward was sincerely pious, he loved the outdoors, he loved spending time at monasteries: in 1300 when he was sixteen, he stayed at St Edmund’s Abbey in Suffolk for a week longer than he had to, enjoying the daily routine, the food and the company of the monks. In 1318 a cleric complained that Edward spent too much time in religious houses, and he always enjoyed spending time with and befriending religious men.
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Being king had brought Edward little but terrible unhappiness. He lost two men he loved dearly, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser, and the company of his wife, his children, his beloved sister Mary and niece Eleanor, everyone else he loved. He had been rejected by his kingdom, humiliated at Bannockburn and elsewhere. Why would he have wanted to rule again? Although Edward was not a man given to critical self-reflection, even he must have realised in and after January 1327 that both he and his kingdom were much better off without him on the throne. Living out his years peacefully and contemplatively in a distant country, praying, working on the land and making the most of his physical strength, might well have appealed to him greatly. It is entirely fitting that the time, manner and place of death of this most unconventional man should be shrouded in mystery, though wherever his body may truly lie, his magnificent tomb in Gloucester with its canopy and alabaster effigy is one of the greatest treasures of medieval England.

Edward II was an exasperating and flawed man who failed as a king and as a war leader. Left an extremely difficult legacy by his mighty father, forced to try to fill a role he had little aptitude for or interest in, he lurched from one crisis to another until finally he became the first king of England forced to abdicate. Although Edward did have abilities when he chose to exercise them, the personal far too often dominated the political, and Edward the king was unable to put aside Edward the man. He was all too human, and his personality leaps off the pages of history and reaches us 700 years later. Although we must not forget his numerous failings and the misery inflicted on many of his subjects during his reign, especially in the north of England, we can bear in mind that he was born into his position, he did not choose it, and therefore try to judge him less harshly than his contemporaries and many historians have. He was not an evil man or one who set out to make anyone suffer; it was his misfortune and his kingdom’s that he was born into a hereditary monarchy and had no other choice than to succeed his father. He gave England one of its greatest kings, his son Edward III, through whom he is the ancestor of a huge percentage of the English population alive today, and of millions of others around the world. Edward II’s story is part of our collective story.

1. Edward’s tomb and effigy in Gloucester Cathedral.

2. Edward’s tomb and effigy, with his feet resting on a lion. (Photos by author, with permission of the Very Reverend Dean of Gloucester)

3. Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, where Edward was forced to abdicate in January 1327. (Courtesy of Steve Taylor under Creative Commons)