This Is the King Who Was Killed By a Red-Hot Poker: A Medieval Murder Mystery, Royal Conspiracy, and the Unsolved Secrets Behind a Brutal Royal Death.

The cell above the rotting corpses reeked of a death that had not yet claimed its final victim.

Edward II could feel the stench seeping through the stone floor, a miasma of decay that seemed to corrode his lungs with every breath. Somewhere in the pit below Berkeley Castle, animals lay in various states of decomposition—intentional torture through odor, a method designed to kill slowly, invisibly, without leaving marks.

But Edward was stronger than they anticipated. His body, the one thing his father had given him that Edward actually possessed—that magnificent physical frame built for warfare though never for wisdom—kept him alive through the foul air and the deprivation.

He had been king once. That seemed like a dream now, a fever-memory from another life.

The dreams, though—those were real. They came every night, filling his cell with voices and ghosts. Piers Gaveston’s face, beautiful and cruel, mocking the nobles who had hunted him down. Hugh Despenser’s ambitions, vast and consuming, eating away at the kingdom like a cancer. And Isabella—his wife, his queen, the woman from France who had learned to hate him with such perfect, measured precision.

In his fever dreams, Edward saw himself as he had been: young, powerful, unaware that the circumstances of his birth had prepared him not for greatness but for catastrophe.

Part Two: The Fall of Favorites

Edward II had been only fourteen when his father died, leaving him a kingdom and a throne he was utterly unprepared to occupy.

From childhood, he had shown an unusual temperament for a prince. While other noble children trained in warfare and statecraft, Edward had wandered the castle grounds seeking out the company of ditch diggers, blacksmiths, and street performers. His tutor had reported with alarm that the young prince seemed more interested in the conversations of common laborers than in the intricacies of governance.

But it was Piers Gaveston who had truly captured Edward’s heart.

The nobles called it corruption. They spoke of an “unhealthy relationship” that had brought the nation to the brink of civil war. But to Edward, Piers had been a salvation—someone who understood him, who didn’t judge him for his peculiarities, who loved him with a fierce and uncomplicated devotion.

When Edward I was alive, the old king had recognized the threat and banished Gaveston from court. But the moment Edward I died, Edward II’s first act as king was to summon his companion back and bestow upon him the earldom of Cornwall—a title typically reserved for members of the royal family itself.

The nobility had been shocked. Then outraged. Then determined.

Edward could remember the coronation at Westminster Abbey, the way Isabella had stood beside him in her royal finery, her French beauty a political alliance made flesh. But Edward’s eyes had been on Piers, and when the wedding gifts arrived, Edward had given them to Gaveston instead of to his bride. Jewelry. Treasures. The symbolic wealth of a kingdom, transferred from queen to favorite.

The insult had been deliberate, almost suicidal in its recklessness.

The nobles had given Edward a choice: abandon Gaveston or face civil war. Edward had tried to compromise, exiling Gaveston to Ireland. But he had also been weak—he always was weak—and he had eventually coerced the nobles into allowing Gaveston’s return. When Gaveston came back to court, neither Edward nor his favorite showed any remorse.

It had been a catastrophic miscalculation.

In 1312, the nobility had finally moved against Gaveston. The Earl of Warwick—humiliated by Gaveston’s mocking nickname, “the black dog of Ardenne”—had led a hunting party that captured the favorite at Scarborough. There had been a trial of sorts, a declaration that Gaveston was a wicked counselor, an open enemy of the people. And then, on a field not far from Warwick Castle, they had run him through with a sword and beheaded him.

Edward had been devastated. His grief had been so profound, so consuming, that it had transformed into a different kind of weakness. Not the weakness of indecision, but the weakness of festering resentment. He had begun planning his revenge, preparing for a day when he might reclaim the power that the nobles had stripped from him.

That day never came.

Part Three: The Humiliation at Bannockburn

Instead, there had been the military campaign against Scotland.

Edward had assembled a massive army with the hope of restoring his reputation through military conquest. He would crush Robert the Bruce. He would recover the honor that had been lost. He would prove to the nobles that he was a capable king after all.

At Bannockburn in June 1314, everything had fallen apart.

The English army became bogged down in terrain that favored the Scottish forces. The strategy that had seemed so promising in planning collapsed under the weight of reality. And when the Scots launched their counterattack, panic swept through the English ranks like a plague.

Edward, faced with the chaos of battle, had made the choice that defined his kingship: he fled.

He had arranged passage to safety while thousands of his soldiers died on the field. The consequences had been swift and complete. No longer merely seen as weak, Edward was now openly derided as a coward, a failed strategist, a monarch unworthy of his crown.

After Bannockburn, it was only a matter of time.

Part Four: The Rise of Despenser

Hugh Despenser the Younger had inherited the uniquely privileged position that Gaveston had once held. But where Gaveston had been content with emotional intimacy and courtly status, Despenser craved real power.

With the quiet support of his father, the Despenser family had gradually established a vast sphere of influence around the throne. Edward, politically feeble and emotionally isolated, had handed Despenser everything: land, titles, control over key territories, a deciding voice in the kingdom’s most important policies.

Entire estates had been seized from rival nobles and granted directly to the Dispensers. The favoritism had sparked a fresh wave of fury among the aristocracy.

And it had finally pushed Queen Isabella past the point of endurance.

Isabella had endured much. She had remained silent during the affair with Gaveston. She had suffered the humiliation of her wedding gifts being transferred to the king’s favorite. She had preserved the image of the monarchy through sheer force of will, even as her husband made one catastrophic mistake after another.

But when Despenser’s influence over foreign policy caused Edward to refuse a mandatory feudal obligation to Isabella’s own brother, King Charles IV of France, something inside her had broken.

She had been sent to France to negotiate the crisis—a diplomatic mission that was supposed to be temporary. Instead, she had found herself unable to return to a kingdom ruled by Despenser’s ambition and Edward’s weakness.

In Paris, she had made a public declaration: “I cannot return while a certain individual stands between me and my lord the king.”

And then she had done something truly revolutionary. She had found Roger Mortimer, an English nobleman who had once been imprisoned by Edward but had escaped to France. Together, they had recruited soldiers, courted disaffected nobles, and devised a plan for invasion.

In September 1326, they had landed on the shores of Suffolk with a small but well-trained force.

Almost no one had resisted.

Part Five: The Deposition

The people of England, exhausted by the cruelty of the Dispensers and disillusioned by the king’s failures, had welcomed Isabella as a savior.

Edward and Hugh Despenser had panicked, fleeing westward in desperation. But the tide had already turned. Despenser the Elder had been captured at Bristol. Edward himself had been seized and imprisoned—no longer as a monarch, but as a traitor to his own kingdom.

In January 1327, for the first time in English history, a reigning monarch had been formally deposed by Parliament. Edward II had been declared unworthy of the throne. He had been forced to abdicate in favor of his son, a fourteen-year-old who would become Edward III.

But deposition, Edward had learned, was not the same as mercy.

Part Six: The Mystery of Death

After his removal from power, Edward had not been executed publicly like common traitors. Instead, he had been placed under guarded house arrest at Berkeley Castle. The confinement had been framed as a means of ensuring the former king’s safety, but everyone understood the truth: Edward’s continued existence posed a political threat to the new regime.

Less than a year after his abdication, on September 21, 1327, Edward II had been declared dead.

From the very beginning, rumors had spread faster and more violently than any royal proclamation.

Some whispered that Edward had not died of illness or grief, but had been murdered in the most horrific way imaginable—a method designed to leave no outward sign. According to the rumors, a red-hot poker had been thrust into his rectum, ensuring no external wounds and preventing any suspicion during examination.

Other stories circulated about Edward being held down by enormous pillows and a weight heavier than that of fifteen substantial men, suffocated in the darkness of his cell. Some accounts mentioned that the attackers had taken care to leave no visible marks on the royal body, to ensure that the death would appear natural or at least unexplainable.

The chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, written some thirty years after the event, had described Edward’s ill-treatment in graphic detail. He had been held in a cell above the rotting corpses of animals. He had survived the treatment through sheer physical strength. And then, on the night of September 21, 1327, he had been murdered.

But here was the mystery that haunted the realm: Berkeley Castle’s account books did record the former king’s death, but the entry was brief and lacking in detail. His death was confirmed, but no witnesses were named. The lord of the castle, Thomas de Berkeley, was not even present at the time of Edward’s supposed demise.

When the body had been prepared for burial at Gloucester, it had been embalmed and wrapped in ser cloth—a thick waxed fabric used to fully encase the corpse. No one had seen the king’s bare body before it was sealed in the coffin.

So the question arose: Was the body in that coffin truly Edward II?

Part Seven: The Question That Would Not Die

The mystery deepened in 1330, three years after Edward was supposed to have died.

Mortimer had executed Edmund, Earl of Kent—Edward II’s own half-brother—on charges of conspiring to rescue Edward from Corfe Castle. But if Edward had truly perished in 1327, why would Edmund risk his life to save a dead man? Why would he have risked everything on a plot to free a ghost?

And when Mortimer himself had been overthrown that same year, investigators had discovered that one of the charges against him claimed he had intentionally spread rumors of Edward’s survival in order to entrap and eliminate loyalists. But this only deepened the enigma. Was Mortimer lying to bait his enemies, or had Edward II never died at all?

There were other strange details that suggested Edward might have survived. Lord Pecche had attempted to plot Edward’s rescue from Corfe Castle in 1330—years after the supposed death—which seemed an odd way to honor a dead king. Why mount a rescue mission for a corpse?

The mystery became legend. The legend became history. And history became uncertain.

Part Eight: In the Cell at Berkeley

But in the cell at Berkeley Castle, Edward II had been very much alive.

The red-hot poker, if it had come, had not killed him immediately. Perhaps chest compression by enormous pillows had been the primary method. Perhaps multiple forms of death had been attempted, layered one upon another like the walls of the castle itself, designed to ensure that he would not survive but that no single cause could be definitively identified.

Edward had lost track of time. Days blurred into nights. The smell of decay never lessened. His food was meager, his water questionable. Guards stood outside his cell with instructions to prevent escape but not to engage in conversation.

He had time to think—endless, agonizing time—about the choices that had brought him to this moment.

He thought about Piers Gaveston’s beautiful, mocking face. He thought about Hugh Despenser’s ambitions. He thought about Isabella, who had started as a pawn in a political marriage and had ended as his nemesis. He thought about the nobles he had refused to listen to, the military campaigns that had failed, the opportunities to lead that he had squandered.

He thought about what it meant to be a king who had never truly been fit to rule.

In the darkness of his cell, Edward wondered what would happen to him. Would they execute him? Would they keep him here indefinitely? Would they simply allow him to die slowly, a prisoner of his own failed reign?

Part Nine: The Speculation

Nearly seven hundred years later, historians and chroniclers would still be debating what had actually happened at Berkeley Castle on September 21, 1327.

Some believed Edward had been murdered exactly as the legends described—the red-hot poker inserted through a horn to avoid external injury, ensuring that no investigation would reveal the cause of death. This method, if true, would have been deliberately chosen to leave no visible marks, no evidence, no proof.

Others believed that Edward had survived. That loyal followers had managed to smuggle him out of Berkeley Castle. That he had lived out his remaining days in obscurity, perhaps in a monastery, perhaps in exile, forever removed from the possibility of claiming his throne.

The discovery of Edmund of Kent’s attempted rescue created a temporal impossibility: if Edward had died in September 1327, why would Edmund have risked his life and ultimately his execution to rescue him in 1330?

Perhaps the answer was that Edmund had believed Edward was still alive. Perhaps he had acted on rumors and hope rather than certainty. Or perhaps the rumors themselves were true, and Edward II had never died at all.

The body buried in Gloucester Cathedral was never definitively identified. The ser cloth that had wrapped the corpse prevented any examination of the remains. The most crucial evidence had been deliberately concealed or destroyed.

Epilogue: The Shadow That Remained

The question of Edward II’s death became one of history’s most enduring mysteries—a question that could never be fully answered because those who knew the truth had taken their secrets to their own graves.

What remained was the body—real or phantom—in Gloucester Cathedral. Somewhere in that royal tomb lay either the actual remains of a failed king or merely the suggestion of him, a symbolic burial of a man who may have already escaped.

And in the darkness, in the shadows of uncertainty, Edward II persisted—not as a historical fact but as a historical possibility. A ghost-king who may or may not have died, whose fate became more mysterious the more authorities tried to conceal it, whose very uncertainty became his most enduring legacy.

The red-hot poker of legend, whether it had been used or not, had burned away the certainty of history itself, leaving only questions and shadows and the haunting impossibility of ever knowing the truth.