The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (35 page)

That night the English encamped in a bitter mood. The Scots, seeing their advantage, decided to keep them up all night. They built huge fires and blew their trumpets and screamed and howled to keep them awake. Morale in the English camp sank; nor did it rise much the next day. The English feigned a frontal attack while an ambush of a thousand men was sent around to attack the Scots from the rear, and to force them closer to the river. But the Scots discovered the ruse, and made to ambush the would-be ambushers. The English advance party was called back. A few men were killed or captured: nothing was gained.

The following day was 1 August, St Peter’s day, and the fourth anniversary of Roger’s escape from the Tower. Perhaps he reflected that his living conditions were hardly any better than they had been in 1323. At least as a prisoner he had been able to sleep. Again, that night, the Scots did all they could to prevent the English from getting any rest.

After three days of this constant harassment by day and night, the English raised their weary heads to behold a bare hill. The Scots had gone. In the middle of the night Douglas and Randolph had led their men several miles along the river to another wooded hill, one even more defensible than the first. The few Scots whom the English had managed to capture in their skirmishes had let on that the Scots were short of bread and wine, although they did have plenty of cattle to eat. It was resolved once more to starve the Scots from their position. The English army shifted camp, to stop the Scots coming and going. Apart from the odd skirmish, nothing happened for eight days.

One night, when the English were being allowed a good night’s sleep for a change, Sir James Douglas secretly led five hundred mounted men across the river.
³⁴
He led them a long way around the English camp, to the far side, and ordered half of them to draw their swords to cut the guy ropes of the English tents; the other half were to have their spears ready, to stab down on the bodies sleeping beneath. According to the Scottish patriot Barbour, as Douglas rode to the English camp he heard a soldier saying how he wanted to stay in the north no longer, for he was much afraid of Black Douglas, to which Douglas replied ‘You have good cause!’ as he killed him. With Douglas blowing his horn, the Scots galloped through the camp, slashing with their swords and stabbing with their spears by the light of the English fires. Sir James was heard yelling, between blasts on his horn, ‘Douglas! Douglas! You will all die, you English barons!’ Even the king’s tent was attacked: two or three of the guy ropes were cut, and the king was shaken badly. Douglas was attacked by a man with a club on his retreat and was wounded and thrown from his horse, but his men
piled towards the sound of his horn, and his assailant was killed. As suddenly as they had arrived, the Scots vanished back into the night.

Thereafter the English once again chose to sleep in their armour. They posted heavy guards on all the approaches to their camp, but no further attacks were staged. On 6 August they captured a Scot who told them that that night the army had been ordered to follow Sir James Douglas’s banner wherever it went. He knew nothing more than this. The English leaders were sure that this meant they would be attacked, and so drew up in readiness, fully armed, in their battle formations. The Scottish fires burnt late, as usual. But shortly before dawn two Scottish trumpeters came to them and announced that the Scots had left for home some time before midnight. A party of men sent across the river to their camp next morning discovered this to be true: le Bel saw three hundred leather cauldrons full of meat to be cooked. It was a final insult to the English, as if the Scots were even giving them a farewell meal.

Two days later Roger, King Edward and the army arrived back in Durham. They found their carts and wagons there, each stored in a barn with a little flag on it to help identification. After two days in Durham they returned to York, and Roger rejoined Isabella. The army was disbanded. The Hainaulters were promised £4,000 compensation for their horses, along with all their other expenses, and sent home.

It had been an absolute fiasco, and no one tried to pretend otherwise. Whose fault was it? Given the youth of the king, one would normally blame those who had command of the army, in this case the Earls of Lancaster, Norfolk and Kent. But the king himself blamed Roger, who, as we have seen, was effectively in charge throughout. Responsibility for the initial failure to contain the Scots probably lies with him, and he certainly prevented the English army from attacking them at Stanhope. Edward believed that such failure amounted to treason. But in Roger’s defence, it was obvious at the time even to footsoldiers like le Bel that the Scots were in too strong a position for the English to mount a serious attack. In addition, it seems probable that Roger actually wanted the Scots to get away. A massacre of Scotsmen would only provoke reprisals, and he and Isabella were not prepared to countenance year after year of war against the Scots for a few barren acres of no-man’s-land, as Edward’s father and grandfather had done. They were determined to honour an agreement which recognised the independence of Scotland, and this would have been jeopardised by a major battle. Thus Edward was justified in accusing Roger of treason but not of incompetence. Roger’s purposes had been to preserve the king’s life on a sham campaign which satisfied the northerners and did not significantly damage the Scots, and this he had done.

Whatever his private motives, the Weardale campaign was publicly embarrassing for Roger. His lack of official command would have done little to lessen Lancaster’s anger, for example. The escape of the ex-king, although still a secret, threatened to humiliate him further. Back at York he heard from Thomas de Berkeley that Edward had in fact been recaptured and secured, but also that further plans to free him were being made by groups of dissident royalists in South Wales. Over the course of the next few weeks, Roger planned a final resolution to his various problems. He decided that the Exchequer and courts should be transferred to York, where they could be more directly administered while negotiations took place with the Scots. And at the beginning of September, he and Isabella agreed what they would do with Edward II. On the 4th he left the court at Nottingham, ignored his summons to Parliament, and went to South Wales.
³⁵
From there he would order his final solution to the problem of the ex-king.

TWELVE

The King’s Murderer?

POPULAR LEGEND HAS
it that Edward II died in agony in Berkeley Castle with a red-hot spit thrust through a horn inserted into his anus. Various elaborations on this are to be found in a number of chronicles: that he had been kept half-naked in a pool of cold water with corpses floating around him for weeks beforehand; that he was pinioned by cushions (or a door, or a table) while he was skewered, and that his screams as the spit entered his body could be heard over a mile away. The usual explanation for the extraordinary cause of death is that the king’s body would be unmarked when examined. These stories are all characteristic of the vivid popular imagination of the period, and it is tempting to conclude that they are unlikely to be true simply for that reason. But they do have a strong basis in many of the chronicles of the early to mid-fourteenth century, and thus a much closer analysis of these and other sources is necessary in order to determine both what happened and what people believed happened. This narrative of Roger’s life must therefore pause in order to establish the limits of what we can reasonably say about the death of Edward II, with a view to determining the nature and extent of his responsibility.

To begin with the official records, we know that Edward III received news of his father’s death late at night on Wednesday 23 September at Lincoln, the message being carried by Thomas Gurney.
¹
The death was announced publicly on Monday 28 September, the last day of Parliament. It was stated officially that Edward had died of natural causes at Berkeley Castle on the feast of St Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist (21 September).
²
The accounts rendered by Thomas de Berkeley and John Maltravers tally with this date: they claimed £5 a day for their expenses in guarding the living king from the date they received him (3 April) to 21 September, and after that they claimed the same rate for custody of the dead king’s body until 21 October, when the corpse was handed over to the Abbot of St Peter’s, Gloucester.
³
From these accounts we know also that Edward II was embalmed at Berkeley in the month following his death, and that a number of people watched with the corpse in the traditional manner until his burial in December. One of these was William Beaukaire, who most importantly started his period of ‘watching’
on the very day of the king’s death, 21 September, and stayed with the corpse the whole time until the burial.
⁴
In addition there was a clerk of the royal household, Hugh de Glanville, who was commissioned to take the body from Berkeley to Gloucester, and who remained with the corpse from 22 October until the burial. He was responsible for paying all the others staying with the corpse, namely, John Eaglescliff, Bishop of Llandaff, for watching from 21 October to the day of the burial; and Robert de Hastings and Edmund Wasteneys, knights; Bernard de Burgh and Richard de Potesgrave, the king’s chaplains; Bertrand de la More and John de Enfield, the king’s sergeants-at-arms; and finally, Andrew, the king’s candle-bearer. All of these men were with the king’s body from 20 October at Berkeley Castle to the day of the burial at Gloucester.
⁵
Finally, we know from official sources that the body was eviscerated and embalmed by a local woman, not the king’s physician as one might have expected; and we can be sure that her work was carried out at Berkeley, as many of the expenses, including 37s for a silver vase to contain the deposed king’s heart, were charged by Thomas de Berkeley to the royal wardrobe.

Even these few bare facts imply the king died in suspicious circumstances. The first point to note is that only one man, William Beaukaire, participated in the formal ‘watching’ with the corpse before 20 October, and that for the month after the death sole responsibility for the king’s body lay with John Maltravers and Thomas de Berkeley. Beaukaire had been pardoned in March 1327 for defending Caerphilly Castle against the invaders the previous year.
⁶
As a royal sergeant-at-arms, his arrival at Berkeley Castle on the day of the death and his prolonged stay with the body until the burial suggests that the king’s death was premeditated by the person who sent him. It also implies that the person who premeditated the death had authority over sergeants-at-arms of the royal household. The next point to note is that the embalming woman had finished with the body before these other watchers saw it. The embalming process of kings, like most nobles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, involved covering the body with a linen cerecloth (a cloth impregnated with wax).
⁷
Thus any cuts, bruises or other wounds on the body would have been entirely covered before any of the named watchers saw it, with the sole exception of William Beaukaire, who, as we have seen, appears to have been involved in the plot to dispose of Edward II on 21 September.

The question of who sent William Beaukaire to Berkeley is not a difficult one to answer. To begin with, in 1330 Roger was directly accused of arranging the king’s murder by Edward III, and was not allowed to answer
the charge, being found guilty by ‘common knowledge’. While this does not itself prove his guilt, we also know that the king’s imprisonment was entirely controlled by Roger. In addition, Roger was probably in the area at the time, just across the Bristol Channel, supposedly attempting to discover the perpetrators of a plot to bring down the government.
⁸
He returned to court shortly after the death occurred. Roger, of course, also had authority over royal sergeants-at-arms, and could have sent Beaukaire. Even more damning is some evidence given in a 1331 court case in which William de Shalford, Roger’s lieutenant in North Wales, was cited as writing from Anglesey to Roger at Abergavenny on 14 September 1327 with news of a plot being formed to release the deposed king by force. According to the court records, Roger is supposed to have shown the letter to William de Ockley – a member of Roger’s wife’s household at the time of her incarceration, and thus a particularly close family servant – and commanded him to take it to Edward’s guardians at Berkeley with the message that the captors should ‘acquaint themselves with its contents and find an appropriate remedy to avoid the peril’.
⁹
These facts, and Roger’s involvement in removing Edward from Kenilworth against Henry of Lancaster’s will, allow us to be confident that it was William de Ockley who bore Roger’s instructions to Berkeley. In all likelihood, William Beaukaire accompanied de Ockley, and remained with the corpse, to ensure no one inspected it closely before it was embalmed and neatly covered in cerecloth.

So much for the responsibility. What actually happened to Edward is a much more complicated question to answer. It was announced at the time that he died of natural causes, and there was no subsequent official statement as to the cause of his death, not even when those supposedly responsible were tried for his murder in 1330. Thus it is necessary to turn to the various chronicles to establish what was known and what was suspected in 1327.

Before commenting on what the various chronicles say, it is worth first making a general point. Several chronicles of the reign of Edward II were composed or copied several years later by monks who rarely left their monasteries. Some resided two or three hundred miles from Berkeley. They were usually dependent on a variety of sources, including travellers’ tales, official proclamations, and other chronicles. Sometimes, as with the case of the clerk Geoffrey le Baker, a contact was known to the chronicler who claimed to be able to shed light on a story beyond the level of general knowledge, but this was very rare. All the extant contemporary chronicles were compiled by men who had no first-hand or (apart from le Baker) second-hand knowledge of the actual process of Edward’s death, which
was obviously a very closely guarded secret, probably known only to six or seven people. With regard to secret plots, most chronicles reflect contemporary rumour and popular opinion more closely than historical facts. To put the issue in perspective, imagine the results if several amateur historians – perhaps working in retirement homes, which monasteries sometimes were – began to write up accounts of a covert political assassination five, ten or twenty years after the event. Imagine them trying to do the same thing in an age before literacy was common, without television, newspapers, radio or railways.