ROGER’S BODY WAS probably first taken to the church of the Greyfriars in London. It is usually said that he was buried there,1 but it seems that there was an attempt to return him to the Welsh Marches shortly after the hanging, as Roger’s widow, Joan, received permission a year after the death to remove his body from the Greyfriars church in Coventry.2 If he was dug up, he was probably reburied at either the Greyfriars Church in Shrewsbury or at Wigmore Abbey. Both churches were destroyed in the Dissolution.3
Joan was implicated in Roger’s treason, although she was at Ludlow at the time of his arrest. In 1336 she was pardoned and her possessions were apologetically restored to her, together with her loss of income. She did not remarry. She died in 1356, at the age of seventy, and was probably buried at Wigmore, possibly with her husband. Two years before she died, her grandson managed to reverse the judgement on Roger and inherited the family estates. Edward III declared the original sentence void owing to Roger not being allowed to speak in his own defence. The grandson thus became the second Earl of March, and Joan once more the dowager countess.
Isabella was never accused of adultery with Roger. Nor was she accused of complicity in the Berkeley Castle plot. She was treated very leniently indeed, and given a very respectable income, and, in time, some measure of freedom. She did not go mad and she was not locked up in Castle Rising, as is often claimed. If she had a son by Roger, he did not inherit the earldom of Lincoln or any other title, and nothing more is known of him. She died in 1358 at Hertford Castle, at the age of sixty-two, and was buried in her wedding dress in the Greyfriars church in London, where Roger’s body had briefly lain. Beneath her grave was buried the heart of Edward II. The grave was destroyed in the Great Fire, and although the church was rebuilt by Wren, this too was almost completely destroyed in the Second World War. A busy road now runs across the site.
One question outlived Roger: the fate of King Edward II. It suited Edward III perfectly to be able to accuse Roger of his murder; and he later expressed his gratitude to Sir William de Montagu for thinking up this means of turning the Berkeley Castle plot to his advantage. The death of the ex-king in Berkeley Castle has consequently become an established historical fact. However, as this book has already stated, Edward II’s fate is a much more complex issue than a murder. It is a question of corruption and power: of knowledge and how that knowledge was used. Thus one must answer the question as to what happened to the ex-king after Berkeley. Did Roger leave a political legacy in the form of a dethroned Edward II?
Just as a man’s life story may begin many years before his birth, so it may end many years after he is dead.