Edward II: The Unconventional King (46 page)

Again, we learn that ‘certain great lords’ supported Rhys’s plot. In response to Shalford’s letter, Mortimer allegedly sent a messenger, William Ockley, to Berkeley Castle to show Shalford’s letter to Edward’s custodians, and ‘charged him to tell them to take counsel on the points contained in the letter and to quickly remedy the situation in order to avoid great peril’. Ockley, or Ockle or Ogle, was a man-at-arms and a rather obscure figure, convicted of the murder of Edward II in November 1330. He seems to have had connections in Ireland: in March 1326, he acted as attorney in Ireland for Stephen Ocle, probably his brother or cousin, and in 1327, lands in that country were restored to him.
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Ockley is presumably the ‘William de Okleye’ who accompanied Roger Mortimer’s wife Joan during her captivity in March 1322.
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Edward II is traditionally said to have been murdered at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327. Edward III heard the news of his father’s death on the night of 23/24 September: the young king, not yet fifteen, sent a letter to his cousin the earl of Hereford informing him that ‘my father has been commanded to God’, and that he had heard the news the night before. The letter is dated at Lincoln on 24 September, and as we see, Edward III assumed the letter brought to him by Sir Thomas Gurney from Lord Berkeley was true and immediately began disseminating news of his father’s demise.
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A few days later, it was announced to parliament that Edward had died of natural causes – it is hard to imagine that anyone believed this – while the parliament of November 1330, the first one held after Isabella and Mortimer’s downfall, gave the cause of Edward’s death as murder for the first time. This later parliament convicted Thomas Gurney and William Ockley of the deed, but the parliamentary rolls say only that ‘they falsely and treacherously murdered him’.
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The method of the alleged murder was never stated. None of the murderers or anyone else involved with it ever spoke publicly about it, and no official government source ever stated the method, which leaves contemporary and later chronicles, none of whom knew the cause of death for certain. Gurney and Ockley, both sentenced to death in absentia, fled. Ockley was never heard of again; Gurney fled to Spain, where he was pursued by Edward III and where he died in 1333.
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Roger Mortimer was also convicted of having had Edward of Caernarfon killed and on thirteen other charges, and Sir Simon Bereford was convicted of aiding Mortimer in all his felonies, including presumably Edward’s murder. These two were executed. Edward II’s custodian Thomas, Lord Berkeley was ultimately acquitted of any complicity in the former king’s death and made a very curious speech to parliament, which we will examine later, and the other custodian Sir John Maltravers was never accused of any role in Edward’s supposed murder either in 1330 or at any other point in his long life (he lived until 1364).

Fourteenth-century chronicles give a wide variety of causes for Edward’s death, far more than one would guess nowadays from the almost inevitable statements by non-specialists that Edward was killed by having a red-hot poker inserted inside him.
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This is emphatically not a certain historical fact. The
Annales Paulini
simply say that Edward died at Berkeley, the
Anonimalle
(whose author knew about the Dunheveds’ plot to free Edward) says he died of an illness, and several continuations of the French Brut claim that he died
de grant dolour
, ‘of great sorrow’.
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Adam Murimuth thought at first that Edward had been murdered ‘by a trick’ and later wrote that he had been suffocated, and the Bridlington chronicler wrote that he did not believe the rumours which were current regarding Edward’s death, presumably a reference to the infamous poker story.
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Lanercost
in the 1340s says that Edward died ‘either by a natural death or by the violence of others’, while the
Scalacronica
says, rather movingly, that Edward died ‘by what manner was not known, but God knows it’.
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A few chroniclers only say that Edward died at Berkeley, without further explanation; the
French Chronicle of London
says he was ‘vilely murdered’ but doesn’t say how; the Wigmore chronicler was sure he died of natural causes; the Lichfield chronicler says he was strangled; and the Peterborough chronicler that he was well in the evening but dead by the morning.
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Chroniclers who give the ‘red-hot poker’ story include Ranulph Higden’s
Polychronicon
of
c
. 1350 and the
Brut
,
though the best-known account is Geoffrey le Baker’s, of the 1350s:

These cruel bullies, seeing that death by foetid odour would not overcome so vigorous a man, during the night of 22 [
sic
] September, suddenly seized hold of him as he lay on his bed. With the aid of enormous pillows and a weight heavier than that of fifteen substantial men they pressed down upon him until he was suffocated. With a plumber’s red-hot iron, inserted through a horn leading to the inmost parts of the bowel, they burned out the respiratory organs beyond the intestines, taking care that no wound should be discernible on the royal body…
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Baker goes on to say that Edward’s screams penetrated the walls of the castle to Berkeley village beyond, where many of the inhabitants fell to their knees and prayed on hearing the dreadful sound. The ludicrousness of this scenario – why bother with a red-hot poker when you have fifteen men and enormous pillows and could simply suffocate the victim? – did not stop writers of later decades repeating the story. Near the end of the fourteenth century, the writer John Trevisa, chaplain of Berkeley, translated the
Polychronicon
into English, and copied the poker story without comment. It is sometimes argued that Trevisa must have known this story was accurate, as he grew up in the village of Berkeley and was a small boy there at the time of Edward’s death, served Edward’s custodian Thomas, Lord Berkeley as chaplain and must have heard him confess to the murder, and would therefore not have translated the passage without comment had he known it to be untrue. This is all false. Trevisa came from Cornwall, and wasn’t born until around 1342, fifteen years after Edward’s alleged murder.
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The Thomas, Lord Berkeley he served as chaplain was not Edward’s custodian of 1327 but his grandson of the same name, who was born in 1353 and died in 1417. Trevisa did not arrive at Berkeley until 1388, long after the death of Edward’s custodian and more than sixty years after Edward’s supposed murder. He had no more knowledge about it than anyone else, and no more than Higden, author of the
Polychronicon
, who was a monk of Chester, 160 miles from Berkeley.

There are many reasons to reject the lurid, sensationalist story of the red-hot poker, despite its frequent repetition in the centuries since 1327. Firstly, the assumed reason for this grotesque method was to kill Edward without leaving a mark on his body – as stated by Baker and repeated numerous times ever since. Yet Baker also says that the villagers of Berkeley heard Edward’s screams. It makes no sense to avoid leaving marks on Edward’s body, yet ensure that the manner of death was so agonising that he screamed loudly, so that the nearby villagers would have known that he was being murdered. Secondly, it is not at all certain that this method would kill a person quickly; it might take hours or days for the victim to die. Thirdly, there was no reason for Gurney and Ockley to use such a pointlessly sadistic method which they couldn’t have known beforehand would work, when much easier and tried and tested methods were at hand. Something as terrible as killing a king would surely have required them to use the easiest, quickest and most effective method they could devise. Roger Mortimer had escaped from the Tower in 1323 by drugging his guards, and knew how to procure sedatives. Gurney and Ockley could have drugged Edward and smothered him, or given him enough sedation that he would never wake up. It is doubtful that anyone would have recognised any signs of smothering on Edward’s dead body. Strangulation would probably have left marks around the neck, but these could have easily been covered up. Fourthly, the red-hot poker story seems a bit too convenient, as a ‘fitting’ punishment for Edward’s presumed sexual acts with men. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, various manuscripts circulated about the death of Edmund Ironside (died 1016), who was supposed to have been murdered on the privy with a dagger inserted inside his bowels, and Edward’s own brother-in-law the earl of Hereford had been killed at Boroughbridge with a pike thrust inside his anus.
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These stories could have been seized on in the common imagination as a likely cause of the former king’s death.

For a month, from 21 September to 20 October, Edward of Caernarfon’s body lay in the chapel of Berkeley Castle guarded and looked after by only one man: a royal sergeant-at-arms named William Beaukaire, who was presumably a Frenchman, as Beaucaire is a town near Avignon. Beaukaire was a decidedly odd choice for the duty. Six months earlier, he had been one of the garrison who held out at Hugh Despenser’s castle of Caerphilly against the queen for four months, for which he was pardoned with the rest in March 1327.
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Among his comrades in the castle were former members of Edward II’s household and Roger atte Watre of the Dunheved gang, also a royal sergeant-at-arms, by now probably dead, in prison or in hiding for his role in freeing the former king. Beaukaire seems to have arrived at Berkeley shortly before Edward’s death.
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Precisely why, of all people, a man who had been an adherent of Edward and Despenser arrived at Berkeley around the time Edward was supposedly murdered is uncertain, and why he was the only man watching the body for an entire month is also a difficult question to answer. Even if Beaukaire had completely renounced his former allegiance and was demonstrating his fervent loyalty to the new regime by participating in Edward’s murder, it is odd that, of all the men who could have been sent to guard Edward of Caernarfon’s body, a former presumed Despenser adherent should have been chosen.

Royal clerk and chronicler Adam Murimuth says that many knights, abbots, priors and burgesses of Bristol and Gloucester came to see Edward’s body ‘by invitation’.
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Unfortunately, he doesn’t give their names, specify what ‘many’ means – ten, fifty, a hundred? – whether they came all at once or individually or in small groups, whether they viewed the body at Berkeley Castle or after it had been moved to Gloucester a month later, or the motives for the invitation: to make sure that Edward was really dead, to identify the body as his, or merely as a ceremonial duty to mark the passing of a former king. We may assume that at least some of these men would have known Edward by sight. None of his own family, however, visited Berkeley to view the body. The Berkeley family historian John Smyth, writing in the early seventeenth century, claimed that Thomas Gurney returned from court with orders to keep Edward’s death a secret locally until 1 November 1327.
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Whether that is true or not, it is highly unlikely that Thomas Berkeley would have started circulating news of Edward’s death until he knew the young king had been informed. This means that he had to wait for at least a week – Thomas Gurney returned to Berkeley Castle from Lincoln on or shortly before 29 September – before sending out messengers inviting the abbots, knights and others to Berkeley to view Edward’s body. A week for Lord Berkeley to be sure that Edward III knew of the death, several days for messengers to ride to Gloucester and Bristol, several more days for the witnesses to receive the message and travel to Berkeley – assuming that is where the viewing took place – means that at least two weeks passed after Edward’s death before any independent observer could have seen his body. Murimuth claims that the men saw the body whole (
integrum
), which seems unlikely, as it is reasonable to assume that Edward was embalmed soon after death, if only to prevent bodily decay; Edward III was embalmed immediately after death in 1377. We know for certain that Edward II’s heart was removed during the embalming process, as Thomas Berkeley bought a silver casket in which to place it and send it to the queen, and it was not a royal physician who performed the embalming but a local woman, whose name is lost to history. (Heart removal was an entirely normal practice in royal burials at this time.) Payment for embalming materials appears on Thomas Berkeley’s household rolls for the period ending 28 September.
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Therefore, Edward’s body was most probably not ‘whole’. Adam Murimuth’s most controversial statement, however, is that the knights, abbots and others observed (
conspexissent
) Edward’s body superficially,
superficialiter
. Precisely what Murimuth was trying to convey with this statement is frustratingly unclear. Royal embalming involved covering the body with cerecloth, or wax-impregnated linen, including the face.
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We cannot say for sure whether the men saw Edward’s face, and ‘superficially’ implies they were only permitted a brief or distant glance at the body.

On 21 October 1327, Edward’s body was taken in state on a black-covered carriage the fifteen miles from Berkeley Castle to Gloucester, where it had been decided that he would be buried. Other men stayed with the body from this time: one was the bishop of Llandaff, John Eaglescliff, a Dominican friar. Given Edward’s great and reciprocated affection for the Dominican order, this was a thoughtful gesture, perhaps by Edward III or Isabella. Others were two royal knights, two chaplains, two royal sergeants and Andrew, a candle-maker, and William Beaukaire also stayed with the body until the day of the funeral.
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Edward’s body remained unburied at St Peter’s Abbey (now Gloucester Cathedral) for two months. It originally lay on a hearse brought from London, but from 24 November was moved to a special one newly built, which had four gilded lions and standing figures of the four evangelists, and was decorated by eight incense-burners in the forms of angels and two more lions.
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Eight hundred gold leaves were bought to gild a leopard decorating the cover lying over Edward’s body, with more purchased to decorate leopards on to standards, banners and horse coverings.
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The body lay in a coffin and was not visible to the public: a wooden image or effigy in Edward’s likeness wearing a copper gilt crown and the robes he had worn to his coronation was used instead. Forty shillings was paid for the carving of the wooden image, and oak barriers were placed around the hearse to keep the crowds away.
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The visitors did not and could not have seen Edward’s face or body.