The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (48 page)

Cuttino’s article, ‘Where Is Edward II?’, appeared in 1978. He summarised the debate to date, and brought together a number of sources not previously collated. He drew attention to the fact that Manuele de Fieschi held several benefices in the Church in England, that he was a distant relative of Edward II, that he held an ecclesiastical position which carried responsibility for the region in which Melazzo and Cecima are situated, that there are weaknesses in the evidence of the chronicles which mention the death, and that some aspects of the funeral arrangements of the late king are open to doubt. His conclusions were that, while it was not possible to prove anything, the implications of Berkeley and Maltravers being forgiven at around the time of the letter ‘are obvious’: presumably that Edward III forgave them on the strength of the letter. Unfortunately there are huge assumptions and gaps in his arguments, and some of his statements are misleading. He states that the William Bishop who gave evidence to Geoffrey le Baker about the death of Edward II ‘has never been traced’, although there is little argument that Bishop was a member of Roger’s retinue in 1321. On the subject of Bishop and the chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, Cuttino claims that Bishop gave le Baker his evidence about the king’s death but the chronicle clearly states that Bishop was a source only for the king’s transportation to Berkeley. Like historians before him, Cuttino also failed to note the inconsistencies in the chronology of the Fieschi evidence (the letter states Edward was at Corfe for only a year and a half, whereas he was probably there for two and a half years, September 1327–March 1330). Finally he declared that Edward could not have received the letter, had it actually been sent, before 16 March 1337 owing to the forgiveness of Berkeley on that date, a peculiar assumption.

The 1996 article by R.M. Haines, ‘The Afterlife of Edward of Carnarvon’ is a much more valuable addition to the literature on Edward’s supposed death. He corrects a number of Cuttino’s and other writers’ more obvious errors, and points out facts which should have been noticed at the outset, most particularly the inconsistency in the chronology of Edward II’s stay at Corfe Castle. He refines the dating of the register’s compilation to probably the time of Arnaud de Verdale, an earlier Bishop of Maguelonne, and notes that the last dated document in the register is from 1337, although there are other undated documents within it which
may be later. He notes the strange style of the Latin, which is particularly Genoese and informal.
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He relates the contents of the letter to verifiable facts, checks the Berkeley Castle accounts for the relevant years (which reveal the purchase of locks among other possible precautions), and relates these and other details to connected evidence. Despite all this, he discounts the possibility that Edward was not buried in December 1327 on two accounts: firstly that a public viewing of Edward’s corpse ‘must have taken place at Berkeley prior to embalming’ – although he provides no evidence that it did – and secondly that Isabella herself did not doubt the body was Edward’s, otherwise she would not have had Edward’s heart buried with her in 1358: again, an unwarranted assumption.
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He suggests the Fieschi letter was a religious forgery, put forward to claim Edward as a martyr, but produces no evidence to support this allegation; nor does he explain how the forgery could have benefited the forger. His discussion on the writing of the document suffers from his assumption that Fieschi would have expected a clerk to have had to translate his Latin for Edward III, whereas the king could read both Latin and French, as shown by his letter to the Pope, and could at least write individual letters.
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The article also suffers from chronological errors of Haines’s own making, most notably that the document could have been written as early as 1333, despite the fact that it clearly describes a four and a half year sojourn in Italy after a journey of more than two thousand miles around Europe, begun no earlier than January 1331.
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Perhaps because of the traditional conviction that Edward II died in Berkeley Castle, no historian has examined what the Fieschi letter actually is. It is not a confession but a report from Fieschi supposedly gleaned from information obtained through the ‘confession’ of the deposed king – that is to say in his own words – not necessarily through a holy confession, although the information may have been gathered in this way. Also none of the historians who have so far discussed the document have attempted to state why it might have been written, with the exception of Bishop Stubbs, who proved all his suggestions implausible. Thus no historian has pointed out that its message is a political one. During the years when this letter might have been written, 1335–43, England was on the verge of starting a European-wide war, and Genoa, the city of the powerful Fieschi family, was attempting to win independence from Milan, which it achieved in 1339 under Simon Boccanegra, the first Doge of Genoa.

A closer examination of the Fieschi letter shows that it can be divided into several parts. Firstly there is information of a kind which Edward III would have already known, details of the capture of Edward II, included in order to demonstrate the authenticity of the letter at the outset. Then
there follows a description of events at Berkeley Castle expressed by the supposed Edward II as an attempt to explain what happened: specifically, whose body was in Gloucester, how he ‘escaped’, how Isabella came by ‘his’ heart, and the reactions of the guards. This included information presumed by, or imparted to, the supposed Edward II after his escape, and during his later incarceration at Corfe. It is written from the point of view of one explaining not how he escaped incarceration but how he escaped death, being secretly transferred to Corfe. It is noticeable that Fieschi states Edward’s keeper was with him all this time: in other words, he did not ‘escape’ as claimed but was transferred secretly under the pretence of an escape. The letter then moves on to explain what happened to him after his removal from Corfe. It is written in the past tense entirely, but nowhere does it refer to Edward being dead. Although the translation above has been taken verbatim from that given in Cuttino’s article, it should be pointed out that the last passage of evidence – ‘he was in this last hermitage for two years or thereabouts’ – could also be read as ‘he has been in this last hermitage for two years or thereabouts’. The implication that Edward was in Lombardy, and that his identity could be verified, gives the letter a potent political force, and indicates it was written not just for Edward II’s benefit but primarily to further Genoese interests.

Given the political implications of a letter such as this coming from Genoa in the 1330s or early 1340s, and the motive for forging such a document, a systematic analysis of its reliability is necessary. Here it is significant that the surviving text is in a bishop’s register, and thus is a copy. Moreover it is probably a copy of a copy, if the original manuscript was sent to Edward. There are five possibilities:

i.  that there was no original letter, and the copy in the register is a forgery;

ii.  that the original was not by Fieschi, and that it was made in bad faith, and his seal applied with or without his knowledge, and thus that the register copy is from a forgery;

iii. that the original was by Fieschi in good faith but upon the evidence of an imposter, and thus that the register copy is not a forgery but contains no information derived from Edward II;

iv. that the original was by Fieschi but was fraudulently compiled for political purposes from received information, and thus that the register copy is not a forgery but contains no information derived from Edward II;

v.  that the original was by Fieschi in good faith based on evidence derived from Edward II directly or indirectly (for example, through a confessor).

The first of these possibilities can be dismissed immediately. According to Haines, the letter is in a singularly different style from any of the other entries in the register, and in an altogether more Italian form.
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In addition, the register was compiled no earlier than 1337 (the date of the last document) and no later than 1368, probably before 1352.
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Thus we can be confident that the entry is a contemporary copy of a document that once existed. Access to a bishop’s register was very limited indeed, and thus this was a poor place to forge a text. This is why the text was unknown to the rest of the world for so many centuries.

With regard to the second option, that the original was a forgery: forged medieval documents are plentiful, but there are reasons for doubting this is one of them. Fieschi’s seal, as a papal notary, would have been very carefully guarded. One could imagine that it might have been temporarily stolen to authenticate the document, but this theory requires an individual or group to have stood to benefit from such a fraudulent document being created. If the document was to be used by a state or political force to effect a policy change, it would have been worthless stealing Fieschi’s seal on account of the risk of his denying the document’s veracity to his kinsman, Edward III. Thus, if the document was a forgery, it was the work of a small group, or an individual.

The motive of an English lord or knight wishing to clear his name of the murder of Edward II can be dealt with fairly briefly as there were very few candidates. Gurney was dead by the time the letter was written, as on internal evidence it cannot be dated before 1335. De Ockley had successfully disappeared by this stage, but even if alive it is difficult to see how he could have gained access to Fieschi’s seal to forge the document. Also it is doubtful whether de Ockley had all the detailed information supplied in the letter. Maltravers, of course, almost certainly had custody of the deposed king at Corfe, but he had relayed his information to Edward in 1334 via Montagu, before this letter could have been written. The only individual who had the status, knowledge, contacts and motive to forge this letter was Lord Berkeley. But since he did not leave England, it is doubtful that he ever met Fieschi, who seems rarely, if ever, to have visited England. It is very unlikely indeed that he knew about Genoese castles and hermitages or the sequence of towns and pilgrim routes on the Continent. Finally one can rule Berkeley out on the grounds that, by his own testimony to Parliament, he knew that Edward II was alive, and thus there was a high risk his information would clash with genuine information given secretly to the king, and incur further displeasure.

To answer the question whether Fieschi could have been fooled by an imposter it is necessary to ascertain the reliability of the evidence in the
document. For a start it contains at least two factual errors and one important lacuna. The first factual error, as Haines noted, is that the period of time between Edward II’s supposed death and the execution of the Earl of Kent, at which time he supposedly left Corfe, was two and a half years, not one and a half as stated by Fieschi. The second error is that the name of John Deveril does not appear, but instead the name ‘Thomas’ is given as the name of the castellan. The surprising lacuna is the fact that the abduction of Edward in July 1327 is not noted, a detail which would give the letter real strength, as very few people knew this secret information. The chronological error was probably a simple mistake, as this information would have been relatively easy for even a forger to get right, and it has to be noted that the testimony is not directly that of the supposed Edward II but his confession written at one or two stages removed.
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With regard to ‘Thomas’ being the castellan, not John Deveril, one could offer the simple explanation that Deveril did not tell the captive his real name, a fact made more likely by the absence of a surname. The failure to note the abduction in July 1327 is harder to account for, but the most likely explanation is that, if this information was genuinely derived from Edward II, this secret escape might be presumed not to have been known to Edward III, and therefore be valueless or negative evidence of its authenticity. Alternatively the letter might only preserve the bare bones of the king’s more complete testimony or confession, a possibility strengthened by the spelling mistakes of the names.

In this context it is remarkable that the letter contains a lot of accurate information. No single extant chronicle written before 1343 (the date that Fieschi became Bishop of Vercelli and thus the last possible date for the letter to have been written) includes all these details. Significantly, no surviving chronicle states that Edward took ship at Chepstow, a fact which has to be verified by recourse to the chamber account now in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries.
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This also confirms that he landed in Glamorgan, at Cardiff. Every subsequent verifiable fact is correct with the exception of the detail that the castellan at Corfe was not ‘Thomas’, as mentioned above.
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There is also the interesting but hitherto unnoticed fact that, if Edward II was moved from Berkeley Castle to Ireland at the time of the arrest of the Earl of Kent, or just before, his period in Ireland (where Roger had very extensive powers and estates) ended just after the November 1330 trials and execution of Roger. It must also be noted that his departure from Ireland at that point is the first time that Fieschi states the deposed king went anywhere without his keeper. The presence of the keeper with the supposed Edward II until December 1330 tallies very well with the probability that he remained in custody, probably under
Maltravers’ orders, until Roger’s death. Putting these facts together we can safely say that if Fieschi was dealing with an imposter, the imposter would have had to be not only well informed about Lombardy and continental geography but also better informed than any contemporary chronicler about Edward II’s movements in South Wales, and in particular familiar with his fateful attempt to sail from Chepstow, at a time when Edward II had only a few dozen men with him. Finally the supposed imposter would have had to make his impersonation in the Genoa region, and also to convince Manuele de Fieschi himself who, as Cuttino noted, was a distant relative of the English royal family. It is far more likely that Fieschi spoke to the real Edward II, who had all this information, rather than to an imposter.