by Ian Mortimer
As a result we may be sure of several things: that Margaret was Edward's first intended bride, and that the description is of her, and that the clerk who inserted the note that Stapeldon's description related to Philippa was doing so on an assumption that only one daughter of the count's was proposed as Edward's marriage partner. We may also be confident that Margaret's birthdate was 24 June 1311. It follows that it is very unlikely that Philippa was born before April 1312. In this context it is worth returning to older narratives, which suggest that she was younger than Edward. Froissart, who knew her in her later years, asserted that she was in her fourteenth year at the time of her marriage in 1328. This implies that she was born between 25 January 1314 and 24january 1315, and thus about three years younger than her sister Margaret, and about two years younger than Edward.
The Fake Death of Edward II
The definite assertion in my biography of Sir Roger Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, that Edward II was not killed in Berkeley Castle in 1327 startled many readers, academics and laymen alike. The idea that historians could have been wrong for centuries about this matter was greeted with scepticism by most scholars and incredulity by many members of the public. As a result, I devoted a considerable amount of time in 2003-4 to revisiting the subject in much greater detail than it has previously received. After considerable research, rethinking, consultation and discussion, the final result was published by The English Historical Review, the leading peer-reviewed journal in the field of English medieval studies. Any reader who wishes to obtain an in-depth perspective on the fake death of Edward II in the period 1327-30 should refer to volume 120 of that journal (November 2005). What follows here is a brief synopsis for those who want a short explanation of why we may have sufficient confidence in this new narrative to begin to interpret Edward III’s reign in the light of his father's survival after 1327.
The starting point is an examination of why we as a society have come to retell the popular story of the death. The main answer to this is that it is repeated in various forms in about twenty chronicles from the mid-to-late fourteenth century. In some narratives Edward was smothered, in others he died with a burning piece of copper inserted into his anus, in one he was strangled, and the remainder just state that he 'died'. None say that he did not die. Therefore, when writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were trying to construct a coherent story of England's past, they looked back to the fourteenth-century chronicles and found them unanimous on the subject of the death. Furthermore, they mostly presumed that the more detailed narratives were more accurate, on the grounds that they provided more information and were thus better-informed. These they assimilated into a popular story which became established and widely accepted before the mid-sixteenth century. The handful of interested antiquaries and textual scholars of the period would have found confirmation of the date of the supposed death in the archives then stored at the Tower. In particular, in the patent rolls they would have found grants to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the king on 21 September, in the royal household accounts they would have found payments for pittances to be given to the poor on the anniversary of Edward II's death, and in the rolls of parliament they would have found direct accusations of murder levelled against Roger Mortimer, Simon Bereford, Thomas Gurney, Thomas Berkeley and William Ockley. This abundance of contemporary record evidence, coupled with the chroniclers' testimony, allowed them and their successors no room to doubt that Edward died on or about 21 September 1327.
What the early scholars did not do was to examine the many flaws and irregularities in the evidence. Until the late twentieth century scholars lacked the methodological sophistication to go beyond the face value of the records and chronicles and deconstruct the information structures underlying the various bodies of evidence. Furthermore, by the late twentieth century it had become academically very unfashionable to question whether specific kings were murdered. A general assumption was made that the evidence was insufficient to warrant any major revisiting of the deaths of any of the four secretly 'murdered' kings (Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI and Edward V), and any attempt to research and explain the supposed later lives of the first two and the younger brother of the last in terms of a genuine survival resulted in prompt scholarly dismissal, regardless of the merits of the argument. The result was an example of 'group think', an intellectual stalemate in which the scholarly elite is so hostile to deviation from an accepted orthodoxy that no individual within the elite is in a position to question it, and no individual outside the elite will be taken seriously if he holds such unorthodox views.
If we examine the chronicles of the fourteenth century, we are presented with about twenty texts, one of which - the shorter continuation of the Brut chronicle - has many variant versions on the matter of the death. No original contribution to narratives of the death was made after 1356; thereafter all the chronicle accounts are reworkings or direct quotations of earlier statements. The earliest chronicle has Edward dying on 21 September of a grief-induced illness. The 'anal torture' death - probably based on thirteenth-century accounts of the death of Edmund Ironside - first appears in a chronicle written at York by an anti-Mortimer polemicist in the mid-133os. The first appearance of the red-hot 'poker' (as opposed to a copper rod) is in 1340. But if we examine all the explicit accounts of the imprisonment and death, and reconstruct the information threads repeated in the various stories, the detailed chronicles may be shown to descend from two original accounts, and one of those was very probably no more than an embellishment of the other. The more reliable of these two authors
(Adam Murimuth) actually distances himself from the idea that the king was murdered, saying it was merely 'common rumour', implying that he himself did not know the truth, although he was the only chronicler in the West Country at the time. Furthermore, these two chronicles are demonstrably incorrect in several ways: for instance, they both accuse John Maltravers of being one of the murderers, although he was not at Berkeley Castle at the time of the supposed death and was never accused of murder. The upshot of this is that no chronicle has any reliable information regarding the circumstances of the death, and all the chronicles together contain only one reliable fact: that there was a royal announcement at Lincoln in September 1327 that Edward II had died of a grief-induced illness at Berkeley Castle on St Matthew's Day (21 September).
This turns attention to the record evidence. There is no doubt that the announcement of the death was made between 24 and 29 September (when the court was at Lincoln). In most circumstances, when one knows that a specific royal announcement was made at a certain time and in a certain place, it is not necessary to question the detail any further. However, when a piece of information has a unique, geographically identifiable source, we may be far more rigorous in assessing its reliability. Putting it simply, we may ask the following question: could the person making the official announcement on behalf of the king at Lincoln have known the truth of what he had been led to believe had happened at Berkeley?
The answer to this is 'definitely not'. Edward III heard about his father's supposed death on the night of 23/24 September and began circulating the information with no check on the veracity of the message. This is proved by an original document in the National Archives - DL 10/253 -which is a letter from Edward to his cousin, the earl of Hereford, written on 24 September, in which he states he heard the news about his father's death during the previous night. It could be objected that Edward III checked the identity after he started spreading the news, but it needs to be borne in mind that Lincoln is no miles from Berkeley. If Edward III -who was only fourteen and under the strict supervision of his mother, one of the instigators of the plot - had been able to order anyone to go directly to Berkeley to check on the identity of the dead corpse, the man could not have got there within five days of the date of the supposed death. Had he done so, and if Lord Berkeley had let him see the corpse, he would have found it already embalmed. This means he would not have been able to identify
it, as fourteenth-century royal embalming completely covered the face and features in wax-impregnated cloth. Further examination of the records reveals that there was no credible exhibition of the unembalmed corpse. As a result of this we may be confident that all the official information about the death of Edward II was based on trust. The ‘fact' of the death depends wholly on the assumption that Lord Berkeley's letter to Edward III about his father's death was written in good faith.
The first important fact arising from this is that we can begin to understand the flow of information underlying the extant evidence for the death. Edward III received Lord Berkeley's letter and believed what it said. As a result the death was officially announced, the news spread around the court and the country, chaplains were endowed to pray for the late king's soul, and a royal funeral was arranged to take place at St Peter's Abbey in Gloucester (now Gloucester Cathedral). This is why there is such an abundance of official evidence relating to the death. Lord Berkeley's letter was accepted in good faith.
We can show relatively easily that in one respect the letter was certainly not written in good faith, for it stated that Edward II died of natural causes. In the fight of later events, this is not sustainable. The question is rather one of how Lord Berkeley lied: did he lie about the cause of the king's death? Or did he lie about the fact that the king had actually died? In answering this Berkeley himself stated in parliament three years later, in November 1330, that he 'had not heard about the death [of Edward III until coming into this present parliament'. This seems to be a confession that he had lied in 1327. Various objections - for example, that he really meant he had not previously heard about the accusation of murder - can be shown to be implausible. Nevertheless, even if his statement had been unambiguous, it could still have been untrue. To test its truth, and its implication that Lord Berkeley had lied in announcing the death in 1327, we have to look for any irregularities in the information patterns created as a result of Lord Berkeley's statement that Edward II had died of natural causes.
The first series of irregularities which arise in the wake of the letter state unequivocally that the king was still alive. The plot of the earl of Kent provides the key evidence. Previous commentators have all followed the early twentieth-century scholar Professor Tout in declaring that Kent was 'stupid'. Tout's statement was based partly on the blatantly politicised accusations against Mortimer of November 1330, partly on the anti-Isabella prejudices of the chonicler Geoffrey le Baker, and partly on his own and his contemporaries' anti-revisionist prejudice. As a result of his condemnation, historians have never bothered to investigate the matter from Kent's point of view. Had they done so they would have realised that there is abundant evidence that he was anything but stupid. Certainly he was not executed for his stupidity. He was condemned to death in the parliament of March 1330 explicitly for the crime of trying to rescue the living King
Edward II 'to help him become king again, and to govern his people as he was wont to do beforehand'. There is no good reason to discount this as evidence that the king was alive and that he had been held at Corfe.
The parliamentary view that Edward was still alive in March 1330 has independent support, also previously overlooked. Kent had an informant, Sir John Pecche, who was the keeper of Corfe Castle until September 1329. Pecche cannot be said to have been deluded as to the presence of the king at Corfe prior to this date. His role in Kent's plot was to tell Ingelram Berengar that Edward II was still alive. As Pecche and Kent had the same information, either one must have informed the other or they must have had an independent source. Given his position as constable of the castle, we may be sure that Pecche did not have to accept the news that Edward II was alive - supposedly in his custody - without checking the truth for himself. It is unthinkable that he jeopardised his reputation, estates and life without ascertaining whether the supposedly dead king was in his own castle, given that it was in his power to do so. Pecche's role in Kent's plot is therefore independent corroborative evidence of the parliamentary view that Edward II was at Corfe in 1330. Both of these pieces of evidence in turn support Berkeley's statement that he had not heard about Edward II’s death in 1330. And to these we may add two more contemporary documents which state that Edward was alive in 1330: a private letter from the archbishop of York to the mayor of London stating that he had 'certain news' that Edward II was still alive, and of course the Fieschi letter. We thus have a number of good, independent pieces of evidence that Lord Berkeley's letter announcing the death of Edward II was deliberately misleading
The announcement that Edward II had been murdered was first officially made in the charges against Mortimer and his adherents after his arrest in 1330. These are riddled with inaccuracies, inconsistencies and anomalies. Not least of these are the conscious acceptance of a lie by Edward III of Lord Berkeley's statement as to where he was at the time of the supposed murder, and the failure to order the arrest of the two men condemned to death for the murder until a week after the trial (during which time they were permitted to leave England). Doubts about the accusations were shared by contemporaries: the majority of the manuscripts of the shorter continuation of the French Brut (completed in or after 1333) repeat the understanding that Edward II had died of natural causes, revealing a reluctance to follow the new accusations of murder. Similarly, in 1354 all the charges against Mortimer were found to be in error, including that which stated he had procured the murder of Edward II. But perhaps the most interesting aspect connected with the claims that Edward II was murdered is Edward III’s treatment of the men responsible for keeping his father safely. He never punished Lord Berkeley in any way at all, letting him keep his lands and lordship and allowing him freely to come to court. And Lord Maltravers was also allowed to keep his lands and lordship. Although he remained in exile in Flanders for several years for his part in betraying Kent, Edward was in correspondence with him as early as 1334. He allowed him to return to England secretly for a meeting in 1335, employed him in Flanders in 1339 and then employed him in Ireland, and rewarded him long before he was officially forgiven for his part in Kent's death. When he finally returned to England in 1351 Edward wrote a letter praising his 'loyalty and goodwill' and specifically stating that he wished 'to do something grandiose for him'. As many people have remarked in the past, Edward's subsequent patronage of the two men responsible for keeping his father safely in 1327 is not consistent with their murdering him.
As a result of these lines of research, it is found that the officially created evidence relating to Edward IFs death is based on information arising from a single announcement which was not verified by the king, but which was in line with the political ambitions of Lord Mortimer, and very probably in line with Isabella's emotional attachment to her husband, which remained strong in his captivity and even up until her death. On their instructions Berkeley faked the death, sent Edward II to Corfe Castle to be secretly maintained by Sir John Maltravers while Sir John Pecche was overseas, and embalmed another corpse to be buried in place of the king. Unfortunately for the plotters, Sir John Pecche returned unexpectedly in early 1328 and discovered Edward II at Corfe Castle. Pecche then informed Kent, who subsequently took action to rescue the king. His plot was discovered by Mortimer's agents. Mortimer's threat to the royal authority — which had been great even before 1330 - now became unbearable for Edward m, who saw his uncle condemned to death in parliament for trying to rescue his sadly abused father from Corfe. Having no doubt that his entire dynasty was at risk, Edward III arranged the seizure of Mortimer and eradicated the widespread doubts about his father's fate by finally creating an official, royal version of the 'death': that Edward II had been murdered by Gurney and Ockley on Mortimer's orders in Berkeley Castle. This served both to destroy Mortimer's support and strengthen Edward III's own status as a ruling king, even though he was still under age. The story of the death of Edward II in Berkeley Castle was thus a political fiction invented by Mortimer and twisted by Edward III into a murder story for reasons of
political legitimacy. The propaganda fall-out from this has misled scholars and deceived laymen ever since.
