A mission headed by Chancellor Burghersh, Bishop of Lincoln, had just returned from Avignon, where it had gone to negotiate a possible marriage between Edward III’s sister and the heir to the throne of France. The letter had been carried by a member of the Bishop’s suite.
Edmund of Kent, who was much stirred by all this, decided to go and check this information for himself, and see what chances there were of the King’s escaping.
He summoned Brother Dienhead from the address he had given him, and set out for Dorset with a small but trusty escort. This was in the month of February.
He reached Corfe on a stormy day when squalls from the sea were whipping across the desolate peninsula, and sent for the Governor of the castle, Sir John Daverill, who came to pay his respects at the one inn in Corfe, hard by the Church of St Edward Martyr, the murdered King of the Saxon dynasty.
Daverill was tall, narrow-shouldered, wrinkled of brow and scornful of lip; his courtesy seemed a little off-hand, rather as if this were a waste of time for a busy man; he apologized for being unable to receive the noble lord in the castle. His orders were peremptory.
‘Is King Edward II alive or dead?’ Edmund of Kent asked.
‘I may not tell you.’
‘But he’s my brother! Is he the man you’re guarding?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell you. A prisoner has been put in my charge; I may reveal neither his name nor his rank.’
‘Will you allow me to interview the prisoner?’
John Daverill shook his head. He was a stone wall, a rock, as impenetrable as the great sinister keep, defended by three large fortifications, that stood on the hill above the slab roofs of the village. There was no doubt that Mortimer chose his servants well.
But there are ways of denying that produce the effect of an affirmative. Would Daverill have been so mysterious, and so inflexible, if it were not the former King over whom he was standing guard?
Edmund of Kent used all his charm, which was considerable, and also other arguments to which human nature is not always insensible. He placed a heavy purse of gold on the table.
‘I want the prisoner to be well treated,’ he said. ‘This is to ease his circumstances; there are a hundred pounds sterling in it.’
‘I can assure you he’s well treated, my lord,’ said Daverill in a low voice that seemed to hint at complicity.
He picked up the purse without apparent embarrassment.
‘I would willingly give double the sum,’ said Edmund of Kent, ‘merely to see him.’
Daverill reluctantly refused.
‘You must realize, my lord, that there are two hundred guards in the castle …’
Edmund of Kent felt he was being an astute soldier by making a mental note of this important fact; it would have to be taken into account when planning the escape.
‘… and if one of them talked, and the Queen Mother came to hear of it, she’d have me beheaded.’
He could not, surely, have betrayed himself more clearly, admitted more overtly that it was King Edward II who lay behind those walls.
‘But I can take a message,’ Daverill went on, ‘because that will be between ourselves.’
Kent was delighted with the rapid progress he had made and at once sat down to write a letter, while the wet gusts of wind made the windows of the inn rattle.
‘May it please you, my very dear brother, I write in all loyalty and respect. I pray God with all my heart that you are in good health, for arrangements are being made to deliver you soon from your prison and the misfortunes under which you suffer. Be assured that I have the support of the greatest barons in England and of all their resources both of troops and treasure. You will be King once more; both prelates and barons have sworn it on the Gospels.’
He merely folded the letter and handed it to Daverill.
‘I pray you to seal it, my lord,’ Daverill said. ‘I would prefer not to know its contents.’
Kent sent one of his suite for wax, applied his seal, and Daverill hid the letter under his surcoat.
‘A message,’ he said, ‘will reach the prisoner from outside, and I have no doubt he will destroy it at once. Thus …’
And he spread his hands wide in a gesture of obliteration and oblivion.
‘If I know anything about men, when the day comes this man will open wide the gates; we shall not even have to fight a battle,’ thought Edmund of Kent.
Three days later his letter was in the hands of Roger Mortimer, who read it to the Council at Westminster, and Queen Isabella, turning to the young King, cried dramatically: ‘My son, my son, I beseech you to take steps against your most mortal enemy who is trying to make the kingdom believe the fable that your father is still alive, so that he may depose you and take your place. For God’s sake give orders for this traitor to be punished before it is too late.’
In fact, orders had already been issued, and Mortimer’s men were galloping to Winchester to arrest the Earl of Kent on his way home. But it was not only his arrest Mortimer desired; he wanted a spectacular conviction. There were also special reasons for haste. In a year’s time Edward III would have reached his majority; he was showing signs of being impatient to start ruling. Having exiled Lancaster, if Mortimer could eliminate Kent, he would cut off the opposition and prevent the young King escaping from his influence.
On March 19th, Parliament met at Winchester to sit in judgement on the King’s uncle.
On being brought from prison, where he had lain for over a month, the Earl of Kent looked thin, haggard and bewildered, and seemed not even to realize what had happened to him. He was clearly not the man to withstand adversity. His haughty nonchalance of manner had gone. On being interrogated by Robert Howel, the Coroner of the Royal Houses, he collapsed, admitting everything, told the story from beginning to end, and gave the names of his informers and accomplices. But who were his informers? The Dominican Order knew of no brother called Dienhead; he had clearly been invented by the accused in an attempt to save himself. And so also had the letter from Pope John XXII; no member of the Bishop of Lincoln’s suite had had any conversation concerning the late King during the embassy to Avignon, either with the Holy Father, or with his cardinals and counsellors. Edmund of Kent kept insisting it was true and felt as if he were going out of his mind. Had he not talked with these Dominicans? Had he not held the letter ‘ab omni poena et culpa’ in his hand?
In the end Kent realized the terrible trap into which he had been drawn by the phantom bait of the late King. Mortimer and his creatures had organized the whole plot: the false emissaries, the false monks, the forged letter and, falsest of all, Daverill of Corfe Castle! And Kent had fallen into it headlong.
The Royal Coroner demanded the death penalty.
Mortimer was sitting on the front bench of the Lords, and held them all with his eyes; while Lancaster, the one man who would have dared speak up in favour of the accused, was out of the kingdom. Mortimer had let it be known that he would not prosecute Kent’s accomplices, whether prelates or no, if Kent himself were condemned. Many of the barons present were compromised in one way or another. They abandoned the accused to the vengeance of the Earl of March. Indeed, he was an expiatory victim.
And though Kent humbly admitted his errors to the House, and offered to go barefoot, wearing only a shirt and with a rope about his neck, to make his submission to the King, the Lords regretfully pronounced the sentence that was expected of them. To quiet their consciences, they whispered to each other. ‘The King will pardon him, the King will use his prerogative of mercy.’
It was, in fact, very unlikely that Edward III would have his uncle beheaded for a deed which, though certainly culpable, had been largely occasioned by imprudence and only too obvious provocation.
Many of those who voted for the death sentence did so in the determination of asking for a pardon next day.
The Commons, however, refused to ratify the Lords’ sentence; they demanded more information and a further investigation.
&nb
sp; But as soon as Mortimer got the vote of the Upper Chamber, he hurried off to the castle, where Isabella was at dinner.
‘It is done,’ he said; ‘we can execute Edmund. But many of our false friends are expecting your son to save him from paying the supreme penalty. I beg you to act first.’
They had been careful to get the young King out of the way for several hours by arranging an official reception for him at Winchester College.
‘The governor,’ added Mortimer, ‘will execute your order, my dear, as if it were the King’s.’
Isabella and Mortimer gazed into each other’s eyes; this was neither the first crime they had committed, nor their first abuse of power. The She-wolf of France signed the order for the immediate execution of her cousin and brother-in-law.
Edmund of Kent was brought from his dungeon; he was dressed in a shirt and his hands were bound; a small escort of archers led him into the castle’s inner courtyard; and there he waited for three hours in the rain while evening fell. Why was he being subjected to this interminable wait before the block? He alternated between wild hope and utter despair. Surely, it could be only because his nephew, the young King, was ordering his reprieve. This hideous waiting must surely be a punishment to inspire him with repentance and also with an appreciation of the quality of the King’s mercy. He prayed, and then suddenly began sobbing. His shirt was soaked and he was shivering; the rain trickled over the block and the archers’ helmets. Would the torture never end?
The fact was that the whole of Winchester was being searched for an executioner, and none could be found. The city’s executioner and his assistants, well aware of how the trial had been conducted and that the King had had no opportunity of issuing a reprieve, obstinately refused to exercise their office on a prince of the blood. They would rather lose their jobs.
Next the officers of the garrison were approached to detail one of their men or ask for a volunteer who would be handsomely rewarded. They refused in disgust. They were prepared to maintain order, mount guard over Parliament, escort the condemned man to the place of execution, but neither they nor their men could be expected to do more.
Mortimer was coldly and furiously angry with the Governor of the castle.
‘Is there no forger, brigand or murderer in your prisons, who would purchase his life in exchange? Go on, make haste, if you don’t want to end up in jail yourself!’
The dungeons were visited and in the end a man was found; he had robbed a church and was to be hanged the next week. They handed him the axe, but he insisted on wearing a mask.
Night had fallen. By the light of the torches flickering under the rain, the Earl of Kent saw his executioner arrive and knew that the long hours of hope had been no more than a last derisory illusion. He uttered a cry of terror; and they had to force him to kneel at the block.
The amateur executioner was more frightened than cruel, in fact he was trembling even more than his victim. He had no experience in handling an axe. He missed his first blow, and the steel slid off the hair. It took him four further blows, struck into a red, nauseating mass. The old archers standing round vomited.
And so died Edmund, Earl of Kent, a gracious but ingenuous prince, before he reached the age of thirty. And the man who had stolen a ciborium was sent home to his family.
When young King Edward III emerged from a long disputation in Latin about the doctrines of Master Occam, he was told that his uncle had been beheaded.
‘With no order from me?’ he said in surprise.
He sent for Lord Montacute, who had accompanied him to the homage at Amiens, and on whose loyalty he knew from experience he could rely.
‘My lord,’ he said, ‘you were in Parliament this day. I want to know the truth.’
2.
The Axe in Nottingham
A CRIME OF STATE must always have at least the appearance of legality.
The fount of law lies in the sovereign, and sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it either through the intermediacy of elected representatives, or by delegation to an hereditary monarch. Sometimes both these forms are combined, as they already were in England.
There could therefore be no legal act in the country which had not the joint consent of monarch and people, whether that consent was tacit or overt.
The execution of the Earl of Kent was legal in form, since the royal powers were exercised by the Council of Regency and, in the absence of the Earl of Lancaster, President of the Council, the power of signing orders devolved on the Queen Mother; but the execution had neither the true consent of Parliament, for it had been sitting under duress, nor the adherence of the King, who had been kept in ignorance of the order issued in his name. Such a deed was bound to be disastrous to its authors.
Edward III did all he could to show his disapproval by insisting that his uncle of Kent’s obsequies be worthy of a prince of the blood.17 Since it was merely a question of a corpse, Mortimer deferred to the young King’s wishes. But Edward never forgave him for having taken the life of a member of the royal family without his knowledge; nor could he forget that Madame Philippa had fainted at the brutal announcement of his uncle of Kent’s execution, for the young Queen was six months with child and greater tact should have been shown her. Edward reproached his mother and, when she answered irritably that Madame Philippa showed too much sympathy with the enemies of the kingdom and that it required courage to be a queen, Edward replied: ‘It is not every woman who has such a stony heart as yours, Madame.’
The incident, however, had no ill-consequences for Madame Philippa, and towards the middle of June she gave birth to a son.18 Edward III felt that deep, grave, simple joy which every man must feel at the birth of the first child given him by the woman he loves and who loves him. He also felt suddenly more mature as a king. His succession was now safe. His sense of dynasty and of his own place in the line of his ancestors and descendants, though the latter were as yet represented merely by a weak child in a frilly cradle, was constantly in his mind and he began to find the tutelage imposed on him increasingly intolerable.
Nevertheless, he felt certain moral scruples. What good could it do to overthrow the directing clique, if one had no better men to replace it with or better principles to apply?
‘Am I fit to govern, and am I old enough to do it?’ he often wondered.
His mind had been profoundly affected by the odious examples of his father and mother. His father had been entirely ruled by the Despensers, and his mother was completely under the domination of Roger Mortimer.
His enforced inaction gave him the chance of watching and thinking. Nothing could be done in the kingdom without Parliament giving or being made to give its agreement. The importance gained by this advisory assembly during recent years, when it had met with increasing frequency in all kinds of places and on every sort of occasion, was simply the consequence of bad government, ill-conducted military campaigns, a dissolute royal family and disorders within the realm due to the constant hostility between the central power and coalitions formed by the great feudal barons.
A stop must be put to the expensive journeys by which the Lords and Commons moved from Winchester to Salisbury and then to York, to hold sessions with no other object than to enable Lord Mortimer to make the country feel the weight of his hand.
‘When I am really King, Parliament will sit on regular dates, and in London whenever possible. As for the army, it is not the King’s army, but consists of the armies of the barons who obey only when it suits them to do so. There must be an army recruited for the service of the realm, and commanded by leaders who hold their power from the King alone. And the law, too, must be concentrated in the hands of the King and everyone must be equal before it. From what they say, there is far greater order in the Kingdom of France. And we must encourage trade, for people are complaining that it suffers from taxes and embargoes on leather and wool which are the wealth of the country.’
These ideas were simple enough, but they were important because they were
in a royal mind and they were almost revolutionary at a time of such anarchy, despotism and cruelty as the nations had scarcely known before.
The aggrieved young Sovereign was thinking very much the same thoughts as his oppressed people. He told only a very few intimates of his intentions, his wife Philippa, Guillaume de Mauny, the equerry she had brought with her from Hainaut, and Lord Montacute in particular, who kept him informed of the views of the young lords.
It is often at the age of twenty that a man formulates the principles by which he will live for the rest of his life. Edward III had one great quality for a sovereign: he was without passions or vice. He had had the luck to marry a princess he loved; and he had the luck to remain in love with her. He had the supreme form of pride, in that his position as King seemed perfectly natural to him. He insisted on respect both for his person and his function; but he hated unnecessary pomp, because it was an insult to the poor and contrary to real majesty.
People who had known the Court of France in the old days said he resembled King Philip the Fair in many ways: in feature, pallor of complexion, and in the coldness of his blue eyes when on occasion he raised his long lashes.
Edward was certainly more communicative and enthusiastic than his maternal grandfather. But those who remarked on this had known the Iron King only in his last years, after more than a quarter of a century of power. No one could remember what Philip the Fair had been like at the age of twenty. The blood of France was more apparent in Edward III than that of the Plantagenets, and it seemed as if the real Capet was on the throne of England.
In October of this year, 1330, Parliament was summoned once again, on this occasion to Nottingham. It looked like being a stormy session; most of the Lords could not forgive the execution of the Earl of Kent, which not only weighed heavily on their consciences, but confirmed all their suspicions about the murder of Edward II.
Henry Wryneck, Earl of Lancaster, who was called ‘old Lancester’ because he was the only member of the royal family who had succeeded in preserving his big lopsided head for fifty years, had at last returned to England, as brave and wise as ever. A disease of the eyes which had threatened him for a long time past had suddenly grown worse and he had become half blind; he had to be led; but the infirmity seemed only to make him the more venerable, and his advice was sought with all the greater deference.