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  The melodramatic escape from the Tower was effected by the drugging of the guards’ wine, followed by a climb up a kitchen chimney and then a descent by rope ladder down to the Thames. Sir Roger hurried to France where Isabella’s brother Charles had just become king.

  The following year Queen Isabella journeyed to Paris, ostensibly to arrange a peace settlement between the two countries. Many historians have pondered why the Despensers let her go, but others have suggested that they were anxious to be rid of her, or that she played such a subtle game they were ignorant of her true motives. At the French court Roger Mortimer greeted her enthusiastically and together they planned to bring down the Despensers — and Edward who remained unaware of what was happening, to the extent that when Isabella wrote suggesting that their thirteen-years-old son, Edward Prince of Wales, should go to Paris to make the traditional homage to the French king he raised no objection. When this ceremony was completed Edward ordered the queen to return with the prince, but she declared that marriage was a bond between husband and wife, and that until the middleman who divided them was gone she would live single or in a convent - a somewhat hypocritical statement as she entered into a passionate love affair with Mortimer.

  At her refusal to return the Despensers persuaded the king to outlaw her and Prince Edward. Meanwhile she corresponded with English nobles who formed an anti-Despenser party, and proposed a marriage between her son and Phillipa, the daughter of William II, Count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland. The delighted count gave her an advance on Phillipa’s dowry to finance an invasion of England, which began on September 24, 1326, when she landed on the Suffolk coast near Harwich with Roger Mortimer in command of her small force of English exiles and mercenaries. After she had made a theatrical pilgrimage to Bury St Edmunds in the symbolic mourning dress of a widow she was joined by a number of barons and many London citizens.

  On learning the news that the queen’s ever-growing army was advancing on London, Edward and the Despensers left the Tower for Gloucester where he tried to raise troops. It was in vain, the population looked upon Isabella as the saviour of the kingdom, and the king fell back to Bristol. Desperately he offered a £1000 reward for Mortimer’s head — Isabella replied by offering £2000 for his.

  On October 26 the queen’s forces reached the city where they were given a rapturous welcome by its citizens. The elder Despenser was condemned to death by Mortimer and the earls of Kent, Leicester and Norfolk, and was hanged from a gibbet 50ft high before being disembowelled.

  According to Froissart’s Chronicle the king and Sir Hugh the younger were in Bristol Castle when the execution took place in sight of the castle walls, and it added: “Intimidated by this execution they endeavoured to escape to the Welsh shore in a boat . . . but after tossing about some days, and striving in vain against contrary winds, Sir Hugh Beaumont observing the efforts of the unfortunate bark, rowed out with a strong force in his barge. The consequence was that the royal fugitive and his hapless favourite were brought back to Bristol and delivered to the queen as prisoners.”

  Queen Isabella planned to take Sir Hugh to London but, aware of what must surely come, he refused to eat and became so ill that she ordered him to be tried at Hereford so that he would not escape her vengeance by dying on the journey. Sir William Trusell, who had recently passed sentence on his father, condemned him to a revolting death.

  The queen watched while, crowned with nettles, he was brought before her on a hurdle. In describing the following execution, in which the prisoner was hanged, drawn and quartered, Froissart wrote that “His member and his testicles were first cut off, because he was a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the King.”

  Edward was taken to Kenilworth where on Janaury 16, 1327, a Parliamentary deputation told him that it had been decided at Westminster that because of his incompetence to rule the kingdom, for being controlled by wicked councillors and for losing terrritories bequeathed to him by his father, he should be deposed and his place taken by Prince Edward.

  When he refused to abdicate voluntarily, the king was told that if he did not his son would be denied the crown and another sovereign be found, presumably Roger Mortimer. In order to safeguard his dynasty, Edward finally agreed.

  Dressed in mourning black, he fell down in a faint in front of the deputation before the abdication ceremony began. Then, with tears rolling down his cheeks, he went through with it, declaring that although he grieved that he was rejected by his subjects, he was pleased they were accepting his son in his place. Sir William Trusell renounced all allegiance to Edward on behalf of England and the Steward of the Household snapped his staff of office to show that it was disbanded. The next month Edward III was crowned and from then on the ex-king was known as “Lord Edward, sometime King of Englande”.

  Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer acted as regents to the young king, and in effect had full control of the realm. At first “Lord Edward” was reasonably treated as a prisoner at Kenilworth Castle where he is said to have written a poem on his misfortune in Anglo-Norman. Translated, the first verse reads:

  In winter woe befell me;

  By cruel Fortune thwarted,

  My life now lies a ruin.

  Full oft have I experienced,

  There’s none so fair, so wise,

  So courteous nor so highly famed,

  But, if Fortune dare to favour,

  Will be a fool proclaimed.

  In the spring Edward was in the charge of Thomas de Berkeley and Sir John Maltravers. The former had been captured at Boroughbridge and his lands given to Hugh Despenser before being restored to him by Isabella; the latter had fled to France after Boroughbridge and joined Isabella’s party there thus neither could be said to have sympathy for their captive. He was moved from the comfort of Kenilworth to Corfe, Bristol and Berkeley Castles successively, and successively his treatment grew worse. It seems that with Isabella’s increasing love for Mortimer, her loathing for her husband grew equally and she avenged herself for the neglect and slights of the past. On the journey to his final place of imprisonment he was forced to wear a crown of straw, and was given ditchwater for shaving, whereupon he said with simple dignity, “Whether you will or no, I have warm tears for my beard.”

  On April 5, 1327, the humiliated ex-monarch was incarcerated in Berkeley Castle and little definite information regarding him filtered out, although there was no shortage of rumours, until the official announcement of his death on September 21. But we do know that during those five months he was kept in a cell-like chamber which is pointed out to visitors to the castle today as the King’s Gallery.

  “The visitor will observe a deep hole like a well in one corner of the room,” states the guidebook. “This is the Dungeon, and it goes down to the level of the courtyard outside, 28 feet. It was the barbarous custom to throw the rotting carcasses of cattle down the pit, when the stench of putrification would eventually asphyxiate the prisoner in the room above . . . Prisoners of lowly birth might be thrown down, still alive, on top of the carcasses, but such was not the practice with captives of gentle birth, let alone of Royal birth. The wretched Edward may thus be imagined as sitting in his small room, breathing the pestilential vapours arising form the charnel-well below,”

  When Edward survived this attempt to give him a fatal infection so it would appear he had died of natural causes, more direct ways were considered. It was becoming more increasingly obvious that Edward was an embarrassment to the new regime. For one thing Isabella was still Edward’s wife, so that his continued existence made her relationship with Mortimer adulterous. There had been sympathy for the queen while she appeared a wronged wife, but now her own morality was open to criticism, especially by the Church.

  But Edward posed a greater problem than this, while he lived he would always be a focal point of revolt for disaffected magnates, for after Edward III was crowned on January 24, 1327, it became apparent that he was king in name only. The real power remained with his mother and her para
mour who had taken the title of Earl of March. The couple retained two-thirds of England’s tax revenue for their own purposes, and it was obvious that once Edward had abdicated the support of the magnates began to wane. The nobility were alarmed when they realised they had exchanged a weak and foolish king for a ruthless tyrant. According to some chronicles there were several conspiracies that summer to rescue the ex-king, and one was said to have almost succeeded.

  In July one Thomas Dunhead, a Dominican friar, and his brother Stephen led a band of conspirators into Berkeley Castle where they managed to release Edward and carry him off to brief safety at Corfe Castle. But soon the prisoner was retaken and the leader of the attempt was barbarously done to death at Berkeley. When a second attempt by Sir Rhys ap Griffith was betrayed to Mortimer it was no longer a question of whether they should have Edward murdered, but how. It was the custom in those days for the corpses of kings to be exposed to public view to prove that they were not the victims of foul play, and Mortimer and Isabella could not afford to be accused of the murder of the official king’s father. Therefore they decided on the death in what was known as the “Italian manner”. It has been suggested that Isabella saw in this form of assassination an ironic piece of revenge, and certainly the form of Edward’s death strengthened the opinions of many historians as to his physical homosexuality.

  There are several versions of what happened next. A fascinating story is that Bishop Orleton sent Edward’s gaolers a letter in Latin which might be construed in two ways — Edwardum occidere nolite timers bonum est, which in translation could mean “Do not kill Edward: it is a good thing to be afraid,” or “Do not fear to kill Edward: it is a good thing.” Alas for popular historians, it seems that this was unlikely as the bishop was out of England at the time.

  The accepted version of the following events is that Sir William Ogle (named as one of the three murderers of the king) was sent with the death sentence to Berkeley from Abergavenny where Mortimer had heard of the second conspiracy to free Edward. What happened next is thus described in Grafton’s Chronicle: “Sir Robert sent a letter unto them (the ex-king’s captors, Thomas de Gourney and John de Maltravers) signifying how and in what wise he should be put to death. And anone after the aforesaid Thomas and John had received the letter, and considered the contents thereof, they made the King in good cheer and in a good countenance at his supper, when he thought least of the proposed treason. And when bed time came, the King went to his bed and lay and slept soundly. And he being in his sound sleep, these traitors and false forsworn persons against their homage and fealty, came privily into his chamber and their company with them, and laid a great table upon his belly, and with strength of men at all four corners pressed it down upon his body wherewith the King awake at being sore afraid of death turned his body, so that he lay grovelling. Then the murderers took a horn and thrust it up into his fundament as far as they might, and then took a hot burning spit and put it through the horn into his body and in the end killed and vilely murdered him, but yet in such wise that after his death it could not be perceived how he came by his death, but being dead he was afterwards buried in Gloucester.”

  The chroniclers agree on the terrible method of killing the king, a way which would leave no external mark on the body and yet was so agonising that it was said that the nearby villagers were awakened by Edward’s shrieks. In the Murimuth Chronicle it was related that “many persons, abbots, priors, knights, burgesses of Bristol and Gloucester were summoned to view the body, and indeed superficially examined it, nevertheless it was commonly said that he was slain as a precaution by the orders of Sir John Maltravers and Sir Thomas Gurney.”

  After being put on view the victim’s corpse was embalmed and the heart in a silver box was given as a memento mori to a hypocritical mourning Isabella. The following December saw a spectacular funeral for the ex-king at Gloucester Cathedral where soon afterwards the tomb became an object of pilgrimage. Edward III had a serene effigy of his father carved in alabaster placed above it — a statue which is one of the greatest pieces of sculpture to come down to us from the medieval age, and as such still attracts crowds of visitors. On the saintly features of the statue there is no hint of the triumph and disaster, the passion and the pain, which had been the dominating threads of Edward’s life.

  Yet as he had avenged his murdered Perrot, Edward was himself avenged. On the night of October 19, 1330, Edward III secretly entered Nottingham Castle with two dozen companions and arrested Mortimer in his mother’s chamber, ignoring her agonised plea of “Bel fitz, eiez pitie du gentil Mortimer!” Then, for having “murdered and killed the king’s father” and of usurping Edward’s royal authority, he was executed in London, his body swinging for two days and two nights from a gallows at Tyburn.

  Queen Isabella was confined for the remaining twenty-eight years of her life to Castle Rising in Norfolk where legend asserts that she suffered from bouts of insanity. Following her death in 1359 her wish to be buried beside Roger Mortimer was carried out; with amazing hypocrisy she had also requested that the embalmed heart of her murdered husband be placed on her breast. If ghosts are drawn back to their mortal remains, what an uneasy triangle that trio must make.

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  CHAPTER FIVE - The Murder of Richard II

  “My God, a wonderful land this is and fickle: which has exiled, slain, destroyed and ruined so many kings, rulers and great men, and is ever tainted with strife and variance and envy.”

  NEVER HAVE LONDONERS shown such jubilation for a new sovereign as they did for Richard of Bordeaux when he made his magnificent entry into the capital the day after the death of his grandfather Edward III. It was a golden day as the ten-years-old boy rode under arch after triumphal arch. His procession - its noble members dressed in white to symbolise the purity of the child king - wound through streets draped with cloths of silver and gold. For the three hours it took to travel from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, conduits flowed with wine and at every turning the gorgeous cavalcade was greeted with spectacle and pageants expressing loyalty and delight at the new age which was believed to be unfolding.

  “In Cheapside was erected a building in the form of a castle, out of which ran streams of wine,” wrote Walsingham, “On its four turrets stood four girls dressed in white, and about the age of the king. As he approached they blew towards him small shreds of gold leaf, a favourite fancy at the time . . . They showered upon him flowers made of gilt paper, and then coming down, filling cups with wine from the fountain, and presented them to him and his attendants. Then flew down an angel from the summit of the castle and offered to the king a gold crown. Every street exhibited some pageant or device, but the merchants of Cheapside obtained the palm for their superior ingenuity.”

  It was an ironic twist of history that the next time such a huge concourse came to view the king at Westminster he was dethroned and lying in his coffin, his shroud carefully concealing wounds which, had someone dared to pluck it away, would have revealed the manner of his assassination and solved one of England’s royal murder mysteries.

  When he came to the throne in 1377 Richard II was the spoilt darling of his family and the people. Perhaps it was this early adulation which gave him his passionate belief in his divine right as a monarch, a belief which was to be a continuing controversy in British politics until the axe finally descended upon the neck of Charles I. In the pattern of Richard’s life, with its tangle of plot and counterplot, its contrasts of magnificence and mystery, there is an uncanny parallel to that of his great-grandfather, Edward II. Richard himself must have become aware of this fateful similarity when, during a period of his greatest unhappiness, he endeavoured to persuade the Pope to canonise his murdered ancestor.

  During his highly strung life he introduced the first breath of the Renaissance into England for, unlike many of his Plantagenet forebears, he was not a soldier king. The country was free from major wars throughout his reign, though his desire to rule alone, coupled with his love of art and p
ersonal extravagance, soured the affection of nobles and commons until it was replaced with hatred. In the bitter end he was the first victim of the Wars of the Roses.

  The son of the Black Prince and his wife, Lady Joan Plantagenet, the Fair Maid of Kent, Richard was born at Bordeaux on January 6, 1367. Four years later he was brought to England where his principal tutor was Sir Simon Burley who instructed him in the code of chivalry. At the death of his famous father in 1376, the boy was presented to Parliament by his grandfather Edward III as his successor. The day after Edward died on June 21, 1377, the great seal was placed in the boy’s hands and he was declared king.

  The actual coronation took place on July 16 when the nobility assembled in the great hall of Westminster. The passage from it to Westminster Abbey glowed warmly in light reflected from the rich scarlet cloth with which it had been carpeted - a portent of the extravagant style which Richard was to enjoy all his life. Prelates, abbots and members of the clergy led the procession, followed by officers of state and magnates, and finally the royal child beneath a canopy of blue silk carried on silver spears by the barons of the Cinque Ports. He walked with naked feet to the altar, knelt in prayer and was then conducted to his throne.

  The long ceremony which followed was an ordeal, and when Sir Simon Burley lifted him in his arms to carry him to the palace he was exhausted. After a rest he returned to the great hall where, after creating four earls and nine knights, he took his place in the royal chair. During the sumptuous feast which followed toasts were drunk to the new reign, minstrels sang and acrobats and jugglers performed in an expensive blaze of candlelight. It must have been a heady few hours for Richard who must have believed that such glory would accompany him through his career. The historian William Howitt commented: “Everything was done which could tend to inspire the boy king with an idea of that absolute greatness which had been already sufficiently instilled into his mind from very infancy by his mother, his uncles, and his courtiers. For such things kings afterwards pay a suitable compensation . . . Never before had such base laudation, such creeping protestations, been practised in this country. Both courtiers and dignitaries of the church used the same language of grovelling sycophancy towards the unsuspecting youth; and little could he dream that, while they were lauding his wisdom and royal virtues, they were preparing for him the execrations of his people and the loss of his throne and life. It has been justly said, that for much of what came afterwards to pass these vile flatterers were really answerable. While, therefore, passing judgement on the follies and the crimes of kings, we should never forget that they have been made what they are by the mercenary courtiers who perpetually throng about thrones. At this moment the youthful Richard was the idol of every class in the nation; the beauty of his person and the memory of his father surrounding him with a halo of popular favour, through which the gloom of after years could make no way.”