Free Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II by Paul Doherty

Moreover, if the King’s corpse
had
been brought back, a great deal of the speculation stirred up by Kent, Edward III, Berkeley and others, would not have arisen.
    There is one other possibility. It’s not a fairy-tale ending but, knowing what we do of Edward II, a possible outcome. Edward II escaped from Berkeley towards the end of July 1327. For a while there would have been disorientation and confusion. However, within twomonths of his escape, Mortimer and Isabella were announcing to a full Parliament at Nottingham how Edward II had died at Berkeley, and the remaining months of 1327 taken up with staging a most elaborate funeral.
    If Edward II had re-emerged he would have faced immediate imprisonment and execution as an imposter. After the events of Berkeley and the public funeral in St Peter’s, what hope did he have in a country controlled by his former wife and her lover? True, he may have elicited the support of men like Kent and Lancaster, but what then? What guarantee did he have that his reappearance would automatically lead to his restoration? Would Lancaster and Kent keep faith with him, men who only a few months earlier had gleefully participated in his destruction and that of his favourites?
    A further clue may lie in Edward II’s own character and attitude. He had been King for almost twenty years. He had lost his wife and his crown. He had faced constant opposition from his nobles and seen his favourites seized and barbarously executed. He had been deserted by his family as well as leading magnates in both church and state. Perhaps he did not wish for a restoration. The constant complaints of chroniclers is that Edward II never really wanted to be king. He had provoked the crisis with Thomas of Lancaster and other barons by trying to abdicate his responsibilities as king and give them to someone else – at the beginning of his reign, Gaveston; at the end, the younger de Spencer. Edward II might have wished to live out the rest of his life in peace, either at home or abroad. A man born to be king, the crown had proved most hazardous to him: he not only realized the danger of a public re-emergence but fundamentally lacked the will to achieve it.
    In the end, the true fate of Edward II can only be a matter of speculation. However, there is considerable evidence that the corpse in the lead coffin beneath the beautiful Purbeck marble sarcophagus in St Peter’s at Gloucester is not Edward II’s.

Notes
A Note on sources
    The primary source material for medieval England and Europe is plentiful, and has been brought together by different individuals and organizations. Most of the chronicles of the period were written in different monasteries up and down the kingdom, often borrowing from, and interdependent on, each other. In the main they have been published either by learned societies or the great Victorian historians like William Stubbs in the Rolls Series. Some chronicles have not been published and can be found in manuscripts either at Canterbury or the University of Cambridge.
    The volume of surviving administrative materials is considerable. Much has been published by the Public Record Office, e.g. the
Calendar of Patent Rolls
and
Calendar of Close Rolls.
These include hundreds of thousands of individual letters, writs, orders, etc. either issued open (‘patent’) or sealed (‘closed’). The rest can be found in either the manuscript collection of the British Library or the Bodleian in Oxford. Others are under the care of the Historical Manuscripts Commission.
    In France there are two principal sources: the National Archives or the Bibliotheque Nationale.
    In the bibliography, I have cited a list of sources consulted, both principal and secondary, and the more important secondary sources are cited in the text or the footnotes. ‘F’ stands for folio; ‘M’ or ‘Mem’ is the abbreviation for Membrane.
     
Main abbrevations
Annales Lond.
Annales Londonienses,
ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Series, London,