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

before landing.
     
Commandment was sent by one called Lea,
He should be beheaded forthwith on the sea:
Alack and alack and alas did he cry,
That ever we forced King Edward to die.
Thus was Sir Thomas despatched of life,
In coming to visit his sorrowful wife.
     
    Maltravers was accused of murdering Edward, acquitted, but later executed for committing a similar crime elsewhere. On balance it looks as if Berkeley knew beforehand what was going to happen in his castle, had qualms about regicide and made himself scarce so that later he could not be accused of murdering the king. All of those concerned in the plot except Gourney were eventually given formal pardons, which tells us nothing about their guilt. Gourney, Ogle and Maltravers were most likely the regicides, the men who actually carried out the murder that, if reported accurately, must rank among the cruellest in history.
    These regicides could not conceivably have acted on their own initiative, though. They must have been acting on instructions. The order to do away with Edward can only have come from Roger Mortimer or Queen Isabella. Ultimately the responsibility for Edward’s death must be theirs. What is still not known is the specific nature of the instructions. They could have been explicit, expressed in the form, ‘The king must die.’ Or they could have been expressed more ambiguously, leaving no doubt in Lord Berkeley’s mind that he was expected to oversee the demise of the unwanted king, yet also enabling Mortimer and the queen the option of protesting later that that was not what they had wanted. Queen Isabella was certainly capable of that level of duplicity and cunning, as her histrionic and totally insincere reaction to Berkeley’s news of her husband’s death showed. It is very unlikely, given the exalted status of the ex-king, that Ogle, Gourney and Maltravers took it upon themselves to decide to kill him on their own initiative. Some order from above must have been given, whatever form of words was used. In assassination conspiracies of this kind, it is often possible to identify the assassins, but nearly always impossible to prove the identity of the instigators.
    The highest level political assassination conspiracies of recent decades have been three-layered conspiracies. The three-layered conspiracy consists of a small team of assassins, an intermediary organization or middle man behind them and, carefully distancing itself from the operation, an originator. This was the structure used in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, with Mehmet Ali Agca and Oral Celik as the gunmen, a Bulgarian organization in the middle and the KGB as the originator of the plot. This structure means that even if the assassins are apprehended and identified the identity of the originator is protected. In the case of Edward II, we have probably identified the assassins correctly (Ogle, Gourney and Maltravers) and can be fairly sure that the plot originated with either Isabella or Mortimer (or both jointly). From his behaviour, Lord Berkeley may well have been the middle man.

The Princes In The Tower

     
    The uncrowned King Edward V and his brother Richard duke of York were the two young sons and heirs of Edward IV, the king of England from 1471 until April 1483. They are remembered as ‘the Princes in the Tower’ and are generally believed to have been murdered in the Tower of London in the summer of 1483. It is also generally assumed that they were murdered on the orders of their uncle, Richard, who then had himself crowned as Richard III.
    When Edward IV died, suddenly and unexpectedly, he left his two sons as heirs at a vulnerable age. Prince Edward was twelve and his brother Richard was nine. Edward’s conscientiously loyal younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester acted quickly to take the two boys into his protection, and that action has always been susceptible of two interpretations. He may