Medieval church porch, East Anglia
Work in progress.
One of medieval history’s unanswered questions is what exactly happened at Berkeley Castle on September 21st 1327? Was King Edward II murdered there by foul means? Or was he secretly taken to Corfe Castle? Or did he flee England altogether and become a hermit in exile? A PRIOR’S TALE uncovers the secret that his Queen, the beautiful Isabelle de Capet, took to her grave.
A commonly quoted version of Edward’s death - that he was murdered with a red-hot poker forced up his fundament - grew from a rumour perpetrated by contemporary chroniclers several years after that night at Berkeley Castle. This became the popular version: but when two centuries later Christopher Marlowe embellished the story in his Edward II, it became accepted as historical truth. Marlowe’s vilification of Edward’s wife as an adulteress and traitor who plotted with her lover to murder her husband, has stuck. She is widely known as the ‘she-wolf of France’. But, as Alison Weir has pointed out in her eponymous biography, ‘a reappraisal is much overdue.’
Nobody has yet explained why a local herb-woman and not the royal physician embalmed the King’s body before it could be identified; why not even close relatives were allowed to view the corpse and why Isabelle herself made no move to do so; why an effigy was made for the funeral, an unprecedented deviation in royal burial ritual; nor why the chief suspects of the supposed regicide all escaped justice and remained free men, the principals even being favoured at court.
This account of the young queen’s close friendship with a monk in whom she confided, reveals a wronged woman of legendary beauty whose intelligence and faith sustained her through dangerous and lonely choices she made for two Kings: her husband Edward II and her son Edward III. Under Isabelle’s patronage Prior Hugelin Norpayn built a Lady Chapel in his monastery church at Eye in Suffolk to enshrine a precious manuscript inherited by the foundation: the ‘Redde Boke’, St Felix’s 7th century copy of the Gospels. Isabelle’s letters to the prior, and entries from his chronicle of the years between 1319 and 1337, follow their relationship through the tumultuous political events of this period alongside the building of the Chapel. Isabelle emerges as a devout, flawed but ultimately loyal woman, a skilled diplomat who took a mortal risk for her husband, for her son, and for the stability of an England riven by misrule. She was buried with a silver casket containing the heart of her husband the deposed King Edward II, revealing to one man only – a monk, under sacramental seal - a secret that has duped historians for nearly eight hundred years.
Based closely on the latest historical research, and on contemporary documents and letters, A PRIOR’S TALE throws new light on this true story of love and jealousy, intrigue and redemption.