The Greatest Traitor

by Ian Mortimer

  Thereafter the English once again chose to sleep in their armour. They posted heavy guards on all the approaches to their camp, but no further attacks were staged. On 6 August they captured a Scot who told them that that night the army had been ordered to follow Sir James Douglas’s banner wherever it went. He knew nothing more than this. The English leaders were sure that this meant they would be attacked, and so drew up in readiness, fully armed, in their battle formations. The Scottish fires burnt late, as usual. But shortly before dawn two Scottish trumpeters came to them and announced that the Scots had left for home some time before midnight. A party of men sent across the river to their camp next morning discovered this to be true: le Bel saw three hundred leather cauldrons full of meat to be cooked. It was a final insult to the English, as if the Scots were even giving them a farewell meal.

  Two days later Roger, King Edward and the army arrived back in Durham. They found their carts and wagons there, each stored in a barn with a little flag on it to help identification. After two days in Durham they returned to York, and Roger rejoined Isabella. The army was disbanded. The Hainaulters were promised £4,000 compensation for their horses, along with all their other expenses, and sent home.

  It had been an absolute fiasco, and no one tried to pretend otherwise. Whose fault was it? Given the youth of the king, one would normally blame those who had command of the army, in this case the Earls of Lancaster, Norfolk and Kent. But the king himself blamed Roger, who, as we have seen, was effectively in charge throughout. Responsibility for the initial failure to contain the Scots probably lies with him, and he certainly prevented the English army from attacking them at Stanhope. Edward believed that such failure amounted to treason. But in Roger’s defence, it was obvious at the time even to footsoldiers like le Bel that the Scots were in too strong a position for the English to mount a serious attack. In addition, it seems probable that Roger actually wanted the Scots to get away. A massacre of Scotsmen would only provoke reprisals, and he and Isabella were not prepared to countenance year after year of war against the Scots for a few barren acres of no-man’s-land, as Edward’s father and grandfather had done. They were determined to honour an agreement which recognised the independence of Scotland, and this would have been jeopardised by a major battle. Thus Edward was justified in accusing Roger of treason but not of incompetence. Roger’s purposes had been to preserve the king’s life on a sham campaign which satisfied the northerners and did not significantly damage the Scots, and this he had done.

  Whatever his private motives, the Weardale campaign was publicly embarrassing for Roger. His lack of official command would have done little to lessen Lancaster’s anger, for example. The escape of the ex-king, although still a secret, threatened to humiliate him further. Back at York he heard from Thomas de Berkeley that Edward had in fact been recaptured and secured, but also that further plans to free him were being made by groups of dissident royalists in South Wales. Over the course of the next few weeks, Roger planned a final resolution to his various problems. He decided that the Exchequer and courts should be transferred to York, where they could be more directly administered while negotiations took place with the Scots. And at the beginning of September, he and Isabella agreed what they would do with Edward II. On the 4th he left the court at Nottingham, ignored his summons to Parliament, and went to South Wales.35 From there he would order his final solution to the problem of the ex-king.

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  TWELVE

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  The King’s Murderer?

  POPULAR LEGEND HAS it that Edward II died in agony in Berkeley Castle with a red-hot spit thrust through a horn inserted into his anus. Various elaborations on this are to be found in a number of chronicles: that he had been kept half-naked in a pool of cold water with corpses floating around him for weeks beforehand; that he was pinioned by cushions (or a door, or a table) while he was skewered, and that his screams as the spit entered his body could be heard over a mile away. The usual explanation for the extraordinary cause of death is that the king’s body would be unmarked when examined. These stories are all characteristic of the vivid popular imagination of the period, and it is tempting to conclude that they are unlikely to be true simply for that reason. But they do have a strong basis in many of the chronicles of the early to mid-fourteenth century, and thus a much closer analysis of these and other sources is necessary in order to determine both what happened and what people believed happened. This narrative of Roger’s life must therefore pause in order to establish the limits of what we can reasonably say about the death of Edward II, with a view to determining the nature and extent of his responsibility.

  To begin with the official records, we know that Edward III received news of his father’s death late at night on Wednesday 23 September at Lincoln, the message being carried by Thomas Gurney.1 The death was announced publicly on Monday 28 September, the last day of Parliament. It was stated officially that Edward had died of natural causes at Berkeley Castle on the feast of St Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist (21 September).2 The accounts rendered by Thomas de Berkeley and John Maltravers tally with this date: they claimed £5 a day for their expenses in guarding the living king from the date they received him (3 April) to 21 September, and after that they claimed the same rate for custody of the dead king’s body until 21 October, when the corpse was handed over to the Abbot of St Peter’s, Gloucester.3 From these accounts we know also that Edward II was embalmed at Berkeley in the month following his death, and that a number of people watched with the corpse in the traditional manner until his burial in December. One of these was William Beaukaire, who most importantly started his period of ‘watching’ on the very day of the king’s death, 21 September, and stayed with the corpse the whole time until the burial.4 In addition there was a clerk of the royal household, Hugh de Glanville, who was commissioned to take the body from Berkeley to Gloucester, and who remained with the corpse from 22 October until the burial. He was responsible for paying all the others staying with the corpse, namely, John Eaglescliff, Bishop of Llandaff, for watching from 21 October to the day of the burial; and Robert de Hastings and Edmund Wasteneys, knights; Bernard de Burgh and Richard de Potesgrave, the king’s chaplains; Bertrand de la More and John de Enfield, the king’s sergeants-at-arms; and finally, Andrew, the king’s candle-bearer. All of these men were with the king’s body from 20 October at Berkeley Castle to the day of the burial at Gloucester.5 Finally, we know from official sources that the body was eviscerated and embalmed by a local woman, not the king’s physician as one might have expected; and we can be sure that her work was carried out at Berkeley, as many of the expenses, including 37s for a silver vase to contain the deposed king’s heart, were charged by Thomas de Berkeley to the royal wardrobe.

  Even these few bare facts imply the king died in suspicious circumstances. The first point to note is that only one man, William Beaukaire, participated in the formal ‘watching’ with the corpse before 20 October, and that for the month after the death sole responsibility for the king’s body lay with John Maltravers and Thomas de Berkeley. Beaukaire had been pardoned in March 1327 for defending Caerphilly Castle against the invaders the previous year.6 As a royal sergeant-at-arms, his arrival at Berkeley Castle on the day of the death and his prolonged stay with the body until the burial suggests that the king’s death was premeditated by the person who sent him. It also implies that the person who premeditated the death had authority over sergeants-at-arms of the royal household. The next point to note is that the embalming woman had finished with the body before these other watchers saw it. The embalming process of kings, like most nobles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, involved covering the body with a linen cerecloth (a cloth impregnated with wax).7 Thus any cuts, bruises or other wounds on the body would have been entirely covered before any of the named watchers saw it, with the sole exception of William Beaukaire, who, as we have seen, appears to have been involved in the plot to dispose of Edward II on 21 September.

&
nbsp; The question of who sent William Beaukaire to Berkeley is not a difficult one to answer. To begin with, in 1330 Roger was directly accused of arranging the king’s murder by Edward III, and was not allowed to answer the charge, being found guilty by ‘common knowledge’. While this does not itself prove his guilt, we also know that the king’s imprisonment was entirely controlled by Roger. In addition, Roger was probably in the area at the time, just across the Bristol Channel, supposedly attempting to discover the perpetrators of a plot to bring down the government.8 He returned to court shortly after the death occurred. Roger, of course, also had authority over royal sergeants-at-arms, and could have sent Beaukaire. Even more damning is some evidence given in a 1331 court case in which William de Shalford, Roger’s lieutenant in North Wales, was cited as writing from Anglesey to Roger at Abergavenny on 14 September 1327 with news of a plot being formed to release the deposed king by force. According to the court records, Roger is supposed to have shown the letter to William de Ockley – a member of Roger’s wife’s household at the time of her incarceration, and thus a particularly close family servant – and commanded him to take it to Edward’s guardians at Berkeley with the message that the captors should ‘acquaint themselves with its contents and find an appropriate remedy to avoid the peril’.9 These facts, and Roger’s involvement in removing Edward from Kenilworth against Henry of Lancaster’s will, allow us to be confident that it was William de Ockley who bore Roger’s instructions to Berkeley. In all likelihood, William Beaukaire accompanied de Ockley, and remained with the corpse, to ensure no one inspected it closely before it was embalmed and neatly covered in cerecloth.

  So much for the responsibility. What actually happened to Edward is a much more complicated question to answer. It was announced at the time that he died of natural causes, and there was no subsequent official statement as to the cause of his death, not even when those supposedly responsible were tried for his murder in 1330. Thus it is necessary to turn to the various chronicles to establish what was known and what was suspected in 1327.

  Before commenting on what the various chronicles say, it is worth first making a general point. Several chronicles of the reign of Edward II were composed or copied several years later by monks who rarely left their monasteries. Some resided two or three hundred miles from Berkeley. They were usually dependent on a variety of sources, including travellers’ tales, official proclamations, and other chronicles. Sometimes, as with the case of the clerk Geoffrey le Baker, a contact was known to the chronicler who claimed to be able to shed light on a story beyond the level of general knowledge, but this was very rare. All the extant contemporary chronicles were compiled by men who had no first-hand or (apart from le Baker) second-hand knowledge of the actual process of Edward’s death, which was obviously a very closely guarded secret, probably known only to six or seven people. With regard to secret plots, most chronicles reflect contemporary rumour and popular opinion more closely than historical facts. To put the issue in perspective, imagine the results if several amateur historians – perhaps working in retirement homes, which monasteries sometimes were – began to write up accounts of a covert political assassination five, ten or twenty years after the event. Imagine them trying to do the same thing in an age before literacy was common, without television, newspapers, radio or railways.

  Two of the earliest chronicles to mention the death of Edward II were both written by canons of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Both were written within ten years of the death. The earlier of the two, the Annales Paulini, is anonymous, and simply states that ‘on the eve of the feast of St Michael the Apostle King Edward died … in Berkeley Castle, where he was held prisoner; and he was buried in Gloucester Abbey’.10 The other, by Adam Murimuth, gives much more information. He was the only contemporary chronicler who was connected with both the court and the south-west region, being at Exeter from June to November 1327, while he administered the diocese after the death of the bishop, James de Berkeley.11 Thus he must be considered the nearest we have to a presence in the area at the time of, and just after, the death. Although he did not begin to write his chronicle for another ten years, he kept a book of memoranda at the time, and this formed the basis of his later work.12 He claimed that Berkeley and Maltravers exchanged custodianship month by month and that Berkeley treated the king well but Maltravers did not; and that for secrecy’s sake Edward was moved from Berkeley to Corfe and back. He notes that Isabella sent her husband delicacies and noncommittal messages in his captivity, but refused to see him. He gives an apparently inaccurate estimate of 100 marks per month (£67) for the expenses of keeping the king, but although this is less than half the actual figure paid, it is what one might expect to be left after his custodians had taken their fees in proportion to their status and their charge.13 As for the death itself, he places this at Berkeley a day later than the official date, on 22 September, and, although he does not give a cause of death under his entry for 1327, he does so under an entry for 1330. Here he states his belief that the king was ‘suffocated’ by Thomas Gurney and John Maltravers with Roger’s connivance. Since this does not reflect the official charge as enrolled in Parliament, and as the official charges did not mention Maltravers in the context of Edward’s death but did mention Ockley, whom Murimuth neglects, the chronicle must reflect his opinion at the time of writing (1337) and was not merely copied from official documentation. Significantly, he indicates that his opinion was widely shared and he specifically states that ‘it was commonly said’ that Edward ‘was killed as a precaution’ by Maltravers and Gurney. The other very important fact in Murimuth’s chronicle is his unique statement that ‘Many abbots, priors, knights, burgesses of Bristol and Gloucester were summoned to see his corpse intact, and this they saw superficially.’14 Murimuth is the only contemporary to mention this exposure of the corpse, but as he was the only chronicler in the south-west at the time, this is not wholly surprising. As one would expect, a number of historians have wondered what he meant by the corpse being seen ‘superficially’: none seems to have considered the embalming process as an explanation. The whole body being covered in cerecloth would go a long way to explain his use of this word, for only the superficial contours of his body would have been visible, and no wounds.15

  A number of chronicles, possibly contemporary with the St Paul’s writers, are continuations of an earlier work, called the Brut, which was an ongoing history of the kingdom of England from its legendary foundation by Brutus. These continuations fall into two groups, referred to by historians as the ‘long version’ and the ‘short version’. The originals of both were written in French and were separately completed in the early to mid-1330s.16 The short version, which was probably compiled in London, survives in a number of manuscripts, including those published as the Anonimalle Chronicle and the French Chronicle of London. Both of these examples give very little information about Edward’s death. The first states merely that Edward was moved from Kenilworth to Berkeley Castle and that ‘soon afterwards the king became ill there and died on the day of St Matthew the Apostle before Michaelmas …’.17 The French Chronicle of London, which is a later derivation from the short version, states that Thomas de Berkeley and John Maltravers were appointed guardians of the king in his imprisonment, and that ‘abetted by certain persons and the assent of his false guardians, he was falsely and traitorously murdered …’.18

  By comparison with the short versions, the long version of the Brut is positively rich in detail. It was probably completed in the north, although it may have been begun in London. Either way it was written by someone sympathetic to the Earl of Lancaster.19 It carries a few obvious mistakes in its entry for 1327: it wrongly claims Maurice de Berkeley, not Thomas, was the king’s keeper at the time of the death, along with Maltravers and their assistant Gurney (whom it calls Thomas ‘Toiourney’ in 1327), and that the king died at Corfe Castle.20 It corrects these mistakes in a later passage relating to events in 1330, which reflects the official proceedings relating
to the death: that the king died at Berkeley under the direction of Thomas Gurney (now correctly spelled with a ‘G’).21 These mistakes ironically increase its value, as they indicate that the entry for 1327 was very probably composed at an earlier date than that of 1330, probably in the period 1328–30, and thus records popular rumour at a slightly earlier date.22 This is important for two reasons: firstly because this entry supports some of the lines in Murimuth which are not found in other contemporary chronicles, for instance that the king lamented that his wife and son did not visit him; that Maltravers was involved in the death; and that the king visited Corfe. The second reason is that the entry for 1327 contains the earliest explicit description of Edward’s death. It states:

  Roger Mortimer sent orders as to how and in what manner the king should be killed. And later, when the aforesaid Thomas and John had seen the letter and the order, they were friendly towards King Edward of Carnarvon at supper time, so that the king knew nothing of their treachery. And when that night the king had gone to bed and was asleep, the traitors, against their homage and against their fealty, went quietly into his chamber and laid a large table on his stomach and with other men’s help pressed him down. At this he awoke, and in fear of his life, turned himself upside down. The tyrants, false traitors, then took a horn and put it into his fundament as deep as they could, and took a spit of burning copper, and put it through the horn into his body, and oftentimes rolled therewith his bowels, and so they killed their lord, and nothing was perceived [as to the manner of his death].23

  None of this is in Murimuth, although he and the author of the Brut had similar background information about Corfe and the king’s lamentations. Indeed, Murimuth seems still not to have heard this story seven years later. Clearly the Lancastrian author of the longer version of the Brut was significantly closer to the source of the red-hot spit story than Murimuth.