Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II Read Online Free PDF Page A

need horses. Even if the security had been as light as Fieschi’s letter describes, the escape would have been noticed, the hue and cry raised and a full pursuit organized.
    The said knights, who had come to kill him, seeing that he had escaped, and fearing the Queen’s anger, for fear of their lives decided to put the porter in a chest, having first cut out the heart. The heart and the body of the said porter they presented to the wicked queen as if it were the body of your fatherand the body of the porter was buried in Glocestart [Gloucester] as the body of the King.
    The reaction of Beresford and Gurney to the escape beggars belief. They are not bothered about an escaped king wandering the highways and byways of Gloucestershire but about what Queen Isabella might do or say. If indeed they did replace the King’s body with the porter’s, they would have needed the connivance and co-operation of others in Berkeley Castle, including Lord Thomas, John Maltravers and other knights and guards. They would also have needed to be extremely fortunate in managing to secure a corpse which, by sheer luck, resembled the dead King. This part of the story can be dismissed out of hand except for one fascinating detail: the business of the King’s heart. The clerk Hugh Glanville supervised the funeral arrangements of Edward of Caernarvon. He had to pay a woman, probably from the locality, for embalming the body, removing the heart and then taking it to Isabella. Nevertheless, as shall be shown later, this was done under great secrecy, and Glanville even tried to ‘doctor’ his account to hide what this woman had done – it only came to light because of some scrupulous clerk at the Exchequer. The only other source of the story of the heart are the Berkeley accounts, which describe how Lord Thomas bought the special casket for the heart to be taken to the Queen. Fieschi, amidst his farrago of possible untruths, has specified one correct factual detail to strengthen his credibility in the eyes of Edward III. True, the story of the heart being removed may have eventually become public knowledge, but Fieschi was writing during Isabella’s lifetime when such details were still a matter ofsecrecy. Glanville did not present his account until 1335, eight years after the murder.
    After he had escaped the prison of the aforesaid castle he was received at Corf [Corfe] castle together with his companion, who had guarded him in prison, by Lord Thomas, castellan of the said castle without the knowledge of Lord John Maltraverse, the lord of the said Thomas, in which castle he remained secretly for a year and a half.
    Corfe Castle in Dorset has figured prominently in the captivity of Edward II. The deposed King was taken there before he was placed in Berkeley. Edmund of Kent truly believed that Corfe was his half-brother’s hiding-place. This part of Fieschi’s story, however, must be taken with more than a pinch of salt. In his account there is no reference to the Dunheved gang or to the other conspiracies and covens being formed in Buckinghamshire or Wales. Instead, we are presented with a picture of the liberated king, not pursued by horsemen or Mortimer’s hordes, but travelling through the English countryside, arriving at Corfe, disguised as a hermit, and staying there eighteen months. It could be argued, if the story were true, that Edward might well have chosen a place his pursuers would least suspect, under their very noses, but it was a highly dangerous ruse and very unlikely. The deposed Edward II had friends and partisans all over England. He could have called on men like Rhys Ap Griffith to hide him in the fastness of Wales and spirit him abroad to France, Spain, or wherever else he wished to go. Or there was the Dominican Order, with its international network ofhouses, which would have provided a marvellous chain of escape for the deposed King. Others, too, would have helped but Edward apparently ignored them, according to