Edward travelled, assuming that the Fieschi Letter is correct, considerable distances. From the port of Sluis to Normandy would be approximately 200 or 250 miles, depending on where in the duchy he went. Normandy to Avignon is about 500 miles, and Avignon to Brabant via Paris close to 600; when he finally reached Brabant, Edward was only a few miles from where he had originally landed at Sluis, and had walked all the way through France, the second largest country in Europe after Ukraine, twice. From the duchy of Brabant he went to Cologne, a city which is 120 miles to the east of Brabant’s main city Brussels and was then ruled by Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria and Archbishop Walram von Jülich, both of whom had family connections to Edward. The journey from Brussels to Cologne would probably have taken Edward through or near the city of Liège where Manuele Fieschi held a benefice, and then through the county of Jülich, ruled by his son Edward III’s brother-in-law Wilhelm, brother of Archbishop Walram. From Cologne Edward travelled south through Germany and Switzerland (or possibly Austria or eastern France) to Milan, a journey of a good 500 miles which necessitated travelling over the highest range of mountains in Europe after the Caucasus, from there presumably to Milascio or Mulazzo which is about 125 miles from Milan, and finally from Mulazzo to the hermitage of Sant’Alberto, almost another 100 miles. Edward’s journeys on the Continent, from Sluis to Normandy to Avignon to Brabant to Cologne to Milan to Mulazzo to Sant’Alberto, represent a total distance of at least 2,000 miles, and other evidence indicates that he returned to Cologne and Koblenz in 1338, and so made the journey of more than 500 miles in reverse. Given that he had become a hermit or pilgrim, he must have made all his journeys on foot, or at the very least perhaps he rode a mule on occasion; he certainly was not galloping over the Continent on a fast and expensive horse, which would have made him extremely conspicuous.
Putting together the timing as detailed in the Fieschi Letter with the evidence that he was in Cologne and Koblenz again in early September 1338 implies that Edward probably arrived at the hermitage near Mulazzo at the end of 1333 or beginning of 1334. He had departed from Ireland at the end of 1330 or beginning of 1331 – Manuele Fieschi says that he left Ireland nine months after the Earl of Kent’s execution on 19 March 1330 – so this gives us three years for his travels around the Continent, excluding the final leg of his journey to Sant’Alberto and the return journey to Cologne. It is hardly a wonder if it took Edward several years to complete such a huge distance, especially as the European weather must have been inclement on numerous occasions and he may have spent winters, or long rainy periods, resting in one place. Crossing the Alps, when travelling from Cologne to Milan, would have been considerably easier in the summer months. Possibly Edward travelled over the Brenner pass, the Septimer, the St Gotthard or the Great St Bernard in 1332 or 1333. From the Brenner he would still have had over 200 miles to travel to Milan, from the Great St Bernard about 140, and from the Septimer and St Gotthard passes about 100. If he had passed through Lausanne, a Swiss town with Fieschi connections, he would have picked up the Via Francigena pilgrim route again, which would have taken him over the Great St Bernard pass and through the town of Vercelli in Piedmont, where Manuele Fieschi was elected bishop in 1343. The Via Francigena also passes through Pontremoli near Mulazzo, and Luni, where Cardinal Luca Fieschi’s nephew Bernabo Malaspina was bishop in the 1330s, on its way to Rome.
The pilgrim route from Trondheim to Rome, which Edward could have joined in the south of Germany, passed over the Brenner. If Edward crossed the Alps into Italy in c. late 1332 or the first half of 1333, this would have given him a few months to travel to Milan and spend some time there before arriving at the hermitage of Santa Maria del Monte above Mulazzo around the end of 1333 or beginning of 1334.1 The Fieschi Letter says he stayed at Mulazzo for two and a half years, probably until the siege of nearby Pontremoli which began in June 1336 forced him or those in charge of him to move him to Sant’Alberto, where he stayed for another two years until the summer of 1338. At this point, according to other evidence, he returned to Cologne and was taken to his son at nearby Koblenz in the late summer of 1338.
Seventy years later, the chronicler Adam of Usk made a very similar journey to Edward when he travelled from England to Rome: from Brabant, he went east through Maastricht and into Germany, then followed the Rhine south through Cologne, Koblenz, Worms, Speyer, Strasbourg and Basel. Finally he crossed the Alps via the St Gotthard pass, which brought him to Milan via Lake Como and then down to Rome. On the way back to England, Usk passed through Pontremoli and Genoa and used the Col du Mont Cenis pass through the mountains into Savoy, eastern France. Usk left England on 19 February 1402 and arrived in Rome on 5 April, a very fast journey given the distance and the time of year; evidently he had few problems traversing the Alps in March.2 Clearly Usk was travelling much faster than Edward, though something of the perils of journeying through the mountains in late winter is apparent from Usk’s comment about the St Gotthard: ‘I was drawn in an ox-wagon half dead with cold and with my eyes blindfold lest I should see the dangers of the pass.’3 A Premonstratensien monk from near Groningen now in the Netherlands also made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1211/12. On the journey there he travelled through France, but made his way home past Milan and Lake Como, probably over the Splügen pass, then north through Basel, Strasbourg, Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne.4 In 1489, a rich Hainaulter merchant named Jehan de Tournay went on pilgrimage to Rome, and followed the Rhine through Cologne and Koblenz until Speyer. He then followed a route through rural Württemberg and Bavaria and through Switzerland before entering Italy via a much more obscure Alpine pass called the Reschen in South Tyrol.5 Edward was certainly travelling well-worn routes; numerous other people in the Middle Ages made their way from Germany down into Italy.
It seems quite clear that Edward of Caernarfon, at least once he arrived in Italy in or around the summer of 1333 and perhaps even in the places he had visited before he arrived in Italy, was spending time at places closely associated with the Fieschi family and their relatives the Malaspinas. All the places he visited on the Continent, with the possible exception of Brabant, were pilgrim sites, but were also, for the most part, places where the Fieschi family held some influence. Edward did not, for example, travel to the most famous pilgrim site in Europe, the burial place of St James in Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, a place visited by numerous English people throughout his lifetime (and long before and afterwards). Perhaps surprisingly, he did not travel anywhere near his mother’s homeland of Castile in Spain, where he had numerous cousins, and for all his long journeys through France also did not go to Gascony in the south-west of that country, the large territory he had once ruled over and where his beloved Piers Gaveston came from. The author of the Scalacronica chronicle says that Gascony was the ‘country and nation which he [Edward] loved best’.6
As he was an extremely devoted supporter of the Dominican order of friars, it seems reasonable that Edward II in the guise of a man who had dedicated himself to religion might have wished to visit Caleruega in northern Castile, the birthplace in c. 1170 of the order’s founder St Dominic, or Burgos not far from Caleruega where his parents had married as teenagers in 1254 and which stood on the long-established pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. Edward could have passed through Piers Gaveston’s native Béarn in Gascony on his way to Caleruega, Burgos and Santiago, and through the lordship of Biscay in northern Spain which in the early 1330s was ruled by his kinswoman Maria Diaz de Haro, with whom he had been on excellent and familiar terms as king; yet he did not. This is perhaps explicable by the fact that the Fieschi family had virtually no interests, influence or even contacts in Spain or Gascony. Assuming that the Fieschi Letter is a viable piece of evidence and not an invention with poorly chosen details, it therefore seems entirely probable that Edward met his kinsman Cardinal Luca Fieschi when visiting John XXII at the papal court in Avignon and that Fieschi took over responsibility for the former king’s movements, via his nephews and trusted agents in Italy and other parts of Europe.
Edward II had had little contact with Italy during his reign, except that he had Italian servants and money-lenders at his court, and it seems a little peculiar that he would choose to go there of all places rather than Gascony and Castile, if he was acting entirely under his own agency; the choice otherwise seems a little random and unlikely. While in Italy, Edward did not even take the opportunity to visit Rome, Assisi or any other well-known pilgrim destination, perhaps also because the Fieschi sphere of influence did not extend to these places. Instead, he spent a total of four and a half years at two obscure hermitages which were not dedicated to saints he had previously shown any interest in, and it can hardly be a coincidence that both of them lay in parts of Italy dominated by the Fieschi and Malaspina families.
Ian Mortimer has written a detailed account of the Fieschi family, their possible involvement in the continued existence of Edward II in the 1330s, and their dealings with Edward III, in his Medieval Intrigue.7 He draws particular attention to Niccolinus or Niccolino Fieschi, a member of the family whose place in the family tree is uncertain but who was certainly a relative of Manuele and of Cardinal Luca, perhaps even Manuele’s uncle. Mortimer considers that Niccolino may have been the man who delivered the Fieschi Letter to Edward III in April 1336, when he was appointed as a member of the king’s council.8 Although this seems be too early for Edward II’s wanderings around the Continent to have been completed and for the Fieschi Letter to have been written in its entirety, it is certainly possible that an earlier version of it was delivered to Edward III in 1336, or that at least Niccolino Fieschi informed Edward III of his father’s whereabouts from 1327 until his visit to the papal court in Avignon presumably sometime in 1331. Cardinal Luca Fieschi’s nephew Antonio Fieschi, made Bishop of Luni in 1338 and already a chaplain of the pope, also visited Edward III in the summer of 1337.9 Antonio and Manuele Fieschi were only fairly distantly related – third cousins, meaning they had a set of great-great-grandparents in common – but were both executors of Cardinal Luca’s will in 1336, so clearly knew each other. It is possible that Cardinal Luca Fieschi gave Edward letters of protection at the papal court when Edward went there to meet John XXII, probably in 1331. Merchants from Genoa, the great port city where the Fieschis came from, were active in much of Europe, so that the letters would be helpful to Edward in getting around, and would be less conspicuous than letters of protection issued by the pope himself.10 Perhaps John XXII and Luca came to the conclusion that Edward would be safest in Italy, though the decision may not simply have been altruistic: custody of the former King of England, who was believed to be dead, would give the Fieschi family a powerful bargaining tool to hold over his son the present king.
So who were the Fieschis? They were a powerful noble family of northern Italy who in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wielded considerable influence in both the religious and the secular worlds. Two Fieschi men, Sinibaldo and Ottobuono, were elected as pope in the thirteenth century (Innocent IV and Adrian V respectively), and many other members of the family became cardinals and bishops. Innocent IV was Cardinal Luca Fieschi’s great-uncle and Manuele Fieschi’s great-great-uncle, and Adrian V was Luca’s uncle. Outside religion, some of the Fieschis were counts of Lavagna, and intermarried often with the Malaspinas, another powerful noble family of the region. Manuele Fieschi was a second cousin once removed and a member of the retinue of Luca Fieschi, who was born in the early 1270s and made a cardinal in 1300.11 Edward I and his son Edward II always addressed Cardinal Luca Fieschi in letters as their cousin or kinsman; the relationship was acknowledged for the first time in October 1300, a few months after Luca became a cardinal when still only in his late 20s, when Edward I called him ‘his dear cousin and friend Luke’.12 Edward I also called Luca ‘the king’s kinsman and dear friend’ in October 1301 when he granted Luca 50 marks a year from the English Exchequer ‘in consideration of his good offices in the king’s affairs’.13 Edward of Caernarfon, the future Edward II, addressed Luca as his kinsman when he wrote to him in 1305, two years before he became king; the men were in contact for many years.14
Luca’s brothers Federico and Carlo and his nephews were also acknowledged as Edward I and II’s kinsmen, but his father Niccolo, Count of Lavagna, and uncles (who included Ottobuono Fieschi, elected Pope Adrian V shortly before his death in 1276) were not. The family connection to the English royal family therefore must have come from Luca’s mother, whose name was Leonora or Lionetta but whose family background is uncertain. Manuele Fieschi, a cousin of Luca but not descended from Luca’s mother, was thus not related to the English royal house; neither was he Luca’s nephew, as some English historians have claimed.15 Luca Fieschi also claimed kinship to Jaime II, King of Aragon in Spain (born 1267, reigned 1291 to 1327), and the only family relationship which would connect him to both Edward II and Jaime II came via the houses of Savoy and Geneva.16 Edward I’s mother Eleanor of Provence, Queen of England and wife of Henry III, was the daughter of Raymond-Berenger V, Count of Provence, and her mother was Beatrice of Savoy, daughter of Thomas, Count of Savoy (Edward II’s great-great-grandfather) and granddaughter of William, Count of Geneva.
Ian Mortimer has suggested that Luca Fieschi’s mother Leonora/Lionetta was a daughter of the Italian nobleman Giacomo del Carretto, marquis of Savona, Noli and Finale (d. 1268), who was a grandson of William, Count of Geneva and the first cousin of Edward II’s great-grandmother Beatrice of Savoy, and was also related to Jaime II of Aragon (another descendant of William, Count of Geneva). Giacomo del Carretto’s daughter Brumisan addressed Edward I as her kinsman in 1278.17 Del Carretto’s second wife Caterina da Marano (c. 1216/18–72) was one of the many illegitimate children of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250), and was the full sister of Enzo, King of Sardinia and a half-sister of Konrad, King of Germany and Manfredi, King of Sicily. It is possible, though still only speculative, that Giacomo del Carretto and Caterina da Marano had another daughter, Leonora or Lionetta, who married Niccolo Fieschi and was the mother of Cardinal Luca Fieschi. If Luca was indeed the grandson of Giacomo and Caterina, he would have been the third cousin of Edward I (they would both be great-great-grandsons of William, Count of Geneva) and the third cousin once removed of Edward II. Luca’s Malaspina nephews Manfredi, Bernabo and Niccolo, who may have been in charge of Edward II in Italy on the cardinal’s behalf, would have been the former king’s fourth cousins. This family link would make Luca a second cousin of Jaime II of Aragon, who was a grandson of Manfredi, King of Sicily and great-grandson of Emperor Frederick II, and also his third cousin once removed via common descent from William, Count of Geneva. There was certainly a blood connection between Luca Fieschi and his brothers and nephews, and Edward I and II; although one of Edward I’s great-uncles from Savoy married a Fieschi woman, a mere marital connection would not be enough for the Kings of England to address several of the Fieschi men as their relatives. Neither Edward I nor his father Henry III ever addressed any of the Fieschis before Luca and his generation as their kinsmen.
To be acknowledged as a cousin of the King of England was a very great honour and one which Edward I and II would only have bestowed on people they knew for certain were their blood relatives, not only people connected to them by marriage, which would have included most of the nobility of Europe. If Luca Fieschi and his brothers were great-grandsons of an emperor, Frederick II (whose much younger third wife Isabella of England was Edward I’s aunt, another possible marital connection between the Fieschis and the English royal family) as well as relatives of the English royals, this would certainly go a long way to explaining the honour, respect and affection shown to them by Edward I and II.18
As for Manuele Fieschi himself, he held benefices in England, though it is not certain that he ever visited the country; quite possibly he did, but there is no direct evidence. Among others, he was a canon of Salisbury, York and Lincoln and an archdeacon of Nottingham. John Walwayn, the English clerk sent to John XXII to explain the Earl of Kent’s plot in March 1330, was also a canon of Salisbury, as were the Wyvill brothers, parsons of Kingsclere in Hampshire.19 Manuele Fieschi was a long way from being a humble, ignorant, illiterate priest who knew nothing of England or European politics or anything beyond his local Italian valley. He was educated and cosmopolitan, and became a notary of Pope John XXII in the late 1320s; the pope only had six notaries, so Manuele held an important position and was one of a small handful of men who had the ear of the pope and access to his correspondence. Fieschi came from a wealthy, highly influential noble family, some of whom were related to the English royal family, worked with no less a figure than the pope himself on a daily basis, and thus was not a man who would have needed to blackmail anyone for privilege and position by fabricating implausible stories about the King of England’s father surviving Berkeley Castle.20
Manuele Fieschi became Bishop of Vercelli in 1343, and held the position until his death in 1348, perhaps of the plague which had then begun ravaging Europe. Manuele died in Milan while acting as an ambassador of the pope to Luchino Visconti, lord of the city and of a rapidly expanding state in northern Italy, who was married to his third cousin Isabella Fieschi, Cardinal Luca’s niece. Manuele was succeeded as bishop by his nephew and later by three more Fieschi bishops, making the rich and strategically placed diocese of Vercelli essentially a Fieschi fief for over a century. This is some indication of the sway the Fieschi family and their relatives the Malaspinas held over much of northern Italy in the fourteenth century and how certain bishoprics were almost hereditary, passing from one Fieschi or Malaspina to another. Both Manuele and his kinsman Cardinal Luca Fieschi knew William Melton, Archbishop of York, and probably also Thomas Dunheved, the friar who had temporarily freed Edward of Caernarfon from Berkeley Castle in the summer of 1327; Dunheved had spent a few months at the papal court in 1325 and been made a papal chaplain. Edward II’s half-brother the Earl of Kent had visited John XXII in the summer or autumn of 1329 and asked his advice about freeing Edward from captivity. Manuele surely also knew of the visit of John Walwayn, his fellow canon of Salisbury, to Avignon in 1330, bringing details of the Earl of Kent’s plot and execution to John XXII. There is therefore every reason to suppose that certainly Manuele and probably Luca as well knew a great deal about the plots to free Edward and the belief among many influential men in England and elsewhere that he had not died in 1327, long before the man claiming to be Edward arrived in Avignon.
There were plenty of men at the papal court in Avignon in the 1330s who knew Edward II and could have recognised him, although the pope himself had never met him. Manuele Fieschi’s first cousin Percivalle Fieschi, Bishop of Tortona, was one of them; he had accompanied their kinsman Cardinal Luca Fieschi to England in 1317–18.21 Luca himself was another, and certainly spent considerable time with Edward in England at that time. Yet another was Cardinal Gaucelin or Gaucelme Jean, who lived until 1348 and was a nephew of John XXII himself, and had accompanied Luca on his visit to England in 1317–18 and also spent much time with Edward; he was the other cardinal attacked and robbed by Sir Gilbert Middleton.22 One of John XXII’s two envoys to England in the summer of 1326, when he was trying to reconcile Edward II and Queen Isabella, was the Dominican Guillaume Laudun, then Archbishop of Vienne and from 1327 Archbishop of Toulouse. Laudun lived until 1352 and had met Edward II face to face in May 1321, September 1324, and at Saltwood Castle, Kent in early June 1326. In 1345 he retired to a Dominican convent in Avignon.23 Laudun’s fellow envoy to Edward II in the early summer of 1326 was Hugues Aimery or Adhémar, son of the lord of Rochemaure, in 1326 Bishop of Orange and from 1328 Bishop of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, both of which are towns just north of Avignon. Aimery would therefore certainly have been close at hand when the man claiming to be Edward II visited the papal court at Avignon, and he lived until 1348. Both he and Guillaume Laudun spent a few days with Edward II at Saltwood Castle at the beginning of June 1326, and talked to him privately when they asked him and Hugh Despenser the Younger questions about Queen Isabella’s refusal to return to her husband and the reasons behind it. Laudun and Aimery had spent considerable time in the company of the King of England not many years before ‘Edward’ arrived at Avignon and thus were in an excellent position to be able to identify him, not only physically but by asking questions only Edward II would be able to answer.
Manuele Fieschi thus simply had to ask his own first cousin, a cardinal who was a rather more distant cousin of his, the pope’s nephew, an archbishop or a bishop, men who would also have been present at the papal court at Avignon, to identify the man he met claiming to be Edward II. Another man well known to Manuele Fieschi who may have been in Avignon in the first half of 1331 was Master John Arundel, brother of the Earl of Arundel who remained loyal to Edward II after Queen Isabella’s invasion. John Arundel, born in about 1290, was a canon of Lichfield, York, Lincoln and, as so many others including Manuele Fieschi himself, of Salisbury. The Arundel siblings were half-Italian through their mother Alesia di Saluzzo, daughter of Tommaso I del Vasto, Marquis of Saluzzo (in northern Italy not far from the places mentioned in this book). Edward II himself was related to the Saluzzos, and if the identity of Cardinal Luca Fieschi’s mother Leonora as discussed above is correct, so was Luca himself; Alesia di Saluzzo was, like Edward and perhaps Luca, yet another descendant of William, Count of Geneva.
In August 1310, Master John Arundel travelled to the papal court in the company of his uncles Giorgio and Bonifacio di Saluzzo – the former was a clerk of Edward II and acknowledged by him some years later as his relative, being his third cousin – and Manfredi Malaspina, presumably Luca Fieschi’s nephew of this name though Malaspina was a secular lord, not a cleric.24 Manuele Fieschi acted as John Arundel’s executor in October 1329 regarding John XXII’s promise of several benefices to him.25 This was the month in which the Archbishop of York William Melton, who was also well known to Manuele Fieschi, received news of Edward II’s survival at Corfe Castle. Some of the lands of John Arundel’s brother Edmund, Earl of Arundel passed after Edmund’s execution in November 1326 to Edward II’s half-brother the Earl of Kent, including the castle of Arundel in Sussex; it was to this castle where Kent intended to take Edward after the latter’s release, according to his confession of March 1330. John Arundel’s nephew Richard was also involved in the Earl of Kent’s plot, and fled from England in June 1330. Master John Arundel died in June 1331, so depending on how long Edward took to reach Avignon after his long journey through France, it is just possible that Arundel was able to confirm to Manuele Fieschi that his brother Edmund the earl had indeed been with the king in South Wales in October 1326, weeks before his beheading, as the Fieschi Letter states. John Arundel would be another man able to confirm the identity of the man presenting himself to Pope John XXII as Edward II, and to confirm one of the details of his story.26
Although we have no way of knowing what, if any, attempts Manuele Fieschi made to confirm the identity of the man presenting himself at the papal court as Edward II, it seems likely that he must have made at least some before he rushed off a letter to the King of England with an incredible and seemingly wildly implausible story about his father living years past his official death. The survival of Edward II in another country and well beyond Edward III’s control was a serious potential threat to the English king, and it seems unlikely that Manuele Fieschi, a well-educated and well-connected notary and associate of the pope, would have written such a letter without considering the implications of what he was doing and checking the identity of the man he met. Although it is not certain that Manuele Fieschi ever saw Edward II in person during his reign – he may well have done, but we cannot prove it – it seems extremely likely that his first cousin Percivalle did, in 1317–18. And in the 1330s, when Manuele wrote his letter telling Edward III that his father had escaped from Berkeley and travelled to Italy, Percivalle was Bishop of Tortona, a town about 20 miles from the hermitage of Sant’Alberto di Butrio, where Manuele claims Edward had gone. Indeed, the hermitage lay in a pocket of the diocese of Pavia within the diocese of Tortona, and the Fieschi Letter states that it lies in the diocese of Pavia, a statement which required good local knowledge. Not only would men who knew Edward II personally have been present in Avignon, Manuele Fieschi could easily have sent people to Sant’Alberto di Butrio to check if Edward had ever been there. The hermitage, as well as being close to his cousin Percivalle’s diocese, lay about 60 miles south of the town of Vercelli, his own future diocese. The Bishop of Pavia, the diocese where Sant’Alberto lay, from 1328 to 1343 was Giovanni Fulgosi, a native of the town of Piacenza 40 miles from Sant’Alberto, which had many Fieschi connections.27
It is possible that Manuele Fieschi wrote the bulk of the letter in c. 1331/32 having recently met Edward II, or at least the man claiming to be Edward II, at Avignon, and updated it years later after he was informed by members of his family where Edward had been ever since. Hearing the account of Edward’s escape from Berkeley and sojourns in Corfe and Ireland from Edward himself enabled Fieschi to write a relatively rather more detailed description of this period, but he had only a general outline of the former king’s movements after leaving Avignon. The expression in the letter that Edward ‘came’ to Avignon, not ‘went’ (venit Avinionem in Latin), might imply that the former king was still there when Fieschi wrote the first part of his letter – though equally might simply mean that Fieschi was in Avignon when he wrote it.28 The rest of the letter could have been completed in c. 1338, after Manuele was informed of Edward’s later movements and that he had spent two and a half years at the hermitage of Milascio/Mulazzo and another two at the hermitage of Sant’Alberto near Cecima. The past tense used in the letter for Edward’s sojourn at Sant’Alberto shows that when Manuele wrote that part of the letter, Edward had already left the hermitage. The Fieschi Letter does not state directly, however, that Manuele Fieschi met Edward at the papal court when Edward visited John XXII there in c. early 1331, and it is not impossible that he met him in Italy some years later.
The French scholar Alexandre Germain discovered the Fieschi Letter in an archive in Montpellier, southern France in 1877, and presented it in Paris on 21 September 1877, which, whether by chance or design, was the 550th anniversary of Edward II’s supposed death.29 It appears in Register A, the first of six volumes of a cartulary begun by Arnaud Verdale, Bishop of Maguelone from 1339 to 1352, and finished by Gaucelm Deaux, bishop from 1367 to 1373. The Fieschi Letter appears on folio 86 recto, and is written in the middle of a series of unrelated documents referring to certain property rights of Bishop Verdale in a small town near Montpellier. It is thirty-eight lines long and the word vacat, vacant or cancelled, is written in the margin. There is no reason at all to think that the letter is a later forgery; the handwriting and decorated initials are consistent with the rest of the register in which it is located, and there are no blank pages in the document which might suggest that the Fieschi Letter was written into the cartulary later in a conveniently empty space. All the documents in the cartulary, with the exception of the last one which dates from 1387 and is a later addition, date from between about 1176 and 1347, though are not in chronological order. The Fieschi Letter is found among the personal documents of Bishop Arnaud Verdale, which strongly implies that he was in possession of a copy of the letter.30 In 1901, the Italian scholar Costantino Nigra wrote a paper about the Fieschi Letter, identifying Milascio (almost certainly wrongly) as Melazzo near Acqui Terme and Cecima as the town of this name south of Voghera, near the hermitage of Sant’Alberto di Butrio (almost certainly correctly). Anna Benedetti, another Italian scholar, claimed in 1924 that Edward II had not only sought refuge at Sant’Alberto but had been buried there.31 Indeed, an empty tomb at the hermitage is claimed as Edward’s first tomb to this day, though in fact there is no evidence that Edward returned there after he apparently met his son in Germany in the autumn of 1338, or that he died there. A skull fragment found at Sant’Alberto has sometimes been thought to be his, but until such time as it can be examined and compared to a DNA sample, this is incapable of proof.
The researchers of the Auramala Project in Italy believe that the copy of the Fieschi Letter which still exists in a Montpellier archive was taken to the Holy Roman Emperor (the ruler and overlord of Germany, large parts of eastern and southern France, parts of Italy, and the Low Countries) Ludwig of Bavaria in early 1339 by the new Bishop of Maguelone near Montpellier, Arnaud Verdale, who had it copied into Register A of his cartulary. Verdale was a papal legate who in 1338–39 was trying to persuade Ludwig to broker peace between England and France, Edward III having claimed the French throne from his mother’s cousin Philip VI in 1337 and begun what much later would become known as the Hundred Years War. On 13 September 1338, just eight days after Ludwig met Edward III at Koblenz in western Germany and also just a few days after the King of England’s wardrobe clerk recorded the appearance in Koblenz of a man who said that he was the king’s father (of which more later), Pope Benedict XII – who had succeeded John XXII on 20 December 1334 – appointed Verdale as an envoy to Ludwig.
Some months later in January 1339, Benedict sent Verdale two secret letters to show the emperor, marked Letter A and Letter B.32 Possibly one of these was the Fieschi Letter. This is only speculation, but Arnaud Verdale was certainly an envoy of the pope sent to Ludwig of Bavaria in 1338–39, and the Fieschi Letter certainly ended up in a cartulary created on Verdale’s orders and was copied into the middle of other documents relating to himself personally. It is difficult to explain otherwise how the Fieschi Letter came to exist in a document created by the Bishop of a town near Montpellier, of all places; neither Verdale himself nor Maguelone/Montpellier had any connections to Manuele Fieschi or any direct connections to Edward III of England. There must be an explanation as to how and why a scribe of the Bishop of Maguelone near Montpellier managed to get hold of a letter sent from an Italian papal notary to the King of England and copy it into the bishop’s register, and this theory seems as good as any.33 It is possible that Verdale showed the letter to Emperor Ludwig on the pope’s orders to demonstrate to him that Edward III’s occupation of the English throne might be deemed shaky, with his father alive and at large on the Continent, which would have a profound effect on his claim to the French throne. Perhaps Verdale’s aim was to show to the emperor that his alliance with England was not in his best interests, and indeed, Ludwig broke off his alliance with Edward III and by the beginning of 1340 was allied with Philip VI of France instead, and in June 1341 revoked the title of imperial vicar which he had bestowed on Edward in September 1338.34
A French historian has pointed out that Arnaud Verdale had ‘wrought the dissolution of an alliance’ between England and the empire which ‘would have been catastrophic for the history of France’.35 Benedict XII’s aim may have been to prevent war between England and France, and to this end sought to persuade the King of England’s new ally the emperor that Edward III was vulnerable because of the continued existence of his father on the Continent. If Ludwig broke off his alliance with Edward III, this might have persuaded Edward to abandon his claim to the French throne and his war against Philip VI (though in fact he did not).
Although Edward III was crowned King of England on 1 February 1327 while his father was certainly still living, and Edward II remained officially alive for the first nine months of his son’s reign, the older Edward was kept in captivity so that he could not threaten his son’s position and authority as king. The plots to free the former Edward II in 1327 were a danger both to Edward III and to his mother the dowager queen Isabella, and to her favourite and co-ruler Roger Mortimer. The usual explanation for the pair’s assumed murder of Isabella’s husband in September 1327 is that they needed to safeguard the young king’s position and their own, and that Edward II had to die so that no-one else would be able to attempt to free him and perhaps try to restore him to the throne. To Edward III, the thought of his father wandering around freely in England or, even worse, in a foreign country where he had no possible control over him and his actions, must have been a serious threat. Edward II had been the crowned and anointed King of England, chosen by God as it was then seen, and there would always be people who believed that his deposition or forced abdication had been invalid and that, whatever Edward’s many flaws and mistakes, only death could stop a king being the rightful king.
Edward II was the first King of England deposed from his throne or forced to abdicate, and there were doubts over the legality of the procedure. The Fieschi Letter was addressed to Edward III and presumably was sent to him (though we have no direct evidence of this as no copy of it has ever been found in England to prove that he received it), but may also have been recycled and sent to Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria in order to sway his decision about allying with Edward III and England against Philip VI and France. The notion that the Fieschi Letter was intended as some form of high-level political blackmail has been suggested by various modern historians. If Edward II was under the control of the Fieschi and Malaspina families in Italy, with the knowledge of Cardinal Luca Fieschi and the popes John XXII and Benedict XII, to be used as potential leverage against Edward III, the young King of England had no means of returning his father to England so that Edward II could publicly renounce his throne again and thus make Edward III’s throne more secure. The idea that Edward II in Italy was not free, wandering around wherever he pleased, but was under the control of a powerful noble Italian family, would also answer the question many people have when faced with the notion of the former King of England’s survival in Italy: why would he not return to England and try to reclaim his throne? If Edward II was not acting under his own agency, and Edward III was not able to gain control of his father either, the question is answered.
So to sum up, the Fieschi Letter may have been originally written in c. 1331/32 after Manuele Fieschi met Edward II, then updated and completed in c. September 1338 with Edward’s later movements on the Continent as a diplomatic tool for the pope’s envoy Arnaud Verdale to use in his dealings with Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria which also began in September 1338. This was shortly after Edward II had supposedly left the hermitage of Sant’Alberto and perhaps met his son in Koblenz on or a little before 6 September 1338. Not too long afterwards, Ludwig broke off his alliance with Edward III and England. The Fieschi Letter was then copied into Verdale’s cartulary, perhaps by accident but to the extreme good fortune of historians centuries later, though it is even possible that it was copied deliberately by a scribe in a kind of fourteenth-century WikiLeaks action, in order to preserve it.36
Arnaud Verdale became Bishop of Maguelone in early 1339, some months after Edward III met Ludwig of Bavaria at Koblenz in early September 1338 and after Verdale himself met the emperor. The bishopric of Maguelone was subsumed into the archbishopric of Montpellier in 1536; Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone is a small community just outside the city of Montpellier, and in the early fourteenth century the area was controlled by the Kings of Aragon in Spain and only came under French control in 1349. The town and bishopric of Maguelone came under increasing pressure from the Kings of France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, via their seneschals in the towns of Nîmes and Beaucaire.37 The latter place, a town on the River Rhône near Avignon, was presumably the home town of William Beaukaire, the sergeant-at-arms who guarded Edward II’s body at Berkeley Castle for a month in 1327 alone and then with a group of others in Gloucester.
The very existence of the Fieschi Letter implies some doubt as to whether Edward II had really died in 1327 or not. Had Manuele Fieschi known for certain that Edward was dead, he would not have been taken in by an impostor, and he had close ties to England and was in a good position to know what was happening there. He must have known about Edward II’s deposition, his alleged murder and his funeral; John XXII, whose notary he was, was kept well informed about events in England. And yet, even knowing of Edward’s official death and funeral, Fieschi was still convinced enough that the man he met was Edward himself to write to Edward’s son about it. If he was lying and knew that the man he met was not Edward II, and yet he told Edward III that he was, what would be his motive to lie to the King of England? Manuele Fieschi of all people did not need to blackmail anyone for influence; from a noble, influential family and working at the papal court with the ear of the pope. If we assume blackmail as his motive for writing the letter to Edward III, it makes far more sense that the blackmail was related to Edward III’s new war with France and claims to the French throne, and that the pope was trying to force peace between the two powerful kingdoms (if so, Edward III ignored the threat, and carried on with his war). But still, trying to blackmail the King of England with the news that his father was not dead at the very least implies that Manuele Fieschi thought Edward III was not entirely sure if his father was dead or not. To make a comparison, attempting blackmail on Edward II by telling him that his father was still alive would never have worked; Edward II had certainly seen his father dead near Carlisle in July 1307 and would never have been vulnerable to claims that Edward I was still alive.
If the man was not Edward II, then why would he lie and claim that he was? The lie could easily be exposed, after all, as soon as someone who had known Edward II saw him. Perhaps he was simply a madman, or looking for attention; if this man was a pretender, he was certainly not the only royal pretender of the era. If the man Manuele Fieschi met was not in fact Edward II, then it must have been someone extremely well informed; there are details in the letter, particularly Edward sailing from Chepstow in October 1326 and his heart being sent to Isabella, which the vast majority of people in England and Europe could not have known. If the man who met Manuele Fieschi was not Edward II, it must have been someone close to Edward in order for him to be aware of such details. And if the man who met Edward II was a madman or an impostor, it is hard to imagine why he spent a full fifteen days or more with the pope; an impostor could have been spotted well before fifteen days had passed, and it would not take John XXII this long to realise that he was dealing with someone deluded or insane who could not possibly be the former King of England.
Historian Seymour Phillips points out correctly that John XXII ‘would have needed little persuading that his strange visitor was an impostor, and so have sent him on his way’, but does not comment on why or how the visitor needed to spend more than two weeks with the pope for it to be ascertained with ‘little persuading’ that he was an impostor.38 The Fieschi Letter also does not say as such that the pope sent the impostor on his way, but that ‘after various discussions, all things having been considered, permission having been received’, the man at the papal court went on to Paris, Brabant and so on. Nowhere does the Fieschi Letter state that John XXII believed the man he met to be an impostor. If John XXII had accepted the man he met as Edward II, as apparently he did, but Manuele Fieschi knew he was an impostor, it would have been peculiar and highly disrespectful for Fieschi not to set the pope straight but to allow him to continue believing that an impostor was the former King of England, and to treat him ‘honourably’. There seems no particular reason for the pope to treat a deluded madman pretending to be a dead king ‘honourably’ for more than two weeks. Historian Andy King says that the Fieschi Letter was written by ‘an Italian who, as far as is known, had never laid eyes on Edward II during his reign, and whose account was written perhaps a decade after his funeral’.39 This is true, but ignores the fact that there were plenty of other men at the curia who did see Edward II during his reign even if Manuele Fieschi did not, some of whom were Fieschi’s own relatives, and that identifying the former King of England was not simply a matter of recognising his appearance. There were questions the man could be asked which only Edward II would know the answers to; if he could not answer them he would easily be exposed, and this would not take as long as fifteen days.
The language the ‘impostor’ used would also be a giveaway. Edward II’s first language was Anglo-Norman, a dialect of French. The use of Anglo-Norman in England, where the vast majority of people spoke only English, was restricted to a small percentage of the population: royalty, nobility, knights and their families, high-ranking lawyers, bishops, sheriffs, probably some abbots, wealthy merchants, a few royal clerks; in short, the rich and powerful and those who had frequent contact with them. Being able to speak it fluently would severely limit the number of people who ‘Edward’ could possibly be, if he was not Edward II. Plenty of men at the papal court would know Anglo-Norman and would be able to differentiate it from other French dialects such as the Francien spoken in Paris and the Île de France. John XXII, born Jacques Duèse, came from Cahors in south-west France and thus was himself a native speaker of French, presumably the Occitan dialect of that region, and his successor Jacques Fournier or Benedict XII also came from the south of France. Fournier was made a cardinal in 1327 and may have been one of the men who knew of Edward II’s visit to the papal court in c. 1331. Guillaume Laudun, the archbishop who had met Edward II in person in England several times, came from the village of Laudun l’Ardoise near Avignon and was yet another native speaker of French who would be able to assess the linguistic ability of the man passing himself off as Edward, and who would also be able to ask him thorough questions.
It was thus well within the pope’s own power to check the man’s identity, as well as asking the many people at the papal court who had met Edward II personally to meet and talk to him. The Fieschi Letter says that the pope met Edward ‘secretly’ yet Manuele Fieschi himself also evidently met him, perhaps at Avignon, and if Manuele Fieschi met him, the pope’s other notaries might have done so, too, and some of the cardinals or other members of the curia. John XXII died on 4 December 1334, years before Edward III could possibly have received Manuele Fieschi’s letter, and was succeeded a few days later by Benedict XII, Cardinal-bishop of Mirepoix. Cardinal Luca Fieschi died on 31 January 1336. Although Edward III, had he wished to do so, could therefore not have asked John XXII or Luca Fieschi directly if they had met his father at Avignon, there were many members of the two men’s households whom he could have asked, including Luca’s nephew and executor Antonio Fieschi, who met Edward III in the summer of 1337.