Chapter 11

DEPOSITION AND DEATH

A CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION

Isabella, her son Edward, Roger Mortimer and their followers spent Christmas 1326 at Wallingford castle, once the property of Piers Gaveston, earl of Cornwall and more recently the prison of Maurice de Berkeley. Here they were joined by Isabella's younger son John of Eltham and a party of Londoners.¹ This was no mere social visit since John Stratford the bishop of Winchester, the newly appointed treasurer, and the earl of Leicester's son-in-law Thomas Wake had already met the mayor and aldermen of London on business ‘touching the king’:² Edward II, who spent his own Christmas at Kenilworth ‘in great sadness’,³ was the unseen presence at the festivities.

Two big problems had to be addressed by the gathering at Wallingford. One was Isabella's future relations with her husband. The tone of her reply in February 1326 to the archbishop of Canterbury's plea for her to come home from France suggests that she still had a strong attachment to Edward.⁴ However, even supposing that she was not actually Roger Mortimer's mistress, she could hardly return to Edward as his wife, for this in itself would imply that Edward still had some status as king and make it almost impossible to remove him from the throne.⁵ Nonetheless her failure to do so required some public explanation. According to Adam Orleton's later defence of his conduct, composed in 1334, comments about Isabella's failure to visit her husband were already being made at Wallingford, and presumably elsewhere, in December 1326. The question was discussed there by the archbishop of Canterbury,⁶ the bishops of Winchester and Norwich, the earls of Leicester and Kent, and others and it was decided that in order to protect Isabella's reputation Orleton should deliver a sermon explaining the reasons. This he did, ‘neither adding to nor diminishing what was laid upon me’, stating that Edward's cruelty to Isabella made it impossible for her to return to him.⁷ Orleton later vigorously defended himself against the charge that he had said that Edward ‘carried a knife in his hose to kill queen Isabella, and that if he had no other weapon he would crush her with his teeth’, admitting only to saying that Edward's anger was increased by Despenser's death.⁸However, if the Historia Roffensis is to be believed, during the parliament of January 1327 Orleton, with the support of other bishops, did then say that if the queen were to return to the king, he would kill her.⁹

Even this did not end Isabella's attachment to Edward. Again according to Orleton, in April 1327 Isabella told a council held at Stamford that she was ready and willing to visit her husband but was told firmly by the prelates and magnates present that it was out of the question.¹⁰ Although Orleton was abroad at the time, on a mission to Avignon to explain to the pope the recent dramatic events in England,¹¹ his account is generally borne out by the mandate of the archbishop of Canterbury Walter Reynolds to the English bishops on 5 May 1327. Reynolds was anxious to quell the rumours about Isabella's failure to return to her husband, stating that until the kingdom was fully at peace it would be dangerous for her to do so.¹² Edward was probably desperate to see both his wife and his children,¹³ but in the light of the archbishop's mandate Adam Murimuth's claim that Isabella hypocritically refused to see him, while sending Edward delicacies and friendly letters, is not believable.¹⁴ It was of course very much in the interests of those who had gained most by Edward's deposition, especially Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, that once in prison he should stay there without any possibility of restoration or reconciliation, but these facts also offer some defence to Mortimer against the charge in 1330 that he ‘falsely and maliciously initiated discord’ between Edward and Isabella.¹⁵ If Mortimer did so, he was merely repeating and perhaps exaggerating a commonly held opinion of the time.¹⁶

PLANS FOR EDWARD

The other and even bigger question raised during the Christmas council at Wallingford was what to do with Edward II. Now that he had finally been separated from the Younger Despenser he could in principle have been restored to some semblance of power. But Edward's ability to escape control and to exploit any evidence of disunity among his opponents had been shown too often before. The tensions that may already have existed between Roger Mortimer and Henry of Lancaster and which almost led to a renewal of civil war in 1328–9 would probably have surfaced even sooner if Edward II had been freed from Kenilworth. It is unlikely that anyone during that Christmas at Wallingford ever seriously considered this option.

Although Edward II had allegedly already been threatened with deposition both in 1310 and 1321,¹⁷ achieving this with some semblance of legality and consent was far more difficult than removing him from the company of his wife. This was an action for which there was no precedent since 1066 and consequently no procedure. According to a late version of Froissart's Chroniques those present at the Wallingford council were each asked whether Edward should be put to death or imprisoned. The first to be asked was Jean de Beaumont, the brother of the count of Hainault and commander of the mercenary troops who had assisted Isabella's invasion, who replied that Edward was king of England and, although he had acted badly, he had done so as the result of bad advice; it was not for Jean or anyone else to condemn Edward to death. He advised that Edward should be put in a castle, with proper regard to his rank, there to live in reasonable comfort for the rest of his life, and in the hope that he would be able to make amends. All those present accepted this advice and Edward was spared death.¹⁸ It is improbable that Jean de Beaumont's role was quite as prominent as Froissart later made out, or that there were no voices calling for Edward's execution, but it is clear that everyone agreed on at least one thing: Edward II had to be removed from the throne.

The first step in detaching Edward's subjects from their allegiance and preparing the way for the act of deposition which followed also formed part of the bishop of Hereford's sermon delivered at Wallingford. Echoing the sermon he had preached at Oxford in October, when he had publicly explained the reasons for the return to England of Isabella and her son, Orleton allegedly accused Edward of being both a tyrant and a sodomite.¹⁹ Although Orleton subsequently denied having used these words about Edward II, or inciting his subjects to rebellion, claiming instead that he was referring to the Younger Despenser,²⁰ even their indirect use would be enough to suggest to his hearers that Edward was not a fit person to be king. Accusations or suggestions of sodomy, which was considered tantamount to heresy, were a familiar method of blackening the character of one's enemies: they were used, for example, by Philip IV of France against both Pope Boniface VIII and the Templars, and in the previous generation had been used against Philip's own father Philip III. They were also employed in 1311 by James II of Aragon against one of his subjects, the count of Ampurias.²¹ The hint, if such it was, that Edward engaged in unnatural vice was readily picked up and disseminated by chroniclers, especially those on the continent.²²

It is likely that the Wallingford council took two further significant actions: firstly the composition of the articles of deposition, or at least of a first draft of the articles which were to be read out by the archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Hall on 13 January;²³ and secondly the decision to send two bishops, the bishop of Hereford and either the bishop of Winchester or London, to Kenilworth to request Edward II's attendance at the parliament²⁴ which was due to begin on 7 January.²⁵

SCENES AT WESTMINSTER

On 31 December Isabella and her followers left Wallingford for London, where they arrived on 4 January and were received with great solemnity by the Londoners.²⁶ Nonetheless the chaos and anarchy in London were still of very recent memory and precautions were taken against any repetition. On 30 December every citizen was required to take an oath by 6 January to keep the peace, and on 2 January orders were issued forbidding anyone to bear arms in the city, except for the guards appointed by the mayor and aldermen and the queen's escort of men-at-arms from Hainault.²⁷

The bishop of Hereford and his colleague returned to Westminster on 12 January, with the news that Edward adamantly refused to attend, saying that he did not wish to venture among enemies and traitors.²⁸ If Edward believed that his absence invalidated the assembly at Westminster as a parliament, whose legality was in any case doubtful, he underestimated the determination of his opponents. They may indeed have preferred Edward's absence to the embarrassment of having in their midst a crowned and anointed monarch whose very presence might pose awkward questions about the legitimacy of their proceedings, as well as attracting sympathy. It was no secret, for example, that the bishop of Rochester and some other bishops were deeply unhappy at the turn of events.²⁹There was also the proximity of two papal envoys, William of Laudun the archbishop of Vienne, who already had long experience of Edward II and English affairs, and Master John de Grandison the archdeacon of Nottingham. They had arrived in England on 10 December 1326, nominally to assist in making peace between England and France, but had they been given the chance they might also have tried to mediate between Edward II and his enemies and to save him from deposition.³⁰

In Edward II's absence matters now proceeded quickly. On 12 January, the day of his return from Kenilworth, the bishop of Hereford asked those present whether they wanted Edward II to remain as king or whether he should be replaced by his son, Edward duke of Aquitaine. It appears that there were differing opinions on this, so parliament was dismissed until the following morning, 13 January, to allow for further thought and persuasion.³¹ At this point the mayor and citizens of London intervened, either on their own account or in concert with Edward II's opponents, by writing to the prelates and magnates asking them to ally with them, to swear to maintain Isabella and her son, and ‘to crown the latter, and to depose his father for frequent offences against his oath and his Crown’.³² On the evening of 12 January there was a meeting of prelates and magnates, probably in Westminster Hall, at which the articles of accusation against Edward II were either drawn up or an existing draft refined, and at which it was agreed that Edward should no longer reign and that he should be be replaced by his son.³³

Up to this point it is possible to be reasonably confident about the sequence of events. However, apart from the formal proclamation of Edward II's ‘abdication’ and Edward III's accession in London on 24 January,³⁴ there is a distinct lack of any official record of the events connected with the end of Edward II's reign in January 1327. The Parliament Roll for January–February 1327 records only the petitions which were presented when parliament resumed in February after the coronation of Edward III. Although there are many references to current events, there is no direct explanation of how Edward III had come to succeed his father. Edward II is referred to only in euphemisms such as ‘Edward his father, when he was king’.³⁵ Even the six articles of accusation against Edward II do not now survive in any official form, although they may once have so existed.³⁶ One official or quasi-official document is the Forma deposicionis Regis Edwardi post Conquestum Secundi, which is preserved in a Canterbury chronicle contained in Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41. It has been plausibly argued that the document was composed by a supporter of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer and designed to provide a description of events which would make it appear that Edward II had voluntarily resigned the throne instead of acting under the threat of force. Edward III's accession was presented as a substitution for the inadequate rule of his father. The author of the Forma deposicionis recorded only one deputation to Edward II at Kenilworth and not two, and implied that Edward II had already consented to his replacement by his son before the events at Westminster on 13 January. The second visit to Kenilworth was therefore made redundant and was not mentioned.³⁷ Nonetheless, if used with care, the Forma deposicionis is still a valuable source.

According to the Forma deposicionis Roger Mortimer of Wigmore was deputed by the gathering of prelates and magnates on the evening of 12 January to announce the results of their deliberations to those assembled in parliament³⁸ when they reconvened in Westminster Hall on the following day, as the bishop of Hereford had asked them to do.³⁹ Then followed a speech from Roger Mortimer and three sermons, by the bishops of Hereford and Winchester and the archbishop of Canterbury, and including the reading by the archbishop of the set of six articles, agreed on the night of 12 January, outlining Edward's defects as king.⁴⁰ Roger Mortimer cleverly told the gathering that he was not speaking for himself but on behalf of the magnates who had unanimously agreed that the king should be removed from the government of the realm because he was inadequate (insufficiens), and because by accepting evil counsel he was the destroyer of the magnates and the Church, in breach of his coronation oath. Therefore Edward's first-born son the duke of Aquitaine should reign in his place if the people gave their approval (si populus preberet assensum). Thomas Wake, Henry of Lancaster's son-in-law, then replied in a clearly prearranged move and, raising his hands, announced that so far as he was concerned Edward should not remain king (dico pro me numquam regnabit). Mortimer was followed by Adam Orleton the bishop of Hereford, who took as his theme the text from chapter 11 of the Book of Proverbs (ubi non est gubernator populus corruet) (‘Where there is no governor the people shall fall’).⁴¹ He described his mission to Kenilworth and how he had spoken frankly to the king. He had addressed the king, citing the text, audi preces populi tui (‘hear the prayers of thy people’),⁴² and speaking of the great and intolerable defects in Edward's government, his adherence to evil and treacherous counsel, his destruction of the magnates and his loss of the lands which his father had left him. For these reasons the prelates and magnates wished Edward's son to rule in his place. Although, according to Orleton, the king had replied that he had followed the counsel ordained for him by the magnates, he showed himself penitent for the misdeeds which the envoys explained to him, and the homages of the magnates were annulled.⁴³ This version of events, as described in the Forma deposicionis, may well reflect words exchanged with the king when Orleton was sent to Kenilworth to try to persuade Edward to attend parliament, but the implication that Edward II had accepted the transfer of sovereignty to his son even before the dramatic events of 13 January is to say the least doubtful, and as already indicated suggests that the Forma deposicionis is not an impartial record.⁴⁴ Orleton was followed by John Stratford the bishop of Winchester who preached on the textcaput meum doleo (‘my head aches’),⁴⁵ arguing that since the king was as it were the head of the kingdom, any weakness in the king produced a weakness in the kingdom; expounding on the many indecencia⁴⁶ and evils which had been brought upon the Church and the kingdom; and concluding that the magnates were unanimous that the king should be replaced by his first-born son in the government of the kingdom, provided that this decision of the prelates and magnates was supported by the people. With this, Thomas Wake stretched out his arms and asked the people if they consented to this decision, and with a loud voice they acclaimed it. Speaking in French, Walter Reynolds the archbishop of Canterbury then began to address the people, taking as his text the proverbial saying Vox populi vox dei (‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’): ‘Dearly beloved, you know that for a long time you have been afflicted by various oppressions on the part of the king and his evil councillors; and you have called upon God for a remedy. Now it appears that your voice has been heard, since by the unanimous consent of all the magnates the lord King Edward has been deprived of the government of the kingdom and his son put in his place, if you consent to this unanimously. He [i.e. the young Edward] has accepted the counsel of the wise men of the kingdom, after the inadequacy (insufficiencia) of the king, as outlined earlier [i.e. in the articles of deposition], and the offences he had brought upon the Church and kingdom were explained to him.’ The whole people with one accord then raised their hands again and shouted ‘Fiat, fiat, Amen’.⁴⁷ After which the young Edward was presented to his future subjects, with the words ‘Behold your king’, followed by the singing of ‘Glory, laud and honour’.⁴⁸

THE ARTICLES OF DEPOSITION

At some point in the proceedings on 13 January, either during the archbishop of Canterbury's concluding sermon or, more probably, at an earlier stage in the day, the articles of deposition were presented to the assembly.⁴⁹ The document was a simple one, without any of the circumstantial detail which had accompanied the charges against, for example, the Younger Despenser. Edward II was accused of being personally incapable of governing, of allowing himself to be led and governed by others who advised him badly, and of refusing to remedy these defects when asked to do so by the great and wise men of the kingdom or allowing anyone else to do so; of devoting himself to unsuitable work and occupations, while neglecting the government of his kingdom; of exhibiting pride, covetousness and cruelty; of losing, for lack of good government, the kingdom of Scotland, and other lands and lordships in Gascony and Ireland (which had been left to him in peace by his father) and of forfeiting the friendship of the king of France and of many other great men; of destroying the Church and imprisoning churchmen, and of putting to death, imprisoning, exiling and disinheriting the great men of his kingdom; of failing to observe his coronation oath through the influence of his evil counsellors; of abandoning his kingdom and doing all in his power to cause the loss both of it and of his people; and of being incorrigible and without hope of improvement. All of which was said to be so notorious that it could not be denied.

Even allowing for the vagueness of these charges and for the simplistic nature of some, such as his alleged personal responsibility for the failure to hold Scotland (which had been far from peaceful in 1307) and for the war in Ireland (which in reality was the scene in 1318 of one of the few definite English military successes), Edward II was depicted as an incompetent ruler and as a man who could not command any respect, whose government in the last resort could only be ended, not mended. He was not however, and very significantly, described as a tyrant. Although the word was freely used of the Younger Despenser,⁵⁰ it was not employed for Edward II⁵¹ any more than it was applied to Richard II in 1399.⁵² Although concepts of tyranny had long been discussed by political theorists such as John of Salisbury in the twelfth century⁵³ and Bracton in the thirteenth,⁵⁴ and were treated almost contemporaneously by the dissident Franciscan William of Ockham,⁵⁵ the implications of using accusations of tyranny to remove a legitimate and anointed king were too contentious and divisive to be of any practical use.⁵⁶ Edward was instead condemned for his inadequacy and for lacking in those qualities necessary in a king,⁵⁷ an approach which even some of those sympathetic to him would have had to admit carried conviction. The fact that Edward had a son and heir available to succeed him on the throne made his removal easier to contemplate, even if still difficult to perform in practice. It was little wonder that at the same time as his father was being deprived of his throne, his son and successor, Edward duke of Aquitaine, was receiving plentiful advice from writers such as Walter Milemete and William of Pagula on how to conduct himself as king.⁵⁸

THE GUILDHALL OATH

After the dramatic events in Westminster Hall on 13 January a gathering was held at the Guildhall in the City of London. In the presence of the mayor, aldermen and ‘a great commonalty’ many of those attending parliament⁵⁹ took an oath to safeguard Isabella, queen of England, and Edward, the son of the king of England, to give good counsel, to safeguard the liberties of the city, and to keep the ordinances made, or to be made, in parliament by the peers of the land.⁶⁰ The wording of the oath makes it clear that although Edward II was on the way out, he was still technically king, and it was less extreme in form than the oath demanded by the citizens of London the day before.⁶¹ Over the next three days the oath was taken by Edward II's half-brothers, the earls of Norfolk and Kent, the earls of Hereford⁶² and Surrey, and their retainers; by Roger Mortimer and twenty-three other barons including the earl of Leicester's son-in-law Thomas Wake; fifty-six knights and ten serjeants ‘of the court’,⁶³ four royal justices,⁶⁴ and four others; twelve or thirteen knights of the shire currently attending parliament; the archbishops of Canterbury and Dublin; John Stratford the bishop of Winchester and treasurer, the bishops of Salisbury, Bath & Wells, Chichester and Llandaff, William Airmyn bishop of Norwich the chancellor, and the bishops of Coventry & Lichfield, Ely, Lincoln, Rochester,⁶⁵ Worcester, and Adam Orleton of Hereford;⁶⁶ the abbots of Westminster, St Albans, Waltham, Bury St Edmunds and Peterborough; three priors, twenty-three priests and clerks;⁶⁷ thirty barons of the Cinque Ports, five men from Bury St Edmunds, and thirteen burgesses from St Albans.⁶⁸

THE END COMES

A second delegation then went to Kenilworth,⁶⁹ probably leaving London on 15 or 16 January.⁷⁰ There are differing accounts of its membership. According to the Historia Roffensis, the bishops of London, Ely and Hereford, two earls, two barons, and representatives from the counties, cities and Cinque Ports were sent to renounce the homage of the realm;⁷¹ the Canterbury chronicle which preserves the Forma deposicionis speaks simply of three bishops, two earls, two barons, two abbots and two justices, without giving any names, apart from that of William Trussell;⁷² the Brut chronicle states that the earl of Surrey went to act for the earls, John de Hothum the bishop of Ely for the clergy, Henry de Percy for the barons, and William Trussell for the knights.⁷³ The most detailed accounts of the delegation are given in the Lanercost and Pipewell chronicles. Lanercost states that the delegation was composed of the bishops of Winchester and Hereford, the earls of Leicester and Surrey, William de Roos and Hugh de Courtenay for the barons, two abbots, two priors, two justices, two Dominicans, two Carmelites, four knights (two from north of the Trent and two from south of the Trent), two citizens of London, and two citizens of the Cinque Ports, numbering twenty-four persons in all. No Franciscan friars were included in the delegation, allegedly at the request of Isabella, who had a particular affection for the order, so that they would not be the bearers of so displeasing a message. There is no mention in this account of William Trussell, although it is certain that he was a member, nor of the bishops of London and Ely.⁷⁴ The Pipewell chronicle gives the composition as the bishops of London, Winchester and Hereford; the abbots of Glastonbury and Dover; the earls of Surrey and Lancaster (i.e. Leicester); the barons Hugh de Courtenay and Richard de Grey; two royal justices, Geoffrey le Scrope and John Bourchier; two (?) barons of the Cinque Ports; four burgesses of London; and four knights to represent the community of the land.⁷⁵While there is no agreement on the exact composition of the delegation sent to Kenilworth, it is clear that it was large in number and intended to be as widely representative of the kingdom as possible, and not just of those who were attending parliament.⁷⁶

The delegation reached Kenilworth or its immediate vicinity on 20 January,⁷⁷ when according to the chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, which has the most detailed account of the mission, the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln⁷⁸ went ahead of the rest and spoke to Edward in private, accompanied only by Henry of Lancaster. They tried to persuade him to resign his crown to his elder son, Edward, promising that he would be honoured as before and suggesting that he would obtain merit in the sight of God and bring peace to his subjects. But they also threatened that, if Edward did not resign his crown, ‘the people’ would withdraw their homage and fealty, repudiate his sons, and place someone of non-royal blood upon the throne. After many tears and much sighing, Edward gave way, prepared, as the chronicler put it, to lay down his life for Christ rather than witness his sons' disinheritance or the disturbance of the kingdom, and knowing that a good shepherd would give his soul for his sheep. The bishop of Hereford then arrived with the other members of the delegation, whom he gathered in order of rank in the king's chamber. At length Edward emerged from an inner room, dressed in a black robe, and so affected by grief that he could barely stand and had to be helped by the earl of Leicester and bishop of Winchester. The bishop of Hereford explained the reason for the delegation's presence and demanded that he resign his crown to his first-born son. Again Edward was threatened that if he did not agree, someone more suitable would be chosen as king. Weeping and crying out, Edward said that he was deeply saddened that his people were so angry with him, but was pleased that his son would at least succeed him as king.⁷⁹ It is possible that a notary, as was later to be the case with Richard II in 1399, formally recorded Edward's acceptance, but there is no clear evidence of this.⁸⁰ The threat to disinherit Edward's sons from the succession is not recorded by any of the other chroniclers and would in any case have been an empty one, since the placing on the throne of anyone other than the young Edward would scarcely have met with general acceptance and would have been a recipe for civil war.⁸¹ There is also a strong element of propaganda attaching to the account of Geoffrey le Baker, who was seeking here and elsewhere to portray Edward II as a suffering saint and martyr.⁸² However, there can be little doubt about Edward's grief at being deprived of his throne and reduced to an imprisoned subject of a new king, even if that king was his own son.⁸³ On the following day, 21 January, Sir William Trussell formally withdrew homage on behalf of the kingdom from Edward, now once more Edward of Caernarfon,⁸⁴ and Sir Thomas Blount, steward of the household, broke his staff of office.⁸⁵ The reign of Edward II was ended, having lasted, as the Canterbury chronicler noted, for nineteen years, twenty-nine weeks and five days.⁸⁶ For the unknown author of the Brut chronicle the downfall of Edward II and the disasters of his reign were the fulfilment of the prophecies of Merlyn:⁸⁷‘and ever afterwards he lived his life in much sorrow and anguish’.⁸⁸

ABDICATION OR DEPOSITION?

The delegation probably arrived back in London from Kenilworth on 25 January, but their news had preceded them.⁸⁹ On 24 January it was proclaimed in London that ‘Sir Edward, late king of England, has of his good will (de sa bone volunte) and by the common counsel and assent of the prelates, earls and barons, and other nobles, and of all the commonalty of the realm, resigned the government of the realm (sen est ouste del governement du roialme), and has granted and wills that the government of the realm shall come to Sir Edward, his eldest son and heir, and that [Edward] shall govern, reign and be crowned king.’ The peace of the new king was proclaimed at the same time;⁹⁰ the first official acts in the name of Edward III were dated on the same day as the proclamation; and his first regnal year began officially on the following day, 25 January.⁹¹

Everything looked neat and tidy. One king had willingly divested himself of his office; a new king, the elder son of the old one and with an unquestioned right to succeed him, had been proclaimed and would soon be crowned. But was it quite so straightforward? Not everyone was happy at the events of January 1327. It is known, for example, that the archbishop of York, one of Edward II's oldest friends and allies, another close friend the bishop of Rochester, and the bishops of London and Carlisle did not consent on 13 January to Edward II's replacement as king by his son.⁹² Many others attending parliament tacitly accepted what was being done because of fear of the Londoners, whose clamour both inside and outside Westminster Hall punctuated the whole proceedings,⁹³which were carefully stage-managed by Roger Mortimer and Thomas Wake. William Trussell, who withdrew allegiance from Edward II on behalf of the whole community of the realm, was also part of the management team: he was not an elected member of parliament,⁹⁴but like Thomas Wake was a follower of Henry of Lancaster, earl of Leicester and Edward II's gaoler at Kenilworth. The taking of the Guildhall oath to support Isabella and the young Edward on 13 January and in the days following added further pressure, which some apparently resisted. Of the forty-seven men summoned to the parliament as barons only seventeen are recorded as having taken the oath.⁹⁵ It is also noticeable that only twelve or thirteen knights of the shire out of sixty-eight who were elected,⁹⁶ and a handful of abbots out of the nineteen who were summoned took the oath. The only burgesses who subscribed were eighteen men from Bury St Edmunds and St Albans, but none of these was an elected member of parliament;⁹⁷ of the 108 elected burgesses none is recorded as subscribing.⁹⁸ Earls and barons and their knightly retainers, on the other hand, were especially prominent.⁹⁹ The representatives of North and South Wales were not even summoned to parliament until it had already begun: and one of the most prominent Welshmen, Sir Gruffydd Llwyd the sheriff of Merioneth, appears to have refused to attend, probably out of loyalty to Edward II and hatred of Roger Mortimer.¹⁰⁰ The pressure was maintained after the deputation had left London for Kenilworth: on 20 January the archbishop of Canterbury and seven bishops took a new oath in support of the young Edward, which this time described him as king. Others may have done the same.¹⁰¹

It was made to seem as if Edward II had willingly resigned or abdicated his throne. But it was obvious to everyone that he had done so under extreme pressure. Earlier in his reign the Ordinances had been imposed upon him against his will and in 1320 he had won support from the pope for the annulment of his personal oath to uphold them: an oath made unwillingly was no oath, in the eyes of the Church. How much greater was the offence when an anointed king was forced to leave his throne; and how great the urgency to bundle the old king quickly out of sight and crown his successor. The chroniclers knew perfectly well that Edward II had been deposed, and several of them said so.¹⁰²

But deposed by whom? Was Edward II deposed by parliament or during parliament? Some of the major events, such as those of 13 January, the presentation of the six articles against Edward II, the speech by Roger Mortimer, the sermons by the archbishop and bishops, and the acclamation of Edward II's elder son, certainly took place in parliament, in Westminster Hall, and in the presence of those who had been summoned to attend. But these were really only the public formalities, and were supplemented by other actions which occurred separately, such as the oath-taking at the Guildhall of the city of London between 13 and 15 January, or the meeting of the magnates and prelates on their own in Westminster Hall on the night of 12 January. The reservations and fears of some of those within Westminster Hall, the careful management of the events that took place there, and the intimidation of any possible opponents by the Londoners both inside and outside Westminster Hall must all be taken into account. What really brought about Edward II's downfall was the combined determination of the leading magnates, their personal followers and the Londoners that he must go. It has aptly been said that if ‘the magnates and prelates had deposed a king in response to “the clamour of the whole people”, that clamour had a distinct London accent’.¹⁰³

The one certainty is that Edward II was still king when the month of January 1327 began, even if held a prisoner, but that he had ceased to be king before the month had ended. Although the deposition of Edward II did not attack kingship itself, the actual process of deposing a legitimate and anointed king involved an attempt to square the circle. That process had in practice taken place during, in, on the margins of and outside an assembly whose own legitimacy was to say the least doubtful. Edward II may in the end have given the appearance of abdicating his throne in favour of his son, but he had done so under intense pressure and while he was a prisoner. It was essential, both for propaganda purposes and for the future peace of the kingdom, that Edward II's deposition should have been agreed to ‘by the prelates, earls, barons, and the whole community of the realm’. The real nature of what had happened did not bear too close an examination.¹⁰⁴ It is hardly surprising that a Parliament Roll for the period before 1 February 1327 does not exist: it is more than likely that one never existed.¹⁰⁵ Edward II had been airbrushed out of the record.

EDWARD IN CAPTIVITY

On 1 February the new king was knighted, together with many other young men, by John de Beaumont, the brother of the count of Hainault, and John de Bohun earl of Hereford.¹⁰⁶ On the following day Edward III was crowned in Westminster Abbey by the archbishop of Canterbury, who had known and worked with his father since at least 1297; and he took the same oath which had been administered to Edward II in 1308.¹⁰⁷ The bishops present included John de Hothum of Ely, Adam Orleton of Hereford, John Stratford of Winchester, Henry Burghersh of Lincoln and William Airmyn of Norwich, all of whom had fallen out with the former king.¹⁰⁸ The former Edward II's two half-brothers, Thomas of Brotherton earl of Norfolk and earl marshal, and Edmund of Woodstock earl of Kent, were present, as were the earls of Surrey and Hereford, Roger Mortimer, Henry de Beaumont, ‘and other magnates of the realm’.¹⁰⁹ On the day after the coronation the work of parliament was resumed: political debts were repaid in the confirmation of the 1321 articles of accusation against the Despensers; the judgment against Thomas of Lancaster in 1322 was reversed; Henry of Lancaster was confirmed as earl of Lancaster and steward of England; and there were moves to have both Thomas of Lancaster and Robert Winchelsey archbishop of Canterbury, another former opponent of Edward II, canonized.¹¹⁰ Roger Mortimer also petitioned for the reversal of the judgment against him in 1323, which was duly granted in July 1327, four months after the end of the parliament.¹¹¹ The other winners in 1327 were the citizens of London, whose actions had done so much to undermine the power of Edward II in the autumn of 1326 and had helped to ensure his deposition in January 1327. The Londoners' petition for the restoration of their liberties could not be refused and on 7 March they were rewarded with a comprehensive charter confirming all the ancient liberties they had held before 1321 and granting them important new privileges.¹¹²

The change in regime was further signified by the choice of a council to advise the new king. ‘Because,’ according to the Brut chronicle, ‘Edward was so young and his father had been misled by false councillors’ he should be governed by twelve great lords of the land: four prelates (the archbishops of Canterbury and York, the bishops of Winchester and Hereford), four earls (Lancaster, Norfolk, Kent and Surrey), and four barons (Thomas Wake, Henry Percy, Oliver Ingham and John de Roos). It may be significant that Roger Mortimer was not among them.¹¹³

EDWARD

The former Edward II, now simply ‘Edward, the king's father’, or ‘Edward of Caernarfon’¹¹⁴ was still at Kenilworth. Little is known about his stay there, except that he was apparently well treated; but even the gift of two tuns of Rhenish wine by his son the new king can have been of little consolation.¹¹⁵ Later, while Edward was at Berkeley, his keepers, Thomas de Berkeley and John Maltravers, were allowed £5 a day for his maintenance;¹¹⁶ altogether they were paid £700, of which £200 came directly from the exchequer, while in May 1327 they received a further £500 in cash, equivalent to one hundred days' maintenance, which was part of the £13,000 in silver pennies found in Caerphilly castle after its surrender by the son of the Younger Despenser.¹¹⁷ It was not lavish but was enough to keep Edward in modest comfort.¹¹⁸ However, if Murimuth is correct, Thomas de Berkeley and John Maltravers took turns in looking after Edward, one month at a time: Berkeley allegedly treated him humanely but Maltravers ‘otherwise’.¹¹⁹ Several of the chroniclers remark on the misery experienced by Edward while he was at Berkeley, though whether he was actually placed in a room adjoining a pit filled with rotting flesh there is no way of knowing.¹²⁰ Regardless of any physical mistreatment, it was to be expected that he should continue to miss the company of his family and could not understand why they still refused to visit him.¹²¹ Any anger he had felt against Isabella and any possibility that he might do her harm had probably dissipated by this time and been replaced by feelings of loss and unhappiness. However, there is little reason to believe that Edward's despair was reflected in the Anglo-Norman poem in which Edward laments his fate and shows repentance for his past misdeeds. This was almost certainly composed by an anonymous fourteenth-century writer, making use of the familiar theme of the wheel of fortune and trying to cast Edward in a favourable light.¹²²

A MULTIPLICITY OF PLOTS

Edward II was gone but not forgotten. No sooner had he been deposed than his friends and allies began plotting to free him from his imprisonment.

The first signs came in early March when a commission was appointed to inquire into the activities of a number of Warwickshire men, including Stephen Dunheved or Dunhead from Dunchurch, a few miles from Kenilworth, and two local priests both named William Aylmer.¹²³ At this stage there was no mention of any plot to release the former king, but a strong hint of something more serious came on 28 April when the earl of Lancaster wrote from Leicester to the chancellor, John de Hothum bishop of Ely, telling him that he had heard that Brother John de Stoke, a Dominican friar from Warwick, had been plotting with others unnamed to ‘betray’ the earl's castle of Warwick, and asking for a commission to arrest him: this was duly issued on 1 May, significantly with orders to bring John to the king in person. Three days later further orders were issued for the arrest of Stephen Dunheved, who was to be taken to Wallingford for imprisonment. These apparently unconnected facts, together with the arrest of William Aylmer which was ordered on 23 April,¹²⁴ suggest that the earl of Lancaster's anxiety about Edward's security, expressed in his letter and recorded by the Leicester chronicler Henry Knighton, was well founded and that the earl was eager for his royal charge to be moved somewhere safer.¹²⁵ Although in 1328 the quarrel between the earl of Lancaster and Mortimer almost led to a renewal of civil war and in 1330 Roger Mortimer was accused of seizing Edward from Kenilworth and taking him to Berkeley with the intention of murdering him,¹²⁶there is nothing to suggest any unwillingness on the earl's part in 1327¹²⁷ or that there was any deliberate intention to exchange Edward's relatively comfortable imprisonment for a harsher regime under Mortimer's control.¹²⁸ Nonetheless, that was to be the effect.

On 3 April 1327 Edward was formally transferred to the custody of two of Roger Mortimer's leading followers, his son-in-law Thomas de Berkeley and Berkeley's brother-in-law John Maltravers.¹²⁹ On 5 April Edward arrived, with a heavily armed escort, either at the abbey of Llanthony in Gloucester or at Gloucester castle which was close by; and on the same day, or very soon afterwards, he was delivered to Berkeley castle.¹³⁰ Within a short time of his arrival at Berkeley a second plot to release him was being hatched, involving some of the same cast of characters as at Kenilworth together with numerous other individuals. The evidence suggests that the conspirators were very determined but at the same time had little or no idea of what they expected to happen if they succeeded in freeing Edward. If they were acting with other more powerfully placed conspirators, there is nothing to suggest this.¹³¹

On 27 July Thomas de Berkeley wrote to the chancellor John de Hothum reminding him of an earlier letter in which he named a number of men who had approached Berkeley castle in force, had seized ‘the father of our lord the king’ from his custody¹³² and had plundered the castle.¹³³ Exactly when this had occurred is not stated but it was probably earlier in July.¹³⁴ Neither is it clear whether Edward had actually been taken out of the castle by the conspirators or whether he had only been freed from his prison within the castle. However, the names of those indicted for the offence are of great interest. They include Stephen Dunheved, the two parsons named William Aylmer who had been involved in the earlier attempt on Kenilworth, and thirteen others from the counties of Warwick, Stafford and Gloucester.¹³⁵ Among the others were Stephen's brother, the Dominican Thomas Dunheved, two other Dominicans, John de Newminster and Henry de Ryhale, a monk from Hailes abbey in Gloucestershire, a canon of Llanthony, and the parson of Huntley in Gloucestershire. Thomas de Berkeley added that his men had also learned that a large number of men had gathered for the same purpose in the county of Buckingham and other adjoining counties, and that two of their leaders were another friar John de Redmere and John Norton. Berkeley said that he would do his best to apprehend Edmund Gacelyn and the others named in the commission. The fate of the Dunheved brothers is uncertain. Thomas is said to have died in prison after an unsuccessful attempt to escape, while his brother Stephen was captured at London. However, Thomas's imprisonment is said to have taken place around 11 June, which does not fit with his involvement at Berkeley in July; his brother apparently escaped and was still at large in 1329.¹³⁶

The striking things about this list of names are the number of clergy, especially Dominican friars, and the number of men who had in one way or another served Edward as king. Edmund Gacelyn had been a royal household knight before 1321 when he had opposed the Despensers; while John de Redmere had, as the letter stated, been the keeper of the king's stud; William Aylmer and John le Botiller had probably also been in royal service.¹³⁷ Of particular significance is the Dominican friar Thomas Dunheved. He had been one of Edward II's confessors and a papal chaplain and he it was who allegedly tried to obtain a divorce between Edward and Isabella while he was at Avignon in 1325;¹³⁸ he may even have been with Edward in Wales in 1326.¹³⁹ Thomas had probably been involved with his fellow Dominican, John de Stoke, and his own brother Stephen in the earlier plot against Kenilworth. Although the royal government understandably did not make the attempt to release Edward public, both the plot and Thomas Dunheved's part in it were known to the writers of the Anonimalle Chronicle and the Annales Paulini.¹⁴⁰

The support given to the former Edward II by lowly members of the clergy and religious orders suggests that Edward's reputation for holiness which later gave rise to a campaign for his canonization had some kind of substance. But the appearance of so many Dominicans in their ranks is especially significant since the English Dominicans had a close relationship with and a fierce loyalty to Edward II both before and after he became king.¹⁴¹ Edward in his turn had expressed ‘a great affection for the order of friars preacher, for many reasons’.¹⁴² They provided his confessors and, in the case of the schemer and trickster Nicholas of Wisbech, supplied him with ‘evidence’ to support his belief in the miraculous powers of the Holy Oil of St Thomas.¹⁴³ The Dominicans who protected Gaveston's body after his death in 1312 may have been from Oxford but it is also likely that they were from the Dominican house in Warwick.¹⁴⁴ In June 1317 these friars told the king in a petition that they and their property had been attacked by the local population on account of monsire Piers.¹⁴⁵ It was then hardly a coincidence that in March–April 1327 John de Stoke and perhaps other Warwick Dominicans plotted to free Edward from his imprisonment nearby at Kenilworth; or that other men from the same area should have been involved in the July plot against Berkeley castle. The attacks planned or carried out against Kenilworth and Berkeley were all too reminiscent of the seizure of Wallingford and of Mortimer's own escape from the Tower in 1323 for the authorities not to take them seriously.

The July plot came at a very difficult and dangerous time for the government of the young Edward III, since England and Scotland were again at war. The Scots had reopened hostilities, which had been dormant since the thirteen-year truce of 1323, when they attacked Norham castle on 1 February 1327, the very day of Edward III's coronation.¹⁴⁶ In retaliation the English launched a campaign in July which resulted only in humiliation for the young king, who came close to capture at Stanhope Park in Weardale near Durham. It also resulted in the dissipation of much of the financial reserve which had been built up under Edward II; and in quarrels and recriminations between Roger Mortimer, the earl of Lancaster and Edward II's half-brother, Thomas of Brotherton the earl of Norfolk and earl marshal.¹⁴⁷ The Scots then launched a savage and very determined attack on the main castles and the countryside of Northumberland during August and September.¹⁴⁸ It was nothing less than a replay of Edward II's campaigns against the Scots and, to make matters worse, there were worrying signs from Ireland. Edward III's rule there was not formally proclaimed until 13 May 1327 and in February the justiciar, John D'Arcy, had sent an emissary to Scotland on ‘certain confidential business touching the lord king’, who was still considered to be Edward II. Robert Bruce's landing in Ulster around Easter 1327 (12 April) may have been connected with this mission, but Bruce certainly had ambitions of his own which may have amounted to a scheme to invade England with the assistance of Edward II's former ministers in Ireland and Edward's supporters and Mortimer's enemies in Wales.¹⁴⁹ The government in England could not have known all of this but by July they had learned enough to be deeply worried about the situation in Ireland.¹⁵⁰ Had they also known that two of Edward II's closest personal allies, Rhys ap Gruffudd¹⁵¹ and Donald earl of Mar,¹⁵² were also in Bruce's ranks, they would have been even more concerned.

By the late summer of 1327 England was under external attack and riddled with internal conspiracies, some of which were aimed at freeing Edward from captivity and perhaps even restoring him to the throne. For all anyone knew, Robert Bruce, now an ailing man and soon to die, might also have seen this as a way to gain the English recognition of Scottish independence which had eluded him ever since Bannockburn. Not surprisingly, Edward's guards took extra precautions. He was apparently moved around secretly by night from place to place, including Corfe castle in Dorset, so that no one could be sure of where he was being held, before finally being brought back to Berkeley.¹⁵³

ANOTHER CONSPIRACY

The precautions were not sufficient: within weeks of Edward's return to Berkeley news came of yet another conspiracy to free the deposed king. On 14 September 1327¹⁵⁴ William Shaldeford, Roger Mortimer's lieutenant in North Wales, wrote to Mortimer from Rhosfair¹⁵⁵ in Anglesey to report a plan to release Edward from Berkeley on the part of Rhys ap Gruffudd and others in South and North Wales, and with the support of certain unnamed magnates. The letter was sent to Mortimer at Abergavenny,¹⁵⁶ and one of Mortimer's retainers William Ockley was allegedly then sent to Berkeley with instructions to Edward's guardians John Maltravers and another of Mortimer's men, Thomas Gurney, to read the letter ‘and to take speedy action to avoid greater danger’:¹⁵⁷‘thereupon William Ockley and the others who had Edward in their custody treacherously slew and murdered Edward, the father of our lord the king, in destruction of the royal blood’.¹⁵⁸ If Edward had been successfully released, the conspirators also intended to bring about the destruction of Roger Mortimer and his followers. Although the story is known today only from a court case in March 1331, when a man from North Wales, Hywel ap Gruffudd, accused William Shaldeford of aiding and abetting the murder of Edward II,¹⁵⁹ it is very plausible that in 1327 men like Rhys ap Gruffudd in South Wales and his counterpart Gruffydd Llwyd in North Wales, in whom loyalty to the former king was joined with hatred of Mortimer, really were planning to release Edward from his captivity. It is also worth remembering that Rhys ap Gruffudd had been with Edward at Neath abbey in his last days of freedom in 1326 and it also appears that he was involved in the earl of Kent's conspiracy in 1330. Hywel himself had probably been one of the men who joined Rhys ap Gruffudd in Scotland after the fall of Edward II.¹⁶⁰ If Hywel's accusations are true, the news of this latest plot to free the former king had come not to Edward III's government but directly and personally to Roger Mortimer, who was then in Wales and therefore able to decide how to react without reference to Edward III and his council.¹⁶¹ This would therefore seem to be an open and shut case: Roger Mortimer had the opportunity to murder the former king and his agents Gurney and Ockley duly carried it out.

On 22 September Thomas Gurney was sent to the king and Isabella with letters from Thomas de Berkeley informing them that Edward had died on the previous day, 21 September, only seven days after the dispatch of Shaldeford's letter from Anglesey.¹⁶²Gurney may have been expecting to find Edward III at Nottingham¹⁶³ but it is more probable that he did so at Lincoln, where a parliament had been meeting since 15 September. The young Edward III was told of his father's death on Wednesday, 23 September, ‘during the night’.¹⁶⁴ The news was clearly made public without delay:¹⁶⁵ for the moment there was no suspicion that the death was other than natural.¹⁶⁶

PEACE AT LAST

Even if there had been any suspicion of foul play, there was no time to look more closely or even for the young Edward III to go to Berkeley to pay his respects.¹⁶⁷ On 24 September Edward wrote to the earl of Hereford (and presumably other magnates) informing him of the death of his father but also warning him that the Scots were reported to be on the point of invading England.¹⁶⁸ Resisting the Scots had to take precedence over grieving for the old king, for whom nothing could now be done. The Scots were continuing their raids in the north, but these were for the moment at least to be the last of their kind, since the English had decided to negotiate for a final peace with Scotland. The failure of the latest Scottish campaign, along with near-bankruptcy¹⁶⁹ and the growing disturbances within England¹⁷⁰ made peace unavoidable. The regime of Mortimer and Isabella also no longer had the (very expensive) support of the force of Hainaulters under John of Hainault, which had left England for home at the end of August.¹⁷¹In early October envoys were sent to seek out Robert Bruce and to discover his terms. These were received on 18 October and formed the basis of negotiations at Newcastle during November and December 1327. On 1 March 1328 Edward III recognized the independent existence of the kingdom of Scotland and the legitimacy of Robert Bruce as its king; and on 17 March a formal treaty was concluded. It was in many respects the same as the abortive treaty for which the earl of Carlisle Andrew Harclay had lost his head in 1323.¹⁷²

A ROYAL FUNERAL

While the preliminaries of peace were taking place the body of the former king lay at Berkeley. The long delay between Edward's death on 21 September and his burial on 20 December was not the result of indifference or callousness on the part of the young king, but rather of the pressure of events. Relations with France remained tense and had to be improved,¹⁷³ while there was also the matter of Edward III's marriage to Philippa of Hainault, whose details had still to be negotiated.¹⁷⁴ The situation was not unlike that at the beginning of the reign of Edward II, when the continuing war in Scotland and the arrangements for Edward and Isabella's own marriage took precedence over the burial of Edward I, who had died on 7 July and whose funeral took place on 27 October.

Such state events in any case took time to organize and there are indications that Edward II's funeral was intended to be a significant event: he was not going to be bundled quickly out of sight and promptly forgotten. The first question to be answered was where he was to be buried. The obvious place was Westminster Abbey, which Henry III had rebuilt to hold the shrine of the royal saint, Edward the Confessor, as well as his own tomb and those of his successors. The abbey was clearly intended to become a royal mausoleum to rival that of the kings of France at Saint-Denis.¹⁷⁵ Both Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, had been buried there and it might be expected that Edward II would also be laid to rest there. However, Edward had been on bad terms with Westminster Abbey since the beginning of his reign,¹⁷⁶ while the political turbulence shown by the Londoners at the end of his reign and which had contributed so much to his deposition in January 1327 might have been expressed once more if the hated king's body were to be brought into their midst.¹⁷⁷ It is known however that the monks of Westminster were anxious for Edward II to be buried there, no doubt for reasons of prestige. Two monks, Robert de Beby and John de Tothale, were sent to Nottingham during October 1327 ‘to seek the body of the dead king’:¹⁷⁸ not to find out where the body of the dead king was, but to obtain it for burial. They were not successful and Westminster Abbey was ruled out in favour of the great Benedictine abbey of St Peter's, Gloucester. The story that John Thoky, the abbot of Gloucester, transported the body on a richly decorated wagon from Berkeley to Gloucester where it was solemnly received by the monks of St Peter's and a procession of the local people, can be only partly true since the orders for the body's removal to Gloucester came directly from the king and the journey was paid for by the exchequer.¹⁷⁹ However the claim in the history of St Peter's, Gloucester, that the monasteries of St Augustine in Bristol, Kingswood near Bristol and Malmesbury in Wiltshire had all refused to accept Edward's body for burial because they were afraid of Roger Mortimer and Isabella and their followers is patently untrue.¹⁸⁰ St Peter's, Gloucester, was deliberately chosen by Edward III and Isabella as Edward's resting place, partly because it was not Westminster but also because it had the merits both of proximity to Berkeley and of some previous connections with the English ruling house: the nine-year-old Henry III had undergone his first coronation there after his accession in 1216, and in 1134 Duke Robert of Normandy, the eldest son of William the Conqueror and one of the leaders of the first crusade, had been buried there.¹⁸¹ It was not a royal abbey in the same sense as Westminster but it had the makings of one.

Little is known in detail about the treatment of Edward II's body while it still lay at Berkeley. According to Adam Murimuth, various abbots, priors, knights and burgesses from Bristol and Gloucester were summoned to view the body but were able to do so only superficially.¹⁸² It was looked after by a royal serjeant, William de Beaucaire, and it was eviscerated and embalmed by an unnamed woman, who was taken to see Isabella at Worcester in the days immediately following the funeral at Gloucester.¹⁸³ Edward's heart was placed in a specially made silver vase costing 37s 8d:¹⁸⁴ after Isabella's own death in 1358 this was placed inside the breast of the effigy on her tomb in the choir of the church of the London Franciscans in Newgate.¹⁸⁵ It is clear that Edward was being regarded and treated with dignity. Instead of such euphemisms as ‘Edward, the king's father’ or even ‘Edward of Caernarfon’, Edward was referred to as king throughout the financial records of his funeral; and this was consistent with the lavish display of the funeral arrangements themselves. It was clearly to be a ceremony which, like a coronation, emphasized the continuity of the monarchy and the legitimacy of both the present and the previous incumbents of the English throne. The ambiguities and untidiness of the events surrounding Edward II's deposition in January were to be made up for by the splendour of his funeral in December, and reinforced within a few years by the construction of an elaborate tomb above his burial place in Gloucester abbey.¹⁸⁶

On 21 October, a month after Edward's death, his body was moved from Berkeley castle to Gloucester abbey,¹⁸⁷ where it was initially placed upon a hearse brought from London. This was then replaced by a specially built one constructed by eight carpenters between 24 November and 11 December. It included four gilded lions painted by the king's painter, John de Eastwick, which stood around the hearse and wore mantles bearing the royal arms, and standing figures of the four evangelists. Eight figures of angels and two lions rampant completed the decoration.¹⁸⁸ A great many people were evidently expected to come to view Edward lying in state, and a great many did so; four stout oak beams were placed around the hearse to control the crowds.¹⁸⁹ The body in its coffin was not visible, being also surmounted by a specially made wooden image of the dead king, which bore a copper crown and was probably dressed in the pieces of armour which were brought from London.¹⁹⁰ This was the first occasion on which a royal effigy was employed in England, but it started a tradition which was followed until the eighteenth century.¹⁹¹ The image of a warrior king was presented for the lying in state but for the actual burial the effigy was adorned with Edward II's coronation robes, which were returned to the great wardrobe in London after the funeral; the body itself was clothed in the undergarments which Edward had worn at his coronation in 1308.¹⁹² While it was awaiting burial the body was again attended by William de Beaucaire, together with the bishop of Llandaff John Eaglescliff, who was a Dominican friar and therefore especially sympathetic to the memory of the late king; two royal chaplains Bernard de Bergh and Richard de Potesgrave; two royal knights Edmund Wasteneys and Robert Hastang; two royal serjeants Bertrand de la More and John de Enfield; and Andrew the king's candle-maker.¹⁹³

The funeral took place on 20 December. Although it was attended by Edward III, Isabella and Mortimer, nothing is known about it. There are no official records and the English chroniclers barely mentioned the occasion.¹⁹⁴ If there were any doubts or suspicions about the circumstances of Edward's death, they were not voiced on that day. On 27 November the archbishop of Canterbury Walter Reynolds, who had known Edward for thirty years but had betrayed him at the last, preceded him to the grave.¹⁹⁵

A ROYAL MAUSOLEUM OR A ROYAL SHRINE?

Edward III and the court had to hasten away. Edward's future bride Philippa of Hainault was about to arrive at Dover prior to their marriage at York on 24 January;¹⁹⁶ and the peace negotiations with Scotland were still in progress. But this was not the end of Edward III's interest in Gloucester, since it appears that he now intended to turn St Peter's abbey into a royal mausoleum or rather a shrine to the memory of his father, and in the process replace the ignominy of Edward II's deposition and imprisonment by a powerful advertisement for the English crown. This in turn raises the question of whether Edward III considered making Gloucester rather than Westminster the usual burial place for English kings. The answer is probably negative: when his brother John of Eltham, earl of Cornwall died in 1336 he was buried at Westminster and a fine tomb later erected in his memory; and when Edward III himself died in 1377 it was to Westminster that his body was conveyed for burial.¹⁹⁷

On 20 December 1328, the first anniversary of his father's burial, Edward III visited Gloucester and showed his gratitude to the people of the town for their respect to the body of his father by confirming their charters; he also granted privileges to the abbey.¹⁹⁸He was there between 13 August and 4 September 1329, and again from 14 to 26 September, after a few days spent at Hereford; and between 22 and 26 June 1330. In September 1332 Edward wrote to the abbots of Gloucester, Hailes, Winchcombe and Tewkesbury, reminding them that his father's anniversary was about to occur and asking them and religious persons from Gloucester and the surrounding area to celebrate it in Gloucester abbey with all due devotion and honour.¹⁹⁹ This was probably an annual occurrence both at Gloucester²⁰⁰ and in the king's own private chapel, or wherever he happened to be.²⁰¹ Edward visited Gloucester again on 14 September 1337, and in March 1343 presented the abbey with a gold ship in honour of his victory over a French fleet at Sluys in 1340 and his recent narrow escape from shipwreck in the Channel: this was offered at the high altar but later attached to Edward II's tomb. In 1353 Edward III's sons also visited Gloucester to pay their respects to their grand-father's memory.²⁰²There is also ample evidence that Edward III encouraged others outside his family to pray for the soul of his father,²⁰³ sometimes as a quid pro quo for a royal grant.²⁰⁴

But Edward II himself was the main attraction at Gloucester. Large numbers of pilgrims came to visit the site of his burial and probably in even larger numbers after the construction of his tomb. It is traditionally believed that the offerings by visitors to the tomb helped to finance the extensive reconstruction of the Norman abbey during the course of the fourteenth century:²⁰⁵ the south transept was rebuilt between 1331 and 1336 in a style modelled on that of St Stephen's Chapel at Westminster;²⁰⁶ a new choir screen and choir were added between 1337 and 1367;²⁰⁷ and the great east window was built between 1350 and 1360, with paintings of the coronation of the Virgin, saints, angels and kings, but also including the arms of Edward II as well as those of Edward III and the Black Prince and other men who had fought at Crécy and Calais in 1346–7.²⁰⁸

The result was a magnificent recreation of the Norman abbey church in the new architectural style known today as perpendicular, and the perfect setting for the royal tomb which was constructed inside it. Although a great deal has been written about the tomb, many uncertainties remain. It is not known, for example, who ordered and paid for it, who designed and constructed it, and exactly when. The tomb effigy is made of alabaster probably from a quarry in Nottinghamshire, and may have been intended to emulate the white marble effigies of French kings of the same period. Edward is shown holding the orb and sceptre and ‘with a fine bearded head, calm and typically Plantagenet, flanked by angels’,²⁰⁹ which has led one commentator to suggest that the tomb was designed to emphasize the saintliness of Edward II, and the idea of the king as a type of Christ.²¹⁰ The effigy lies on a tomb-chest of Purbeck marble and is surmounted by a canopy of fine-grained Cotswold oolitic limestone, which has been described as ‘the work of a genius and arguably the most thrilling of all tomb canopies’.²¹¹

It was certainly in the interests of the monks of Gloucester to have a king buried in their midst, especially one whose supposed saintly qualities attracted streams of visitors seeking miracles. Gloucester abbey was no doubt well aware of Hereford cathedral only about 30 miles away which possessed the shrine of the recently canonized Thomas Cantilupe and had been making a steady income from pilgrims since his death in 1282.²¹² Gloucester was now in a position to offer competition and appears to have done so: the number of pilgrims to Hereford had declined steeply by the mid-1330s.²¹³ It might therefore have made good business sense for the monks of Gloucester abbey to invest in an elaborate shrine to Edward II without any involvement on the part of the crown. This may have been what happened²¹⁴ but it seems unlikely. In the first place the tomb was clearly the work of a master and not of a local craftsman or architect. It was work of the very highest quality with both a national and an international significance.²¹⁵ Two possibilities have been suggested, both men who had worked on royal building projects at Westminster: Thomas of Canterbury, who was in charge of St Stephen's chapel, Westminster, between about 1323 and c. 1335–6, and was also familiar with the latest developments in London and Canterbury, with a suggested building date for the tomb of about 1330;²¹⁶ and William Ramsey, surveyor of the king's works from 1336, with a construction date of 1336–9.²¹⁷ Secondly, it was very much in the interest of Edward III that his father should not only be buried amid splendour but that his tomb, when it was built, should convey a message of quiet but dignified majesty. If pilgrims wished to visit the tomb in search of miracles, so much the better. The English royal house could do with a saint from its own ranks, to add to the cult of St Edward the Confessor which was national rather than dynastic in nature, and also to counter the miracles attributed to Edward II's old opponent and deadly enemy, Thomas of Lancaster. In the quality and power of the effigy the tomb has no contemporary parallel and has aptly been described as ‘a remarkable example of theatrical statecraft’, and ‘a monument fit for a saint … that remains to-day a powerful manifestation of the evocative power of great architecture’.²¹⁸ It is hard to believe that an object of such subtlety and importance could have been created without both the approval and the involvement of Edward III. There is also the possibility that the king was concerned in and contributed to the rebuilding of the abbey church, especially the south transept which has close architectural parallels with the tomb.²¹⁹ If we were to guess at a possible date for the dedication of the tomb, it might be September 1337, the occasion of a visit by Edward III²²⁰ and the year following the completion of the south transept.

Another question is who paid for the tomb. Pilgrims and visitors no doubt made a contribution as the Abbey chronicle claimed, but there are no extant financial records of the medieval abbey to show whether or not this was so.²²¹ It is also possible that the town of Gloucester made its own contribution in return for the confirmation of its charters in December 1328, but again there is no evidence to support this. On the other hand, if Edward III contributed wholly or largely to the cost,²²² there should be documentary proof of this. Unfortunately this is not the case either.²²³ By the time that Edward III took over the rule of his kingdom from the regime of his mother Isabella and Roger Mortimer in late 1330, the treasury was almost empty.²²⁴ He was reduced to raising money by extraordinary measures and did so, for example, for the wedding of his sister Eleanor to Count Reginald of Guelders in 1332, when he sent out what amounted to begging letters to the heads of nearly 300 religious houses: these brought in over £1,300.²²⁵ It is conceivable that Edward III also raised money by special measures for the construction of his father's tomb. In his account for 1332–3 the sheriff of Gloucestershire recorded a sum of £1, 521 received from the lands at Cheltenham and Slaughter belonging to the great Benedictine abbey of Fécamp in Normandy.²²⁶ These had been in royal custody for several years, arising first from the seizure of the lands of alien religious houses in 1324 during the war of Saint-Sardos and then from the vacancy which arose when the abbot Pierre Roger was appointed as archbishop of Rouen. Pierre Roger was well known to the English court through his close involvement in Anglo-French relations: in 1328 and again in 1329 he was sent to England to demand that Edward III should perform homage; and in between these two missions he was sent to Gascony to sequester Edward's revenues until he agreed to pay homage, which was eventually performed at Amiens on 6 June 1329.²²⁷ It might have seemed appropriate to Edward III that in turn the abbey's own sequestered revenues should be used to help pay for his father's tomb: £1,521 would have gone a long way towards this.²²⁸ But there was another reason why Fécamp might have made a contribution: this was the close connection which had existed between England and the abbey since the time of Edward the Confessor, who had been a generous benefactor to the abbey, including granting it land in Sussex.²²⁹ The monks of Fécamp had retained their interest in Edward the Confessor and England and in about 1308 had installed stained glass depicting the lives of St Louis and St Edward, possibly to mark the marriage of Edward II and Isabella at nearby Boulogne.²³⁰ If they were interested in Edward II at the beginning of his reign, perhaps they were still interested in him after his death. This is of course highly speculative and there is no proof of any of these suggestions. Nonetheless a link between two famous Benedictine abbeys, one in Normandy and the other in Gloucester, remains an intriguing possibility.

HOW DID EDWARD II DIE?

The sources are generally in agreement that Edward died on 21 September 1327 and at Berkeley castle, with the exception of some versions of the Brut chronicle which place his death at Corfe castle in Dorset.²³¹ There is however a much wider variety of explanations for his death.²³² Some sources recorded simply that he died, but made no attempt at any further explanation; one that he died naturally; others that he died of grief; others claimed that he was murdered, but without much elaboration; and a final category had the lurid red-hot iron story. The first group includes the initial announcement of his death during the parliament assembled at Lincoln in September 1327; the Annales Paulini say no more than that he died at Berkeley and was buried at Gloucester;²³³ the short annals composed at the Cistercian abbey at Newenham near Axminster in Devon in the early 1330s say only that Edward died and lay at Gloucester;²³⁴ the Canterbury chronicle says that Edward ‘Migravit ad Christum’ at Berkeley and was buried at Gloucester;²³⁵while the author of the Wigmore chronicle went out of his way to insist that Edward died a natural death, whatever was said to the contrary.²³⁶ Other examples could also be given, although some express doubt.²³⁷ The shorter continuations of the French Brutchronicle, ending in the early 1330s, use language which suggests that Edward died of grief but which might also be taken to mean that he died in pain.²³⁸ The Anonimalle Chronicle, another continuation of the French Brut, says simply that Edward became ill and died.²³⁹ But there were also doubters. Adam Murimuth, another writer connected with St Paul's, who wrote his final account twenty years after the event but was certainly working from much earlier notes, was shrewd and generally well informed; he was also the administrator of the vacant diocese of Exeter when Edward died and so not a great distance away. He too said that Edward died at Berkeley; but then added that it was commonly said that Edward had been murdered ‘by a trick’;²⁴⁰ later when writing of Mortimer's execution in 1330 he says that Mortimer was accused of having Edward suffocated.²⁴¹ The Lanercost chronicler hedged his bets, saying that Edward died either naturally or through the violence of others;²⁴² the author of the Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon, writing at Bridlington in the 1330s, noted that he did not believe what was then being written;²⁴³ an annotation in the Peterborough chronicle records that ‘Edward was in good health in the evening but was found dead on the morrow’;²⁴⁴ and the French chronicle of London remarked that he was ‘vilely murdered’.²⁴⁵ Some writers were more specific as to the mode of death. Strangulation was cited by the Lichfield chronicler,²⁴⁶ while suffocation combined with the insertion of a red-hot iron into Edward's bowels was offered by a number of writers. This appears in the longer continuations of the Brut chronicle;²⁴⁷ Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon;²⁴⁸ the Chronicon of Geoffrey le Baker;²⁴⁹ the chronicle of Meaux abbey in Yorkshire;²⁵⁰ and in Henry Knighton's chronicle written at Leicester;²⁵¹ one version of the Brut adds that Edward was first of all drugged while he sat at dinner before being killed.²⁵² Through the sheer horror of the account and by dint of repetition the red-hot iron has become the classic explanation of Edward's death.

There were also plenty of suggestions as to both the instigators and the actual murderers. The author of the Historia Roffensis, in recording that Thomas Gurney brought the news of Edward's death to Lincoln, spoke volumes when he described Gurney as ‘the follower of Satan’ and added that Edward had died while in the hands of enemies who had long planned to kill him, ‘saying we shall put him to a most shameful death’.²⁵³ John Maltravers and Thomas Gurney were named as the killers by Adam Murimuth, theBrut, and Geoffrey le Baker, among others; the Brut added that they were acting on orders received by Thomas de Berkeley from Roger Mortimer; Geoffrey le Baker claimed that Berkeley was deliberately kept away from Edward because he was too kindly disposed towards him,²⁵⁴ but that the orders for Edward's death were sent by Isabella through the medium of a deliberately ambiguous message composed by Adam Orleton, the bishop of Hereford.²⁵⁵

It is possible that Edward did die a natural death. Although he was described as a man of outstanding strength,²⁵⁶ there is no way of knowing his physical condition during the time of his imprisonment at Kenilworth and Berkeley and how far he was affected by confinement and possible ill-treatment. However, the mental condition of a man who had so recently been in a position of power with all the trappings of royalty and was now separated from family, friends and dignity is likely to have been very poor. It is easy to believe that Edward was deeply depressed by September 1327.²⁵⁷ If there were any underlying physical illness as well this might have been enough to bring about or accelerate his death. However, nearly all the references to a natural death or death from illness come from soon after Edward's presumed death and before new information came to light or other explanations had time to be elaborated. It seems more likely that he was murdered, probably by suffocation, and with the intention of leaving no outward mark on his body. A violent death, allegedly accompanied by the dying screams of the victim, is at odds with such a plan. The gruesome story of the red-hot iron may be true, or simply be a dramatic way of accounting for Edward's death from a painful illness. But it is also possible that it was a later addition: once the story began to circulate it quickly took on the status of undisputed fact. It has been plausibly argued that the story, with its implications of anal rape, was developed later as propaganda by his enemies, specifically in order to blacken his reputation still further²⁵⁸ and probably also to counter any attempts to portray him as a potential saint.²⁵⁹ There is also a parallel, which may be significant, between this story and the twelfth-century chronicle accounts of the murder in 1016 of an earlier English king, Edmund Ironside.²⁶⁰

There is no definite evidence of any initial suspicions about the manner of Edward II's death. As already mentioned, it is known that the woman who eviscerated Edward's corpse visited Isabella at Worcester a few days after the funeral. This could be interpreted as Isabella wanting to know more about the manner of her husband's death, either because she had a guilty conscience or because she suspected foul play; or the purpose may simply have been for her to receive Edward's heart.²⁶¹ Although it is impossible to prove that Isabella had nothing to do with her husband's death, one part at least of the accusations against her can be rejected. The ambiguous message allegedly sent to Edward's gaolers on her behalf by the bishop of Hereford was pure fiction, since the bishop was not even in England at the time and so could not possibly have done this. A similar literary device has been traced via the St Albans chronicler Matthew Paris writing in the mid-thirteenth century to the early thirteenth-century French chronicler, Alberic des Trois Fontaines, who recorded a message allegedly written in 1213 by the archbishop of Gran/Ezstergom in Hungary, instigating the murder of Queen Gertrude the wife of Andrew II of Hungary: Reginam interficere nolite timere bonum est.²⁶²

It was not until the fall and execution of Roger Mortimer in October–November 1330 that Edward's death was first publicly described as murder and that anyone was named as responsible. In the indictment laid before parliament in November 1330 Mortimer was accused of having Edward moved from Kenilworth to Berkeley castle where he was ‘traitorously, feloniously and falsely murdered and killed by him and his followers’.²⁶³ Two of these followers, Thomas Gurney and William Ogle or Ockley, were also judged guilty of the murder of ‘King Edward, the father of our present lord the king’ and sentenced to death in their absence.²⁶⁴

THE PRISONER AT CORFE

The execution of Roger Mortimer and the conviction of Ockley and Gurney were the continuation and climax of another drama which had been working itself out since 1327. No sooner had Edward II been buried than tales began to circulate that he was not dead after all and that someone else was buried in his place. The usual cast of fantasizing friars reappeared on stage, together with former friends and allies of the departed king, and at least some leading magnates.

On 16 March 1330 Edward II's half-brother, Edmund of Woodstock the earl of Kent, was brought first before Robert Howel, the coroner of the king's household, and then before the magnates who were assembled in parliament at Winchester. After interrogation by Howel and Roger Mortimer Edmund made a remarkable confession: that the pope had asked him to free the former king from imprisonment, offering to pay the costs of doing so; that a Dominican friar from the London convent had come to him at Kensington near London and told him that he had raised the devil, who had told him for certain that the former king was still alive;²⁶⁵ that William Melton, the archbishop of York, sent Robert de Taunton, one of his chaplains, to him with an offer of £5,000 to aid in Edward's delivery. In a long and circumstantial confession Edmund gave the names of a number of people who he said were also involved, who believed that Edward was still alive and wanted to see him freed: four knights, Ingelram Berenger, William de la Zouche, John Pecche and Fulk Fitz Warin; William de Cliff; Hugh Despenser; two Dominican friars, Edmund and John Savage, who were ‘out of their order’;²⁶⁶ and the bishop of London. On a journey to France he had met Sir Henry de Beaumont and Sir Thomas Roscelyn in the chamber of the duke of Brabant, the former Edward II's nephew. The two exiles had said they planned to launch an invasion of England via Scotland, with the aid of Donald, earl of Mar. A Cistercian monk from Quarr abbey on the Isle of Wight had also arranged a barge to bring Edward and Edmund from Corfe to Arundel castle, and from there to wherever they decided. Edmund also admitted that he had written to Sir Bogo de Bayouse and Sir John Deveril concerning Edward's release from captivity.²⁶⁷ The lengthy account of the affair in the Brut chronicle appears to be based in part on Edmund's confession, but it adds that certain Dominicans had told him not just that Edward was alive but that he was being held by Thomas Gurney in Corfe castle, whose constable was John Deveril.²⁶⁸ When approached by Edmund, Deveril had admitted to him that he had Edward in his custody but was under strict orders not to allow anyone to see him. Edmund gave Deveril a letter addressed to his brother in which he promised to release him and claimed that he had the support of many prelates, earls and barons. Deveril betrayed him and took the letter directly to Roger Mortimer.²⁶⁹ The earl of Kent's confession was then repeated before a deputation of peers attending parliament. The result was a foregone conclusion, and the earl was executed outside the gate of Winchester castle on 19 March, but only after a delay in finding someone willing to perform the execution.²⁷⁰

A month later it was the turn of William Melton, archbishop of York, who was interrogated before the king and his council at Woodstock on 23 April and again at Banbury on 30 April. Melton was charged that on 10 October 1329 a certain William de Kingsclere had come to him at Sherburn, ‘announcing to him and emphatically asserting that Edward, the late king of England, the father of the present king, was alive and in good health in the prison of Corfe Castle and asking him if he would furnish any advice or help in releasing him’. Melton had allegedly replied that he would have sold all his goods and chattels, except for a single vestment and a single chalice, in order to bring this about. It was claimed that Melton had then sent William de Kingsclere to Scotland to obtain the assistance of Donald, earl of Mar, who replied that when he was notified by the archbishop he would enter England with an army of 40,000 men. The archbishop denied all the charges and was to have been tried before Henry le Scrope, together with the bishop of London and William, the abbot of Langdon in Kent.²⁷¹ These three men, William la Zouche ‘and many others’ petitioned the king during the parliament of November–December 1330 on the grounds that John de Haltby from Ipswich and Martin Love had tried to implicate them in the rebellion of the earl of Kent,²⁷² and the proceedings ended abruptly on 12 December 1330 when Edward III ordered the justices not to take any further action since he held the archbishop completely guiltless of adherence to Edmund of Woodstock.²⁷³

In the end the only person to suffer death for his adherence to the alleged plot was the earl of Kent himself, and he won little sympathy because of his past behaviour and that of his followers.²⁷⁴ William Melton's clerk Robert de Taunton and various unidentified Dominican and Carmelite friars were put into prison;²⁷⁵ the provincials of the two orders, the distinguished scholar Simon de Boraston and John de Baconthorpe, may have been exiled for a time;²⁷⁶ and four knights, Fulk Fitz Warin, John Pecche, Ingelram Berenger and George de Percy, had their lands seized as the earl's adherents.²⁷⁷

It is easier to construct some kind of narrative than to explain exactly what was going on in 1330; to what extent those engaged in the plot really believed that Edward II was still alive; or whether they were simply entrapped by their own wishful thinking and by Mortimer and his agents; or whether they used the opportunity to further their own political agendas. An element of all these was probably involved. Part of the explanation was certainly the activities of friars concerned to demonstrate their continued loyalty to the former king, prepared to clutch at any straws and to persuade others of the truth of their stories. If Thomas Dunheved himself was no longer alive to lend his own special brand of fanatical loyalty, then other friars certainly did so. Several of the names of those identified by Edmund of Woodstock in his confession are men who had been connected with the Younger Despenser before 1327: Sir Ingelram Berenger was a former Despenser retainer; William de Cliff a chancery clerk had also been a Despenser adherent;²⁷⁸ the Carmelite Richard de Bliton had been the Younger Despenser's confessor;²⁷⁹ and Hugh Despenser was the son and heir of the Younger Despenser who had defended Caerphilly castle during the siege of 1326–7. Then there were the old and loyal friends of the former king, William Melton the archbishop of York, Stephen Segrave the bishop of London and William abbot of Langdon. All of these groups were hostile in varying degrees to the regime of Mortimer and Isabella.²⁸⁰ Particular attention has been drawn to the possible role of Sir John Pecche, one of the knights implicated by the earl of Kent. It has been suggested that he was in a position to know whether or not Edward II really was alive and being held at Corfe, since he had been constable of the castle.²⁸¹ Pecche had been appointed as constable in December 1325 but it is not clear when he left office. He and his wife were made attorneys prior to going overseas in February 1327 and again in February 1328.²⁸² Whether he did go overseas or not is unknown but it is very unlikely that he remained as constable until 1329, as has been argued.²⁸³ John Maltravers was formally appointed as constable in September 1329, but was already described as keeper in the previous month, while there is evidence that he was also at Corfe in or about September 1327.²⁸⁴ This suggests that he may have replaced John Pecche much earlier than the date of his formal appointment. Earlier in his career Pecche had had associations both with the Younger Despenser and, interestingly enough, was also acquainted with the Dunheved family;²⁸⁵ Pecche and Fulk Fitz Warin, another knight named by the earl of Kent, had also played an important part in the war against the Mortimers in the Welsh March in 1321–2.²⁸⁶ Far from knowing that Edward II was alive and well in Corfe castle, Pecche may have been as much influenced by rumour and disinformation as anyone else.

Another source of hostility was Henry, earl of Lancaster. Although Lancaster and his son-in-law Thomas Wake had helped to orchestrate the events which led to Edward II's deposition in January 1327, and he had apparently willingly acquiesced in Edward's transfer from Kenilworth to Berkeley in April that year, tension between him and Mortimer was increasing. This arose in part from the peace treaty with Scotland in 1328 to which he was bitterly opposed, together with others such as Henry de Beaumont who had claims to lands in Scotland; but it also stemmed from the growing influence and arbitrary behaviour of Roger Mortimer. Mortimer's power, symbolized by the title of earl of March which he was granted in October 1328, exceeded even that of the Younger Despenser against whom he had fought in the closing years of Edward II's reign. In the summer and autumn of 1328 the situation deteriorated so far that Lancaster began raising an army; among his sympathizers were the former king's two half-brothers, the earls of Kent and Norfolk. Open conflict was avoided and most of the rebels were pardoned, with the exception of Henry de Beaumont, Thomas Wake and Thomas Roscelyn who were forced into exile and fled to France.²⁸⁷ It was deeply ironic that some of those who invaded England with Isabella and Mortimer in 1326 were once again abroad and plotting, this time Mortimer's downfall.

There is a hint of things to come as early as November 1328 when the earl of Lancaster wrote to the mayor of London telling him that the earl of Kent had made certain communications with him, which he could not put into writing but which the bearer would report by word of mouth. Although it has been suggested that these concerned rumours that Edward II was still alive and that Lancaster was implicated in the earl of Kent's plot,²⁸⁸ this probably indicates no more than a growing sympathy between the two earls. The earl of Kent did however go to France in June 1329 on royal business connected with the canonization of Thomas of Lancaster²⁸⁹ and it was evidently during this period that he contacted the Lancastrian exiles living in Paris as well as visiting Avignon.²⁹⁰ If the account in the Brut is to be believed, Edmund told the pope that he thought his brother Edward was still alive. Although this account then says that the pope gave Edmund encouragement in releasing his brother from captivity,²⁹¹ it seems unlikely that the pope would have committed himself to such a rumour: it is more probable that he fobbed Edmund off with polite words, but no more. In fact John XXII appears to have been profoundly embarrassed when he discovered that Edmund had engaged in a plot, and when John Walwayn, canon of Salisbury, came to Avignon in 1330, shortly after the execution of the earl of Kent,²⁹² he expressed his unease very forcibly and made it clear that he did not and never had believed that Edward II was still alive. On 5 September 1330 the pope wrote to both Isabella and Edward III, thanking them for the news that John Walwayn had just brought and expressing his amazement that the earl of Kent could have asserted that the pope believed something so incredible: ‘that he for whom such solemn funeral ceremonies had been held was alive’.²⁹³ The pope added that he believed firmly that those who were present at the funeral were not deceived and did not attempt to deceive. If the funeral had been secret, there might be some justification for the report, but as it was held in public there was none. Had the pope believed such a report, he would have dealt not with the earl of Kent or anyone else, but with the queen and her son concerning the restoration to liberty and the production in public of the man said to be alive.²⁹⁴

The pope had not believed that Edward II was still alive in 1330 and, just as significantly, some of the chroniclers did not believe it either. The author of the Lanercost chronicle expressed his amazement that the Dominican friar who began the rumour, or indeed any educated person, should have believed the devil, the father of lies;²⁹⁵ while Geoffrey le Baker remarked that the whole thing was false and a fantasy.²⁹⁶ Roger Mortimer and his agents must have learned of the existence of rumours being spread by certain friars and had then used them to entrap their enemies.²⁹⁷

THE END OF ROGER MORTIMER

Mortimer's success in snaring Edmund of Woodstock contributed to his own downfall only a few months later. Edward III was furious and ashamed: he had been very reluctant to order the execution of his uncle Edmund of Woodstock and had done so only under great pressure, from both his mother Queen Isabella and from Mortimer.²⁹⁸ There were other reasons for what followed but it is likely that the death of the earl of Kent was the last straw for the eighteen-year-old king. Mortimer and his mother between them had usurped the power which was rightfully his as king; they had bankrupted the treasury; humiliated him in his first and unsuccessful campaign against the Scots in 1327; imposed upon him a hateful treaty with the same enemy and, without his approval, married his sister Joan to David Bruce, the son and heir of Robert Bruce;²⁹⁹ and there was also the question of relations with France. With the aid of one of his most trusted followers, William de Montacute, Edward began to plot the overthrow of Mortimer. In early September Mortimer and Isabella moved, with Edward III, to Nottingham castle. Despite Mortimer's suspicions of a plot against him, Edward III and his supporters held their nerve, and on 19 October Montacute and a group of armed men entered the castle by an underground passage during the night and placed Mortimer under arrest.³⁰⁰ The following month Edward III gained his revenge. Mortimer was indicted before parliament for the murder of Edward II at Berkeley castle in September 1327 and for other crimes, was duly convicted, and was drawn and hanged at Tyburn on 29 November.³⁰¹

PUNISHING THE GUILTY

Several of Mortimer's followers were dealt with at the same time. Simon de Bereford was convicted of aiding and abetting Mortimer in all his crimes;³⁰² William Ockley and Thomas Gurney were convicted of the murder of Edward II;³⁰³ and two others, the Yorkshire knight Bogo de Bayouse and John Deveril, who had been at Corfe when the earl of Kent tried to find the former king, were both found guilty of the earl's entrapment.³⁰⁴

However, neither of Edward's former keepers at Berkeley castle, John Maltravers and Thomas de Berkeley, was charged with responsibility for his death. Maltravers was instead sentenced to death in his absence for his alleged leading role in plotting against the earl of Kent. He was charged with knowing that Edward was dead but not with his murder.³⁰⁵ Thomas de Berkeley was present in parliament and must have known in advance that it was reasonably safe for him to be there, since he was treated quite differently. He may have been encouraged by the fact that his son Maurice de Berkeley and Thomas de Bradeston, a royal household knight but with Berkeley connections, were among the conspirators who had arrested Roger Mortimer on the night of 19–20 October.³⁰⁶Thomas de Berkeley accepted that Edward had been delivered into the safe-keeping of himself and John Maltravers at Berkeley, and that Edward was murdered there while in their custody, but said that ‘he was never an accomplice, a helper or a procurer in his death, nor did he ever know of his death until this present parliament’.³⁰⁷ He also claimed that when Edward was murdered he was absent from the castle at Bradley and was so ill that he could remember nothing of what took place. When he was asked why he did not take better care of the king, he replied that he had appointed other keepers and officials to act in his place, and again denied any part in Edward's death. On 20 January 1331 a jury of twelve knights appeared before the king in parliament and declared that Thomas de Berkeley was not guilty of any part in Edward's murder, that they believed that he had been ill, that Thomas Gurney and William Ockley had been acting in his place, and that they had carried out the murder. The king was evidently not fully convinced, since Berkeley was left in the custody of the steward of the royal household to await a decision on his fate at the next parliament.³⁰⁸

The jury which advised Edward III on the guilt or innocence of Thomas de Berkeley was no ordinary body of county knights attending parliament, but included well-connected and experienced men, such as the royal household bannerets Roger Swynnerton, John D'Arcy and John de Wisham (seneschal of Gascony from 1324 to 1327; and currently justice of North Wales), and a royal household knight, William Trussell (who had formally renounced the community's homage to Edward II in January 1327).³⁰⁹ Such men knew perfectly well that anyone who had committed treasonable acts could expect no mercy: if they had disbelieved Berkeley's story, there is little doubt that they would have said so.³¹⁰ But the men who were best placed to tell the jury and the king about Thomas de Berkeley's guilt or innocence were William Ockley, Thomas Gurney and John Maltravers, who were not to be found, having already fled the country each with a sentence of death and a price on his head hanging over him.³¹¹

THE EXILES

Nothing was heard again of William Ockley and his fate remains a mystery. Maltravers could in principle have gone to Ireland, where his younger brother Edward held the valuable family manor of Rathkeale in Co. Limerick, but he would have been far too conspicuous there and would have invited arrest by the royal authorities.³¹² Instead Maltravers and Gurney, who both had close family connections with the south-west of England, probably escaped to the continent from the small Cornish port of Mousehole, with the aid of two local men, Benedict Noght and John le Taverner. The authorities believed that these two remained in contact with Maltravers and Gurney after their escape and continued to supply them with food and arms.³¹³ Even this was not the end of the story. Maltravers appears to have gone to the Low Countries, where he had spent a previous period of exile after 1322, and worked hard at rehabilitating himself by acting as an English agent at the time when Edward III was busily building alliances there against France.³¹⁴ In 1332 Maltravers's wife Agnes went abroad, allegedly on pilgrimage but probably in order to join her husband. In 1334 Maltravers contacted Edward III because he ‘was desirous to reveal to him many things concerning his honour and the estate and well-being of the realm’. It is likely that he wished to tell what he knew about the death of Edward II, with which he had not been charged but about which he certainly knew more than was good for him. William de Montacute, the same knight who had been instrumental in the overthrow of Roger Mortimer in 1330, was sent to the continent to meet him.³¹⁵ If Maltravers did tell his side of the tragedy of Edward II, no record has survived but, as will appear, it is likely that his evidence was closely linked with the exoneration of Thomas de Berkeley in 1335.³¹⁶ In 1339 Maltravers was granted a life annuity of £100; in 1342 his wife was authorized to stay with him for as long as she wished; in 1345 Maltravers submitted to Edward III in Flanders;³¹⁷ in 1351 he was pardoned and eventually returned to England, where he died in 1364.³¹⁸ Even more extraordinary than the real-life story of John Maltravers is the outside possibility that he was so well known in the Low Countries as an Englishman who had fled his country after being involved in the death of a nobleman that he became an inspiration for the fictional English knight, Sir John Mandeville, the hero of one of the most widely read works of travel literature of the late medieval and early modern period.³¹⁹

The fate of Thomas Gurney was very different. Since Gurney had been convicted of playing a direct role in the murder of Edward II, Edward III was determined to capture him and discover the truth about his father's death. In 1331 Gurney was found in Spain, and held prisoner in Burgos by the king of Castile,³²⁰ but escaped before Edward III's agents could take charge of him.³²¹ He then made his way to Italy and was discovered in Naples, where an English agent, William of Cornwall, held him. Gurney was taken back to Collioure near Perpignan, then into Spain, and finally to Bayonne, in Edward III's duchy of Gascony. There he died in the early summer of 1333.³²²

Another fugitive from justice was the Yorkshire knight Bogo de Bayouse, who, like Maltravers and John Deveril, was sentenced to death for the entrapment of the earl of Kent at Corfe castle.³²³ He fled to France, travelled via the Rhône valley, and ended up in Rome where he was joined by his wife Alice and lived in rooms rented from an unnamed countess. Bogo died in Rome on 26 July 1334 and was buried in the local parish church of San Celso, near the Ponte Sant' Angelo. The English authorities were certainly interested in his whereabouts but so far as is known they did not succeed in tracing him. Nonetheless, although Bogo and his wife may have lived in reasonable comfort, they must have been in constant fear of discovery.³²⁴

The ultimate fate of Thomas de Berkeley depended in part on the fugitives. It is unlikely that Bogo de Bayouse knew anything at first hand about what had happened at Berkeley in 1327, but Gurney and Maltravers were another matter. When parliament next met in September 1331 the prelates and magnates informed the king that since Thomas Gurney, who knew fully how the murder had been committed, was still alive, so far as they knew, the king and his council should wait until the following parliament before taking any decision on Berkeley's fate.³²⁵ In fact it was several parliaments later before the king and his council returned to the subject of Thomas de Berkeley, and in the meantime Gurney had died, taking his secrets with him to the grave. Although Berkeley was not formally pardoned for his neglect of his royal prisoner until the parliament of March 1337,³²⁶ a recent discovery has shown that two years earlier, during the York parliament of May–June 1335, Berkeley was declared by the king to be ‘quit of the death of the king his father and without culpability’. The reason for the decision was not given but it is likely that it was the result of newly acquired information about Edward's death and that it had come from none other than John Maltravers.³²⁷

Edward II was dead and buried, and the men guilty of his murder had been punished. But it was not the end of the story.

¹ Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, f. 124v; Anonimalle, 132–3.

² Ann. Paul., 318; CMPR, 17; Williams, Medieval London, 297; Calendar of the Letter-Books …: E, ed. Sharpe, 215.

³ ‘In ingenti tristitia’: Flores, 235.

⁴ Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, ed. Twysden, col. 2766 (recte 2767–8). See the discussion of this letter in Ch.10.

⁵ Cf. Haines, The Church and Politics, 176.

⁶ After his flight from London on 15 Oct. Reynolds had remained in Canterbury or other places in Kent, keeping his distance from the turmoil in London and from the events in Oxford, Bristol and Hereford. However, he ventured back as far as Lambeth on 23 Dec. and was at Newington near Wallingford on the 29th: Wright, The Church and the English Crown, 410. The exact process by which Reynolds decided or was induced finally to desert Edward II and to throw in his lot with the new regime is unknown: cf. Haines, Stratford, 175.

⁷ Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, ed. Twysden, cols 2767–8; Chartulary, ed. Goodman, 106–7. Interestingly, Orleton makes no mention of Roger Mortimer, who was certainly present at Wallingford.

⁸ Chartulary, ed. Goodman, 105–7; Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, ed. Twysden, col. 2767.

⁹ BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49: ‘si Regina Regi adhereret occideretur ab eo.’

¹⁰ Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, ed. Twysden, cols 2767–8; Chartulary, ed. Goodman, 106–7.

¹¹ Haines, The Church and Politics, 228.

¹² R.M. Haines, ‘The Stamford Council of April 1327’, EHR, cxxii (2007), 141–8, esp. 145–8.

¹³ Brut, i, 252.

¹⁴ Murimuth, 52.

¹⁵ ‘Also, the said Roger falsely and maliciously initiated discord between the father of our lord the king and the queen his consort, and he caused her to believe that if she came to him he would have killed her with a knife or murdered her in another manner. Because of which, for that reason, and by his other subtle scheming, he caused the said queen not to come to her said lord, to the great dishonour of the king and of the queen his mother, and perhaps the great damage of all the realm in future, which God forbid’: PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 1.

¹⁶ The claim that Edward would have killed Isabella, and even their son, if they had come to visit him in prison, was also repeated by the author of the Brut chronicle: Brut, i, 252–3.

¹⁷ Vita, 18–21, 192–3.

¹⁸ Froissart, 85: this is from the fourth redaction of Froissart's chronicle. One of Froissart's patrons was Jean de Beaumont (d. 1356) who was able to tell him about his role in events in England nearly 30 years before. Although the early part of Froissart's chronicle was based very closely on the work of the Liège chronicler Jean le Bel who was in England in 1327 and acquired a great deal of first-hand information, this story does not appear in le Bel's account. On Jean le Bel (c. 1290–1370) and Froissart (? 1337–c. 1404) see the articles by J. Vale and M.C.E. Jones in the Oxford DNB.

¹⁹ ‘tyrannus et sodomita’: see Mortimer, ‘Sermons of sodomy’, 50–2; and Ormrod, ‘The sexualities of Edward II’, 39. However, the articles of his deposition in 1327 did not accuse him of either tyranny or sodomy. Orleton's alleged remarks about Edward II are contained in the charges laid against Orleton by John Prickehare in April 1334 as part of the attempt to prevent his translation from Worcester to the diocese of Winchester: The Register of John de Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, ed. F.C. Hingeston-Randolph, iii (London, 1899), 1542 (this has the full Latin text of the charges, including the offending words ‘tyrannus et sodomita’); Chartulary, ed. Goodman, 104–5. There is a new edition of Prickehare's charges in R.M. Haines, ‘Looking back in anger’, EHR, cxvi (2001), 398–404.

²⁰ Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, ed. Twysden, cols 2763–4; Chartulary, ed. Goodman, 106. Out of delicacy perhaps, Twysden inserted ‘etc’ after the word ‘tyrannus’ and made no reference to sodomy, which is similarly absent from Goodman's edition of the Winchester cartulary. In his refutation of the charges against him, Orleton also spoke of Edward's immoderate and inordinate love for Despenser: ‘quem Rex immoderato et inordinato amore dilexit’: Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, col. 2767. This detail is also omitted by Goodman.

²¹ Mortimer, ‘Sermons of Sodomy’, 52–3; Brown, ‘The prince is father of the king’, 525–6; J.A. Brundage, ‘The politics of sodomy: Rex v. Pons Hugh de Ampurias (1311)’, in In Iure Veritas: Studies in Canon Law in Memory of Schafer Williams, ed. S.B. Bowman & B.E. Cody (Cincinnati, 1991), 3–10; see also the Introduction to this book. The very interesting discussion of Edward II's sexuality by C.T. Wood in ‘Queens, queans and kingship’, in Wood, Joan of Arc and Richard III (Oxford, 1988), 12–17, does not allow for the possibility that his character was deliberately blackened in 1326–7. Sodomitical acts were also among the charges laid against Richard II in 1399: Evans, The Death of Kings (London, 2003), 130–1, 245.

²² See, e.g., Chronographia Regum Francorum, ed. Moranville, 285, under the year 1326: ‘sese sodomitane immundicie, ut sibi imponebatur, tradidit, innaturalem venerem naturali libidini preferens’; Le Bel, 28, writing about the cutting off of Despenser's genitals at his execution, ‘pour tant qu'il estoit herites et sodomites, ainsi comme on disoit, et mesmement du roy mesmes’. Jean le Bel's opinion was quoted almost verbatim by his successor and fellow Hainaulter, Jean Froissart: Froissart, 87–8. The only example I have found among English writers is the chronicle of Meaux abbey in Yorkshire which was composed before 1399: ‘Ipse quidem Edwardus in vitio sodomitico nimium delectabat, et fortuna ac gratia omni suo tempore carere videbatur’: Melsa, 355.

²³ French Chron, 57; Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, ed. Twysden, cols 2765–6 (where the full text of the articles is given); Chartulary, ed. Goodman, 106 (where only the opening lines are given). According to Orleton's later defence, the decision of the prelates and magnates that the king should be removed was embodied in a document drawn up by John Stratford the bishop of Winchester and set down in writing by Stratford's secretary and public notary William Mees. Given the nature of the debate at Wallingford, it is very unlikely that the composition of the articles would have been delayed until after the beginning of parliament at Westminster on 7 Jan.

²⁴ Literae Cantuarienses, i, ed. Sheppard, 204–5: a letter from Henry of Eastry, prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, to the archbishop, which indicates that a delegation had been sent before the start of parliament, but does not name the two bishops. The Lanercost chronicle names them as Orleton and Stratford: Lanercost, 257; while the so-called Pipewell chronicle names them as Orleton and Stephen Gravesend of London: BL, Cotton Ms. Julius A.1, f. 56, printed in M.V. Clarke, Medieval Representation and Consent (London, 1936; repr. New York, 1964), 194. Since they returned from Kenilworth on 12 Jan., it is most unlikely that they had departed only on the 7th, the day parliament formally began, and far more probable that they left from Wallingford at the same time that Isabella left there for London: cf. Valente, ‘Deposition’, 855.

²⁵ There is no record of the writs of summons issued on 28 Oct. in the name of Edward II's son as guardian of the kingdom for a meeting of parliament on 14 Dec. On 3 Dec. 1326 further writs were issued at Ledbury in the name of Edward II, postponing the meeting of the parliament ‘for certain necessary causes and utilities' to Westminster on 7 Jan. 1327, and recording the alleged basis on which the original summons was issued. Edward II is recorded as stating that, through the agency of his ‘most beloved consort Isabella queen of England’ and of Edward his ‘firstborn son keeper of the kingdom’, he himself being outside the kingdom, he had wished to hold a parliament at Westminster on 14 Dec. to have a ‘colloquium’ and ‘tractatum’ with those present ‘upon various affairs touching himself and the state of his kingdom’: PW, II, ii, 350–66; CCR, 1327–30, 101–2; RDP, iii, 369–72. Since in reality Edward II did not summon the parliament which met in his name and during which he lost his throne, the legality of both the original summons of 28 Oct. and of the prorogation of 3 Dec. is highly questionable.

²⁶ Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, f. 124r; Anonimalle, 132–3.

²⁷ CPMR, 11, 18.

²⁸ Lanercost, 257. For what follows I am greatly indebted to the sequence of events worked out by Dr Claire Valente in ‘Deposition’. Her chronology is generally both clearer and more convincing than, for example, that of Haines, in Stratford, 179–86 (who appears to conflate the events of 7 and 13 Jan. and also places the critical sermons by the bishops of Hereford and Winchester and the archbishop of Canterbury on three separate days, 13, 14, and 15 Jan., following the Lanercost chronicle); and Fryde, 196–200 (who has the sermons of the bishop of Winchester and archbishop of Canterbury occurring after the return of the delegation sent to Kenilworth to renounce homage rather thanbeforehand); Williams, Medieval London, 298. My main difference from Dr Valente's chronology is in placing the Guildhall oaths after rather than before the proceedings in parliament on 13 Jan.

²⁹ BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v.

³⁰ The envoys were kept at Canterbury and did not reach London until 4 Jan. Although there is no record of their participation in the events that followed, and they left England on 26 Jan., they would certainly have been able to inform the pope of Edward II's fate: Foedera, II, i, 647; Haines. Stratford, 177.

³¹ BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49r, 49v. Dr Valente is surely correct in placing this address by Orleton on 12 Jan., when the real business of the parliament began, rather than on 7 Jan., the official opening day of the assembly, as implied in the Historia Roffensis: Valente, ‘Deposition’, 855, n. 4; 858, n. 2. However, her argument that the parliament was dismissed until the following afternoon is incorrect. The reference in the Historia Roffensis to the meeting reassembling ‘hora tercia’ after everyone had had food and drink clearly means the morning, at about 9 a.m.: cf. Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 167, 287, n. 9.

³² CPMR, 11–12; Valente, ‘Deposition’, 855–6.

³³ The meeting is described by Jean le Bel: Le Bel, 29; and is referred to in the Forma deposicionis.

³⁴ CCR, 1327–30, 1. The full French text from the Close Roll is given in Foedera, II, ii, 683, and in Select Documents, 38.

³⁵ See PROME, Parliament of Jan. 1327, C 65/1, passim.

³⁶ For the text of the articles of deposition see Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, ed. Twysden, col. 2765–6 (where the full text of the articles is given); Chartulary, ed. Goodman, 106 (where only the opening lines are given). The articles are more conveniently published in Foedera, II, i, 650, and in Select Documents, 37–8, using the text derived from Lambeth Palace Ms. 1213. A better text, drawn from the Winchester Chartulary, is now available in Valente, ‘Deposition’, 878–81. One significant correction in interpretation is in clause 6, where the meaning of the word ‘deguerpist’ is shown to be ‘abandoned’ (because Edward had left England for Wales, and probably intended going to Ireland) rather than ‘neglected’ or ‘stripped’. An official version of the articles apparently existed in the time of Richard II, when it was used by his opponents in 1386–7, and was probably destroyed by Richard after his coup of 1397: Valente, 856–7.

³⁷ Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41 is a late 14th-century continuation of the chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury down to the year 1385. It is particularly valuable for the events of 1320–2 and later: see Phillips, 206–22, passim. The Forma deposicionis, which is contained on ff. 125–6, and is followed by William Trussell's renunciation of homage, is clearly a separate document which had come into the hands of the continuator, who was probably working at Canterbury. Given the important role played by the archbishop of Canterbury in the events of 1327, it is not surprising that a copy of the document should have been preserved there. Another copy may also have reached St Albans and been known to the St Albans chronicler, Thomas Walsingham: Historia Anglicana, 186; Valente, ‘Deposition’, 872. For a printed text see Fryde, App. 2, 233–5. There are however some errors in Fryde's transcription: e.g., ‘rundit’ and ‘rundebat’ for ‘respondit’ and ‘respondebat’, and three Fiats at the end of the document instead of two: Valente, 871, n. 3. Another transcript of the document is published, together with the Historia Roffensis (BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V) account of Edward II's deposition, in Haines, King Edward II, App. A, 343–5. For discussions of the Forma deposicionis see Valente, 871–5; Haines, Stratford, 184–6.

³⁸ Forma deposicionis, Fryde, 233; Valente, ‘Deposition’, 856.

³⁹ BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, ff. 49r, 49v (Historia Roffensis).

⁴⁰ Forma deposicionis, Fryde, 233; Valente, ‘Deposition’, 858–9.

⁴¹ Proverbs, 11: 14. Given as ch. 13 in the Forma deposicionis, Fryde, 233–4.

⁴² Paralipomenon II, ch. 6, verse 21 (i.e. Second Book of Chronicles).

⁴³ Forma deposicionis, Fryde, 234. Lanercost, 257, has another text for Orleton's sermon, from Ecclesiastes 10: 3, Rex insipiens perdet populum suum, in which he dwelt on the king's unwise and foolish behaviour, and his puerilities, ‘if they can be called such’ (si tamen puerilia dici debent). The Historia Roffensis records a different text from the same chapter of the Bible: vae terra cuius Rex puer est (10: 16), an unfortunate choice perhaps since the replacement for Edward II was still only fourteen years old: BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v.

The Lanercost chronicler also states that the three sermons were delivered on three successive days, which seems unlikely given the way in which the excitement of the occasion was deliberately built up by those who orchestrated it: see Valente, ‘Deposition’, 858–60; cf. Haines, Stratford, 183.

⁴⁴ The contents of this sermon are more appropriate to the second mission to Kenilworth after 13 Jan. and the withdrawal there of homage from Edward II, rather than to the events of 13 Jan. when the withdrawal of homage was signalled but had not yet occurred. See Valente, ‘Deposition’, 873, and more generally 871–5. Perhaps the text given in the Lanercost chronicle and referred to in the Historia Roffensis represents the actual sermon delivered by Orleton on 13 Jan.

⁴⁵ 2 Kings, 4: 19; Forma deposicionis, Fryde, 234. This text is confirmed in Lanercost, 258, and in the Historia Roffensis, BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v.

⁴⁶ ‘improprieties’ or ‘things that were unfitting’ rather than ‘indecencies’ in the modern sense.

⁴⁷ Forma deposicionis, Fryde, 234: not three Fiats: Valente, ‘Deposition’, 871, n. 3. The archbishop's text is confirmed by Lanercost, 258, and BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v. My translation of the archbishop's words differs in places from that in Fryde, 200, especially in the emphasis that consent was still to be sought from all those in attendance at parliament and had not already been obtained; and that the young Edward had accepted the advice of the wise men of the kingdom.

⁴⁸ ‘Ecce Rex vester’; ‘Gloria laus et honor’: BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v; Valente, ‘Deposition’, 859. Although the chronicle speaks of homage being performed to Edward, this cannot have been the case since homage had not yet been withdrawn from his father: cf. Valente, 859. The young Edward was apparently not prepared to accept the crown while his father remained unwilling to give it up: Historiae Anglicana, 186.

⁴⁹ References to the king's failings in the reports of the sermons given on 13 Jan. suggest that the audience had already heard the articles. The words ‘ut prius’ towards the end of the archbishop's sermon also suggest that the articles had previously been read out. The Forma deposicionis does not specifically refer to the reading of the articles by the archbishop; the French chronicle of London, the Anonimalle chronicle, and the Pipewell chronicle account all record that the archbishop read the articles while not saying at what point in the proceedings he did so: French Chroni., 57; Anonimalle, 132–3; Clarke, Medieval Representation, 194.

⁵⁰ E.g., in Isabella's proclamation at Wallingford on 15 Oct. 1326, and in the judgment against Despenser before his execution at Hereford on 24 Nov.: Foedera, II, i, 645–6; Holmes, ‘Judgment’, 264–7. Mortimer was later described in similar fashion: e.g. the Lanercost chronicler wrote that in 1329 Thomas Wake and others fled to France ‘fearing the cruelty and tyranny of the earl of March’: Lanercost, 265.

⁵¹ In 1334 Adam Orleton had to defend himself against the charge of having described Edward II as a tyrant in his sermon delivered at Oxford in Nov. 1326, arguing that he was referring to the Younger Despenser and not the king: Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, ed. Twysden, cols 2763–4; Chartulary, ed. Goodman, 105–6. The only chronicle references I have found to Edward II as a tyrant are in the Flores, a notably hostile source, which describes the king as giving way to ‘insane tyranny’ (vesanae tyrannidi: sub 1322; and in the Vita where a letter from an unidentified religious sent in 1316 to the king's confessor noted that a king ‘is fittingly called king while he rules well; when he robs his people he is rather adjudged to be a tyrant. Indeed our king, passing through the country, takes men's goods and pays little or nothing or badly’: Flores, 214–15; Vita, 128–31. It is surprising that there is no discussion of the subject in Fryde's Tyranny and Fall.

⁵² See C. M. Barron, ‘The tyranny of Richard II’, BIHR, xli (1968), 1–18; T. Jones, ‘Was Richard II a tyrant?’, in Fourteenth Century England, v, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2008), 130–60. In Richard II's case, he was accused of tyranny only by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, but not directly in any of the articles of deposition. His attacks on the property of his subjects could however be construed as tyrannical behaviour, even if not openly described as such: Barron, 1.

⁵³ R. H. Rouse & M. A. Rouse, ‘John of Salisbury and the doctrine of tyrannicide’, Speculum, xlii (1967), 693–709, esp. 695, ‘ “Between a tyrant and a prince there is this single or chief difference, that the latter obeys the law”, while the former “brings the laws to nought”.’

⁵⁴ F. Schulz, ‘Bracton on kingship’, EHR, lx (1945), 136–76, esp. 151–3: ‘the king who violates his duty to maintain justice automatically ceases to be king. He is no longer a king, but a tyrant’. Bracton does not however seek to justify tyrannicide.

⁵⁵ See A.S. McGrade, ed., A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government (Cambridge, 1992). This was written some time between 1334 and Ockham's death in 1347.

⁵⁶ For a general discussion of the themes of kingship and tyranny see C. Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot, Hants & Burlington, VT, 2003), 14–15, 19–25; and the chapter on government by J. Dunbabin in J.H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, c.350–c.1450 (Cambridge, 1988), 495–6.

⁵⁷ See the discussion of the notion of the princeps inutilis with reference to the resignation of Pope Celestine V in 1298, and the depositions of Adolf of Nassau in 1298 and Edward II in 1327 in Peters, The Shadow King, 213–42; Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 217–18.

⁵⁸ The betrothal in 1326 of Philippa of Hainault and the young Edward was probably also the occasion of the production of two illuminated manuscripts which were presented by Philippa to Edward between the time of their betrothal and their marriage in 1328: Paris, BN, Ms. Fr. 571 (containing among other texts Brunetto Latini's Livre dou Tresor), and Harvard Law School Ms. 12 (containing a set of statutes): M.A. Michael, ‘Towards a hermeneutics of the manuscript’ in Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages, ed. P. Horden (Donington, Lincs, 2007), 308–11, 313–16; Wathey, ‘The marriage of Edward III’, 14–22. Soon after Edward arrived back in England in Sept. 1326 he was presented with a text of the Secretum Secretorum by a clerk, Walter Milemete, who had also written a separate treatise, De Nobilitatibus, Sapienciis et Prudenciis Regum, for the young Edward by the time he was crowned in Jan. 1327: Michael, ‘Towards a hermeneutics’, 314–15, and idem, ‘The iconography of kingship’. The Milemete ms, which is also elaborately illuminated, is preserved as Christ Church, Oxford, Ms. 92. F. 4v of this ms has a drawing of a king and queen, possibly intended to be Edward II and Isabella, looking at one another with an unhappy expression. On both William Milemete and William of Pagula (whose work, The Mirror of Edward III, was composed no later than 1332) see also Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-century England, ed. C. J. Nederman (Tempe, Ariz., 2002). The future Edward III would certainly be given a better grounding in the theory of good government than his father had received.

⁵⁹ Many of those who took the oath were not participating in the parliament in any formal capacity: e.g. the household knights of the earls, Isabella and the young Edward, as well as many of the barons of the Cinque Ports, and the men from Bury St Edmunds and St Albans. A lot of people were clearly in London for the excitement of the occasion.

⁶⁰ CPMR, 12. The oath in its original French form is given in Literae Cantuarienses, i, ed. Sheppard, 204–7. The Ann. Paul., 323, contains a different version of the oath, which refers to Isabella and to ‘Edward ore rey d'Engleterre’ (i.e. ‘Edward, now king of England’) in a context which implies that the young Edward was already regarded as king. It is likely that this oath is the one taken at the Guildhall on 20 Jan. by the archbishop of Canterbury and other prelates: CPMR, 11, n. 2.

⁶¹ CPMR, 11–12: in which the prelates and magnates were asked to crown the young Edward as king and to depose his father ‘for frequent offences against his oath and his Crown’. The names of those who took the oath are listed in CPMR, 12–14.

⁶² John de Bohun was the son and heir of Humphrey de Bohun who had been killed at Boroughbridge in 1322. John was restored to his earldom and lands on 1 Nov. 1326.

⁶³ Henry of Lancaster the earl of Leicester was not among those who took the oath, presumably because he was keeping Edward II secure at his castle of Kenilworth. His son-in-law Thomas Wake clearly represented his interests during the parliament. The knights were presumably the followers of Isabella and the young Edward: their names included Edward, Roger and John, the sons of Roger Mortimer.

⁶⁴ Including the chief justice Geoffrey le Scrope, and Robert Mablethorp who had presided over Thomas of Lancaster's judgment in 1322.

⁶⁵ This confirms the statement in the Historia Roffensis that the bishop was undecided about how to act: BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v.

⁶⁶ William Melton, the archbishop of York, was conspicuous by his absence.

⁶⁷ Including Master Gilbert de Middleton the official of Canterbury; the dean of the court of Arches; and the dean of St Paul's.

⁶⁸ Williams, Medieval London, 298; Clarke, Medieval Representation, 181–2. The full list of names is given in CPMR 12–14.

⁶⁹ Earlier Henry of Eastry, the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, had written to the archbishop of Canterbury suggesting that a second deputation, consisting of two earls, two barons, four persons from the cities and borough, and four knights, should be sent to Kenilworth to make a further attempt to persuade the king to attend parliament. This was not done but may have had a bearing on the composition of the delegation which did in the end go to Kenilworth: Literae Cantuarienses, i, ed. Sheppard, 204–5 (the letter is undated but clearly belongs to the period of the parliament).

⁷⁰ One of the delegation's members, the earl of Surrey, did not take the Guildhall oath until 15 Jan.: CPMR, 12; Valente, ‘Deposition’, 860.

⁷¹ BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v.

⁷² Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, f. 125v.

⁷³ Brut, i, 241–2.

⁷⁴ Lanercost, 258; Valente, ‘Deposition’, 860.

⁷⁵ Clarke, Medieval Representation, 194.

⁷⁶ The fact that it was not simply a parliamentary delegation but something much wider in scope is emphasized in ibid., 190–1; and in B. Wilkinson, ‘The deposition of Richard II and the accession of Henry IV’, EHR, liv (1939), 225–7. The most detailed analysis of the sources relating to the delegation is in Clarke, Medieval Representation, 186–90, where it is also suggested that the size of the delegation might have followed the procedure in ch. xvii of the famous Modus Tenendi Parliamentum for choosing a committee of 25 in order to settle discord between the king and the magnates: Clarke, 189–90. As argued earlier, there is no evidence that the Modus was used or intended to be used in any of the political controversies earlier in the reign, specifically in 1321. However another possibility is that the procedure for a committee of 25 contained in the treatise on the steward was a model for 1327, since there is strong evidence that the treatise was made use of by the earl of Lancaster in 1321–2: Vernon Harcourt, His Grace the Steward, 164–7, 148–51; Wilkinson, ‘The Sherburn indenture’, App. II, 19–21; Gesta Edwardi, 62–4. Whether or not either of these possible models had any bearing on the events of 1327, the essential point was that the delegation was large, thereby sharing out the responsibility (and any possible future blame or recrimination) for the king's removal from the throne.

⁷⁷ The Pipewell chronicle: Clarke, Medieval Representation, 194.

⁷⁸ Le Baker, 27. This is the only mention of the bishop of Lincoln as a member of the delegation.

⁷⁹ Le Baker, 27.

⁸⁰ Valente, ‘Deposition’, 860, n. 6. The author of the Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon reported that it was put in writing, as did the St Alban's chronicler, Thomas Walsingham: Gesta Edwardi, 90; Historia Anglicana, 187. It is reasonable to suppose that the proclamation on 24 Jan. announcing Edward's resignation was based on a document just received from the delegation at Kenilworth.

⁸¹ Making either Edward II's first cousin Henry of Lancaster or even Roger Mortimer king could never have worked as long as Edward II's two sons, Edward and John, and his two half-brothers, the earls of Norfolk and Kent, were alive. There is no reason to believe that such a move was ever seriously considered.

⁸² See Haines, Stratford, 178–9.

⁸³ See, e.g., BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v; Clarke, Medieval Representation, 195; Knighton, i, 442; Murimuth, 51.

⁸⁴ Le Baker, 28; CMR, 1326–27, 29, no. 155 (letters patent of a citizen of London, 6 Feb. 1327). For the text of the renunciation of homage, see Foedera, II, I, 650; Rotuli Parliamentorum Hactenus Inediti, ed. Richardson & Sayles, li, 100–1; Select Documents, 38; Knighton, i, 441–2; Ann. Paul., 324; Anonimalle, 132–3. See also Fryde, 234–5, where the text is taken from Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, f. 126r, following the Forma deposicionis.

Although the renunciation of homage is not recorded in the Parliament Roll for 1327 (C 65/1) there is a copy in C 49/83, m.2r, a roll whose heading describes it as ‘the Points of the Parliament’. This is the source of the text published by Richardson & Sayles. In addition to Trussell's renunciation, it includes the petitions of the community of the realm which bear a close relation to the material contained in the Parliament Roll; the 1321 articles against the Despensers, which were confirmed in 1327; and a form of coronation office (although no specific mention is made of Edward III). C 49/83 was probably one of a number of unofficial rolls produced to satisfy a public demand for information on the events surrounding the deposition of Edward II. For further details see PROME, Parliament of Jan. 1327, Introduction and the edn of C 49/83.

⁸⁵ Le Baker, 28; Valente, ‘Deposition’, 860–1.

⁸⁶ Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, f. 126v.

⁸⁷ Brut, i, 242–7; Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 191–2.

⁸⁸ ‘and ever he levede his lif aftirward in miche sorw and anguisse’: Brut, i, 247.

⁸⁹ Valente, ‘Deposition’, 861.

⁹⁰ CCR, 1327–30, 1; Foedera, II, ii, 683; Select Documents, 38. Orders to proclaim Edward III's accession in the rest of England, Wales and Ireland were sent out on 29 Jan.: CCR, 1327–30, 1.

⁹¹ The last dated enrolments of acts in the name of Edward II were on 21 and 23 Jan.: CCR, 1323–7, 629 (21 Jan.); CMR, 1326–27, 206 (23 Jan.); Valente, ‘Deposition’, 860, n. 3.

⁹² However, the bishop of Rochester appears to have done fealty to the young Edward, sending the archbishop to perform it in his name: BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v; cf. Valente, ‘Deposition’, 859; Haines, Stratford, 182.

⁹³ BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 49v: ‘quidam metu ducti nonnulli tacite propter metum London’. The Londoners had a special interest in seeing that Edward II was removed from the throne, since they wanted immunity for their murder of the bishop of Exeter and other violent acts of Oct. 1326 and also confirmation of the liberties of their city: BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, ff. 49v–50r; Williams, Medieval London, 297–9.

⁹⁴ Clarke, Medieval Representation, 190–1.

⁹⁵ RDP, iii, App. i, Part i (London, 1829), 370; CPMR, 12 (24 men are described here as barons but only 15 of them were actually summoned to parliament as barons; two more men who were summoned as barons are listed here among the knights who took the oath). Because a baron did not apparently take the oath, it should not be assumed that he did not approve of Edward II's deposition, but many probably did not.

⁹⁶ Of the 13 knights described as knights of the shire in CPMR only nine can be identified in the list of knights returned to the parliament; however, three more elected knights appear in the list of ‘knights and serjeants of the court’ and were probably retainers of the crown or other lords: CPMR, 13; Members of Parliament, part i, Parliaments of England, 1213–1702 (London, 1879), 75–7.

⁹⁷ CPMR, 11, n. 3. Both Bury St Edmunds and St Albans had given special support to Isabella and her followers after their landing in Sept. 1326: Ann. Paul., 314–15. Their burgesses probably came to London to join in the excitement.

⁹⁸ Members of Parliament, Part i, 75–7.

⁹⁹ CPMR, 12–14.

¹⁰⁰ Edwards, ‘Sir Gruffydd Llwyd’, 594–6. Welsh representatives had been summoned in 1322, in gratitude for their role in suppressing the revolt of the Mortimers and the other Marchers. Twenty-three out of the 24 representatives (both Welsh and English) summoned from North Wales attended. The one missing was presumably Gruffydd Llwyd. No returns exist for those summoned from South Wales: Members of Parliament, Part i, 77.

¹⁰¹ CPMR, 11; Ann. Paul., 323; French Chron., 58. The archbishop of Canterbury also gave the Londoners 50 tuns of wine, presumably to try to buy their goodwill. The seven bishops are not named.

¹⁰² Most notably the unknown Canterbury chronicler who inserted the title Forma deposicionis Regis Edwardi post Conquestum Secundi at the beginning of the document which was otherwise designed to preserve a version of events favourable to Isabella and Mortimer: Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, ff. 125r–126r; Fryde, 233–5. See alsoAnn. Paul., 322; Lanercost, 258, 260; Flores, 235. The chronicler Adam Murimuth, who was a canon of St Paul's and had acted as a royal diplomat at the papal curia and emphasized that Edward II gave up his throne only because he had no choice: Murimuth, 51.

¹⁰³ Williams, Medieval London, 298.

¹⁰⁴ See the valuable discussions in Valente, ‘Deposition’, 862–8; Wilkinson, ‘Deposition’, 223–9; Clarke, Medieval Representation, 173–95; W.H. Dunham & C.T. Wood, ‘The right to rule in England’, American Historical Review, lxxxi (1976), 738–61, esp. 738–44; Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 216–18. The medal struck to mark Edward III's coronation, with the motto ‘Populi dat iura voluntas’ (‘The will of the people gives rights’) indicated one contemporary view of the events which had taken place since 7 Jan. 1327: see Valente, 866.

¹⁰⁵ Various explanations have been offered for the lack of a Parliament Roll covering the events up to Edward III's coronation on 1 Feb. 1327. It has been suggested that a roll once existed and that it was removed by Richard II after he was threatened with deposition in 1386; that the absence of a roll proves that the assembly was not legally a parliament at all; or that the new king did not want a record of a parliamentary deposition which might set a precedent: Valente, ‘Deposition’, 862–3, citing Clarke, Medieval Representation, 177; Wilkinson, ‘Deposition’ 224; and G.T. Lapsley, Crown, Community and Parliament, ed. H. Cam & G. Barraclough (Oxford, 1951), 311. The Jan. 1327 assembly is unambiguously described as a parliament in the writs of summons; members of parliament were paid from 7 Jan; and although there was a break between the proclamation of Edward III as king and the reassembly of parliament after his coronation, there was no prorogation and the assembly was treated all as one. Yet although the parliament was nominally summoned by Edward II and he was deposed in the course of it, the Parliament Roll (C 65/1) is described as the Rotulus Parliamenti Edwardi Tertii and not the roll of the twentieth year of the reign of Edward II.

¹⁰⁶ Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, f. 126r. Roger Mortimer's three sons were among those knighted: Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 170; 288. nn. 15, 16.

¹⁰⁷ CCR, 1327–30, 100; Foedera, II, ii, 684.

¹⁰⁸ The others present were the bishops of Chichester, Worcester and Llandaff. The absentees included the bishop of Carlisle and William Melton, the archbishop of York, another of Edward II's oldest allies, who, it is likely, both still disapproved of the change of king; Melton's absence was probably also connected with the difficulties which always arose when an archbishop of York travelled in the province of Canterbury. The presence of the bishops of London and Rochester, who had earlier disapproved of Edward II's removal, is not mentioned in the official record, but according to the Historia Roffensis both men took part in the coronation ceremony: BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, ff. 49v, 50r.

¹⁰⁹ CCR, 1327–30, 100; Foedera, II, ii, 684.

¹¹⁰ See PROME, Parliament of Jan. 1327, C 65/1 items 1 (the Despensers), 2 (Lancaster; and Winchelsey); CCR, 1327–30, 105–6. Henry of Lancaster, earl of Leicester was styled earl of Lancaster on 26 Oct. 1326 and formally restored to the earldom on 3 Feb. 1327.

¹¹¹ CPR, 1327–30, 142. Although he lodged his petition in Feb., there is no mention of Mortimer in the Parliament Roll for 1327. Nor is it clear why he had to wait until July when Henry of Lancaster's petition in respect of his brother Thomas was answered at once. Possibly Mortimer was less powerful at this stage than he may appear: cf. Mortimer,The Greatest Traitor, 170–2.

¹¹² For the petitions of the citizens and the replies of Edward III and his council see PROME, Parliament of Jan. 1327, C 49/43/173. The text of the charter is in Ann. Paul., 325–32. See also Williams, Medieval London, 298–9.

¹¹³ This is recorded in a manuscript of the Brut in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Ms. 174, ff. 152v–153r, cited in Haines, Stratford, 188. The appointment of such a council was one of the things asked for in the commune petition submitted at the 1327 parliament, but it is likely that it had already been decided before parliament reconvened after Edward III's coronation: PROME, Parliament of Jan. 1327, C 65/1, item 5; Haines, Stratford, 188.

¹¹⁴ The former description was used a number of times in the Parliament Roll for Jan.–March 1327; the latter appears, e.g., in the letters close of 20 Aug. 1327 referring to the recent attempt to release him from Berkeley castle: CCR, 1327–30, 158.

¹¹⁵ PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, E 175/2/216, item 19.

¹¹⁶ CCR, 1327–30, 27 (15 May 1328). This contradicts the claim by Adam Murimuth that only 100 marks a month were allowed: Murimuth, 52.

¹¹⁷ E 352/120, m.39r (1 Ed. III): account of John de Langton, clerk, for the treasure, goods and chattels in Caerphilly; Berkeley Castle Muniments, Select Roll 39; J. Smyth of Nibley, The Lives of the Berkeleys, ed. Sir J. Maclean (Gloucester, 1883), i, 293; Rees, Caerphilly Castle, 113. The enrolled accounts of Thomas de Berkeley and John Maltravers, for custody of Edward II, from 3 April to 21 Sept. 1327, and of his body from 21 Sept. to 21 Oct. 1327 are contained in E 352/120, m.25r. There is also a heading for these accounts at the top of m.25v, as if more material was to go there. The original accounts do not appear to be extant. See also S.A. Moore, ‘Documents relating to the death and burial of King Edward II’, Archaeologia,(1887), 223–4.

¹¹⁸ Rolls 39, 41, 42 of the Berkeley accounts contain references to the supply of wine, wax, spices, eggs, cheese, capons, cattle, etc. for Edward's use. I should like to thank Mr David Smith, honorary archivist at Berkeley castle, for enabling me to see these and other material at Berkeley in 1998. See also I.H. Jeayes, Descriptive Catalogue of the Charters and Muniments at Berkeley Castle (Bristol, 1892), 274–7. Edward did not however have the use of the personal effects which he had left behind in Caerphilly castle. His bed and clothing and other items were given by Isabella and the newly crowned Edward III to the hospital of St Leonard at York, whose recently appointed warden was a royal clerk: Rees, Caerphilly Castle, 86–7.

¹¹⁹ Murimuth, 52.

¹²⁰ Brut, i, 252–3; Le Baker, 33.

¹²¹ See, e.g., Brut, i, 252–3; Le Baker, 29.

¹²² For the latest discussions of the fascinating text see Valente, ‘The “Lament of Edward II”’, and Tyson, ‘Lament for a dead king’. See also Ch. 1 of this book.

¹²³ CPR, 1327–30, 79–81.

¹²⁴ SC 1/29/64; CPR, 1327–30, 99–100. The author of the Anonimalle chronicle was however aware of a plot to rescue Edward from Kenilworth and states that this was the reason for his transfer to Berkeley: Anonimalle, 134–5.

¹²⁵ The earl of Lancaster was particularly aware of the danger to Kenilworth whenever he was away on other business: Knighton, i, 444.

¹²⁶ Knighton, i, 447–8, 450–1, 454–5; PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 1.

¹²⁷ Cf. Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 173, where it is suggested that Mortimer had indeed schemed to obtain control of the former king.

¹²⁸ Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 156–7. Tout's paper is the classic account and the starting-point for all later writing. The most recent discussions are R.M. Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus’, Trans. Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Soc., cxiv, for 1996 (1997), 65–86; idem, Death of a King (Lancaster, 2001); idem, King Edward II, 219–38; Doherty, Isabella, 113–215; Haines, ‘Sir Thomas Gurney of Englishcombe in the county of Somerset, regicide?’, Somerset Archaeology and Natural History, cxlvii (2004), 45–65; Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 244–64; idem, ‘The death of Edward II in Berkeley castle’, EHR, cxx (2005), 1175–214; idem, The Perfect King (London, 2006), App. 2, ‘The fake death of Edward II’, and App. 3, ‘A note on the later life of Edward II’; and J.S. Hamilton, ‘The uncertain death of Edward II’, History Compass (2008). See also the historical novel by Doherty, The Death of a King, and an account by a local historian, R. Perry, Edward the Second (Wotton-under-Edge, Glos., 1988). There is also an excellent survey of the controversies by G. Marchant, Edward II in Gloucestershire (Gloucester, 2007), which was published in aid of the Edward II tomb conservation project.

¹²⁹ E 352/120, m.25r; Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, f. 126v; Phillips, 262, 264–5. According to the historian of the Berkeleys, John Smyth of Nibley, the handing-over of Edward was recorded in an indenture made between Henry of Lancaster and Berkeley and Maltravers: Lives of the Berkeleys, i, 291–2. On the other hand, as Tout pointed out, neither man was very likely to be sympathetic towards the deposed king. After 1322 Berkeley had been imprisoned until his release in Oct. 1326; after the Younger Despenser's execution at Hereford he had been briefly reunited at Wigmore with his wife who had also been imprisoned and whom he had not seen for six years; and in Jan. 1327 had made a short visit to his ancestral home at Berkeley before attending parliament: ibid., 288; Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 156–7. Maltravers had spent much of the time since 1322 in exile on the continent before returning with Isabella and Mortimer in Sept. 1326, and had also just regained his forfeited lands: article on Maltravers by C. Shenton in the Oxford DNB.

¹³⁰ Ann. Paul., 333; Murimuth, 52. The 5 April is the date given for his arrival at Berkeley in the Canterbury chronicle, Murimuth and by Smyth: Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, f. 126v; Murimuth, 52; Lives of the Berkeleys,i, 291. The 70 miles between Kenilworth and Berkeley could have been covered between 3 and 5 April without too much difficulty. Presumably his escort was on guard for any possible rescue attempt. A list of repairs needed to Gloucester castle in Jan. 1331 referred to a little chapel opposite Llanthony called ‘Edwardes chaumbre’ and to a latrine called ‘Kyngeswardrobe’: CIM, ii, 286, no. 1166. This suggests that Edward was held in the castle rather than the abbey; given the need for security, this makes more sense.

¹³¹ The annals of St Paul's speak of the support of ‘quibusdam magnatibus’ without specifying who they were: Ann. Paul., 337.

¹³² ‘ravi le pere nostre seignor le roi hors de nostre garde’.

¹³³ The original letter is preserved as, SC 1/35/207. It was first noticed and published by F.J. Tanquerey as ‘The conspiracy of Thomas Dunheved, 1327’, EHR, xxxi (1916), 119–24, where the author was wrongly identified as John Walwayn. This identification was accepted by Tout in ‘Captivity and death’, 160–1, and in Fryde, 201. However, it is now known that the letter was sent by Thomas de Berkeley, who was appointed as a commissioner of the peace on 11 July and on 1 Aug. was ordered to arrest 21 named persons: CPR, 1327–30, 154, 156–7. There is no evidence that John Walwayn had any connection with Berkeley castle or Edward's imprisonment there. Significantly, the commission of 1 Aug. mentions the plundering of Berkeley castle but says nothing about Edward and accuses the men instead of having refused to join Edward III's expedition against the Scots.

¹³⁴ Fryde, 201, gives the date as 9 July, citing Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 166, which does not mention any date. Her source may be KB 27/272, m.2v, which records the trial of some of the conspirators ‘for trying to seize the king’, but without adding any significant details: Fryde, 269, n. 26.

¹³⁵ Thomas de la Hay and William atte Hulle had also been involved at Kenilworth.

¹³⁶ Ann. Paul., 337; CCR, 1327–30, 146, 549; Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 163; Tanquerey, ‘Conspiracy’, 123–4. Redmere and Norton were arrested at Dunstable: SC 8/69/3444.

¹³⁷ Tanquerey, ‘Conspiracy’, 123–4. On Aylmer see also Waugh, ‘For king, country and patron’, Journal of British Studies, xxii (1983), 30.

¹³⁸ Ann. Paul., 337; Lanercost, 254. The story of the divorce is probably apocryphal: Haines, Stratford, 156.

¹³⁹ SAL Ms. 122, p. 34; Haines, Stratford, 209, n. 90.

¹⁴⁰ Anonimalle, 134–5; Ann. Paul., 337. The author of the Anonimalle chronicle also knew about the earlier plot against Kenilworth and the friars' part in it. A closely related text, Bod., Lyell Ms. 17, f. 118v, also mentions the friars, but without giving any names.

¹⁴¹ See the discussion in ch. 2 of this book.

¹⁴² Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 1 & 21.

¹⁴³ Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 196–201.

¹⁴⁴ Hamilton, 99.

¹⁴⁵ C 81/100/4276–7; CCW, 472; Bullock-Davies, ‘Multitudo’, 180, n. 8.

¹⁴⁶ Foedera, II, ii, 649; Lanercost, 256.

¹⁴⁷ For an account of the Stanhope Park campaign see Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, 26–41; Barrow, 252–4; Fryde, 210–14.

¹⁴⁸ Barrow, 254.

¹⁴⁹ Frame, English Lordship, 139–41, 175–6.

¹⁵⁰ Ibid., 179.

¹⁵¹ Rhys fled to Scotland after the fall of Edward II, was involved in Sept. 1327 in the unsuccessful plot to free him from captivity, and then fied once more to Scotland: Griffiths, Principality, 100; McNamee, 240.

¹⁵² Donald had spent most of his life at the English court and had a close personal loyalty to Edward II. After Edward's fall he too went to Scotland where he involved himself in schemes to restore Edward II to his throne: McNamee, 240; Barrow, 252.

¹⁵³ Murimuth, 52. This episode is probably a source of Geoffrey le Baker's story that Edward was moved from place to place. Corfe also figures in Le Baker's account, as does Bristol: Le Baker, 30–1. Another likely source is the version of the French Brut contained in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Ms. 178, ff. 169r, v: V.H. Galbraith, ‘Extracts from the Historia Aurea and a French “Brut” (1317–1347)’, EHR, xliii (1928), 216. Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, i, 291, interprets the stays in Corfe and Bristol as taking place during the initial movement of Edward from Kenilworth to Berkeley rather than as a consequence of the escape attempt in July.

¹⁵⁴ Monday after the Nativity of the BVM. Tout misread the date as the Monday before, i.e. 7 Sept: Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 165, 184.

¹⁵⁵ Rhosfair on the Menai Straits is now known as Newborough: ibid., 184, n. 4. Mortimer had been appointed as justice of both North and South Wales on 20 Feb. 1327. On Shaldeford see ibid., 166–7. On 8 Sept. Mortimer was ordered to arrest all those breaking the peace in Wales, so there was clearly already some concern: CCR, 1327–30, 217–18; CPR, 1327–30, 207.

¹⁵⁶ Shaldeford believed Mortimer to be at Abergavenny, but he may have been somewhere else in the Welsh March, such as his castle at Ludlow. The Berkeley castle records show that a number of (undated) letters from Thomas de Berkeley were directed to Mortimer at Ludlow. Berkeley Castle Muniments, Select Roll 39: Berkeley steward's accounts, 1 Jan.–29 Sept. 1327.

¹⁵⁷ ‘et qils feissent hastive remedie pur greindre peril eschuer’: Select Cases, ed. Sayles, v, 59. I have preferred my own translation to the accurate but rather clumsy rendering in Sayles, ‘and to furnish speedy remedial measures in order to eschew greater peril’.

¹⁵⁸ ‘Sur quoi le dit William Docleye et les autres qavoient le dit sire Edward en garde trayterousement oscirent et murdrirent le dit sire Edward, pier noster seigneur le roi, en destruccion du saunc real’: Select Cases, ed. Sayles, v, 59.

¹⁵⁹ The full text in the original French and Latin is published with an English translation ibid., 58–63. It is also transcribed in Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 185–9. The original source is KB 27/285, m.9, although Tout gives the reference as KB 27/285, m.188. The case was not however brought to a conclusion in the court of King's Bench, on the grounds that because the charges related to acts both in the principality of Wales and in England they could not finally be determined in England: Select Cases, ed. Sayles, v, 63.

¹⁶⁰ CCR, 1327–30, 212; CFR, 1319–37, 169; CCR, 1330–33, 51; Griffiths, Principality, 100; McNamee, 240.

¹⁶¹ There is nothing to suggest that Edward III and the council knew of this plot at the time. If they had, the near coincidence of the warning message and Edward's death might have been too much to believe.

¹⁶² The date of Edward's death is very clearly given as 21 Sept. in the accounts of Hugh de Glaunville: E 101/383/1, and in their enrolled form, E 352/125, m.46v, and E 372/177, m.45d.

¹⁶³ Gurney was paid 31s 1d for this duty: Berkeley Castle Muniments Select Rolls 39; Jeayes, Descriptive Catalogue, 274; Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, i, 293, 296–7. The record says that Nottingham was Gurney's destination.

¹⁶⁴ ‘Trescher cosin novelles nous vyndront y ce meskerdy le xxiii iour de Septembre de deinz la nuyt qe nostre trescher seignur e piere est a dieu comaundez’: DL 10/253: letter dated at Lincoln on 24 Sept. The news probably came during the night of 23/24 Sept. rather than 22/23 Sept. The Historia Roffensis (BL Ms. Cotton Faustina B.V, f. 51r), confirms that Gurney brought the news to Lincoln, but gives the date as 22 Sept., which was the date of his departure from Berkeley.

¹⁶⁵ Although, according to the Berkeley historian, the news of Edward's death was not announced locally until 1 Nov. It is not clear whether this was an order brought back by Gurney from Lincoln or an order by Thomas de Berkeley, Edward's keeper: Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, i, 297.

¹⁶⁶ On 23 Oct. Edward's old friend and ally William Melton, archbishop of York offered an indulgence to all who prayed for the soul of the former king: Letters from Northern Registers, ed. Raine, 355–6 (where the date is wrongly given as 1328). Melton describes Edward's death as a fatalis casus, ‘a fatal happening’. I don't think it means anything as literal as a fall, as suggested by Ian Mortimer: ‘The death of Edward II’, 1192.

¹⁶⁷ In 1307 one of Edward II's first acts had been to go to Burgh-on-Sands near Carlisle ‘to weep for his father’: Lanercost, 207.

¹⁶⁸ DL 10/253.

¹⁶⁹ The war cost over £67,000 and exhausted the treasure built up by Edward II in his later years: A.E. Prince, ‘The payment of army wages in Edward III's reign’, Speculum, xix (1944), 138. Edward III's coronation had cost a further £13,550: Vale, The Princely Court, 81; E 101/382/9.

¹⁷⁰ Apart from the plots to release the former king, there were serious riots in Abingdon in April and in Bury St Edmunds in July 1327; London was also very disturbed: Foedera, II, ii, 711.

¹⁷¹ Doherty (D.Phil.), 220–1; the Hainaulters' wages amounted to nearly £55,000.

¹⁷² For details of the negotiations see Barrow, 254–60. As Professor Barrow has argued, the treaty showed what Edward II might have achieved if he had been prepared to act with generosity and to make the necessary leap of faith. On the other hand Edward II perceived – probably rightly – that such a treaty would have been regarded as a humiliation. There was also the question of the ‘disinherited’, those Scottish magnates who had fought against Bruce and English magnates with claims to lands in Scotland. This was not settled in 1328 and was one of the causes of renewed war between England and Scotland in 1333, as well as a cause of serious tension within England itself.

¹⁷³ One of the first actions of Edward III's government after the coronation in Feb. 1327 was to send an embassy to Paris to try to resolve the continuing tensions over Gascony. The details are recorded in Foedera, II, ii, 180, 185–6; AN, J 634, nos 15–17, 19, 20. There was also of course the need for the new king of England to do homage for the duchy of Aquitaine, as his father had done in 1308 and 1320 and as he himself had done in 1325. Edward III performed his homage at Amiens on 6 June 1329: AN, J 634, nos 21, 21 bis.

¹⁷⁴ Further negotiations took place in Hainault in early Aug. 1327 and the papal dispensation for the marriage was issued on 30 Aug.: Inventaire analytique, ed. Wymans, nos 583–4, p. 130.

¹⁷⁵ See Palliser, ‘Royal mausolea’, 1–8; Binski, Westminster Abbey, ch. 3, ‘A royal fellowship of death: the royal mausoleum under Henry III and Edward I’.

¹⁷⁶ See Ch. 1 of this book, ‘The reputation of a king’.

¹⁷⁷ London was already in a very disturbed state in the autumn of 1327: Foedera, II, ii, 711, 723. In 1326 the Londoners had also shown their continued sympathy with the memory of Thomas of Lancaster: French Chron., 54.

¹⁷⁸ ‘pro corpore Regis defuncti petendo’: Westminster Abbey Munimenta, WAM 20344, for the revenues of the church of Oakham in Rutland. They were away for a total of 21 days (not 31 days as given in Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 169, n. 1) which would place their mission in the period between news of Edward II's death reaching Westminster and the order to remove his body from Berkeley. As the current or past infirmerer (1321–2), John de Tothale might have possessed the necessary skills for preserving a body before burial. He was however of some importance since he had been present at and taken a part in Edward III's coronation in Jan. 1327: Westminster Abbey, Liber Niger, f. lxxvi v. On the careers of the two monks see E.H. Pearce, The Monks of Westminster (Cambridge, 1916), 71–2, 77–8.

¹⁷⁹ E 368/100, m.8r; E 101/383/1.

¹⁸⁰ Historia et Cartularium, ed. Hart, 44–5. Both Mortimer and Isabella attended the funeral in Dec. The history was written for or by abbot Walter Frocester in the late 14th century at a time when the abbey had benefited substantially from the cult which had developed around the dead king and from the offerings of pilgrims at a his tomb. There is a translation of the parts of the chronicle relating to Edward II in Welander, The History … of Gloucester Cathedral, 628–30, 634.

¹⁸¹ See also Palliser, ‘Royal mausolea’, 8–9; D. Verey & A. Brooks, Gloucestershire, ii, The Vale and the Forest of Dean; The Buildings of England (London, 2002), 397.

¹⁸² Murimuth, 53–4. This seems to refer to the time when Edward's body was still at Berkeley but it is not clear.

¹⁸³ Hugh de Glaunville's original accounts for the custody of Edward's body and for his funeral are preserved in E 101/383/1, and were also enrolled on the Chancellor's Roll for 6 Ed. III, E 352/125, m.46v, and on the Pipe Roll for the same year, E 372/177, m.45d. A transcript of this material was published in 1887 by Moore, ‘Documents’, 224–6. There is an earlier edition by J. Hunter, ‘Expenses of conveying the body of King Edward II from Berkeley Castle to the Abbey of Gloucester’, Archaeologia, xxvii (1838), 294–7. There is also important material in the accounts of Thomas de Useflete, E 361/3, m.8d, and in the accounts of the great wardrobe for 1 Edward III, E 101/383/3 (both published in W. St John Hope, ‘On the funeral effigies of the kings and queens of England’, Archaelogia, lx (1907), 530–1).

¹⁸⁴ Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, 293, citing the Berkeley receiver's account for 1327, which is no longer extant. There is no mention of this in the funeral accounts. It was common for the heart to be removed and sometimes given separate burial. In the case of Edward II's mother, Eleanor of Castile, there were three separate burials: of her body at Westminster, her entrails at Lincoln, and her heart at the Blackfriars in London: Binski, Westminster Abbey, 107–10; Parsons, Eleanor, 59–60.

¹⁸⁵ E.B.S. Shepherd, ‘The church of the Friars Minor in London’, Archaeological Journal, lix (1902), plan between 248 & 249, and 259, 267. Isabella's tomb and other monuments were sold in 1547 at the time of the Reformation and the church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666: The Grey Friars of London: their History with the Register of their Convent and an Appendix of Documents, ed. C.L. Kingsford (Aberdeen, 1915; repr. 1965), 7, 74–5; F.D. Blackley, ‘Isabella of France, Queen of England, 1308–1358, and the late medieval cult of the dead’, Canadian Journal of History, xv (1980), 30; idem, ‘The tomb of Isabella, wife of Edward II of England’, Bulletin of the International Soc. for the Study of Church Monuments, viii (1983), 161–4.

¹⁸⁶ There is a very valuable discussion of Edward II's funeral and its significance in J. Burden, ‘Re-writing a rite of passage’, in Rites of Passage, ed. N. F. McDonald & W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2004), 13–29.

¹⁸⁷ Moore, ‘Documents’, 224–5.

¹⁸⁸ E 101/383/3, m.6; Moore, ‘Documents’, 221; Burden, ‘Re-writing’, 17–18.

¹⁸⁹ Moore, ‘Documents’, 226. The account specifically mentions the crush of people.

¹⁹⁰ E 101/383/3, m.6; E 101/624/14 (enrolled on E 372/181, m.38, 10 Ed. III, 1336–7). Even if the body was not fully enclosed it is unlikely that the face would have been visible, perhaps helping to give rise to later suspicion that the body was not that of Edward II. This mistake was not repeated in the case of Richard II, whose body lay ‘with the face uncovered so that all could see it’: Evans, The Death of Kings, 135, citing Adam of Usk.

¹⁹¹ See Burden, ‘Re-writing’, 17 and n. 16; St John Hope, ‘Funeral effigies’, 517–50; A. Harvey & R. Mortimer, eds, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 1994), 4–6, 30–6. Edward II's funeral effigy has not survived but those of later rulers, starting with Edward III (St John Hope, 532) and ending with Queen Anne, are displayed in the undercroft of Westminster Abbey. See also the discussions in Lindley, Gothic to Renaissance, who suggests that Edward II's funeral effigy was designed to draw attention away from the body itself and any rumours of foul play or even that the former king was still alive and in custody: Lindley, 110–12. In this case one might ask why the same procedure was followed for Edward III and other kings whose deaths were not mysterious. It seems more likely that the wooden effigy was a natural development from the practice followed since the time of the death of King John of displaying the embalmed body of the king dressed in his coronation robes: Lindley, 99–101. As Lindley points out, the battle against the forces of putrefaction changed the form of royal funerals, especially if they were delayed for any reason.

¹⁹² E 361/3, m.8d; E 403/232, m.2; St John Hope, ‘Funeral effigies’, 530–1, 564, Burden, ‘Re-writing’, 17.

¹⁹³ Moore, ‘Documents’, 224–6; Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 169.

¹⁹⁴ Lanercost, 260, for example remarked simply that Edward was not buried with other kings in London since he had been deposed and was not a reigning king. The St Paul's annalist noted that he was buried in Gloucester abbey in the presence of his first-born son and many magnates, but said no more: Ann. Paul., 337–8. The Charter Roll witnesses for 20 Dec. included the bishops of Ely and Norwich and the earl of Kent; a charter dated at Worcester on Christmas Day named the earl of Lancaster and Roger Mortimer: C 53/114, mm.6, 5.

¹⁹⁵ He died at Mortlake on 16 Nov.: Ann. Paul., 338.

¹⁹⁶ She landed on 23 Dec. accompanied by her father, Count William of Hainault: Ann. Paul., 339; Knighton, i, 446–7.

¹⁹⁷ In both cases Edward III gave specific orders that Westminster was to be chosen.

¹⁹⁸ CChR, 1327–41, 97; Welander, History, 144. The movements of the privy seal also place Edward III at Gloucester on 4–7 Oct. 1328; 13 Aug.–4 Sept. and 14–26 Sept. 1329; 22–26 June 1330; 14 Sept. 1337; and again in March 1343: C. Shenton, The Itinerary of Edward III and his Household, 1327–1345 (Kew, 2007), 36, 48–9, 60, 168, 249.

¹⁹⁹ E 368/104 (5–6 Ed. III), m.120d.

²⁰⁰ For other examples, in 1338 and the 1340s, see Ormrod, ‘The personal religion of Edward III’, 871.

²⁰¹ On 21 Sept. 1338, e.g., he attended mass at the conventual church of St Andrew in Antwerp for the soul of Edward II on the anniversary of his father's death. Masses in memory of Edward II were also celebrated on that date by the Dominicans of Antwerp and by the Carthusians just outside the city: The Wardrobe Book of William de Norwell, ed. Lyon et al., 207.

²⁰² Murimuth, 135; Welander, History, 630 (trans. of Historia et Cartularium, using Gloucester Cathedral Ms. 34); Ormrod, ‘The personal religion of Edward III’, 860, 871 (a similar gift was made to four other shrines, at Walsingham, St Paul's and Canterbury (chapel of St Thomas and Lady Chapel); Evans, English Art, 164–5.

²⁰³ Mark Ormrod argues however that while Edward III was not indifferent to the memory of Edward II, he did not go out of his way to encourage veneration of his father: Ormrod, ‘Personal religion’, 870–1.

²⁰⁴ E.g., 4 March 1334: grant to the abbey of Stratford in return for saying mass for the soul of Edward II and others: CChR, 1327–41, 306; 13 July 1338: grant to Thomas de Sibthorp, parson of Bekyngham, diocese of Lincoln, who had set up chantries in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the soul of Edward II in the churches of Sibthorp, diocese of York, and Bekyngham: CChR, 1327–41, 450; 3 May 1341: Bishop Wulstan of Worcester (1339–49) was excused attendance at parliaments on grounds of age and in return for the annual celebration of Edward II's anniversary at Gloucester: CPR, 1340–3, 431; 13 March 1345: confirmation of grants made by Queen Isabella to Peter de Eltham, clerk, for saying mass in the manor chapel for the souls of Edward II and John of Eltham before she surrendered the manor to Edward III: CPR, 1343–45, 445. Isabella's original grant was probably made in about 1336, at the time of her son John's death. It is significant that she included her former husband in the prayers.

²⁰⁵ The Historia et Cartularium claims that the offerings enabled Abbot Wigmore to rebuild the transept in six years; Welander, History, 628 (trans.); Verey & Brooks, Gloucestershire, 397.

²⁰⁶ Welander, History, 151–60; Verey & Brooks, Gloucestershire, 397, 401, 407–8.

²⁰⁷ Welander, History, 161–76; Verey & Brooks, Gloucestershire, 397–8, 408–10.

²⁰⁸ Welander, History, 183, 192–7; Verey & Brooks, Gloucestershire, 401–2, 416–17.

²⁰⁹ Verey & Brooks, Gloucestershire, 420. Although it is tempting to think that the face of Edward II might have been modelled from a death mask, there is no evidence that this was the case: the effigy was an idealized representation of the king rather than an attempt at portraiture: Welander, History, 147. The tomb was restored at the expense of Oriel College, Oxford, on three occasions in the 18th century, in 1737, 1789 & 1798; a major restoration was undertaken by the Board of Works in 1875; it was cleaned in 1940 and some repairs carried out in 1963 and 1968. The recent study and conservation of the tomb, completed in 2007, have revealed that the grave was marked initially by a slab of dark grey-green Purbeck stone from Dorset, on which the painted wooden effigy of the king used in his funeral may have been laid; the grave was first enclosed with a kerb of limestone, after which a Purbeck plinth was added to the top of the slab; a solid core of limestone with deep inset arches was then built on it, with a surrounding set of Purbeck arches keyed in and carved in intricate detail with plant forms; above these arches were metal coats of arms of Edward's relatives; the larger niches held statues of them, the so-called ‘weepers’; 12 smaller arches may have held the 12 Apostles; amid these symbolic figures was laid the life-sized alabaster effigy of the king: R. M. Bryant, G. N. H. Bryant & C. M. Heighway, The Tomb of Edward II: a Royal Monument in Gloucester Cathedral (Stonehouse, Glos., 2007), 1–16.

²¹⁰ A. McG. Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries and England (University Park, Penn., 2000), ch. 5, ‘The royal English tomb during the minority and reign of Edward III’, 83–4; Evans, English Art, 164–5.

²¹¹ Verey & Brooks, Gloucestershire, 420; C. Wilson, entry on the tomb of Edward II in Alexander & Binski, eds, The Age of Chivalry: catalogue entry 497 (pp. 416–17). There is also a detailed description of the tomb in Morganstern, Gothic Tombs, 83 –91.

²¹² He was canonized in 1320. See R.C. Finucane, ‘Cantilupe as thaumaturge’, and Morgan, ‘Effect of the pilgrim cult’, in St. Thomas Cantilupe Bishop of Hereford, ed. M. Jancey (Hereford, 1982), 137–44 and 145–52.

²¹³ Morgan, ‘Effect of the pilgrim cult’, 150. There may of course have been other reasons for the decline.

²¹⁴ Mark Ormrod suggests that the erection of Edward II's tomb in Gloucester abbey was the work of ‘relic-hungry monks' anxious to claim ‘their very own royal saint’ and that they rather than Edward III paid for it: Ormrod, ‘Personal religion’, 870–1. The same view is expressed by G.P. Cuttino & T.W. Lyman in their important paper, ‘Where is Edward II?’, Speculum, liii (1978), 525, n. 20, in which they cite the reply of Dr Howard Colvin to their query: ‘It [the tomb] was certainly not paid for by the king [Edward III] and was presumably commissioned by the abbot and convent of Gloucester. So far as I know there are no Gloucester accounts for this period, so the tomb is almost certainly undocumented.’

²¹⁵ There are close similarities in general design between Edward II's tomb at Gloucester, his son John of Eltham's at Westminster, and the tomb of Pope John XXII in Avignon cathedral: Binski, Westminster Abbey, 92, 177–80; C. Wilson in Alexander & Binski, eds, Age of Chivalry, cat. entry 497 (pp. 416–17); Morganstern, Gothic Tombs, 91–5. John XXII's tomb, which was built c. 1335–45, was designed by an English mason, possibly John the Englishman who was active at Avignon between 1336 and 1341: P. Binski & D. Park, ‘A Ducciesque episode at Ely’, in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1986), 39. There are also parallels in the quality of the work with the tomb of Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, in Westminster Abbey, which was made between his death in 1324 and 1330: Morganstern, 68, 73–80. It has been suggested that the three-bay design and tiered superstructure of the tomb in Tewkesbury abbey of Hugh Despenser, the son of the Younger Despenser, who died in 1349, was loosely based on that of Edward II: P. Lindley, ‘The later medieval monuments and chantry chapels’, in Morris & Shoesmith, eds, Tewkesbury Abbey, 166.

²¹⁶ Binski, Westminster Abbey, 176, 178. The attribution to Thomas of Canterbury is accepted by Wilson in Alexander & Binski, eds, Age of Chivalry, cat. entry 497 (pp. 416–17). On St Stephen's chapel see ibid., cat. entries 324, 325 (pp. 337–9), also by Dr Wilson. Using other work by Dr Wilson, Morganstern suggests a date very soon after Edward's burial in 1327 for the tomb and that Isabella was responsible for having it built: Gothic Tombs, 83. I am not convinced by Ormrod's suggestion that even if Thomas of Canterbury was the architect responsible, this does not necessarily mean that the tomb was either commissioned or paid for by Edward III: Ormrod, ‘Personal religion’, 870, n. 123. It is unlikely that such an important royal servant would have been diverted to work in which his employer Edward III was not involved in some way.

²¹⁷ Mortimer, The Perfect King, 460, n. 87. On Thomas of Canterbury and William Ramsey see KW, i, 514–16; J.H. Harvey, ‘The origins of the perpendicular style’, in Studies in Building History, ed. E.M. Jope (London, 1961), 135–58.

²¹⁸ Morganstern, Gothic Tombs, 83.

²¹⁹ C. Wilson has suggested that the architect of the tomb was also responsible for the south transept: Alexander & Binski, eds, Age of Chivalry, cat. entry 497 (pp. 416–17).

²²⁰ Ormrod ‘Personal religion’, 871; E 101/388/5. One might further speculate that Edward III's long visit to Gloucester in Aug.–Sept. 1329 was concerned in part with the making of his father's tomb: Shenton, Itinerary of Edward III, 48–9.

²²¹ The records and manuscripts belonging to the abbey were dispersed at the time of the Reformation. The manuscripts now in the cathedral library are later acquisitions. For example, Gloucester Cathedral Ms. 34, containing abbot Walter of Frocester's Historia Monasterii Gloucestriae, which includes material on the pilgrims who visited Edward II's tomb (ff. 18r–19v; Welander, History, 629), was bought by the dean and chapter in 1879 from a dealer in Berlin: S. M. Eward, A Catalogue of Gloucester Cathedral Library (Gloucester, 1972), 5; I. M. Kirby, Diocese of Gloucester (Gloucester, 1967), 2, 30. W.H. Hart's Rolls Series edition of the Historia Monasterii Gloucestriae (London, 1863) was produced from manuscripts in the British Library and the Queen's College, Oxford.

²²² Palliser, ‘Royal mausolea’, 8–9, considers that Edward III was primarily responsible both for the building of the shrine and for the rebuilding of the abbey, and that these were not just a local initiative based on pilgrims' offerings at the tomb of Edward II.

²²³ I have examined a substantial amount of financial material for the early years of the reign of Edward III without finding any mention of his father's tomb.

²²⁴ C. Shenton, ‘Edward III and the coup of 1330’, in The Age of Edward III, ed. J.S. Bothwell (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2001), 24. As already noted, the enormous surplus inherited from Edward II in 1326 had almost all been spent by the end of 1327.

²²⁵ A.K. McHardy, ‘Paying for the wedding’, in Fourteenth Century England, iv, ed. J.S. Hamilton (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2006), 43–60.

²²⁶ E 352/125, no membrane number; E 372/177/m.30 (6 Ed. III); E 106/7/4 (extent of lands of Fécamp, Glos., 18 Ed. II); SC 6/bundle 1125/no. 15 (accounts for lands of alien priories in Glos., 18 Ed. II to 3 Ed. II, including those of Fécamp). Edward III took the fealty of the new abbot on 20 April 1332, when the financial obligations of the abbey to the English crown would have ceased.

²²⁷ Chaplais, Le Duché-pairie, 157–8; Sumption, Trial by Battle, i, 109–10, 119–20. In 1342 Pierre Roger also became pope as Clement VI.

²²⁸ The restoration of the tomb completed in 2007 cost £152,000.

²²⁹ F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor (London, 1970), 39, 180, 230; P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters (London, 1968), no. 1054. In 1247 Henry III forced the monks to exchange their lands at Rye and Winchelsea for Cheltenham and Slaughter in Glos.: CChR, 1226–57, 321–2; D. Matthew, The Norman Monasteries and their Possessions(Oxford, 1962), 76.

²³⁰ M. Harrison, ‘A life of Edward the Confessor in early fourteenth-century stained glass at Fécamp in Normandy’, Journal of Warburg & Courtauld Institutes, xxvi (1963), 22–37; M. Kauffmann, ‘The image of St Louis’, in Kings & Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. A. J. Duggan (London, 1993), 265.

²³¹ Brut, i, 253. This may be a significant detail, possibly reflecting the development of the story of Edward II's death in the years after 1327, since in 1330 Corfe was the scene of the earl of Kent's vain attempt to free Edward II, who he had been led to believe was still alive and held there: Brut, i, 263–4. A version of the French Brut, ending in 1333 (Trinity College Dublin, TCD Ms. 500, f. 191) also seems to imply that Edward died at Corfe.

²³² Ian Mortimer has published a very useful guide to the sources in his paper ‘Sermons of sodomy’, Table 1, ‘Principal accounts which mention the death of Edward II, 1327–1400’, 58–60. He lists 21 such sources, both in manuscript and in published form, but several more manuscript sources can be added: the Canterbury chronicle, Trinity College Cambridge, Ms. R.5.41, f. 126v; the Historia Roffensis, BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 51r; the Wigmore chronicle, Univ. of Chicago Ms. 224, f. 35; Memorabilia facta tempore Regis Edwardi secundi in Anglia (contained in the Register of the Cistercian abbey of Newenham, near Axminster, Devon), BL, Arundel Ms. 17, f. 44r; and two more versions of the French Brut, Bod. Lyell Ms. 17, f. 118v, and TCD Ms. 500, f. 191. Yet another version of the Brut is the text edited from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Ms. 178: Galbraith, ‘Extracts from the Historia Aurea’, esp. 216–17.

²³³ Ann. Paul., 337–8.

²³⁴ BL, Arundel Ms. 17, f. 44r: it makes no mention of Berkeley.

²³⁵ Trinity College Cambridge, Ms. R.5.41, f. 126v.

²³⁶ Univ. of Chicago Ms. 224, f. 35:’ quicquid aliter pacis mundi ablocuntur morte naturali moriebatur’. This was, however, written about 40 years later, at Wigmore priory, of which the Mortimers were patrons, and is not an unbiased witness. See Gransden, ii, 61.

²³⁷ See Mortimer, ‘Principal accounts’ in ‘Sermons of sodomy’; Woburn chronicle, BL, Cotton Ms. Vespasian E ix, ff. 80r–80v; Lanercost, 260; Le Baker, 172; and Scalacronica, 94–5, which said he died but that the manner of death was unknown.

²³⁸ E.g., Edward ‘enmaladist en le dit chastel de Berkelee grevousement de grant dolour et morust’: Bod. Lyell Ms. 17, f. 118v; ‘tost après le Roi par cas de maladie en le chastel de Berkeleie grevousement de grant dolour e morust’: Trinity College Dublin, TCD Ms. 500, f. 191. Mortimer also cites three other Brut mss: BL, Cotton Ms. Cleopatra D.VII, f. 174v; BL, Harleian Ms. 6359, f. 83r; BL, Cotton Ms. Domitian A.X, f. 87r (which also suggests that his death was finally brought about by murder). On the French Brut and its value for the reign of Edward II see Taylor, English Historical Literature, ch. 6, esp. 120–7, and App. I, 274–84.

²³⁹ Anonimalle, 134–5: see the Introduction. Also Taylor, English Historical Literature, ch. 7, esp. 133–9.

²⁴⁰ ‘per cautelam occisus’: Murimuth, 53–4. The Latin word cautela literally means ‘a trick’ or ‘a device’. Perhaps the sense here should be metaphorical, such as ‘by treachery’ or ‘treacherously’. Cf. Mortimer, ‘Principal accounts’ in ‘Sermons of sodomy’, 58.

²⁴¹ ‘suffocatus’: Murimuth, 63.

²⁴² Lanercost, 260.

²⁴³ Gesta Edwardi, 97–8.

²⁴⁴ Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus’, 72; BL, Cotton Ms. Claudius A.V (‘Edwardus vespere sanus in crastino mortuus est inventus’).

²⁴⁵ French Chron., 58.

²⁴⁶ Mortimer, ‘Principal accounts’ in ‘Sermons of sodomy’, 58; BL, Cotton Ms. Cleopatra D.IX, f. 63r.

²⁴⁷ Brut, i, 248–9, 253. On the English version of the Brut see Taylor, English Historical Literature, 127–31.

²⁴⁸ Polychronicon, 324.

²⁴⁹ Le Baker, 33–4.

²⁵⁰ Melsa, 354–5.

²⁵¹ Knighton, i, 448, says he was killed (‘occisus’) but on p. 446 also gives the suffocation and red-hot iron story.

²⁵² Galbraith, ‘Extracts’, 216–17. The English Brut says he was killed after he had gone to bed and did not suspect any treachery: Brut, i, 253.

²⁵³ ‘Sathanae satellitem’; ‘Obiit itaque in manibus hostium qui multo tempore mortem illi inceptanates et dicentes morte turpissima occidamus eum’: BL, Cotton Ms. Faustina B.V, f. 51r.

²⁵⁴ Murimuth, 53–4; Brut, i, 253; Le Baker, 32–4; Galbraith, ‘Extracts’, 216–17.

²⁵⁵ ‘Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est’, which could be interpreted as either ‘Do not fear to kill Edward. It is good’, or ‘Do not kill Edward. It is good to fear’: Le Baker, 31–2.

²⁵⁶ Polychronicon, 298–300. The description was written after his death.

²⁵⁷ As the account in the Brut, i, 252–3, would strongly suggest.

²⁵⁸ Mortimer, ‘Sermons of sodomy’, 53–6, 58–60. See also Evans, The Death of Kings, 124–34, where the story is treated as originating in rumour ‘modelled to fit his supposed homosexuality and passivity’, rather than propaganda, and Ormrod, ‘The sexualities of Edward II’, in Dodd & Musson, eds, The Reign of Edward II, 37–9.

²⁵⁹ Geoffrey le Baker's account seems designed to establish Edward II's credentials as a potential saint. Some of the details in Le Baker are very similar to those in the account of Edward's ill-treatment and murder to be found in Brut, i, 252–3; Galbraith, ‘Extracts’, 216–17.

²⁶⁰ Chaplais, 16–17, 112–13; Mortimer, ‘Sermons of sodomy’, 51. Godfrey II, duke of Lower Lorraine, is said to have been murdered in the same way in 1076: Chaplais, 112, n. 18. Two 12th-century examples of death by impalement are cited in Evans, The Death of Kings, 132–3. In 1447 Duke Humphrey of Gloucester was also allegedly murdered by the insertion of a red-hot iron: Evans, 124–34. Another parallel is the death of the earl of Hereford at the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, when a spear thrust through a gap in the planking of the bridge entered his body by the anus and spilled his bowels: Brut, i, 219. The red-hot iron story might have been a literal or poetic revenge for the earl's death.

²⁶¹ E 101/383/1; E 352/125, m.46v; E 372/177, m.45d; Moore, ‘Documents’, 224–6. The only important difference between the original and the enrolled versions of Henry de Glaunville's accounts is that the reference to the woman who disembowelled Edward II after death is only in the enrolments, E 352 and E 372. This was noted in Moore, 218. The evisceration of the corpse could also have contributed to the growth of the red-hot iron legend, if that is what it was.

²⁶² Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H.R. Luard, Rolls Series, iii (London, 1876), 51; Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum, ed. F. Madden, Rolls Series, ii (London, 1866), 233–4; Chronica Albrici Monachi Trium Fontium, MGH, SS.23, ed. G.H. Pertz (Hanover, 1874; repr. 1963), 898. See Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 164, n. 1. The origins of the literary device were originally revealed by S.H. Cassan in his Lives of the Bishops of Winchester, i (London, 1827), 185: Haines, The Church and Politics, 109.

²⁶³ PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 1: ‘et ordina q'il feust mande au chastell de Berkle, ou par lui et ses soens feust treterousement, felonessement, et falsement murdre et tue’. No evidence was presented to support this and none given in defence of Mortimer, who was judged guilty by the earls and barons present and sentenced to death. Mortimer was in prison during the proceedings.

²⁶⁴ PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 5: ‘and that whoever can take the said Thomas alive will have £100, and that whoever brings the head 100 marks. In addition that whoever can take the said William alive will have 100 marks, and that whoever brings the head, if it happens that he be not taken alive, will have £40 of the king's gift’.

²⁶⁵ Murimuth, 253–7. The Lanercost chronicle claims that this was none other than Thomas Dunheved, but he was probably dead by then: Lanercost, 265. According to Geoffrey le Baker, the Dominican was sent to Corfe by Edmund to confirm the story and, after bribing a doorkeeper, made his way inside and even claimed to have seen Edward dining splendidly: Le Baker, 44.

²⁶⁶ The Lanercost chronicle claims that three Dominicans, in addition to Thomas Dunheved, were involved, Edmund and John (presumably the Savage brothers) and a certain Richard: Lanercost, 265.

²⁶⁷ Murimuth, 59–60, and App., 253–7 (the text and translation of the earl of Kent's confession); Brut, i, 266 (this mentions the direct involvement of Mortimer).

²⁶⁸ Brut, i, 263–7.

²⁶⁹ The text of the letter (whether it is genuine is another matter) is in ibid., i, 265.

²⁷⁰ CCR, 1330–33, 132; Foedera, II, ii, 783, 787; Murimuth, 60; Brut, i, 267; Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 231–2.

²⁷¹ Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, f. 129v; Select Cases, ed. Sayles, v, 43–5; KB 27/280, m.38.

²⁷² SC 8/173/8613; SC 8/172/8555; PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 7. SC 8/50/2485 identified Haltby as a former adherent of the Younger Despenser.

²⁷³ Select Cases, ed. Sayles, v, 45. A similar order was given with regard to the bishop of London.

²⁷⁴ Murimuth, 60; Le Baker, 44. Edmund has won little sympathy from historians either, being regarded as unreliable in his political allegiances, as well as stupid and gullible, which is probably a fair assessment: see, for example, Tout, ‘Captivity and death’, 172–3.

²⁷⁵ Including Thomas Dunheved, if the Lanercost writer is to be believed: Le Baker, 44; Murimuth, 60; Lanercost, 265.

²⁷⁶ See S. Tugwell's article on Boraston in the Oxford DNB. Boraston was certainly back in favour in 1333; Baconthorpe was in Paris for a time in 1330.

²⁷⁷ CPR, 1327–30, 565. Pecche's lands were restored on 9 Aug. 1330: CCR, 1330–33, 52.

²⁷⁸ Tout, Place of the Reign, 123; Fryde, 225.

²⁷⁹ Le Baker, 44; Haines, Stratford, 213, n. 109.

²⁸⁰ The list of over 40 men whose arrest was ordered on 31 March 1330 as adherents of the earl of Kent included the familiar figures of Rhys ap Gruffudd and Stephen Dunheved, four friars (Richard de Pontefract, Richard Vavasour, Henry Domeram and Thomas de Bourne), and two former members of Edward II's chamber, a squire John Harsik and the usher Peter Bernard: CFR, 1319–37, 169–70; CCR, 1330–33, 51; J.C. Davies, ‘The first journal of Edward II's chamber’, EHR, xxx (1915), 670, 676, 662–80.

²⁸¹ Mortimer, ‘The death of Edward II’, 1201–2.

²⁸² CPR, 1324–7, 202; CPR, 1327–30, 11, 234.

²⁸³ Mortimer, ‘The death of Edward II’, 1201: the reference cited, Complete Peerage, x, 343, n. b., does not support this statement.

²⁸⁴ CFR, 1327–37, 149; CCR, 1327–30, 487; Mortimer, ‘The death of Edward II’, 1190, citing Berkeley Castle Muniments, Select Roll 39.

²⁸⁵ Saul, ‘The Despensers’, 27, 29. Pecche was a Warwickshire man and evidently a neighbour of the Dunheveds; he had a dispute with Margery de Dunheved, against whom he invoked Despenser's help.

²⁸⁶ Bod., Laud Ms. Misc. 529, f. 107; Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41, ff. 116v, 117; Phillips, 220–1. There is no confirmation of Ian Mortimer's statement that Pecche had sided with Mortimer during the initial stages of the Despenser war before being reconciled with the king: Mortimer, ‘The Death of Edward II’, 1201.

²⁸⁷ For a short summary of events see Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III, 4–5; Fryde, 216–24; Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, 61–3.

Another sign of the times was the murder in Oct. 1328 of Sir Robert de Holland, the former retainer of Thomas of Lancaster, who had betrayed him in 1322: Maddicott, ‘Thomas of Lancaster and Sir Robert Holland’, 469.

²⁸⁸ CPMR, i, 72; V.B. Redstone, ‘Some mercenaries of Henry of Lancaster, 1327–1330’, TRHS, 3rd ser., vii (1913), 160–1, 166 (this has the French text of the letter). Paul Doherty has however shown a possible link between William Aylmer and the earl of Lancaster in relation to the Dunheveds' attack on Berkeley in 1327: Doherty, Isabella, 123–5.

²⁸⁹ CPR, 1327–30, 397, 415. He was accompanied by William Melton's clerk Robert de Taunton who was later implicated in his plot. This may imply that Melton knew something of the rumours about Edward II's survival even before Oct. 1329. On the other hand, Melton had been closely involved since Feb. 1327 in the attempt to have Thomas of Lancaster canonized, so there was a good reason for his clerk to go to Avignon with the earl of Kent: Letters from Northern Registers, ed. Raine, 339–42.

²⁹⁰ The earl cannot be found again in England until 3 Dec. 1329: C 53/116, m.27.

²⁹¹ Brut, i, 263.

²⁹² Walwayn was probably sent to explain what had recently been occurring in England: see Foedera, II, iii, 40–1.

²⁹³ CPL, 499. This letter is no longer extant in The National Archives but I have checked the original papal register in which it is recorded without finding any material which is not in the calendared version: ASV, Vatican Register 116, f. 41: the relevant passage is ‘miramur quomodo nobilis ille [i.e. the earl of Kent] assere potuit quod nos rei tam incredibili fidem dederimus credulam videlicet illum vivere pro quo facte fuerunt exequie tam solemnes’.

²⁹⁴ Ibid. The pope was very well and speedily informed about events in England: on 7 Nov. he wrote to Edward III about the arrest of Roger Mortimer on 19 Oct. (which he had probably heard of on 3 Nov.), asking that he should be treated justly and shown mercy: CPL, 498. On the same day he told Edward III that he had heard Edward was not showing signs of filial affection to his mother; should she have done anything to justify his behaviour, the pope exhorted him to remember what she had done for him, and what enmity and ill-will against herself she had provoked in his service. He begged Edward to show mercy, that he might find mercy on the Day of Judgment: CPL, 498.

²⁹⁵ Lanercost, 265: ‘Mirum vero est quod dictus frater, vel aliquis multum literatus, voluit credere diabolo, cum a Deo dicatur in sancto Evangelio secundum Johannem, quod mendax est et pater eius, id est, inventor eius mendacii’.

²⁹⁶ Le Baker, 44: ‘totum hoc fuisset falsum et fantasiatum’.

²⁹⁷ It has been suggested that the two mysterious Dominicans, Edmund and John Savage who were never arrested, were agents provocateurs: Doherty (D.Phil.), 296. John Deveril and Bogo de Bayouse belonged to the garrison at Corfe and were certainly Mortimer's agents. At the time of writing, a paper by Roy Haines, ‘Roger Mortimer's scam’, was awaiting publication in Trans. Bristol and Glos. Archaeological Society. This has now appeared in cxxvi (2008), 139–56, and has been followed by a second paper, ‘Sumptuous apparel for a royal prisoner: Archbishop Melton's letter, 14 January 1330’, EHR, cxxiv (Aug. 2009), 885–94, in which a letter from William Melton to a London draper, Simon Swanlond, is published and discussed. The letter, whose existence was first noted by J.H. Bloom in ‘Simon de Swanland and King Edward II’, Notes and Queries, 11^th ser., iv (1911), 1–2, confirms that Melton had been led to believe that Edward was still alive in 1330 but provides no evidence that this was the case. The letter also shows that the William de Cliff, whom I identified above with the chancery clerk of that name, was in fact another friar. Professor Haines has also shown that the clerk Robert de Taunton is properly identified as Robert de Tauton (‘Roger Mortimer's scam’, 150). William de Kingsclere, who was accused of being responsible for persuading William Melton that Edward II was alive (Select Cases, ed. Sayles, v, 43–5), was captured in Rochester on 25 July 1332 and imprisoned in the Tower of London: E 101/310/34; J. Hunter, ‘On the measures taken for the apprehension of Sir Thomas de Gournay, one of the murderers of King Edward the Second’, Archaeologia, xxvii (1838), 283, 290.

²⁹⁸ Brut, i, 267.

²⁹⁹ Edward III had even refused to attend the wedding at Berwick in July 1328: Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, 51–3.

³⁰⁰ Mortimer The Greatest Traitor, 236–9; Haines, Stratford, 214.

³⁰¹ PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 1; Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 239–40.

³⁰² PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 2: ‘the murder of a liege lord, and the destruction of the royal blood line’ were included among his offences but there is no suggestion that he was directly involved in Edward II's death.

³⁰³ PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 5.

³⁰⁴ PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 4. William de Montacute was appointed as constable of Corfe in Dec. 1330: CFR, 1327–37, 211. If anything untoward was happening there, he would soon have known.

³⁰⁵ PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 3: ‘All the peers, earls and barons assembled at this parliament at Westminster have also closely examined, and have assented and agreed thereupon that John Maltravers is guilty of the death of Edmund, earl of Kent, the uncle of our present lord the king, in that he principally, traitorously and falsely plotted the death of the said earl, since he knew of the death of King Edward [le dit Johan savoit la mort le roi Edward], nevertheless the said John by ingenious means and by his false and evil subtleties led the said earl to understand the king was alive, which false plotting was the cause of the death of the said earl and of all the evil which followed’.

³⁰⁶ Shenton, ‘Edward III’, 24–6; Phillips, 262, 265.

³⁰⁷ PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 16: ‘dicit quod ipse nuncquam fuit consentiens, auxilians, seu procurans, ad mortem suam, nec unquam scivit de morte sua usque in presenti parliamento isto’.

³⁰⁸ Ibid.

³⁰⁹ See list of household bannerets and knights in 1330 in CMR, 1326–27, 377. Swynnerton and Trussell had previously been the earl of Lancaster's retainers; there were several John Darcys, all closely related, but this Darcy is probably the man who had been one of the earl of Pembroke's chief retainers until his death in 1324 and until recently had been justice of Ireland.

³¹⁰ PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, items 3, 5.

³¹¹ Maltravers was valued at 1,000 marks if taken alive and brought to the king and at £500 (wrongly given as £50 in the English translation in PROME) for his head; while Gurney and Ockley respectively were worth £100 and 100 marks alive or 100 marks and £40 for the head alone.

³¹² Frame, English Lordship, 61–2. Control of Rathkeale passed to Maltravers in 1351 after his return from exile: Frame, 68.

³¹³ On 15 July 1331 a commission of oyer and terminer was appointed to inquire into the activities of Noght and Taverner: CPR, 1330–34, 144.

³¹⁴ See Sumption, Trial by Battle, i, ch. 7, ‘Grand strategy’.

³¹⁵ CPR, 1330–34, 535. In March 1335 Edmund Bereford (Maltravers's brother-in-law), Maurice de Berkeley (the son of Thomas de Berkeley), John Moleyns and Nicholas Beche were all pardoned by Edward III for receiving Maltravers, apparently when he had briefly slipped back into England. Montacute was separately pardoned for receiving Maltravers: CPR, 1334–38, 88–9. Berkeley's presence is very significant in relation to the decision in 1335 to pardon his father. See also J.S. Bothwell, ‘Agnes Maltravers (d. 1375) and her husband John (d. 1364)’, in Fourteenth Century England, iv, ed. J.S. Hamilton (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2006), 84–5.

³¹⁶ W.M. Ormrod, ‘Richard de Bury and the monarchy of Edward III’, in War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, c. 1150–1500, ed. C. Given-Wilson, A. Kettle & L. Scales (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2008), 172–4.

³¹⁷ CPR, 1330–34, 535; CPR, 1343–45, 535.

³¹⁸ The pardoning of Maltravers is all the more remarkable given the size of the reward offered for his capture. Edward III was however trying to clear the decks politically in the mid-1330s by pardoning both former supporters of Edward II who had suffered in his downfall and former allies of Mortimer. Another remarkable detail is that as early as Feb. 1331 Edward III's queen Philippa had obtained an income for Maltravers's wife, Agnes (d. 1375) from the dowers of John Nerford (d. 1329) and John Argentine (d. 1318), her former husbands, in order to maintain her family, now destitute following the confiscation of Maltravers's lands. For the career of John Maltravers and his activities after 1330 see Phillips, ‘“Edward II” in Italy’, 210; the article by C. Shenton in the Oxford DNB; and Bothwell, ‘Agnes Maltravers’, 80–92.

³¹⁹ See Phillips, ‘The quest for Sir John Mandeville’, esp. 251–2.

³²⁰ According to a version of the French Brut, both Gurney and Maltravers had gone to Spain, ostensibly as pilgrims to Compostella, but were recognized at Burgos by an English lady, Isolda de Belhouse, who denounced them to the local authorities. Maltravers escaped but Gurney was arrested. This account may be partially true but does not include Gurney's own escape: Galbraith, ‘Extracts’, 217. See also Haines, ‘Sir Thomas Gurney’, 58–9.

³²¹ Diplomatic relations between England and Castile had been very close ever since the marriage of the future Edward I and Eleanor of Castile at Burgos in 1254: see Childs, ‘England in Europe’, 104–10; and Phillips, ‘Plantagenet Ireland, England and Castile: from Burgos (1254) to Batalha (1385)’, in Spanish–Irish Relations through the Ages, ed. D. M. Downey & J. Crespo MacLennan (Dublin, 2008), 5–11.

³²² J. Hunter, ‘On the measures taken for the apprehension of Sir Thomas de Gournay, one of the murderers of King Edward the Second’, Archaeologia, xxvii (1838), 274–94; Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus’, 76–9, 85 (incl. map on p.78 which shows the pursuit and capture of Gurney); Haines, ‘Sir Thomas Gurney’, 45–65. The French Brut account claims that Gurney was beheaded by the seneschal of Gascony Sir Oliver Ingham after he had confessed that he had ‘assented’ to the death of Edward II and had told how he died: Galbraith, ‘Extracts’, 217; Haines, ‘Sir Thomas Gurney’, 61. However, it is clear from the records published by Hunter that Gurney had been sick and had been given medical treatment which failed to save his life: Hunter, 285, 292–3. The exact date of Gurney's death is not recorded.

³²³ Bayouse (whose name is wrongly given as ‘Bayons’ in RP, ii, 53) was sentenced in his absence, as was Deveril; a price of £100 and 100 marks was put on them if taken alive, and 100 marks or £40 for their head: PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330 (C 65/2), item 4.

³²⁴ The details of Bogo's death are contained in C 49/45, no. 30 (proceedings on a petition of his brother William de Bayouse for restitution of the family lands in Helperby, Yorkshire) and KB 27/301, rotulus 25. Bogo had enough money to be able to leave four florins to pay the priests of S. Celso to say masses for his soul and 16 florins in aid of the Holy Land. For the strange tale of Bogo de Bayouse see my paper ‘“Edward II” in Italy’, 210–11; I have discussed the topic further in ‘An Englishman in Rome, 1330–1334’, in Dublin and the Medieval World, ed. A. Simms & A. Fletcher (Dublin, 2009), 422–32. It is not known what happened to John Deveril.

³²⁵ PROME, Parliament of Sept. 1331, C 65/2, item 18: ‘depuis qe Monsir Thomas de Gourneye, qi savoit pleynement coment le murdre se fist, par qi nostre seignur le roi et son conseil ent poeient estre enfourme, feust en vevant a ce q'ils entendeient’.

³²⁶ Foedera, II, iii, 160; PROME, Parliament of March 1337, Introduction.

³²⁷ Ormrod, ‘Richard de Bury’, 172–4; C 81/1708/34.