Dr Ian Mortimer: The Greatest Traitor

The Greatest Traitor
About writing the book

First books are miraculous. Later ones are just hard work. It does not matter how many books you write, the process of becoming a published writer, like becoming a father, is one that happens just once and cannot be repeated. For this reason I have very many special memories of writing The Greatest Traitor.

It will surprise no one to learn that the root of my interest in Roger Mortimer lies in the name. As a child I was taken to Wigmore Castle, Roger's ancestral seat, and allowed to climb all over its overgrown walls. It was a huge spur to my imagination. I started researching the history of the family at about the age of seven. Frustrated at my local library's shortage of books on medieval history, I first applied to the British Library for a Readers Pass at the age of twelve. They told me to reapply when I was reading for a second degree.

Thirteen years later I did just that. By then I had a degree in history and was reading for a MA in Archive Studies at UCL. My passion for the past had in no way diminished. Working at Devon Record Office had allowed me unfettered access to a wealth of evidence about past lives from parish registers and court records to medieval deeds. I was fascinated by records of the early nineteenth-century lunatic asylums and records of eighteenth-century wife sales, of sixteenth-century market customs and the hardship of seventeenth-century sailors, kidnapped by Algerian pirates off the coast of Devon and sold as slaves in Tunisia.

In all this I had not forgotten Roger Mortimer and his remarkable story. Escaping from the Tower of London and fighting in Ireland still seemed remarkable exploits. Seducing a queen was a deed which I had come to appreciate even more as an adult. Governing England during the minority of Edward III seemed a far more remarkable occupation than academics generally acknowledged. History in scholars' hands seemed just so rigid: a study not of the past but of the extant evidence for the purposes of education. It was certainly not my understanding of history: an exploration of how fourteenth-century people had lived, loved, feared, dreamed and fought. All poetry and all the emotion of human existence had been stripped out of the past, as if it was somehow more accurate to portray the past as devoid of all humanity. This was patently wrong; Roger Mortimer lived one of the greatest roller-coaster rides of the middle ages. By comparison with his life experiences, history-as-education was simply dull.

So I decided to write a historical novel about Roger Mortimer, 'The Highest Treason'. It was 240,00 words long and unpublishable. By this stage I was working at the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, having edited a couple of volumes of seventeenth century documents and written a few articles. I was also writing poetry; about thirty of my poems had appeared in literary journals. After a move back to Devon in 1999, and a year working in the Centre for Medical History at Exeter University, it suddenly clicked. Why write poetry or fiction when I could say what I wanted to say about human existence in the past through the medium of historical biography? I wrote to an agent offering three ideas: were any of them interesting? Yes, came the reply, The Greatest Traitor.

I received the phone call from my agent telling me I had a contract and an advance in a dimly lit basement room of the library at Exeter University. I had spent many hours there as an undergraduate, reading volumes of sixteenth and seventeenth-century exploration. The room had subsequently been converted. I was in charge of a large collection of twentieth century literary manuscripts: Ted Hughes, Charles Causley, Agatha Christie, A. L. Rowse and many other writers connected with the West Country. Rare volumes surrounded me in the dusty silence. Then the phone rang. It was like an annunciation.

My subsequent memories of actually writing The Greatest Traitor are largely bound up with what happened on Friday 7 December 2001. I was sitting at my desk in my office at home, thinking about the death of Edward II. This was a subject which had occupied my thoughts for several months. If you are writing about the early fourteenth century in general you can say with perfect justification that you don't know what happened to the ex-king in 1327. If you are writing a study of the life and character of the person who is supposed to have murdered him, you cannot cling to the raft of ignorance. You have to present a full and coherent portrait of your subject and that includes outlining whether you think Roger Mortimer was a murderer or not, and why. If you cannot do that, you have failed as a biographer.

Originally I had said to my publisher that Roger Mortimer deserved to come to wider attention for he was the only man who had killed the king and slept with the queen, 'a sort of Freudian double', I had joked. By August 2001 I was not so sure. The great library of the late archaeologist and historian C. A. Ralegh Radford had been broken up, and I had bought a large number of his books and journals, including his run of Archaeologia. Reading about the funeral customs of the kings of England in a 1905 volume, I realised how it was possible that Edward II's features were never displayed, being covered in cerecloth. This tallied with G. P. Cuttino's article on the Fieschi letter. I emailed my publisher saying that I was going to tell the traditional story of the murder but then suggest in a final chapter, 'Chapter Twelve Revisited', that it was possible that Roger Mortimer had kept Edward II alive. I felt I could justify this on the grounds that both narratives pointed to Roger Mortimer as a remarkable schemer. This revised plan was acceptable, and I began to shape my notes accordingly.

By 7 December Chapter Twelve Revisited amounted to thirty thousand words on the circumstances of the death. That day I was trying to simplify it, to cut out unnecessary argument and facts. Around lunch time I remembered a moment a few days earlier when I had been crouched down with a large tome on the floor of the University Library. I had been looking for evidence that Edward III had charged Lord Berkeley specifically with murder. It turned out that he had indeed. On verifying that fact, I thought to myself, 'well, that suggests the young king believed Lord Berkeley did kill his father'. But at the same time it left me puzzled, for as every historian knows, Edward III never took any serious action against Lord Berkeley. If Berkeley had killed Edward II, one would have expected some reaction from Edward III in line with the charges. As I sat at my desk, staring the computer screen pondering on this, I recalled what I had done next in the Library after looking up the charge of murder. I had checked whether the charges against Lord Maltravers were the same. They were not. Lord Maltravers was charged with conspiracy in the death of the earl of Kent, nothing else. And in 1330 he had been found guilty in his absence of the same crime: nothing to do with murder. I remembered how that had worried me at the time, and now I was even more perplexed.

And then it hit me, a realisation so powerful that I could not grasp what I was thinking. In that instant a little bit of elusive logic had brushed my mind, and I was searching desperately to recover it. Slowly, as if emerging from a dream, I grasped what it was. I had established an unquestionable fact allowing me to be confident that Edward II had not died in Berkeley Castle. It was very complicated, but it was secure. Lord Maltravers and Lord Berkeley were equally responsible for the life of the king in captivity, this was explicit in the Parliament Rolls. If one of them (Berkeley) was charged with murder and the other one (Maltravers) was not, then either the king was protecting the one who was not charged or he was fabricating evidence against the one who was. There was no way Edward III was protecting Maltravers; although he was only charged with a conspiracy against the earl of Kent, he had been sentenced to death in his absence. That left only one possibility: Edward III had concocted false charges of murder against Lord Berkeley. That explained why he had never taken any serious action against him. It also explained why Lord Berkeley had claimed that he did not know 'about' the death.

The implications were profound. If I was to proceed in good conscience, I would have to say that I did not believe that Roger Mortimer killed Edward II. In fact I would have to lay out the evidence why I believed that Edward II did not die in Berkeley Castle. It was a hell of a challenge. I might be a qualified archivist, a university lecturer in historical methodology and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, but I now had to decide what I was going to do publicly. Any claim that a medieval king was not murdered was inevitably going to be placed in the same basket as the Princes in the Tower debate. Was I going to claim that Edward II did not die in Berkeley Castle, and risk the tidal wave of prejudice which attends historical revisionism? Or was I going to stick to plan A, and say we don't know what happened, and pretend I had no good grounds for doubting that Edward II died on 21 September 1327?

Of course, as soon as you realise you have a choice, you realise that really the 'choice' is an illusion. How can any historian consciously research a subject to a point beyond that reached by any other writer, discover an extraordinary series of inconsistencies in the data, realise that the conclusion is a stunning new narrative, and then pretend nothing has happened? It is not possible. Nor is it sensible: historical knowledge is never advanced by writers sticking to accepted norms, fearful of public reaction. Cowardice is never inspiring. So I drew together the evidence as best I could, and laid my thinking bare to the world.

It was the right decision. In late 2003 and early 2004 I returned to the subject, and found a different, much stronger argument why we can be sure that Edward II was not killed in Berkeley Castle. It was later published in The English Historical Review in December 2005. This is the only scholarly article ever published which concludes that a supposedly murdered king was actually kept alive. It takes into account much more evidence than I had at my disposal in 2001, proves that there was no information basis to the announcements of the death, and is altogether more robust and authoritative on the question of whether Edward II was alive in 1330. So far no one has found a fault in it.