Edward II: The Unconventional King (47 page)

Very little is known about Edward’s funeral of 20 December 1327 itself, as no details survive, except that it cost over £350.
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The three-month delay since his death was normal: his father died on 7 July 1307 and was buried on 27 October, and his widow Isabella died on 22 August 1358 and was buried on 27 November. What was highly unusual was the use of the wooden effigy, the first time one is known to have been used in a royal burial in western European history.
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Edward III, now fifteen, his mother Isabella and Roger Mortimer certainly attended. Edward II’s younger half-brother Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, and niece Elizabeth de Burgh, were there, and so presumably were his other half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, his cousin Henry of Lancaster, many other magnates and prelates, and perhaps Edward’s younger children John, Eleanor and Joan. Roger Mortimer had himself a new black tunic made for the occasion. Three years later, he would be dragged to his execution wearing it.
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After Edward of Caernarfon’s funeral, Edward III, Queen Isabella, Roger Mortimer and the court moved on to Worcester. In January 1328, Isabella summoned the woman who had embalmed her husband’s body to her, though to what purpose and what the woman said to her is not known.

Normally, when a man’s body lies in state for two months and his funeral takes place in the presence of dozens or hundreds of people, including his own family, we know that his life has ended and may bring our account of it to a close. But for Edward II, that most unconventional, complex and contradictory of men, nothing could ever be that simple.

Edward was not dead.

On 14 January 1330, William Melton, archbishop of York and a long-term friend and ally of Edward II (whom he had known well since at least 1297), sent an extraordinary letter to the mayor of London, Simon Swanland.
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Begging Swanland to keep what he wrote secret, Melton told him,

We have certain news of our liege lord Edward of Caernarfon, that he is alive and in good health of body, in a safe place at his own wish [or command] … We beg you as dearly as we trust in you that you procure for us a loan of £200 in gold, if you can have it, for the comfort of and in secret, taken to the said lord for us, and that you obtain two half cloths of different colours, good cloth and intimate clothing and good fur of miniver for six garments and three hoods of miniver, and two coverlets of different colours of the larger size, with the hangings, and two belts and two bags, the best that you can find for sale, and twenty ells of linen cloth, and send for his Cordovan leather so that we have six pairs of shoes and two pairs of boots, and have the above-mentioned things bundled up together … and come to us as soon as you can to advise us how we will procure such a great sum of money for the said lord, as we wish that he may be helped as far as we and you are able to arrange…

The archbishop was so certain Edward of Caernarfon was alive that he ordered provisions for him, the focus on clothing explained by Swanland being a draper who had often supplied cloth to Edward’s household. Melton was far from being the only person utterly convinced of the former king’s survival years after his funeral. Edward’s half-brother the earl of Kent was executed in March 1330 after admitting to parliament that he had attempted to free Edward from Corfe Castle in Dorset. Many men joined Kent’s conspiracy and were either arrested or fled the country, and the plan had advanced far enough that arrangements had been made for Edward to be transferred by boat from Corfe along the coast to Kent’s castle of Arundel in Sussex. In late 1329, Edward’s Scottish friend Donald, earl of Mar, promised to come to England with an army to effect Edward’s release. Some of the men who aided the earl of Kent and the archbishop of York’s plans to free Edward sought refuge with Edward’s nephew the duke of Brabant and plotted an invasion of England, intending to land near Scotland with Mar’s help. Proclamations were issued declaring that anyone who stated that the former king was alive would be arrested, and half the country was wondering if it was true. Many people in Wales supported Rhys ap Gruffydd, one of the men who firmly believed that Edward was still alive, and the earl of Kent’s adherents were thought to be particularly numerous in East Anglia. In short, many people in England, Wales, Scotland and on the Continent strongly believed that Edward of Caernarfon was alive years after his alleged death and were, in various ways, attempting to help him.

Exactly what happened to whom at Berkeley Castle in September 1327 will never be known for certain. A body was shown ‘superficially’ to a group of knights, abbots and burgesses, and was buried at Gloucester on 20 December 1327. The body was never visually displayed to the public, as the face was (almost certainly) covered in waxed cloth and the body encased in a coffin, with a covering decorated with a gilded leopard and a wooden effigy on top of it. Even at Edward’s funeral, it seems apparent that his face was not uncovered, even to his family and friends, as his brother Kent and the archbishop of York were later completely convinced that he was alive.
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It is reasonable to assume that Kent was not satisfied that anyone else had seen Edward’s face and body closely enough to identify him properly either. As the earl, in attempting to free the supposedly dead king in 1329/30, must have known that he might suffer grave penalties for his actions (as he did; he was beheaded), he would hardly have acted the way he did without being entirely certain that neither he nor anyone else had seen Edward dead. The same applies to Archbishop Melton, and to knights of south-west England, such as Ingelram Berenger and Nicholas Dauney, who may have attended Edward’s funeral in Gloucester and may have been among the men previously invited to see his body ‘superficially’, and who joined Kent and the archbishop in 1329/30.

William Melton’s letter tantalises with the things he did not say: where Edward was, whether contact had been made with him directly, what happened at Berkeley in September 1327, how Edward was safe at his own wish or command, which implies that he somehow had control of his current situation. Probably Melton thought it imprudent to commit these details to parchment and told his messenger William Cliff – perhaps the man of this name who was once Hugh Despenser’s attorney – to inform Swanland orally. His request to Swanland to have the £200 secretly ‘taken to the said lord for us’ implies that he knew how to gain access to Edward and that his messenger informed Swanland of the location. Melton must have had what he thought was extremely convincing evidence of Edward’s survival to write such a letter, and he pledged the vast sum of £5,000 and declared that he would sell everything he owned, except for one vestment and one chalice, to help the former king. When interrogated in April 1330 about his part in the affair, Melton said that he had heard from a William Kingsclere on 10 October 1329 that Edward was alive. Kingsclere is hard to trace, and Melton did not state what proof he furnished, but obviously the archbishop found it plausible and compelling. The earl of Kent’s confession as recorded by Adam Murimuth says that a friar who raised the devil informed him that Edward II was alive.
Lanercost
names this friar as none other than Thomas Dunheved.
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It is impossible that men such as the bishop of London and the numerous others would have supported Kent on the strength of a devil-raising friar, so either this bizarre detail was inserted into the confession to discredit Kent, or he himself invented it to protect his real source.

Melton asking Swanland for £200 in gold, in limited circulation in England but useful on the Continent, indicates that the plan was not to try to restore Edward to the throne, at least not yet, but to send him somewhere abroad. Where this might have been is a matter for speculation: perhaps Ireland, where a letter of the 1330s claims he did in fact go after escaping from Berkeley; Castile, his mother’s homeland; Scotland, where he could count on the support of Robert Bruce’s nephew the earl of Mar; the papal court in Avignon, where the 1330s letter also says he went; or Brabant, where his sister Margaret still lived and his nephew ruled, and where some of the men plotting on his behalf in 1330 gathered. Duke John III of Brabant allowed Kent to meet two of his supporters in his chamber in Paris.
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It is also unclear what the purpose was of sending Edward overseas: to keep him hidden away in secret, to give him an opportunity to raise an army, or to use his presence abroad to threaten Isabella and Mortimer in some way.

Kent believed his half-brother to be at Corfe Castle. It seems almost certain that Edward was indeed held at Corfe at some point. Adam Murimuth states ‘Edward was secretly removed from Berkeley by night and taken to Corfe and other secret places’. The
Brut
author believed he was murdered at Corfe.
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The association of Edward of Caernarfon with Corfe is very strong, and that Edward was outside Berkeley at some point is confirmed by the castle records, which say that one Henry Pecche was his guardian ‘at Berkeley and elsewhere’. In September 1327, Edward’s joint legal custodian John Maltravers was paid over £258 from Berkeley Castle accounts for ‘services to the king’s father in Dorset’, and received letters from Lord Berkeley at Corfe.
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More than seventy named men aided the earl of Kent in his plot to free Edward of Caernarfon in 1329/30 and presumably shared his belief in Edward’s survival, and the searches for his adherents across the south of England and Wales, recorded in the chancery rolls, indicate that the true number was far higher than this. Simon Swanland’s role was never discovered, and Melton and his messenger William Cliff kept quiet about his involvement. Many others, however, were arrested between March and August 1330, or fled the country. They included the earl of Buchan, the bishop and a former sheriff of London, Edward’s nephew Edward Monthermer, his great-nephew, Hugh Despenser’s eldest son Huchon (in prison at Bristol Castle), numerous men who had been in Edward’s household, former adherents of the Despensers including Hugh’s confessor Richard Bliton, Rhys ap Gruffydd and Sir Gruffydd Llwyd’s son Ieuan, lords, knights, sheriffs, clerks, squires, chaplains, friars, monks, merchants, and men so obscure they cannot be traced. Even Thomas Wake, who played a vital role in Edward II’s deposition in January 1327, joined the plot and had fled from England by 4 April 1330. William la Zouche, one of the men who captured Edward and Hugh Despenser on 16 November 1326, was another Kent supporter, and told the earl that freeing Edward ‘would be the greatest honour that ever befell him’.
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The majority of the men, however, had once been close and loyal to Edward II, and thus it is likely that they genuinely believed in his survival and wanted to help him. The participation of Stephen Dunheved, a fanatical supporter of Edward imprisoned at Newgate prison for trying to rescue him in 1327, suggests he truly believed Edward was alive, as does the participation of Edward’s close friend William, abbot of Langdon and many of his former servants and other friends, such as William Aune, Peter Bernard, John Harsik, Roger Audley, Adam Wetinhale, William Marenny, Giles of Spain, John de Toucestre and John Coupland. Kent has often unfairly been condemned as stupid and gullible by modern historians unable otherwise to explain his plot in the light of their certainty that Edward of Caernarfon was dead.
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Kent was not stupid, and even if he were, Archbishop Melton, Bishop Stephen Gravesend of London, the earl of Mar and the countless others who shared his belief and acted on it were not.

Kent’s supporter Ingelram Berenger, a Somerset knight pardoned for adherence to the Despensers in 1327, went to the earl to tell him that Sir John Pecche of Warwickshire would help the plot in any way he could.
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This is highly significant, because Pecche was constable of Corfe Castle until replaced by John Maltravers on 24 September 1329. He also had links to Thomas and Stephen Dunheved’s brother John.
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Clearly Pecche was in an excellent position to know the truth of Edward of Caernarfon’s incarceration at the castle, and would not have joined the earl of Kent’s plot to free him, with his son Nicholas, had he not been entirely sure that Edward was alive there – something which was easily within in his power to check.

The men trying to free Edward in 1330 were punished when the plot came to light. The earl of Kent died for it. Archbishop Melton, Bishop Gravesend and others were indicted before King’s Bench. Many men were imprisoned and their lands and goods seized; Sir William Cleydon died in prison, and John Pecche was one of those who lost all his lands and goods. Others fled the country and did not return until Edward III took over governance of his own kingdom. These men did not act on a whim, or because they were gullible and stupid; they were sure that the former king was alive and risked a great deal to free him. Donald of Mar was even willing to bring an army to England to help his friend, and promised the archbishop of York that he would raise 40,000 men, an impossibly large number (almost three times the size of Edward II’s army at Bannockburn), but Mar’s exaggeration demonstrates his determination to help Edward.
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If a large number of influential people firmly believed in Edward II’s survival and acted on it despite the grave penalties they knew they would suffer in case of failure, then clearly there is an extremely high chance that Edward was indeed alive. A common modern explanation for the plot by writers convinced that he was dead by then is that the men who took part in it did not really believe he was alive, but were merely expressing their dissatisfaction with the regime of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer. They didn’t need to pretend belief in the former king’s survival to do that. Henry of Lancaster and many allies rebelled against the pair in late 1328 without using his cousin’s name, and Richard Fitzalan, son of the executed earl of Arundel, attempted to raise an army against them in June 1330 also without mentioning Edward. William Melton’s letter to Simon Swanland begged the latter not to reveal the startling news to ‘any man or woman of the world’, hardly the words of a man trying to start an uprising in the former king’s name, and if everyone had known for sure that Edward II was dead, invoking his name in a rebellion – even if it perhaps provided a useful rallying call – would not have threatened Mortimer and Isabella. Henry of Lancaster was not tried for treason and executed or imprisoned in 1329 for raising an army and openly rebelling against the Crown, yet somehow the earl of Kent had to be beheaded for trying to free a dead man. Henry of Lancaster himself told the mayor of London John de Grantham on 5 November 1328 that Kent had told him certain things which he could not put into writing, but of which his messenger would inform the mayor orally.
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