The King Murdered in a Castle Basement (Maybe)

On the evening of 21 September 1327, in a small room in the keep of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, the deposed King Edward II of England — held there as a state prisoner since the previous April — was either killed by his guards, by means too gruesome to write down, or died quietly of natural causes, or possibly was smuggled out of the castle that night and replaced in the coffin by the body of a recently dead unfortunate of similar build. Which of these three things actually happened is, seven hundred years later, still genuinely uncertain.

The official version, issued by the regency government that was then ruling England on behalf of the fourteen-year-old Edward III, was the second one. The King had died of natural causes. The body was viewed by local witnesses, sealed in a lead coffin, and buried with appropriate ceremony in Gloucester Cathedral on 21 December 1327. The funeral was a state event. The young Edward III attended.

The first version — the gruesome murder — became the popular and almost universal version within thirty years of the event. It was set down in detail by the English chronicler Geoffrey le Baker around 1355 and was repeated by the Welsh-Latin chronicler Ranulf Higden and most subsequent medieval and early-modern English historians. It is the version in Shakespeare’s Edward II (via Marlowe, who used it from the chronicles). It is the version most modern readers have heard. According to Le Baker, the King was held down on a bed by his guards and killed by means of a heated metal rod inserted through a drinking horn into his rectum, so that the cause of death would not be visible on the body. The method had the additional advantage, in the medieval theological tradition, of being a sodomitic punishment that fit the King’s well-known reputation for relationships with male favorites — most prominently Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser.

The third version — that the King survived the night and was smuggled abroad — was first proposed in earnest by the British historian Ian Mortimer in his 2003 biography of Roger Mortimer (no relation), the man who had effectively governed England with Edward’s estranged wife Isabella between 1326 and 1330. Ian Mortimer argued that the documentary evidence allows — and in some places favors — the conclusion that Edward II did not die in 1327, that the corpse buried in Gloucester Cathedral was someone else’s, and that the deposed king lived another fourteen years in obscure exile in continental Europe before dying around 1341 in northern Italy.

These three reconstructions are not equally well-supported. None of them is impossible. The standard modern academic position, set out most carefully by Seymour Phillips in his 2010 biography for the Yale English Monarchs series, is the careful middle: that Edward II almost certainly died at Berkeley on or about 21 September 1327, that the red-hot-poker story is almost certainly later chronicler invention, that the most likely actual cause of death is either smothering by guards or a less spectacular form of strangulation, and that the precise circumstances are unknowable.

The political situation in September 1327

Edward had been king since 1307. He had been deposed in January 1327 by a coalition of English magnates led by Queen Isabella (Edward’s wife and the sister of the French king) and her lover Roger Mortimer, an English Marcher lord who had escaped from the Tower of London in 1323 and had returned in 1326 with a small French-backed invasion. The deposition was a constitutional event without precedent in English history. The Parliament that authorized it — convened at Westminster in January 1327 — required the King to abdicate in favor of his fourteen-year-old son, who became Edward III. The actual government was conducted by Isabella and Roger Mortimer as a regency.

The deposed King was first held at Kenilworth Castle, under the relatively gentle custody of his cousin Henry of Lancaster. After a series of plots to free him surfaced in the spring of 1327, the regency moved him to the more secure and more isolated Berkeley Castle in early April. Berkeley was held by the loyalist Thomas Berkeley, who was Roger Mortimer’s son-in-law. The King’s day-to-day custodians at Berkeley were Berkeley himself, John Maltravers (a knight from Dorset connected to Mortimer), and a small staff. The conditions of the custody varied; chronicle accounts say he was treated reasonably at first and harshly later in the summer.

The regency had reason to want Edward dead. As long as he was alive, he was the focus of legitimist plots — and there had already been several. Edward III was a minor, the regency’s authority was contested, and a surviving deposed king was a perpetual political threat. The murder of an anointed king was, however, a theological and political problem of its own. The Mortimer regime had to find a way for Edward to stop being a problem without overtly killing him.

The death announcement was made on the evening of 23 September 1327. The body was held at Berkeley for several weeks while the funeral arrangements were made. A small number of local witnesses — knights, clergy, the burgesses of Bristol and Gloucester — were brought to view the body. The body was washed, dressed, and laid in state. Their testimony, preserved in administrative records, says only that they saw the body and that it was identifiable as Edward.

The funeral itself was the most significant state event of the regency’s first year. Isabella attended. Edward III attended. Roger Mortimer attended. The funeral was conducted with full royal ceremony, the body interred in a stone sarcophagus in the cathedral, an elaborate alabaster effigy commissioned that would be installed over the following years. The cathedral became, almost immediately, a pilgrimage site. By the 1340s the dead king was being unofficially venerated as a martyr. Pilgrim donations from his shrine substantially financed the rebuilding of the cathedral choir.

What the chronicles say

The earliest chronicle account is in the Brut Chronicle, an Anglo-Norman vernacular history that was being continuously updated in the early 1330s. The Brut says only that the King died of natural causes. No murder. No poker.

The first appearance of the murder story is in the Chronicle of Adam Murimuth, an English ecclesiastical historian writing around 1340, who says that Edward was suffocated. No poker.

The first appearance of the red-hot-poker story is in Geoffrey le Baker’s Chronicon, written in the mid-1350s — thirty years after the event. Le Baker provides the full graphic account that has become the popular version. He claims, without explaining how, to have his information from a Berkeley servant who had witnessed the murder. The Le Baker account is repeated, with some elaboration, in Higden and in subsequent chronicles.

The pattern of the chronicle evidence is therefore: contemporary sources say natural causes; sources within a decade say suffocation; sources thirty years later add the elaborate sexualized-murder detail. The modern historical consensus, established by Phillips and others, is that the natural-causes account is propaganda, the suffocation account is probably true, and the poker account is later invention designed to retroactively impose a medieval theological judgment on Edward’s sexuality.

This is also a useful illustration of a general principle of medieval source criticism: the more dramatic the version of a famous death, the more skeptically it should be treated, and the later it appears in the chronicle record the more skeptically still.

The Italian rumor

Ian Mortimer’s 2003 argument that Edward escaped Berkeley rests substantially on a document called the Fieschi letter, sent around 1335 by an Italian cleric named Manuele Fieschi (a member of the Genoese banking family then operating in the papal court at Avignon) to King Edward III. The letter claims that Edward II did not die at Berkeley, that he escaped his captors with the help of a sympathetic servant, that he made his way across the Channel and through France to Italy, and that he had been living quietly as a hermit in various Lombard religious houses for the previous eight years. The letter offers to provide further details if requested.

The Fieschi letter exists. It is preserved in the archives of the diocese of Maguelone in southern France. It is in genuine fourteenth-century handwriting and on genuine fourteenth-century parchment. What it actually means is contested. The conservative interpretation — held by most academic historians — is that it is either a fraud, a confused report, or a deliberate political fiction connected to the papal court’s intricate relations with the English crown in the 1330s. The aggressive interpretation, held by Mortimer and a small minority of other historians, is that it is what it appears to be: a genuine report from an Italian churchman who had personal contact with the survivor.

The case for the aggressive interpretation is partly indirect. Edward III, in the years after his successful 1330 coup against his mother Isabella and Roger Mortimer (the latter was hanged at Tyburn in November 1330), engaged in a series of unusually expensive and discreet diplomatic communications with the papal court that included payments to an unnamed person in Lombardy. The payments fit the pattern of supporting a living deposed predecessor in obscurity. They do not prove it.

The body at Gloucester Cathedral has never been disturbed for examination. Modern non-invasive scanning techniques — proposed periodically over the past three decades — have never been authorized by the Dean and Chapter of the cathedral. As long as the tomb remains sealed, the question of whether Edward II actually rests in it cannot be settled.

What stands

Berkeley Castle is still in the hands of the Berkeley family. It has been continuously occupied since the eleventh century. The room in which Edward is traditionally said to have died is preserved as a small chamber on the keep’s first floor, with a vaulted stone ceiling and a single narrow window. The window has been blocked since the eighteenth century. Visitors to the castle are shown the room as part of the standard tour.

Edward’s tomb in Gloucester Cathedral is in the north ambulatory of the choir, beneath an elaborate stone canopy installed in the 1330s. The alabaster effigy on top of the tomb shows the King in his coronation robes, crowned, with a serene expression. The effigy is, by general consent, one of the finest pieces of fourteenth-century English sculpture. It has been repaired several times. The most recent restoration, in 2007, replaced a fragment of the King’s nose that had been knocked off in the 1640s during the English Civil War.

The body inside the tomb is whoever it is.