Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II

by Paul Doherty

  The older she grew, the more pious Isabella became, in the spirit of the times, visiting shrines at Walsingham or entertaining visitors. She was addressed as ‘Madame the Queen Mother’ or sometimes ‘Our Lady Queen Isabella’. She continued to live in some style: she went hunting, employed minstrels, was partial to a barrel of sturgeon, and generally acted as the lady of the manor. Her last household accounts book amply illustrates her life as a ‘Grande Dame’.44 Isabella wrote, and received letters from, her son the King, the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Lancaster, the Chancellor, her daughter the Queen of Scotland, Queen Philippa and the King of France. They brought her presents at New Year as well as a constant stream of gifts: casks of Bordeaux, boars’ heads, quadrants of copper and barrels of bream. The Queen Mother also loved music. She had her own small orchestra of minstrels and paid thirteen shillings and four pence to Walter Hert, one of her viola players, to go to the school of minstrelsy in London to receive a better education. She had eight ladies of her chamber, thirty-three clerks and squires, Master Lawrence her surgeon, as well as huntsmen and grooms for the stable. She enjoyed falconry, and had caskets full of jewels with which she bedecked herself to attend the great St George’s Day celebrations at Windsor in April 1358: girdles of silk studded with silver, 300 rubies, 1800 pearls and a circlet of gold.

  Song birds trilled in her chambers, which were decorated with black carpets and coloured cloths. She subsidized poor scholars at Oxford and made sure that 150 poor people were given alms on the principal feasts and Holy Days of the year. In addition to this, thirteen poor people were fed at her expense every day of the year, an extra three poor people every Monday and a further three every Friday and Saturday. Only one entry indicates any memory of her husband. Isabella gave a donation of forty shillings to the Abbess of the Minoresses outside Aldgate in London to purchase food, etc. on the anniversaries of the deaths of Edward, ‘late King of England’, and of her second son, John of Eltham. Apart from that, the record is silent on any memory of or regret for Edward of Caernarvon.

  The Queen was constantly visited by her son, her daughter, Joanna of Scotland, her grandson, the Black Prince, and notables from France. Some entries, however, show that she had not forgotten her past. At least three times in one month Roger Mortimer, the Earl of March, came to dinner. He was the grandson of her lover and was specially favoured by the old Queen. Even more regular in attendance was Agnes, the widow of the Earl of Pembroke and one of Mortimer’s daughters. She and Isabella became close friends and hardly ever separated. Isabella was still a great romantic. There are many entries in her household book for parchment and vellum being prepared for her library and she still revelled in the stories of Arthur and Lancelot and sent copies of these chivalrous deeds to the King of France.

  Her list of visitors average about two or three every day for the year 1357–8. Perhaps they came at the behest of her son, suggesting that Isabella was lonely or even depressed. Or did they really come to visit a Queen, who had become a legend in her lifetime, who had taken up arms and destroyed her enemies? The entries in her visitors’ book do afford signs of genuine affection, even deep love for this ageing Queen. Joanna of Scotland, who followed her husband into captivity, was clothed and fed by her mother. Isabella also entertained the Earl of Douglas, and they must have laughed about how, many lifetimes ago, his ancestor had tried to capture her outside York.

  In the end, death came quickly. The household accounts show no prolonged illness and record that Isabella fell ill in the course of a single day, under the effect of a too-powerful medicine which she insisted on taking. This gave rise to rumours that her mind was unbalanced, that she had sunk into a deep depression and almost willed her own death. But the household accounts for 1357–8 contradict this. She had been slightly unwell in the February of her last year but, by spring, she was better. On 1 August payments were made to Nicholas Thomason, a London apothecary, for certain spices and ointments, but these may have been for her perfumery or kitchen. However, on 12 August 1358, messengers were again despatched to London for medicines. Eight days later, a leading London physician was summoned and a messenger despatched ‘with the greatest haste’ to Canterbury to bring back Master Lawrence, the surgeon, to see the Queen. She died, however, on 22 August. Her corpse was dressed for burial and remained in the chapel of Hertford Castle until 23 November, with payment being made to fourteen poor persons to watch and pray by the Queen’s corpse day and night. The Prior of Coventry, the Bishop of Lincoln and the Abbot of Waltham Abbey came to celebrate the funeral masses.

  Isabella’s corpse was taken by solemn procession into London. On 22 November 1358, King Edward III ordered the sheriffs of London and Middlesex to cleanse the city streets of dirt and all impurities, then to lay down gravel along Bishopsgate and Aldgate in preparation for his mother’s corpse being brought into the city.45 Isabella had chosen Greyfriars, the Franciscan Church at Newgate, for her last resting place. There is a legend that, before her death, she had joined the Third Order of St Francis, an organization of lay penitents, not bound by vows, who supported the spirit and religious life of St Francis of Assisi.46 She was buried near the high altar,47 and the Archbishop of Canterbury officiated at the ceremony. The funeral took place on 27 November and the following day her entourage travelled back to Castle Rasing.

  In death, as in her life, Isabella was as enigmatic and mysterious as ever. Princesses of the blood supervised their own funeral arrangements. Isabella was interred, according to legend, with her husband’s heart still in the silver casket which she had been given some thirty-one years previously.48 She was also buried in her wedding dress.49 It would be fascinating to conclude that, in her last few weeks of life, Isabella’s memory drifted back to that cold January day, some fifty years earlier, when she had met her prince at the door of Notre Dame Cathedral in Boulogne to enter into a marriage which, all of Europe thought, would bring a lasting peace to the continent.

  Nevertheless, that enigmatic smile on Isabella’s face on her statue above John of Eltham’s tomb in Westminster Abbey is striking, as if she knows something we do not. She may have been buried in her wedding dress, with her husband’s heart beside her, but she chose Greyfriars in Newgate, the same church which had received the hanged corpse of her beloved Roger Mortimer. Indeed, although she died on 22 August, her funeral took place almost on the anniversary of the day that Mortimer died on the scaffold at Tyburn. Mortimer’s remains were later removed to Wigmore. Isabella’s marble sarcophagus was a casualty of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, and what remained of Greyfriars was destroyed by the German air force in the Second World War. Greyfriars is now a simple park in a bustling part of London, although, according to folklore, Isabella’s ghost still haunts the ruins of the monastery.

  Maybe Isabella did not choose to be buried in Gloucester because, as we shall see, in her heart of hearts, she knew that her husband’s corpse was not buried there. Why should she lie next to the remains of some commoner, whose body had been used to disguise the fact that her husband had not died at Berkeley but had escaped to live out life obscurely? Is that why Isabella cared very little for Gloucester or bothered to pray for her husband’s soul or confess to a crime she may have liked to have committed but did not? Perhaps that explains her enigmatic smile and rather mysterious funeral arrangements.

  Isabella’s death marked the end of an era. From now on, English kings would wage war against France and not give up their claim to the French throne for centuries. Isabella’s war against the de Spencers, their destruction and her husband’s fall from grace, had also marked the beginning of an era. Other English kings had been brought to book, faced rebellion, forced to sign charters, swear oaths and bow before the opposition. Isabella, however, brought about the first formal deposition of an English king, even though it was for her own selfish motives. She began a process which, over the next few hundred years, would bring the Crown under the rule of Parliament. Forty-one years after her death, her great-grandson,
Richard II, would also be deposed and imprisoned. In the fifteenth century the Crown became locked in a fierce struggle with the barons and great lords over who should sit on the throne at Westminster and how that king should rule. The Tudors later reacted against this, emphasizing their own glory and power, but the first legal deposition by Parliament of a reigning monarch in 1327 was then cited by those who constructed the process for Charles I’s deposition and public execution over 300 years later.

  SEVEN

  The Immortal King

  ‘. . . William Le Galeys . . . qui asserit se patrem domini regis nunc.’

  ‘. . . William the Welshman . . . who claims that he is the father of our present Lord the King.’

  ‘The King is dead, long live the King!’ Deep in the folklore of many cultures lies the idea of the immortal king – or the king who dies, but rises again. The concept plays a central part in religious belief, and even in our own constitution, where it is recognized that the wearer of the crown may die but the sacred office always continues. It is understandable, therefore, that throughout the medieval period, kings and princes, who died in mysterious circumstances, were said to have survived. After the battle of Hastings, William of Normandy was unable to find the corpse of Harold and had to ask the latter’s mistress, Edith ‘Swan Neck’, for her help in combing the battlefield for his body. Richard II is supposed to have starved to death at Pontefract in 1399. Rumours grew that he had escaped and the hostile Scottish court was only too willing to produce a look-alike, although the English dismissed him as a ‘mammet’, a puppet of their enemies. The prime examples, of course, are the young Edward V and his brother Richard Duke of York, the Princes in the Tower. For years after his victory at Bosworth in 1485, Henry VII was dogged by the likes of Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck and others, who claimed to be one of the lost princes.

  In France, there was a similar trend. Did Joan of Arc die at Rouen in 1431, or was she allowed to escape to Lorraine where she married and raised a family? Did little Dauphin Louis, who disappeared into the Bastille, the heir apparent of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, survive in hiding? Well into the nineteenth century, the French government was harassed by various claimants who put forward well-documented evidence that they were Louis XVII, a prince of the blood and the rightful heir to the French throne. A similar mystery surrounds Marshal Ney, Napoleon’s general, who first abandoned his master when he was exiled to Elba but then rejoined him and fought at the battle of Waterloo. Ney was court-martialled for treason and shot, but legend persisted that he had really escaped to live out a secret life in America.

  In the twentieth century, an impostor claimed to be Anastasia Romanov, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the only survivor of the massacre of her family. Following the Second World War, the western allies and the newly founded Israeli government investigated stories that leading Nazis, such as Martin Borman and others, had cheated the hangman’s noose and were hiding in the cities of South America.

  Accordingly, stories that Edward II did not die at Berkeley must, at first, be regarded as highly suspect. Even during his own lifetime Edward had had to face pretenders, such as the Oxford scholar who elaborated his incredible story about the sow and his missing ear. The Brut Chronicle, which had a reputation for instigating rumour and gossip, clearly states that one of the reasons Edmund of Kent believed his brother had not been killed at Berkeley were the constant rumours, throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom, that Edward of Caernarvon had survived. After Kent’s execution, Isabella and Mortimer had been forced to issue proclamations stridently condemning both the Earl of Kent and the allegations that Edward II had not died and been buried in Gloucester Cathedral. However, in this case there was one piece of written testimony which cannot be overlooked.

  Around 1340 a letter was written by Manuel Fieschi, claiming to have met and talked to the deposed Edward II.1 Fieschi was not a rumour-monger, but an Italian priest, a high-ranking papal notary, provided with an English benefice at Salisbury as early as 1319. On the 18 June 1329 Fieschi was given another benefice at Ampleforth in Yorkshire and a few months later he was made a Canon of Liege. By the fourteenth century, the practice whereby high-ranking clerics collected benefices or prebends was fast becoming one of the leading abuses of the western Church. On 20 December 1329, Fieschi was made Archdeacon of Nottingham as well as a Canon of Salisbury Cathedral. By 26 August 1330, Fieschi was resident at the Papal Curia and must have known about Kent’s conspiracy as well as the consequent fall of Isabella and Mortimer. On 10 December 1331, Fieschi gave up the archdeaconry of Nottingham in return for a benefice at Luton Manor in the diocese of Lincoln. On 3 December 1333, Fieschi must have returned to England as it is recorded that he swore out letters of attorney on that date. Two years later he was given fresh letters of attorney to return to Italy. On 28 April 1342, Edward III ratified Fieschi’s retention of the benefices at Salisbury and Ampleforth. The Pope created Fieschi Bishop of Vercelli the following year and he died in 1348.

  Fieschi was a distant cousin of the English royal family, and consequently must have been acquainted with Edward II during his visits to England. He was an ambitious cleric, recognized and respected by the English Crown and its Church, as well as the papacy. His letter to Edward III reads as follows:

  In the name of the Lord, Amen. These things which I heard from the confession of your father, I have written down with my own hand and for this reason I have taken care to communicate them to your lordship. First of all he said that, feeling that England was in insurrection against him because of the threat from your mother, he departed from his followers in the castle of the Earl Marshal by the sea which is called Gesota [Usk]. Later, driven by fear, he boarded a vessel, together with Lord Hugh de Spencer, the Earl of Arundel and a few others and landed in Glomorgom [Glamorgan] on the coast. There he was captured together with the said Lord Hugh and Master Robert de Baldoli [Baldock] and they were taken by Lord Henry de Longo Castello [Lancaster] and they led him to Chilongurda [Kenilworth] castle and others were taken elsewhere to other places and there, many people demanding it, he lost his crown. Subsequently you were crowned at the feast of Candelmas next. Finally they sent him to the castle of Berchele [Berkeley]. Later the attendant who guarded him, after a time, said to your father: ‘Sire, Lord Thomas de Gornay and Lord Simon d’Esberfoit [Beresford] knights have come to kill you. If it pleases you then I shall give you my clothes then you may escape more easily.’ Then, dressed in these clothes, he came out of prison by night and managed to reach the last door without opposition because he was not recognized. He found the porter sleeping and straight away killed him. Once he had taken the keys of the door, he opened it and left together with the man who had guarded him. The said knights, who had come to kill him, seeing that he had escaped, and fearing the Queen’s anger, for fear of their lives decided to put the porter in a chest, having first cut out the heart. The heart and the body of the said porter they presented to the wicked queen as if it were the body of your father and the body of the porter was buried in Glocestart [Gloucester] as the body of the King. After he had escaped the prison of the aforesaid castle he was received at Corf [Corfe] castle together with his companion, who had guarded him in prison, by Lord Thomas, castellan of the said castle without the knowledge of Lord John Maltraverse, the lord of the said Thomas, in which castle he remained secretly for a year and a half. Later on, hearing that the Earl of Kent, who had maintained that he was alive, had been beheaded, he embarked on a ship with his aforesaid custodian and by the will and counsel of the said Thomas, who had received him, had crossed to Ireland where he remained eight months. Afterwards, because he was afraid that he might be recognized there, donning the habit of a hermit, he returned to England and came to the port of Sandvic [Sandwich] and in the same disguise he crossed the sea to Sclusa [Sluys], travelled to Normandy and, from Normandy, as many do crossing Languedoc, he came to Avignon, where he gave a florin to a papal servant and sent, by the same servant, a note to Po
pe John [John XXII]. The Pope summoned him and kept him secretly and honourably, for more than fifteen days. Finally, after various deliberations covering a wide range of subjects, after receiving permission to depart [licencia] he went to Paris, from Paris to Brabant and from Brabant to Cologne to see the [supposed relics of the] Three Kings and offer his devotions. After leaving Cologne, he crossed Germany and reached Milan in Lombardy and in Milan he entered a certain hermitage of the castle Milasci [Melazzo] where he remained for two and a half years. Because this castle became involved in a war he moved to the castle of Cecime in another hermitage in the diocese of Pavia in Lombardy. And he remained in this last hermitage for two years or thereabouts, remaining confined and carrying out prayers and penitence for you and other sinners. In testimony of these things I have appended a seal for your lordship’s consideration. Your Manuel Fieschi, notary of the Lord Pope, Your devoted servant.

  Fieschi’s letter was found in the departmental archives at Montpellier in a cartulary, compiled in 1368, of Gaucelm de Deaux, Bishop of Maguelonne, treasurer of Urban V. It was published in a transcription by Alexandre Germain in 1878 and again in 1881.2 William Stubbs, the great nineteenth-century English editor of medieval manuscripts, published it in the second volume of his edition of The Chronicles of Edward II. Commenting on the letter, Stubbs says; ‘It must have been the work of someone sufficiently well acquainted with the circumstances of the King’s imprisonment.’ Nevertheless he dismissed it as improbable because of inconsistencies in matters of detail. Stubbs’ spiritual successor, the great Manchester historian. T. F. Tout, was not so definitive: ‘It is a remarkable document, so specious and detailed, and bearing none of those marks by which the gross medieval forgery can genuinely be detected. Yet who can believe it if it is true? Was it simply a fairy tale? The confession of a madman? Was it a cunning effort of Edward III’s enemies to discredit the conqueror of Crecy?’