The official version of Edward II’s death is that he died at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327, in the custody of the keepers his stepmother had appointed for him after his deposition. The cause of death given in the chronicle tradition is murder by a hot iron inserted into his bowels — a piece of late-medieval rhetorical-allegorical embellishment that modern historians substantially reject. The real cause was probably suffocation, possibly murder by other means, possibly natural causes triggered by deliberate ill-treatment. The body was buried at Gloucester Abbey (now Gloucester Cathedral) within a few weeks. The tomb survives.

In 1878 the French archivist Alexandre Germain was cataloguing a box of medieval correspondence in the Montpellier municipal archives when he found a Latin letter that suggested the entire official version was a fabrication.

The letter

The letter is addressed to Edward III of England and signed by Manuel Fieschi, a senior papal notary at Avignon and a member of the wealthy Genoese Fieschi family. It is undated but contextually situated around 1336–1338 — about nine years after Edward II’s official death and six years after the Nottingham coup that put Edward III in personal power.

Fieschi claims to have received the following account in confession from a man calling himself Edward of Caernarvon — the personal name of the deposed king. The man’s account, as Fieschi forwards it:

  1. The keepers at Berkeley Castle had been warned in autumn 1327 that William Ockley and the senior conspirators planned to murder Edward II. A porter of the castle, sympathetic to the king, helped him escape by night.
  2. Edward swapped clothes with the porter, who took the king’s place in the cell. The porter was murdered shortly afterwards; the body was substituted for Edward II’s at the burial. The substitution was concealed by burying with the face covered.
  3. Edward walked across the Severn estuary into Wales, then to Ireland, then to the Continent. He visited the papal court at Avignon in 1330 and obtained confirmation from Pope John XXII of his royal identity in confidential audience.
  4. He travelled through Burgundy and Lombardy, eventually settling at the small hermitage of Sant’Alberto di Butrio near Cecima, in the Lombard Apennines. He had been living there for several years at the time of the letter, supported by anonymous Italian patrons.

What modern historians think

The letter has been the subject of substantial scholarly attention since its 1878 discovery. The arguments against its authenticity are: the difficulty of an English king travelling unrecognised across half of Europe; the silence of every other surviving source on the alleged Italian afterlife; the substantive political motive Edward III would have had to suppress the letter if its claim were true (which would make its preservation in a French archive mysterious); and the substantive lateness of the only physical attestation (a single document, undated, surviving in only one copy).

The arguments for taking it seriously are: Manuel Fieschi was a and well-documented papal notary whose other surviving correspondence is uniformly sober; the substantive geographical and topographical details in the letter are accurate to a degree that suggests first-hand knowledge of the Lombard sites; the historian Ian Mortimer has identified circumstantial evidence in the English royal-account books that Edward III made a confidential payment to a “William the Welshman” (substantively a plausible pseudonym for the deposed king) in 1338; and the substantively conspicuous absence of Edward III’s public reverence for his father’s Gloucester tomb is consistent with the king substantively knowing the tomb to be empty.

The substantive scholarly verdict is unresolved. The official Berkeley Castle death remains the standing institutional history; the Italian afterlife is the live revisionist alternative; the case for either substantively depends on assumptions about the reliability of the Fieschi document that the document itself does not allow us to test.

The hermitage at Sant’Alberto di Butrio still stands. A local tradition there — substantively independent of the 1878 discovery — claims that a 14th-century English nobleman is buried under the floor of the side chapel. The site has never been formally excavated.