Edward II: The Unconventional King (45 page)

Whether Edward of Caernarfon, at Berkeley Castle, was aware that his wife and her favourite were sowing the seeds of their own destruction and repeating his mistakes is unknown. About Edward’s state of mind during his imprisonment, or even how he passed his days, we have likewise no idea. As he lay in his room at Berkeley, Edward may or may not have known that outside the castle, he still had friends, men who had resolved to free him and restore him to the throne. The plot to remove him from Kenilworth in March had failed, but the men, fierce and fanatical supporters of the former king, were undeterred. Their leader was Thomas Dunheved, the Dominican friar whom the king had sent to the pope in 1324. Thomas was aided by his brother Stephen Dunheved, formerly lord of the manor of Dunchurch in Warwickshire – not another friar, as is often stated – who had been forced to abjure the realm, or voluntarily exile himself from England to avoid execution, after committing an unspecified felony. Stephen returned to England and had become a valet of Edward’s chamber by mid-February 1322.
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Stephen and Thomas Dunheved gathered about them a group of men equally determined to free him from Berkeley: Thomas ‘travelled through England, not only secretly but even openly, stirring up the people of the south and north to rise for the deposed and imprisoned king and restore the kingdom to him’.
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The
Brut
says that the Dominicans ‘cast and ordained, both night and day, how they might bring him out of prison’, and that Thomas Dunheved ‘gathered a great company’.
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How Stephen and Thomas built their group cannot be known, but some former members of Edward II’s household joined them, including three of his sergeants-at-arms, Roger atte Watre, Thomas de la Haye and John le Botiler.
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The group’s highest-profile member was Edmund Gascelyn, a knight, who witnessed grants of Hugh Despenser and his father on several occasions and is described in a petition of 1327 as a Despenser adherent.
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Another member was Peter de la Rokele, under-sheriff of Buckinghamshire, another former adherent of Hugh Despenser and grandfather of William Langland (born
c
. 1325/30), one of the greatest poets of medieval England.
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The group had a strong clerical element, including Robert Shulton, a Cistercian monk of Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire; Henry de Rihale and John de Stoke, Dominican friars of Warwick; and John, a monk from the Cistercian abbey of Newminster. Edward II had stayed at Newminster, near Morpeth in Northumberland and 300 miles from Berkeley, on several occasions during his reign, the last time in August 1322. He must have made a powerful impression on John for the latter to leave his convent and travel to the other end of the country to fight for his former king, nearly five years after the last time he can have seen Edward. Other members included two parsons both called William Aylmer, and William Russell, parson of Huntley near Gloucester.

Roger Mortimer and Isabella got wind of the Dunheveds’ plans, and as the fact that they were trying to free Edward of Caernarfon was too sensitive to commit to writing, ordered the known members of the group to be arrested on other charges – usually theft, breaking and entering, extortion and assault. The Patent Roll of March to July 1327 is full of entries accusing Dunheved adherents of these crimes, the important thing being to arrest and imprison them at all costs, as the thought of the former king of England wandering around freely in the company of men determined that he be free and perhaps even restored to the throne was too awful to contemplate.
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At the beginning of May 1327, Stephen Dunheved and John de Stoke were to be arrested and ‘taken to the king’. After early May, the gang disappeared for a month, then turned up in the North West, where Roger Mortimer and Isabella ordered the justice of Chester – Richard Damory, brother of Edward II’s late favourite Roger – to arrest and imprison Thomas and Stephen Dunheved and other ‘malefactors’ gathering there who had ‘perpetrated homicides and other crimes’.
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And the Dunheved group were not alone in plotting to restore Edward: his old friend Donald, earl of Mar ‘returned to Scotland after the capture of the king, hoping to rescue him from captivity and restore him to his kingdom, as formerly, by the help of the Scots and of certain adherents whom the deposed king still had in England’.
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Although Mar was in the north of England in the summer of 1327, leading one of the three columns of his uncle Robert Bruce’s army against the new regime, his adherents gathered in the south-west of England and the Marches ‘to do and procure the doing of what evils they can against the king [Edward III] and his subjects’, that is, stirring up trouble on Edward of Caernarfon’s behalf.
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Mar, a great friend of Edward, was now described as the ‘enemy and rebel’ of his son, and Mortimer and Isabella ordered the arrest of two of his supporters in Staffordshire in August 1327 merely for sending letters to him.
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On 14 July, they ordered the justice of Chester Richard Damory to imprison Richard le Brun, former mayor of the town, for adherence to Mar.
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It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Dunheved brothers were in Chester in June, and the town was a centre of disaffection in 1327, at least partly, perhaps, on Edward of Caernarfon’s account: leading merchants were fined, and eighteen children imprisoned in the castle as hostages to ensure the citizens’ good behaviour, at their own cost, as they had been ‘disobedient and ill-behaved’ towards Edward III.
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In the summer of 1327, Robert Bruce decided that the opportunity to take advantage of the political chaos in England was too good to resist: although Isabella and Mortimer sent envoys to negotiate a ‘final peace’ with him, the Scots launched an attack on England on 15 June, with Donald of Mar and Bruce’s friends Thomas Randolph and James Douglas leading the three columns.
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With Roger Mortimer, the most powerful man in England and Edward of Caernarfon’s greatest enemy, safely out of the way hundreds of miles to the north, the Dunheved group could go ahead with their plan to liberate Edward. Probably in mid- to late June, they launched an attack on Berkeley Castle.

The truly astonishing thing is that the Dunheveds achieved their goal. This attack, which should have been a suicide mission with no chance of success, worked. The men managed to seize Edward, and even had time to plunder the castle before they fled into the Gloucestershire countryside, perhaps leaving a few dead bodies of their colleagues behind. Astonishing as this attack certainly was, we would have little knowledge of it were it not for the fortunate survival of a letter written by Thomas Berkeley on 27 July 1327 to John Hothum, chancellor of England, wherein Berkeley talks of ‘some people indicted before me in the county of Gloucestershire, for coming towards the castle of Berkeley with an armed force, for having seized the father of our lord the king out of our keeping, and feloniously robbing the said castle’.
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An entry on the Patent Roll five days later, granting Berkeley powers of arrest, names the same men as his letter, deeming them guilty of ‘coming with an armed force to Berkeley Castle to plunder it, and refusing to join the king in his expedition against the Scots’.
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Obviously the gang members had no intention of joining the Scottish expedition – and the clerics would never have been expected to – but this was a general accusation which would ensure that sheriffs would arrest them.
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The writ judiciously omits any mention of Edward of Caernarfon.

What happened to Edward? It should be noted that Berkeley’s letter does not explicitly state that the Dunheveds ever took him outside the castle, only that they managed to abduct him from Berkeley’s custody. Although no direct evidence exists to confirm that Edward was ever recaptured, we may assume either that he was, or that the Dunheveds were forced to flee without him. Berkeley’s letter betrays no alarm that Edward was wandering about freely, and while one might argue that he would not have dared commit such a sensitive fact to paper but would have ordered his messenger to inform Hothum orally, the tone of the letter is not what we would expect if he had been in a genuine panic that Edward was at liberty. Also, more of Edward’s friends conceived another plot to release him in early September, and they would surely have known if he were free.

Thomas Berkeley’s letter also declares that ‘I have heard from members of my household, who have seen and heard of it, that a great number of people have assembled in Buckinghamshire and other adjoining counties for the same cause’; that is, attempting to free Edward. This is unfortunately the only surviving evidence for this, the third (or part of the second, perhaps) plot to liberate him in 1327. However, Berkeley’s letter states that two men whom he describes as ‘great leaders of the company’ were arrested in Dunstable, Bedfordshire – which borders Buckinghamshire – before the attack on Berkeley Castle, and ‘are held there in prison’. They were John Norton, a clerk of Edward II, and John Redmere, formerly keeper of Edward’s stud-farm, both of them Dominican friars. The Close Roll confirms that Norton and Redmere were in prison at Dunstable by 11 August 1327, and an order was issued on 21 October to send them and two other men held with them to the notorious Newgate prison in London.
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Norton and Redmere petitioned Edward III, claiming that they had innocently been hearing Mass at the house of their order when the prior of Dunstable’s bailiffs burst in, accused them of attempting to free Edward from Berkeley and threw them into prison, and that they were ‘at point of death’ as a result.
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While Redmere subsequently vanishes from history, Norton’s petition was successful: he was still alive in 1329.
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The
Annales Paulini
say that Thomas Dunheved, Dominican friar, was captured at Budbrooke near Warwick, 18 miles from his family home of Dunchurch, and taken to Isabella. Supposedly Thomas was caught while trying to escape from Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire, was thrown into a deep dungeon and died there in misery, though he may still have been alive in 1330.
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His brother Stephen Dunheved fled to London, and the mayor and sheriffs were ordered to arrest him on 1 July 1327. He was captured and sent to Newgate, but escaped shortly before 7 June 1329.
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Stephen reappears on record in 1330, when another order for his arrest was issued, this time for aiding the earl of Kent in his attempts to free the supposedly dead Edward II from prison. William Aylmer, parson of Deddington, was captured in Oxford shortly before 20 August 1327 and accused of ‘consenting to and abetting the robbery of Berkeley Castle, and the taking of Edward of Carnarvan, the late king’.
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Most of the Dunheved gang were either dead, in prison or in hiding by the autumn of 1327 (Peter de la Rokele, for example, vanishes from the records for more than three years and reappears soon after Isabella and Mortimer’s downfall).
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And yet Edward still had supporters determined to free him, and in early September, they hatched yet another plot. The leader of this latest attempt was Rhys ap Gruffydd, formerly a squire of Edward’s chamber, whom Edward appointed as an envoy to Isabella in November 1326. Possibly, Donald of Mar also aided this latest attempt in person, and Sir Gruffydd Llwyd of North Wales, who had aided Edward during the Marcher campaign in 1322 and was a long-term ally of the king, also joined. The plot failed when it was betrayed to Roger Mortimer’s deputy justice of Wales, William Shalford, on 7 September.
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Roger Mortimer was in Wales at the time, and by 26 October had imprisoned thirteen conspirators at Caernarfon Castle, Edward’s birthplace.
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This plot is indirect proof that the Dunheveds had not succeeded in releasing Edward from Berkeley, or had done so only temporarily.

Although most of his kingdom had rejected him in 1326, and he had ended his reign wandering around Wales with a handful of supporters, the plots to free Edward of Caernarfon in 1327 show that he still had friends. The success of the Dunheveds’ attack on Berkeley Castle demonstrates that this was no disorganised bunch of ruffians attracted by violence and plunder; the attack was well planned, well equipped and brilliantly executed. The number of arrest warrants issued, the warnings of malefactors gathering across numerous counties, Thomas Berkeley’s statement that a ‘large number of people’ in Buckinghamshire and neighbouring counties were plotting on Edward’s behalf, and the
Brut
’s comment that the Dunheveds had ‘gathered a great company’, suggest that there was a well-supported scheme to liberate Edward. The
Annales Paulini
even claim that ‘certain magnates’ supported the Dunheveds’ plot to free Edward, though their identity is unknown.
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The latest plot to free Edward of Caernarfon convinced some men that he was too dangerous to be allowed to live. One of them, if we may believe the 1331 testimony of Hywel ap Gruffydd, one of Rhys ap Gruffydd’s co-conspirators, was the deputy justice of Wales, William Shalford. Supposedly, Shalford sent a letter on 14 September 1327 to Mortimer. Hywel ap Gruffydd accused Shalford of complicity in the death of Edward II, and his testimony against Shalford runs:

Rhys ap Gruffydd and others of his faction had assembled their power in South Wales and in North Wales, with the agreement of certain great lords of England, in order to forcibly deliver the said Lord Edward, father of our lord the king, who was then detained in a castle at Berkeley. And he [Shalford] also made clear in that letter that if the Lord Edward was freed, that Lord Roger Mortimer and all his people would die a terrible death by force and be utterly destroyed. On account of which the said William Shalford, like the traitor he is, counselled the said Roger that he ordain such a remedy in such a way that no one in England or Wales would think of effecting such deliverance.
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