The Perfect King (80 page)

Thus we arrive at the end of Edward's life. But in one respect it is not the end. The great majority of people in England of English ancestry are descended from him
, if not the entire population.
Although comparatively few people today will be able to prove every generation, the genealogy is less important than the genes. The virtues and the weaknesses of this man have passed into the entire English people, in every walk of life. He may not have been the perfect king he tried to be, but, given the unattainable heights of his ambition, we have to applaud his achievement. For better or for worse, he helped to make the English nation what it is. And for better or for worse, he helped us become what we are.

Philippa
of
Hainault’
s
Date
of
Birth

The register of Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter, contains a delightful description of a daughter of the count of Hainault, dated
1319,
which has long been thought to refer to Philippa. Stapeldon writes that the girl was, according to her mother, aged 'nine on the next Nativity of St John the Baptist'
(24
June). He mentions that her hair was 'between blue [i.e. blue-black] and brown', her eyes were 'brown and deep', her forehead large, and her nose was 'large at the tip' but not snubbed, and 'her neck shoulders and all her body and limbs of good form'. The adjectives used are those of romance literature, with th
e notable exception that Stapeld
on stated she had some off-white teeth. Many historians (including the author of Philippa's article in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
have accepted that this relates to Philippa, and have assumed as a result that she was sli
ghtly
older than Edward, being born in
1310.
However, this is incorrect.

For a start, the eldest daughter of the count of Hainault was Margaret, who was born in
1311.
If Philippa had been born before
1311,
she would have been in a much stronger position to inherit the county which passed to her sister on the death of their brother William in
1345.
But laying this inconclusive argument aside, there are aspects of the actual entry in Stapeldon's register which should concern us. Although this is in the same hand as the surrounding text, and thus contemporary, the statement that it was Philippa is of later date, in a later hand (probably that of Bishop Grandison), and an insertion in the margin. Therefore the attribution to Philippa is not part of the description. As noted in Chapter One, Stapeldon made two trips to the courts of Flanders and Hainault in
1319:
one from January to March, and another in the summer. The reason for the error that Philippa was born in
1310
is a double assumption: that the description relates to Philippa as the insertion suggests, and that the description was made on Stapeldon's return to England after his first trip in March
1319.
If correct, this would mean that the girl he described was born on
24
June
1310.
However, this overlooks Stapeldon's second trip in the summer of
1319.
Edward sent Stapeldon back again to see Count William of Hainault, urging the count to pay special heed to 'certain matters' which
Stapeldon would discuss with him. This second visit was organised before
10
April
1319,
the date of Edward III
's letter to Count William. However, Stapeldon did not receive his letters of safe-conduct - the equivalent of a passport - until
27
May, and at that point he was in the north, at York.
These letters stated he should return from his mission by Michaelmas
(29
September). If we then check Stapeldon's register it appears that his reference to the Hainaulter girl appears on folio
142,
after entries for May, June and July
1319.
The description therefore dates from his second trip to Hainault. This took place between
6
July (when he was at Canterbury) and
7
August (when he was in London). He did not return to see the king at York, but returned to the West Country, and sent his report by letter: hence the appearance of a copy in his register. Therefore his reference to the girl as nine on the 'next'
24
June must refer to the next such date after
6
July, i.e.
1320.
So we can be sure that the girl he was describing was born in
1311.
This was Count William's eldest daughter, Margaret, who was born in that year, as mentioned above. It would follow that Stapeldon was looking over Margaret of Hainault for the possible marriage to Edward, not Philippa. Other documents confirm that Count William wrote to the pope on
10
December
1318
seeking dispensation for Margaret of Hainault to be married to Edward. Although permission for the marriage was granted by the pope in
1321,
as stated in Chapter One, nothing came of the attempt. By the time of Edward's visit to Hainault in
1326,
Margaret had been married for eighteen months to Ludvig of Bavaria, the future Holy Roman Emperor; hence she never became Edward's bride.

As a result we may be sure of several things: that Margaret was Edward's first intended bride, and that the description is of her, and that the clerk who inserted the note that Stapeldon's description related to Philippa was doing so on an assumption that only one daughter of the count's was proposed as Edward's marriage partner. We may also be confident that Margaret's birthdate was
24
June
1311.
It follows that it is very unlikely that Philippa was born before April
1312.
In this context it is worth returning to older narratives, which suggest that she was younger than Edward. Froissart, who knew her in her later years, asserted that she was in her fourteenth year at the time of her marriage in
1328.
This implies that she was born between
25
January
1314
and
24january 1315,
and thus about three years younger than her sister Margaret, and about two years younger than Edward.

The
Fake
Death
of
Edward
II

The definite assertion in my biography of Sir Roger Mortimer,
The
Greatest Traitor,
that Edward II was not killed in Berkeley
Castle
in
1327
startled many readers, academics and laymen alike. The idea that historians could have been wrong for centuries about this matter was greeted with scepticism by most scholars and incredulity by many members of the public. As a result, I devoted a considerable amount of time in
2003-4
to
revisiting the subject in much greater detail than it has previously received. After considerable research, rethinking, consultation and discussion, the final result was published by
The English Historical Review
,
the leading peer-reviewed journal in the field of English medieval studies. Any reader who wishes to obtain an in-depth perspective on the fake death of Edward II in the period
1327-30
should refer to volume
120
of that journal (November
2005).
What follows here is a brief synopsis for those who want a short explanation of why we may have sufficient confidence in this new narrative
to begin to interpret Edward III’
s reign in the light of his father's survival after
1327.

The starting point is an examination of why we as a society have come to retell the popular story of the death. The main answer to this is that it is repeated in various forms in about twenty chronicles from the mid-to-late fourteenth century. In some narratives Edward was smothered, in others he died with a burning piece of copper inserted into his anus, in one he was strangled, and the remainder just state that he 'died'. None say that he did not die. Therefore, when writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were trying to construct a coherent story of England's past, they looked back to the fourteenth-century chronicles and found them unanimous on the subject of t
he death. Furthermore, they mostl
y presumed that the more detailed narratives were more accurate, on the grounds that they provided more information and were thus better-informed. These they assimilated into a popular story which became established and widely accepted before the mid-sixteenth century. The handful of interested antiquaries and textual scholars of the period would have found confirmation of the date of the supposed death in the archives then stored at the Tower. In particular, in the patent rolls they would have found grants to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the king on
21
September, in the royal household accounts they would have found payments for pittances to be given to the poor on the anniversary of Edward II's death, and in the rolls of parliament they would have found direct accusations of murder levelled against Roger Mortimer, Simon Bereford, Thomas Gurney, Thomas Berkeley and William Ockley. This abundance of contemporary record evidence, coupled with the chroniclers' testimony, allowed them and their successors no room to doubt that Edward died on or about
21
September
1327.

What the early scholars did
not
do was to examine the many flaws and irregularities in the evidence. Until the late twentieth century scholars lacked the methodological sophistication to go beyond the face value of the records and chronicles and deconstruct the information structures underlying the various bodies of evidence. Furthermore, by the late twentieth century it had become academically very unfashionable to question whether specific kings were murdered. A general assumption was made that the evidence was insufficient to warrant any major revisiting of the deaths of any of the four
secretly
'murdered' kings (Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI and Edward V), and any attempt to research and explain the supposed later lives of the first two and the younger brother of the last in terms of a genuine survival resulted in prompt scholarly dismissal, regardless of the merits of the argument. The result was an example of 'group think', an intellectual stalemate in which the scholarly elite is so hostile to deviation from an accepted orthodoxy that no individual within the elite is in a position to question it, and no individual outside the elite will be taken seriously if he holds such unorthodox views.

If we examine the chronicles of the fourteenth century, we are presented with about twenty texts, one of which - the shorter continuation of the
Brut
chronicle - has many variant versions on the matter of the death. No original contribution to narratives of the death was made after
1356;
thereafter all the chronicle accounts are reworkings or direct quotations of earlier statements. The earliest chronicle has Edward dying on
21
September of a grief-induced illness. The 'anal torture' death - probably based on thirteenth-century accounts of the death of Edmund Ironside - first appears in a chronicle written at York by an anti-Mortimer polemicist in the mid
-1
33os.
The first appearance of the red-hot 'poker' (as opposed to a copper rod) is in
1340.
But if we examine all the explicit accounts of the imprisonment and death, and reconstruct the information threads repeated in the various stories, the detailed chronicles may be shown to descend from two original accounts, and one of those was very probably no more than an embellishment of the other. The more reliable of these two authors

(Adam Murimuth) actually distances himself from the idea that the king was murdered, saying it was merely 'common rumour', implying that he himself did not know the truth, although he was the only chronicler in the West Country at the time. Furthermore, these two chronicles are demonstrably incorrect in several ways: for instance, they both accuse John Maltravers of being one of the murderers, although he was not at Berkeley
Castle
at the time of the supposed death and was never accused of murder. The upshot of this is that no chronicle has any reliable information regarding the circumstances of the death, and all the chronicles together contain only one reliable fact: that there was a royal announcement at Lincoln in September
1327
that Edward II
had died of a grief-induced illness at Berkeley
Castle
on St Matthew's Day
(21
September).

This turns attention to the record evidence. There is no doubt that the announcement of the death was made between
24
and
29
September (when the court was at Lincoln). In most circumstances, when one knows that a specific royal announcement was made at a certain time and in a certain place, it is not necessary to question the detail any further. However, when a piece of information has a unique, geographically identifiable source, we may be far more rigorous in assessing its reliability. Putting it simply, we may ask the following question: could the person making the official announcement on behalf of the king at Lincoln have known the truth of what he had been led to believe had happened at Berkeley?