APPENDIX 3
RESEARCH INTO THE life of Edward II after the collapse of Mortimer’s regime in October 1330 is complicated by a number of factors. Unlike the question of his ‘death’ – which is a finite problem which can be answered logically by examining the information structures underpinning the evidence for the death and scrutinising the evidence for events contingent on his survival – the matters of where he was after 1330 and when he died are potentially limitless. One is caught between the unending possibilities and the shortage of direct evidence. Most important business was conducted orally, through messengers, not in a written format. Therefore there is rarely any written material for us to evaluate. However, despite these problems it is important for readers to have an idea of the nature of the research in progress and some findings, in order to understand how Edward II’s survival affected Edward III, as outlined in Chapters Four to Eight of this book.
There is only one piece of written evidence which overtly claims that Edward II was definitely alive after 1330. This is the famous Fieschi letter, written by Manuel Fieschi in about 1336, and known since 1877 from the copy in a cartulary of a mid-fourteenth-century bishop of Maguelonne. (Readers wanting to see the text and a reproduction of the original will find both in The Greatest Traitor: the Life of Sir Roger Mortimer.) In brief the letter states that, after the execution of Kent, Edward II was taken from Corfe to Ireland, where he remained for nine months. Up to this point he had the same custodian as had attended him in 1327 at Berkeley, but, after November 1330, he was released (probably partly on account of the danger of being found out by Edward III and partly on account of the fact that the mastermind of the plot, Mortimer, was dead). The ex-king made his way to Sandwich dressed as a pilgrim and then travelled to Avignon, where he saw the pope. If he had walked to Avignon at a rate of about ten miles per day with the other pilgrims travelling south, he would have taken about eight weeks to reach the papal palace, arriving about the end of February or early March 1331. After spending two weeks with the pope, Fieschi’s letter states that he went from there to Brabant, and from Brabant to the shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne, then to Milan, and then to ‘a certain hermitage of the castle of Milasci’, where he stayed for two-and-a-half years, moving on account of a war in the area to another hermitage near ‘Cecima, in the diocese of Pavia’, where he had been for two years by the time of the letter being written.
There is another well-known document which suggests that Edward II was alive in the 1330s. It has a strikingly reliable provenance. This is the royal wardrobe account written by or under the auspices of William Norwell in 1338–40 which states twice that the William le Galeys who was brought to Edward III at Koblenz in September 1338 claimed to be the king’s father. The first of these two references is an undated payment ‘to Francisco the Lombard sergeant at arms of the king for the money by him spent on the expenses of William le Galeys who asserts that he is the father of the present king, previously arrested (arestati)1 at Cologne and by the said Francisco led to the king at Koblenz by his own hand, 25s 6d’. Judging from the king’s itinerary derived from the same manuscript volume, this delivery of le Galeys must have been while the king was staying at Niederwerde near Koblenz, between 30 August and 7 September 1338. The second entry is specifically dated to 18 October, when the royal party was at Antwerp. Francisco – now fully named as ‘Francekino Forcet’ – was paid ‘for the money received by him for the expenses of William Galeys remaining in his custody, who calls himself king of England, father of the present king, namely for three weeks in December of year twelve (1338) by his own hand 13s 6d’.2
In considering these two documents it is important to understand that there are several areas in which they corroborate each other. These are (1) that Edward II was believed by important individuals definitely or possibly to have been alive in the later 1330s, (2) that the person claiming to be Edward II was in the protection or custody of Italians, (3) that his expenses were meagre (fittingly for a man living as a recluse) and (4) that probably both narratives may be connected with the Fieschi family of Genoa and the papal court. As a result of this corroboration it seems it would be wrong to presume that the Fieschi letter is a forgery as no one has managed to find any evidence that it is anything other than what it purports to be. Furthermore, there are reasons to suppose that William le Galeys was not an impostor. Not only was he not punished, he was entertained at royal expense and his keeper was paid in advance for his expenses in December. One logical explanation for the advance payment is that Philippa was expected to give birth to Edward II’s grandchild about then (Lionel being born at the end of November).
To carry this debate further requires us firstly to establish what evidence there is to corroborate or deny the Fieschi statement and Norwell’s suggestion that Edward II was still alive in the mid-to-late 1330s; and secondly to establish what evidence there is that Edward II had died by a certain date. Contrary to most assumptions, these two questions are not directly connected. If Fieschi’s letter was fraudulent, one would still have to answer the question of when Edward II died (given the findings of the research summarised in Appendix Two). And if the letter is correct, it still says nothing about Edward’s death.
To begin with the survival of Edward II. In trying to understand the political and social context for the writing of the Fieschi letter an examination of the Fieschi family has been undertaken, as well as the careers of Manuel himself and the two family members of greatest importance in the 1330s: Cardinal Luca Fieschi (d.1336) and Niccolinus Fieschi, also known as ‘Cardinal’, of Genoa. The author of the letter, Manuel, was resident with Luca (his second cousin once-removed) at Avignon, and served him as a notary, and also served as a papal notary from before 1327 to 1343, when he was made bishop of Vercelli. Luca died at his house in Avignon on 31 January 1336, whereupon Manuel became his executor.3 On the internal evidence of the letter, unless there is a mistake in the periods spent at the two hermitages in Italy, the letter cannot have been written much before January 1336. Given the fullness with which the letter accounts for Edward’s whereabouts up to about January 1336 but not for a period beyond that, it is likely that it was written in the first half of 1336, perhaps triggered by the death of Cardinal Luca.
In The Greatest Traitor I suggested that it was Niccolinus Fieschi who brought the Fieschi letter to England in April 1336, a date which would agree with the above analysis.4 Since writing that, other reasons have emerged to suggest Niccolinus was involved with the delivery of the Fieschi letter. He was a relative, probably an uncle or first cousin once-removed of Manuel’s, and a contemporary (probably a second cousin) of Cardinal Luca. He was additionally a lawyer and an ambassador representing not only the pope but also the Genoese state and Edward III, who treated him with exceptionally high regard. If his kinsman Manuel was deliberately trying to mislead Edward III over something as serious as the survival of Edward II in Italy in early 1336, we must ask why Edward III rewarded Niccolinus so enthusiastically on meeting him at the Tower on 15 April 1336. And we must also wonder why he continued to trust him with his secret business, employing him as a high-level diplomat to negotiate peace treaties with the French, Genoese, Sicilians and the pope for the next eight years, undertaking to pay him more than a thousand pounds in fees and expenses for his service between July 1338 and April 1343. When Edward wrote to the pope in 1340 to explain his assumption of the title King ofFrance, he picked the sexagenarian Niccolinus to be the bearer of his letter, and described him as an ‘intimate confidant’, and expressly remarked on his ‘proven faithfulness and far-sighted circumspection’.5 Unless Edward never received the Fieschi letter, one cannot believe it was written in bad faith, for if it had been it would be impossible to understand why Edward completely trusted a man closely connected with its author. On the other hand, if the letter was written in good faith, and was received by Edward, it would explain why Niccolinus became so trusted from the moment he arrived at the Tower in April 1336: he was acting as the representative of the custodians of Edward II. It would also explain why Niccolinus was present at Koblenz in September 1338, at the time of the meeting of William le Galeys and Edward III.
Let us return to the letter itself. One important point which has not previously been discussed concerns the two castles. The castle Milasci is unlikely to be Melazzo, as identified by Anna Benedetti in the 1920s, as the place has no known reference to the Fieschi family or any other character in this story, and there is no other evidence to sustain this identification. In contemporary documents, Melazzo appears in Latin as Melagius, not Milasci. There are a number of alternatives, however, of which one demands particular attention. This is Mulazzo, in the Val di Magra, four miles from Pontremoli, a town once belonging to Cardinal Luca Fieschi, given by him in his will to his nephews, and from 1329 to 1336 in the hands of his niece’s husband Pietro Rossi. Mulazzo was even closer to the estates of Luca’s nephew, Niccolo Malaspina, ‘il Marchesotto’.6 This might be significant as Niccolo Malaspina’s other estates (Godiasco, Oramala and Piumesana, among others) were situated very close to Cecima, the place to which Edward II is supposed to have been transferred when war threatened his first sanctuary in about 1334.
Another aspect which has hitherto escaped detailed investigation is the identity of the man who guided William le Galeys to Edward III in 1338. Francisco Forcetti or Forzetti appears in later English accounts dealing with wool exports to Italian companies.7 He also appears in two other English references: one relating to a Barcelona ship (probably relating to the Barcelona agency of the Peruzzi) which needed to be taken from Haverfordwest to Bristol in December 1342 and the other an appointment in 1344 to guard a Buckinghamshire manor held by an Italian, Tedisio Benedicti.8 His ‘Lombard’ (Italian) identity, coupled with his status as a royal sergeant-at-arms, shows that William le Galeys was not ‘arrested’ at Cologne by a local officer as a law-breaker or local demonstrator, but by an agent of Edward’s who was employed (apparently exclusively) on Italian business. That Forzetti was reimbursed for his expenses in bringing William le Galeys from Cologne to Edward at Koblenz (fifty-seven miles) suggests he was specifically charged with this task. Certainly this was not a normal ‘arrest’ in the sense of it being a response by a local law officer to the antics of a local malefactor. In this context it is very interesting that Forzetti too had a link with the Val di Magra. Tedisio Benedicti (whose Buckinghamshire manor he was guarding in 1344) was a papal sergeant-at-arms and an esquire of Queen Philippa’s who came from Falcinello in the Val di Magra, about twelve miles from Mulazzo.9 Benedicti was probably familiar with at least one international connection of the Fieschi family, Francisco Fosdinovo. The village of Fosdinovo is very close – about three miles – to that of Falcinello in the Val di Magra. This Francisco Fosdinovo came to England in 1337 with Antonio Fieschi (d.1344) and Giffredus de Groppo San Pietro: two men who had very close links with Cardinal Luca and Niccolo Malaspina, ‘il Marchesotto’.10 It is even possible that Francisco [of?] Fosdinovo and Francisco Forzetti were one and the same man. If they were, the implication would be that the man who took William le Galeys to Edward III in 1338 was an agent of Luca Fieschi’s nephew and heir.
Given that Edward II was almost certainly still alive in 1330, we should note that the two documents which relate to his whereabouts after that date both suggest that he was in Italian custody. After a very thorough programme of checking and re-checking, I can find no good reason to doubt the outline of the Fieschi letter, and many reasons to believe it genuine. I particularly rate the detail given in the letter on Edward’s final days of freedom, the knowledge the letter displays about Welsh, English and Italian topography, the correlations with the Norwell account, the pre-planned ‘arrest’ and prolonged entertainment of William le Galeys in the Low Countries (as opposed to the death penalty usually meted out to royal pretenders), the extraordinary level of trust placed in the Genoese relative of the letter’s author, the fact the letter was written by the notary of Edward II’s most important kinsman at Avignon, and the circumstantial links between Edward III, Cardinal Luca Fieschi and his kinsmen and contacts from the Val di Magra. I am also very interested in – and take seriously – the timeliness of certain acts connected to the Fieschi, such as Edward III’s ratification of the estate of Manuel Fieschi in August 1342 immediately after his return from a very high-speed visit to Gloucester, the place of his father’s tomb. Laying aside the inevitable anti-revisionist prejudices which attend such thinking, there is no sound reason to disregard the outline of the Fieschi letter in postulating where Edward II was after 1330.
On the basis of the foregoing passages, it seems probable that Cardinal Luca Fieschi was the ‘godfather’ of Edward II’s preservation in Italy. First of all we know that, even before he arrived at Avignon, Edward II knew Luca. He was related to him and had met him in his youth, when Luca had come to his father’s court.11 The two men had met several times in 1317 when Luca had been sent by Pope John XXII to negotiate a peace between Edward II and Robert Bruce. They had probably met as recently as May 1325, when Cardinal Luca had obtained royal protection while visiting England.12 So when Edward II arrived at Avignon in about March 1331, he had a powerful relative in the papal curia whom he knew reasonably well. And Manuel – Luca’s notary – was there too. When, after spending time with the pope, Edward II left Avignon, he made his way ultimately to Italy. In so doing he was probably accompanied, and Luca Fieschi is the most likely candidate for arranging his protection from Avignon to Italy. First he went to Brabant and Cologne. Both these places had personal prophetic symbolism for the English royal family (as explained in Chapter One). When he came to Milan he was on territory familiar to the Fieschi, as Luccinus Visconti, brother of the ruler of Milan, was married to Isabella Fieschi, Cardinal Luca’s niece. If we are right in supposing that Mulazzo was Edward’s next port of call, then, as we have already seen, he was close to the estates of Niccolo Malaspina, Luca’s nephew. More than that, the whole district was under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishop of Luni, and this was practically a pocket appointment of Luca’s. The most powerful town in the district, Pontremoli, was a town granted to Luca and controlled in 1331 by Pietro Rossi, the husband of Ginetta Fieschi, Luca’s niece. When war threatened the Val di Magra in 1334, prior to the protracted siege of Pontremoli (1335–36), it seems that Edward was moved to a hermitage in the north, near Cecima and the northern estates of Niccolo Malaspina. Here he remained until Luca’s death at the end of January 1336. Shortly after this the late Luca’s kinsman and notary, Manuel Fieschi, still based in Avignon, wrote the letter to Edward III finally revealing the whereabouts of his father.
One further series of facts involving Luca is worth noticing. On 26 April 1331, approximately six weeks after Edward II is likely to have arrived in Avignon, a clerk called William Aslakeby was licensed to be absent from his church at Sibthorpe for two years while he served in the household of Luca Fieschi.13 It seems Luca may have requested the assistance of an English priest in his large household at Avignon. Aslakeby was late setting out, still being in England in December 1331, but presumably he went shortly after that, as nothing more is heard of him for the next two years. He was back in England in October 1334, for on the 28th of that month he received licence to be absent for another two years, this time in the service of Manuel Fieschi.14
What is particularly interesting about this is that Sibthorpe was a collegiate church, founded by Thomas Sibthorpe in the 1320s to say prayers for the well-being of his friends, his family and Edward II during their lives, and for their souls after death. After Aslakeby returned from Luca Fieschi’s household in 1334, the ordinances of the church were rewritten by Archbishop Melton of York. In this revision it was made very unclear whether Edward II was among the living or the dead: his name seems to have been concatenated with that of Edward III.15 The matter was only sorted out when the ordinances were rewritten again in February 1343; this time Edward II was clearly placed among the dead.
This draws our attention to other collegiate churches and chantries which were founded around this time for the benefit of Edward II’s soul. Bablake in Coventry – Queen Isabella’s own foundation to pray for the salvation of her husband’s soul – was not founded until 1342 and not endowed until May 1344. 16 These expressions of renewed concern for the soul of Edward II in the period 1342–44 tally with the belated creation of Edward of Woodstock as the prince of Wales in parliament on 12 May 1343. This is significant, as prince of Wales was the one title which Edward II never gave up in his lifetime. Therefore, together with other facts directly connected with Edward III (mentioned in Chapter Eight), we have a rough answer to the second of our initial questions, regarding the date of Edward II’s death: in the period between the parliaments of 1341 and 1343, probably the autumn of 1341.
In conclusion, there is some evidence which supports the general narrative of the Fieschi letter and suggests that his kinsman and friend Cardinal Luca Fieschi took a central role in protecting Edward II from 1331 to 1336, after which Luca’s executor wrote the Fieschi letter to Edward III explaining his situation. In answer to the second of our questions, it would appear that Edward III heard about his father’s death in or about late 1341. As this date begs the question where he had been since 1330, and as there is no evidence other than the Fieschi letter and the accounts of William Norwell (1338) to suggest where he had been, and since both of these suggest that Edward II had been in Italy prior to 1338, it seems reasonable to accept the Fieschi letter’s explanation of Edward II’s whereabouts, in outline at least. It also seems reasonable to suppose he was still in Fieschi custody in 1338, on the grounds that Niccolinus Fieschi was present at the time of his arrival and an Italian (Forzetti) was paid for bringing him to Koblenz. Whether he was returned to Italy after that and died there is another matter, about which we have almost no evidence. All we have to go on is a questionable piece of oral testimony gathered at Sant’ Alberto di Butrio in the twentieth century,17 and the favour shown by Edward III to the Fieschi in the early and mid-1340s, suggesting they remained valuable to Edward after 1340.
All this is of the greatest importance for understanding the life of Edward III. Laying aside the personal ramifications, the political influence it gave the Fieschi and, more importantly, Cardinal Luca’s superior, the pro-French pope, would have been considerable. If Edward II was in the custody of Cardinal Luca Fieschi, then both Pope Jean XXII and Pope Benedict XII would have been able to use this as a bargaining lever with Edward. In international negotiations Edward would have been severely compromised. If he was deemed to be complicit in his father’s illegal removal from the English throne, he would have been deeply damaged, especially if the pope had authorised Edward II’s restoration. If he was found to have acceeded to his own uncle’s execution for trying to free his father on the pope’s orders – as he had – he risked worse trouble. It is therefore very important to know when Edward II died and so when this situation came to an end. That Edward II was probably still alive in 1340 explains why Benedict XII was so strenuous in intervening in the peace process: he knew Edward III was compromised. But a date for his death in late 1341 means that Clement VI would not have been able to exercise this same influence over Edward III. Edward was no doubt rather relieved about that.