17

The Curious Case of the King Who Lived

On 14 January 1330, William Melton, archbishop of York and a long-term friend and ally of Edward II (whom he had known well since at least 1297), sent an extraordinary letter to the mayor of London, Simon Swanland.¹ Begging Swanland to keep what he wrote secret, Melton told him,

We have certain news of our liege lord Edward of Caernarfon, that he is alive and in good health of body, in a safe place at his own wish [or command] … We beg you as dearly as we trust in you that you procure for us a loan of £200 in gold, if you can have it, for the comfort of and in secret, taken to the said lord for us, and that you obtain two half cloths of different colours, good cloth and intimate clothing and good fur of miniver for six garments and three hoods of miniver, and two coverlets of different colours of the larger size, with the hangings, and two belts and two bags, the best that you can find for sale, and twenty ells of linen cloth, and send for his Cordovan leather so that we have six pairs of shoes and two pairs of boots, and have the above-mentioned things bundled up together … and come to us as soon as you can to advise us how we will procure such a great sum of money for the said lord, as we wish that he may be helped as far as we and you are able to arrange…

The archbishop was so certain Edward of Caernarfon was alive that he ordered provisions for him, the focus on clothing explained by Swanland being a draper who had often supplied cloth to Edward’s household. Melton was far from being the only person utterly convinced of the former king’s survival years after his funeral. Edward’s half-brother the earl of Kent was executed in March 1330 after admitting to parliament that he had attempted to free Edward from Corfe Castle in Dorset. Many men joined Kent’s conspiracy and were either arrested or fled the country, and the plan had advanced far enough that arrangements had been made for Edward to be transferred by boat from Corfe along the coast to Kent’s castle of Arundel in Sussex. In late 1329, Edward’s Scottish friend Donald, earl of Mar, promised to come to England with an army to effect Edward’s release. Some of the men who aided the earl of Kent and the archbishop of York’s plans to free Edward sought refuge with Edward’s nephew the duke of Brabant and plotted an invasion of England, intending to land near Scotland with Mar’s help. Proclamations were issued declaring that anyone who stated that the former king was alive would be arrested, and half the country was wondering if it was true. Many people in Wales supported Rhys ap Gruffydd, one of the men who firmly believed that Edward was still alive, and the earl of Kent’s adherents were thought to be particularly numerous in East Anglia. In short, many people in England, Wales, Scotland and on the Continent strongly believed that Edward of Caernarfon was alive years after his alleged death and were, in various ways, attempting to help him.

Exactly what happened to whom at Berkeley Castle in September 1327 will never be known for certain. A body was shown ‘superficially’ to a group of knights, abbots and burgesses, and was buried at Gloucester on 20 December 1327. The body was never visually displayed to the public, as the face was (almost certainly) covered in waxed cloth and the body encased in a coffin, with a covering decorated with a gilded leopard and a wooden effigy on top of it. Even at Edward’s funeral, it seems apparent that his face was not uncovered, even to his family and friends, as his brother Kent and the archbishop of York were later completely convinced that he was alive.² It is reasonable to assume that Kent was not satisfied that anyone else had seen Edward’s face and body closely enough to identify him properly either. As the earl, in attempting to free the supposedly dead king in 1329/30, must have known that he might suffer grave penalties for his actions (as he did; he was beheaded), he would hardly have acted the way he did without being entirely certain that neither he nor anyone else had seen Edward dead. The same applies to Archbishop Melton, and to knights of south-west England, such as Ingelram Berenger and Nicholas Dauney, who may have attended Edward’s funeral in Gloucester and may have been among the men previously invited to see his body ‘superficially’, and who joined Kent and the archbishop in 1329/30.

William Melton’s letter tantalises with the things he did not say: where Edward was, whether contact had been made with him directly, what happened at Berkeley in September 1327, how Edward was safe at his own wish or command, which implies that he somehow had control of his current situation. Probably Melton thought it imprudent to commit these details to parchment and told his messenger William Cliff – perhaps the man of this name who was once Hugh Despenser’s attorney – to inform Swanland orally. His request to Swanland to have the £200 secretly ‘taken to the said lord for us’ implies that he knew how to gain access to Edward and that his messenger informed Swanland of the location. Melton must have had what he thought was extremely convincing evidence of Edward’s survival to write such a letter, and he pledged the vast sum of £5,000 and declared that he would sell everything he owned, except for one vestment and one chalice, to help the former king. When interrogated in April 1330 about his part in the affair, Melton said that he had heard from a William Kingsclere on 10 October 1329 that Edward was alive. Kingsclere is hard to trace, and Melton did not state what proof he furnished, but obviously the archbishop found it plausible and compelling. The earl of Kent’s confession as recorded by Adam Murimuth says that a friar who raised the devil informed him that Edward II was alive. Lanercost names this friar as none other than Thomas Dunheved.³ It is impossible that men such as the bishop of London and the numerous others would have supported Kent on the strength of a devil-raising friar, so either this bizarre detail was inserted into the confession to discredit Kent, or he himself invented it to protect his real source.

Melton asking Swanland for £200 in gold, in limited circulation in England but useful on the Continent, indicates that the plan was not to try to restore Edward to the throne, at least not yet, but to send him somewhere abroad. Where this might have been is a matter for speculation: perhaps Ireland, where a letter of the 1330s claims he did in fact go after escaping from Berkeley; Castile, his mother’s homeland; Scotland, where he could count on the support of Robert Bruce’s nephew the earl of Mar; the papal court in Avignon, where the 1330s letter also says he went; or Brabant, where his sister Margaret still lived and his nephew ruled, and where some of the men plotting on his behalf in 1330 gathered. Duke John III of Brabant allowed Kent to meet two of his supporters in his chamber in Paris.⁴ It is also unclear what the purpose was of sending Edward overseas: to keep him hidden away in secret, to give him an opportunity to raise an army, or to use his presence abroad to threaten Isabella and Mortimer in some way.

Kent believed his half-brother to be at Corfe Castle. It seems almost certain that Edward was indeed held at Corfe at some point. Adam Murimuth states ‘Edward was secretly removed from Berkeley by night and taken to Corfe and other secret places’. TheBrutauthor believed he was murdered at Corfe.⁵ The association of Edward of Caernarfon with Corfe is very strong, and that Edward was outside Berkeley at some point is confirmed by the castle records, which say that one Henry Pecche was his guardian ‘at Berkeley and elsewhere’. In September 1327, Edward’s joint legal custodian John Maltravers was paid over £258 from Berkeley Castle accounts for ‘services to the king’s father in Dorset’, and received letters from Lord Berkeley at Corfe.⁶

More than seventy named men aided the earl of Kent in his plot to free Edward of Caernarfon in 1329/30 and presumably shared his belief in Edward’s survival, and the searches for his adherents across the south of England and Wales, recorded in the chancery rolls, indicate that the true number was far higher than this. Simon Swanland’s role was never discovered, and Melton and his messenger William Cliff kept quiet about his involvement. Many others, however, were arrested between March and August 1330, or fled the country. They included the earl of Buchan, the bishop and a former sheriff of London, Edward’s nephew Edward Monthermer, his great-nephew, Hugh Despenser’s eldest son Huchon (in prison at Bristol Castle), numerous men who had been in Edward’s household, former adherents of the Despensers including Hugh’s confessor Richard Bliton, Rhys ap Gruffydd and Sir Gruffydd Llwyd’s son Ieuan, lords, knights, sheriffs, clerks, squires, chaplains, friars, monks, merchants, and men so obscure they cannot be traced. Even Thomas Wake, who played a vital role in Edward II’s deposition in January 1327, joined the plot and had fled from England by 4 April 1330. William la Zouche, one of the men who captured Edward and Hugh Despenser on 16 November 1326, was another Kent supporter, and told the earl that freeing Edward ‘would be the greatest honour that ever befell him’.⁷ The majority of the men, however, had once been close and loyal to Edward II, and thus it is likely that they genuinely believed in his survival and wanted to help him. The participation of Stephen Dunheved, a fanatical supporter of Edward imprisoned at Newgate prison for trying to rescue him in 1327, suggests he truly believed Edward was alive, as does the participation of Edward’s close friend William, abbot of Langdon and many of his former servants and other friends, such as William Aune, Peter Bernard, John Harsik, Roger Audley, Adam Wetinhale, William Marenny, Giles of Spain, John de Toucestre and John Coupland. Kent has often unfairly been condemned as stupid and gullible by modern historians unable otherwise to explain his plot in the light of their certainty that Edward of Caernarfon was dead.⁸ Kent was not stupid, and even if he were, Archbishop Melton, Bishop Stephen Gravesend of London, the earl of Mar and the countless others who shared his belief and acted on it were not.

Kent’s supporter Ingelram Berenger, a Somerset knight pardoned for adherence to the Despensers in 1327, went to the earl to tell him that Sir John Pecche of Warwickshire would help the plot in any way he could.⁹ This is highly significant, because Pecche was constable of Corfe Castle until replaced by John Maltravers on 24 September 1329. He also had links to Thomas and Stephen Dunheved’s brother John.¹⁰ Clearly Pecche was in an excellent position to know the truth of Edward of Caernarfon’s incarceration at the castle, and would not have joined the earl of Kent’s plot to free him, with his son Nicholas, had he not been entirely sure that Edward was alive there – something which was easily within in his power to check.

The men trying to free Edward in 1330 were punished when the plot came to light. The earl of Kent died for it. Archbishop Melton, Bishop Gravesend and others were indicted before King’s Bench. Many men were imprisoned and their lands and goods seized; Sir William Cleydon died in prison, and John Pecche was one of those who lost all his lands and goods. Others fled the country and did not return until Edward III took over governance of his own kingdom. These men did not act on a whim, or because they were gullible and stupid; they were sure that the former king was alive and risked a great deal to free him. Donald of Mar was even willing to bring an army to England to help his friend, and promised the archbishop of York that he would raise 40,000 men, an impossibly large number (almost three times the size of Edward II’s army at Bannockburn), but Mar’s exaggeration demonstrates his determination to help Edward.¹¹

If a large number of influential people firmly believed in Edward II’s survival and acted on it despite the grave penalties they knew they would suffer in case of failure, then clearly there is an extremely high chance that Edward was indeed alive. A common modern explanation for the plot by writers convinced that he was dead by then is that the men who took part in it did not really believe he was alive, but were merely expressing their dissatisfaction with the regime of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer. They didn’t need to pretend belief in the former king’s survival to do that. Henry of Lancaster and many allies rebelled against the pair in late 1328 without using his cousin’s name, and Richard Fitzalan, son of the executed earl of Arundel, attempted to raise an army against them in June 1330 also without mentioning Edward. William Melton’s letter to Simon Swanland begged the latter not to reveal the startling news to ‘any man or woman of the world’, hardly the words of a man trying to start an uprising in the former king’s name, and if everyone had known for sure that Edward II was dead, invoking his name in a rebellion – even if it perhaps provided a useful rallying call – would not have threatened Mortimer and Isabella. Henry of Lancaster was not tried for treason and executed or imprisoned in 1329 for raising an army and openly rebelling against the Crown, yet somehow the earl of Kent had to be beheaded for trying to free a dead man. Henry of Lancaster himself told the mayor of London John de Grantham on 5 November 1328 that Kent had told him certain things which he could not put into writing, but of which his messenger would inform the mayor orally.¹²

Kent’s execution for a non-existent crime would make far more sense if the plot was real, Edward II was alive, and Kent, William Melton and the others really were on the brink of freeing him from Corfe Castle. The merciless speed with which the earl was tried and killed suggests that Isabella and Mortimer knew the plot was a genuine one and nearing fruition. The thought of the former king at liberty outside England, with powerful allies such as the duke of Brabant, the earls of Mar and Buchan and even the pope – Kent claimed to have the support of John XXII, whom he visited to discuss Edward’s ‘deliverance’ in June 1329 – must have been extremely threatening to them. From the evidence we have, it is possible to work out how events were meant to unfold. Simon Swanland’s men would try to gain access to Edward at Corfe and give him the money, clothes and shoes ordered by Melton from Swanland. It may be that Melton wrote to more men he trusted at this time to ask for other provisions to be taken to Edward as well, but the letters have not survived. It may also be that he had heard Edward’s life at Corfe, though safe, was not comfortable, hence his wish to provide warm fur-lined clothes, coverlets and hangings for him, or perhaps these items were intended for the chilly sea journey from Dorset to Sussex in the late winter of 1330. John Gymmynges, another former Despenser adherent and valet of Edward II’s chamber, and his cousin, a monk of Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight, were to provide three sailing vessels to take Edward and the earl of Kent to Kent’s castle at Arundel. Kent evidently had it in mind to be present in person when Edward was freed. A writ to all the sheriffs of England declared that the earl ‘had made alliance on both sides of the sea to assemble a force of men-at-arms’.¹³Perhaps he intended to take this armed force and either attack Corfe or, using his authority as a son, brother and uncle of kings, simply demand entry and leave with Edward. The three boats may have been intended to carry the men-at-arms as well as Kent and Edward. Kent’s confession only says that after they had reached Arundel Castle, Edward would have been taken ‘whithersoever should have been appointed’, presumably in consultation with Melton, their other allies and of course Edward himself.¹⁴ Unfortunately, Kent made the fatal error of asking his wife Margaret Wake to write a letter to his brother, telling him, ‘I shall ordain for you that you shall soon come out of prison’. He was betrayed by John Deveril and Bogo de Bayouse of the Corfe garrison, who sent the letter to Roger Mortimer.¹⁵ The earl, a brave honourable man, died on the scaffold in Winchester on 19 March 1330. He left his heavily pregnant widow Margaret and three small children, one of whom, Joan, was the mother of Richard II.

And there is other evidence which points to Edward II’s survival past 1327. Sometime in the 1330s, an Italian papal notary called Manuel Fieschi, a nobleman by birth and appointed bishop of Vercelli in 1343, wrote a fascinating letter to Edward III. In it, he explained how Edward II escaped from Berkeley Castle in 1327, which story Fieschi claimed to have heard from the mouth of Edward himself. A servant, also called his custodian, told Edward that Thomas Gurney and Simon Bereford were coming to kill him. To save himself, Edward killed a sleeping porter, and, using the porter’s keys to let himself out of the castle, fled with the unnamed servant and went to Corfe, where he stayed for a year and a half. Meanwhile, Edward said, the porter’s body was buried as his at Gloucester. When at Corfe, he heard that his half-brother Kent had been executed, so he left there and went to Ireland, where he remained for nine months, that is, until Roger Mortimer’s arrest and execution in late 1330. Dressed as a hermit, he briefly touched at Sandwich, from where he sailed to Normandy and travelled through France to Avignon, where he met John XXII and spent fifteen days with him, in secret. Edward then travelled to Brabant, Cologne and through Germany to Milan, to the hermitage ofMilasci(probably Mulazzo in the Val di Magra); he stayed there for two years, and, finally, moved on to the hermitage of Cecima in the diocese of Pavia, where he remained for another two years.¹⁶ Although the letter does not state directly that Edward II was still alive at the time of writing, neither does it say that he was dead.

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

The letter contains a chronological error: Kent’s execution followed two and a half years after Edward’s supposed murder, not eighteen months as the letter states, though perhaps this is just a scribal error. The letter is in some ways problematic, for example the notion that Edward could escape from Berkeley simply by killing one man. After the Dunheveds successfully attacked the castle and seized Edward, it is most unlikely to have been guarded by only one porter, who moreover was asleep at the time. Edward’s fleeing to Corfe Castle, and staying there for so long without the garrison noticing or recognising him, is also hard to explain. The letter names Thomas Gurney and Simon Bereford as Edward’s would-be killers, though the November 1330 parliament found Gurney and William Ockley guilty. Then again, Simon Bereford was condemned to death at this parliament for aiding Roger Mortimer in all his felonies, including presumably the murder of Edward II. Edward knew Gurney and Bereford, who were knights, but surely had no idea who the man-at-arms Ockley was, and if we assume that Edward really did meet Manuel Fieschi, perhaps he heard that Gurney had been sentenced to death for his murder and that Bereford had been executed, and put two and two together. The detail in the early part of the letter, which describes Edward’s attempt to sail from Chepstow in October 1326, being captured by Henry of Lancaster in Glamorgan and escorted to Kenilworth and later Berkeley, ‘his’ heart being sent to Isabella, John Maltravers being at Corfe in September 1327, is accurate and much of it could not have been known to an outsider. Edward’s putting to sea at Chepstow on 20 October 1326, for example, is mentioned in no chronicle and is known only from his last chamber account, which fortunately still survives.¹⁷ If the man who met Manuel Fieschi and told him this story was not Edward II, he must have been someone very close to him.

There is another Italian connection with Edward. When his son Edward III was in Koblenz, Germany, in September 1338, his wardrobe book records a payment to William le Galeys, ‘who says he is the king’s father’ and who was taken to Edward III by Francisco the Lombard, i.e. of Lombardy in Italy. At Antwerp a few weeks later, the same man, now called Francekino Forcet or in modern spelling Francisco Forcetti, received money for his expenses looking after William le Galeys, who ‘calls himself king of England and the father of the present king’. The name le Galeys means ‘the Welshman’, and Edward II was of course born in Wales.¹⁸ As with the Fieschi letter, there is nothing in Edward III’s wardrobe book which names le Galeys as an impostor or says that his claim to be the king’s father was false, and the keeper of Edward III’s wardrobe, William Norwell, had known Edward II well and served him from 1313 onwards.¹⁹ At a time when royal pretenders were almost invariably executed, as with John of Powderham in 1318, William le Galeys met Edward III at the king’s expense and spent time with him and perhaps Queen Philippa (Edward and Philippa’s son Lionel was born in Antwerp in November 1338).²⁰ Almost certainly le Galeys was the same man who met John XXII and Manuel Fieschi. Two of Edward II’s closest friends bore the name William, the archbishop of York and the abbot of Langdon, so if William le Galeys really was the former king, this might explain the name he took.

One final piece of evidence to consider in relation to Edward II’s survival is the testimony to the November 1330 parliament of Thomas, Lord Berkeley, Edward’s joint legal custodian at Berkeley Castle in 1327. Lord Berkeley’s father-in-law Roger Mortimer was sentenced to death at this parliament, and executed on 29 November. Berkeley’s brother-in-law and Edward’s other custodian, John Maltravers, was sentenced to death in absentia for his role in the entrapment and execution of the earl of Kent some months before, as were John Deveril and Bogo de Bayouse. Thomas Gurney and William Ockley were also condemned to death in absentia because they ‘falsely and treacherously murdered’ Edward II. Berkeley was asked how he wished to acquit himself of complicity in the king’s death. His very odd reply, as recorded by a clerk in Latin, was: ‘He never consented to his death, either by helping or by procuring it, and he never knew of his death until this present parliament.’²¹ Lord Berkeley thus stated that he hadn’t known Edward II was dead until he came to parliament, when the king was meant to have died in his own castle more than three years previously. Berkeley’s words have often been translated and interpreted over-elaborately to make them fit into the notion that Edward was killed at Berkeley Castle: that Lord Berkeley really meant he didn’t know Edward had been murdered, or that he didn’t know the circumstances of his death. His words, however, simply mean ‘he never knew of (or about) his death until the present parliament’. No more, no less.

It is true that no fourteenth-century chronicle says that Edward survived, and all say he died in 1327, giving a wide variation of causes of death, including that he died naturally or of illness or grief. This wide variation, in fact, demonstrates how little faith we should place in chronicle evidence for Edward’s supposed death. None of them knew what happened at Berkeley and they were merely repeating stories they had heard or giving what they thought was a plausible explanation for the sudden death of a previously strong and healthy forty-three-year-old king. The people who knew about Edward’s death or otherwise, Mortimer, Berkeley, Maltravers, Gurney, Ockley and probably Isabella, never spoke publicly about it, and chroniclers were as prone to believing and repeating mere rumour as anyone else, and frequently did so, especially near the end of Edward II’s reign. Men who knew Edward well and cared about him, such as his half-brother Kent and his loyal friends, such as the archbishop of York, Stephen Dunheved, the earl of Mar and the abbot of Langdon, are a more reliable source for what happened to him than chroniclers who never saw him and in many cases were writing decades later and hundreds of miles away. Even Adam Murimuth, the only chronicler in the south-west of England in September 1327 (albeit almost a hundred miles away from Berkeley, in Exeter) changed his mind about the cause of death, saying at first somewhat cryptically that Edward died ‘by a trick’, then later that he was suffocated. Clearly Murimuth, though a clerk in royal service, had no more reliable information than anyone else, and also wrongly thought that Maltravers was one of Edward’s killers. It was widely believed in 1327 and beyond that Edward was dead, as the information came from seemingly the most authoritative source there could be, his son the king himself. Yet the young Edward III immediately began spreading the news solely on the basis of Thomas Berkeley’s letter, long before he could have sent anyone to Berkeley Castle to verify that it was true, and there is no evidence that he ever sent anyone there at all to see his father’s body. And here came Thomas Berkeley to parliament three years later and announced that despite sending this letter, he had not previously known of the former king’s death. As Ian Mortimer points out, ‘the whole edifice of chronicle and record evidence that Edward II died was founded on a deception’.²²

Having accepted in 1327 that his father was dead and spread the news without checking, having attended Edward II’s funeral and marked the anniversary of his death every year, Edward III had no choice in 1330 but to continue the charade. To this end, Thomas Gurney and William Ockley were convicted in parliament of having killed him, but evaded execution. Roger Mortimer, also charged with Edward’s murder, was hanged, but he was convicted on thirteen other charges which demonstrate Edward III’s fury at his mother’s favourite usurping his royal power. The young king was always going to execute Mortimer; adding the charge of killing Edward II made no difference, and confirmed in people’s minds that the former king truly was dead. The last thing Edward III would have wanted was for him to be known to be alive, which might have resulted in civil war and the young king accused of treason, even forced to give up his throne to his father. Edward II’s deposition was of very dubious legality and it was by no means impossible that he could have made himself king again, though whether he would have wanted to is another matter. Still, Edward III could not take the risk.

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

Pretending that the king was dead gave Roger Mortimer and Isabella all the advantages of a truly dead king without the disadvantages of committing regicide and, in Isabella’s case, the murder of her own husband. There is nothing to suggest that the queen, despite her rebellion against the Despensers and by extension Edward, desired his death, or that she was under Mortimer’s thumb and would have stood by without protest as he had Edward murdered. It is far more probable that she refused to allow him to be killed and demanded that another solution be found.²³ Isabella was never accused of any role in it, and although it is understandable that Edward III might wish to draw a veil over his mother’s complicity in his father’s murder, her affectionately referring to Edward in 1325/26 as her ‘very sweet heart’ and her ‘very dear and very sweet lord and friend’, publicly grieving for the collapse of their marriage and avenging herself savagely on the man she held responsible for it, sending Edward gifts and wishing to visit him in 1327, suggest that she still loved him, not that she loathed him and wanted him dead. It is a huge step from anger and grief to having your husband and the father of your children killed in cold blood, and there is no evidence that she ever took this step. Isabella, daughter of two sovereigns, sister of three kings, who knew from the age of three that she would marry Edward and be his queen, was a woman with a profound and sacred sense of royalty, and it is hard to imagine how she could have tolerated the murder of a man as royal as she herself. After Isabella and Mortimer fell from power, her son Edward III treated her with every respect, and she lived an entirely conventional life as a dowager queen. She was not, as is still often stated today, locked up at Castle Rising and she did not go mad. She died at Hertford Castle in August 1358 and was buried at the Greyfriars church in London with the clothes she had worn at her wedding to Edward in 1308, and with his heart on her breast. It is merely a romantic myth that she chose to lie next to Roger Mortimer; he was buried in Coventry.²⁴

The fact remains that a body was buried at Gloucester in December 1327, and if it was not Edward II’s, whose was it? This is a question we unfortunately cannot answer; likewise, we cannot know whether the man standing in for the former king died naturally or not. Edward himself thought the sleeping castle porter he killed was buried in his place, but it seems unlikely that such a man would fortuitously resemble him closely enough to be passed off as him. Edward was tall and uncommonly strong. Then again, we know from tomb excavations that Hugh Despenser’s nephew Hugh Hastings stood five feet ten inches, and Archbishop William Melton, who came from a humble family in Yorkshire, was six feet tall.²⁵ Clearly men of such height were not unknown in England in the early fourteenth century, and not only among the nobility. As the body at Berkeley was almost certainly embalmed shortly after death and covered with waxed cloth, including the face, it need not have resembled Edward too closely as long as the height more or less matched. Even if the face was visible, pale and sunken in death it might still have fooled the visitors who only saw it superficially. Or perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps one of the knights or abbots who saw it told the earl of Kent or others of his suspicions. For the first month after death, the sergeant-at-arms William Beaukaire, who had been pardoned at Hugh Despenser’s castle of Caerphilly some months before, guarded the body, presumably to stop anyone examining it too closely, before it was carried on a funereal carriage to Gloucester.

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

Taken individually, all the pieces of evidence that Edward II survived past 1327 could be explained away, if we wish. Kent, Melton, Mar and their many supporters were misled by false information and, fond of Edward, carried away by their own wishful thinking. Manuel Fieschi was taken in by a well-informed impostor. Thomas Berkeley told parliament that he hadn’t previously known that Edward was murdered and his words were written down confusingly. William the Welshman was a deluded subject of Edward III whom the king spent time with and magnanimously forgave for pretending to be his royal father. But taken as a whole, the pieces build a very strong picture that Edward II did not die at Berkeley in 1327. So, then, where did he die? Most probably in Italy, in the hermitage of Sant’Alberto di Butrio high in the hills near Cecima in the province of Pavia, where Manuel Fieschi says he lived. Both the Val di Magra where Edward first went or was taken (where Mulazzo is located) and the area around Cecima were then dominated by the Fieschi family, and the sergeant Francisco Forcetti also had ties to the Val di Magra.²⁶ An empty tomb in the hermitage of Sant’Alberto is claimed as Edward’s to this day and shown to visitors, and it has long been accepted in Italy that Edward died in that country.²⁷ Or perhaps his body was returned to England and buried in his tomb at Gloucester after all, and his heart removed to be sent to Isabella for her to be buried with later. Edward III made a pilgrimage to Gloucester in March 1343, the first time he had visited since 1337.²⁸. We cannot know for sure when Edward died, though Ian Mortimer has suggested 1341 or early 1342, as the early 1340s saw a flurry of Edward-related activity: Queen Isabella founded a chantry in Coventry in 1342 to pray for the soul of her husband; as noted, Edward III made a pilgrimage to Gloucester in 1343; and at the parliament of May 1343, the king passed on the title of prince of Wales, the one title his father had never given up to him, to his eldest son.²⁹ Edward of Caernarfon would then have been in his late fifties.

Objections to the idea that Edward lived on in Italy after his ‘death’ are usually rooted in incredulity. The red-hot poker story has been repeated as fact so many times that it can be difficult to grasp that it didn’t happen. Throughout history there have been other tales of famous people living on secretly after their deaths, which understandably leads many people to the conclusion that Edward’s story must likewise be a myth; but Edward’s afterlife was testified to by an archbishop, bishops, earls and many others who knew him well. It is also hard for some to imagine that a king, especially one as extravagant as Edward, might have been able or willing to live in obscurity and as a hermit at that. But Edward was sincerely pious, he loved the outdoors, he loved spending time at monasteries: in 1300 when he was sixteen, he stayed at St Edmund’s Abbey in Suffolk for a week longer than he had to, enjoying the daily routine, the food and the company of the monks. In 1318 a cleric complained that Edward spent too much time in religious houses, and he always enjoyed spending time with and befriending religious men.³⁰ Being king had brought Edward little but terrible unhappiness. He lost two men he loved dearly, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser, and the company of his wife, his children, his beloved sister Mary and niece Eleanor, everyone else he loved. He had been rejected by his kingdom, humiliated at Bannockburn and elsewhere. Why would he have wanted to rule again? Although Edward was not a man given to critical self-reflection, even he must have realised in and after January 1327 that both he and his kingdom were much better off without him on the throne. Living out his years peacefully and contemplatively in a distant country, praying, working on the land and making the most of his physical strength, might well have appealed to him greatly. It is entirely fitting that the time, manner and place of death of this most unconventional man should be shrouded in mystery, though wherever his body may truly lie, his magnificent tomb in Gloucester with its canopy and alabaster effigy is one of the greatest treasures of medieval England.

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