Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Here stood the oak tree on which an arrow shot by Sir Walter Tyrell at a stag glanced and struck King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, on the breast, of which he instantly died, on the second day of August, anno 1100. King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, being slain, as before related, was laid in a cart, belonging to one Purkis, and drawn from hence, to Winchester, and buried in the Cathedral Church of that city.’

  But not everyone believes that the Rufus Stone was raised in the right place. Some believe the king met his end at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu.

  William Rufus was a horrible man, even by the standards of medieval rulers. He had two surviving brothers, one older and one younger than himself, who both wanted his throne. Both of them had the strongest of motives for wanting him dead. It is not at all surprising that there was a conspiracy to assassinate and replace him. The thing that is most surprising is that after ten years of staving off threats to his safety William went off willingly into the woods with his murderers.

  A curious but significant fact that has been overlooked is that William’s brother Richard died long before (in 1081) at the age of twenty-four – in a hunting accident in the New Forest. Perhaps Henry was remembering this portentous and life-changing event from their younger days when he set up the ‘hunting accident’ in the New Forest for his brother William.

  Edward II

  Like William II, Edward II was an English king who met his end under mysterious circumstances. While William’s death was alfresco, out in the New Forest, Edward’s was a claustrophobic death in a castle dungeon – or so it is thought. The appalling death of Edward II took place on 21 September 1327, in a chamber in Berkeley Castle. The deposed king was forty-three years old, constitutionally strong, and his murderers tried several different ways of killing him before he eventually died. The road to this terrible death was a long and complicated one, involving power struggles among nobles, personal rivalries, personality clashes, heterosexual and homosexual love affairs, and an adulterous queen who was ready to depose her own husband out of revenge.

  Edward II was born in Wales. He was the baby born in Carnarvon Castle to Eleanor of Castile in 1284 and presented to the Welsh by Edward I as their Prince of Wales. He was seen as a weak king because he preferred quiet rustic pursuits to soldiery; indeed he would probably have been a happier man if he had been born a simple countryman. He enjoyed gardening, basket-making and ditch-digging, preferring them to the noble arts of government, warfare and jousting. His chosen hobbies were of the wrong class, and this made him an object of sheer contempt among his courtiers. When he chose a lover, it was not just the fact that it was a gay lover that drew contempt, but a low-born gay lover. In an age where birth and breeding meant everything, Piers Gaveston was just too low-born to be countenanced at the royal court. That Gaveston could beat any and all of them at jousting only served to make the situation worse. Gaveston was also arrogant and sarcastic.

  In these ways, Edward II antagonized his barons very early in his reign. A group of barons, headed by Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, seized Gaveston and executed him in June 1312. Edward adopted two new favourites with the same name, Hugh Le Despenser, father and son. These were very different men from Gaveston. They were administrators, but Edward gave them far too much power, so that they too became objects of hatred among the barons. In 1322, Edward led an army against the rebellious Roger Mortimer, and succeeded in capturing him and imprisoning him in the Tower of London. Then Edward marched against Thomas of Lancaster, defeating, capturing and summarily beheading him.

  The queen meanwhile began to cultivate a relationship with Roger Mortimer while he was imprisoned in the Tower. It was probably with Queen Isabella’s help that Roger Mortimer escaped from the Tower; once free he was able to create new problems for the king.

  In the end, Edward’s most dangerous enemy turned out to be his queen, whom he had married when she was twelve. Even then, French observers at the wedding said that Edward loved Gaveston more than Isabella. Poor Isabella had to put up with Edward’s very public slights and infidelities for many years. The last straw was when the Despensers tried to persuade Edward that Isabella was a bad influence. In 1325, she offered to undertake a diplomatic mission to her brother the king of France. This was really a ruse to escape from the English court.

  Isabella arranged a treaty between the two kings, but indicated that Edward would have to travel to France to sign it. He was persuaded not to go by the Despensers, who were afraid that he might be turned against them if he spent a significant amount of time talking to other people; then they might lose their hold over him. They also feared what might happen to them, the Despensers, without the personal protection of the king. They had seen what happened to Gaveston. So, a compromise was to send the young Prince Edward, which was exactly what the conniving Isabella wanted. She then had her son safely with her and could mount a small invasion without fear of her son being taken as a hostage. In September 1326, with a company of only 700 men, Isabella landed at Harwich and succeeded in pulling off a coup d’état. Edward, her husband, fled to Wales rather than fight against her. The Despensers were hunted down and killed. Then the king himself was captured and imprisoned at Kenilworth Castle.

  The usurpers, Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, needed to get rid of Edward II so that her son Prince Edward could become king. Isabella approached Parliament with a request to depose her husband. They refused, but indicated that she might persuade him to abdicate in favour of her son. This she succeeded in doing. King Edward II abdicated five days later, on 25 January 1327. The ex-king was then taken to Berkeley Castle.

  It is almost certain that Edward was murdered there. Two key questions remain to be answered: who carried out the murder and on whose orders?

  In 1327, Lord Berkeley, the owner of Berkeley Castle, was commissioned jointly with Sir John Maltravers to guard the royal prisoner. Lord Berkeley was not residing at his castle at the time of the king’s murder, but was ill elsewhere. Later he was to make much of this absence, when he found himself on trial, and it may well be that he deliberately distanced himself from his prisoner because he knew what was to follow and did not want to be blamed for it. If so, he must take his share of culpability for Edward’s death. By providing his castle and washing his hands of the ex-king’s fate, he was as guilty as the assassins.

  It is not clear whether Queen Isabella or Mortimer – or the two of them together – had decided to have Edward killed from the start. Certainly at least one of them came to this decision after there was an attempt to rescue Edward. Obviously, all the while he lived he might be reinstated. In later years, this proved to be the problem with Henry VI, who was deposed, then reinstated, then deposed and murdered. It was foreseeable. It was too risky to let Edward live. The initial orders, which probably emanated directly from Mortimer or Isabella, were to keep Edward in such poor living conditions that he would just die of neglect. But this reckoned without Edward’s strong constitution; he went on living, and so the living conditions were made even worse. Still he would not die. Finally, he was held down and a red-hot poker inserted into his bowels – a slow and agonizing death that would leave no outward mark on his body.

  On the night of 21 September 1327, the inmates of Berkeley Castle were terrified by shrieks coming from the king’s apartment. The next day the king was found dead. His body was put on display in Gloucester and people were encouraged to go and see the body. Roger Mortimer wanted everyone to believe that the deposed king really was dead and could never regain the throne. The citizens of Gloucester were rounded up to view this unceremonious lying-in-state, but they were kept a good distance back from the corpse. Was this because there were, after all, some tell-tale marks of violence on the body? Or was it because the body smelt so awful?

  Given the peculiar circumstances of Edward’s forced abdication, some people have inevitably proposed that the official version of his demise was fabricated. They suggest that Edward II was not killed at Berkeley
Castle at all, but was instead rescued and lived out the rest of his life abroad. The body briefly displayed and then buried in a royal tomb at Gloucester might have been a substitute: a body, yes, but someone else’s. That might be the reason why the crowd was kept at a distance. Mortimer’s men did not want to risk someone spotting that it was not the body of Edward II. In the middle ages, ordinary people did not see their king very often, and there were no press photographs to make the king a familiar figure. Passing off a corpse of approximately the right build and hair colour would have been fairly easy.

  There was a significant delay before Edward’s funeral took place on 20 December 1327, but that can be explained by the military expedition in Scotland. One reason for believing that Edward lived on is that some of his contemporaries believed it. Edmund, Earl of Kent, said that Edward still lived and was imprisoned at Corfe Castle. There was even a plot to free him from Corfe, which led to arrests, treason trials and executions. The Earl of Kent himself was executed in 1330. Another piece of evidence that Edward survived is a letter dating from 1337, written by the papal notary Fieschi. Fieschi claimed in this letter that he actually met Edward II in Italy, describing his life on the run until he ended up at a monastery near Milan. The document could be a forgery, but there is no reason to think so; Fieschi may have been exaggerating when he said he met the ex-king, but the possibility remains that the story about Edward’s macabre death at Berkeley Castle was a sensational cover-up, designed by Roger Mortimer and Isabella to bring Edward’s supporters to heel. If Edward was dead, he was literally a lost cause.

  The case has to be left open, at least until such time as more solid evidence of Edward’s escape and emigration to Italy emerges. For the moment it seems sensible to work on the hypothesis that he did indeed die at Berkeley Castle, not least because the story of the manner of his death was extremely destructive to the Mortimer cause. It inspired pity for the dead king and sympathy for his cause, anger and disgust at the queen and her paramour. If Mortimer and Isabella had wanted to invent a story, then a ‘natural causes’ death would have been far better. The story about the red-hot poker is too awful to have been made up. Thomas Deloney’s Strange Histories (modernized spellings) give us the fully developed late medieval horror of Edward’s protracted sufferings, beginning with the failed attempt to poison him, then going on to the foul-smelling pit before the final horror of the red-hot poker.

  Loathing his life at last his keepers came,

  Into his chamber in the dead of night:

  And without noise they soon entered the same,

  With weapons drawn and torches burning bright,

  Where the poor prisoner fast asleep in bed

  Lay on his belly, nothing under his head.

  The which advantage when the murderers saw,

  A heavy table on him did they throw:

  Wherewith awaked, his breath could scarcely draw,

  With weight thereof they kept him under so,

  Then turning up his clothes above his hips,

  To hold his legs, a couple quickly skips.

  Then came the murderers, one a horn had got,

  Which far into his fundament down he thrust.

  Another with a spit all burning hot,

  The same quite through the horn he strongly pushed,

  Among his entrails in most cruel wise, forcing hereby most lamentable cries.

  And while within his body they did keep

  The burning spit still rolling up and down,

  Most mournfully the murdered man did weep,

  Whose wailing noise waked many in the town,

  Who guessing by his cries his death grew near,

  Took great compassion on that noble peer.

  And at each bitter shriek which he did make,

  They prayed to God for to receive his soul:

  His ghastly groans enforced their hearts to ache,

  Yet none durst go to cause the bell to toll:

  Ah me, poor man, alack, he cried, and long it was before he died.

  Strong was his heart and long it was God knows

  Ere it would stop unto the stroke of death.

  First was it wounded with a thousand woes,

  Before he did resign his vital breath.

  Once Edward’s slow murder was completed, Lord Maltravers was the one who rode to court to bring the news that her husband was dead. He evidently expected to be welcomed and well rewarded, but Isabella wept and wrung her hands, calling him a traitor for killing her noble wedded lord. Maltravers was thoroughly shaken when he was turned away from court. He realized he had been tricked, and returned to tell Sir Thomas Gourney and the other murderers that the queen had outlawed them all. Suddenly their lives were in peril, and they had to leave England as soon as possible.

  Then farewell England, where we were born,

  Our friends and kindred which hold us in scorn.

  At Lord Berkeley’s trial, Sir Thomas Gourney and William Ogle were specifically named as the ex-king’s murderers, but they had fled the country. There is no record of Ogle ever having been found. Perhaps he successfully changed his identity and vanished. Sir Thomas Gourney was detained in Spain and brought back to England, but there is no record of his having been punished. According to one version of the story, Gourney was taken ill after his arrest and died under guard, in France, while on his way back to England. According to another version, picked up by Thomas Deloney, he was returning to England voluntarily because he missed his wife and children, was recognized on the ship and beheaded before landing.

  Commandment was sent by one called Lea,

  He should be beheaded forthwith on the sea:

  Alack and alack and alas did he cry,

  That ever we forced King Edward to die.

  Thus was Sir Thomas despatched of life,

  In coming to visit his sorrowful wife.

  Maltravers was accused of murdering Edward, acquitted, but later executed for committing a similar crime elsewhere. On balance it looks as if Berkeley knew beforehand what was going to happen in his castle, had qualms about regicide and made himself scarce so that later he could not be accused of murdering the king. All of those concerned in the plot except Gourney were eventually given formal pardons, which tells us nothing about their guilt. Gourney, Ogle and Maltravers were most likely the regicides, the men who actually carried out the murder that, if reported accurately, must rank among the cruellest in history.

  These regicides could not conceivably have acted on their own initiative, though. They must have been acting on instructions. The order to do away with Edward can only have come from Roger Mortimer or Queen Isabella. Ultimately the responsibility for Edward’s death must be theirs. What is still not known is the specific nature of the instructions. They could have been explicit, expressed in the form, ‘The king must die.’ Or they could have been expressed more ambiguously, leaving no doubt in Lord Berkeley’s mind that he was expected to oversee the demise of the unwanted king, yet also enabling Mortimer and the queen the option of protesting later that that was not what they had wanted. Queen Isabella was certainly capable of that level of duplicity and cunning, as her histrionic and totally insincere reaction to Berkeley’s news of her husband’s death showed. It is very unlikely, given the exalted status of the ex-king, that Ogle, Gourney and Maltravers took it upon themselves to decide to kill him on their own initiative. Some order from above must have been given, whatever form of words was used. In assassination conspiracies of this kind, it is often possible to identify the assassins, but nearly always impossible to prove the identity of the instigators.

  The highest level political assassination conspiracies of recent decades have been three-layered conspiracies. The three-layered conspiracy consists of a small team of assassins, an intermediary organization or middle man behind them and, carefully distancing itself from the operation, an originator. This was the structure used in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, with Mehmet Ali Agca and Oral Celik as the
gunmen, a Bulgarian organization in the middle and the KGB as the originator of the plot. This structure means that even if the assassins are apprehended and identified the identity of the originator is protected. In the case of Edward II, we have probably identified the assassins correctly (Ogle, Gourney and Maltravers) and can be fairly sure that the plot originated with either Isabella or Mortimer (or both jointly). From his behaviour, Lord Berkeley may well have been the middle man.

  The Princes in The Tower

  The uncrowned King Edward V and his brother Richard duke of York were the two young sons and heirs of Edward IV, the king of England from 1471 until April 1483. They are remembered as ‘the Princes in the Tower’ and are generally believed to have been murdered in the Tower of London in the summer of 1483. It is also generally assumed that they were murdered on the orders of their uncle, Richard, who then had himself crowned as Richard III.

  When Edward IV died, suddenly and unexpectedly, he left his two sons as heirs at a vulnerable age. Prince Edward was twelve and his brother Richard was nine. Edward’s conscientiously loyal younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester acted quickly to take the two boys into his protection, and that action has always been susceptible of two interpretations. He may have intended from the first to imprison and do away with them so that he could have the throne for himself. Or he may have taken them into his care for their own safety.

  Whatever his motive, Richard arranged for the young king to be escorted to Stony Stratford, where he took personal charge of the two boys. The road from Northampton to Stony Stratford was lined with soldiers. From Stony Stratford he accompanied them to London and lodged them in the Tower. This is often seen as a sinister move, indicating Richard’s malevolent intention, but the Tower was as much a royal residence as a prison, and it may have been chosen as the safest place to house the boys at a time of political uncertainty. At the same time, Richard took the precaution of arresting Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who was the young king’s guardian, and imprisoning him at Pontefract Castle for plotting to kill the young king.