Forbidden History - A Royal Murder: Who Killed Edward II?

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

In this episode we delve into the bizarre circumstances surrounding the death of Edward II of England, a king whose tragic end has long been shrouded in mystery. After being deposed and imprisoned by his wife, Queen Isabella, and a faction of powerful barons, Edward's demise has sparked centuries of debate. Was his death a result of natural causes, a tragic accident, or a carefully orchestrated murder? Cast List:  Ciaran O’Keefe: Criminal Psychologist Prof. Michael Green: Forensic Pathologist  Andrew Rose: Barrister & QC Richard Felix: Author & Historian  Charles Berkeley: Berkeley Castle Paul Doherty: Author & Historian Lynda McLaren: Tour Guide, Berkeley Castle Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. England 1327. The body of the recently deposed King Edward II lays on his cell at Berkeley Castle, waiting to be embalmed. If official accounts are to be believed, Edward died from natural causes. perhaps an undisclosed illness.

But for some, the demise of the former king was suspiciously timely and all too convenient for his enemies. In medieval times, I think pretty easy to get away with murder if you were intelligent until you knew how the system operated. Could there be more sinister and gruesome reasons behind the death of Edward II? He'd already escaped from at least as a prisoner at two castles So they decided in the end to kill him.

For centuries, many rumors have circulated about what really happened to Edward. Some believe he was murdered by having a cowhorn and a red-hot poker inserted into his bowels. I think the cowhorns story and the red-hot poker, although some people will say it's not true. I tend to believe that it is fact. How quickly he died depends on how long the poker. was and how hot the poker was. If it just goes through the bowel wall into the belly cavity, he will die relatively slowly, but in very great pain.

Others say that he was suffocated. The belief here at Berkeley, and it's certainly my idea, is that Edward was suffocated, probably under a heavy mattress. I would equate it more with the motivation of an assassin. For that reason, we could look at the person that's committed that assassination, as being somebody who's potentially a psychopath. And there are those who are convinced that Edward escaped.

Personally, I don't think Edward II died at Berkeley Castle. I think Lord Barclay's statement, I didn't know the king was dead until his present parliament, is an indicator of the truth. It would be incredible if one day we found the answer to what happened to Edward II, and I believe we have such an extensive a lot of archive material here at Berkeley.

I believe we could solve this great mystery and find out was Edward murdered, or did he die of natural causes? The late Middle Ages was a turbulent time for England. The great famine and savage civil wars had left the country in a state of near collapse. What England needed was a strong, decisive and able ruler. What it got was Edward II. Edward II was the sum of Edward I.

and his wife, Ellen of Castile. We know he had a very lonely childhood. We know his father kept himself really a royal nursery, looked after by squires and commoners. Edward II was a man born to be king, but he wasn't fitted, he wasn't trained. He became king at a time when England was involved in a very bloody and long war with Scotland.

While at war with the Scots, Edward was also plagued by an uprising of English barons, He was now fighting a war on two fronts. Edward II was personally very brave, very courageous, but as a general, he had nothing of his father's ability. He was defeated in Scotland in May 1314 at the famous Battle of Bannockburn and had to retreat south. Edward also found it difficult to trust his leading earls, and in particular his cousin, Thomas

of Lancaster. Thomas, second Earl of Lancaster. Second Earl of Lancaster was a grandson of King Henry III. His intense dislike for the king, along with his own ambition, led him to be a key player in the revolt against Edward's reign. For most of Edward's reign, he was involved in a really quite bloody struggle with Lancaster. Edward was victorious by a sheer fluke. Other people did the fighting for him. In 1308, Edward married Isabella, the daughter of King Philip IV of France.

She was just 12 years old at the time, but the marriage was one of convenience rather than love. King Edward II was certainly not his father, Edward I. He was, as far as his father was concerned, he was a failure, and surrounded himself with handsome favourites. But his real favourite was Pearce Gaviston, and he put him in a very very, very high, exalted position. Gaviston really put the country against, not only Edward, but against himself, and Gaviston eventually was beheaded by the Earl of Warwick. By 1325, after 17 years of marriage, Edward and Isabella's relationship had now begun to crumble.

Isabella had been accepting of Edward's close friendship with Gaviston, but her intense dislike for Edward's new favourite, Hugh Dispenser, with her. could set in motion the downfall of the unpopular king. Dispenser was a real gangster, a thug. His influence over Edward seems to be incomplete, so much so that Isabella fled to France. While in France, of course, Isabella met, Dispenser's enemy, Mortimer, who was in exile and formed an alliance with him. Roger Mortimer was a powerful English noble who conducted a failed uprising against Edward

and Dispenser. Mortimer had been imprisoned, but had escaped and fled to France. Eventually, Edward and Dispenser have their way. The French say to Isabella, you've got to leave. So she flees to the low country, so a place called Hainaut, where she manages to negotiate a wedding settlement with her young son and the Count of Hainold's daughter. Part of the dowry is an invasion fleet. Together, Isabella and Mortimer managed to gain support and raise an army to invade England. Comprising mainly of mercenaries and a few exiled English nobles, they set sail from France.

On the 24th of September 1326, Isabella and Mortimer's invasion force landed on English soil. Everton and dispenser tried to raise troops, but they can't. It's just a general collapse. No one will support them. They were forced to flee to Wales, but were soon hunted down and and captured. Edward is put into honorable sort of prison house arrest at Kenilworth. Dispenser, however, is taken to Hereford, where he is most barbarously executed, hanged, drawn, quartered, castrated, the full rigor for law for treason. In the months that followed, Kenilworth Castle proved a less than secure location to imprison Edward.

He had several local nobles who remained loyal to the king and were planning his escape. When Isabella and Mortimer heard about the plot to free Edward that quickly had him move to Barclay Castle. So much of Britain's medieval history tends to lie in ruins, but not so with Barclay Castle. It is so well preserved. We still have the steps that King Edward II walked up to. We still have the doorway that he went through and the room where he was murdered. The Ubliette outside is still preserved. And to be honest with you, Berkeley,

the Berkeley Castle is one of the best preserved medieval castles in the British Isles and of course has one of the most fascinating, horrendous murder stories in British history. In 1327, they brought Edward II prisoner. When he first came, he was treated very well. We have paperwork that shows that an allowance of five pounds a day was made to keep the king, his servants, he had his own chef, and a marshal to look after his horses. So he lived like a wealthy gentleman, but he was a prisoner and he wanted

to escape. It's one of the oldest inhabited castles in the country. For nearly 850 years, it has been home to 27 generations of the Barclay family. The current heir, Charles Barkley, has undertaken the task of sorting through the extensive archive dating back hundreds of years. We have here one of the very old documents in the castle. We've got archives going back to the 12th century. This document here tells a story of Sir Thomas Gurney, going to Nottingham to tell Edward the 3rd, the king's son, that his father hadn't been murdered.

He'd be died of natural causes. A noble knight, Sir Thomas Gurney was the man sent by Thomas de Barclay to deliver the news of Edward's death. Gurney himself would later be accused of Edward's murder, bringing the validity of death by natural causes into question. You can imagine how it was taken by the king's son by Edward III at the time. An incredible document in reasonably good condition, and it tells a very important piece of English history. For many scholars and historians, the suspicious circumstances surrounding Edward's death

has led them to search for other possibilities. But if Edward II's death was not the result of natural causes, how did he die? And why? One of the most enduring theories of Edward's death has become a cornerstone of England's long and bloody history. For nearly 700 years, this medieval murder mystery has confounded scholars and historians. Author and historian Richard Felix has researched the Red Hot Poker Theory and believes it to be true. King Edward II was deposed by his wife, Queen Isabella, and her lover. He was imprisoned in Barclay Castle, but he had to die.

He was in the way. They imprisoned him next to the Ubliette, a deep dungeon where animal bodies, carcasses and human bodies were also thrown. The whole idea was for the king to die of the stench, jail fever, typhus, but he was made of hardier stuff. Legend has it that they then tried to suffocate him. Remember, this guy should have no marks or scars on his body. It had to be a natural death.

And they say that they actually took a huge oak table and tried to suffocate him with it. Number one, he would have had marks on him, and number two, no one would die of suffocation, not from an oak table. The whole idea would be that there would be that there would be no marks, no burns, no scars on the king. They then took a red hot poker from the fire.

fire and inserted it through the cow's horn into the king's bowels. It took him well over quarter of an hour to die in dreadful agony. He eventually died of either a seizure, shock or a heart at home. And so died King Edward II and the road was now clear for Isabella and Roger Mortimer to rule England but not for long. Linda McLaren is an official guide at Barclay Castle, where they have their own theory about what happened to Edward II. We're now in the room where it is believed Edward II was murdered on the 21st of September 1327.

Now the big question, of course, is how was this man murdered? The original idea was that he had a red-hot poker pushed into his backside. I think that's unlikely. If you want to murder someone quietly and discreetly, The last thing that's going to spring to mind is the Red Hot Poker. Other people believe that he escaped, that he actually got away from Berkeley, that he fled over to Ireland and then to Europe where he spent the rest of his life in a hermitage.

Unlikely for a Plantagenet King, I think. But what we believe here in Berkeley is that he was suffocated as he slept on his bed, because they didn't want any signs of violence on the king's body, Because the body would have to be identified before it was taken to Gloucester Cathedral. And that is where Edward II's tomb is. That is certainly where my money is, and it's what we believe here at Berkeley. But what do experts make of the claim that Edward was suffocated to death? There have been cases where people have smothered suffocated people.

Often people in prostrate health who are not able to struggle in order to, perhaps inherit money or for some other motive. And it's sometimes not too difficult to do. If the, as I said, the person who is the victim is elderly or weak, poor health smothering with a pillow might be a fairly easy thing to do. If you're going to strangle somebody and put either your hands or a piece of rope around the neck, that almost, always leaves some external signs, not just the damage to the neck, but the face is purple,

that a little hemorrhages into the skin round the eyes. On the other hand, if you use a Duro, deliberate upper respiratory obstruction with a pillow or a blanket over the face or a hand over the mouth, you don't get the classical signs of asphyxia, you don't get the eyes popping out, you don't get the purple face and the protruding tongue. In medieval times it would have been much more difficult, I think, to assess how somebody had died if there was a... There had been some form of suffocation, although, of course, lack of oxygen, there were certain signs, I believe. But, no, I think the medieval forensic science was... would have hardly filled the back of a heaping kind in those days.

If we are going to assume that Edward was in a weakened state anyway, he's been still. and he's been nursed in a dungeon which has been in effect to half a septic tank. He's going to be in no position to struggle. He's going to die fairly quickly, I should think, and so there could well be no signs at all. The other problem that we have, of course, is that they broke all their own laws, they didn't involve the coroner, they didn't have a jury to view of the body. The only people who looked at his body while it was fresh after death were the people who might have well been involved in the killing anyway.

anyway, so we've got no independent description at all of whether he showed any signs or not. If Edward was suffocated on the orders of Isabella and Mortimer, who would they have used to carry out the murder? Dr. Kiran O'Keefe believes whoever it was may not have had a choice. If you've been given the order but being told, if you don't do this, then the consequences will be far greater, so the consequences will be you will be punished or your family will be be punished or you will be executed because it's an order from the Queen. So therefore, the costs are much greater if you don't do it than if you just commit the murder. So that's one sort of situation that might have been in play.

When you look at killings that occur in that sort of environment, anybody is prone to do that killing if they're put in a situation where they have no choice. If Edward was murdered, where does the blame ultimately live? lie. If Isabella had ordered or indirectly indicated that Edward should be killed, she would be a party to the crime. No doubt about that at all. She would be at the very least an age and the better. In fact, I think she'd be a principal because she was giving the orders that he should go. So yes, subject to her royal status and the law of the time, but that's one thing. But in terms of modern legal theory, she would be just as guilty as a person who actually did the deed,

whatever the deed was, which caused the death of Edward. Suffocation, a tried and tested method for taking the life of your enemies. It would seem to be an effective way to conceal a murder, if indeed a murder did actually take place. Author and historian Paul Doherty has spent many years researching the life and death of Edward II. He believes that something else may have happened to the deposed king,

something that doesn't involve an illness, a red-hot poker, or indeed any form of death at Berkeley Castle. I believe Edward II escaped from Berkeley Castle, what happened to him afterwards is the real mystery.

Isabella and Mortimer, however, had to hide that fact. They used the corpus of an imposter. That's why they wouldn't allow the body to be taken across country to the Royal Moser. at Westminster or allow royal officials or royal physicians to dress the corpse. Instead, they hired this nameless, anonymous woman.

The real mystery of Edward II has never been resolved. He'd already escaped from at least as a prisoner at two castles, as well as trying to escape a plot was hatched to take him away from Berkeley, and they felt after this that they couldn't go on keeping him at the castle. Knowing that his life was in danger, did Edward, or those loyal to him, somehow managed to orchestrate his escape from Barclay Castle? And if so, how did they do it? Is it possible that he escaped? My theory is that they definitely got into the castle. We know that they were doing repair work at Barkley at the time.

There were a lot of carpenters around. Perhaps they were able to infiltrate the workmen, and they got in. Many English nobles were still loyal to Edward. to Edward, believing him to be the true king of England. But could he have escaped from Barclay? And if he had, how was it covered up? And why? Most of the gang that attacked Barclay Castle

were rounded up and disappeared. They were never put on trial. Mortimer In Isabella wanted to smooth things out. They wanted to keep things evil. They couldn't very well broadcast that their former king was on the loose. They also had to take care of any stories that he had been freed

that he could even stage a comeback what better way than to have a mass, a royal funeral, a requiem mass, the court turn of a Gloucester, a solemn burial, all the festivities and all the liturgy around this.

What they wanted to do was really bury, not so much Edward the Second, but bury his name, bury his reign. One piece of evidence that seems to support the theory that Edward escaped is a document known as the Fieschi letter. Manuel Fieschi, an Italian papal Legate, that supposedly interviewed the Welshman who was supposedly Edward II. The letter states that Edward II did not, in fact, die at Barclay Castle. It suggests that Edward swapped clothes with a servant

and used the disguise to escape. He then apparently was taken to Corff Castle, from Corff Castle to Ireland, and became a hermit. And he died somewhere in Italy years later. Could Edward II have escaped from Barclay Castle to spend the remainder of his life in exile? The only thing you could do to identify

that this was the king was finding. people who knew him well and say this is the king, this is Edward. Easy enough on a fresh body, on a body which has been stuck in a casket and has been taken around what from Barclay to Bristol and then somewhere else, by the time it's putified and bloated and brown and green and unpleasant. Identification is going to be difficult. The other thing is there is this problem that there are no independent witnesses. Personally, I don't think Ever the Second died at Berkeley Castle. I think Lord Barclay's statement,

I didn't know that King was dead until its present Parliament, is an indicator of the truth. I can't understand why they didn't allow the body to be buried at Westminster. I can't understand why they didn't allow royal physicians. I can't understand why they didn't allow royal witnesses to say yes, that is the body of Edward II. So on the balance of probability, They were hiding something very, very serious.

And I believe that Edward II had escaped, Mortimer and Isabella panicked, and they had a look-like buried. What motivates people to quakes disappear, unquote, is varied. There are, of course, people who do it simply to escape justice, to partake of their ill-gotten gain somewhere else. Also, cases of people are afraid they're going to be prosecuted, so they decide they better disappear.

There are many possibilities here, but certainly it's a motivation for people to disappear if they think that their current persona is a dangerous one or one which is going to land them in jail. Why did Edward never attempt to reclaim his throne as the rightful king of England? So you've got situations, even in royalty, royalty within the last hundred years. You've got cases where people have stepped out of the limelight, not wanted all. of the glitz and glamour or public scrutiny that occurs, I'll be quite happy living in a two-by-two house and not have to deal with any of that. It's not surprising that that happens. There seems to be little doubt that Edward would have wanted to escape. But with so little physical evidence to go on, how can it be proven? Should we accept the official account that

Edward died of natural causes? Or can we believe the tale of the tale of the the Red Hot Poker? Or was he killed by suffocation, as many people now believe? We have so many documents here in the castle, but none of them really say for definite, yeah, Edward was murdered in this way at the castle or he died of natural causes for definite. Most people agree he did die here, whether it was natural causes or he was murdered. Precious little evidence that he would escaped from Berkeley Castle and quite a lot of evidence that he died. there, but again how he died is difficult to determine. If Edward was killed at Barclay Castle, what method was used?

One of the forms of killing him was to actually position his cell near what was called an uble-et, which was a deep pit, where animal bones, animal bodies, carcasses, human bodies as well were thrown. And the whole idea was for him to die of what they called the stench, which was typhus. which was typhus. But he didn't. If Edward II was killed with the classical red-hot poker up his backside, which is

the story which has gone around for years and years and years. It gives you no guarantee of a quick death and also why choose a complicated way of killing somebody when you've got an easy way. With events taking place almost 700 years ago and with nearly all evidence lost, it's easy to see how so many different theories

could arise over time. One point, however, does remain consistent. Most historians now agree that the official account of death by natural causes was most likely a cover-up. But for what? Probably the best-known theory of all is a tale that has been around for generations. But experts now tend to agree that using a red-hot poker to cause death without leaving visible signs is a rather complicated.

an improbable method. The red-hot poker theory, which emerged many years later, doesn't really seem plausible. Whether he was smothered, of course, that is possible, but when people are smothered, they often struggle. On the other hand, if he's in a weak condition

when he was smothered, he might not have been able to struggle. In other words, if perhaps he had been starved or was ill, very weak, it might be possible to dispatch him without much without much, indeed any sign that a crime would have been committed. It's a fascinating story, if true, but there is no hard evidence to support the claim that Edward II escaped from Barclay Castle.

Although rumors have persisted over the years, experts are reluctant to agree in the absence of hard proof, which leaves us with one last theory. Most experts agree that Edward was murdered at Barclay Castle, and it seems most likely that they would have used simple but effective means to kill him. Suffocation would have guaranteed his death, while leaving little to no visible signs of foul play. Even if it had got to the point where I could say death was due to asphyxia by smothering, I could have certainly put on the death certificate, and this is one of my favorite phrases,

experience as consistent with. A sad and violent end to a man who was remembered more for his personal relationships and public failures than for his achievements as King of England. But what happened to the people responsible for his death, Isabella and Mortimer? Mortimer had been granted considerable titles, land and wealth by Isabella, and his increasing grip on power began to worry the young Edward III. And in October 1330, Mortimer was arrested on the King's orders. He stood trial, accused of 14 crimes including assuming royal power and the murder of Edward

II. Found guilty on all 14 charges, he was taken to London and executed by hanging. Isabella, however, received a more lenient punishment. Dripped of her excessive wealth and land, she retired to Castle Rising in Norfolk. Shortly before she died at the age of 63, Isabella joined a monastic order and became a nun, perhaps as penance for her part in the murder of Edward II. Unexplored catacombs buried beneath the city,

a crumbling castle perched on a mountain peak, a top-secret government bunker, a cursed mansion cloaked in legend. I'm Sasha Auerbach. Join me in Tom Ward every Wednesday and Sunday as we reveal the mysteries and histories behind these abandoned places and ask, where did everyone go? We'll hear from Sasha, who knows the history the best. In fact, there's a very famous book by a chap named Marcus Rediker called The Many-Headed Hydra, and he talks about pirate ships as an experiment in radical democracy. And me, who knows nothing, erinautical scientists can't quite explain it.

They say, we don't actually know how it gets to. up there. How it stays up? You're just not good at a science. No, there are explanations? There are explanations. It's just plain physics. Brought to you by Like a Shot, makers of forbidden history. Search for Where Did Everyone Go

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