Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II (19 page)

The adherents of Edward III stoutly protested their innocence, except Montague who, loyal to the last, cleverly
asserted that he would do nothing inconsistent in his duty to the King.
¹⁰
The depth of Mortimer’s arrogance, and his true intentions, are revealed in the Marcher Lord’s reply. He made the startling declaration that, if anything the King said or did conflicted with what Mortimer wanted, then the King was not to be obeyed.
¹¹
Montague, delighted by this, immediately returned to the King and reported the entire proceedings. He depicted Mortimer as greater than the Crown, urging Edward to act, summing up the situation pithily: ‘It would be better to eat the dog than let the dog eat us.’ Edward, probably fearful for his mother, was reluctant to act. Moreover, Isabella and Mortimer had commandeered the castle and it would be very difficult to effect a
coup
.
¹²

According to Swynbroke and local legend, Montague offered the King a way of staging his successful
coup
through a secret entrance into the castle, still called ‘Mortimer’s Cavern or Tunnel’. Although a secret entrance would get the plotters into the castle, it would still be thronged with Mortimer’s henchmen. Accordingly, Edward summoned the Constable Robert Eland and, through a mixture of threats and promises, brought him into the conspiracy against Mortimer. The Constable agreed to force a postern gate open so that Montague and a group of knights could enter.
¹³
Just before dark on 19 October 1330, Montague and his band of conspirators appeared to panic and flee from Nottingham. Under the cover of darkness, they reassembled, armed to the teeth, in the park outside the castle. They stayed there for a while. Others were supposed to join them but later claimed they’d got lost. In reality they had panicked and decided to stay on the sidelines to watch developments.
¹⁴

Montague decided to strike. He and twenty-three companions stole through the unbarred postern gate and crossed the outer and inner baileys to the door of the keep where Isabella and Mortimer were lodged. Here they were joined by the King. The door to the keep was opened and they crept up the steps.
¹⁵
High in the keep, in a room adjoining Isabella’s, Mortimer had assembled a meeting of his clique, which included the Queen, the Bishop of Lincoln and others, to discuss measures to arrest Montague and the other suspects. The noise of the attacking force brought this council meeting to an abrupt end.

Sir Hugh Turplington, one of Mortimer’s henchmen, raised the alarm and with others rushed down to attack the King’s party, screaming ‘Treason! Treason!’. A short but very violent dagger and sword fight broke out on the stairs. Turplington had his brains dashed out; another, Richard Monmouth, was cut down. The rest surrendered. Mortimer had barred the door and was busy arming himself when the King, Montague and their party burst in. Mortimer and Beresford put up a short struggle but were arrested immediately. Henry Burghesh, Bishop of Lincoln, made a vain and inglorious attempt to escape down a privy but got stuck and was hauled out. Isabella threw herself at her son’s feet, screaming: ‘
Ayez pitie! Ayez pitie à gentil Mortimer
!’.
¹⁶

The
coup
had been brilliantly successful. News of Mortimer’s arrest created panic: the castle was now thronged with the young King’s knights and the adherents of Mortimer and Isabella made themselves scarce. Edward immediately sent messages to Lancaster, inviting him to bring his troops back into the city. Lancaster hurried to obey, overjoyed at Mortimer’s fall. Edward wished to
carry out a summary execution there and then but Lancaster persuaded him not to act like a tyrant but to have the Welsh lord tried by his peers.
¹⁷
Mortimer, together with Beresford and a few others, was brought to Leicester and then sent south under a guard of a hundred men to be lodged in the Tower. Isabella, beside herself with grief, was treated with more consideration and placed under house arrest at Berkhampsted.
¹⁸

On the morning of 20 October a proclamation was issued, announcing the downfall of Isabella and Mortimer and summoning a Parliament to meet at Westminster on 26 November, where the King could hear grievances against Mortimer and his cohorts.
¹⁹
The administration was purged, but no real punitive action was taken except against Mortimer and a few others. The Westminster Parliament reconvened at the end of November. Mortimer was brought from the Tower and summoned to the bar of the House. He was dressed appropriately in a mantle with the words: ‘
QUID GLORIARIS?
’ (‘Where is your glory?’) inscribed on it. He was bound, gagged and given no chance to speak during his trial.

Justice was swift. Mortimer was charged on fourteen counts: he was held directly responsible for the murder of Edward II, the death of Edmund of Kent and of creating discord between Edward II and Queen Isabella. Parliament and the kingdom were given the general drift of the King’s intentions. Mortimer was the source of all wickedness and Edward’s parents, especially his ‘Dearest Mother’ Isabella, were simply casualties of this. Mortimer was judged guilty, sentenced to be hanged and handed over to the Earl Marshal to carry out the sentence.
²⁰

On 29 November 1330, the disgraced Earl, dressed in
the same black mantle he had worn at Edward II’s funeral, a potent jibe at his hypocrisy, was dragged at the tail of a horse from the Lion Gate of the Tower to the Elms at Tyburn.
²¹
Alongside him rode some of his fiercest opponents, chanting verses from Psalm 51.
²²
At Tyburn, Mortimer, probably in return for the King’s leniency in not sentencing him to be quartered and disembowelled, addressed the crowds. He mentioned nothing about the Queen or the death of Edward II, but openly confessed that the Earl of Kent had been the victim of a cruel conspiracy.
²³
Sentence was then carried out. Mortimer’s body was left to hang naked for two days and nights before being handed over to the Friars Minor for burial in their church at Grey Friars near St Paul’s.
²⁴
Parliament also passed sentence on Simon Beresford, who was found guilty ‘by common repute’ of a number of crimes, chief of which was being Mortimer’s principal accomplice. Beresford was executed on 21 December. He was the only adherent of Mortimer to suffer the full rigour of the law. Maltravers, Bayouse, Deverel, Ockle and Gurney had all fled, so sentence of death was passed upon them ‘in absentia’ and rewards fixed for their capture, dead or alive.
²⁵

These summary sentences provide an insight into who was held responsible for which crimes. Maltravers, Bayouse and Deverel were not accused of being involved in the murder of Edward II but of enticing the Earl of Kent to his death. The only two singled out as regicides were Thomas Gurney and William Ockle: ‘For the death of King Edward, father of Our Lord the King who is now, that they falsely and traitorously murdered him.’ Even then a distinction was made:
£
100 for Gurney captured alive, for his head only, 100 marks; and for Ockle, 100 marks alive and
whoever brought in his head,
£
40.
²⁶
The rewards were enticing enough for those who wished to make a quick profit, but the sly, versatile and mendacious Thomas, Lord of Berkeley, played a decisive hand in the escape of these wanted men.
²⁷
Berkeley, too, should have expected to suffer the full rigours of the law. After all, he was Mortimer’s henchman, related to him by marriage, and he had been directly responsible for the custody of Edward II.

Lord Thomas was not at Nottingham when Mortimer was arrested but at Berkeley. He made no attempt to flee and, when summoned to answer before the November Parliament, came to London to present his defence. By then the King must have guessed what had happened to his father. Mortimer had been arrested on 19 October but he was not executed until 29 November. The condemnations of Beresford, Maltravers, Gurney and Ockle and the rest were not drawn up until the same date. It is curious that Edward III waited over five weeks before ordering the arrest of his father’s killers. Indeed, it was not until 3 December that the warrants were sworn out for the arrest of those who had enticed Kent to his death, as well as of the two regicides, Gurney and Ockle. Beresford also spent almost two months in the Tower before execution was carried out. It is likely that the King’s agents used this delay to interrogate prisoners but it also gave the other condemned men at least six weeks to escape from the kingdom and flee abroad.
²⁸
Possibly Edward III was keener to see the back of these people rather than their heads on poles over London Bridge.

But Berkeley’s conduct was audacious in the extreme. He turned up in Parliament, heard the allegations levelled against him and was asked for an explanation. Berkeley’s
reply was as follows: ‘He said that he had never been consenting to the King’s death nor had he assisted the murderers or done anything to procure that death. Indeed, he never even knew about that death until the present Parliament.’
²⁹
While conceding he was Lord of Berkeley Castle, and that the old King had been imprisoned there, but under the direct supervision of Thomas Gurney and John Maltravers, he, Berkeley, denied any responsibility for what had happened when the old King had been killed. Moreover, he had not been in Berkeley Castle at the time, but so ill he had been recuperating at his nearby manor of Bradley. He then took an oath on this and a whole troop of his friends turned up to swear a similar oath that Thomas Berkeley could not have been guilty of the old King’s death and that the real culprits were Thomas Gurney and William Ockle.
³⁰

This, surely, must be one of the most surprising defences in law ever made. Here was a man who had been responsible for the custody of the captive King and paid
£
5 a day for it. When he submitted his account he made no mention of any absence. He had supervised the dressing of the royal corpse for burial and taken it to Gloucester where it was handed over to the clerk Hugh Glanville. There is no evidence of Berkeley being ill and according to his own accounts, he was in the prime of health when Edward II died, indulging in a spot of hunting and generally administering his estates. Even those who stood bail for him could not get their stories straight. In his declaration Berkeley cheerfully passes the blame to John Maltravers and Thomas Gurney. When his guarantors turned up, Maltravers’ name was dropped and replaced with William Ockle.
³¹

The most surprising line in Berkeley’s defence was his bald, almost mocking statement: ‘That he didn’t even know Edward II was dead until this present parliament’ – i.e. November 1330. The only thing more surprising than this is that the King, council and Parliament accepted this farrago of nonsense in its entirety. Nothing happened to Berkeley. He was released on bail and returned to the West Country unscathed. Finally in March 1337 Berkeley was cleared of all allegations that he had been involved in the murder of Edward II.
³²
Maltravers was less fortunate but also escaped unscathed. He had to spend a great deal of time abroad. In 1342 the King allowed his wife, Agnes Maltravers, to travel to Flanders to be with him, which proves that although Edward III knew where Maltravers was he made no attempt to have him arrested and extradited. In fact, the exile was quietly acting as the King’s agent abroad. In 1345 Maltravers was eventually granted protection to come and go, travel to and from England, without fear of arrest.
³³

The only exception to Edward III’s lenient treatment of his father’s murderers was Thomas Gurney. Ockle seems to have disappeared but Gurney became a refugee in Europe, hotly pursued by Edward III’s agents. By 20 May 1331, Gurney had turned up in Castile. Edward successfully asked King Alphonso to secure Gurney’s arrest and issued warrants and letters of protection for Gurney’s safe passage. A huge reward of
£
300 was also given to John Martin de Lyne of Spain for the arrest of Thomas Gurney, whilst the Spanish messenger who brought the news of Gurney’s capture was given the very princely sum of
£
50. The principal agent in Gurney’s pursuit was a shadowy character known as Giles of Spain. He landed at
Dover on 17 June 1331 and put in his account for 372 days spent in pursuing Gurney, but failed to bring the prisoner back with him. Gurney had escaped from gaol. Giles had, however, managed to secure one of the smaller fry, an accomplice of Gurney, John Tilley, and incarcerated him in a Gascon prison.

Giles of Spain was a professional bounty hunter. Once he returned to England, he went looking for others who, like Tilley, had never been openly accused of being party to Edward’s death: men such as William of Kingsclere, whom he arrested in Rochester; Sir Richard Durell at Northampton and John de Spicer of London. None of these men is mentioned by the chronicles, or other documents, as being involved in Edward II’s murder. Nor is there any reference to them being brought to trial. The logical conclusion is that they were probably members of the garrison at Berkeley whom the King brought in for questioning and were later released.

The hunt for Gurney, however, was not given up. In January 1333, a royal agent in Naples spotted Gurney and arrested him. Sir William Tweng, a household knight, was despatched to bring the prisoner to England. According to the chroniclers, Swynbroke and Walsingham, Gurney was decapitated at sea lest he implicate other great ones of the land. Conspiracy theorists would love the story of Gurney being hustled on board ship and then executed lest, when he returned to England, he used that defence beloved of many, ‘I was simply carrying out orders’, before naming those really responsible. This does not fit the facts. If Edward wanted Gurney dead, professional assassins in England and Europe would have jumped at the chance to carry out the contract and fetch Gurney’s head back in a
barrel of salt. Sir William Tweng’s account, indeed, tells a different story. He seems to have taken great care with his prisoner. Gurney was in poor condition: Tweng had to buy him clothing, linen, shoes and even a special bed for him in prison.