GREAT UNSOLVED CRIMES (True Crime) by Rodney Castleden Read Free Book Online

elsewhere. Later he was to make much of this absence, when he found himself on trial, and it may well be that he deliberately distanced himself from his prisoner because he knew what was to follow and did not want to be blamed for it. If so, he must take his share of culpability for Edward’s death. By providing his castle and washing his hands of the ex-king’s fate, he was as guilty as the assassins.
    It is not clear whether Queen Isabella or Mortimer – or the two of them together – had decided to have Edward killed from the start. Certainly at least one of them came to this decision after there was an attempt to rescue Edward. Obviously, all the while he lived he might be reinstated. In later years, this proved to be the problem with Henry VI, who was deposed, then reinstated, then deposed and murdered. It was foreseeable. It was too risky to let Edward live. The initial orders, which probably emanated directly from Mortimer or Isabella, were to keep Edward in such poor living conditions that he would just die of neglect. But this reckoned without Edward’s strong constitution; he went on living, and so the living conditions were made even worse. Still he would not die. Finally, he was held down and a red-hot poker inserted into his bowels – a slow and agonizing death that would leave no outward mark on his body.
    On the night of 21 September 1327, the inmates of Berkeley Castle were terrified by shrieks coming from the king’s apartment. The next day the king was found dead. His body was put on display in Gloucester and people were encouraged to go and see the body. Roger Mortimer wanted everyone to believe that the deposed king really was dead and could never regain the throne. The citizens of Gloucester were rounded up to view this unceremonious lying-in-state, but they were kept a good distance back from the corpse. Was this because there were, after all, some tell-tale marks of violence on the body? Or was it because the body smelt so awful?
    Given the peculiar circumstances of Edward’s forced abdication, some people have inevitably proposed that the official version of his demise was fabricated. They suggest that Edward II was not killed at Berkeley Castle at all, but was instead rescued and lived out the rest of his life abroad. The body briefly displayed and then buried in a royal tomb at Gloucester might have been a substitute: a body, yes, but someone else’s. That might be the reason why the crowd was kept at a distance. Mortimer’s men did not want to risk someone spotting that it was not the body of Edward II. In the middle ages, ordinary people did not see their king very often, and there were no press photographs to make the king a familiar figure. Passing off a corpse of approximately the right build and hair colour would have been fairly easy.
    There was a significant delay before Edward’s funeral took place on 20 December 1327, but that can be explained by the military expedition in Scotland. One reason for believing that Edward lived on is that some of his contemporaries believed it. Edmund, Earl of Kent, said that Edward still lived and was imprisoned at Corfe Castle. There was even a plot to free him from Corfe, which led to arrests, treason trials and executions. The Earl of Kent himself was executed in 1330. Another piece of evidence that Edward survived is a letter dating from 1337, written by the papal notary Fieschi. Fieschi claimed in this letter that he actually met Edward II in Italy, describing his life on the run until he ended up at a monastery near Milan. The document could be a forgery, but there is no reason to think so; Fieschi may have been exaggerating when he said he met the ex-king, but the possibility remains that the story about Edward’s macabre death at Berkeley Castle was a sensational cover-up, designed by Roger Mortimer and Isabella to bring Edward’s supporters to heel. If Edward was dead, he was literally a lost cause.
    The case has to be left open, at least