The Greatest Traitor

by Ian Mortimer

  William de Ockley did flee the country, and was in his absence found guilty with Gurney, the other messenger in the plot, of murdering Edward II. Gurney himself did not initially flee but was protected by Lord Berkeley until the trial. After Berkeley’s line of defence had been refused, and Gurney had been sentenced to death in his absence, Gurney was given money by Berkeley in order to escape.21 A reward of £100 was offered for him alive and 100 marks for his head. From England he fled to Spain, where he was captured at Burgos in 1331. Having escaped, he remained at large until William de Tweng caught him in Naples in 1333, but he died at Bayonne in de Tweng’s custody on the return journey, despite the efforts of two physicians to save him.22 De Ockley carried a lower price of 100 marks alive or £40 for his head. After fleeing, he was never heard of again.

  This comparison of the later careers of the protagonists shows that there was no band of men who collectively knew and felt their guilt and fled into the night. Of the five men accused in Parliament, two were arrested, one fled, and two remained in England until the trial, the less important man fleeing after his protector’s plea on their joint behalf had been disallowed and he (Gurney) had been sentenced to death. Berkeley did not flee, confident he could refute the allegations against him. There were other people involved in the supposed murder – presumably Berkeley’s household men-at-arms – who did not flee. In 1332, one of Edward’s agents found William de Kingsclere at Rochester and Richard de Well near Northampton, both of whom he stated were connected with the Berkeley Castle plot.23 Apart from Roger and Bereford, Gurney was the only man to suffer in any way for the murder, and his death was not the result of judgement. Some men who were involved, like William Beaukaire and William de Shalford, were never accused or arrested. De Shalford in fact was rewarded for long loyal service in 1337 at the request of Richard of Arundel and William de Montagu.24

  Much of the evidence given in the foregoing passages is either circumstantial or tangential to the supposed death of Edward II. Some, however, is not. Careful sifting of the facts reveals three details in particular which together demonstrate that he did not die in Berkeley Castle. Firstly, there is a hitherto unnoticed inconsistency in the official records which undermines the government pronouncement that he was killed. The records of the trials in the Parliamentary Rolls show that Maltravers and Berkeley were acknowledged to have been jointly and equally liable for the safe keeping of the ex-king. As has already been mentioned, Maltravers was not charged with murder or with failing in his responsibility to keep the ex-king safely, whereas Berkeley was, on both accounts. As only one of the two men equally liable was charged, either the charges which ought to have been brought against both of them lacked substance or the king was protecting one man, Maltravers. That Edward III was not protecting him is clear in the full traitor’s death sentence passed on him for the lesser crime of being an accessory in the plot against Kent.25 It follows that the charges of murder and of failing to prevent Edward II’s death, brought successively against Berkeley, were groundless.

  The above argument is important in itself but its greater historical significance is that it independently corroborates Berkeley’s initial trial statement that Edward II was still alive, as far as he knew, in November 1330. Furthermore, it supports an implication of that statement which explains the method of deception. Berkeley himself had led the funeral cortege into Gloucester, and so his claim that he had not heard of the death ‘until this present parliament’ implies a confession that his announcement of Edward II’s death to Edward III in September 1327 was a lie. The announcement of the death to Parliament, the arrangements for the funeral, and the subsequent spread of the news throughout the country were all consequences of this flow of misinformation from Berkeley.

  To sum up: the chronicles which state that Edward II died in Berkeley Castle were based, either directly or via subsequent rumour, on the official announcement of the death which was made for the first time in Parliament on 28 September. This statement and its successors were based on information supplied by Lord Berkeley during the week following 21 September, first received by the king on the 23rd. This information was, by Berkeley’s own admission in 1330, false. That Edward III knew this in 1330 is made clear by his bringing groundless charges against Berkeley, his acceptance of a demonstrably false alibi which preserved the fiction that Edward II was dead, and his inability in 1330 to charge Maltravers with the ‘murder’ of Edward II, or even to charge him with failing in his legal responsibility to look after the ex-king. The correlation of these perspectives shows that the principal defendant and the prosecution were essentially in agreement in November 1330: Edward II was, as far as was known to both of them, still alive. This undermines all previous government announcements that the ex-king was dead, and demonstrates that all subsequent official statements that he had been killed in Berkeley Castle were unfounded. It does not prove that Edward II was actually alive at this time, merely that he was not believed to be dead, and known not to have died in Berkeley’s custody.26

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  The above passages do not include all the evidence relating to the survival of Edward II, only the key facts relating to the period between 21 September 1327 and the end of November 1330. As some later evidence explains and enlarges upon the findings laid out above, and as the later life of the ex-king was a direct consequence of Roger’s connivance, the rest of this chapter will contain the evidence pertinent to Edward II after Roger’s execution.

  In the late nineteenth century, Alexandre Germain, a French archivist working on an official register of the medieval Bishopric of Maguelonne in the Archives départementales d’Hérault at Montpellier, found an official copy of a letter from Manuele de Fieschi, a papal notary and later Bishop of Vercelli who died in 1348, addressed to Edward III of England. This is a full translation:

  In the name of the Lord, Amen. Those things that I have heard from the confession of your father I have written with my own hand and afterwards I have taken care to be made known to your highness. First he says that feeling England in subversion against him, afterwards on the admonition of your mother, he withdrew from his family in the castle of the Earl Marshal by the sea, which is called Chepstow. Afterwards, driven by fear, he took a barque with lords Hugh Despenser and the Earl of Arundel and several others and made his way by sea to Glamorgan, and there he was captured, together with the said Lord Hugh and Master Robert Baldock; and they were captured by Lord Henry of Lancaster, and they led him to the castle of Kenilworth, and others were [held] elsewhere at various places; and there he lost the crown at the insistence of many. Afterwards you were subsequently crowned on the feast of Candlemas next following. Finally they sent him to the castle of Berkeley. Afterwards the servant who was keeping him, after some little time, said to your father: Lord, Lord Thomas Gurney and Lord Simon Bereford, knights, have come with the purpose of killing you. If it pleases, I shall give you my clothes, that you may better be able to escape. Then with the said clothes, at twilight, he went out of the prison; and when he had reached the last door without resistance, because he was not recognised, he found the porter sleeping, whom he quickly killed; and having got the keys of the door, he opened the door and went out, with his keeper who was keeping him. The said knights who had come to kill him, seeing that he had thus fled, fearing the indignation of the queen, even the danger to their persons, thought to put that aforesaid porter, his heart having been extracted, in a box, and maliciously presented to the queen the heart and body of the aforesaid porter as the body of your father, and as the body of the said king the said porter was buried in Gloucester. And after he had gone out of the prisons of the aforesaid castle, he was received in the castle of Corfe with his companion who was keeping him in the prisons by Lord Thomas, castellan of the said castle, the lord being ignorant, Lord John Maltravers, lord of the said Thomas, in which castle he was secretly for a year and a half. Afterwards, having heard that the Earl of Kent, because he said he was alive, had been beheaded, he took a ship wit
h his said keeper and with the consent and counsel of the said Thomas, who had received him, crossed into Ireland, where he was for nine months. Afterwards, fearing lest he be recognised there, having taken the habit of a hermit, he came back to England and proceeded to the port of Sandwich, and in the same habit crossed the sea to Sluys. Afterwards he turned his steps in Normandy and from Normandy, as many do, going across through Languedoc, came to Avignon, where, having given a florin to the servant of the pope, sent by the said servant a document to Pope John, which pope had him called to him, and held him secretly and honourably more than fifteen days. Finally, after various discussions, all things having been considered, permission having been received, he went to Paris, and from Paris to Brabant, from Brabant to Cologne so that out of devotion he might see The Three Kings, and leaving Cologne he crossed over Germany, that is to say, he headed for Milan in Lombardy, and from Milan he entered a certain hermitage of the castle of Melazzo, in which hermitage he stayed for two years and a half; and because war overran the said castle, he changed himself to the castle of Cecima in another hermitage of the diocese of Pavia in Lombardy, and he was in this last hermitage for two years or thereabouts, always the recluse, doing penance and praying God for you and other sinners. In testimony of which I have caused my seal to be affixed for the consideration of Your Highness. Your Manuele de Fieschi, notary of the lord pope, your devoted servant.27

  Historians have puzzled over this letter ever since it surfaced, privately published by Germain, in Montpellier in 1878. A few years after it appeared, the great constitutional historian, Bishop Stubbs, included it in his edition of the Chronicles illustrative of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II. His opinion was that it ‘must have been the work of some one sufficiently well-acquainted with the circumstances of the king’s imprisonment to draw up the details without giving an opening for ready refutation’. He admitted that the letter tallied with the facts as they were then understood, but could not believe its story to be true, and attempted to dismiss it on grounds of improbability. This was an admission of defeat, as he himself stated. He made a few suggestions as to why it might have been created, then carefully showed how each suggestion was implausible, and gave up, saying ‘There the fact remains, at present inexplicable.’

  The next great British historian to consider the document also drew a blank. Thomas Frederick Tout’s lines on the subject in his article on the captivity of Edward II, published in 1919, are full of scholarly despair: ‘It is a remarkable document, so specious and detailed, and bearing none of those marks by which a gross medieval forgery can generally be detected. Yet who can believe it true? Who shall decide how it arose? Was it simply a fairy tale? Was it the real confession of a madman? Was it a cunning effort of some French enemies to discredit the conqueror of Calais?’28

  Since then advances have been made, but no one has been able to assess the matter objectively with any illuminating results. Scholars have fallen back on the Stubbs/Tout confusion, unable to comprehend how an escape could have taken place against the backdrop of the chroniclers’ evidence. A couple of writers have taken a contrary view, and have so blithely accepted the letter at face value that they have committed equally great sins of misinterpretation. Most guilty of the latter is Anna Benedetti, an Italian professor of English, who in 1924 identified the Lombardy castles at which Edward was supposed to have stayed as the castles of Melazzo d’Acqui and Cecima sopra Voghera, and the hermitage in which he died as the Abbazia di Sant’Alberto di Butrio, this being situated near the latter of the two castles.29 The fundamental weakness in her working was that she identified a carved capital as relating to Roger, Isabella and Edward, although this capital was made more than a hundred years earlier. To bolster her theory she highlighted a legend at Sant’Alberto that an English king had taken refuge there. A modern plaque in the monastery states that there was ‘The first tomb of Edward II, king of England’ and that ‘his bones were taken by Edward III and transported to England and reburied in the tomb at Gloucester’.30 There is no evidence for this latter statement but it is a plausible suggestion in view of Edward III’s later pilgrimages to Gloucester. G.P. Cuttino has pointed out that it is practically impossible now to determine whether the legend existed before the publication of the Fieschi letter.31 Natalie Fryde, in her book The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II, suggested that it would be wrong to dismiss the Fieschi letter, although she did not go further into details about the evidence and left the matter unresolved. Only two scholars in the last thirty years have commented in academic journals on the Fieschi letter: G.P. Cuttino and R.M. Haines.

  Cuttino’s article, ‘Where Is Edward II?’, appeared in 1978. He summarised the debate to date, and brought together a number of sources not previously collated. He drew attention to the fact that Manuele de Fieschi held several benefices in the Church in England, that he was a distant relative of Edward II, that he held an ecclesiastical position which carried responsibility for the region in which Melazzo and Cecima are situated, that there are weaknesses in the evidence of the chronicles which mention the death, and that some aspects of the funeral arrangements of the late king are open to doubt. His conclusions were that, while it was not possible to prove anything, the implications of Berkeley and Maltravers being forgiven at around the time of the letter ‘are obvious’: presumably that Edward III forgave them on the strength of the letter. Unfortunately there are huge assumptions and gaps in his arguments, and some of his statements are misleading. He states that the William Bishop who gave evidence to Geoffrey le Baker about the death of Edward II ‘has never been traced’, although there is little argument that Bishop was a member of Roger’s retinue in 1321. On the subject of Bishop and the chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, Cuttino claims that Bishop gave le Baker his evidence about the king’s death but the chronicle clearly states that Bishop was a source only for the king’s transportation to Berkeley. Like historians before him, Cuttino also failed to note the inconsistencies in the chronology of the Fieschi evidence (the letter states Edward was at Corfe for only a year and a half, whereas he was probably there for two and a half years, September 1327–March 1330). Finally he declared that Edward could not have received the letter, had it actually been sent, before 16 March 1337 owing to the forgiveness of Berkeley on that date, a peculiar assumption.

  The 1996 article by R.M. Haines, ‘The Afterlife of Edward of Carnarvon’ is a much more valuable addition to the literature on Edward’s supposed death. He corrects a number of Cuttino’s and other writers’ more obvious errors, and points out facts which should have been noticed at the outset, most particularly the inconsistency in the chronology of Edward II’s stay at Corfe Castle. He refines the dating of the register’s compilation to probably the time of Arnaud de Verdale, an earlier Bishop of Maguelonne, and notes that the last dated document in the register is from 1337, although there are other undated documents within it which may be later. He notes the strange style of the Latin, which is particularly Genoese and informal.32 He relates the contents of the letter to verifiable facts, checks the Berkeley Castle accounts for the relevant years (which reveal the purchase of locks among other possible precautions), and relates these and other details to connected evidence. Despite all this, he discounts the possibility that Edward was not buried in December 1327 on two accounts: firstly that a public viewing of Edward’s corpse ‘must have taken place at Berkeley prior to embalming’ – although he provides no evidence that it did – and secondly that Isabella herself did not doubt the body was Edward’s, otherwise she would not have had Edward’s heart buried with her in 1358: again, an unwarranted assumption.33 He suggests the Fieschi letter was a religious forgery, put forward to claim Edward as a martyr, but produces no evidence to support this allegation; nor does he explain how the forgery could have benefited the forger. His discussion on the writing of the document suffers from his assumption that Fieschi would have expected a clerk to have had to translate his Latin for Edward III, whereas the king could read both Latin an
d French, as shown by his letter to the Pope, and could at least write individual letters.34 The article also suffers from chronological errors of Haines’s own making, most notably that the document could have been written as early as 1333, despite the fact that it clearly describes a four and a half year sojourn in Italy after a journey of more than two thousand miles around Europe, begun no earlier than January 1331.35

  Perhaps because of the traditional conviction that Edward II died in Berkeley Castle, no historian has examined what the Fieschi letter actually is. It is not a confession but a report from Fieschi supposedly gleaned from information obtained through the ‘confession’ of the deposed king – that is to say in his own words – not necessarily through a holy confession, although the information may have been gathered in this way. Also none of the historians who have so far discussed the document have attempted to state why it might have been written, with the exception of Bishop Stubbs, who proved all his suggestions implausible. Thus no historian has pointed out that its message is a political one. During the years when this letter might have been written, 1335–43, England was on the verge of starting a European-wide war, and Genoa, the city of the powerful Fieschi family, was attempting to win independence from Milan, which it achieved in 1339 under Simon Boccanegra, the first Doge of Genoa.